FROM WIKIPEDIA - Sheriff John was an American children's television host who appeared on KTTV in Los Angeles from July 18, 1952, to July 10, 1970, on two separate series, Sheriff John's Lunch Brigade and Sheriff John's Cartoon Time. He was played by John Rovick, (October 2, 1919, Dayton, Ohio – October 6, 2012, Boise, Idaho) who had served as a radio operator-gunner in the United States Army Air Corps in World War II, surviving 50 combat missions in the European Theater of Operations. Following the war, he became a radio announcer, moving to television in its early days. Rovick developed the program's concept himself. As Sheriff John, he began each program entering his office, singing "Laugh and be happy, and the world will laugh with you." He then said the Pledge of Allegiance and read a safety bulletin. Rovick showed cartoons, including Q.T. Hush, Underdog, Crusader Rabbit and Porky Pig, and was often visited by farm animals. An artist, "Sketchbook Suzie", would draw pictures requested by viewers; he would complete squiggles sent by the children and make a squiggle for them to complete. Sheriff John would give lessons about safety and good health habits. The highlight of the show was the birthday celebration. Sheriff John would read as many as a hundred names, and then bring out a cake and sing the Birthday Party Polka ("Put Another Candle on my Birthday Cake"). In 1979, John Rovick reprised his role as Sheriff John on KTTV, briefly hosting a Sunday morning version of the TV series, TV POWWW. Rovick won an Emmy Award in 1952 and appeared on the Emmy broadcast in 1998, introduced by longtime fan Michael Richards. In 1981 Rovick retired from KTTV after 32 years. On October 6, 2012, he died in Boise, Idaho, after a brief illness. He had just turned 93 years old.
January 1, 1930
Ali Ahmad Said Esber (born 1 January 1930), also known by the pen name Adonis or Adunis, is a Syrian poet, essayist, and translator. He has written more than twenty books and volumes of poetry in the Arabic language as well as translated several works from French. Imprisoned in Syria in the mid-1950s as a result of his beliefs, Adunis settled abroad and has made his career largely in Lebanon and France. A perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he has been regularly nominated for the award since 1988 and has been described as the greatest living poet of the Arab world.
January 1, 1873
Mariano Azuela González (January 1, 1873 – March 1, 1952) was a Mexican author and physician, best known for his fictional stories of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. He wrote novels, works for theatre and literary criticism. Azuela wrote many pieces including the newspaper piece ‘Impressions of a Student’ in 1896, the novel Andrés Pérez, maderista in 1911, and Los de abajo, (or The Underdogs), in 1915. Azuela was born in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco. During his days in the Mexican Revolution, Azuela wrote about the war and its impact on Mexico. He served under president Francisco I. Madero as chief of political affairs in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco - his home town. After Madero's death, he joined the military forces of Julián Medina, a follower of Pancho Villa, where he served as a field doctor. He later was forced for a time to emigrate to El Paso, Texas. There he wrote Los de abajo, a first-hand description of combat during the Mexican revolution, based on his experiences in the field. In 1917 he moved to Mexico City where for the rest of his life he continued his writing and worked as a doctor among the poor. In 1942 he received the Mexican national prize for literature. On April 8, 1943 he became a founding member of Mexico's National College. In 1949 he received the Mexican national prize for Arts and Sciences. He died in Mexico City March 1, 1952 and was placed in a sepulchre of the Rotonda de los Hombres Ilustres.
January 1, 1951
Henry Chang is an Asian-American detective story author from New York City. Born and raised in Chinatown, Chang bases his Detective Jack Yu Series primarily in this setting, and his objective "insider's" view influences the development of his stories' settings. His series focuses on the violence and poverty in Chinatown which he witnessed as he grew up. He is a graduate of CCNY. He began writing his first novel whilst working as a director of security for the Trump Organization. In 2011, Chang was honored by Hamilton Madison House, an organization for improving impoverished areas of Manhattan, for his literary contributions to historic Chinatown. He has been featured at the Asian American Literary Festival and has done readings in collaboration with the New Museum's Festival of Ideas for the New City and the Museum of Chinese in America. He lives in Chinatown, Manhattan.
January 1, 1955
Jaime Collyer (born January 1, 1955, Santiago, Chile) is a Chilean writer, born in Santiago, Chile in 1955 who became part of a generation of writers known as the 'Nueva narrativa chilena' or the New Chilean Narrative. His works have been translated into English, French and other languages, winning various literary prizes and acclaim. Born in 1955, Collyer claims he discovered the joy of writing fiction as a child in school at a young age. Later in university, studying psychology, he realised 'the only thing I wanted to do was to write.' Having finished his degree in 1980, Collyer moved to Madrid, Spain in 1981 to begin a writing career and to study International Relations and Political Science. In 1986, he co-wrote a children's book Hacia el nuevo mundo, and his writing career began in earnest from there. He published El infiltrado in 1989, which was awarded a prize as the best Latin-American novel translated to French that year. Collyer has continued to publish works to much critical acclaim and has won the Premio Municipal de Santiago for his short story collections, amongst various other awards for his publications in general. The New York Times Book Review described him as 'a born writer'. Collyer cites a diverse and wide ranging set of influences from various countries and cultures. Amongst them are Rudyard Kipling and Vladimir Nabokov as well as German post war writers such as Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass. Chief amongst his influences are authors of Latin-American extraction, including Julio Cortázar and Juan Carlos Onetti. Perhaps his most salient influence, an author to whom he has been compared, is the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges. Undoubtedly an influence, Collyer was even dubbed 'The New Borges' after the release of the collection Gente al acecho (People on the Prowl). Borges is mentioned within the collection in the story 'Ultimos días de nuestro vecino', in which a character comes across the Aleph, a place where all points on the earth can be seen from one point, something which Borges had described in his own short story in the collection The Aleph.
January 1, 1947
John M. Del Vecchio was drafted in 1969 shortly after graduating from Lafayette College with a Bachelors Degree in Psychology and minor emphasis in Civil Engineering. In 1970 he volunteered for Viet Nam where he served as a combat correspondent for the 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile); in 1971 he was awarded a Bronze Star for Heroism in Ground Combat. Along with The 13th Valley, Del Vecchio is the author of For the Sake of All Living Things, Carry Me Home, Darkness Falls, numerous articles and papers including the widely quoted, ‘The Importance of Story’; the forward for Wounds Of War and the afterword for Code Word: Geronimo. His books have been translated into four languages and published worldwide. He has lectured extensively on the history of the Viet Nam War in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, and has appeared on FOX News as a military/political commentator. Del Vecchio is currently working on screenplays based on his novels, a book about resilience in the fourth quarter of life tentatively titled Exit Strategies, and an expose on the financial crisis from ‘a street-level’ perspective tentatively titled From The Bottom Looking Up.
January 1, 1768
Maria Edgeworth (1 January 1768 – 22 May 1849) was a prolific Anglo-Irish writer of adults' and children's literature. She was one of the first realist writers in children's literature and was a significant figure in the evolution of the novel in Europe. She held advanced views, for a woman of her time, on estate management, politics and education, and corresponded with some of the leading literary and economic writers, including Sir Walter Scott and David Ricardo.
January 1, 1957
Martín Espada (born 1957) is a Latino poet, and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches poetry. Puerto Rico has frequently been featured as a theme in his poems.
January 1, 1971
ANTTI TUOMAINEN (born January 1, 1971) was an award-winning copywriter in the advertising industry before he made his literary debut in 2007 as a suspense author. In 2011 Tuomainen’s third novel, THE HEALER, was awarded the Clue Award for ‘Best Finnish Crime Novel 2011’ and it is now being translated into twenty-six languages. He lives in Helsinki, Finland.
January 1, 1879
Edward Morgan Forster OM, CH (1 January 1879 – 7 June 1970) was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: ‘Only connect … ’. His 1908 novel, A Room with a View, is his most optimistic work, while A Passage to India (1924) brought him his greatest success.
January 1, 1854
Sir James George Frazer (1 January 1854 – 7 May 1941) was a Scottish social anthropologist and folklorist influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion. He is often considered one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology. His most famous work, The Golden Bough (1890), documents and details the similarities among magical and religious beliefs around the globe. Frazer posited that human belief progressed through three stages: primitive magic, replaced by religion, in turn replaced by science.
January 1, 1937
A prolific poet, novelist, children’s writer, critic, and editor, John Fuller has written or edited nearly 50 books, including more than a dozen collections of poetry. Fuller was born in Kent, England, and his father was the poet Roy Fuller. John Fuller was mentored by W.H. Auden and also influenced by Eliot, Graves, and Stevens. His poetry displays a virtuosic ease within the constraints of formal, metered verse; it is a poetry of ideas.
January 1, 1936
Luiz Alfredo Garcia Roza (born 1936 in Rio de Janeiro) is a retired Brazilian professor and current novelist. As an academic he wrote philosophy and psychology textbooks. After retiring from academia he became known as a novelist and shared the Prêmio Jabuti for Literature in 1997. He is known for his Detective fiction, in particular his Inspector Espinosa Mystery series. He had little knowledge of crime or police-work before he began writing. Some of his works have been translated into English.
January 1, 1923
Ousmane Sembene, who was born into a Senegalese fishing family in 1923, worked at a diversity of jobs before writing his first book, THE BLACK DOCKER, in 1956. Since then he has written several novels and short story collections, through which he tells the saga of his land and its people. He has also gained a reputation for his films, particularly BLACK GIRL and THE MONEY ORDER, which were well received both in the U.S. and abroad.
January 1, 1938
Emil Richard Johnson (born 1938 in Prentice, Wisconsin ; died December 1997 ) was an American writer of crime fiction. When Johnson left the army in 1960, he had trouble integrating into civilian life. With no fixed abode, he entered into a life of crime. In 1962 during a robbery in Minnesota Johnson shot a security guard. He already had two convictions and as a result was sentenced to forty years in prison at the State Prison of Stillwater in Minnesota. In prison, Johnson began writing out of boredom. His debut novel, Death on Silver Street ( Silver Street ), proved to be his literary breakthrough. Audiences and critics alike were enthusiastic, and the novel won an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America in 1969.
January 1, 1928
Camara Laye (January 1, 1928—February 4, 1980) was an African writer from Guinea. He was the author of The African Child (L'Enfant noir), a novel based loosely on his own childhood, and The Radiance of the King (Le Regard du roi). Both novels are among the earliest major works in Francophone African literature. Camara Laye later worked for the government of newly independent Guinea, but went into voluntary exile over political issues. Camara Laye was born in Kouroussa, a town in what was then the colony of French Guinea. His family were Malinke (a Mandé speaking ethnicity), and he was born into a caste that traditionally worked as blacksmiths and goldsmiths. His mother was from the village of Tindican, and his immediate childhood surroundings were not predominantly influenced by French culture. He attended both Koranic and French elementary schools in Kouroussa. At age fifteen he went to Conakry, the colonial capital, to continue his education. He attended vocational studies in motor mechanics. In 1947, he travelled to Paris to continue studying mechanics. There he worked and took further courses in engineering and worked towards the baccalauréat. Camara Laye published his first novel in 1953, the autobiographical L'Enfant noir (The African Child, also published under the title The Dark Child). It follows his own journey from childhood in Kouroussa, his education in Conakry, and eventual departure for France. The book won the Prix Charles Veillon in 1954. L'Enfant noir was followed the next year by Le Regard du roi (The Radiance of the King). The Radiance of the King was described by Kwame Anthony Appiah as 'one of the greatest of the African novels of the colonial period.' In 1956 Camara Laye returned to Africa, first to Dahomey, then the Gold Coast, and finally to newly independent Guinea, where he held several government posts. He left Guinea for Senegal in 1965 because of political issues, never returning to his home country. In 1966 Camara Laye's third novel, Dramouss (A Dream of Africa), was published. In 1978 his fourth and final work, Le Maître de la parole - Kouma Lafôlô Kouma (The Guardian of the Word), was published. The novel was based on a Malian epic told by the griot Babou Condé about Sundiata Keita, the thirteenth-century founder of the Mali Empire. Camara Laye's authorship of Le Regard du roi was questioned by literary scholar Adele King in her book Rereading Camara Laye.She claimed that he had considerable help in writing L'Enfant noir and did not write any part of Le Regard du roi. Scholar F. Abiola Irele, in an article called In Search of Camara Laye asserts that the claims are not 'sufficiently grounded' to adequately justify that Laye did not author the mentioned work.
January 1, 1924
Kamala Markandaya (January 1, 1924 - May 16, 2004) was a pseudonym used by Kamala Purnaiya Taylor, an Indian novelist and journalist. A native of Mysore, India, Markandaya was a graduate of Madras University, and afterwards published several short stories in Indian newspapers. After India declared its independence, Markandaya moved to Britain, though she still labeled herself an Indian expatriate long afterwards. Known for writing about culture clash between Indian urban and rural societies, Markandaya's first published novel, NECTAR IN A SIEVE, was a bestseller and named a notable book of 1955 by the American Library Association. Other novels include SOME INNER FURY (1955), A SILENCE OF DESIRE (1960), POSSESSION (1963), A HANDFUL OF RICE (1966), THE NOWHERE MAN (1972), TWO VIRGINS (1973), THE GOLDEN HONEYCOMB (1977), and PLEASURE CITY (1982/1983). Kamala Markandaya belonged to that pioneering group of Indian women writers who made their mark not just through their subject matter, but also through their fluid, polished literary style. NECTAR IN A SIEVE was her first published work, and its depiction of rural India and the suffering of farmers made it popular in the West. This was followed by other fiction that dramatized the Quit India movement in 1942, the clash between East and West and the tragedy that resulted from it, or the problems facing ordinary middle-class Indians—making a living, finding inner peace, coping with modern technology and its effects on the poor. Markandaya died in London on May 16, 2004.
January 1, 1948
Zakes Mda (born January 1, 1948) is professor of creative writing in the Department of English at Ohio University, and a South African novelist, poet, and playwright.
January 1, 1950
Anthony Olcott is a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Intelligence, and was Officer in Residence at Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. While at the Director of National Intelligence's Open Source Center, he served as Senior Analyst in the Emerging Media Group, and also as an Expert Analyst covering Russia and Central Asia. Olcott has received numerous awards and citations from the intelligence community.
January 1, 1933
John Kingsley 'Joe' Orton (1 January 1933 – 9 August 1967) was an English playwright and author. His public career was short but prolific, lasting from 1964 until his death three years later. During this brief period he shocked, outraged, and amused audiences with his scandalous black comedies. The adjective Ortonesque is sometimes used to refer to work characterised by a similarly dark yet farcical cynicism.
January 1, 1955
Iain Pears (born in 1955) is an English art historian, novelist and journalist. He was educated at Warwick School, Warwick, Wadham College and Wolfson College, Oxford. Before writing, he worked as a reporter for the BBC, Channel 4 (UK) and ZDF (Germany) and correspondent for Reuters from 1982 to 1990 in Italy, France, UK and US. In 1987 he became a Getty Fellow in the Arts and Humanities at Yale University. His well-known novel series features Jonathan Argyll, art historian, though international fame first arrived with his best selling book An Instance of the Fingerpost (1998), which was translated into several languages. Pears currently lives with his wife and children in Oxford.
January 1, 1963
Claudia Rankine is a Jamaican poet and playwright born in 1963 and raised in Kingston, Jamaica and New York City. She has taught at Case Western Reserve University, Barnard College, University of Georgia, and in the writing program at the University of Houston. As of 2011, Rankine is the Henry G. Lee Professor of Poetry at Pomona College.
January 1, 1919
Jerome David 'J. D.' Salinger (January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010) was an American writer who won acclaim early in life. He led a very private life for more than a half-century. He published his final original work in 1965 and gave his last interview in 1980. In 1951, his novel The Catcher in the Rye was an immediate popular success. His depiction of adolescent alienation and loss of innocence in the protagonist Holden Caulfield was influential, especially among adolescent readers.
January 1, 1893
Paulo de Oliveira Leite Setúbal (January 1, 1893 – May 4, 1937) was a Brazilian writer, lawyer, journalist, essayist and poet. He occupied the 31st chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters from 1934 until his death in 1937.
January 1, 1953
Han Shaogong (born January 1, 1953) is an award-winning novelist, essayist, and translator. He is author of Moon Orchid (1985), Bababa (1985), Womanwomanwoman (1985), and Deserted City (1989). He is also former editor of the magazines Hainan Review and Frontiers, and is vice-chairman of the Hainan Writer's Association.
January 1, 1928
Iain Crichton Smith, OBE (1 January 1928 – 15 October 1998) was a Scottish poet and novelist, who wrote in both English and Gaelic. He was born in Glasgow, but moved to the isle of Lewis at the age of two, where he and his two brothers were brought up by their widowed mother in the small crofting town of Bayble, which also produced Derick Thomson. Educated at the University of Aberdeen, Crichton Smith took a degree in English, and after serving in the National Service Army Education Corps, went on to become a teacher. He taught in Clydebank, Dumbarton and Oban from 1952, retiring to become a full-time writer in 1977, although he already had many novels and poems published.
January 1, 1951
Maureen Tan is the author of numerous articles, four fiction novels, and several short stories. She is a consultant specializing in the science/technology and healthcare fields. Before beginning her consulting practice, she worked for the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and also served as a Public Affairs Officer for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
January 1, 1883
Federigo Tozzi (January 1, 1883 in Siena; died March 21, 1920 in Rome), a follower of Gabriele D'Annunzio and Giovanni Verga, was encouraged by Luigi Pirandello and was himself a major influence on Alberto Moravia, who held him in the highest regard. In his short but prolific writing life, during the second decade of the twentieth century, he produced one hundred and twenty stories, five novels, two books of poetry, as well as plays, essays, and piles of drafts, notes, and letters. Yet after his initial success, he was virtually ignored in the fifty years following his death and only belatedly recognized as a supreme stylist and master of Italian realism.
January 1, 1915
John Henrik Clarke (born John Henry Clark, January 1, 1915 – July 16, 1998), was a Pan-Africanist American-African writer, historian, professor, and a pioneer in the creation of Africana studies and professional institutions in academia starting in the late 1960s.
January 1, 1955
Winifred Mary Beard (born 1 January 1955) is an English Classical scholar. She is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge, a fellow of Newnham College, and Royal Academy of Arts professor of ancient literature. She is also the classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement, and author of the blog, "A Don's Life", which appears in The Times as a regular column. Her frequent media appearances and sometimes controversial public statements have led to her being described as "Britain's best-known classicist."
January 1, 1896
Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) was a Scottish philosopher, theoretical physicist, historian of science and financier. He claimed to have worked with Albert Einstein on the unified field theory. He further claimed that this work was based on the theory of the 18th century natural philosopher Roger Boscovich. Whyte proposed something he called "the unitary principle" to unify physics theories. Experimental work on this theory was carried out by Leo Baranski. Whyte was the author of the book Internal Factors in Evolution (1968). He proposed that Darwin's theory of natural selection is limited to external factors, and internal factors are a second directive agency in evolution. Whyte proposed the term "internal selection", John Tyler Bonner in the American Scientist positively reviewed the book. Other scientists have been more critical. Biologist Robert E. Hillman gave the book a negative review, commenting "in a weak and ill-supported effort to deemphasize the role of natural selection in evolution Whyte has detracted from what could have been a fine analysis and philosophical discussion of the latest advances in the chemical basis of heredity and evolution."
January 1, 1883
Alberto Gerchunoff (January 1, 1883 – March 2, 1950), was an Argentine writer born in the Russian Empire, in the city of Proskuriv, now Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine. His family emigrated in 1889 to the Argentinian Jewish agricultural colony of Moïseville, now Moisés Ville. His father, Rab Gershon ben Abraham Gerchunoff was murdered by a gaucho on February 12, 1891. After a few months the family moved to Rajil, founded by philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch as a haven for Jews fleeing the pogroms of Europe. Later, he lived in Buenos Aires, Argentine. Jorge Luis Borges described him thus: 'He was an indisputable writer, but his reputation transcends that of a man of letters. Unintentionally and perhaps unwittingly, he embodied an older type of writer ... who saw the written word as a mere stand-in for the oral, not as a sacred object.' Although he worked primarily as a journalist for Argentina's leading newspaper La Nación, he also wrote many important novels and books on Jewish life in Latin America, including The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas, which was later produced into a movie. For most of his life Gerchunoff espoused assimilationism for the Jews of Argentina, though altered his stance with the rise of Hitler, eventually advocating for the establishment of the state of Israel before the United Nations in 1947. He is said to have collaborated with Wilhelm Reich on a version of his orgone box designed to preserve the core of Jewish cultural memories, many of which were collected by him as oral histories and published under the title Héroes de los Intersticios in 1948.
January 2, 1951
André Aciman (born 2 January 1951 in Alexandria, Egypt) is a writer, currently distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of City University of New York teaching the history of literary theory and the works of Marcel Proust. His memoir, Out of Egypt (1995), won a Whiting Writers' Award. He previously taught creative writing at New York University and French literature at Princeton University. In 2009 Aciman was Visiting Distinguished Writer at Wesleyan University. Influences:Marcel Proust, James Joyce. Aciman was born in Egypt in a French-speaking home where family members also spoke Italian, Greek, Ladino, and Arabic. His family were Jews of Turkish and Italian origin who settled in Alexandria, Egypt in 1905. Aciman moved with his family to Italy at the age of fifteen and then to New York at nineteen. He has a B.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Lehman College and an A.M. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University.
January 2, 1920
Isaac Asimov (born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov, January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992) was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. His books have been published in nine out of ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal Classification. Asimov is widely considered a master of hard science fiction and, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, he was considered one of the ‘Big Three’ science fiction writers during his lifetime. Asimov's most famous work is the Foundation Series; his other major series are the Galactic Empire series and the Robot series. The Galactic Empire novels are explicitly set in earlier history of the same fictional universe as the Foundation Series. Later, beginning with Foundation's Edge, he linked this distant future to the Robot and Spacer stories, creating a unified ‘future history‘ for his stories much like those pioneered by Robert A. Heinlein and previously produced by Cordwainer Smith and Poul Anderson. He wrote hundreds of short stories, including the social science fiction ‘Nightfall‘, which in 1964 was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America the best short science fiction story of all time. Asimov wrote the Lucky Starr series of juvenile science-fiction novels using the pen name Paul French. The prolific Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as much nonfiction. Most of his popular science books explain scientific concepts in a historical way, going as far back as possible to a time when the science in question was at its simplest stage. He often provides nationalities, birth dates, and death dates for the scientists he mentions, as well as etymologies and pronunciation guides for technical terms. Examples include Guide to Science, the three volume set Understanding Physics, Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery, as well as works on astronomy, mathematics, the Bible, William Shakespeare's writing and chemistry. Asimov was a long-time member and vice president of Mensa International, albeit reluctantly; he described some members of that organization as ‘brain-proud and aggressive about their IQs’. He took more joy in being president of the American Humanist Association. The asteroid 5020 Asimov, a crater on the planet Mars, a Brooklyn, New York elementary school, and a literary award are named in his honor.
January 2, 1956
Lynda Barry (born Linda Jean Barry; January 2, 1956) is an American cartoonist, author, and teacher. Barry is best known for her weekly comic strip Ernie Pook's Comeek. She garnered attention with her 1988 illustrated novel The Good Times are Killing Me, about an interracial friendship between two young girls, which was adapted into a play. Her second illustrated novel, Cruddy, first appeared in 1999. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
January 2, 1886
Apsley George Benet Cherry-Garrard (2 January 1886 – 18 May 1959) was an English explorer of Antarctica. He was a member of the Terra Nova Expedition and is acclaimed for his historical account of this expedition, The Worst Journey in the World. Born in Lansdowne Road,[A] Bedford, as Apsley George Benet Cherry, the son and eldest child of Major General Apsley Cherry (later Cherry-Garrard) of Denford Park in Berkshire (later of Lamer Park in Hertfordshire where he became High Sheriff) and his wife, Evelyn Edith (née Sharpin), daughter of Henry Wilson Sharpin of Bedford. He was educated at Winchester College and Christ Church, Oxford where he read Classics and Modern History. While at Oxford he rowed in the 1908 Christ Church crew which won the Grand Challenge Cup at the Henley Royal Regatta. His surname was changed from Cherry to Cherry-Garrard by the terms of his great-aunt's will, through which his father inherited the enormous Lamer Park estate near Wheathampstead in Hertfordshire. Apsley inherited the estate on his father's death in 1907. Cherry-Garrard had always been enamoured by the stories of his father's achievements in India and China where he had fought with merit for the British Defence Forces, and felt that he must live up to his father's example. In September 1907, Dr Edward Adrian 'Bill' Wilson met with Captain Scott at Reginald Smith's home in Cortachy, to discuss another Antarctic expedition; Smith's young cousin Apsley Cherry-Garrard happened to visit and decided to volunteer.
January 2, 1935
FRANCESCA DURANTI was born on January 2, 1935. Her 1986 novel THE HOUSE ON MOON LAKE was a literary triumph, winning the Bagutta Prize, the Martina Franca Prize, and the City of Milan Prize. Her next novel, HAPPY ENDING, was a bestseller in Italy and was praised as ‘beautiful, lively, and intelligent’ (Library Journal) when published in the United States. Ms. Duranti has a law degree from the University of Pisa and has translated novels from French, German, and English. She lives in Milan, Italy.
January 2, 1915
John Hope Franklin (January 2, 1915 – March 25, 2009) was an American historian of United States and former president of Phi Beta Kappa, the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Southern Historical Association. Franklin is best known for his work From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947, and continually updated. More than three million copies have been sold. In 1995, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
January 2, 1948
TONY JUDT (2 January 1948 – 6 August 2010) was born in London in 1948. He was educated at King's College, Cambridge, and the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, and has taught at Cambridge, Oxford, Berkeley and New York University, where he is currently the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies and Director of the Remarque Institute, which is dedicated to the study of Europe and that he founded in 1995. The author or editor of eleven books, he is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, The New York Times and many other journals in Europe and the United States.
January 2, 1925
Richard Jessup (January 2, 1925 in Savannah, Georgia - October 22, 1982 in Nokomis, Florida) was a prolific American author and screenwriter. He also wrote under the name of Richard Telfair. Jessup was raised by his mother, Annie Jessup, until at the age of 16, he join the United States Merchant Marine. He was a merchant seaman and junior officer for 11 years during which time he said he read a book every day. He learned to be a writer by copying War and Peace on a typewriter whilst afloat, corrected all the errors, then threw the work over the side. His first published novel was The Cunning and the Haunted published in 1954 based on his experiences in orphanages. In the same year, Jessup wrote a teleplay for Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. The novel was filmed as The Young Don't Cry in 1957 with Jessup writing the screenplay for the film with Sal Mineo as the lead. He began writing Westerns in 1957 with Cheyenne Saturday and finishing with Chuka where he wrote the screenplay for the film of the same name for actor and producer Rod Taylor. Jessup wrote a series of five Westerns featuring Wyoming Jones under the name Richard Telfair. With his Western series ending, in the same year he wrote again as Telfair for a series of spy novels featuring Montgomery Nash. He used the name Telfair for an original novel based on the TV series Danger Man (the half-hour precursor to 'Secret Agent', as it was known in the US) called Target for Tonight in 1962. Inspired by The Hustler, Jessup wrote a novel of poker playing called The Cincinnati Kid that was filmed with Steve McQueen. Another of his novels, The Deadly Duo, was also filmed. In 1969, he wrote Sailor based on his experiences as a merchant seaman. Otto Preminger bought the rights to his novel Foxway for filming, but the movie was never made. His final work was Threat published in 1981. He died of cancer in 1982.
January 2, 1884
Oscar Devereaux Micheaux (January 2, 1884 – March 25, 1951) was an American author, film director and independent producer of more than 44 films. Although the short-lived Lincoln Motion Picture Company produced some films, he is regarded as the first major African-American feature filmmaker, the most successful African-American filmmaker of the first half of the twentieth century and the most prominent producer of race films. He produced both silent films and ‘talkies’ after the industry changed to incorporate speaking actors.
January 2, 1945
Mario Szichman was born on January 2, 1945 in Buenos Aires. Between 1967 and 1971, he lived in Caracas, where in addition to his first two novels, he wrote the controversial book Miguel Otero Silva: mitologia de una generacion frustrada. He returned to Buenos Aires in 1971 and during a four-year stay was editor for an Argentinian news agency and wrote a critical study of contemporary Venezuelan history entitled Uslar: cultura y dependencia. Back in Caracas from 1975 to 1981, Szichman was given a professorial position at the University of Andres Bello, and appointed director of the literary supplement of Ultimas Noticias. He presently resides in New York City, where he is a correspondent for the Capriles chain of Caracas, and writes for the Latin Desk of United Press International. He is working on a new novel set in Argentina. During a decade, Mario Szichman sketched Out alternate versions of a single inexhaustible theme of dual and analagous identity, of culture loss and revelation in the New World, in the human context of a group of desperate low-life immigrants within an older Argentina still ruled by senorialpatricians. First the theme took form in Crónica falsa (1969), then in Los judios del Mar Dulce (1971), later returning to La verdadera crónica falsa (1972) and now finding its point of convergence, of climax, in the saga of the Pechof family, in At 8: 25 Evita Became Immortal.
January 2, 1931
Zakaria Tamer (born January 2, 1931 in Damascus, Syria) is an influential master of the Arabic-language short story. He is one of the most important and widely read and translated short story writers in the Arab world, as well as being the foremost author of children’s stories in Arabic. He also writes children's stories and works as a freelance journalist, writing satirical columns in newspapers. His volumes of short stories, are often reminiscent of folktales, and are renowned for their relative simplicity on the one hand and the complexity of their many potential references on the other. They often have a sharp edge and are often a surrealistic protest against political or social oppression and exploitation. Most of Zakaria Tamer’s stories deal with people’s inhumanity to each other, the oppression of the poor by the rich and of the weak by the strong. The political and social problems of his own country, Syria, and of the Arab world, are reflected in the stories and sketches in the satirical style typical of his writing. His first stories were published in 1957. Since then he has published eleven collections of short stories, two collections of satirical articles and numerous children’s books. His works have been translated into many languages, with two collections in English, Tigers on the Tenth Day (translated by Denys Johnson-Davies, Quartet 1985) and Breaking Knees, published June 2008. In 2009 he won the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary prize
January 2, 1919
Charles Ray Willeford III (January 2, 1919 – March 27, 1988) was an American writer. An author of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and literary criticism, Willeford is best known for his series of novels featuring hardboiled detective Hoke Moseley. The first Hoke Moseley book, MIAMI BLUES (1984), is considered one of its era's most influential works of crime fiction. Film adaptations have been made of three of Willeford's novels: COCKFIGHTER, MIAMI BLUES, and THE WOMAN CHASER.
January 2, 1943
Teofilo F. Ruiz is professor of history and of Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA. His many books include Spain’s Centuries of Crisis and From Heaven to Earth. In 2007, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and selected as one of UCLA’s Distinguished Teachers.
January 2, 1929
Charles Beaumont (January 2, 1929 – February 21, 1967) was an American author of speculative fiction, including short stories in the horror and science fiction subgenres. He is remembered as a writer of classic Twilight Zone episodes, such as "The Howling Man", "Miniature", "Printer's Devil", and "Number Twelve Looks Just Like You", but also penned the screenplays for several films, among them 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, The Intruder, and The Masque of the Red Death. In 1963, when Beaumont was 34 and overwhelmed by numerous writing commitments, he began to suffer the effects of "a mysterious brain disease" which seemed to age him rapidly. His ability to speak, concentrate, and remember became erratic. By 1965 Beaumont was too ill to even create or sell story ideas. Charles Beaumont died in Woodland Hills, California at the age of 38. His son Christopher later said that "he looked ninety-five and was, in fact, ninety-five by every calendar except the one on your watch".
January 2, 1925
Richard Jessup (January 2, 1925 in Savannah, Georgia - October 22, 1982 in Nokomis, Florida) was a prolific American author and screenwriter. He also wrote under the name of Richard Telfair. Jessup was raised by his mother, Annie Jessup, until at the age of 16, he joined the United States Merchant Marine. He was a merchant seaman and junior officer for 11 years during which time he said he read a book every day. He learned to be a writer by copying War and Peace on a typewriter whilst afloat, corrected all the errors, then threw the work over the side. His first published novel was The Cunning and the Haunted published in 1954 based on his experiences in orphanages. In the same year, Jessup wrote a teleplay for Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. The novel was filmed as The Young Don't Cry in 1957 with Jessup writing the screenplay for the film with Sal Mineo as the lead. He began writing Westerns in 1957 with Cheyenne Saturday and finishing with Chuka where he wrote the screenplay for the film of the same name for actor and producer Rod Taylor. Jessup wrote a series of five Westerns featuring Wyoming Jones under the name Richard Telfair. With his Western series ending, in the same year he wrote again as Telfair for a series of spy novels featuring Montgomery Nash. He used the name Telfair for an original novel based on the TV series Danger Man (the half-hour precursor to 'Secret Agent', as it was known in the US) called Target for Tonight in 1962. Inspired by The Hustler, Jessup wrote a novel of poker playing called The Cincinnati Kid that was filmed with Steve McQueen. Another of his novels, The Deadly Duo, was also filmed. In 1969, he wrote Sailor based on his experiences as a merchant seaman. Otto Preminger bought the rights to his novel Foxway for filming, but the movie was never made. His final work was Threat published in 1981. He died of cancer in 1982.
January 3, 1938
Alma Flor Ada (born January 3, 1938 in Camagüey, Cuba) has lived in Cuba, Spain, and Peru. She now lives in San Francisco, California, where she is a Professor Emerita of multicultural education at the University of San Francisco. She is an award-winning Cuban-American author of children’s books, poetry, and novels. Dr. Ada is recognized for her work promoting bilingual and multicultural education in the United States.
January 3, 1892
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor who is best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.
January 3, 1919
Robin Gerard Penleigh Boyd CBE (3 January 1919 – 16 October 1971) was an influential Australian architect, writer, teacher and social commentator. He, along with Harry Seidler, stands as one of the foremost proponents for the International Modern Movement in Australian architecture. He is the author of the influential book The Australian Ugliness (1960), a critique on Australian architecture, particularly the state of Australian suburbia. Like his American contemporary John Lautner, Boyd had relatively few opportunities to design major buildings and his best known and most influential works as an architect are his numerous and innovative small house designs.
January 3, 1951
Ken Bruen (born 1951) is an Irish writer of hard-boiled and noir crime fiction Education and teaching career Born in Galway, he was educated at Gormanston College, County Meath and later at Trinity College Dublin, where he earned a PhD in metaphysics. Bruen spent twenty-five years as an English teacher in Africa, Japan, S.E. Asia and South America. His travels have been hazardous at times, including a stint in a Brazilian jail. Bruen is part of a literary circle that includes Jason Starr, Reed Farrel Coleman, and Allan Guthrie. His works include the well-received White Trilogy and The Guards. In 2006, Hard Case Crime released Bust, a collaboration between Bruen and New York crime author Jason Starr. Bruen's short story "Words Are Cheap" (2006) appears in the first issue of Murdaland. He has also edited an anthology of stories set in Dublin, Dublin Noir. Jack Taylor's informant, named China, is a nod of the head by Ken Bruen to author Alan Hunter's original informant character named China, in the George Gently series of novels, first published in 1955. Bruen is also the recipient of the first David Loeb Goodis Award (2008) for his dedication to his art. Other works of note include The Killing of the Tinkers, The Magdalen Martyrs, The Dramatist and Priest, all part of his Jack Taylor series, which began with The Guards. Set in Galway, the series relates the adventures and misadventures of a disgraced former police officer working as a haphazard private investigator whose life has been marred by alcoholism and drug abuse. It chronicles the social change in Ireland in Bruen's own lifetime, paying particular attention to the decline of the Catholic Church as a social and political power. Themes also explored include Ireland's economic prosperity from the mid-1990s onwards, although it is often portrayed as a force which has left Ireland as a materialistic and spiritually drained society which still harbours deep social inequality. This is the side of the Celtic Tiger best portrayed in Bruen's Ireland-based novels. Immigration is also a theme to be found in these works. Bruen is the recipient of many awards: The Shamus Award in 2007 (The Dramatist) and 2004 (The Guards), both for Best P.I. Hardcover; The Macavity Award in 2005 (The Killing of the Tinkers) and 2010 (Tower, cowritten by Reed Farrel Coleman), both for Best Mystery Novel; The Barry Award in 2007 (Priest) for Best British Crime Novel; the Grand Prix de Literature Policiere in 2007 (Priest) for Best International Crime Novel. He was also a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 2004 (The Guards) and 2008 (Priest), both for Best Novel.
January 3, 106 BC
Marcus Tullius Cicero (3 January 106 BC – 7 December 43 BC), was a Roman philosopher, politician, lawyer, orator, political theorist, consul and constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the Roman equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists. His influence on the Latin language was so immense that the subsequent history of prose in not only Latin but European languages up to the 19th century was said to be either a reaction against or a return to his style. According to Michael Grant, 'the influence of Cicero upon the history of European literature and ideas greatly exceeds that of any other prose writer in any language'. Cicero introduced the Romans to the chief schools of Greek philosophy and created a Latin philosophical vocabulary (with neologisms such as humanitas, qualitas, quantitas, and essentia) distinguishing himself as a linguist, translator, and philosopher. Petrarch's rediscovery of Cicero's letters is often credited for initiating the 14th-century Renaissance in public affairs, humanism, and classical Roman culture. According to Polish historian Tadeusz Zieli?ski, 'Renaissance was above all things a revival of Cicero, and only after him and through him of the rest of Classical antiquity.' The peak of Cicero's authority and prestige came during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and his impact on leading Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke, David Hume, and Montesquieu was substantial. His works rank among the most influential in European culture, and today still constitute one of the most important bodies of primary material for the writing and revision of Roman history, especially the last days of the Roman Republic. Though he was an accomplished orator and successful lawyer, Cicero believed his political career was his most important achievement. It was during his consulship that the Second Catilinarian Conspiracy attempted to overthrow the government through an attack on the city by outside forces, and Cicero suppressed the revolt by executing five conspirators without due process. During the chaotic latter half of the 1st century BC marked by civil wars and the dictatorship of Gaius Julius Caesar, Cicero championed a return to the traditional republican government. Following Julius Caesar's death Cicero became an enemy of Mark Antony in the ensuing power struggle, attacking him in a series of speeches. He was proscribed as an enemy of the state by the Second Triumvirate and consequently killed in 43 BC.
January 3, 1944
Blanche d’Alpuget was born in Sydney and now lives in Canberra. She has worked as a journalist in the United Kingdom, Indonesia, and Malaysia as well as in Australia.
January 3, 1969
Marie Darrieussecq (born Bayonne, Pyrénées-Atlantiques 1969) is a French writer.
January 3, 1937
Alexander Russell Frater (born New Hebrides, 3 January 1937) is a travel writer and journalist. Frater's grandfather and his father were Scottish Presbyterian missionaries in the New Hebrides, now Vanuatu. His grandfather Maurice was based on the island of Paama, which had previously been hostile to all outsiders, from 1900-1939. His father Alexander, who became a doctor after training in Sydney, established a hospital on the island of Iririki, offshore from Parliament House in Port Vila, training many Pacific Islanders in the treatment of tropical diseases. His mother established and ran two schools in Vanuatu. In 1946 the family moved to Suva, Fiji, where Frater Snr. became Professor at the Central Medical School (he later took a post in New Zealand and died there). After primary school Frater was sent to Scotch College in Melbourne, and then attended the University of Melbourne as an undergraduate in the late 1950s. He married Marlis (d. 19 October 2011) in 1962 and moved to the UK to pursue a career as a journalist (with further study, Durham and Perugia). They had 2 children, Tania and John. He lives in south west London. Frater is noted for three well-regarded travel books, the most recent, Tales from the Torrid Zone, is in part an autobiography (of his childhood in Vanuatu) and a travelogue, was reviewed by the New York Times and described as "a pleasing grab bag of a book, a jumble of funny encounters, strange sights, forgotten history and really bad food". Chasing the Monsoon (1990) is another notable work in which he follows the Monsoon in India. It was made into a BBC documentary in which he featured. In the book Beyond the Blue Horizon (1984) the author in went to Statesman-Aldwych Travel in London and asked them to provide him with a ticket to all the airfields that Imperial Airways used on their route from London to Australia in 1935. He succeeded in visiting most of the many strange airfields used then, and also describes the many intermediate flights between them with local airlines unknown to most readers. The book also covers how it was to travel as a passenger to these far-away and forgotten places back in 1935. His latest book to date, published in 2008, is The Balloon Factory. It focuses on the pioneers of aviation based at The Balloon Factory in Farnborough, UK
January 3, 1911
Josef Herman (3 January 1911 – 19 February 2000), was a highly regarded Polish-British realist painter who influenced contemporary art, particularly in the UK. His work often had subjects of workers and was inherently political. He was among more than a generation of eastern European Jewish artists who emigrated to escape persecution and worked abroad. For eleven years he lived in South Wales.
January 3, 1955
Kevin Jackson (born 3 January 1955 in London) is an English writer, broadcaster, filmmaker and pataphysician. He was educated at the Emanuel School, Battersea, and Pembroke College, Cambridge. After teaching in the English Department of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, he joined the BBC, first as a producer in radio and then as a director of short documentaries for television. In 1987 he was recruited to the Arts pages of The Independent. He has been a freelance writer since the early 1990s and is now a regular contributor to BBC radio programmes, including Radio 4's Saturday Review. Jackson often collaborates on projects in various media: with, among others, the film-maker Kevin Macdonald, with whom he co-produced a Channel 4 documentary on Humphrey Jennings, The Man Who Listened to Britain (2000); with the cartoonist Hunt Emerson, on comic strips about the history of Western occultism for Fortean Times, on two comics inspired by John Ruskin (published by the Ruskin Foundation) and on a book-length version of Dante's Inferno (Knockabout Books, 2102); with the musician and composer Colin Minchin (lyrics for various songs, and the rock opera Bite, first staged in West London, October 2011); and with the songwriter Peter Blegvad (short surreal plays for BBC Radio 3 – eartoons). Jackson also conducted a long biographical interview with Blegvad, published by Atlas Press in September 2011 as The Bleaching Stream. Jackson appears, under his own name, as a semi-fictional character in Iain Sinclair's account of a pedestrian journey around the M25, London Orbital. Worple Press published Jackson's book of interviews with Sinclair, The Verbals in 2002. He was among the founder members of the London Institute of 'Pataphysics, and holds the Ordre de la Grande Gidouille from the College de Pataphysique in Paris. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Companion of the Guild of St George. From 2009–2011 he was Visiting Professor in English at University College, London.
January 3, 1951
Rosa Montero (born 3 January 1951 in Madrid, Spain) is an award-winning journalist for the Spanish newspaper El País and an author of contemporary fiction. Montero was born into a lower-middle-class family in Cuatro Caminos, a district of Madrid. A bout of tuberculosis forced her to remain at home between the ages of five and nine, and she began reading and writing extensively during that time. She then entered the Beatriz Galindo Institute of Madrid, and at 17, she began her university studies in Madrid's School of Philosophy and Arts (Facultad de Filosofía y Letras). The following year she was admitted into the Journalism School, and during her university years, she participated in independent theater groups. After school, she began working as a journalist, and in 1976 she began working at El País. In 1977 she began publishing interviews in the Sunday edition of the paper, and the following year, she won the 'Manuel del Arco' prize for her work, and was the first woman to receive it. She, as well, published her first novel in 1979, Crónica del desamor (Chronicle of Enmity). In 1980, she won the National Journalism prize for her articles and literary reports, and that year she was named editor in chief of the weekly version of El País. In 1981 she published La función Delta (The Delta Function), and the following year, a collection of her interviews previously published in El País was released, with the title 'Cinco años de país' (Five Years of El País). The novel Te trataré como una reina (I Will Treat You Like a Queen) followed in 1983 and was a commercial success. She was awarded the World Prize of interviews in 1987, and published Temblor (Tremor) in 1990. Her first children's story, 'El nido de los sueños' (The Nest of Dreams), was published in 1992, and in the following years she released Bella y oscura (Beautiful and Dark, 1993) and La vida desnuda (The Naked Life, 1994). In 1994 she was awarded the Journalism Prize, and in 1997 she received the Spring Novel Prize for her work La hija del caníbal (The Cannibal's Daughter). In 1999, she published Pasiones (Passions), and in 2002, Estampas bostonianas y otros viajes. In 2003, she published what she considers one of her best works, La loca de la casa (The Lunatic of the House). This book won the 'Qué Leer' Prize to the best book published in Spain in 2003, and the Grinzane Cavour Prize for the best foreign book published in Italy in 2004. In 2005 she published 'Historia del Rey Transparente' (Story of the Transparent King), which has also won the 'Qué Leer' Prize as the best book published in Spain in 2005.
January 3, 1954
Robert Olmstead (born January 3, 1954) is an American novelist and educator. Olmstead is the author of the novels AMERICA BY LAND, A TRAIL OF HEART'S BLOOD WHEREVER WE GO and SOFT WATER. He is also the author of a memoir STAY HERE WITH ME, as well as River Dogs, a collection of short stories, and the textbook ELEMENTS OF THE WRITING CRAFT. His novel COAL BLACK HORSE has received national acclaim, including the 2007 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Fiction and the 2008 Ohioana Book Award for Fiction. He is currently the Director of Creative Writing at Ohio Wesleyan University. He has also served as the Senior Writer in Residence at Dickinson College and as the director of creative writing at Boise State University.
January 3, 1942
Jonah Raskin is Professor of Communication Studies at Sonoma State University and the author of THE RADICAL JACK LONDON: WRITINGS ON WAR AND REVOLUTION, AMERICAN SCREAM: ALLEN GINSBERG'S ‘HOWL’ AND THE MAKING OF THE BEAT GENERATION, and FOR THE HELL OF IT: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ABBIE HOFFMAN, all available from University of California Press.
January 3, 1950
Jean Thompson is the author, most recently of Who Do You Love: Stories, a 1999 National Book Award finalist for fiction. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundations, she lives in Urbana, Illinois.
January 3, 1949
Gerald Horne is an African-American historian who currently holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. Born in January 1949 he was raised in St. Louis, USA. After undergraduate education at Princeton University he received his PhD from Columbia University and a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a frequent contributor to Political Affairs magazine.
January 4, 1925
Richard T. Drinnon (born January 4, 1925, in Portland, Oregon; died April 19, 2012 in Port Orford, Oregon) was professor emeritus of history at Bucknell University. He received his PhD from the University of Minnesota. In 1961, while Drinnon was a professor at the University of California, he was discovered by police to be the next person on the target list of John Harrison Farmer, who felt that he was on a mission from God to kill people that he believed were associated with communism. During the Columbia University protests of 1968, Drinnon participated in a student walkout of a speech at Bucknell University by Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, when Humphrey blamed protesters for disorder on the campus. Drinnon shouted 'This is a disgrace' and walked out along with about 30 students.
January 4, 1883
Max Forrester Eastman (January 4, 1883 – March 25, 1969) was an American writer on literature, philosophy and society; a poet, and a prominent political activist. Moving to New York City for graduate school, Eastman became involved with liberal and radical circles in Greenwich Village. He supported socialism and became a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance, and an activist for a number of liberal and radical causes. For several years, he edited The Masses. With his sister Crystal Eastman, in 1917 he co-founded The Liberator, a radical magazine of politics and the arts. In later life, however, Eastman changed his views, becoming highly critical of socialism and communism after his experiences during a nearly two-year stay in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, as well as later studies. He was influenced by the deadly rivalry between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, by which Trotsky was assassinated, as well as the wholesale abuses of the 1930s show trials under Stalin, who conducted widespread terror against his citizens; repression and purges that resulted in the imprisonment and deaths of millions of people in the Soviet Union. Eastman became an advocate of free-market economics and anti-communism, while remaining an atheist and independent thinker. In 1955, he published Reflections on the Failure of Socialism. He published more frequently in The National Review and other conservative journals in later life, but always remained independent in his thinking; for instance, he publicly opposed United States involvement in the Vietnam War in the 1960s, earlier than most.
January 4, 1901
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
January 4, 1943
Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D. is an author, speaker, and filmmaker who is internationally recognized for her work on the image of women in advertising and her critical studies of alcohol and tobacco advertising.
January 4, 1921
Francis Paul Prucha (January 4, 1921 – July 30, 2015) was an American Jesuit, historian, and professor emeritus of history at Marquette University. His work, The Great Father, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and is regarded as a classic among professional historians
January 4, 1936
GHOLAM-HOSSEIN SA’EDI was born in Tabriz in 1935. While studying for a medical degree, he became involved in political activities that later caused him to be imprisoned by the Shah. After being tortured, he was released and allowed to come to the United States. Sa’edi has published over thirty works - including plays and short stories - and is now living in Iran.
January 4, 1951
Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno lives in Montague, Massachusetts, with his wife, the poet Patricia Pruitt, and their little white dog, Salty. In 2007 he was guest writer at the first Mussoorie Writers' Festival in India. His books include E.E. Cummings: A Biography (Methuen Publishing, 2005) and The Continual Pilgrimage: American Writers in Paris, 1944-1960 (City Lights, 2001). He currently teaches in the program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT.
January 4, 1952
Michele Faith Wallace (born January 4, 1952) is a black feminist author, cultural critic, and daughter of artist Faith Ringgold. Michele Wallace was born in Harlem in 1952. She attended the New Lincoln School and the College of the City of New York, and has worked at Newsweek and taught writing at New York University. She has written for many journals, among them Ms. Magazine, The Village Voice, and Esquire. She is best known for her 1979 book Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. Wallace's writings on literature, art, film, and popular culture have been widely published and have made her a leader of African-American intellectuals. She is a Professor of English at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).
January 4, 1867
Ricardo Fernandez Guardia (Alajuela, January 4, 1867 - San Jose, February 25, 1950 ) was a Costa Rican writer, politician and diplomat. He was the son of Isabel Guardia Gutiérrez and the historian León Fernández Bonilla. Not only did he continue his father's historical studies and contribute to the development of new research incorporating key texts in the country's history, he also elevated Costa Rican history to a higher category merging scientific and literary material to create his chronicles. A cultivator and follower of the best of the Spanish and French literary traditions, Fernández Guardia identified himself with the birth of literary realism and the Costa Rican theater. He is considered by some to be the first classical author in Costa Rica. His concern for the purity of the language and the logical structuring of the expression of his ideas make up a unit of style unprecedented in Costa Rican letters. He was Secretary of Foreign Relations and attached portfolios from 1909 to 1910. He wrote numerous and documented historical works, including: The Discovery and the Conquest, Historical Book of Costa Rica, Colonial Chronicles, Historical Review of Talamanca, Morazán in Costa Rica, Independence, Things and People of Yesteryear, the League War and the Quijano invasion, Gleaning in the past and Don Florencio del Castillo in the Cortes of Cádiz . He was also the author of several literary works and political essays, including a 1916 message, in which the policies of President Alfredo González Flores were criticized. He was Secretary of the Legation of Costa Rica in Europe (1885-1889) and Charge d'Affaires ad interim in Spain (1886-1887), First Secretary of the Legation in Europe (1897-1901), Minister on a special mission in Italy (1900 ), Minister on special mission in Honduras (1904), Confidential agent of Costa Rica in the United States (1917), Minister on special mission in Panama (1920) and in Mexico (1921), Consul General in Spain (1929-1930) and Minister Plenipotentiary of Costa Rica in Guatemala (1944-1945). Declared Benemérito de la Patria by the Costa Rican legislature in 1944.
January 5, 1966
TANANARIVE DUE is a Miami Herald columnist and the author of THE BETWEEN, a novel the New York Times Book Review hailed as ‘a finely honed work that always engages and frequently surprises.’ A finalist for the Bram Stoker Award for a first novelist, she is also included in NAKED CAME THE MANATEE, a collaborative mystery novel featuring several Miami writers.
January 5, 1921
Friedrich Dürrenmatt (January 5, 1921 – December 14, 1990) was a Swiss author and dramatist. He was a proponent of epic theater whose plays reflected the recent experiences of World War II. The politically active author gained fame largely due to his avant-garde dramas, philosophically deep crime novels, and often macabre satire. One of his leading sentences was: ‘A story is not finished, until it has taken the worst turn’. Dürrenmatt was a member of the Gruppe Olten. Dürrenmatt was born in Konolfingen, in the Emmental (canton of Bern), the son of a Protestant pastor. His grandfather Ulrich Dürrenmatt was a conservative politician. The family moved to Bern in 1935. Dürrenmatt began to study of philosophy and German language and literature at the University of Zurich in 1941, but moved to the University of Bern after one semester. In 1943 he decided to become an author and dramatist and dropped his academic career . In 1945-46, he wrote his first play ‘It is written’. On October 11 1946 he married the actress Lotti Geissler. She died on January 16 1983 and Dürrenmatt married again in 1984 to another actress, Charlotte Kerr. Dürrenmatt also some of his own works and his drawings were exhibited in Neuchâtel in 1976 and 1985, as well as in Zürich in 1978. Like Brecht, Dürrenmatt explored the dramatic possibilities of epic theater. His plays are meant to involve the audience in a theoretical debate, rather than as purely passive entertainment. When he was 26, his first play, It Is Written, premiered to great controversy. The story of the play revolves around a battle between a sensation-craving cynic and a religious fanatic who takes scripture literally, all of this taking place while the city they live in is under siege. The play’s opening night in April, 1947 caused fights and protests in the audience. His first major success was the play Romulus the Great. Set in the year 476 A.D., the play explores the last days of the Roman Empire, presided over, and brought about by its last emperor. The Visit (Der Besuch der alten Dame, 1956) which tells of a rich benefactor visiting her beneficiaries, is the work best known in the United States. The satirical drama The Physicists (Die Physiker, 1962) which deals with issues concerning science and its responsibility for dramatic and even dangerous changes to our world has also been presented in translation. Radio plays published in English include Hercules in the Augean Stables (Herkules und der Stall des Augias, 1954), Incident at Twilight (Abendstunde im Spätherbst, 1952) and The Mission of the Vega (Das Unternehmen der Wega, 1954). The two late works ‘Labyrinth’ and ‘Turmbau zu Babel’ are a collection of unfinished ideas, stories, and philosophical thoughts. In 1990, he gave two famous speeches, one in honour of Václav Havel (Die Schweiz, ein Gefängnis? / Switzerland a Prison?), and the other in honour of Mikhail Gorbachev (Kants Hoffnung / Kant’s Hope). Dürrenmatt often compared the three Abrahamic religions and Marxism, which he also saw as a religion. Even if there are several parallels between Dürrenmatt and Brecht, Dürrenmatt never took a political position, but represented a pragmatic philosophy of life. In 1969, he traveled in the USA, in 1974 to Israel, and in 1990 to Auschwitz in Poland. Dürrenmatt died on December 14, 1990 in Neuchâtel. (original title: Die Panne, 1956 - Peter Schifferli, Verlags AG. ‘Die Arche’, Zurich).
January 5, 1949
Roger Eatwell (born January 5, 1949) is a British academic currently a Professor of Politics at the University of Bath. Eatwell studies far-right extremist European politics, and has authored several books and articles on fascism and right-wing Euoprean movements.
January 5, 1932
Umberto Eco is Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna. His collections of essays include Kant and the Platypus, Serendipities, Travels in Hyperreality , and How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays . He is also the author of the novels: The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum , and The Island of the Day Before.
January 5, 1931
Juan Goytisolo Gay (5 January 1931 – 4 June 2017) was a Spanish poet, essayist, and novelist. He lived in Marrakech from 1997 until his death in 2017. He was considered Spain's greatest living writer at the beginning of the 21st century, yet he had lived abroad since the 1950s.
January 5, 1954
LASZLO KRASZNAHORKAI lives in Pilissentlãszló, Hungary. He has won numerous prizes including Best Book of the Year in Germany in 1993 for THE MELANCHOLY OF RESISTANCE. Two of his novels have been made into award-winning films by the renowned filmmaker Béla Tarr.
January 5, 1904
LUISA MERCEDES LEVINSON (January 5, 1904, Buenos Aires, Argentina - March 4, 1988, Buenos Aires, Argentina) was born in Buenos Aires to a Spanish mother and Australian father. Undoubtedly, family influences account for her cosmopolitan outlook and freedom of spirit which contributed in no small measure to the formation of a picturesque personality. Yet her sensitivity to the cultural values of her native land pulsates and is reflected in her many works. Many of her books have been translated into various languages. Levinson was the recipient of prestigious literary awards not only in her native Argentina, but abroad as well, winning the admiration of the literary world. Her daughter, Luisa Valenzuela, is currently an award-winning writer of international renown.
January 5, 1946
Arthur Lyons was born on January 5, 1946 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He was a writer, known for Slow Burn (1986) and E! Mysteries & Scandals (1998). He was married to Barbara. He died on March 21, 2008 in Palm Springs, California.
January 5, 1938
Ngugi wa Thiong'o (born January 5, 1938) is a Kenyan author, formerly working in English and now working in Gikuyu. His work includes novels, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children's literature. He is the founder and editor of the Gikuyu-language journal, Mutiiri. In 1977, Ngugi embarked upon a novel form of theater in his native Kenya which sought to liberate the theatrical process from what he held to be ‘the general bourgeois education system’, by encouraging spontaneity and audience participation in the performances. Ngugi's project sought to ‘demystify’ the theatrical process, and to avoid the ‘process of alienation [which] produces a gallery of active stars and an undifferentiated mass of grateful admirers’ which, according to Ngugi, encourages passivity in ‘ordinary people’. Although Ngaahika Ndeenda was a commercial success, it was shut down by the authoritarian Kenyan regime six weeks after its opening. Ngugi was subsequently imprisoned for over a year. Adopted as an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, the artist was released from prison, and fled Kenya. In the United States, he taught at Yale University for some years, and has since also taught at New York University, with a dual professorship in Comparative Literature and Performance Studies, and the University of California, Irvine. Ngugi has frequently been regarded as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. His son is the author Mukoma wa Ngugi. Ngugi was born in Kamiriithu, near Limuru in Kiambu district, Kenya, of Kikuyu descent, and baptised James Ngugi. His family was caught up in the Mau Mau War; his half brother Mwangi was actively involved in the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, and his mother was tortured at Kamriithu homeguard post. He received a B.A. in English from Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, in 1963; during his education, a play of his, THE BLACK HERMIT, was produced in Kampala in 1962. He published his first novel, WEEP NOT, CHILD, in 1964, which he wrote while attending the University of Leeds in England. It was the first novel in English to be published by an East African. His second novel, THE RIVER BETWEEN (1965), has as its background the Mau Mau rebellion, and described an unhappy romance between Christians and non-Christians. THE RIVER BETWEEN is currently on Kenya's national secondary school syllabus. His novel A Grain of Wheat (1967) marked his embrace of Fanonist Marxism. He subsequently renounced English, Christianity, and the name James Ngugi as colonialist; he changed his name back to Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and began to write in his native Gikuyu and Swahili. The uncensored political message of his 1977 play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I WILL MARRY WHEN I WANT) provoked then Vice President Daniel arap Moi to order his arrest. While detained in the Kamiti Maximum Security Prison, he wrote the first modern novel in Gikuyu, Caitaani mutharaba-Ini (DEVIL ON THE CROSS), on prison-issued toilet paper. After his release, he was not reinstated to his job as professor at Nairobi University, and his family was harassed. Due to his writing about the injustices of the dictatorial government at the time, Ngugi and his family were forced to live in exile. Only after Arap Moi was voted out of office, 22 years later, was it safe for them to return. His later works include Detained, his prison diary (1981), DECOLONISING THE MIND: THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE IN AFRICAN LITERATURE (1986), an essay arguing for African writers' expression in their native languages, rather than European languages, in order to renounce lingering colonial ties and to build an authentic African literature, and MATIGARI (1987), one of his most famous works, a satire based on a Gikuyu folktale. In 1992 he became a professor of Comparative Literature and Performance Studies at New York University, where he held the Erich Maria Remarque Chair. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature as well as the Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine. On August 8, 2004, Ngugi returned to Kenya as part of a month-long tour of East Africa. On August 11, robbers broke into his apartment: they assaulted both the Professor and his wife, and stole money and a computer. Since then, Ngugi has returned to America, and in the summer 2006 the American publishing firm Random House published his first new novel in nearly two decades, WIZARD OF THE CROW, translated to English from Gikuyu by the author. On November 10, 2006, while in San Francisco at Hotel Vitale at the Embarcadero, Ngugi was harassed and ordered to leave the hotel by an employee. The event led to a public outcry and angered the Kenyan community in the San Francisco Bay area and abroad, prompting an apology by the hotel.
January 5, 1908
Harry Kurnitz (January 5, 1908 – March 18, 1968) was an American playwright, novelist, and prolific screenwriter who wrote swashbucklers for Errol Flynn and comedies for Danny Kaye. He also wrote some mystery fiction under the name Marco Page. Kurnitz grew up in Philadelphia and attended the University of Pennsylvania. He entered journalism as a book and music reviewer for The Philadelphia Record in 1930. In his spare time he wrote fiction. A mystery story Kurnitz wrote in 1937, Fast Company, about skulduggery in the rare-book business, led him to Hollywood. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bought the book, and Kurnitz wrote the screenplay. Kurnitz wrote more than forty movie scripts, among them Witness for the Prosecution, What Next, Corporal Hargrove?, and How to Steal a Million. His first play was Reclining Figure, a 1954 comedy about painters and their patrons and the tricks of the dealers and collectors who prey on them. Later, Kurnitz wrote the hit comedy Once More, with Feeling!. Other plays included High Fidelity and The Girl Who Came to Supper, a musical he wrote with Noël Coward, who composed the music and lyrics. On March 18, 1968, Kurnitz died of a heart attack. At the time of his death he was working on a detective story.
January 5, 1844
Jose Manuel de los Reyes González de Prada y Ulloa (Lima, January 5, 1844 – Lima, July 22, 1918) was a Peruvian politician and anarchist, literary critic and director of the National Library of Peru. He is well remembered as a social critic who helped develop Peruvian intellectual thought in the early twentieth century, as well as the academic style known as modernismo. He was close in spirit to Clorinda Matto de Turner whose first novel, Torn from the Nest approached political indigenismo, and to Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera, who like González Prada, practiced a positivism sui generis. David Sobrevilla is Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Saint Marcos of Lima and of Philosophy of Law at the University of Lima. He has published numerous works on philosophy, philosophy of law and of culture, German and Latin American aesthetics, and theory of aesthetics. Frederick Fornoff is Professor of Spanish, Comparative Literature, and Creative Writing at The University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. He is the recipient of many awards including the NEA, NEH, and Fulbright.
January 5, 1921
Blaise Cendrars (September 1, 1887 - January 21, 1961) was born in 1887 of mixed Swiss and Scottish descent. At the age of fifteen he swung down from a fifth-floor balcony to escape his parents and begin his world traveling. Employed by a jewel merchant, he first went through Russia, Persia, and China; from then on he traveled everywhere, living by his wits, making films, serving as a corporal in the Foreign Legion during World War I, and writing. Cendrars died in Paris in 1961.
January 5, 1902
Stella Dorothea Gibbons (5 January 1902 – 19 December 1989) was an English author, journalist, and poet. She established her reputation with her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932), which won the literary Prix Femina Étranger and has been reprinted many times. Although she was active as a writer for half a century, none of her later 22 novels or other literary works—which included a sequel to Cold Comfort Farm—achieved the same critical or popular success. Much of her work was long out of print before a modest revival in the 21st century. The daughter of a London doctor, Gibbons had a turbulent and often unhappy childhood. After an indifferent school career she trained as a journalist, and worked as a reporter and features writer, mainly for the Evening Standard and The Lady. Her first book, published in 1930, was a collection of poems which was well received, and through her life she considered herself primarily a poet rather than a novelist. After Cold Comfort Farm, a satire on the genre of rural-themed 'loam and lovechild' novels popular in the late 1920s, most of Gibbons's novels were based within the middle-class suburban world with which she was familiar. Gibbons became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. Her style has been praised by critics for its charm, barbed humour and descriptive skill, and has led to comparison with Jane Austen. The impact of Cold Comfort Farm dominated her career, and she grew to resent her identification with the book to the exclusion of the rest of her output. Widely regarded as a one-work novelist, she and her works have not been accepted into the canon of English literature—partly, other writers have suggested, because of her detachment from the literary world and her tendency to mock it.
January 6, 1943
Pam Cook (born January 6, 1943, Farnborough, United Kingdom) is Professor Emerita in Film at the University of Southampton. She was educated at Sir William Perkins's School, Chertsey, Surrey and Birmingham University, where she was taught by Stuart Hall,
January 6, 1582
Alonso de Contreras (Madrid, Spain, 6 January 1582 - 1641), was a Spanish sailor (captain of a frigate), soldier (captain of infantry and then of cavalry), privateer, adventurer and writer, best known as the author of his autobiography; one of the very few autobiographies of Spanish soldiers under the Spanish Habsburgs and possibly one of the finest, together with the True History of the Conquest of New Spain (Historia Verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España) by Bernal Diaz del Castillo.
January 6, 1955
Jan DeBlieu is an American writer whose work often focuses on how people are shaped by the landscapes in which they live. Her own writing has been influenced by her adopted home on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. She is the author of four books including Hatteras Journal, Meant to Be Wild, Wind (which won the John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Natural History Writing, the highest national honor for that genre) and Year of the Comets. Her fifth book, which examines living in service to others, is forthcoming. She also has published dozens of essays and magazine articles, both in literary journals and mainstream publications like The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, Audubon, and Orion. Her work has been widely anthologized. In 2003 she was named the Cape Hatteras Coastkeeper for the North Carolina Coastal Federation, a post she held until 2012. She has since returned to full-time writing. While DeBlieu's work has mostly focused on naturally history, landscape, and place, this shifted after the death of her son in a car accident in 2009. Since then she has concentrated on exploring how ordinary people can help change the lives of people in need.
January 6, 1931
Edgar Lawrence Doctorow (January 6, 1931 – July 21, 2015) was an American novelist, editor, and professor, best known internationally for his works of historical fiction. He wrote twelve novels, three volumes of short fiction and a stage drama. They included the award-winning novels Ragtime (1975), Billy Bathgate (1989), and The March (2005). These, like many of his other works, placed fictional characters in recognizable historical contexts, with known historical figures, and often used different narrative styles. His stories were recognized for their originality and versatility, and Doctorow was praised for his audacity and imagination. A number of Doctorow's novels were also adapted for the screen, including Welcome to Hard Times (1967) starring Henry Fonda, Daniel (1983) starring Timothy Hutton, Billy Bathgate (1991) starring Dustin Hoffman, and Wakefield (2016) starring Bryan Cranston. His most notable adaptations were for the film Ragtime (1981) and the Broadway musical of the same name (1998), which won four Tony Awards. Doctorow was the recipient of numerous writing awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Ragtime, National Book Critics Circle Award for Billy Bathgate, National Book Critics Circle Award for The March, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction. Former President Barack Obama called him "one of America's greatest novelists".
January 6, 1950
Michael Genelin (born January 6, 1950) is an American author and former Los Angeles Head Deputy District Attorney in the Hardcore Gang Division. Genelin has been involved around the world in Penal Code reform, Anti-Corruption reform in government, including legislative drafting, Ethics Establishment and Training, Freedom of Information laws, Witness Protection Practices, Trial Advocacy, Investigation and Trial of Cases, particularly homicides, Judicial Procedures, Reform and Creation of Evidence Procedures, Human Resources, all aspects of training, including Anti-Corruption Investigation and Prosecution and the general operations of law enforcement/prosecution/criminal court programs, Investigative Journalism Training, and Interactive Governmental Communications.
January 6, 1943
Todd Alan Gitlin (born January 6, 1943) is an American sociologist, political writer, novelist, and cultural commentator. He has written about the mass media, politics, intellectual life and the arts, for both popular and scholarly publications.
January 6, 1940
Penny Lernoux (January 6, 1940 - October 9, 1989, Mount Kisco, NY) was a reporter and an expert on the Latin American Church. She lived in Bogota, Colombia, for several years. She was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Southern California and has written on Latin America for Newsweek, the Nation, Copley News Service, U.S. Information Agency, and the National Catholic Reporter. She was a Fellow and grant recipient of the Alicia Peterson Foundation. The grant was awarded her to do research into the Church in Latin America.
January 6, 1945
Barry Holstun Lopez (born January 6, 1945) is an American author, essayist, and fiction writer whose work is known for its humanitarian and environmental concerns. He won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for Arctic Dreams (1986) and his Of Wolves and Men (1978) was a National Book Award finalist.
January 6, 1921
Wolfgang Lotz (6 January 1921 – 13 May 1993), who later adopted the Hebrew name Ze'ev Gur-Arie, was an Israeli spy in Egypt during the 1960s providing intelligence and conducting terror operations against Egyptian military scientists. He was arrested by Egypt in 1965, and subsequently repatriated to Israel in a prisoner exchange.
January 6, 1910
Wright Marion Morris (January 6, 1910 – April 25, 1998) was an American novelist, photographer, and essayist. He is known for his portrayals of the people and artifacts of the Great Plains in words and pictures, as well as for experimenting with narrative forms. Wright Morris died April 25, 1998 at the age of 88 years. He is buried in the Chapman Cemetery.
January 6, 1961
Antonya Nelson (born January 6, 1961) is an American author and teacher of creative writing who writes primarily short stories. She received a BA degree from the University of Kansas in 1983 and an MFA degree from the University of Arizona in 1986.She lives in Telluride, Colorado; Las Cruces, New Mexico; and Houston, Texas. Nelson's short stories have appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker, Quarterly West, Redbook, Ploughshares, Harper's, and other magazines. They have been anthologized in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories.Several of her books have been New York Times Book Review Notable Books: In the Land of Men (1992), Talking in Bed (1996), Nobody's Girl: A Novel (1998), Living to Tell: A Novel (2000), and Female Trouble (2002).
January 6, 1936
Nadezda Obradovic (January 6, 1936, Belgrade, Serbia - 2004, Belgrade, Serbia) was a Serbian-Yugoslavian translator.
January 6, 1882
Ivan Olbracht (January 6, 1882, Semily, Czech Republic - December 30, 1952, Prague, Czech Republic) was born in the Czech town of Semily in 1882. After studying law and history in Berlin and Prague and serving two years in the Austrian army, he bavame a journalist and later edited Rude Pravo (Red Power), the leading Czech communist paper. Olbracht wrote several novels and shorter works and translated Arnold Zweig, Thomas Mann, and others into Czech. He is best known for the novel Nikola the Outlaw (1933) and the story collection The Sorrowful Eyes of Hannah Karajich (1937). He died in Prague in 1952. Marie K. Holecek is a translator and former history professor. Her translation of Josef Pesek's Story of Czechoslovakia, appeared in 1930. Holecek's most recent translation is Alois Jirasek's Old Czech Legends.
January 6, 1951
Dillibe Onyeama (born January, 6 1951) was born in Enugu, travelled to UK in 1959, stayed there 22 years, and returned in 1981 to head a book publishing company called DELTA PUBLICATIONS (NIGERIA) LIMITED, which has over 500 titles on its list. He has 26 published books to his name, published mainly in Europe. Married with 6 adult children. Studied in notable British schools, and got a Diploma in Journalism at The Writers School of Great Britain (incorporating The Premier School of Journalism).
January 6, 1943
Osvaldo Soriano, Journalist and writer. Born January 6, 1943 in Mar del Plata, Argentina – died on January 29, 1997 in Buenos Aires. Soriano became a staff writer at La Opinión right from the start in 1971 when editor Jacobo Timerman founded the newspaper. La Opinión was permeated with progressive politics and soon there was an attempt to squash the left-wing influence with-in the paper. After six months of not having any of his articles published, Soriano began writing a story in which a character named Osvaldo Soriano reconstructs the life of English actor Stan Laurel. The work became his first novel, Triste, solitario y final (English: Sad, lonely and final), a melancholic parody set in Los Angeles with the famed fictional Philip Marlowe detective as his joint investigator. It was some months after the publication of his novel that he visited the American city, and actually stood by the grave of Stan Laurel, leaving there a copy of his book. Shortly after the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional coup d'etat in Argentina in 1976, he moved to Brussels first (where he met his wife Catherine), and then to Paris, where he lived in exile until 1984. While in France he befriended Julio Cortázar with whom he founded the short-lived experience of the monthly magazine Sin censura. After the fall of the military junta he returned to Buenos Aires and the publication of his books were met with large success, not only in South America but also in several other countries where his works begun to be translated and published.
January 6, 1923
Jacobo Timerman (6 January 1923 – 11 November 1999), was a Soviet-born Argentine publisher, journalist, and author of Lithuanian Jewish descent, who is most noted for his confronting and reporting the atrocities of the Argentine military regime's Dirty War during a period of widespread repression in which an estimated 30,000 political prisoners were "disappeared." He was persecuted, tortured and imprisoned by the Argentine junta in the late 1970s and was exiled in 1979 with his wife to Israel. He was widely honored for his work as a journalist and publisher. In Israel, Timerman wrote and published his most well-known book, Prisoner Without A Name, Cell Without a Number (1981), a memoir of his prison experience that added to his international reputation. A longtime Zionist, he published a strongly critical book about Israel's 1982 Lebanon war. Timerman returned to Argentina in 1984, and testified to the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons. He continued to write, publishing books in 1987 about Chile under the Augusto Pinochet regime and in 1990 about Cuba under Fidel Castro.
January 6, 1902
Moysés Vellinho (January 6, 1902 - August 27, 1980, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) was born in Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, in 1902. He studied at the Colégios Anchieta e Jólio de Castilhos in Pôrto Alegre and took a degree in juridical and social sciences at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in 1926. Mr. Vellinho served as district attorney for Caxias do Sul and Jaguarão in 1926-7; as Chief of the Cabinet, Department of the Interior from 1928 to 1930; and as a cabinet official in the Ministry of Justice in 1931. From 1935 to 1937 he was a deputy in the state assembly and from 1938 to 1964 minister of the State Court of Accounts. He is an active associate of the Instituto Histórico e Geogrâfico do Rio Grande do Sul and a member of the Academia Internacional da Cultura Portuguesa in Lisbon and the Conselho Federal de Cultura in Rio de Janeiro. His publications include Letras da Provincia (1944), Simôes Lopes Neto (1957), and Machado de Assis (1960). Mr. Vellinho lives in Pôrto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, and is currently working on another historical study of the region. . (original title: Capitania d’El Rei, 1964 - Editora Globo, Porto Alegre).
January 6, 1915
Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master's degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest in 1945, then left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies. Peter J. Columbus is Administrator of the Shantigar Foundation in Rowe, Massachusetts. Donadrian L. Rice is Professor of Psychology at the University of West Georgia. Together they are the coeditors of Alan Watts—Here and Now: Contributions to Psychology, Philosophy, and Religion, also published by SUNY Press.
January 7, 1919
Robert Duncan (January 7, 1919 – February 3, 1988) was an American poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black Mountain College. Duncan's mature work emerged in the 1950s in the literary context of Beat culture. Duncan was a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance.
January 7, 1957
Nicholson Baker (born January 7, 1957) is an American writer of fiction and non-fiction. His fiction generally de-emphasizes narrative in favor of careful description and characterization. He often focuses on minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness. Baker has written about poetry, literature, library systems, history, politics, time manipulation, youth, and sex. He has written about libraries getting rid of books and newspapers and created the American Newspaper Repository. He received a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001 for his nonfiction book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper and the International Hermann Hesse Price (Germany) in 2014. Baker has also written about and edited at Wikipedia. A pacifist, he has also written about the buildup to World War II.
January 7, 1956
Ian Bell (7 January 1956 – 10 December 2015) was a Scottish journalist and author who won the Orwell Prize for political journalism in 1997. Over a thirty-year career he wrote for and edited: The Scotsman, The Herald, The Sunday Herald, the Daily Record and The Times Literary Supplement. He was named Scotland's columnist of the year four times between 2000 and 2012.
January 7, 1953
Dionne Brand (born January 7, 1953) is a Canadian poet, novelist, essayist and documentarian. She was Toronto's third Poet Laureate from September 2009 to November 2012.
January 7, 1893
Frank Appleton Collymore (7 January 1893 - 17 July 1980) was a famous Barbadian literary editor, author, poet, stage performer and painter. His nickname was ‘Barbadian Man of the Arts’. He also taught for 50 years at Combermere School, where he sought out and encouraged prospective writers in his classes, notably George Lamming. Collymore was born at Woodville Cottage, Chelsea Road, Saint Michael, Barbados (where he lived all his life). Aside from being a student at Combermere School (from 1903 until 1910), he was also one of its staff members until his retirement in 1958, up to which point he was its Deputy Headmaster. After this, he often returned to teach until 1963. On the stage, he became a member of the ‘Bridgetown Players’, which began in 1942. As an artist, he made many drawings and paintings to illustrate his own writings. He called them ‘Collybeasts’ or ‘Collycreatures’. In 1942, he began the famous Caribbean literary magazine BIM (originally published four times a year), for which he is most well-known, and was also its editor until 1975. John T. Gilmore has written of Collymore: ‘As a lover of literature, he was also a dedicated and selfless encourager of the work of others, lending books to aspiring writers from their schooldays onwards, publishing their early work in Bim, the literary magazine he edited for more than fifty issues from the 1940s to the 1970s, and helping them to find other markets, especially through the relationship he established with Henry Swanzy, producer of the influential BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices.’ Three literary awards have been named after him.
January 7, 1925
Gerald 'Gerry' Malcolm Durrell (7 January 1925 – 30 January 1995) was an English naturalist, zookeeper, conservationist, author and television presenter. He founded what is now called the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and the Jersey Zoo (now Durrell Wildlife Park) on the Channel Island of Jersey in 1958, but is perhaps best remembered for writing a number of books based on his life as an animal collector and enthusiast. He was the youngest brother of the novelist Lawrence Durrell.
January 7, 1954
Cornelius Eady (born 1954) is an American poet focusing largely on matters of race and society, particularly the trials of the African-American race in the United States. His poetry often centers around jazz and blues, family life, violence, and societal problems stemming from questions of race and class. His poetry is often praised for its simple and approachable language.
January 7, 1891
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist whose fictional and factual accounts of black heritage remain unparalleled. Her many books include DUST TRACKS ON A ROAD; THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD; JONAH'S GOURD VINE; MOSES, MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN; MULES AND MEN; and EVERY TONGUE GOT TO CONFESS.
January 7, 1923
William Hugh Kenner (January 7, 1923 – November 24, 2003), was a Canadian literary scholar, critic and professor. Kenner was born in Peterborough, Ontario, on January 7, 1923. His father Dr. H.R.H. Kenner taught classics and his mother Mary (Williams) Kenner taught French and German at Peterborough Collegiate Institute. Kenner attributed his interest in literature to his poor hearing, caused by a bout of influenza during his childhood. Attending the University of Toronto, Kenner studied under Marshall McLuhan, who wrote the introduction to Kenner's first book Paradox in Chesterton, about G. K. Chesterton's works. Kenner's second book, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951) was dedicated to McLuhan, who had introduced Kenner to Pound on June 4, 1948, during Pound's incarceration at St. Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, D.C., where Kenner and McLuhan had driven as a detour from their trip from Toronto to New Haven, Connecticut. (Pound, who became a friend of Kenner's, had suggested the book be titled The Rose in the Steel Dust.) Later, Kenner said of McLuhan, ‘I had the advantage of being exposed to Marshall when he was at his most creative, and then of getting to the far end of the continent shortly afterward, when he couldn't get me on the phone all the time. He could be awfully controlling.’Later, when McLuhan wrote that the development of cartography during the Renaissance created a geographical sense that had never previously existed, Kenner sent him a postcard reading in full: ‘Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, Yours, Hugh.’’ In 1950, Kenner earned a Ph.D. from Yale University, with a dissertation on James Joyce, James Joyce: Critique in Progress, for Cleanth Brooks. This work, which won the John Addison Porter Prize at Yale, became Dublin's Joyce in 1956. His first teaching post was at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1951 to 1973); he then taught at Johns Hopkins University (from 1973 to 1990) and the University of Georgia (from 1990 to 1999). Kenner played an influential role in raising Ezra Pound's profile among critics and other readers of poetry. The publication of The Poetry of Ezra Pound in 1951 ‘was the beginning, and the catalyst, for a change in attitude toward Pound on the American literary and educational scenes.’ The Pound Era, the product of years of scholarship and considered by many to be Kenner's masterpiece, was published in 1971. This work was responsible for enshrining Pound's reputation (damaged by his wartime activities) as one of the greatest Modernists. Though best known for his work on modernist literature, Kenner's range of interests was wide. His books include an appreciation of Chuck Jones, an introduction to geodesic math, and a user's guide for the Heathkit H100/Zenith Z-100 computer; in his later years was a columnist for both Art & Antiques and Byte magazine. Kenner was also a contributor to National Review magazine and a friend of William F. Buckley, Jr. Kenner was married twice: his first wife, Mary Waite, died in 1964; the couple had three daughters and two sons. His second wife, whom he married in 1965, was Mary-Anne Bittner; they had a son and a daughter. Hugh Kenner died at his home in Athens, Georgia on November 24, 2003.
January 7, 1956
Cris Mazza is also the author of Something Wrong With Her, a hybrid memoir published by Jaded Ibis Press in 2014, a companion piece to Various Men Who Knew Us As Girls. She has authored over a dozen other books, mostly novels and collections of short fiction. Mazza now lives in the Midwest and is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois Chicago.
January 7, 1958
Mark Moffett (born 7 January 1958) …has developed a career that combines science and photography, in spite of being a high school dropout. Although his family was not academic, encouraged by his parents he sought out biologists by the age of 12. He continues to travel to conduct research on ecology and behavior, photograph and write for National Geographic and other magazines, author books, and lecture and appear on television as an ecologist-storyteller. He has been compared to Jacques Cousteau and Jane Goodall, and National Geographic has called him the Indiana Jones of Entomology"
January 7, 1934
Abel Parentini Posse, born Córdoba, Argentina, on 7 January 1934, is an Argentine diplomat and writer. He was designated at a diplomatic mission in Venice by Alejandro Agustín Lanusse in 1973 and hold similar offices during the following Argentine governments, both military and civilian. He was briefly considered as a possible foreign minister of Néstor Kirchner by the beginning of his mandate in 2003, but the role was finally designated to Rafael Bielsa. Posse's 1983 work Los perros del paraíso won the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos Prize.
January 7, 1912
Charles Samuel Addams (January 7, 1912, Westfield, NJ - September 29, 1988, New York City, NY) was an American cartoonist known for his darkly humorous and macabre characters. He signed his cartoons Chas Addams. Some of the recurring characters, who became known as the Addams Family, have been the basis for spin-offs in several other forms of media.
January 7, 1967
Benjamin Kwakye (born 7 January 1967) is a Ghanaian novelist. His first novel, The Clothes of Nakedness, won the 1999 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, best first book, Africa. His novel The Sun by Night won the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Best Book Africa. His novel The Other Crucifix won the 2011 IPPY award. Kwakye was born in Accra, Ghana. He graduated from Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School. He practises law around Chicago, and is a director of the African Education Initiative.
January 8, 1921
Leonardo Sciascia (January 8, 1921 – November 20, 1989) was an Italian writer, novelist, essayist, playwright and politician. Some of his works have been made into films, including Open Doors (1990) and Il giorno della civetta (1968). Sciascia was born in Racalmuto, Sicily. In 1935 his family moved to Caltanissetta; here Sciascia studied under Vitaliano Brancati, who would become his model in writing and introduce him to French novelists. From Giuseppe Granata, future Communist member of the Italian Senate, he learned about the French Enlightenment and American literature. In 1944 he married Maria Andronico, an elementary school teacher in Racalmuto. In 1948 his brother committed suicide, an event which had a profound impact on Sciascia. Sciascia's first work, Favole della dittatura (Fables of the Dictatorship), a satire on fascism, was published in 1950 and included 27 short poems. This was followed in 1952 by La Sicilia, il suo cuore, also a poetry collection, illustrated by Emilio Greco. The following year Sciascia won the Premio Pirandello, awarded by the Sicily region, for his essay 'Pirandello e il pirandellismo.' In 1954 he began collaborating with literature and ethnology magazines published by Salvatore Sciascia in Caltanissetta. In 1956 he published Le parrocchie di Regalpetra, an autobiographic novel inspired by his experience as an elementary school teacher in his home town. In the same year he moved to teach in Caltanissetta, only to move again to Rome in 1957. In the autumn of that year he published Gli zii di Sicilia, including sharp views about themes such as the influence of the US and of communism in the world, and the 19th century unification of Italy. After one year in Rome, Sciascia moved back to Caltanissetta, in Sicily. In 1961 he published the mystery Il giorno della civetta (The Day of the Owl), one of his most famous novels, and in 1963, the historical novel Il consiglio d'Egitto (The Council of Egypt), set in 18th-century Palermo. After a series of essays, in 1965 he wrote the play L'onorevole (The Honorable), a denunciation of the complicities between government and mafia. Another political mystery novel is 1966's A ciascuno il suo (To Each His Own). The following year Sciascia moved to Palermo. In 1969 he began a collaboration with Il Corriere della Sera. That same year he published the play Recitazione della controversia liparitana dedicata ad A.D., dedicated to Alexander Dubcek. In 1971 Sciascia returned again to mystery with Il contesto (The Challenge), which inspired Francesco Rosi's movie Cadaveri eccellenti (1976). The novel created polemics due to its merciless portrait of Italian politics. Same was the fate of Todo modo, in this case due to its description of Italian Catholic clergy. At the 1975 communal elections in Palermo, Sciascia ran as an independent within the Italian Communist Party (PCI) slate, and was elected to the city council. In the same year he published La scomparsa di Majorana, dealing with the mysterious disappearance of scientist Ettore Majorana. In 1977 he resigned from PCI, due to his opposition to any dealing with the Christian Democratic party. Later he would be elected to the Italian and European Parliament with the Radical Party. Sciascia last works include the essay collection Cronachette (1985), the novels Porte aperte (1987) and Il cavaliere e la morte (1988). He died in June 1989 at Palermo. A number of his books, such as The Day of the Owl (Il giorno della civetta) and Equal Danger (Il contesto), demonstrate how the Mafia manages to sustain itself in the face of the anomie inherent in Sicilian life. He presented a forensic analysis of the kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro, a prominent Christian Democrat, in his book The Moro Affair. Sciascia's work is intricate and displays a longing for justice while attempting to show how corrupt Italian society had become and remains. His linking of politicians, intrigue, and the Mafia gave him a high profile, which was very much at odds with his private self. This high profile resulted in his becoming widely disliked for his criticism of Giulio Andreotti, then Prime Minister, for his lack of action towards freeing Moro and answering the demands of the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades). Sciascia was part of a House of Deputies investigation into Moro's kidnapping, which concluded that there was a certain amount of negligence on the part of the Christian Democrat Party in their stance that the state was bigger than a person and that they would not swap Moro for 13 political prisoners, even though Moro himself had stated that the swapping of innocent people for political prisoners was a valid option in negotiations with terrorists. However, senior members of the party conveniently forgot this stance and even went as far as to say that Moro had been drugged and tortured to utter these words. Sciascia's books are rarely characterized by a happy end and by justice for the ordinary man. Prime examples of this are Equal Danger, in which the police's best detective is drafted to Sicily to investigate a spate of murders of judges. Focusing on the inability of authorities to handle such investigation into the corruptions, Sciascia's hero is finally thwarted. Sciascia wrote of his unique Sicilian experience, linking families with political parties, the treachery of alliances and allegiances and the calling of favors that result in outcomes that are not for the benefit of society, but of those individuals who are in favor. His 1984 opus Occhio di Capra is a collection of Sicilian sayings and proverbs gathered from the area around his native village, to which he was intensely attached throughout his life.
January 8, 1824
William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 – 23 September 1889) was an English novelist, playwright, and author of short stories. His best-known works are The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Armadale, and No Name. Collins was born into the family of painter William Collins in London. He received his early education at home from his mother. He then attended an academy and a private boarding school. He also traveled with his family to Italy and France, and learned the French and Italian languages. He served as a clerk in the firm of the tea merchants Antrobus & Co. His first novel Iolani, or Tahiti as It Was; a Romance, was rejected by publishers in 1845. His next novel, Antonina, was published in 1850. In 1851 he met Charles Dickens, and the two became close friends. A number of Collins's works were first published in Dickens's journals All the Year Round and Household Words. The two collaborated on several dramatic and fictional works, and some of Collins's plays were performed by Dickens's acting company. Collins published his best known works in the 1860s, achieving financial stability and an international reputation. During this time he began suffering from gout, and developed an addiction to opium, which he took (in the form of laudanum) for pain. He continued to publish novels and other works throughout the 1870s and 80s, but the quality of his writing declined along with his health. He died in 1889.
January 8, 1910
The distinguished African-American writer and educator Cyrus Colter was born in Noblesville, Indiana, on January 8, 1910. A recipient of the prestigious University of Iowa School of Letters first prize award for short fiction, Colter published many short stories and poems, as well as six novels, throughout his career. Colter worked for the Illinois Commerce Commission before resigning to take a faculty position at Northwestern in the Department of African-American Studies. He remained at Northwestern until his retirement in 1978. Colter died in 2002. Colter was one of two children born to James Alexander Colter and Ethel Marietta Basset Colter. His father's various jobs included insurance salesman, actor, musician and regional director of the Central Indiana division of the NAACP, which took the family from Noblesville to Greensboro, Indiana, and later to Youngstown, Ohio. Cyrus Colter graduated from Rayen Academy in Youngstown and pursued his undergraduate degree at Youngstown University (Ohio) and Ohio State. In 1940 he earned a degree from the Chicago-Kent College of Law. On January 1, 1943, he married Imogene Mackay, a teacher, who served as his supporter and critic until her death in 1984. Colter's early life was marked by his legal and military pursuits. After a brief stint as an agent for the Internal Revenue Agency, Colter served in World War II as a field artillery captain and saw combat in Europe in the Fifth Army under General Mark Clark. In 1946, he returned to civilian life and the practice of law in Chicago. Four years later, Governor Adlai Stevenson appointed him to the Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC), where his twenty-three year tenure was the longest in that agency's history. In 1960, at the age of fifty, Colter reassessed his life's work and began an accelerated reading program that focused on Russian literature. Colter became more and more impressed with the range of characters depicted by Tolstoy, Dostoevski, and Chekhov, and he recognized the deficiency of African-American literature in this regard. When his wife challenged him to address this problem in fiction, Colter began to write. Colter's first short story, A Chance Meeting, was published in 1960 in Threshold, a little magazine out of Belfast, Ireland. Ten years later, a collection of his short stories, The Beach Umbrella (1970), won the prestigious University of Iowa School of Letters first prize award for short fiction (chosen by Kurt Vonnegut). In the years that followed, he published countless short stories and poems, and six novels: The Rivers of Eros (1972), The Hippodrome (1973), Night Studies (1979), A Chocolate Soldier (1988), The Amoralists and Other Tales (1988) and City of Light (1993). Now widely read, his works have been translated into German, Italian, Hungarian, Danish, French, and Japanese. Colter resigned from the ICC in 1973 in order to accept a professorship of creative writing in Northwestern's Department of African-American Studies, then two years old. A year later Colter was named as the first Chester D. Tripp Professor of the Humanities, a post he held until his retirement in 1978. Colter died on April 17, 2002. Throughout his lifetime, Colter received countless accolades, including an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Illinois (Chicago). One of the highest honors was bestowed in 1990 when Colter's was one of the names engraved on the frieze of the new Illinois State Public Library alongside such Illinois literary figures as Upton Sinclair, Carl Sandburg, Studs Turkel and Gwendolyn Brooks.
January 8, 1937
Leon Forrest was born in Chicago in 1937 and is considered one of the most important African American writers of his generation. He taught English and African American studies at Northwestern University until his death in 1997. His novels include There Is a Tree More Ancient than Eden (Random House, 1973), The Bloodworth Orphans (Random House, 1977), Divine Days (Another Chicago Press, 1992), and Two Wings to Veil My Face (Asphodel, 1997).
January 8, 1935
Robert Littell (born January 8, 1935) is an American novelist and journalist who resides in France. He specializes in spy novels that often concern the CIA and the Soviet Union. Littell was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family, of Russian Jewish origin. He is a 1956 graduate of Alfred University in western New York. He spent four years in the U.S. Navy and served at times as his ship's navigator, antisubmarine warfare officer, communications officer, and deck watch officer. Later Littell became a journalist and worked many years for Newsweek during the Cold War. He was a foreign correspondent for the magazine from 1965 to 1970. Littell is an amateur mountain climber and is the father of award-winning novelist Jonathan Littell.
January 8, 1933
Juan Marsé (born January 8, 1933 in Barcelona as Juan Faneca Roca) is a Spanish novelist, journalist and screenwriter. In 2008 he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, 'the Spanish-language equivalent' to the Nobel Prize in Literature. His mother died in childbirth, and he was soon adopted by the Marsé family. At age 14 he started to publish some of his writings in Insula magazine and in a cinema magazine while working as an apprentice jeweller. One of his stories won the Sésamo Prize, and in 1958 he published his first novel, Encerrados con un solo juguete (Locked up with a Single Toy), which was a finalist of the Biblioteca Breve Seix Barral Prize. Afterwards, he spent two years in Paris working as 'garçon de laboratoire' at the Pasteur Institute and translating screenplays and teaching Spanish. Back in Spain he wrote Esta cara de la luna (This Side of the Moon), repudiated and never included in his complete works. In 1965 he won the Biblioteca Breve Prize with Últimas tardes con Teresa (Last Evenings with Teresa). He married Joaquina Hoyas and began working in advertising and writing dialogues for films. He wrote La oscura historia de la prima Montse (The Dark Story of Cousin Montse), which was not very successful, and Si te dicen que caí (If They Tell You I Fell), which was published in Mexico due to Francoist censorship and won the Novel International Prize. In 1974, he started a column in the magazine Por Favor while continuing writing for the film industry. His novel La muchacha de las bragas de oro (Girl with Golden Panties) won the Planeta Prize in 1978, which made him known to the general public. He wrote two novels about post-war Barcelona, Un día volveré (One Day I'll Come Back) and Ronda del Guinardó, followed by the collection of short stories, Teniente Bravo. In the 1990s, he received numerous prizes, including Ateneo de Sevilla Prize for El amante bilingüe (The Bilingual Lover) and the Critic Prize and Aristeion Prize for El embrujo de Shanghai (The Shanghai Spell). In 1997 he was awarded the Juan Rulfo Prize for Latin American and Caribbean Literature. After seven years of silence he published Rabos de Lagartija (Lizards' Tails), which won the Critic Prize and Narrative National Prize. Marsé was the winner of the 2008 Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious award for Spanish-language literature. On 6 March 2014 MacLehose Press will publish The Calligraphy of Dreams.
January 8, 1885
Abraham Johannes Muste (January 8, 1885 - February 11, 1967) was a socialist active in the pacifist movement, labor movement and the US civil rights movement. He was born in Zierikzee, the Netherlands, and became a naturalized United States citizen in 1896. He attended Hope College, where he was class valedictorian and captain of the basketball team, continuing a tradition of leadership and excellence in his beloved Fraternal Society (OKE). He earned a Bachelor’s degree (A. B.) in 1905 and a Master’s degree (M. A.) in 1909 from the Theological Seminary of the Dutch Reformed Church (now the New Brunswick Theological Seminary). He earned a doctorate (B. D.) from Union Theological Seminary in 1913. He also attended New York University, and Columbia University. Muste was the author of Non-violence in an Aggressive World (1940). Muste taught Latin and Greek at Northwestern Classical Academy (now Northwestern College (of Iowa)) from 1905 to 1906. He was ordained a minister of the Reformed Church in America in 1909. In 1917, he resigned his ministry when his pacifism led to conflicts with his parishioners. Muste volunteered for the American Civil Liberties Union and was enrolled as a minister of the Religious Society of Friends in 1918. Active in labor affairs from 1919, he was general secretary of the Amalgamated Textile Workers of America from 1920 to 1921. He also taught at Brookwood Labor College from 1921 to 1933. From 1940 to 1953, he was the executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, during which time he became an advisor to Martin Luther King Jr. After leaving Brookwood Labor College, he founded a socialist movement which, through a fusion with the Trotskyist organisation, became the Workers’ Party of the United States. Later he renounced Marxism and again became a Christian pacifist; throughout his life he remained an active participant in the activities of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. He supported the presidential candidacies of Eugene V. Debs and Robert M. La Follette, Sr., and also had close friendships with John Dewey and Norman Thomas. In 1957, Muste headed a delegation of pacifist and democratic observers to the 16th National Convention of the Communist Party. He was also on the national committee of the War Resisters League (WRL) and received their Peace Award in 1958. Always a creative activist, he led public opposition with Dorothy Day to civil defense activities in New York city during the 1950s and 1960s. At the end of his life, Muste took a leadership role in the movement against the Vietnam War. In 1966, he traveled, with members of the Committee for Non-Violent Action, to Saigon and Hanoi. He was arrested and deported from South Vietnam, but received a warm welcome in North Vietnam from Ho Chi Minh.
January 8, 1948
Stuart Nicholson is a celebrated jazz writer. He is the author of several award-winning books, including a biography of Billie Holiday and a history of Jazz-Rock. He has contributed to major newspapers, from the New York Times to the Manchester Guarding, and major jazz publications including Downbeat 0 and Jazz Times . He lives in Woodlands St.-Mary, Berkshire, England.
January 8, 1896
Manuel Rojas Sepúlveda (January 8, 1896 – March 11, 1973) was a Chilean writer and journalist. Rojas was born in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, the son of Chilean parents. In 1899 his family returned to Santiago, but in 1903, after the father's death, the mother returned to Buenos Aires again, where he attended school until the age of eleven. In 1912, at the age of sixteen, he decided to return alone to Chile. Once he arrived to the country, he got involved with intellectuals and anarchist groups, while working in many different activities as an unskilled labourer: as house painter, electrician, agricultural worker, railroad handyman, loading ships, tailor's apprentice, cobbler, ship guard, and actor in small-time itinerant groups. Many of the situations and characters he encountered there later became part of his fictional world. He returned to Argentina in 1921 publishing his first poems there. Back in Chile, he worked intensely in his narrative production and at the same time he worked in the National Library and at the Universidad de Chile press. He married María Baeza and had three children. He joined the Los Tiempos and the Las Ultimas Noticias newspapers as a linotype operator first and ultimately worked on Santiago newspapers as a journalist, all the while also working at the Hipódromo Chile (Santiago racetrack). After the death of his wife, he married again and started to travel. He received the Chilean National Prize for Literature in 1957. He toured Europe, South America and the Middle East. He became a university professor of Chilean and American Literature in the US and at the Universidad de Chile. His works have as a central theme the representation of the instability, misery and marginality of the members of the working class. The development of the psychological and existential complexities of his characters established a difference between his work and prior literary movements (criollismo, mundonovismo), that were characterized by a less complex view of individuality. He died in Santiago on March 11, 1973.
January 8, 1938
As an extension of her creative and activist self, Yarbrough turned to writing in the 1970’s. Her published works have appeared in The New York Times, The Black Collegian Magazine, and The Journal of African Civilization. In 1979 her first book, Cornrows, was published by Paperstar/Putnam Grosset. Later, three more books followed: The Shimmershine Queens, The Little Tree Growing in the Shade, and Tamika and the Wisdom Rings. Yarbrough is presently working on a new family book, scheduled for release in 2010. Quite naturally, Nana Camille Yarbrough is an educator. Her passion to teach is evidenced in her serving as a faculty member in the Black Studies Department at City College of New York (CUNY) for twelve years. She taught dance there. She also taught the Katherine Dunham technique at Southern Illinois University. Over the years and to this day, she has lectured at countless colleges, universities, conferences, festivals, and community events across the country, ranging from Howard University to the University of Wisconsin; from the Brooklyn Museum to the National Action Network, and many others. In 1994, Yarbrough was enthroned by ABLADEI, Inc. (Ghanian), GA as Naa Kuokor Agyman I Queen Mother to the late Dr. John Henrik Clarke. She is also founder of the Throne House of Harriet Tubman. In 2004, she was again enthroned in the village of Agogo-Asanti, Ghana as Nana Tabuoa Tonko II. Such an honor is reserved for very few people.
January 8, 1927
Poet, artist, and translator Charles Tomlinson (January 8, 1927, Penkhull, Stoke-on-Trent, United Kingdom - August 22, 2015, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom) was born in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire in 1927. Fluent in German, French, and Italian, he read English at Queen’s College Cambridge, studying with poet Donald Davie, who was an early influence and later became a close friend. Tomlinson taught elementary school before joining the University of Bristol, where he taught for 36 years. His collections of poetry include Relations and Contraries (1951), American Scenes and Other Poems (1966), To Be Engraved on the Skull of a Cormorant (1968), The Shaft (1978), Jubilation (1995), Skywriting and Other Poems (2003), for which he won the New Criterion Poetry Prize, and New Collected Poems (2009). Tomlinson’s work is known for its attention to both visual and aural perception, its painterly effects, and its cosmopolitan, even urbane, style and subject matter. Though he wrote of the natural world, especially in his early work, his philosophical bent and interest in other places and cultures—as well as his highly regarded work as a translator—made him somewhat of an outsider in British poetry. According to the critic Michael Hennessy, Tomlinson is the most international and least provincial English poet of his generation. At a time when most of his contemporaries were drawing inward, nursing and grooming their ‘Englishness,’ Tomlinson was traveling, engaging with the world, and enriching his work through the agency of American, European, and even Japanese poetic traditions. Tomlinson was a champion of America and American poetry. He held visiting positions at the University of New Mexico and Princeton University; his collection A Peopled Landscape (1963) was influenced by the landscape of the American Southwest, while Notes from New York, and Other Poems (1984) was prompted by a visit to New York. Essay collections such as Some Americans (1981) and American Essays (2001) also treated his long-standing relationship with American culture and poetry. In an interview with the Paris Review he remarked that his sense of America cohered out of many fragments, among them that tiny reproduction of a Georgia O'Keeffe, utterly unknown here at the time. I came to America at a period when the New York School had shifted attention from Paris to that city. For me, it was one of those periods of rapid assimilation—Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, particularly Gorky. Tomlinson was influenced by American poets quite early in his career and admitted an affinity for American modernists such as William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, George Oppen, and Louis Zukofsky. Critical Quarterly writer Alan Young compared the American modernist poets’ project to Tomlinson’s own ‘basic theme’, in Tomlinson’s words: ‘that one does not need to go beyond sense experience to some mythic union, that the I can only be responsible in relationship and not by dissolving itself away into ecstasy or the Oversoul.’ And Jonathan Barker, also quoting Tomlinson in the Times Literary Supplement, pointed out that Tomlinson rejects symbolic poetry as representing ‘a view of life too subjective to allow accurate contemplation of the outside world.’ Tomlinson is also known as a translator, and translated work by César Vallejo, Attilio Bertolucci, Antonio Machado, and Octavio Paz, with whom he wrote the collection Airborn/Hijos del aire (1981), a bilingual edition of a single poem which each poet translated into the language of the other. In his Paris Review interview, Tomlinson noted of his work with Paz on Airborn: I simultaneously came to realize just how many of our poets, going back to Chaucer, had been great translators, all the time extending the possibilities of English by introducing new forms and new ideas for poetry. So I went ahead and edited The Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation (1980). Tomlinson’s work as an editor—he has also edited Marianne Moore: A Collection of Critical Essays (1969) and William Carlos Williams’ Selected Poems (1976)—and translator have secured his place as one of Britain’s most important and diverse talents. In learning his craft from numerous poets of varied backgrounds, Tomlinson has found a style all his own; critics such as Cal Bedient considered him to be unmistakably an original poet. Bedient continued in British Poetry since 1960: There is in him, it is true, a measure of Wordsworth ... [but] Wordsworth discovers himself in nature—it is this, of course, that makes him a Romantic poet. Tomlinson, on the other hand, discovers the nature of nature: a classical artist, he is all taut, responsive detachment. Ultimately, it is difficult to categorize Tomlinson as either distinctly British or American. To my mind, the poet Ed Hirsch has said, Tomlinson is one of the most astute, disciplined, and lucent poets of his generation. He is one of the few English poets to have extended the inheritance of modernism and I suspect that his quiet, meditative voice will reverberate on both sides of the Atlantic for a long time to come. Charles Tomlinson became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998. He received numerous awards and honors for his work, including the Italian Premio Internationale Flaiano per la Poesia and the Bennett Award from the Hudson Review. He was made a CBE in 2001 and received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Gloucestershire in 2008. He died in 2015.
January 9, 1890
Karel Capek (January 9, 1890 - December 25, 1938) was one of the most influential Czech writers of the 20th century. Capek was born in Malé Svatonovice, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic). He wrote with intelligence and humour on a wide variety of subjects. His works are known for their interesting and precise descriptions of reality, and Capek is renowned for his excellent work with the Czech language. He is perhaps best known as a science fiction author, who wrote before science fiction became widely recognized as a separate genre. He can be considered one of the founders of classical, non-hardcore European science fiction, a type which focuses on possible future (or alternative) social and human evolution on Earth, rather than technically advanced stories of space travel. However, it is best to classify him with Aldous Huxley and George Orwell as a speculative fiction writer, distinguishing his work from genre-specific hard science fiction. Many of his works discuss ethical and other aspects of revolutionary inventions and processes that were already anticipated in the first half of 20th century. These include mass production, atomic weapons, and post-human intelligent beings such as robots or intelligent salamanders. In addressing these themes, Capek was also expressing fear of impending social disasters, dictatorship, violence, and the unlimited power of corporations, as well as trying to find some hope for human beings.
January 9, 1927
Patricia Carlon (9 January 1927 – 29 July 2002) was an Australian crime fiction writer whose most notable works are fourteen suspenseful novels published between 1961 and 1970. She sometimes used the pseudonyms Patricia Bernard and Barbara Christie. She was rediscovered in the 1990s, after The Whispering Wall (1969) and The Souvenir (1970) were republished as part of a series of Australian Classic Crime. These and other novels have subsequently been reissued in the United States and Australia. Carlon lived almost all her life with, or next door to, her parents, in Wagga Wagga and the Sydney suburbs of Homebush and Bexley. Her income source from her late teens onwards was writing articles and short stories for magazines as well as her novels. She refused all interviews. After her death it became known that she had been profoundly deaf since the age of 11: something even her publishers had been unaware of, as she always communicated with them by letter. Her deafness has since been related to themes and plots in her novels, in which people in possession of the truth about a crime are often isolated and in peril, either through being physically trapped, or because they are unable make others believe them.
January 9, 1908
Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, often shortened to Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908 – April 14, 1986), was a French existentialist philosopher, public intellectual, and social theorist. She wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography in several volumes, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues. She is now best known for her metaphysical novels, including SHE CAME TO STAY and THE MANDARINS, and for her 1949 treatise THE SECOND SEX, a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism. She is also noted for her lifelong polyamorous relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre.
January 9, 1942
John Dunning (born January 9, 1942) is an American writer of non-fiction and detective fiction. He is known for his reference books on old-time radio and his series of mysteries featuring Denver bookseller and ex-policeman Cliff Janeway.
January 9, 1966
Sousa Jamba (born 9 January 1966) is an Angolan author and journalist. Sousa Jamba was born in 1966 in Dondi, Huambo, in central Angola. His family were all supporters of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), which fought alongside the MPLA in the Angolan War for Independence (1961–75) and then against the MPLA in the ensuing civil war (1975–2002). In 1975, nine-year-old Jamba with his family left the country, fleeing the violence following Angola's independence, and went to Zambia, where he lived as a refugee, before going to England. Jamba has said: "There was a sense that if you were from Unita you either had to leave the country or go out into the bush, which is precisely what my family did." In 1985 Jamba returned to Angola, and worked as a reporter and translator for the UNITA News Agency. In 1986, he went to study in Britain on a journalism scholarship, and soon began writing for The Spectator. From 1988 to 1991 he studied for a BA degree in Media Studies at Westminster University, London. He also has a master's degree in Leadership and Strategic Communications from Seton Hall University in New Jersey. He returned to his home country after 27 years of exile. Jamba's books include Patriots (1992), an autobiographical novel that received much critical acclaim. Andrew McKie of The Telegraph writes of it: "Sousa Jamba's brilliant and terrifying (and often very funny) novel Patriots gives an account of a child's view of the war in Angola." Jamba's second novel, A Lonely Devil, was published in 1993. He has written widely for newspapers and journals, among them Granta, The Spectator and the New Statesman. He writes a weekly column for the Angolan newspaper Semanario Angolense. He also writes a column on leadership for the business magazine Exame. He currently lives in Jacksonville, Florida, USA.
January 9, 1871
Eugène Nielen Marais (9 January 1871 – 29 March 1936) was a South African lawyer, naturalist, poet and writer. He has been hailed as an intellectual genius and an Afrikaner hero. Marais was born in Pretoria, the thirteenth and last child of Jan Christiaan Nielen Marais and Catharina Helena Cornelia van Niekerk. He attended school in Pretoria, Boshof and Paarl, and much of his early education was in English, as were his earliest poems. He matriculated at the age of sixteen. After leaving school, he worked in Pretoria as a legal clerk and then as a journalist before becoming owner (at the age of twenty) of a newspaper called Land en Volk (Country and (the Afrikaner) People). He involved himself deeply in local politics. He began taking opiates at an early age and graduated to morphine (then considered to be non-habit forming and safe) very soon thereafter. He became addicted, and his addiction ruled his affairs and actions to a greater or lesser extent throughout his life. When asked why he took drugs, he variously pleaded ill health, insomnia and, later, the death of his young wife as a result of the birth of his only child. Much later, he blamed accidental addiction while ill with malaria in Mozambique. Some claim his use of drugs was experimental and influenced by the philosophy of de Quincey. Marais married Aletta Beyers, but she died from puerperal fever a year later, eight days after the birth of their son. Eugène Charles Gerard was Marais' only child. In 1897 — still in his mid-twenties – Marais went to London to read medicine. However, under pressure from his friends, he entered the Inner Temple to study law. He qualified as an advocate. When the Boer War broke out in 1899, he was put on parole as an enemy alien in London. During the latter part of the war he joined a German expedition that sought to ship ammunition and medicines to the Boer Commandos via Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique). However, he was struck down in this tropical area by malaria and, before the supplies could be delivered to the Boers, the war ended. From 1905 Marais studied nature in the Waterberg ('Water mountain'), a wilderness area north of Pretoria, and wrote in his native Afrikaans about the animals he observed. His studies of termites led him to conclude that the colony ought to be considered as a single organism, a prescient insight that predated the elaboration of the idea by Richard Dawkins. In the Waterberg, Marais also studied the black mamba, spitting cobra and puff adder. Moreover, he observed a specific troop of baboons at length , and from these studies there sprang numerous magazine articles and the books My Friends the Baboons and The Soul of the Ape. He is acknowledged as the father of the scientific study of the behaviour of animals, known as Ethology. As the leader of the Second Afrikaans Language Movement, Marais preferred to write in Afrikaans, and his work was translated into various languages either late in his life or after his death. His book Die Siel van die Mier (The Soul of the Ant, but usually given in English as the Soul of the White Ant) was plagiarised by Nobel laureate Maurice Maeterlinck, who published La Vie des Termites (translated into English as The Life of Termites or The Life of White Ants), an entomological book, in what has been called "a classic example of academic plagiarism" by University of London's professor of biology, David Bignell. Marais accused Maeterlinck of having used his concept of the "organic unity" of the termitary in his book. Marais had published his ideas on the termitary in the South African Afrikaans-language press, both in Die Burger in January 1923 and in Huisgenoot, which featured a series of articles on termites under the title "Die Siel van die Mier" (The Soul of the (White) Ant) from 1925 to 1926. Maeterlinck's book, with almost identical content, was published in 1926. It is alleged that Maeterlinck had come across Eugene Marais' series of articles, and that it would have been easy for Maeterlinck to translate from Afrikaans to French, since Maeterlinck knew Dutch and had already made several translations from Dutch into French before. It was common at the time for worthy articles published in Afrikaans to be reproduced in Flemish and Dutch magazines and journals. Supported by a coterie of Afrikaner Nationalist friends, Marais sought justice through the South African press and attempted an international lawsuit. This was to prove financially impossible and the case was not pursued. However, Marais gained a measure of renown as the aggrieved party and as an Afrikaner researcher who had opened himself up to plagiarism because he published in Afrikaans out of nationalistic loyalty. Marais brooded at the time of the scandal: "I wonder whether Maeterlinck blushes when he reads such things [critical acclaim], and whether he gives a thought to the injustice he does to the unknown Boer worker?" Despite these misgivings, there is no reference to Eugène Marais in the bibliography. Maeterlinck's other works on entomology include The Life of the Ant (1930). Professor VE d'Assonville wrote about Maeterlinck as "the Nobel Prize winner who had never seen a termite in his whole life and had never put a foot on the soil of Africa, least of all in the Waterberg.". Robert Ardrey, an admirer of Eugène Marais's, attributed Marais' later suicide to this act of plagiarism and theft of intellectual property by Maeterlinck. Ardrey said in his introduction to The Soul of the Ape, published in 1969, that 'As a scientist he was unique, supreme in his time, yet a worker in a science unborn.' He also refers to Marais' work at length in his book African Genesis. There is evidence that Marais' time and research in the Waterberg brought him great peace and joy and provided him with artistic inspiration. In the poem Waar Tebes in die stil woestyn, he writes (as translated into English by J. W. Marchant) 'There would I know peace once more, where Tebes in the quiet desert lifts it mighty rockwork on high ...'. (Tebus is one of the principal peaks of the area). That said, Marais was a long-term morphine addict and suffered from melancholy, insomnia, depression and feelings of isolation. In 1936, deprived of morphine for some days, he borrowed a shotgun on the pretext of killing a snake and shot himself in the chest. The wound was not fatal, and Marais therefore put the gun barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He did so on the farm Pelindaba, belonging to his friend Gustav Preller. For those who are familiar with the dark moods of certain of Marais' poems, there is a black irony here; in Zulu, Pelindaba means 'the end of the business' – although the more common interpretation is 'Place of great gatherings' Marais and his wife Aletta are buried in the Heroes' Acre, Pretoria. Marais' work as a naturalist, although by no means trivial (he was one of the first scientists to practise ethology and was repeatedly acknowledged as such by Robert Ardrey and others), gained less public attention and appreciation than his contributions as a literalist. He discovered the Waterberg Cycad, which was named after him (Encephalartos eugene-maraisii). He was the first person to study the behaviour of wild primates, and his observations continue to be cited in contemporary evolutionary biology. He is among the greatest of the Afrikaner poets and remains one of the most popular, although his output was not large. Opperman described him as the first professional Afrikaner poet; Marais believed that craft was as important as inspiration for poetry. Along with J.H.H. de Waal and G.S. Preller, he was a leading light in the Second Afrikaans Language Movement in the period immediately after the Second Boer War, which ended in 1902. Some of his finest poems deal with the wonders of life and nature, but he also wrote about inexorable death. Marais was isolated in some of his beliefs. He was a self-confessed pantheist and claimed that the only time he entered a church was for weddings. An assessment of Marais' status as an Afrikaner hero was published by historian Sandra Swart. Although an Afrikaner patriot, Marais was sympathetic to the cultural values of the black tribal peoples of the Transvaal.
January 9, 1951
John Prados received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He is the author of The Soviet Estimate: U.S. intelligence and Russian Military Strength and The Sky Would Fall: Operation Vulture: The U.S. Bombing Mission in Indochina, 1954. The creator of many simulation games, he lives in Washington, D. C.
January 9, 1941
Robert D. Putnam is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University and founder of the Saguaro Seminar, a program dedicated to fostering civic engagement in America. He is the author or coauthor of ten previous books and is former dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
January 9, 1890
Kurt Tucholsky (January 9, 1890 – December 21, 1935) was a German-Jewish journalist, satirist and writer. He also wrote under the pseudonyms Kaspar Hauser, Peter Panter, Theobald Tiger and Ignaz Wrobel. Born in Berlin-Moabit, he moved to Paris in 1924 and then to Sweden in 1930. Tucholsky was one of the most important journalists of the Weimar Republic. As a politically engaged journalist and temporary co-editor of the weekly magazine Die Weltbühne he proved himself to be a social critic in the tradition of Heinrich Heine. He was simultaneously a satirist, an author of satirical political revues, a songwriter and a poet. He saw himself as a left-wing democrat and pacifist and warned against anti-democratic tendencies – above all in politics, the military and justice – and the threat of National Socialism. His fears were confirmed when the Nazis came to power in 1933: his books were listed on the Nazi's censorship as 'Entartete Kunst' ('Degenerate Art') and burned, and he lost his German citizenship.
January 9, 1975
Gunnhild Øyehaug is an award-winning Norwegian poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her story collection Knots was published by FSG in 2017, and Wait, Blink has been made into the acclaimed film Women in Oversized Men’s Shirts.She has also worked as a coeditor of the literary journals Vagant and Kraftsentrum. Øyehaug lives in Bergen, where she teaches creative writing. Kari Dickson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and grew up bilingual. She has a BA in Scandinavian studies and an MA in translation. Before becoming a translator, she worked in theater in London and Oslo. She teaches in the Scandinavian department at the University of Edinburgh.
January 10, 1887
JOSE AMERICO DE ALMEIDA was born in 1887 and now lives in retirement in Joao Pessoa. His long life has been devoted almost entirely to public service and literature. His first novel A Bagacei’ra (Trash, 1928) enjoyed enormous success, but he continued his political career, supporting Getulio Vargas in the 1930 revolution in Brazil and subsequently holding such offices as Minister of Public Works and Ambassador to the Vatican. In 1937 he was a candidate for the Presidency of Brazil. He has served as senator and governor of the state of Paraiba. In 1966 he was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters. In addition to A Bagaceira José Américo has written two other novels, 0 Boquirao (1935) and Coiieiras (1936), and various volumes of memoirs, the most recent of which was published in 1976.
January 10, 1957
Valerio Magrelli (born January 10, 1957 in Rome) is an Italian poet. He has published critical works on Dadaism and Paul Valéry, as well as notable translations of Mallarmé, Verlaine, and Valéry. He is currently working on a study of Baudelaire.
January 10, 1916
Bernard Binlin Dadié (or sometimes Bernard Dadie) (born 1916 near Abidjan) is a prolific Ivorian novelist, playwright, poet, and ex-administrator. Among many other senior positions, starting in 1957, he held the post of Minister of Culture in the government of Côte d'Ivoire from 1977 to 1986. Dadié was born in Assinie, Côte d'Ivoire, and attended the local Catholic school in Grand Bassam and then the Ecole William Ponty. He worked for the French government in Dakar, Senegal, but on returning to his homeland in 1947 became part of its movement for independence. Before Côte d'Ivoire's independence in 1960, he was detained for sixteen months for taking part in demonstrations that opposed the French colonial government. In his writing, influenced by his experiences of colonialism as a child, Dadié attempts to connect the messages of traditional African folktales with the contemporary world. With Germain Coffi Gadeau and F. J. Amon d'Aby, he founded the Cercle Culturel et Folklorique de la Côte d'Ivoire (CCFCI) in 1953. His humanism and desire for the equality and independence of Africans and their culture is also prevalent.
January 10, 1893
Vicente García-Huidobro Fernández (January 10, 1893 – January 2, 1948) was a Chilean poet born to an aristocratic family. He was an exponent of the artistic movement called Creacionismo ('Creationism'), which held that a poet should bring life to the things he or she writes about, rather than just describe them. Huidobro was born into a wealthy family in Santiago. After spending his first years in Europe, he enrolled in a Jesuit secondary school in Santiago where he was expelled for wearing a ring, which he claimed, was for marriage. He studied literature at the University of Chile and published Ecos del alma (Soul's Echoes) in 1911, a work with modernist tendencies. The following year he married, and started to edit the journal Musa Joven (Young Muse), where part of his later book, Canciones en la noche (Songs in the Night) appeared, as well as his first calligram, 'Triángulo armónico' ('Harmonic Triangle'). In 1913, along with Carlos Díaz Loyola, he edited the three issues of the journal Azul, and published both Canciones en la noche and La gruta del silencio (The Grotto of Silence). The next year, he gave a lecture, Non serviam, which reflected his aesthetic creed. In another work of the same year, he explained his religious doubts and criticized the Jesuits, earning himself the reproach of his family. In 1916 he moved to Europe with his wife and children. While in Madrid, he met Rafael Cansinos-Asséns, with whom he had exchanged letters since 1914. He settled in Paris and published Adán (Adam), a work that began his next phase of artistic development. Huidobro met and mixed with most of the Parisian avant garde of this period: Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Jacques Lipchitz, Francis Picabia, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Paul Éluard and Blaise Cendrars. In October 1918 Huidobro traveled to Madrid, the first of a series of annual trips to that city. There he shared both Creacionismo and his knowledge of the Parisian vanguard with the artistic elite. Thus began the literary movement Ultraísmo. He corresponded with Tristan Tzara and collaborated with him on his Dadaist journal. The following year he brought a rough draft to Madrid of the series of poems that would eventually become his masterwork, Altazor. While Huidobro continued to write in Paris, in 1921 he founded and edited the international journal of art, Creación in Madrid; the journal featured a Lipchitz sculpture and the paintings of Georges Braque, Picasso, Gris and Albert Gleizes. In November he printed the second issue in Paris and entitled it Création Revue d'Art. In December he presented his famous lecture, La Poesía (Poetry), which served as prologue to Temblor de Cielo (Tremor of Heaven). He continued his diverse artistic activities in Europe until 1925, when he moved back to Chile to edit and publish political journalism and criticism. Youthful supporters proclaimed him their candidate for president. A bomb explosion followed in front of his house, however Huidobro escaped unharmed. He returned to Europe by the late 1920s, where he began to write the novel, Mío Cid Campeador; he also continued his work on Altazor and began Temblor de Cielo. It was at this time that he discovered that he was heir to the Marquisate of Casa Real. He also participated to the Mandrágora Surrealist movement founded in 1938. He died in Cartagena.
January 10, 1922
Terence Kevin Kilmartin CBE (10 January 1922 – 17 August 1991) was an Irish-born translator who served as the literary editor of The Observer between 1952 and 1986. He is best known for his 1981 translation of Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. Kilmartin was born on 10 January 1922 in the Irish Free State. Moving to England as a child, he was educated at Xaverian College in Mayfield, East Sussex. His limited knowledge of French developed when, at the age of 17, he was recruited to teach English to a French family's children. During the Second World War, Kilmartin was keen to serve in the armed forces, however, with only one kidney he was deemed medically unfit. Instead he served in the Special Operations Executive (SOE). He worked in London under Colonel Maurice Buckmaster. Kilmartin defied orders from Buckmaster in 1944 to take part in a parachute jump into France as part of Operation Jedburgh. He subsequently earned medals for his military service. During his time at SOE Kilmartin became acquainted with David Astor. His first post after the war was as a radio journalist, before he joined the staff of The Observer in 1949. Initially, he worked in the foreign affairs office of the newspaper, becoming assistant literary editor in 1950 and literary editor in 1952. During this time, Kilmartin also began translation work of French literature, starting with the major works of Henri de Montherlant: The Bachelors, The Girls, The Boys, and Chaos and Night. He also translated works by Malraux and Sagan. It was he who performed the first revision of the Scott Moncrieff translation of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. As literary editor of The Observer, Kilmartin procured the freelance reviewing services of Anthony Burgess from 1960 onwards. A Reader's Guide to The Remembrance of Things Past Kilmartin compiled a comprehensive Reader's Guide to the Remembrance of Things Past (1983). The Guide comprises four separate indices: an index of characters in the Remembrance; an index of actual persons; an index of places; and an index of themes. The reader is thus enabled to locate almost any reference, e.g. Berlioz, or The Arabian Nights, or Madame Verdurin in any particular scene or setting, or Versailles. The volume and page numbers are keyed to the 3-volume Remembrance of Things Past of 1981, translated by Scott Moncrieff and revised by Kilmartin himself. They do not apply, of course, to other editions of the Remembrance or the Search for Lost Time, as it is now frequently called.
January 10, 1903
Jens August Schade (10 January 1903, Skive, Denmark - 11 November 1978, Copenhagen) was a Danish poet. His debut was the 1926 poetry collection den levende violin, "the living violin". He referred to himself in his poetry as "the bright poet". The themes of his poetry were often the interconnection between the erotic and the forces of the cosmos. In 1963 he received the grand prize of the Danish Academy. His 1928 work "Læren om staten" is part of the Danish Culture Canon.
January 10, 1888
Erna Fergusson (January 10, 1888 – July 30, 1964) was an avid writer, historian, and storyteller, who documented the culture and history of New Mexico for more than forty years.
January 10, 1887
John Robinson Jeffers (January 10, 1887 – January 20, 1962) was born in 1887 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The son of Presbyterian minister and Biblical scholar, Dr. William Hamilton Jeffers, as a boy Jeffers was thoroughly trained in the Bible and classical languages. The Jeffers family frequently traveled to Europe, and Robinson attended boarding schools in Germany and Switzerland. In 1902, Jeffers enrolled in Western University of Pennsylvania; when his family moved to California, he transferred to Presbyterian Occidental College as a junior. Jeffers graduated from college at age 18. Jeffers studied literature, medicine, and forestry during his years as a student. In 1906 he met a fellow graduate student, Una Call Kuster. The two fell in love, though at the time Una was married. They married in 1913, the day after Una’s divorce was finalized, and moved to Carmel, on California’s coast. Jeffers and his wife lived in Carmel for the rest of their lives, building the stone Tor House and Hawk Tower, both of which figure prominently in his work. It was at the beginning of his time in Carmel that Jeffers turned exclusively to writing poetry. Jeffers’ first volume of verse, Flagons and Apples, appeared in 1912, but it was the 1924 publication of Tamar and Other Poems that brought him attention. In the ensuing years his lyrics, written in a rugged, free-verse line derived from Walt Whitman, and his psychologically probing narrative poems, written in traditional blank verse, made him famous. Nature not only serves as a backdrop for Jeffers’s verse; animals and natural objects are frequently compared to man, with man shown to be the inferior. There is not one memorable person, Jeffers wrote in Contrast, there is not one mind to stand with the trees, one life with the mountains. Jeffers preferred nature to man because he felt that the human race was too introverted, that it failed to recognize the significance of other creatures and things in the universe. Jeffers termed his philosophy inhumanism, which he explained was a shifting of emphasis from man to not man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence.... It offers a reasonable detachment as a rule of conduct, instead of love, hate, and envy. Humanity had been spurned by an uncaring God, Jeffers believed, so each individual should rid himself of emotion and embrace an indifferent, nonhuman god. To develop his philosophy of inhumanism, Jeffers drew on his extensive reading in philosophy, religion, mythology, and science. Critics have connected Jeffers’s ideas to those of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Lucretius, and cyclical historians such as Giambattista Vico, Oswald Spengler, and Flinders Petrie. Certain motifs and symbols recur in Jeffers’s poetry and serve to underline his poetry's philosophical stance. Many of his narrative poems include images of rape or incest, which Jeffers uses to emphasize the danger of man’s introversion. Jeffers was not noted for his technical ingenuity, but he did develop a style that meshed with his philosophy. Poet, critic, and anthologist Louis Untermeyer praised Jeffers for his gift of biting language and the ability to communicate the phantasmagoria of terror. Critic Selden Rodman noted that Jeffers wrote his poetry with a one-dimensional straightforwardness that is almost Homeric. And the similes he uses, if not Homeric, are as primitively American as the flintlock and the Maypole. Jeffers reached the pinnacle of his fame early. In 1932 he was on the cover of Time, and in 1946 his version of the Greek drama Medea played on Broadway. But popular opinion began to turn against Jeffers when a full formulation of his doctrine seemed to calmly foresee the extinction of the human race. Some of his political views, including references in his work to Pearl Harbor, Hitler, Stalin, and Roosevelt, were also uneasily received in the period after World War II. His collection, The Double Axe (1948), included a publisher’s warning on the potentially unpatriotic poems inside. In recent years, Robinson Jeffers has regained his central place in the burgeoning field of eco-poetics. His uncompromising work celebrates the enduring beauty of sea, sky and stone and the freedom and ferocity of wild animals, and strives to create a vision of world in which human experience is productively questioned, qualified, and even decentered. Jeffers’ efforts to shift emphasis and significance from man to not-man and his prophetic rage at his country’s imperial ambitions have resonated with later readers and been crucial influences on such West Coast poets as William Everson, Yvor Winters, Gary Snyder and Robert Hass.
January 10, 1955
Yasmina Khadra is the feminine pseudonym adopted by Mohammed Moulessehoul to avoid military censorship. Moulessehoul was born in the Algerian Sahara in 1955 and at one time was an officer in the Algerian military. His recent fiction trilogy on Middle Eastern realities-The Swallows of Kabul, The Attack, and The Sirens of Baghdad-has been widely acclaimed and translated. Moulessehoul is now retired from the military and living in France. Donald Nicholson-Smith and Alyson Waters are both seasoned translators. This is their first translation together.
January 11, 1958
James P. Delgado is the President of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology. His previous books include LOST WARSHIPS: AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL TOUR OF WAR AT SEA, ACROSS THE TOP OF THE WORLD: THE QUEST FOR THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE, and THE BRITISH MUSEUM ENCYCLOPEDIA OF UNDERWATER AND MARITIME ARCHAEOLOGY.
January 11, 1922
Fred Pittman Ellison (January 11, 1922 - October 4, 2014) was an assistant professor at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, he taught experimental classes in Spanish at both elementary and high school levels in a research project funded by the U.S. Department of Education. In 1962, on arriving at the University of Texas, he initiated the teaching of Portuguese in Austin, at Saint Edward's High School and was coordinator, with a Brazilian colleague, of a major project involving four other writers that eventuated in Modern Portuguese, an influential textbook used in U.S. universities for many years. In the sixties he founded the Portuguese Language Development Group of the AATSP, a nationwide group that continues to meet every year. Throughout his career Fred was especially drawn to Brazil, its people and its literature, a little-studied area which he had begun to explore in his dissertation on the Brazilian novel.
January 11, 1961
Jasper Fforde (born 11 January 1961) is a British novelist. Fforde's first novel, The Eyre Affair, was published in 2001. Fforde is mainly known for his Thursday Next novels, although he has written several books in the loosely connected Nursery Crime series and has begun two more independent series, The Last Dragonslayer and Shades of Grey. Fforde was born in London on 11 January 1961, the son of John Standish Fforde, the 24th Chief Cashier for the Bank of England (whose signature appeared on sterling banknotes during his time in office). He is the cousin, by her marriage to Desmond Fforde, of the author Katie Fforde, the grandson of Polish political adviser Joseph Retinger, and a great-grandson of journalist E. D. Morel. Fforde was educated at the progressive Dartington Hall School, and his early career was spent as a focus puller in the film industry, where he worked on a number of films, including The Trial, Quills, GoldenEye, and Entrapment. Fforde published his first novel, The Eyre Affair, in 2001. His published books include a series of novels starring the literary detective Thursday Next: The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, First Among Sequels, One of our Thursdays Is Missing and The Woman Who Died a Lot. The Eyre Affair had received 76 publisher rejections before its eventual acceptance for publication. Fforde won the Wodehouse prize for comic fiction in 2004 for The Well of Lost Plots. The Big Over Easy (2005), set in the same alternative universe as the Next novels, is a reworking of his first written novel, which initially failed to find a publisher. Its original title was Who Killed Humpty Dumpty?, and later had the working title of Nursery Crime, which is the title now used to refer to this series of books. These books describe the investigations of DCI Jack Spratt. The follow-up to The Big Over Easy, The Fourth Bear, was published in July 2006 and focuses on Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Fforde's books are noted for their profusion of literary allusions and wordplay, tightly scripted plots, and playfulness with the conventions of traditional genres. His works usually contain elements of metafiction, parody, and fantasy. None of his books has a chapter 13 except in the table of contents where there is a title of the chapter and a page number. In many of the books the page number is, in fact, the page right before the first page of chapter 14. However, in some the page number is just a page somewhere in chapter 12. Shades of Grey, the first novel in a new series, was published December 2009 in the United States and January 2010 in the United Kingdom. The sixth Thursday Next novel One of our Thursdays is Missing was published in February 2011. Fforde also plans a third Nursery Crime novel, The Last Great Tortoise Race: The Last Great Tortoise Race will be the third and final instalment of the NCD series. It is scheduled for 2017. In November 2010 he produced The Last Dragonslayer, unconnected with his other works but in a similar though simplified style, a young-adult fantasy novel about a teenage orphan. The book was originally planned as the first in a trilogy. Subsequent entries were released in 2011 and 2014; a fourth book is scheduled for 2016. In 2009, Fforde published a story in the Welsh edition of Big Issue magazine (a magazine distributed by the homeless) called 'We are all alike' (previously called 'The Man with no face'). He also published 'The Locked Room Mystery mystery' [sic] in the The Guardian newspaper in 2007 and this story remains online. The U.S. version of Well of Lost Plots features a bonus chapter (34b) called 'Heavy Weather', a complete story in itself, featuring Thursday Next in her position as Bellman.
January 11, 1946
Janet Campbell Hale (born January 11, 1946, Riverside, California) is a Native American writer. Her father was a full-blood Coeur d'Alene, and her mother was of Kootenay, Cree and Irish descent. In a sparse style that has been compared to Hemingway, Hale's work often explores issues of Native American identity and discusses poverty, abuse, and the condition of women in society. She wrote Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter (1993), which includes a discussion of the Native American experience as well as stories from her own life. She also wrote The Owl's Song (1974), The Jailing of Cecelia Capture (which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1985), Women on the Run (1999), and Custer Lives in Humboldt County & Other Poems (1978). Janet Campbell Hale has taught at Northwest Indian College, Iowa State University, College of Illinois, and University of California at Santa Cruz, and has served as resident writer at University of Oregon and University of Washington. Hale currently lives on the Coeur d'Alene Reservation in De Smet, Idaho.
January 11, 1842
William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist who was also trained as a physician. The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, James was one of the leading thinkers of the late nineteenth century and is believed by many to be one of the most influential philosophers the United States has ever produced, while others have labelled him the 'Father of American psychology'.
January 11, 1920
Slavko Janevski (January 11, 1920, Skopje - January 20, 2000) was a renowned Macedonian poet, prose and script writer. He finished high school in Skopje. From 1945 onwards he was the editor of the first teenage magazine called "Pioneer". Janevski is the author of the first novel to be written in Macedonian language "Seloto zad sedumte jaseni". As script writer he adapted the historical drama "Macedonian bloody wedding" in 1967. Janevski received many awards, among others "AVNOJ" 1968 and "Makedonsko slovo" for the book "Thought"
January 11, 1941
Wolf Lepenies is one of Germany’s foremost intellectuals. He served as Rector of the Wissenschaftskolleg, the German Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (1986-2001), where he is now a Permanent Fellow.
January 11, 1927
John Lynch (11 January 1927 – 4 April 2018) was Professor of Latin American History at the University of London. He spent most of his academic career at University College, and then from 1974 to 1987 as Director of the Institute of Latin American Studies. The main focus of his work was Spanish America in the period 1750–1850. John Lynch was born on 11 January 1927 in Boldon, County Durham, in northern England. He married Wendy Kathleen Norman in 1960, both are Catholic. They had 5 children. Lynch studied at the University of Edinburgh (MA, 1952), and at the University of London (Ph.D., 1955). He served in the British Army after World War II from 1945-48. He then taught at the University of Liverpool (1954–61) and, since 1961 has been teaching at the University of London. He was the director for the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of London from 1974 until his retirement in 1987. The scope of his work expanded over the years: from the River Plate area to Latin America as a whole; and from the 18th to the 19th centuries. He died on 4 April 2018 at the age of 91.
January 11, 1972
Mathias Énard studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. A professor of Arabic at the University of Barcelona, he won the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie and the Prix Edmée de la Rochefoucault for his first novel, La perfection du tir. He has been awarded many prizes for ZONE, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre. Charlotte Mandell has translated fiction, poetry, and philosophy from the French, including works by Proust, Flaubert, Genet, Maupassant, Blanchot, and many other distinguished authors
January 11, 1943
Eduardo Mendoza Garriga (born 11 January 1943 in Barcelona, Spain) is a Spanish novelist. He studied law in the first half of the 1960s and lived in New York City between 1973 and 1982, working as interpreter for the United Nations, and then tried to become a lawyer and then he realized that he wanted to be a writer. He maintained an intense relationship with novelists Juan Benet and Juan García Hortelano, poet Pere Gimferrer and writer (and neighbour) Félix de Azúa. In 1975 he published his very successful first novel, La verdad sobre el caso Savolta (The Truth about the Savolta Case), where he shows his ability to use different resources and styles. The novel is considered a precursor to the social change in the Spanish post-Franco society and the first novel of the transition to democracy. He describes the union fights from the beginning of the 20th century, showing the social, cultural and economic reality of the Barcelona at the time. A year later he was awarded the Critic Prize. His most acclaimed novel is probably La ciudad de los prodigios (The City of Marvels, 1986), about the social and urban evolution of Barcelona between the Universal Expositions of 1888 and 1929. It was adapted to the screen by Mario Camus in 1999. In 1992, he published his novel, El Año del Diluvio (The Year of the Flood), which tells of the inner conflicts faced by Sister Consuelo after she meets and falls in love with Augusto Aixelâ, with very evocative descriptions of the post-(civil)war deprivations prevailing in Spain at that time. In 1996, he published his third major Barcelona novel, this time set in the 1940s, Una comedia ligera (A Light Comedy). Also within Mendoza's work stands the saga of the mad detective, a peculiar character, an unnamed accidental-detective locked up in a mental hospital. The first of these novels, El misterio de la cripta embrujada (The Mystery of the Bewitched Crypt, 1979) is a parody with hilarious moments mixing detective stories with gothic narrative. In the second novel of the saga, El laberinto de las aceitunas (The Labyrinth of the Olives, 1982) he confirms his talent as parodist; the novel is one of his most successful works. The third novel of the saga, La aventura del tocador de señoras (The Adventure of the Powder Room) and the fourth one, El enredo de la bolsa y la vida were published in 2002 and 2012, respectively. The 5th novel will be released in October 2015 under the name of "El secreto de la modelo extraviada". The newspaper El País published two of his novels by instalments, Sin noticias de Gurb (No Word from Gurb, 1990) and El último trayecto de Horacio Dos (The Last Journey of Horatio Dos, 2001), both of them science fiction comedy novels. In 1990, his work in Catalan Restauració made its debut. He later translated it into Spanish himself. In October 2010, he won the literary prize Premio Planeta for his novel Riña de gatos. Madrid, 1936. In December 2013, he won the European Book Prize (fiction) for Riña de gatos. In June 2015, he won the Franz Kafka Prize. And in 2016 he won Premio Cervantes. Eduardo Mendoza's narrative studies divides his work into serious novels, or major novels, and humorous novels, or minor ones, although recent studies have shown the seriousness, criticism and transcendence in his parodic novels, as well as the humor presents in his serious novels , due to the influence of the characteristics of the postmodern novel.
January 11, 1904
Miguel Angel Menéndez (January 11, 1904, Izamal, Mexico - June 24, 1982, Mexico City, Mexico) was born in the province of Yucatan, but as a very young man he went to Mexico City to become a newspaper reporter. He was also active in both the political and financial worlds of Mexico and held several important governmental offices. Miguel Angel Menéndez wrote several very well-received volumes of poetry, NAYAR was his first novel.
January 11, 1923
Ernst Nolte (11 January 1923 – 18 August 2016) was a German historian and philosopher. Nolte’s major interest was the comparative studies of fascism and communism (cf. Comparison of Nazism and Stalinism). Originally trained in philosophy, he was professor emeritus of modern history at the Free University of Berlin, where he taught from 1973 until his 1991 retirement. He was previously a professor at the University of Marburg from 1965 to 1973. He was best known for his seminal work Fascism in Its Epoch, which received widespread acclaim when it was published in 1963. Nolte was a prominent conservative academic from the early 1960s and was involved in many controversies related to the interpretation of the history of fascism and communism, including the Historikerstreit in the late 1980s. In recent years, Nolte focused on Islamism and "Islamic fascism". He was the father of legal scholar Georg Nolte. Nolte received several prizes, including the Hanns Martin Schleyer Prize and the Konrad Adenauer Prize.
January 11, 1935
Walter Nugent (January 11, 1935, Watertown, NY - 2012) was a former President of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and former president of the Western History Association.
January 11, 1909
R. R. Palmer was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. For many years he taught at Princeton University, and several of his books have been published by Princeton University Press. These include CATHOLICS AND UNBELIEVERS IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY FRANCE (1939), TWELVE WHO RULED: THE COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC SAFETY IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION (1941 and 1958), and a translation of Georges Lefebvre's THE COMING OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION (1947).
January 11, 1903
Alan Stewart Paton (11 January 1903 – 12 April 1988) was a South African author and anti-apartheid activist.
January 11, 1929
Peter Dale Scott (born 11 January 1929) is a Canadian-born poet, former diplomat, and former English professor at the University of California, Berkeley. A son of the Canadian poet and constitutional lawyer F. R. Scott and painter Marian Dale Scott, he has been critical of American foreign policy since the era of the Vietnam War. Scott was a signatory in 1968 of the 'Writers and Editors War Tax Protest' pledge, in which participants vowed to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. He spent four years (1957–1961) with the Canadian diplomatic service. He retired from the UC Berkeley faculty in 1994.
January 11, 1949
Born in Spain in 1949, PACO IGNACIO TAIBO II has lived in Mexico since 1958, and has been a nationalized Mexican citizen since 1980. He is currently professor of history at the UAM-Azcapotzalco (Metropolitan University of Mexico City), and is executive vice president of the International Association of Crime Writers. The author of numerous novels, works of history, and short-story collections, many of which have been published throughout the world, Taibo lives with his wife and daughter in Mexico City.
January 11, 1963
Jan Arnald (born 11 January 1963) is a Swedish novelist and literary critic, who uses the pen name Arne Dahl when writing crime fiction. He is also a regular writer in Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. He published Barbarer (2001) and Maria och Artur (2006) under his own name, but under his pen name he has written a series of crime novels about a fictional group of Swedish crime investigators, called ‘A Gruppen’ in Swedish and ‘the Intercrime Group’ in the first English translation.
January 11, 1958
Daniel Tobin is an award-winning author and editor. He has been granted fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
January 11, 1921
ANTONIN BARTUSEK (January 11, 1921, Želetava, Czech Republic - April 24, 1974, Prague, Czech Republic) was born in 1925 in Zeltava, Western Moravia, and studied at Charles University, Prague. He now works at the State Office for Historical Monuments. His volumes of poetry arc: Fragments (1945), Destiny (1947) and then, following a prolonged silence during the period of Stalinism, Oxymoron (1965) and the existentialist Red Strawberries (1967), and more recently Dance of the Emu Bird and Antistar (1969) and Royal Progress (1970). He has translated American, French and German poetry and is the author of essays in the field of art history, scenography and literary criticism.
January 12, 1729
Edmund Burke PC (12 January [NS] 1729 – 9 July 1797) was an Irish statesman born in Dublin; author, orator, political theorist, and philosopher, who, after moving to England, served for many years in the House of Commons of Great Britain as a member of the Whig party. Mainly, he is remembered for his support of the cause of the American Revolutionaries, and for his later opposition to the French Revolution. The latter led to his becoming the leading figure within the conservative faction of the Whig party, which he dubbed the 'Old Whigs', in opposition to the pro–French Revolution 'New Whigs', led by Charles James Fox. Burke was praised by both conservatives and liberals in the nineteenth century. Since the twentieth century, he has generally been viewed as the philosophical founder of conservatism.
January 12, 1876
John Griffith ‘Jack’ London (born John Griffith Chaney, January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916) was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. He is best remembered as the author of The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush.
January 12, 1952
Walter Mosley is the author of more than forty books, including eleven previous Easy Rawlins mysteries, the first of which, DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS, was made into an acclaimed film starring Denzel Washington. ALWAYS OUTNUMBERED was an HBO film starring Laurence Fishburne, adapted from Mosley’s first Socrates Fortlow novel. A native of Los Angeles and a graduate of Goddard College, he holds an MFA from CCNY and lives in Brooklyn. New York. He is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, a Grammy, and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
January 12, 1969
David Stephen Mitchell (born 12 January 1969) is an English novelist. He has published seven novels, two of which, number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004), were shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
January 12, 1878
Ferenc Molnár (originally Ferenc Neumann; 12 January 1878 – 1 April 1952) was a Hungarian-born dramatist and novelist who adopted American citizenship. Molnár was born in Budapest. He emigrated to the United States to escape persecution of Hungarian Jews during World War II. As a novelist, Molnár may best be remembered for The Paul Street Boys, the story of two rival gangs of youths in Budapest. It was ranked second in a poll of favorite books as part of the Hungarian version of Big Read in 2005 and has been made into feature films on several different occasions. His most popular plays are Liliom (1909, tr. 1921), later adapted into a musical (Carousel); The Guardsman (1910, tr. 1924), which served as the basis of the film of the same name, which starred Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne (1931); and The Swan (1920, tr. 1922). His 1918 film, The Devil, was adapted three years later for American audiences, starring George Arliss in his first nationally released film. Two of Molnár's plays have been adapted for other media: The Good Fairy, was adapted by Preston Sturges and filmed in 1935 with Margaret Sullavan, and subsequently turned into the 1947 Deanna Durbin vehicle, I'll Be Yours. (It also served as the basis for the 1951 Broadway musical Make a Wish, with book by Sturges.) Molnár's play Olympia was adapted for the movies twice, the first time (quite unsuccessfully) as His Glorious Night (1929), and secondly as A Breath of Scandal (1960), starring Sophia Loren. In 1961, Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond turned Molnar's one-act play Egy, kett?, három into One, Two, Three, a film starring James Cagney and Horst Buchholz. His play, The Play at the Castle, has twice been adapted into English by writers of note: by P. G. Wodehouse as The Play's the Thing and by Tom Stoppard as Rough Crossing. Molnár served as a proud and jingoistic supporter of the Austro-Hungarian Empire while working as a war correspondent during the First World War. So positive were his war reports that he was decorated by the Habsburg Emperor, but criticized by some of his pacifist peers. He later wrote Reflections of a War Correspondent, describing his experiences. Molnár died, aged 74, in New York City, where he settled, via special immigration legislation, which was passed by the United States Congress, according him the status of returning [permanent] resident, to wit, Private Law 88-122/H. R. 3366, approved/enacted 19 December 1963 and retroactive to 9 December 1961. It is unclear if Molnar ever became a naturalized United States citizen.
January 12, 1949
Born in Kobe in 1949, Haruki Murakami studied classic Greek drama at Waseda University, then managed a jazz bar in Tokyo from 1974 to 1981, during which time he published three novels. The third of these was A Wild Sheep Chase, which earned him Japan’s prestigious Noma Literary Award for New Writers and ended his career at the jazz bar. His next novel, The End of the World and the Hard-Boiled Wonderland, won him the coveted Tanizaki Prize. With the publication of Norwegian Wood in 1987, the dam seemed to burst. The novel, issued in two volumes, has sold to date a total of 4.01 million copies. Dance, Dance, Dance, the sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, is his most recent work; published in 1988, in nine months it has sold over a million copies. Between books, Murakami has translated novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Irving, Paul Theroux, Raymond Carver, and Tim O’Brien into Japanese. He lives in Rome, Italy. Alfred Birnbaum, the translator, was born in Washington, DC, in 1957, and grew up in Tokyo. After his undergraduate years at the University of Southern California, he returned to Japan for graduate study at Waseda University, remaining in the country another nine years. He now lives in Barcelona, Spain.
January 12, 1954
Gianni Riotta is a novelist and journalist, and is the co-editor of La Stampa, one of Italy's leading newspapers. He lives in Turin and New York.
January 12, 1969
Paul Collins is a writer specializing in science history, memoir, and unusual antiquarian literature. His 7 books have been translated into 10 languages, and include Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books (2003) and The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (2011). His freelance work includes pieces for the New York Times, Slate, and New Scientist, and he appears on NPR Weekend Edition as its resident 'literary detective' on odd old books. Collins lives in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches in the MFA program at Portland State University.
January 12, 1628
Charles Perrault (12 January 1628 – 16 May 1703) was a French author and member of the Académie française. He laid the foundations for a new literary genre, the fairy tale, with his works derived from pre-existing folk tales. The best known of his tales include Le Petit Chaperon rouge (Little Red Riding Hood), Cendrillon (Cinderella), Le Chat Botté (Puss in Boots), La Belle au bois dormant (The Sleeping Beauty) and La Barbe bleue (Bluebeard). Some of Perrault's versions of old stories may have influenced the German versions published by the Brothers Grimm 200 years later. The stories continue to be printed and have been adapted to opera, ballet (such as Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty), theatre, and film. Perrault was an influential figure in the 17th-century French literary scene, and was the leader of the Modern faction during the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns.
January 13, 1832
Horatio Alger, Jr. (January 13, 1832 – July 18, 1899) was a prolific 19th-century American author, best known for his many juvenile novels about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of middle-class security and comfort through hard work, determination, courage, and honesty. His writings were characterized by the 'rags-to-riches' narrative, which had a formative effect on America during the Gilded Age. Alger's name is often invoked incorrectly as though he himself rose from rags to riches, but that arc applied to his characters, not to the author. Essentially, all of Alger's novels share the same theme: a young boy struggles through hard work to escape poverty.
January 13, 1952
Geoffrey Canada (born January 13, 1952, The Bronx, New York City, NY), who is president of the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families in New York City, was awarded a 1995 Heinz Award for his leadership in nurturing and protecting children. This is his first book.
January 13, 1939
Edgardo Cozarinsky (born January 13, 1939, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a writer and filmmaker. He is best known for his Spanish-language novel Vudú urbano. Cozarinsky was born to an Argentine family of Ukrainian-Jewish descent. His last name comes from his grandparents, Ukrainian Jewish immigrants who arrived in Argentina from Kiev and Odessa in the late nineteenth century. After an adolescence spent in neighbourhood cinemas showing double bills of old Hollywood films and reading an inordinate amount of fiction in Spanish, English and French (favourite authors – Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, Henry James), he studied literature at Buenos Aires University, wrote for local and Spanish cinephile magazines, and published an early essay on James, which he developed from his university thesis – El laberinto de la apariencia (The Labyrinth of Appearance, 1964), a book which he later suppressed. In his early twenties he became acquainted with Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo in Buenos Aires. In 1973 he won a literary prize for his essay on gossip as narrative device in the writings of James and Proust. In 1974 he published Borges y el cine, a book that he expanded in every reprint (Spain, 1978 and 2002, and translations). He has since that time also declined to have this book reprinted. Cozarinsky visited Europe from September 1966 to June 1967, stopping for a visit to New York City on his return to Buenos Aires. Arriving back home, he more fully committed himself to his writing. He wrote for the culture sections of the Argentine weeklies Primera Plana and Panorama, then he produced his first film. It was an underground feature shot on weekends over the course of a year, knowing that it could not pass the local censorship of the period. It was nevertheless screened at festivals throughout Europe and the United States. Its title was already a challenge – ... (Puntos suspensivos – Dot Dot Dot). During the turmoil of Argentina's Dirty War, Cozarinsky left Buenos Aires for Paris, where he concentrated on his filmmaking. He produced fiction films and 'essays', mixing documentary material with personal refletions on the material. The most distinguished of these is La Guerre d'un seul homme (One Man's War, 1981), a confrontation between Ernst Jünger's wartime diaries and French newsreels of the occupation period. At a time when European television networks were willing to support such ventures, Cozarinsky was able to develop this approach in a series of original works. During the period 1970-1990, Cozarinsky published little. However, his sole novel from the period gained a wide audience - Vudú urbano (Urban voodoo, 1985), a mixture of fiction and essay not unlike his film work, with prologues by Susan Sontag and Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Cozarinsky returned to Buenos Aires for a short stay after the end of Argentina's military junta. He then returned three years later to produce Guerreros y cautivas (Warriors and Captive Women), filmed in the country's far southern reaches. He visited Argentina several times after that, occasionally filming segments or backgrounds for his films. His most adventurous later films were Rothschild's Violin and Ghosts of Tangier, both made between 1995 and 1996. Cozarinsky was diagnosed with cancer in 1999. This motivated him to dedicate his remaining time to his writing. While still in the hospital following his diagnosis he wrote the first two stories for La novia de Odessa (The Bride from Odessa). From that date on, his film work became sparse and he started publishing 'all the books I had not put on paper', fiction mostly but also essays and chronicles. He became established as a Spanish-language writer, and his works were also translated into several other languages. During this period he spent most of his time in Buenos Aires, returning to Paris for regular short stays. In 2005 he wrote and directed a play (Squash) and wrote a mini-opera Raptos (Raptures). In that year he also appeared on the alternative stage along with his medical doctor, in one of Vivi Tellas' 'documentary theater' ventures -Cozarinsky y su médico. In 2008 he started work on the libretto for a chamber opera with the musician Pablo Mainetti – Ultramarina, based on motives from his own novel El rufián moldavo (The Moldavian Pimp). Cozarinsky has filmed in such diverse locations as Budapest, Rotterdam, Tallinn, Tangiers, Vienna, Granada, Saint Petersburg, Seville and Patagonia. He presently alternates most of his time between Buenos Aires and Paris.
January 13, 1923
Mojmír Drvota (January 13, 1923 in Czech Republic - April 27, 2006) was professor emeritus in the Department of Photography and Cinema at Ohio State University
January 13, 1932
Tony Geraghty is a British subject and an Irish citizen. He is a veteran of the British Red Berets and served as a military liaison officer with U.S. forces during the Gulf War, for which he was awarded the Joint Service Commendation Medal for Military Merit with a citation signed by General H. Norman Schwarzkopf. Geraghty has also worked in the United States as a writer for the Boston Globe.
January 13, 1933
Ron Goulart (born January 13, 1933) is an American popular culture historian and mystery, fantasy and science fiction author. Goulart was prolific, and wrote many novelizations and other routine work under various pseudonyms: Kenneth Robeson (pen name), Con Steffanson (pen name), Chad Calhoun, R.T. Edwards, Ian R. Jamieson, Josephine Kains, Jillian Kearny, Howard Lee, Zeke Masters, Frank S. Shawn, and Joseph Silva. Goulart's first professional publication was a 1952 reprint of the SF story "Letters to the Editor" in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction; this parody of a pulp magazine letters column was originally published in the University of California, Berkeley's Pelican. His early career in advertising and marketing influenced much of his work. In the early 1960s, Goulart wrote the text for Chex Press, a newspaper parody published on Ralston Purina cereal boxes (Wheat Chex, Rice Chex, Corn Chex). He contributed to P.S. and other magazines, along with his book review column for Venture Science Fiction Magazine. Cheap Thrills: An Informal History of the Pulp Magazines (1972) is his best known non-fiction book.
January 13, 1906
PASCHOAL CARLOS MAGNO, a Brazilian now attached to the Embassy in London, wrote this novel in English. He is already well known in his native land as a poet and a playwright but this is his first fiction, and it appears suitably at the moment when an Anglo-Brazilian alliance has drawn our two countries together, and when we are beginning to realize how vital to the future peace and prosperity of the world will be the vast energies and possibilities of the greatest of the South American nations.
January 13, 1843
Fakir Mohan Senapati (13 January 1843 - 14 June 1918) born on January 13, 1843, at Mallikashpur in Balasore, played a leading role in establishing the distinct identity of Oriya, a language mainly spoken in the Indian state of Odisha. Fakirmohan Senapati is regarded as the father of Oriya nationalism and modern Oriya literature.
January 13, 1929
Villy Sørensen (13 January 1929 – 16 December 2001) was a Danish short-story writer, philosopher and literary critic of the Modernist tradition. His fiction was heavily influenced by his philosophical ideas, and he has been compared to Franz Kafka in this regard. He was the most influential and important Danish philosopher since Søren Kierkegaard. Born in Copenhagen, Sørensen graduated from the Vestre Borgerdydskole in 1947, and then attended the University of Copenhagen and the University of Freiburg studying philosophy. Although he did not graduate, he later received an honorary degree from the University of Copenhagen. Sørensen published his first collection of short stories, Strange Stories in 1953, which many critics have identified as being the start of Danish literary Modernism. He published additional collections of short stories in 1955 and 1964, all winning various awards in Denmark. These stories generally explored the absurd and hidden parts of the human psyche. Sørensen began editing the journal Vindrosen (with Klaus Rifbjerg) in 1959. Afterward, he became a member of the Danish Academy in 1965, subsequently editing several other Modernist journals and periodicals. Sørensen, though he continued to produce short fiction throughout his life, was also deeply engaged in philosophy, about which he wrote many essays and several books including Seneca: The Humanist at the Court of Nero and his response to Søren Kierkegaard's Either/Or, Hverken-eller (i.e. 'Neither/Nor'). He also published books and essays about Nietzsche, Kafka, Marx, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, and was a notable translator of over 20 books.
January 13, 1945
Elton Glaser is the author of seven other poetry collections: Relics, Tropical Depressions, Color Photographs of the Ruins, Winter Amnesties, Pelican Tracks, Here and Hereafter, and The Law of Falling Bodies. His poems have appeared in the 1995, 1997, and 2000 editions of The Best American Poetry. Among Glaser's awards are two fellowships from the NEA, seven fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, the Iowa Poetry Prize, the 1996 Ohionana Poetry Award, and the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Akron, former director of the University of Akron Press, and former editor of the Akron Series in Poetry.
January 14, 1960
Eric Alterman (born January 14, 1960) is an American historian, journalist, author, media critic, blogger, and educator. He is currently CUNY Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College, the media columnist for The Nation, and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress as well as the author of ten books. His weblog named Altercation was originally hosted by MSNBC.com from 2002 to 2006, moved to Media Matters for America until December 2008, and is now hosted by The Nation.
January 14, 1956
Ronan Bennett (born: 14 January 1956) is a Northern Irish novelist and screenwriter. Bennett was raised in a devout Roman Catholic family headed by William H. and Geraldine Bennett at 420 Merville Garden Village in the Whitehouse area of Newtownabbey, Northern Ireland. He attended the Christian Brothers Grammar School in West Belfast (generally known as St Mary's CBGS). In 1974, while still in school, Bennett was convicted of murdering Inspector William Elliott, a 49-year-old police officer in the Royal Ulster Constabulary during an Official IRA bank robbery at the Ulster Bank in The Diamond shopping area at Rathcoole, close to his Merville Garden Village home, on 6 September 1974. His conviction was overturned on appeal in 1975 and Bennett was released from Long Kesh prison near Lisburn, Co. Antrim. Later Bennett apparently displayed a sympathy towards the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), which made its name after it killed Margaret Thatcher's Northern Ireland advisor Airey Neave in 1979. Bennett then moved to London. In 1978 he was arrested for conspiracy to cause explosions and spent 16 months in prison on remand. Bennett conducted his own defence, and he and his co-defendants were acquitted in 1979. He studied history at King's College London receiving a first class honours degree, and later completed his Ph.D. at the college in 1987. Bennett lives in London with his family. His partner is Georgina Henry, editor of guardian.co.uk. Since 2006, he has co-hosted a regular Monday chess column with Daniel King in The Guardian, which seeks to be instructive, rather than topical. Through test positions taken from actual games, their amateur and expert assessments of the possible continuations are discussed and compared. It has been supposed that Nigel Short's column was axed to make way for the new feature and the justification for this change has been the subject of some debate in chess circles. Bennett has published five novels and two non-fiction works. It was his third novel The Catastrophist that brought him into the public eye. This novel was set in the Belgian Congo just before independence, with the rise and fall of Patrice Lumumba as political backdrop, The Catastrophist is the story of a doomed love affair between novelist James Gillespie and a fiery idealistic journalist, Inès. Critics hailed the novel, which drew inevitable comparisons to Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad and John le Carré's African novel, The Constant Gardener. It was nominated for the Whitbread Award in 1998. The Catastrophist is a bleak book about the impossibility of love and of political peace in certain circumstances. The central character, James, (who changes his name from the Irish 'Seamus' to the Anglo form when he moves to London) follows Inès to the Congo as the Belgian colons are preparing to leave and the Communist sympathiser Lumumba is about to be killed by a rival ‘tribe’ vying for control (with clandestine US support). James writes some pieces for the Observer in London as the political situation gets much worse, and he becomes more involved because Inès herself is heavily engagé, reporting for the Italian Communist Party newspaper. Their sexual relationship is handled with great frankness, and their love appears very real, but she moves away from him, into the cause, and takes a young African supporter of Lumumba as a lover. She asks James to help them escape as their lives become threatened by a dangerous CIA man and the black tribal group he supports. Despite his own bitterness about losing her, James refuses to tell the American and his African co-conspirators where Inès and her lover are hiding. He is jailed and badly beaten, but eventually the CIA man believes his story that he does not know where Inès is hiding, and lets him go. Inès consoles him with one final sexual act before escaping with her African lover. The sub-text is about James' impossible task in holding a woman who throws herself into a cause that the detached novelist cannot join. There is considerable poignancy in the scenes where he realises that she has gone for good, and no longer loves him. Bennett's fourth novel, Havoc, in its Third Year, was published in 2004. It is a dark tale of Puritan fanaticism, set in a town in northern England in the 1630s, in the decade before Cromwell and his Roundheads took over the kingdom. Havoc was also well received in the press. Bennett was an uncredited co-author of Stolen Years, the prison memoir of Paul Hill, one of the Guildford Four who were wrongfully convicted in 1975 for the Guildford and Woolwich pub bombings the previous year. Bennett has also written several acclaimed screenplays for film and television, among them The Hamburg Cell and the controversial Rebel Heart. He contributes regularly to the British and Irish press. In 2006, Bennett's new novel Zugzwang, was published week-by-week in the British Sunday newspaper The Observer. The novel was written in weekly installments with new chapters being submitted to the newspaper close to publication date. Each chapter was accompanied by illustrations created by British artist Marc Quinn.
January 14, 1937
Hendrik Jan Marsman (14 January 1937 – 29 October 2012), better known by his pen name, J. Bernlef, was a Dutch writer, poet, novelist and translator, much of whose work centres on mental perception of reality and its expression. He won numerous literary awards, including the Constantijn Huygens Prize in 1984 and the P. C. Hooft Award in 1994, both of which were for his work as a whole. His book Hersenschimmen features on the list of NRC's Best Dutch novels.
January 14, 1874
Sidney Ernest Dark (14 January 1874 – 11 October 1947) was an English journalist, author and critic who was editor of the Church Times, among other publications. Dark wrote more than 30 books on subjects ranging from the church to literature and theatre, as well as biographies and novels.
January 14, 1896
John Roderigo Dos Passos (January 14, 1896 – September 28, 1970) was a radical American novelist and artist active in the first half of the twentieth century.
January 14, 1934
Marek Hlasko (14 January 1934 – 14 June 1969) was a Polish writer. Hlasko’s biography is highly mythologized, and many of the legends about his life he spread himself. His literary career started in 1951 when he wrote Baza Sokolowska, his first set of short stories. Hlasko became a correspondent for Trybuna Ludowa (a popular Polish daily) when he was working for ‘Metrobudowa’. He made his debut with Baza Sokolowska in Sztandar Mlodych (a daily paper published in Poland in 1950-1997) in 1954. He gained publicity and popularity thanks to his original working style as well as his unconventional behaviour and clothing. He was a legendary figure of the young generation, a symbol of non-conformism. He was well-built; however, the physical appearance concealed over-sensitivity and uncertainty. He was prone to depression and could not adapt to everyday reality. Marek’s inclination to rows contrasted with his friends’ positive opinions of him. In 1958, he went to Paris. The press there called him an Eastern European James Dean, as Hlasko strikingly resembled him. Hlasko really identified himself with this role: he vandalized pubs and restaurants. At this time, he gained worldwide publicity. Nonetheless, he liked the life of a vagrant, so he left Paris and went to Germany and then to Italy. The anticommunist edition of Cmentarze in the émigré Polish-language Parisian monthly Kultura launched a press campaign against him. When Marek was refused a renewal of his passport, he asked for political asylum in the Western Germany. After three months, he changed his mind and tried to return to Poland. However, while waiting for an answer from the Polish government, he decided to go to Israel in 1959. He could not live without Poland but at the same time he could not return to his homeland. In 1963, he spent a month in prison for his feuds with the police. In 1964 he twice attempted suicide. Between 1963 and 1965, he spent a total of 242 days in psychiatric clinics. In 1965, he divorced his wife, and in 1966, with Roman Polanski's help, he went to Los Angeles. He was supposed to write screenplays, but it did not work out. He had an affair with Betty, the wife of Nicholas Ray, the author of Rebel Without a Cause, and thereby ended his career as a screenwriter. He got a pilot’s licence instead. In December 1968, during one of his parties, he fell out with Krzysztof Komeda. As a result of this accident, Komeda got a brain hematoma and died four months later. Hlasko was to say: ‘If Krzysztof dies, I'll go along’ (Jesli Krzysio umrze, to i ja pójde). In 1969, he came back to Germany. He died in Wiesbaden at the age of 35. The circumstances of his death remain unknown. One hypothesis is that he mixed alcohol with sedative drugs. However, those who knew him maintain that suicide was out of the question in his case. In 1975, his ashes were taken to Poland, and buried at the Powazki Cemetery in Warsaw.
January 14, 1916
John Oliver Kittens was born in Macon, Georgia, in 1916. He attended Edward Waters College, Morris Brown College, and Howard University, as well as the Terrell Law School and Columbia and New York Universities. In 1936 he joined the staff of the National Labour Relations Board in Washington, where he served until 1942 and again in 1946 after his return from the war. For 26 months he was with the Amphibian Forces in the South Pacific. Mr Killens has won the Afro-Arts Theatre Cultural Award for 1955, the Brooklyn N.A.A.C.P. Literary Arts Award for 1957, and the Climbers Business Club Humanitarian Award for 1959. He is chairman of the Harlem Writers’ Guild Workshop and of the Writers’ Committee of the American Society of African Culture. He writes for television and films, his latest film being Odds Against Tomorrow, starring Harry Belafonte. Mr Kittens, who lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children, recently travelled by Land-Rover 12,000 miles through West Africa doing research for a proposed television series. AND THEN WE HEARD THE THUNDER is Mr Killens’s second novel; his first, YOUNGBLOOD, was published in 1954.
January 14, 1886
Hugh John Lofting (14 January 1886 – 26 September 1947) was a British author, trained as a civil engineer, who created the character of Doctor Dolittle, one of the classics of children's literature.
January 14, 1885
John Alden Mason (14 January 1885 – 7 November 1967) was an archaeological anthropologist and linguist. Mason was born in Orland, Indiana, but grew up in Philadelphia's Germantown. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1907 and a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in 1911. His dissertation was an ethnographic study of the Salinan Amerindian ethnic group of California. He also authored a number of linguistic studies, including a study of Piman languages. His later ethnographic works included studies of the Tepehuan. The first series of Juan Bobo stories published in the U.S. occurred in 1921. They appeared in the Journal of American Folklore under the title Porto Rican Folklore, and were collected by Mason from Puerto Rican school children. The story collection consisted of 56 "Picaresque Tales" about Juan Bobo, and included such exotic titles as Juan Bobo Heats up his Grandmother, Juan Bobo Delivers a Letter to the Devil, Juan Bobo Throws his Brother Down a Well, and Juan Bobo refuses to Marry the Princess. Mason was curator of the University Museum at the University of Pennsylvania from 1926 until his retirement in 1958. His papers are housed at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.
January 14, 1928
Martin Prager Mayer (born January 14, 1928, New York City) is the writer of 35 non-fiction books, including Madison Avenue, U.S.A. (1958), The Schools (1961), The Lawyers (1967), About Television (1972), The Bankers (1975), The Builders (1978), Risky Business: The Collapse of Lloyd's of London (1995), The Bankers: The Next Generation (1997), The Fed (2001), and The Judges (2005). Mayer's books describe and criticize American industries or professional groups. His book on Madison Avenue was described by Cleveland Amory as "The first complete story on the ... advertising industry". Mayer wrote a music column for Esquire from 1952 to 1975. He was a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. He is married to Revenue Watch Institute President Karin Lissakers.
January 14, 1957
Anchee Min (born January 14, 1957) is a Chinese-American painter, photographer, musician, and author who lives in San Francisco and Shanghai. Min has published two memoirs, Red Azalea and The Cooked Seed: A Memoir, and six historical novels. Her fiction emphasizes strong female characters, such as Jiang Qing, the wife of chairman Mao Zedong, and Empress Dowager Cixi, the last ruling empress of China. She graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a B.F.A. and M.F.A. in Fine Arts. She is married to author Lloyd Lofthouse.
January 14, 1925
Yukio Mishima is the pen name of Kimitake Hiraoka (January 14, 1925 – November 25, 1970), a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, and film director. Mishima is considered one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century.
January 14, 1947
Adolph Leonard Reed Jr. (born January 14, 1947) is an American professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in race and American politics. He has taught at Yale, Northwestern, and the New School for Social Research and he has written on racial and economic inequality. He is a founding member of the U.S. Labor Party and a frequent contributor to The Progressive and The Nation.
January 14, 1927
Carolyn Stoloff is a poet and a painter. Her previous volume of verse, STEPPING OUT, was highly acclaimed by outstanding poets, and her poems have appeared in major poetry magazines and other periodicals. Ms. Stoloff has been the recipient of grants from the National Council on the Arts and from the MacDowell Colony in order to work on this volume. Four of her poems (three of which are included here) received the Theodore Roethke Award from Poetry Northwest, and others won the Poetry Contest of The Miscellany (North Carolina). She lives in New York, but spent the summer of 1972 working in Taos, New Mexico.
January 14, 1875
Albert Schweitzer was a German - and later French - theologian, organist, philosopher, physician, and medical missionary in Africa, also known for his interpretive life of Jesus.
January 15, 1957
André Alexis (born 15 January 1957 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago) is a Canadian writer who grew up in Ottawa and currently lives in Toronto, Ontario. His debut novel, Childhood (1997), won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and was a co-winner of the Trillium Award. In addition to his writing, he is a member of the editorial board of This Magazine.
January 15, 1957
JON LEE ANDERSON is the author of GUERRILLAS: JOURNEYS IN THE INSURGENT WORLD, CHE GUEVARA: A REVOLUTIONARY LIFE THE LION’S GRAVE: DISPATCHES FROM AFGHANISTAN, and, with his brother, Scott Anderson, WAR ZONES and INSIDE THE LEAGUE.
January 15, 1926
Humberto Arenal (Havana, January 15, 1926 - Havana, January 26, 2012) was a Cuban writer, playwright and theater director. During his career Arenal was the director of major cultural institutions on the island, such as the Teatro Nacional, the Teatro Musical de La Habana, the Conjunto Dramatico of Matanzas and the Teatro Lirico Nacional de Cuba. The author of El sol a plomo (1959), Los animales sagrados (1967) and Quien mato a Ivan Ivanovich? (1995), Arenal won the National Prize for Literature in 2007. He is still remembered for the great success of his open-air staging of the play Aire frio, by Virgilio Piñera, in 1962. Humberto Arenal died January 26, 2012 in Havana at the age of 85.
January 15, 1812
Peter Christen Asbjørnsen (15 January 1812 – 5 January 1885) was a Norwegian writer and scholar. He and Jørgen Engebretsen Moe were collectors of Norwegian folklore. They were so closely united in their lives' work that their folk tale collections are commonly mentioned only as "Asbjørnsen and Moe".
January 15, 1948
Hazel V. Carby (January 15, 1948, United Kingdom) is Chair of African American Studies at Yale University. She is the author of RECONSTRUCTING WOMANHOOD: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist and RACE MEN.
January 15, 1936
Frank Conroy (January 15, 1936 – April 6, 2005) was an American author, born in New York, New York to an American father and a Danish mother. He published five books, including the highly acclaimed memoir Stop-Time. Published in 1967, this ultimately made Conroy a noted figure in the literary world. The book was nominated for the National Book Award. Conroy graduated from Haverford College, and was director of the influential Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa for 18 years, from 1987 until 2005, where he was also F. Wendell Miller Professor. He was previously the director of the literature program at the National Endowment for the Arts from 1982 to 1987. Conroy's published works included: the memoir Stop-Time; a collection of short stories, Midair; a novel, Body and Soul, which is regarded as one of the finest evocations of the experience of being a musician; a collection of essays and commentaries, Dogs Bark, but the Caravan Rolls On: Observations Then and Now; and a travelogue, Time and Tide: A Walk Through Nantucket. His fiction and non-fiction appeared in such journals as The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, Harper's Magazine and Partisan Review. He was named a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. In addition to writing, Conroy was an accomplished jazz pianist, winning a Grammy Award in 1986 for liner notes. His book Dogs Bark, But the Caravan Rolls On: Observations Then and Now includes articles that describe jamming with Charles Mingus and with Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman. The latter session occurred when Conroy was writing about the Rolling Stones for Esquire. Conroy had arrived at a mansion for the interview, found nobody there, and eventually sat down at a grand piano and began to play. Someone wandered in, sat down at the drums, and joined in with accomplished jazz drumming; then a fine jazz bassist joined in. They turned out to be Watts and Wyman, whom Conroy did not recognize until they introduced themselves after the session. Conroy died of colon cancer on April 6, 2005, in Iowa City, Iowa, at the age of 69. The Frank Conroy Reading Room in the Dey House, the home of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, was named in his honor. Conroy is the subject of Mentor: A Memoir by Tom Grimes, his former student at the Iowa Writers Workshop and long-time friend.
January 15, 1931
Alfred W. Crosby (born January 15, 1931, Boston, MA) is a Professor Emeritus of History, Geography, and American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of such books as The Columbian Exchange and Ecological Imperialism.
January 15, 1933
Ernest James Gaines (born January 15, 1933) is an African-American author. His works have been taught in college classrooms and translated into many languages, including French, Spanish, German, Russian and Chinese. Four of his works have been made into television movies. His 1993 novel, A Lesson Before Dying, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Gaines has been a MacArthur Foundation fellow, awarded the National Humanities Medal, and inducted into the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters) as a Chevalier.
January 15, 1933
Kevin K. Gaines is associate professor of history and African American studies at the University of Michigan.
January 15, 1933
Agustin Gomez-Arcos (15 January 1933 – 20 March 1998) was a Spanish writer. He was born in Enix, Spain. He studied law but quit university for theater. However, some of his work was banned in Franco's Spain. He emigrated to London in 1966, then to Paris in 1968 and wrote primarily in French, often with themes condemning the fascist Spanish state. He died in Paris of cancer.
January 15, 1955
Anthony Tony Grooms was born January 15, 1955, and grew up in Louisa, Virginia. He is the oldest of six children in his African-American family, which also has Native American and European backgrounds. His parents, Robert E. Grooms and Dellaphine Scott, promoted education, so Grooms became a part of the Freedom of Choice plan. He attended a white public school in 1967 consisting of partial integration, and his experience there has had a significant influence on his writing. Graduating in 1978 from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, Anthony Grooms received a Bachelor of Arts in theatre and speech. He strived for a more advanced education and graduated in 1984 from George Mason University with a Masters of Fine Arts in English. He has taught at a variety of schools: Clark State University, University of Georgia, University of Cape Coast in Ghana, West Africa, and Kennesaw State University. Grooms has always been a writer, but he never considered himself one until graduate school. He moved to Atlanta, Georgia, in 1988 after first finishing graduate school and then marrying Pamela B. Jackson. In Atlanta, he found the civil rights movement during the 1960s as a basis for his writing. Grooms is now an instructor teaching creative writing, along with other English and literature courses, at Kennesaw State University outside of Atlanta, Georgia. Grooms has received many awards for his writings: the Lillian Smith Prize for Fiction (twice), the Sokolov Scholarship of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Lamar lectureship of Wesleyan College, and an Arts Administration Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2006, the Georgia Center of the Book chose two of Grooms’ published works, Ice Poems and Trouble No More, for Top 25 List of Books all Georgians should Read. Anthony Grooms is an author of published writings covering a variety of subjects, but his most well-known piece of literature, Bombingham, is a novel addressing issues faced during the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Other works of writing include Ice Poems, an assortment of poems, and Trouble No More, an assortment of short stories. His stories and poems have appeared in leading literary journals including Callaloo, African American Review, and Crab Orchard Review.
January 15, 1929
Martin Luther King Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist who became the most visible spokesperson and leader in the civil rights movement from 1954 through 1968. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using the tactics of nonviolence and civil disobedience based on his Christian beliefs and inspired by the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi. King led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and in 1957 became the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). With the SCLC, he led an unsuccessful 1962 struggle against segregation in Albany, Georgia, and helped organize the nonviolent 1963 protests in Birmingham, Alabama. He also helped organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. On October 14, 1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. In 1965, he helped to organize the Selma to Montgomery marches, and the following year he and the SCLC took the movement north to Chicago to work on segregated housing. In his final years he expanded his focus to include opposition towards poverty and the Vietnam War, alienating many of his liberal allies with a 1967 speech titled "Beyond Vietnam". J. Edgar Hoover considered him a radical and made him an object of the FBI's COINTELPRO from 1963 on. FBI agents investigated him for possible communist ties, recorded his extramarital liaisons and reported on them to government officials, and on one occasion mailed King a threatening anonymous letter, which he interpreted as an attempt to make him commit suicide. In 1968, King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., to be called the Poor People's Campaign, when he was assassinated by James Earl Ray on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee; riots followed in many U.S. cities. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was established as a holiday in numerous cities and states beginning in 1971, and as a U.S. federal holiday in 1986. Hundreds of streets in the U.S. have been renamed in his honor, and a county in Washington State was also rededicated for him. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was dedicated in 2011.
January 15, 1900
Andreas William Heinesen (15 January 1900 – 12 March 1991) was a poet, novel writer, short story writer, children's book writer, composer and painter from the Faroe Islands. The Faroese capital Tórshavn is always the centre of Heinesen's writing and he is famous for having once called Tórshavn 'The Navel of the World'. His writing focuses on contrasts between darkness and light, between destruction and creativity. Then following is the existential struggle of man to take sides. This is not always easy, however, and the lines between good and bad are not always clearly defined. Heinesen was captivated by the mysterious part of life, calling himself religious in the broadest sense of the word. His life could be described as a struggle against defeatism with one oft-quoted aphorism of his is that 'life is not despair, and death shall not rule'. As he was born and raised before the Faroese language was taught in the schools, he wrote mainly in Danish but his spoken language was Faroese. All his books are later translated into his native Faroese. He published his first collection of poetry when he was 21 and he had three more published before he wrote his first novel Blæsende gry (Stormy Dawn) in 1934. He read every single one of the chapters to the painter Sámal Joensen-Mikines, as he was worried that his Danish wasn't good enough. That was followed up with Noatún (1938). Noatún has a strong political message – solidarity is the key to a good society. His next book The Black Cauldron (1949) deals with the aftermath of decadent living combined with religious hysteria. In The Lost Musicians (1950) Heinesen leaves the social realism of his earlier works behind, instead giving himself over to straightforward storytelling. Mother Pleiades (1952) is an ode to his imagination. Its subtitle is 'a Story From the Beginning of Time'. Heinesen wasn't content with writing only novels. In the fifties he began writing short stories as well. Most of them have been printed in these three collections entitled The Enchanted light, Gamaliel's Bewitchment and Cure Against Evil Spirits (1969). In the novel The Good Hope, his main character the Rev. Peder Børresen is based on the historical person Rev. Lucas Debes. When Heinesen was asked how long it had taken to write it, he answered 'forty years. But then I did other things in between'
January 15, 1902
Nâz?m Hikmet Ran (15 January 1902 – 3 June 1963), commonly known as Nâz?m Hikmet, was a Turkish poet, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, director and memoirist. He was acclaimed for the 'lyrical flow of his statements'. Described as a 'romantic communist' and 'romantic revolutionary', he was repeatedly arrested for his political beliefs and spent much of his adult life in prison or in exile. His poetry has been translated into more than fifty languages.
January 15, 1931
Garth St. Omer was born in Castries, St Lucia, on 15 January 1931. On graduating from St Mary’s College, a Roman Catholic high school for boys in St Lucia, he taught for seven years, 1949—56, in high schools in the Eastern Caribbean. He entered the University College of the West Indies, Jamaica, in 1956 on a UCWI scholarship, and graduated in 1959 with an Honours degree in French, with Spanish as subsidiary subject. Between 1959 and 1961 he taught as an English Language Assistant in lycees in Dax and Albi, France. From 1961 to 1966 he taught French and English at Apam Secondary School, Ghana. The years 1966 to 1969 were devoted to full-time writing of fiction, in England and the West Indies. In 1969 he entered the graduate school of Fine Arts of Columbia University, taking courses in creative writing, translation, film-making, film history and film aesthetics. He graduated in 1971 with the MFA degree. In 1971 he enrolled in the Comparative Literature programme of Princeton University to read for the PhD degree. He successfully completed the requirements in 1975, his dissertation being on THE COLONIAL NOVEL, a comparative study of Albert Camus, V. S. Naipaul and Alejo Carpentier (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms, 1975). In 1975 he joined the English Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara, as Associate Professor, and was subsequently promoted to the rank of full Professor. His awards include a Writing Grant from the Arts Council, London, England (1967), a Columbia University fellowship (1969—71), a Ford Foundation fellowship (1969—73), and a Princeton University fellowship (1971—75).
January 15, 1920
Melvin Jonah Lasky (15 January 1920 – 19 May 2004) was an American journalist, intellectual, and member of the anti-Communist left. He founded the German journal Der Monat in 1948 and, from 1958 to 1991, edited Encounter, one of many journals revealed to have been secretly funded by the CIA through the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). From 1950 to 1963, the CIA covertly supported the CCF and a number of its publications, including Encounter. While Lasky did admit he knew of the CIA's role as a funding source prior to its reveal in 1966, rumors that he was a CIA agent have not been substantiated by evidence. In 1947, Lasky wrote an influential document that made the case for a cultural Cold War intended to win over European intellectuals. He was the older brother of Floria Lasky, an influential entertainment lawyer, and Joyce Lasky Reed, the President and founder of the Fabergé Arts Foundation and former Director of European Affairs at the American Enterprise Institute.
January 15, 1891
Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (15 January 1891 – 27 December 1938) was a Russian poet and essayist who lived in Russia during and after its revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. He was one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets. He was arrested by Joseph Stalin's government during the repression of the 1930s and sent into internal exile with his wife Nadezhda. Given a reprieve of sorts, they moved to Voronezh in southwestern Russia. In 1938 Mandelstam was arrested again and sentenced to a camp in Siberia. He died that year at a transit camp.
January 15, 1966
Giles Milton (born 15 January 1966) is a writer who specialises in the history of exploration. His books have been published in seventeen languages worldwide and are international best-sellers. He has written eight works of non-fiction, two comic novels and two books for young children. He is best known for his 1999 best-selling title, Nathaniel's Nutmeg, a historical account of the violent struggle between the English and Dutch for control of the world supply of nutmeg in the early 17th century.
January 15, 1622 baptised
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known by his stage name Molière (1622–1673), was a French playwright and actor who is considered to be one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature. Among Molière's best-known works are The Misanthrope, The School for Wives, Tartuffe, The Miser, The Imaginary Invalid, and The Bourgeois Gentleman.
January 15, 1809
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (15 January 1809 – 19 January 1865) was a French politician and the founder of mutualist philosophy. He was the first person to declare himself an anarchist using that term and is widely regarded as one of the ideology's most influential theorists. Proudhon is even considered by many to be the "father of anarchism". He became a member of the French Parliament after the revolution of 1848, whereafter he referred to himself as a federalist. Proudhon, who was born in Besançon, was a printer who taught himself Latin in order to better print books in the language. His best-known assertion is that Property is Theft!, contained in his first major work, What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and Government (Qu'est-ce que la propriété? Recherche sur le principe du droit et du gouvernement), published in 1840. The book's publication attracted the attention of the French authorities. It also attracted the scrutiny of Karl Marx, who started a correspondence with its author. The two influenced each other: they met in Paris while Marx was exiled there. Their friendship finally ended when Marx responded to Proudhon's The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty with the provocatively titled The Poverty of Philosophy. The dispute became one of the sources of the split between the anarchist and Marxist wings of the International Working Men's Association. Some, such as Edmund Wilson, have contended that Marx's attack on Proudhon had its origin in the latter's defense of Karl Grün, whom Marx bitterly disliked, but who had been preparing translations of Proudhon's work. Proudhon favored workers' associations or co-operatives, as well as individual worker/peasant possession, over private ownership or the nationalization of land and workplaces. He considered social revolution to be achievable in a peaceful manner. In The Confessions of a Revolutionary Proudhon asserted that, Anarchy is Order Without Power, the phrase which much later inspired, in the view of some, the anarchist circled-A symbol, today "one of the most common graffiti on the urban landscape." He unsuccessfully tried to create a national bank, to be funded by what became an abortive attempt at an income tax on capitalists and shareholders. Similar in some respects to a credit union, it would have given interest-free loans. Stewart Edwards, Lectuter in Politics at the University of Southampton and Visiting Assistant Professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, has drawn the main points from Proudhons disparate writings over two decades, particularly his notions of the state, economic organization, mutualisnt, history and revolution, and given them a lucid introduction. The translator is Elizabeth Fraser, Lecturer in French at the University of Southampton.
January 15, 1931
Alan Scholefield (15 January 1931 - 26 October 2017) was a South African writer famous for his Macrae and Silver series.
January 15, 1935
Robert Silverberg (born January 15, 1935) is an American author and editor, best known for writing science fiction. He is a multiple winner of both Hugo and Nebula Awards, a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, and a Grand Master of SF. He attended every Hugo Awards ceremony since the inaugural event in 1953. Silverberg was born in Brooklyn, New York. A voracious reader since childhood, he began submitting stories to science fiction magazines during his early teenage years. He received a BA in English Literature from Columbia University, in 1956. While at Columbia, he wrote the juvenile novel Revolt on Alpha C (1955), published by Thomas Y. Crowell with the cover notice: "A gripping story of outer space". He won his first Hugo in 1956 as the "best new writer". That year Silverberg was the author or co-author of four of the six stories in the August issue of Fantastic, breaking his record set in the previous issue. For the next four years, by his own count, he wrote a million words a year, mostly for magazines and Ace Doubles. He used his own name as well as a range of pseudonyms during this era, and often worked in collaboration with Randall Garrett, who was a neighbour at the time. (The Silverberg/Garrett collaborations also used a variety of pseudonyms, the best-known being Robert Randall.) From 1956 to 1959, Silverberg routinely averaged five published stories a month, and he had over 80 stories published in 1958 alone. In 1959, the market for science fiction collapsed, and Silverberg turned his ability to write copiously to other fields, from historical non-fiction to softcore pornography. "Bob Silverberg, a giant of science fiction... was doing two [books] a month for one publisher, another for a second publisher, and the equivalent of another book for a magazine... He was writing a quarter of a million words a month." In the mid-1960s, science fiction writers were becoming more literarily ambitious. Frederik Pohl, then editing three science fiction magazines, offered Silverberg carte blanche in writing for them. Thus inspired, Silverberg returned to the field that gave him his start, paying far more attention to depth of character development and social background than he had in the past and mixing in elements of the modernist literature he had studied at Columbia. The novels he wrote in this period are considered far superior to his earlier work.[citation needed] Perhaps the first book to indicate the new Silverberg was To Open the Sky, a fixup of stories published by Pohl in Galaxy Magazine, in which a new religion helps people reach the stars. That was followed by Downward to the Earth, a story containing echoes of material from Joseph Conrad's work, in which the human former administrator of an alien world returns after the planet's inhabitants have been set free. Other acclaimed works of that time include To Live Again, in which the memories and personalities of the deceased can be transferred to other people; The World Inside, a look at an overpopulated future; and Dying Inside, a tale of a telepath losing his powers. In the August 1967 issue of Galaxy, Pohl published a 20,000-word novelette called "Hawksbill Station". This story earned Silverberg his first Hugo and Nebula story award nominations. An expanded novel form of Hawksbill Station was published the following year. In 1969 Nightwings was awarded the Hugo for best novella. Silverberg won a Nebula award in 1970 for the short story "Passengers", two the following year for his novel A Time of Changes and the short story "Good News from the Vatican", and yet another in 1975 for his novella "Born with the Dead". After suffering through the stresses of a thyroid malfunction and a major house fire, Silverberg moved from his native New York City to the West Coast in 1972, and he announced his retirement from writing in 1975. In 1980 he returned, however, with Lord Valentine's Castle, a panoramic adventure set on an alien planet, which has become the basis of the Majipoor series—a cycle of stories and novels set on the vast planet Majipoor, a world much larger than Earth and inhabited by no fewer than seven different species of settlers. In a 2015 interview Silverberg said that he did not intend to write any more fiction. Silverberg received a Nebula award in 1986 for the novella Sailing to Byzantium, which takes its name from the poem by William Butler Yeats; a Hugo in 1987 for the novella Gilgamesh in the Outback, set in the Heroes in Hell universe of Bangsian Fantasy; a Hugo in 1990 for Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted Silverberg in 1999, its fourth class of two deceased and two living writers, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America made him its 21st SFWA Grand Master in 2005. Silverberg has been married twice. He and Barbara Brown married in 1956, separated in 1976, and divorced a decade later. Silverberg and science fiction writer Karen Haber married in 1987. They live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Before the age of 30, Silverberg was independently wealthy through his investments and once owned the former mansion of New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia.
January 15, 1902
Karlo Štajner (15 January 1902 – 1 March 1992) was a Yugoslavian communist activist and author of Austrian origin and a prominent Gulag survivor. Štajner was born in Vienna, where he joined the Communist Youth of Austria, but emigrated to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1922 on the order of the Young Communist International to help the newly established Communist Party of Yugoslavia. After an illegal communist printing house in Zagreb where Štajner worked was searched by the police in 1931, he fled Yugoslavia, visiting Paris, Vienna, and Berlin before finally settling in the Soviet Union in 1932 where he worked in the Comintern publishing house in Moscow. During the Great Purge in 1936, Štajner was arrested and spent the next 17 years in prisons and gulags and three more years in exile in Siberia. He was released in 1956 after being rehabilitated, and returned to Yugoslavia. He spent the rest of his life in Zagreb with his wife Sonya whom he married in Moscow in the 1930s. In 1971, Štajner published a book titled "Seven Thousand Days in Siberia" about his experiences. The book was a bestseller in Yugoslavia and was named the "book of the year 1972" by the Vjesnik newspaper.
January 16, 1912
Fernando Benitez (Mexico City, January 16, 1912 - Mexico City, February 21, 2000) was a Mexican journalist, writer, editor, and historian.
January 16, 1956
Anouar Benmalek (January 16, 1956) is a novelist, journalist, mathematician and poet. He was born in Casablanca. After the 1988 riots in Algeria in protest of government policies, he became one of the founders of the Algerian Committee Against Torture. His novel Lovers of Algeria was awarded the Prix Ragid. The novel, The Child of an Ancient People, won the Prix R.F.O. du Liv. Benmalek's work has been described as "elegiac, multilayered meditation on Algeria's violent history." He has been compared to Camus and Faulkner.
January 16, 1948
Gordon Burn (16 January 1948 - 17 July 2009) was an English writer born in Newcastle upon Tyne and the author of four novels and several works of non-fiction. Burn's novels deal with issues of modern fame and faded celebrity as lived through the media spotlight. His novel Alma Cogan (1991), which imagined the future life of the British singer Alma Cogan had she not died in 1966, won the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel. His other novels, Fullalove and The North of England Home Service, appeared in 1995 and 2003, respectively. His non-fiction deals primarily with sport and true crime. His first book, Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son, was a study of Peter Sutcliffe, 'the Yorkshire Ripper,' and his 1998 book, Happy Like Murderers: The Story of Fred and Rosemary West, dealt in similar detail with two of Britain's most notorious serial killers. Burn's interest in such infamous villains extended to his fiction, with Myra Hindley, one of the 'Moors murderers', featuring prominently in the novel Alma Cogan. His sport-based books are Pocket Money: Inside the World of Snooker (1986) and Best and Edwards: Football, Fame and Oblivion (2006), which deals with the twin stories of Manchester United footballers Duncan Edwards and George Best, and the 'trajectory of two careers unmoored in wildly different ways.' He also wrote a book with British artist Damien Hirst, On the Way to Work, a collection of interviews from various dates between 1992-2001. He contributed to The Guardian regularly, usually writing about contemporary art. Gordon Burn died of bowel cancer in 2009, aged 61.
January 16, 1947
Michel Chion has written many books on the cinema, including a series of groundbreaking works on film sound as well as Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey (BFI, 2001) and two volumes in the BFI Modern Classics series—on Eyes Wide Shut (2002) and The Thin Red Line (2004).
January 16, 1935
Inger Christensen (16 January 1935 – 2 January 2009) was a Danish poet, novelist, essayist and editor considered the foremost Danish poetic experimentalist of her generation. Born in the town of Vejle, on the eastern, Jutland coast of Denmark, Christensen's father was a tailor, her mother a cook before her marriage. After graduating from Vejle Gymnasium, she moved to Copenhagen and, later, to Århus, studying at the Teachers’ College there. She received her certificate in 1958. During this same period, Christensen began publishing poems in the journal Hvedekorn, and was guided by the noted Danish poet and critic Poul Borum (1934–1995), whom she married in 1959 and divorced in 1976. After teaching at the College for Arts in Holbæk from 1963 to 1964, she turned to writing full-time, producing two of her major early collections, Lys (Light, 1962) and Græs (Grass, 1963), both examining the limits of self-knowledge and the role of language in perception. Her most acclaimed work of the 1960s, however, was It (det), which, on one level, explored social, political and aesthetic issues, but more deeply probed large philosophical questions of meaning. The work, almost incantatory in tone, opposes issues such as fear and love and power and powerlessness. In these years Christensen also published two novels, Evighedsmaskinen (1964) and Azorno (1967), as well as a shorter fiction on the Italian Renaissance painter Mantegna, presented from the viewpoint of various narrators (Mantegna's secretary Marsilio, the Turkish princess Farfalla, and Mantagena's young son), Det malede Værelse (1976, translated into English as The Painted Room by Harvill Press in 2000). Much of Christensen's work was organized upon ‘systemic’ structures in accordance with her belief that poetry is not truth and not even the ‘dream’ of truth, but ‘is a game, maybe a tragic game—the game we play with a world that plays its own game with us.’ In the 1981 poetry collection Alfabet, Christensen used the alphabet (from a [‘apricots’] to n [‘nights’]) along with the Fibonacci mathematical sequence in which the next number is the sum of the two previous ones (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34…). As she explained: ‘The numerical ratios exist in nature: the way a leek wraps around itself from the inside, and the head of a snowflower, are both based on this series.’ Her system ends on the n, suggesting many possible meanings including ‘n’s’ significance as any whole number. As with It, however, despite its highly structured elements this work is a poetically evocative series concerned with oppositions such as an outpouring of the joy of the world counterposed with the fears for and forces poised for its destruction. Sommerfugledalen of 1991 (Butterfly Valley: A Requiem, 2004) explores through the sonnet structure the fragility of life and mortality, ending in a kind of transformation. Christensen also wrote works for children, plays, radio pieces, and numerous essays, the most notable of which were collected in her book Hemmelighedstilstanden (The State of Secrecy) in 2000. In 1978, she was appointed to the Royal Danish Academy; in 1994, she became a member of the Académie Européenne de Poésie (‘European Academy of Poetry’); in 2001, the Akademie der Künste (‘Academy of the Arts’) in Berlin. She won the Grand Prix des Biennales Internationales de Poésie in 1991; She received the Rungstedlund Award in 1991. Der österreichische Staatspreis für Literature (‘Austrian State Prize for European Literature‘) in 1994; in 1994, she won the Swedish Academy Nordic Prize, known as the 'little Nobel'; the European Poetry Prize in 1995; The America Award in 2001; the German Siegfried Unseld award in 2006; and received numerous other distinctions. Her works have been translated into several languages, and she was frequently mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature. DENISE NEWMAN was born in New Jersey, and studied comparative literature at the University of Copenhagen. She is herself a published poet. . Originally published in Danish in 1976 as Det Malede Vaerelse.
January 16, 1938
Shirley Christian (born January 16, 1938, Pettis County, Missouri, MO) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author. Her most recent book, Before Lewis and Clark: The Story of the Chouteaus, the French Dynasty that Ruled America’s Frontier, was published in April 2004 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Previously, she was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, The Miami Herald and the Associated Press. She lived and worked in numerous countries of Latin America for nearly 20 years, and in New York and Washington, winning the Pulitzer for international reporting in 1981 for articles published in The Miami Herald about the wars in Central America. Her first book, Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family, was published in 1985 by Random House. Shirley Christian was born in a farmhouse in Pettis County, Missouri, and grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, where she attended public schools. She earned a bachelor’s degree in language and literature from Pittsburg (Kan.) State University in 1960 and a master’s degree in international journalism from Ohio State University in 1966. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University during the 1973-74 academic year. In addition to books and her work on newspapers, Shirley Christian has written magazine articles for The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and other publications. She was an adjunct professor of journalism at Columbia University and the University of Kansas. She lives in Kansas City.
January 16, 1924
Richard Hugh Dillon (born January 16, 1924 in Sausalito, California) was a librarian and the author of many articles and books on California, including California trail herd (1961), The legend of Grizzly Adams (1966), Fool's gold: the biography of John Sutter (1967), Humbugs and heroes: a gallery of California pioneers (1970), and Delta country (1982). The collection consists of ca. 300 photographs of old and new San Francisco Chinatown and the Mother Lode country, as well as photostats, captions, and signed mounts. There are also illustrative photographs used in Richard H. Dillon's Hatchet men (1962).
January 16, 1889
Pavel Eisner (16 January 1889 – 8 July 1958), also known as Paul Eisner and under the pseudonym Vincy Schwarze, was Czech-German linguist and translator and the author of many studies about Czech language. He is considered one of the most important Czech translators of all time and was said to be proficient in 12 languages - English, French, Icelandic, Italian, Hungarian, German, Norwegian, Persian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, and Tibetan. He produced some of the earliest Czech language translations of Franz Kafka's work. Eisner came from a Jewish family in Prague. He was bilingual from his childhood. He went to college at Prague's German University, where he studied Slavonic, German, and Romance languages and graduated in 1918. He worked as a translator for the Czech Chamber of Commerce and Crafts and, at the same time, edited for the German newspaper, Prager Presse. During this time, he also contributed to several cultural magazines. During the German occupation, he and his wife were persecuted as members of the Jewish community, though he managed to publish a book under the pseudonym, Vincy Schwarze.
January 16, 1906
Geraldo Guirty is a four-generation Saint Thomian. He was born January 16, 1906, a subject of Denmark, and witnessed the transfer of his island country, Saint Thomas, to Uncle Sam. Guirty began his education at Saint Thomas’s Catholic School, finished high school with Rhodes Preparatory, New York City, and graduated from Long Island University. Post-graduate courses were taken at Columbia, the City University, and New York Law School. Guirty has traveled the Orient, the United States, South America, Europe, and the Caribbean. The author has written for the New York Amsterdam News, the Jamaica (West Indies) Daily Gleaner, and the Guyana (South America) Chronicle. Presently he writes for the Virgin Islands Daily News. Guirty is married to Louise Blake. They celebrated their golden anniversary in January 1989.
January 16, 1952
Gordon Hutner is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and founding editor of the journal American Literary History.
January 16, 1955
Mary Karr (born January 16, 1955) is an American poet, essayist and memoirist. She rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. She is the Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University.
January 16, 1928
William Joseph Kennedy (born January 16, 1928) is an American writer and journalist born and raised in Albany, New York, to William J. Kennedy and to Mary E. McDonald. Kennedy was raised a Catholic. Many of his novels feature the interaction of members of the fictional Irish-American Phelan family, and make use of incidents of Albany's history and the supernatural. Kennedy's works include The Ink Truck (1969), Legs (1975), Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (1978), Ironweed (1983, winner of 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; film, 1987), and Roscoe (2002).
January 16, 1936
Geoffrey Neil Leech FBA (16 January 1936 – 19 August 2014) was a specialist in English language and linguistics. He was the author, co-author or editor of over 30 books and over 120 published papers. His main academic interests were English grammar, corpus linguistics, stylistics, pragmatics and semantics.
January 16, 1935
Michael Scammell is the author of Solzhenitsyn, a Biography, which won the Los Angeles Times and English PEN’s prizes for best biography after its publication. He is the editor of The Solzhenitsyn Files, Unofficial Art from the Soviet Union, and Russia’ s Other Writers, and has translated Nabokov, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and other Russian authors into English. His reviews and articles have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Harpers, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing and translation in the School of the Arts at Columbia University in New York.
January 16, 1938
JO SOARES is one of Brazil’s best-known and most- loved cultural figures. His hugely successful career in television, theater, and film has been supplemented over recent years by his entry into the world of books and journalism with the publication of three works of nonfiction and numerous articles in Brazil. A SAMBA FOR SHERLOCK is his first novel.
January 16, 1933
Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer and filmmaker, teacher and political activist, publishing her first major work, the essay 'Notes on 'Camp'', in 1964. Her best known works include On Photography, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, The Way We Live Now, Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others, The Volcano Lover and In America. Sontag was active in writing and speaking about, or travelling to, areas of conflict, including during the Vietnam War and the Siege of Sarajevo. She wrote extensively about photography, culture and media, AIDS and illness, human rights, and communism and leftist ideology. Her essays and speeches sometimes drew criticism. The New York Review of Books called her 'one of the most influential critics of her generation.'
January 16, 1924
Aleksandar Tišma (16 January 1924 – 15 February 2003) was a Serbian novelist. Tišma was born in Horgoš, Kanjiža on the present-day border of Serbia and Hungary, to a Serbian father and an Hungarian-speaking Jewish mother. He completed his elementary and middle school education in Novi Sad before going on to study economy and French language and literature in Budapest during World War II, finally graduating in Germanistics from the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philology. From 1945 to 1949 he worked as a journalist for Slobodna Vojvodina and Borba newspapers, and then as editor and redactor at Matica srpska until his retirement in 1982. He became a corresponding member of the Vojvodina Academy of Sciences and Arts (VANU) in 1979 and was promoted into a regular member in 1984, and subsequently became a regular member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) upon their fusion 1992. From 2002, he was also a member of the Academy of Arts, Berlin. Tišma's works were concerned with themes of humanity's search for freedom, and suffering, violence, horror and guilt people encounter along the way. Along with Czes?aw Mi?osz, Danilo Kiš and György Konrád, his works are sometimes classified as part of "Mitteleuropa" literature—dark and contemplative, yet humanistic and thought-provoking. In political affairs, Tišma often publicly supported and acted in favor of pro-democratic movements in Serbia, although he was reluctant to openly join any political organization. In 1993, as a sign of disagreement with Slobodan Miloševi?'s regime and increasing nationalist hysteria in the country, he left Serbia and lived in self-imposed exile in France until 1996. He died in 2003, aged 79, in Novi Sad. His works were translated into 17 languages. Among other awards, he received the Novi Sad October Award, the NIN Award for best novel of the year (for The Use of Man, 1977), the Andri? Award and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (1995). He also translated works of other authors from German and Hungarian into Serbian, notably Imre Kertész's novel Fatelessness.
January 16, 1936
Estela Portillo-Trambley (January 16, 1936 - December 1, 1999) was a Chicana poet and playwright. Portillo-Trambley was born on January 16, 1936 in El Paso, Texas. She earned a B.A. and M.A. in English from the University of Texas at El Paso and had a career as a high school teacher from 1957 to 1964, at the El Paso Technical Institute, before dedicating herself to writing. She is the first Chicana to publish a short story collection and the first to write a musical comedy. She was the resident dramatist at El Paso Community College from 1970-75. While there she produced and directed the college's dramatic productions and served as a drama instructor. She died on December 1, 1999. Portillo-Trambley won the 1973 Quinto Sol Award, a literary award presented by Quinto Sol Publications. and in 1985 attained second place in the 1985 New York Shakespeare Festival's Hispanic American playwright's competition for her play Black Light. In 1990 she was named Author of the Pass by the El Paso Herald Post.and was inducted into the El Paso Women's Hall of Fame in 1996.
January 16, 1954
Annah Sobelman (1954 - 2017) was born on January 16, 1954 in Los Angeles, CA, to William and Vieanna (Knutson) Sobelman. With an exuberance for life and a laugh that filled the universe, 'Annah accomplished much in life. A graduate of the University of Southern California, she then went on to Pepperdine Law School where she received her JD and taught, and New York University School of Law where she received her JD in Corporate Law. Her true passion however was poetry. She attended the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, and received her MFA from New York University. As a gifted and fearless poet, 'Annah authored The Tulip Sacrament (Wesleyan University Press, 1995) and In The Bee Latitudes (University of California Press, 2013). An extraordinary, encouraging, and enthusiastic teacher, she influenced the lives of many young poets while teaching at the University of Montana in Missoula, St. John's College in Santa Fe, NM, and in private poetry workshops in her home in Taos, NM. In the late '80s she founded and edited The Taos Review. 'Annah loved music, the piano, art, romance, poetry, movies, adventure, nature, fishing, animals and her friends where she acquired many while living in Taos 1988-2003, 2014-2016; Santa Fe 2016-2017, Los Angeles 2011-2014, and her beloved Florence, Italy 2003-2011.
January 16, 1910
William Bedell Stanford (16 January 1910 – 30 December 1984) was an Irish classical scholar and senator. He was Regius Professor of Greek at Trinity College, Dublin between 1940 and 1980 and served as the twenty-second Chancellor of the University between 1982 and 1984. He was born in Belfast, the son of a Dublin-born Church of Ireland clergyman who served in Waterford and Tipperary. He was educated at Bishop Foy's School in Waterford, where a special teacher had to be recruited to coach him in Greek. He subsequently won a sizarship to Trinity College. He was elected a Foundation Scholar in his first year at Trinity, having become an undergraduate in October 1928. He also served as Auditor of the College Classical Society. He was editor of TCD: A College Miscellany in Hilary term of 1931. He became a Fellow in 1934 and was one of the last Fellows to be elected by examination. Stanford was one of seven candidates nominated for the Provostship of the University on 11 March 1952 but was eliminated along with two other candidates in the first round of the election. He was considered, at the age of 42, to be too junior. The successful candidate on that occasion was the mathematician, A.J. McConnell, who remained in office for 22 years.
January 17, 1771
Charles Brockden Brown (January 17, 1771 – February 22, 1810), an American novelist, historian, and editor of the Early National period, is generally regarded by scholars as the most important American novelist before James Fenimore Cooper. He is the most frequently studied and republished practitioner of the 'early American novel,' or the US novel between 1789 and roughly 1820. Although Brown was not the first American novelist, as some early criticism claimed, the breadth and complexity of his achievement as a writer in multiple genres (novels, short stories, essays and periodical writings of every sort, poetry, historiography, reviews) makes him a crucial figure in US literature and culture of the 1790s and first decade of the 19th century, and a significant public intellectual in the wider Atlantic print culture and public sphere of the era of the French Revolution.
January 17, 1600
Pedro Calderón de la Barca y Barreda González de Henao Ruiz de Blasco y Riaño, usually referred as Pedro Calderón de la Barca (17 January 1600 – 25 May 1681), was a dramatist, poet and writer of the Spanish Golden Age. During certain periods of his life he was also a soldier and a Roman Catholic priest. Born when the Spanish Golden Age theatre was being defined by Lope de Vega, he developed it further, his work being regarded as the culmination of the Spanish Baroque theatre. As such, he is regarded as one of Spain's foremost dramatists and one of the finest playwrights of world literature.
January 17, 1958
Ted Conover (born January 17, 1958, in Okinawa and raised in Denver, Colorado) is an American author and journalist. A graduate of Denver's Manual High School and Amherst College and a Marshall Scholar, he is also a distinguished writer-in-residence in the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University. He teaches graduate courses in the Literary Reportage concentration and an undergraduate course on journalism and empathy.
January 17, 1938
DARYL CUMBER DANCE is the author of HONEY, HUSH! AN ANTHOLOGY OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN’S HUMOR, SHUCKIN AND JIVIN’, FOLKLORE FROM CONTEMPORARY JAMAICANS, LONG GONE, FIFTY CARIBBEAN WRITERS, NEW WORLD ADAMS, and THE LINEAGE OF ABRAHAM. She is a professor at the University of Richmond.
January 17, 1918
Fabián Dobles Rodríguez (January 17, 1918 – March 22, 1997) was a Costa Rican writer and left-wing political activist. An author of novels, short stories, poems, and essays, he earned international recognition as an author dealing with the plight of the poor and with social protest. Fabian Dobles was born in 1918 in the small Costa Rican town of San Antonio de Belen, where his father was the local doctor. He read law at the University of Costa Rica, San Jose, and in the 1940s established his reputation as one of Central America’s leading novelists and short-story writers with Aguas turbias, a novel in the Costa Rican vernacular, and Ese que llaman pueblo, both of which attracted comparison with Steinbeck. His short stories have been translated into English, German, and Russian, and his best-known novel, the colorful agrarian saga, El sitio de las Abras, has gone through ten editions. Among Dobles’s many national and international awards is the Magon National Prize for Culture. In 1993 his complete works were published in five volumes by the University of Costa Rica Press/National University Press. Los anos, pequenos dias (YEARS LIKE BRIEF DAYS) was first published in 1989 by Editorial Costa Rica.
January 17, 1706
Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 – April 17, 1790) was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat.
January 17, 1972
Kate Morgenroth is the author of the adult thrillers Kill Me First and Saved. She lives in New York City.
January 17, 1940
Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali (born 17 January 1940) is a South African poet. He has written in both Zulu and English. He studied at Columbia University. He now lives in Soweto. Mtshali was born in Vryheid, Natal, South Africa. He worked as a messenger in Soweto before becoming a poet, and his first book, Sounds of a Cowhide Drum (1971), explores both the banality and extremity of apartheid through the eyes of working men of South Africa, even while it recalls the energy of those Mtshali frequently calls simply "ancestors". Published with a preface by Nadine Gordimer, Sounds of a Cowhide Drum was one of the first books of poems by a black South African poet to be widely distributed. It provoked considerable debate among the white South African population, but was extremely successful, winning the Olive Schreiner Prize for 1974 and making a considerable profit for its white publisher, Lionel Abrahams.Mtshali's work was popular among white liberals in South Africa, which may have made him less of an icon for other black poets. In a 1978 interview, the poet Keorapetse Kgositsile compares Mtshali's case to the Harlem Renaissance in the United States, a period when the importance of white patronage for black work made the emerging black literature more politically complex. Other critics have praised Mtshali's documentation of the struggle of apartheid; poet Dike Okoro (who was born in 1973, and perhaps has a different generational perspective from Kgosistsile's) has said, "Mtshali stands out for the role of addressing oppression and its effects. . . fear as an element of craft and theme predominates." Mtshali's second book, Fireflames (1980), is far more militant, often expressly promising revolution. After his success as a poet, Mtshali became an educator. He was vice-principal of Pace College, a commercial school in Soweto. He taught at the New York City College of Technology.
January 17, 1875
Florencio Sánchez (January 17, 1875 – November 7, 1910) was a Uruguayan playwright, journalist and political figure. He is considered one of the founding fathers of theater in the River Plate region of Argentina and Uruguay. Sanchez was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1875. Though he had little formal schooling, he read widely and began writing early. Later he established himself as a capable, often satirical, journalistic chronicler. His interest in social problems motivated his affiliation with the Centro Internacional de Estudios Sociales. Among the activities of this group was the production of plays of social protest in Spanish and Italian, which afforded Sanchez an occasion for practical theatrical experience. Eventually fixing his residence in Buenos Aires, he led a disorganized, bohemian life, eking out a meagre living as a journalist and clerk, his health progressively undermined by tuberculosis. In a desperate attempt to recover his health, Sanchez undertook a trip to Europe, only to die in Milan, Italy, in 1910, barely a year after his departure from Buenos Aires. During a six-year period in Buenos Aires, Florencio Sanchez created the dramatic works which have assured him immortality. From 1903 to 1909 he wrote some twenty plays, which may be broadly divided into rural and urban dramas. The first category, which includes the author’s best works, began with M’hijo el dotor (1903). The theme is the conflict between two generations, represented by the noble, conservative old gaucho, and his book-educated son. In La grin ga, the dramatic conflict is between the progressive foreigner, or grin go, and the tradition-bound criollo, whose self- reliant virtues no longer blind Sanchez to the fact that his kind is doomed to extinction. Barranca abajo, the most skillfully constructed of Sanchez’s plays, is a stark rural tragedy depicting the decadence of a gaucho family. The year 1905 saw the first performance of this drama and marked a turning point in the author’s creative activity. Thenceforth Sanchez turned his attention toward the spectacle of urban life in Buenos Aires (El desalojo, La tigra, Moneda falsa, etc.). The native idealistic bent of Sanchez’s character and his experience in life combined to infuse a reforming and sociological quality into his dramatic output. He deals repeatedly with the deterioration of the gaucho, the latter’s conflict with the immigrant, family problems, the social evils of poverty and alcoholism, never losing sight of the imperative need for tolerance on all sides. He captures his scenes with a photographic realism which is particularly apparent in an astonishingly accurate reproduction of popular speech. Naturally sympathetic toward his fellow man, and especially so in regard to the poor and oppressed, Sanchez absorbed the literary techniques of the day -notably those of Ibsen and Naturalism - and applied them to the panorama of life in the River Plate. In doing this, he became not only the founder of the modern Argentine theatre but the first Latin American dramatist of unmistakable originality.
January 17, 1925
Alfred Fabian "Al" Young (January 17, 1925, New York City, NY - November 6, 2012, Durham, NC) was an American historian. Young is regarded as a pioneer in the writing of the social history of the American Revolution and was a founding editor of the academic journal Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas.
January 17, 1914
William Edgar Stafford (January 17, 1914 – August 28, 1993) was an American poet and pacifist, and the father of poet and essayist Kim Stafford. He was appointed the twentieth Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1970. Vincent Wixon, scholar in the William Stafford Archives, is the author of three books of poetry: Blue Moon, The Square Grove, and Seed. He has coproduced documentary films on Lawson Inada and William Stafford. His article written with Paul Merchant, ‘William Stafford and His First Publishers: The Making of West of Your City and Traveling through the Dark,’ can be read on the Stafford Archives website.
January 17, 1964
Michelle Robinson Obama served as First Lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, Mrs. Obama started her career as an attorney at the Chicago law firm Sidley & Austin, where she met her future husband, Barack Obama. She later worked in the Chicago mayor’s office, at the University of Chicago, and at the University of Chicago Medical Center. Mrs. Obama also founded the Chicago chapter of Public Allies, an organization that prepares young people for careers in public service. The Obamas currently live in Washington, DC, and have two daughters, Malia and Sasha.
January 18, 1911
José María Arguedas Altamirano (18 January 1911 – 28 November 1969) was a Peruvian novelist, poet, and anthropologist. Arguedas was a mestizo of Spanish and Quechua descent who wrote novels, short stories, and poems in both Spanish and Quechua. Generally remembered as one of the most notable figures of 20th century Peruvian literature, Arguedas is especially recognized for his intimate portrayals of indigenous Andean culture. Key in his desire to depict indigenous expression and perspective more authentically was his creation of a new language that blended Spanish and Quechua and premiered in his debut novel Yawar Fiesta. Jose Maria Arguedas was born in Andahuaylas, a province in the southern Peruvian Andes. He was born into a well-off mestizo family, but his mother died when he was two years old. Because of the absence of his father, a lawyer who travelled frequently, and his bad relationship with his step-mother and step-brother, he comforted himself in the care of the family's indigenous servants, allowing him to immerse himself in the language and customs of the Andes, which came to form an important part of his personality. He went to primary school in San Juan de Lucana, Puquio, and Abancay, and completed his secondary studies in Ica, Huancayo, and Lima. He began studying at The University of San Marcos (Lima) in 1931; there he graduated with a degree in Literature. He later took up studies in Ethnology, receiving his degree in 1957 and his doctorate in 1963. Between 1937 and 1938 he was sent to prison for his protesting an envoy sent to Peru by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Arguedas also worked for the Ministry of Education, where he into practice his interests in preserving and promoting Peruvian culture, in particular traditional Andean music and dance. He was the director of the Casa de la Cultura (1963) and Director of the National Museum of History (1964–1966). Arguedas shot himself in the head on November 29, 1969 in his office at the Agrarian University in La Molina, leaving behind very specific instructions for his funeral, a diary depicting his depression, and a final unfinished manuscript, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (The Fox From Up Above and the Fox From Down Below). This work includes portions of Arguedas’ diary, memories of his distressing childhood, thoughts on Peruvian culture, and his reasons for suicide. He depicts his struggle between his desire to authentically illuminate the life of the Andean Indians and his personal anguish trapping him in depression. The title of the book originates in a Quechua myth that Arguedas translated into Spanish earlier in his life. ‘El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo’ refers to the Quechua symbols for life and death, and modernity and tradition. Arguedas began his literary career by writing short stories about the indigenous environment familiar to him from his childhood. He wrote in a Spanish highly influenced by Quechua syntax and vocabulary. By the time he published his first novel in 1941, Yawar Fiesta (‘Blood Festival’), he had begun to explore the theme that would interest him for the rest of his career: the clash between Western ‘civilization’ and the indigenous, ‘traditional’ way of life. He was thus considered part of the Indigenista movement in South American literature, and continued to explore this theme in his next two books Los Ríos Profundos (‘Deep Rivers’) (1958) and Todas las Sangres (1964). Yet he also was conscious of the simplistic portrayal of the indigenous peoples in other Indigenista literature and worked hard to give the Andean Indians a true voice in his works. This effort was not always successful as some critics contend that Arguedas portrayed Indian characters as too gentle and childlike. Another theme in Arguedas' writing is the struggle of mestizos of Indian-Spanish descent and their navigation between the two seemingly separate parts of their identity. Many of his works also depicted the violence and exploitation of race relations in Peru's small rural towns and haciendas, Arguedas was moderately optimistic about the possibility of a rapprochement between the forces of ‘tradition’ and the forces of ‘modernity’ until the 1960s, when he became more pessimistic. In his last (unfinished) work, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (‘The Fox From Up Above and the Fox From Down Below’) (1969), he abandoned the realism of his earlier works for a more postmodern approach. This novel expressed his despair, caused by his fear that the 'primitive' ways of the Indians could not survive the onslaught of modern technology and capitalism. At the same time that Arguedas was becoming more pessimistic about race relations in his country, younger indigenist intellectuals became increasingly militant, often criticizing his work in harsh terms for his poetic, romanticized treatment of indigenous and rural life.
January 18, 1909
CALVIN S. HALL (January 18, 1909, Seattle, WA - April 4, 1985, Santa Cruz County, California, CA) was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1909 and educated in the public schools there. He attended the University of Washington and then the University of California at Berkeley where he received his bachelor’s degree in 1930 and his Ph.D. in psychology in 1933. He was an instructor at the University of California and was then appointed assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon where he remained for three years. In 1937 he was appointed associate professor and chairman of the Division of Psychology at Western Reserve University. In 1940 he was promoted to a professorship, and until 1951 served as chairman of the department. Professor Hall is the author of THE MEANING OF DREAMS and has contributed chapters to such books as the HANDBOOK OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, the HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY, YOU AND MARRIAGE, and READINGS IN CHILD DEVELOPMENT. He has also published a number of research articles in the professional psychology journals. Professor Hall’s principal interests in psychology are personality theory and research. He is married, has a daughter, and resides in Mayfield Village, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio.
January 18, 1867
Félix Rubén García Sarmiento (January 18, 1867 – February 6, 1916), known as Rubén Darío, was a Nicaraguan poet who initiated the Spanish-American literary movement known as modernismo (modernism) that flourished at the end of the 19th century. Darío has had a great and lasting influence on 20th-century Spanish literature and journalism. He has been praised as the ‘Prince of Castilian Letters’ and undisputed father of the modernismo literary movement.
January 18, 1926
Waldomiro Freitas Autran Dourado (1926 – September 30, 2012) was a Brazilian novelist. Dourado was born in Patos de Minas, state of Minas Gerais. Going against current trends in Brazilian literature, Dourado's works display much concern with literary form, with many obscure words and expressions. Minas Gerais is the setting for most of Dourado's books, resembling the early to mid-20th century regionalist trend in Brazilian literature. Most literary critics consider Dourado's work to have similarities to Baroque literature. In 1981, Dourado won the prestigious Goethe Prize. In 2000, Dourado won the Camões Prize, the most important literary prize in the Portuguese sprachraum. In 2001, Brazilian filmmaker Suzana Amaral released the film Uma Vida em Segredo. It was based on the novel of same title by Autran Dourado. Dourado died of stomach bleeding on September 30, 2012, in Rio de Janeiro. He was 86 years old.
January 18, 1932
Samuel Asare Konadu (18 January 1932 – 1994) was a Ghanaian journalist, novelist and publisher, who also wrote under the pseudonym Kwabena Asare Bediako. Born in Asamang, Ashanti Region, Gold Coast, Asare Konadu attended local primary and middle schools before studying at Abuakwa State College. In 1956 he was sent abroad by the government to study in London and at Strasbourg University, joining the Ghana News Agency on his return to Ghana in 1957 Konadu's narrative strategy is considered unique among his Ghanaian contemporaries at the time that three stylistic features were notable in Ghanaian prose fiction. According to Charles Angmor, one being the "simple plot with simple character" and the other being the "intricate plot and character". The third was identified as "a very simple plot and a very simple characterization, with a didactic moral twist". Konadu's works contained two or more of these strategies. Konadu started his own publishing company after the overthrow of Ghana's first president Kwame Nkrumah in 1966. Before that, he had already written and published two books, one of which was called Come Back Dora (1966) sold fifty thousand copies brought him into the limelight. Konadu's works draw on Ghanaian rural life and traditional practices of mostly Akan culture. He wrote a few popular fiction works under his Kwabena Asare Bediako pseudonym.
January 18, 1882
A. A. Milne (1882-1956) was a playwright and journalist as well as an author and storyteller. Ernest H. Shepard (1879-1976) was a cartoonist and illustrator.
January 18, 1689
Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (18 January 1689 – 10 February 1755), generally referred to as simply Montesquieu, was a French lawyer, man of letters, and political philosopher who lived during the Age of Enlightenment. He is famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers, which is implemented in many constitutions throughout the world.
January 18, 1951
Sally Jane Morgan (born 18 January 1951) is an Australian Aboriginal author, dramatist, and artist. Morgan's works are on display in numerous private and public collections in both Australia and around the world.
January 18, 1930
Breandan O hEithir (1930–1990) was an Irish writer and broadcaster. He was born in Inishmore, County G was born on Inishmore in the Aran Islands, Co. Gaiway, and is the nephew of the author Liam O’Flaherty. He has worked as a fisherman in England, an itinerant bookseller, a publisher’s editor and as the Gaelic Editor on the Irish Press, Dublin. He has also lived in Germany for two years as a freelance writer and broadcaster. Mr O hEithir was also a weekly columnist with the Irish Times and a reporter and scriptwriter with Radio Telefis Eireann.
January 18, 1779
Peter Mark Roget (18 January 1779 – 12 September 1869) was a British physician, natural theologian and lexicographer. He is best known for publishing, in 1852, the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (Roget's Thesaurus), a classified collection of related words.
January 18, 1941
Charles Elliot "Charley" Rosen is an American author and former basketball coach. From 1983–1986, he was an assistant to Phil Jackson with the Albany Patroons of the Continental Basketball Association.
January 18, 1942
Franz Rottensteiner (born 18 January 1942) is an Austrian publisher and critic in the fields of science fiction and speculative fiction in general. Rottensteiner was born in Waidmannsfeld, Lower Austria. He studied journalism, English and history at the University of Vienna, receiving his doctorate in 1969. He served about fifteen years as librarian and editor at the Österreichisches Institut für Bauforschung in Vienna. In addition, he produced a number of translations into German of leading science fiction authors, including Herbert W. Franke, Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick, Abe K?b?, Cordwainer Smith, Brian W. Aldiss and the Strugatski brothers. In 1973 his anthology of science fiction View From Another Shore, published in the USA by Seabury Press, introduced a number of European authors to the English-reading public. Selected authors included Stanislaw Lem, Josef Nesvadba, Gerard Klein, Lino Aldani and Jean-Pierre Andrevon. The year 1975 saw the start of his series Die phantastischen Romane. For seven years it re-published works of both lesser- and better-known writers as well as new ones, ending with a total of 28 volumes. In the years 1979-1985 he brought out translations of H. G. Wells's works in an eighteen volumes series. Rottensteiner provoked some controversy with his negative assessment of American science fiction; "what matters is the highest achievements, and there the US has yet to produce a figure comparable to H.G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, Karel ?apek or Stanis?aw Lem." Rottensteiner described Roger Zelazny, Barry N. Malzberg, and Robert Silverberg as producing "travesties of fiction" and stated "Asimov is a typical non-writer, and Heinlein and Anderson are just banal". However, Rottensteiner praised Philip K. Dick, listing him as one of "the greatest SF writers". From 1980 through 1998 he was advisor for Suhrkamp Verlag's Phantastische Bibliothek, which brought out some three hundred books. In all, he has edited about fifty anthologies, produced two illustrated books (The Science Fiction Book (1975) und The Fantasy Book (1978)) as well as working on numerous reference works on science fiction. His close association with and promotion of Lem until 1995 was a factor in the recognition of the latter in the United States. Rottensteiner has been the editor of Quarber Merkur, the leading German language critical journal of science fiction, since 1963. In 2004, on the occasion of the hundredth number of this journal, he was awarded a special Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis.
January 18, 1914
Arno Schmidt (18 January 1914 - 3 June 1979) was a German author and translator. Born in Hamburg, son of a police constable, Schmidt moved with his widowed mother to Lauban (in Lusatia, then Lower Silesia, now Polish) and visited the secondary school in Görlitz. He then worked as a clerk in a textile company in Greiffenberg. At the outset of World War II in 1939, Schmidt was drafted into the Wehrmacht. He first served in Alsace and after 1941 in fairly quiet Norway. In 1945, Schmidt volunteered for active duty at the front in Northern Germany in order to be granted a brief home visit, as was the custom. He used that visit to organize a defection from Lusatia westwards for him and his wife, in order to evade capture by the Red Army, which was famed for its abuse of prisoners of war (POW) and German civilians in the east, and gave himself up to British forces in the German province of Lower Saxony. After an interlude as an English POW and later as an interpreter at a police school, Schmidt started his future life as a freelance writer during the time of wandering that followed the war. Since Schmidt's pre-war home in Lauban was in the part of Germany placed under Polish administration after the war, Schmidt became part of the throng of refugees moved by the authorities from village to village in West Germany. This included stints in Cordingen (in the Bomlitz county of Lower Saxony), Gau-Bickelheim, and Kastel (both in the newly formed province of Rhineland-Palatinate). In Kastel, he was accused in court of blasphemy and moral subversion, which was then still prosecuted in the Catholic parts of West Germany. As a result, Schmidt and his wife moved to the Protestant city of Darmstadt in Hesse, where the suit against him was dismissed. In 1958, the Schmidts moved to the small village of Bargfeld (near Celle) in Lower Saxony, where they were to stay (cf. Martynkewicz 1992). Schmidt was a strict individualist, almost a solipsist. Disaffected by his experience of the Third Reich, he had an extremely pessimistic world view. In Schwarze Spiegel, he describes his utopia as an empty world after an anthropogenic apocalypse. Although he was a strict atheist, he maintained that the world was created by a monster called Leviathan, whose predatory nature was passed on to humans. Still, he thought this monster could not be too powerful to be attacked, if it behooved humanity. His writing style is characterized by a unique and witty style of adapting colloquial language, which won him quite a few fervent admirers. Moreover, he developed an orthography by which he thought to reveal the true meaning of words and their connections amongst each other. One of the most cited examples is the use of ‘Roh=Mann=Tick’ instead of ‘Romantik’ (revealing romanticism as the craze of unsubtle men). The atoms of words holding the nuclei of original meaning he called Etyme (etyms). His theory of etyms is developed in his magnum opus, Zettels Traum, in which an elderly writer comments on Edgar Allan Poe's works in a stream of consciousness, while discussing a Poe translation with a couple of translators and flirting with their teenage daughter. Schmidt also accomplished a translation of Edgar Allan Poe's works himself (1966–73, together with Hans Wollschläger). In the 1960s, he authored a series of plays for German radio stations presenting forgotten or little known and - in his opinion - vastly underrated authors, as e.g. Johann Gottfried Schnabel, Karl Philipp Moritz, Leopold Schefer, Karl Ferdinand Gutzkow, et al. These ‘plays’ are basically talks about literature with two or three participants plus voices for quotations (Schmidt lent his voice for his translations of FINNEGANS WAKE quoted in Der Triton mit dem Sonnenschirm [1961]). 11 of these so called ‘Radio-Essays’ were republished on 12 audio CDs in the year 2003. As none of his works sold more than a few thousand copies, he lived in extreme poverty. During the last few years of his life, Arno Schmidt was financially supported by the philologist and writer Jan Philipp Reemtsma, the heir of the German cigarette manufacturer Philipp F. Reemtsma. After a stroke, Arno Schmidt died in a hospital at Celle. The Arno Schmidt Foundation (Arno Schmidt Stiftung) in Bargfeld, dotated by Jan Philipp Reemtsma, is publishing his complete works. The US entrepreneur and technology writer Dave Winer is a grandnephew of Arno Schmidt. Dalkey Archive Press will be reissuing their four-volume series of Schmidt's work translated by John E. Woods in April 2011. The series includes COLLECTED NOVELLAS, COLLECTED STORIES, NOBODADDY'S CHILDREN, and TWO NOVELS. The reissues are scheduled to coincide with ‘Rediscovering Arno Schmidt events in the US, UK, and continental Europe.’.
January 18, 1963
PETER STAMM was born on January 18, 1963 in Weinfelden, Switzerland. He is the author of the novel, AGNES (1998), and numerous short stories and radio plays. MICHAEL HOFMANN has translated the works of many German writers, including Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, and Peter Stephan Jungk. He is also the author of four books of poetry, most recently APPROXIMATELY NOWHERE, and a book of essays, BEHIND THE LINES.
January 18, 1928
Iwan Martua Dongan Simatupang (January 18, 1928, North Sumatra, Indonesia - August 4, 1970, Jakarta, Indonesia was born in 1928 in Sibolga, north Sumatra. He took part in the 1945 to 1949 Indonesian Revolution against the Dutch, and was captured in March 1949. After the Revolution, he studied medicine in Surabaya, anthropology and drama in Holland, and philosophy in Paris. He returned to Indonesia in 1961. Shortly after his return, he completed Ziarah (Jakarta, 1969) which was published in the Writing in Asia series as The Pilgrim in 1975 and which in 1978 was honoured with the first ASEAN Literary Award for the Novel. Drought was first published in 1972 in Jakarta under the title Kering. His other novels are Merahnya Merah (The Redness of Red, Jakarta 1968) and Kooong, The Story of a Pigeon (Jakarta 1975). Iwan Simatupang died in 1970. Iwan Simatupang is regarded as a major innovator in the field of the Indonesian novel. He challenged traditional concepts of plot and characterisation. His novels are marked by his razor-sharp sense of humour. The panel for the First ASEAN Literary Awards described The Pilgrim as confronting 'the crisis of sensitivity, represented by the archetypal searcher, in the modern world’ and as 'a courageous and poignant portrayal of the human condition.’ Harry Aveling (Swami Anand Haridas), the translator of both Drought and The Pilgrim, is Dean of the School of Human Communication, Murdoch University, Perth, and is a noted translator of modern Indonesian and Malay literature. Other translations by Harry Aveling in the Writing in Asia series are The Fugitive by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Srengenge and Al and Other Stories by Shahnon Ahmad and From Surabaya to Armageddon: Indonesian Short Stories. Forthcoming are Sri Sumarah and Other Stories by Umar Kayam, Lazy River by A. Samad Said, Kooong by Iwan Simatupang and The Prince of Mount Tahan by Ishak Haji Muhammad.
January 18, 1811
Édouard René Lefèbvre de Laboulaye (18 January 1811 – 25 May 1883) was a French jurist, poet, author and anti-slavery activist. In 1865 he originated the idea of a monument presented by the French people to the United States that resulted in the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. He got the idea thinking that this would help strengthen their relationship with the United States. Laboulaye was received at the bar in 1842, and was chosen professor of comparative law at the Collège de France in 1849. Following the Paris Commune of 1870, he was elected to the national assembly, representing the departement of the Seine. As secretary of the committee of thirty on the constitution he was effective in combatting the Monarchists in establishing the Third Republic. In 1875, he was elected a life senator, and in 1876 he was appointed administrator of the Collège de France, resuming his lectures on comparative legislation in 1877. Laboulaye was also chairman of the French Anti-Slavery Society. Laboulaye was president of the Société d'économie politique. Always a careful observer of the politics of the United States, and an admirer of its constitution, he wrote a three-volume work on the political history of the United States, and published it in Paris during the height of the politically repressed Second Empire. During the American Civil War, he was a zealous advocate of the Union cause and the abolition of slavery, publishing histories of the cultural connections of the two nations. At the war's conclusion in 1865, he became president of the French Emancipation Committee that aided newly freed slaves in the U.S. The same year he had the idea of presenting a statue representing liberty as a gift to the United States, a symbol for ideas suppressed by Napoleon III. The sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, one of Laboulaye's friends, turned the idea into reality. Jack Zipes is the editor of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (both Princeton), as well as The Great Fairy Tale Tradition (Norton). He is professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota.
January 19, 1946
Julian Patrick Barnes (born 19 January 1946) is a contemporary English writer. Barnes won the Man Booker Prize for his book The Sense of an Ending (2011), and three of his earlier books had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: Flaubert's Parrot (1984), England, England (1998), and Arthur & George (2005). He has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh (his late wife's surname), though has published nothing under that name for more than twenty-five years. In addition to novels, Barnes has published collections of essays and short stories. He was selected as the recipient of the 2011 David Cohen Prize for Literature. Barnes has also won several literary prizes in France, including the Prix Médicis for Flaubert's Parrot and the Prix Femina for Talking It Over. Previously an Officier of L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, in 2004 he became a Commandeur of L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His honors also include the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Shakespeare Prize, the San Clemente literary prize, and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He received the Europese Literatuurprijs in 2012.
January 19, 1737
Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (also called Bernardin de St. Pierre) (19 January 1737 Le Havre – 21 January 1814 Éragny, Val-d'Oise) was a French writer and botanist. He is best known for his 1788 novel Paul et Virginie, now largely forgotten, but in the 19th century a very popular children's book.
January 19, 1969
Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including BREATH, EYES, MEMORY, KRIK? KRAK!, a National Book Award finalist, THE FARMING OF BONES, an American Book Award winner, and THE DEW BREAKER, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the first Story Prize. She lives in Miami with her husband and daughter.
January 19, 1919
Alan Peter Goodfellow was born on January 19 1919 at Bideford, Devon, and educated at Aldenham before being apprenticed at AV Roe's aircraft factory. Preferring the outdoor life, however, he went to work on an uncle's farm in Oxfordshire, and started to fly gliders with his father. A member of the Royal Flying Corps as a teenager, his father had shared a tent with Albert Ball, the fighter pilot VC, and was a founding member of the RAF in 1918. He, his sister and brother held pilot's licenses in the 1930s; and on the outbreak of war young Peter, his brother Norman (who flew in 804 and 880 squadrons) and their father all volunteered for the Fleet Air Arm. After coming out of the Navy Peter Goodfellow studied agriculture at Reading University, then managed a farm in the Waveney Valley before starting work as a buyer for Walls Meats, covering the east of England from a base at Saxmundham, Suffolk. When Walls was reorganised, Goodfellow quickly found a similar job dealing with fruit farmers for the banana company Geest. His keen interest in wildlife led him to start collecting books on the subject, a hobby which consumed the last 40 years of his life, and he used his business travels as an opportunity to haunt the bookshops of East Anglia. He acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of books about birds and corresponded widely with other collectors. In 2000 he displayed rare items from his private collection at an exhibition in Norwich. Goodfellow dealt in books, under the name Carlton Books, and the Inland Revenue twice accused him of running a business rather than pursuing a hobby. On each occasion he was able to show that on ordinary accounting principles he was making a loss, and that – were he a business – they would owe him money. No lover of bureaucracy or officialdom, he was rather pleased with these victories.Peter Goodfellow is a retired English teacher and lifelong birdwatcher. His books include Birds as Builders and Birds of Britain: The Identification Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe.
January 19, 1921
Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, Patricia Highsmith spent much of her adult life in Switzerland and France. Educated at Barnard College, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek, she had her first novel, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, published in 1950 and saw it quickly made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock. Despite receiving little recognition in her native land during her lifetime, Highsmith, the author of more than twenty books, won the O. Henry Memorial Award, The Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de Littérarure Policière, and the Award of the Crime Writers’ Association of Great Britain. She died in Switzerland in 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne.
January 19, 1932
George Mann MacBeth (19 January 1932 – 16 February 1992) was a Scottish poet and novelist. He was born in Shotts, Lanarkshire. When he was three, his family moved to Sheffield. He was educated in Sheffield at King Edward VII School where he was Head Prefect in 1951 (photo), before going up to New College, Oxford, with an Open Scholarship in Classics. He joined BBC Radio on graduating in 1955 from the University of Oxford. He worked there, as a producer of programmes on poetry, notably for the BBC Third Programme, until 1976. He was a member of The Group. He resigned from the BBC to take up novel writing; he introduced a series of thrillers involving the spy, Cadbury. In his later post-BBC years, after divorcing his first wife, he married the novelist Lisa St Aubin de Terán, by whom he had a child, Alexander Morton George MacBeth. After a divorce, he moved with his new wife, Penny, to Ireland to live at Moyne Park, Abbeyknockmoy, near Tuam in County Galway. A few months later, George MacBeth was diagnosed as suffering from motor neurone disease, of which he died in early 1992. In the last poetry he wrote, MacBeth provides an anatomy of a cruel disease and the destruction it caused two people deeply in love. Penny and George had two children, Diana ('Lally') Francesca Ronchetti MacBeth and George Edward Morton Mann MacBeth. Poems from Oby (1982) was a Choice of the Poetry Book Society; Oby is a Norfolk village. He received a Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for his work. He died in Tuam, County Galway, Ireland.
January 19, 1931
Robert Breckenridge Ware "Robin" MacNeil, OC (born January 19, 1931) is a Canadian-American novelist, and retired television news anchor and journalist who partnered with Jim Lehrer to create The MacNeil/Lehrer Report in 1975.
January 19, 1926
Hans-Jürgen Massaquoi (January 19, 1926 – January 19, 2013) was a German-American journalist and author. He was born in Hamburg, Germany, to a white German mother and Liberian Vai father, the grandson of Momulu Massaquoi, the consul general of Liberia in Germany at the time. His grandfather Momolu as king of the Gallinas in 1905. In his autobiography, Destined to Witness, Massaquoi describes his childhood and youth in Hamburg during the Nazi rise to power. His biography provides a unique point of view: he was one of very few German-born children of German and African descent in all of Nazi Germany. He was often shunned, but miraculously escaped Nazi persecution. This duality remained a key theme throughout his early life until he witnessed racism as practiced in colonial Africa and later in Jim Crow USA. Massaquoi enjoyed a relatively happy childhood with his mother, Bertha Baetz, who had arrived to Hamburg from Nordhausen and earlier from Ungfrungen. His father, Al-Haj Massaquoi, was a law student in Dublin, who only occasionally lived with the family at the consul general home in Hamburg. Eventually his grandfather, the first African posted to the diplomatic corps in Europe, was recalled to Liberia, and Hans Massaquoi and his mother remained in Germany. The early adaptability of the young Massaquoi was remarkable. He was not aware of any other mixed race children in Hamburg, and like most German children his age, he was lured by Nazi propaganda into thinking that joining the Hitler Youth was an exciting adventure of fanfare and games. There was a school contest to see if a class could get a 100% membership of the Deutsches Jungvolk (a subdivision of Hitler Youth), and Massaquoi's teacher devised a chart on the blackboard which showed who had joined and who had not. As the chart was filled in after each person joined, Massaquoi was pointedly the sole student left out. He recalled saying, "But I am German ... my Mother says I'm German just like anybody else". His later attempt to join his friends by registering at the nearest Jungvolk office was also met with contempt. Massaquoi's denial of this rite of passage reinforced his perception of being ostracized due to being deemed "Non-Aryan" despite his German birth and mostly traditional German upbringing after his grandfather returned to Liberia. After the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935, Massaquoi was officially classified as non-Aryan. As such, though highly capable and would have been eligible had he not been bi-racial, he was barred from pursuing educational advancement leading to a professional career and instead was forced by the Nazis to embark on an apprenticeship as a laborer. A few months before completing school, Massaquoi was required to go to a government-run job center where his assigned vocational counselor was Herr von Vett, a member of the SS. Upon seeing the "telltale black SS insignia of dual lightning bolts in the lapel of his civilian suit", Massaquoi expected humiliation. Instead, he was surprised when he was greeted with "a friendly wink", offered a seat and asked to present something which he had made. After showing Von Vett an axe and discussing his experience in working for a local blacksmith shop, Massaquoi was informed that he could "be of great service to Germany one day" because there would be a great demand for technically trained Germans, who would go to Africa to train and develop an African workforce when Germany reclaimed its African colonies. Before Massaquoi left the interview, Von Vett invited him to shake his hand, an unusual move not in keeping with other Nazi officials Massaquoi had encountered outside of his neighborhood. Though barred from dating Aryans, Massaquoi courted a white girl, but they had to keep their relationship a secret, especially as her father was a member of the police and the SS. Such relationships were forbidden and classified as Rassenschande (race defilement) by the race laws. To keep the relationship secret, they met only in the evenings, when they would go for walks. As he dropped his girlfriend off at her house one night, he was stopped by a member of the SD, the intelligence branch of the SS. He was taken to the police station as he was believed to be "on the prowl for defenceless women or looking for an opportunity to steal". Fortunately for Massaquoi, he was recognised by a police officer as living in the area and working: "This young man is an apprentice at Lindner A.G., where he works much too hard to have enough energy left to prowl the streets at night looking for trouble. I happen to know that because the son of one of my colleagues apprentices with him". The SD officer closed the case and gave the Nazi salute, and Massaquoi was allowed to leave the station. Increasingly as he matured, Massaquoi came to despise Hitler and Nazism. His skin color made him a target for racist abuse. He was often targeted by Nazi employers, denied citizenship and was excluded from serving in the German army during World War II. As unemployment, hunger and poverty grew rampant, he tried to enlist, but he was once again abusively castigated and rejected by Nazi officers. During the period following the Allies near destruction of Hamburg, he befriended the family of Ralph Giordano, a half-Jewish acquaintance of the surreptitious Swing Kids jazz devotees. The Giordanos managed to survive the war by hiding and helped Massaquoi and his mother secure a nearby basement after their Hamburg neighborhood was destroyed. Giordano, a lifelong friend, became a renowned journalist as well. In 1948 Massaquoi's father, Al Haj, secured his passage for residency in Liberia. Massaquoi was fascinated and chagrined by Africa. While appreciative that his father made possible his escape from post WW II Germany, he eventually grew estranged from his father, whom he considered arrogant and somewhat tyrannical. Fortunately, the two reconciled just before his father's death which preceded Massaquoi's reconnecting with his maternal family in the United States. Massaquoi emigrated to the United States in 1950. He served two years in the army as a paratrooper in the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division and later became a naturalized U.S. citizen. His GI bill helped fund his journalism degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and he worked on his masters at Northwestern University until the impending birth of his first son catapulted into his career at Jet magazine and then Ebony magazine, where he became managing editor. His position allowed him to interview many historical figures of the arts, politics and civil rights movement in America and Africa. He was interviewed in turn by Studs Terkel for his oral history The Good War, and related his unique experiences in Germany under the Nazi government. Masaquoi visited family and friends in Germany many times throughout his life, always cognizant of Germany's complex history as the country of his childhood. At the time of his death, Massaquoi was married to the love of his life, Katharine Rousseve Massaquoi. He had two sons by a previous marriage, Steve and Hans Jr., who also survived him.
January 19, 1809
Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 - October 7, 1849) was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective-fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career. He was born as Edgar Poe in Boston, Massachusetts; he was orphaned young when his mother died shortly after his father abandoned the family. Poe was taken in by John and Frances Allan, of Richmond, Virginia, but they never formally adopted him. He attended the University of Virginia for one semester but left due to lack of money. After enlisting in the Army and later failing as an officer's cadet at West Point, Poe parted ways with the Allans. His publishing career began humbly, with an anonymous collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), credited only to ‘a Bostonian’. Poe switched his focus to prose and spent the next several years working for literary journals and periodicals, becoming known for his own style of literary criticism. His work forced him to move between several cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. In Baltimore in 1835, he married Virginia Clemm, his 13-year-old cousin. In January 1845 Poe published his poem ‘The Raven‘ to instant success. His wife died of tuberculosis two years after its publication. He began planning to produce his own journal, The Penn (later renamed The Stylus), though he died before it could be produced. On October 7, 1849, at age 40, Poe died in Baltimore; the cause of his death is unknown and has been variously attributed to alcohol, brain congestion, cholera, drugs, heart disease, rabies, suicide, tuberculosis, and other agents
January 19, 1897
Carl Kerényi (January 19, 1897, Timi?oara, Romania - April 14, 1973, Kilchberg, Zürich, Switzerland) was born Temesvar in Hungary in 1897. In 1927 he became lecturer in the History of Ancient Religions at the University of Budapest, and from 1936 to 1943 he was professor of Classical Philology there. When in 1944 Hungary became involved in the fighting, Professor Kerenyi went to Switzerland where he taught at the University of Basel till 1946. His first book was published in Tubingen in 1927, but until he went to Greece in 1929 his interest was divided between classical philology, the history of religion, and literature. In Greece, however, those interests were united and in his subsequent work on classical mythology they have all been served. He was a noted humanist and had a correspondence with Thomas Mann on the subject of the creation of myths, on which they held similar views. His work also aroused the interest of C. G. Jung and in 1948 Professor Kerényi went to teach at the Jung Institut in Zurich. His most important works are APOLLO (1940), LA RELIGIONE ANTICA (1951), and with C. G. Jung INTRODUCTION TO A SCIENCE OF MYTHOLOGY.
January 19, 1896
Bertram David "Bert" Wolfe (January 19, 1896 – February 21, 1977) was an American scholar and former communist best known for biographical studies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, and Diego Rivera.
January 19, 1887
Alexander Humphreys Woollcott (January 19, 1887 – January 23, 1943) was an American critic and commentator for The New Yorker magazine and a member of the Algonquin Round Table. He was the inspiration for Sheridan Whiteside, the main character in the play The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939) by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, and for the far less likable character Waldo Lydecker in the film Laura (1944). Woollcott was convinced he was the inspiration for his friend Rex Stout's brilliant, eccentric detective Nero Wolfe, an idea that Stout denied.
January 19, 1951
Miriam Silverberg (January 19, 1951, Washington, D.C. - March 16, 2008, Los Angeles, CA) was Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles and the author of Changing Song: The Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu (1990). Silverberg received her master’s degree at Georgetown University and her doctorate from the University of Chicago. Her master’s essay dealt with the massacre of Koreans in Tokyo following the 1923 earthquake. She carried her interest in Japanese colonialism in Korea to UCLA, where she encouraged graduate students to study Japanese and Korean modernity together. Her research interests include modern Japanese thought, culture, and social transformation; social and cultural theory; and comparative historiography. Her books include Changing Song: The Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), which received the 1990 John King Fairbank Prize in East Asian History. She retired from UCLA in 2005. Miriam was a vibrant, productive, and important scholar. Despite debilitating illness over the last several years, she continued her research and writing and published Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (University of California Press, 2007), which examines the history of Japanese mass culture during the 1920s and 1930s before the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. On December 7 and 8, 2007, the UCLA Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies held a two-day symposium on Imperial Japan and Colonial Sensibility: Affect, Object, Embodiment to celebrate the work of Silverberg, who was its original organizer.
January 19, 1942
Pat Mora is an author, speaker, educator, and literacy advocate. She has written more than forty-five books for adults, teens, and children. Her poetry collections include Chants, Borders, Communion, Agua Santa: Holy Water, Aunt Carmen’s Book of Practical Saints, and Adobe Odes; her books of nonfiction include Nepantla: Essays from the Land in the Middle and the family memoir House of Houses. Recipient of two honorary doctorates and a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
January 20, 1931
Sawako Ariyoshi (20 January 1931 – 30 August 1984) was a Japanese writer and novelist. Born in Wakayama City and a graduate of Tokyo Women's Christian College, Sawako Ariyoshi spent part of her childhood in Java. A prolific novelist, she dramatises significant issues in her fiction such as the suffering of the elderly, the effects of pollution on the environment, and the effects of social and political change on Japanese domestic life and values, especially on the lives of women. Her novel The Twilight Years depicts the life of a working woman who is caring for her elderly, dying father-in-law. Among Ariyoshi's other novels is The River Ki, an insightful portrait of the lives of three rural women: a mother, daughter, and granddaughter. Her novel The Doctor's Wife, a historical novel dramatising the roles of nineteenth-century Japanese women as it chronicles the experience of a pioneer doctor with breast cancer surgery, has identified her as one of the finest postwar Japanese women writers. The Doctor's Wife (1966) is considered as her best novel. Starting in 1949, Ariyoshi studied literature and theatre at the Tokyo Women's Christian College until she graduated in 1952. In 1959 she spent a year at the Sarah Lawrence College in New York. She then worked with a publishing company and also wrote for journals, joined a dance troupe, and wrote short stories and scripts for various media. She travelled extensively, getting material for her serialized novels of domestic life, mostly dealing with social issues. Recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 1959, Ariyoshi had received some Japanese literary awards and was at the height of her career when she died quietly in her sleep.
January 20, 1945
Robert Olen Butler (born January 20, 1945) is an American fiction writer. His short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993.
January 20, 1925
Reverend Father Ernesto Cardenal Martínez (born January 20, 1925) is a Nicaraguan Catholic priest, poet and politician. He is a famous liberation theologian and the founder of the primitivist art community in the Solentiname Islands, where he lived for more than ten years (1965–1977). A member of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, a party he has since left, he was Nicaragua's minister of culture from 1979 to 1987.
January 20, 1866
Euclides da Cunha (January 20, 1866 – August 15, 1909) was a Brazilian journalist, sociologist and engineer. His most important work is Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands), a non-fictional account of the military expeditions promoted by the Brazilian government against the rebellious village of Canudos, known as the War of Canudos. This book was a favorite of Robert Lowell, who put it above Tolstoy, the Russian writer. Jorge Luis Borges also commented on it in his short story ‘Three Versions of Judas‘. The book was translated into English by Samuel Putnam and published by the University of Chicago Press in 1944. It remains in print. Euclides da Cunha was also heavily influenced by Naturalism and its Darwinian proponents. Os Sertões characterised the coast of Brazil as a chain of civilisations while the interior was more primitively influenced. Euclides da Cunha was the basis for the character of The Journalist in Mario Vargas Llosa's The War of the End of the World. Euclides da Cunha occupied the 7th chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters from 1903 until his death in 1909.
January 20, 1927
Qurratulain Hyder (20 January 1927 – 21 August 2007) was an influential Indian Urdu novelist and short story writer, an academic, and a journalist. One of the most outstanding literary names in Urdu literature, she is best known for her magnum opus, Aag Ka Darya (River of Fire), a novel first published in Urdu in 1959, from Lahore, Pakistan, that stretches from the 4th century BC to post partition of India. Popularly known as "Ainee Apa" among her friends and admirers, she was the daughter of writer and pioneers of Urdu short story writing Sajjad Haidar Yildarim (1880–1943). Her mother, Nazar Zahra, who wrote at first as Bint-i-Nazrul Baqar and later as Nazar Sajjad Hyder (1894–1967), was also a novelist and protegee of Muhammadi Begam and her husband Syed Mumtaz Ali, who published her first novel. She received the 1967 Sahitya Akademi Award in Urdu for Patjhar Ki Awaz (Short stories), 1989 Jnanpith Award for Akhire Shab Ke Humsafar, and the highest award of the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters, the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship in 1994. She also received the Padma Bhushan from the Government of India in 2005.
January 20, 1956
William Maher is an American comedian, political commentator and television host. He is known for the HBO political talk show Real Time with Bill Maher and the similar late-night show called Politically Incorrect, originally on Comedy Central and later on ABC.
January 20, 1920
Herbert Mitgang (January 20, 1920 – November 21, 2013) was an American author, editor, journalist, playwright, and producer of television news documentaries.
January 20, 1947
Jim Nisbet is the author of eight previous novels, including LETHAL INJECTION, THE PRICE OF THE TICKET and THE SYRACUSE CODEX, and five volumes of poetry. Over the past forty years, his work has also appeared in many newspapers, magazines and anthologies. In addition to works of fiction, he has written LAMINATING THE CONIC FRUSTUM, a how-to book about designing and building retro-futuristic furniture. He lives with his wife in San Francisco.
January 20, 1932
Heberto Padilla (20 January 1932 – 25 September 2000) was a Cuban poet, and the center of the so-called 'Padilla affair.' Although Padilla initially supported the revolution led by Fidel Castro, by the late 1960s he began to criticize it openly, and in 1971 he was imprisoned by the Castro regime. A number of prominent Latin American, North American, and European intellectuals, including Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, Susan Sontag, and Jean-Paul Sartre, spoke out against Padilla's incarceration, and the resulting controversy came to be known as 'the Padilla affair.' The reaction of the international intellectual and literary community eventually led to Padilla's release from prison, but he was not allowed to leave the country until 1980.
January 20, 1920
Julio Ricci Torres (Montevideo, 20 January 1920 - ibid., 1995) was a Uruguayan writer, linguist, philologist, translator, and publisher. His career as a linguist and philologist led him to conduct courses at universities in Sweden, Italy, France and the United States. He started writing at the end of the 1960s, after producing several works of translation of Swedish writers to the Spanish, and completed seven volumes of short stories. He was also an editor, through his label Gemini, where he worked with new writers of later prominence like Miguel Angel Campodonico and Tarik Carson. The narratives of Ricci are urban-themed and linked to naturalism and realism. Ricci considered Halldór Laxness to be a major influence in his work, along wiht other Nordic writers and Center European writers.
January 20, 1884
Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin (January 20 (Julian) / February 1 (Gregorian), 1884 – March 10, 1937) was a Russian author of science fiction and political satire. He is most famous for his 1921 novel We, a story set in a dystopian future police state. Despite having been a prominent Old Bolshevik, Zamyatin was deeply disturbed by the policies pursued by the CPSU following the October Revolution. In 1921, We became the first work banned by the Soviet censorship board. Ultimately, Zamyatin arranged for We to be smuggled to the West for publication. The subsequent outrage this sparked within the Party and the Union of Soviet Writers led directly to Zamyatin's successful request for exile from his homeland. Due to his use of literature to criticize Soviet society, Zamyatin has been referred to as one of the first Soviet dissidents.
January 20, 1894
Junzabur? Nishiwaki 20 January 1894 – 5 June 1982) was a contemporary Japanese poet and literary critic, active in Sh?wa period Japan, specializing in modernism, Dadaism and surrealism. He was also a noted painter of watercolors. Nishiwaki was born in what is now part of the city of Ojiya in Niigata prefecture, where his father was a banker. He came to Tokyo intending to become a painter and studied under the famous Fujishima Takeji and Kuroda Seiki but had to give up an artistic career due to his father’s sudden death. Instead, he enrolled in Keio University's Department of Economics, and also studied Latin, English, Greek, and German. Even as a student he demonstrated extraordinary language abilities, writing his thesis entirely in Latin. As a student, he was drawn to the works of Arthur Symons and Walter Pater, as well as the art works of French symbolism. Nishiwaki became interested in poetry while a student at Keio University, and contributed verses to the boy's magazine Shonen Sekai. He also began to write poetry in English. Nishiwaki expressed distaste for the romanticism and subjective modes which dominated modern Japanese poetry. After graduation, in April 1917, he was hired by the Japan Times newspaper, but left over a management dispute a few months later. He then found a position at the Bank of Japan in March 1918, but was forced to resign due to poor health. Through the introduction of a friend, he was then accepted at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in June 1919. Nishiwaki then accepted a teaching post at Kei? University in April 1920, while continuing to contribute English verses to various journals, and editing poetry magazines on the side. In 1922, Nishiwaki decided that he wanted to study in England, and took the steamer Kitano Maru from Kobe in 1922. However, he arrived too late to be admitted to a university, and spent a year in London at ease, meeting with leaders of the modernist literary movement, including John Collier and Sherard Vines. He lived at the Hotel Rowland in Kensington in 1923, and visited Scotland in July. He was finally admitted to New College, Oxford in May 1924, enrolling in the honors course, and travelling to France and Switzerland in his free time. While at Oxford, over the next three years he was introduced to modernist literature and the works of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. He was also fascinated by Charles Baudelaire and developments in the French surrealism, and even attempted to compose some works in French. His first volume of poetry, Spectrum (1925), was written in English and published in London at his own expense. While in England, Nishiwaki married Marjorie Biddle in 1924, but divorced her in 1932. He remarried to Saeko Kuwayama in 1932, by whom he had a son. Returning to Japan in 1926, Nishiwaki accepted a position as a professor at Kei? University’s Facility of Letters and taught the history of English Literature as well as a range of courses in linguistics. However, he kept writing on the side, and was especially inspired by the poetry of Hagiwara Sakutar?, whom he lauded as one of the great poets of the Taish? period. Nishiwaki experimented with new techniques, and began writing poetry in Japanese for the first time. In 1927, he published Japan's first surrealist poetry magazine, Fukuiku Taru Kafu Yo. The next year, along with collaborators such as Anzai Fuyue, he brought out another new magazine Shi to Shiron ('Poetry and Poetic Theory') and became a leader of the new contemporary poetry movement. In 1933, he published Ambarvalia, a collection which gathered together the previous experiments and efforts in writing poetry in Japanese; however, Nishiwaki suddenly stopped publishing after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, and announced that he would concentrate on research of the classics and ancient literature. He was one of the 14 poets arrested on charges of sedition, after the introduction of the National Mobilization Law as government censors chose to interpret some of his surrealistic poems in a critical manner. During World War II, he evacuated to Chiba Prefecture with his library of over 3000 volumes, and later to back to his hometown of Ojiya in Niigata. Nishiwaki lived in Kamakura, Kanagawa prefecture during the Pacific War years of 1942-1944. After the war, in 1947, he revealed another major anthology titled Tabibito kaerazu ('No Traveler Returns'). Nishiwaki also devoted effort to translation, publishing a Japanese version of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which was received with great critical acclaim. He followed this with yet another collection of his own verse in 1953, titled Kindai no g?wa ('Modern Fables'). While writing poetry and translations, Nishiwaki continued teaching at Kei? University until his retirement in 1962. Nishiwaka was awarded the prestigious Yomiuri Prize in 1957. In 1962, Nishiwaki was appointed to the Japan Art Academy, and at the invitation of Alitalia and the Italian Institute for the Middle East, he was invited to Europe. In September 1967, he visited Montreal in Canada to speak at the World Poetry Conference. In 1971, he was designated a Person of Cultural Merit by the Japanese government. Nishiwaki was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974 and awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, 2nd class, by the Japanese government. Nishiwaki was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, 1960, 1961 and 1962. Nishiwaki died of heart failure at the age of 88 at his hometown in Niigata. His grave is at the temple of Z?j?-ji in Shiba, Tokyo.
January 21, 1944
Jack Henry Abbott (January 21, 1944 – February 10, 2002) was an American criminal and author. He was released from prison in 1981 after gaining praise for his writing and being lauded by a number of high-profile literary critics, including author Norman Mailer. Six weeks after his release, however, he fatally stabbed a man during an altercation, was convicted of manslaughter and returned to prison, where he committed suicide in 2002.
January 21, 1908
Vaikom Muhammad Basheer (21 January 1908 – 5 July 1994) was a Malayalam fiction writer from the state of Kerala in India. He was a humanist, freedom fighter, novelist and short story writer. He is noted for his path-breaking, disarmingly down-to-earth style of writing that made him equally popular among literary critics as well as the common man. He is regarded as one of the most successful and outstanding writers from India. Translations of his works into other languages have won him worldwide acclaim. His notable works include Balyakalasakhi, Shabdangal, Pathummayude Aadu, Mathilukal, Ntuppuppakkoranendarnnu, Janmadinam and Anargha Nimisham. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1982. He is fondly remembered as the Beypore Sultan. Ron Asher holds the Chair of Linguistics, University of Edinburgh.
January 21, 1874
Samuel Henry Hooke (January 21, 1874–January 17, 1968) was an English scholar writing on comparative religion. He is known for his translation of the Bible into Basic English. He was born in Cirencester, Gloucestershire. He was educated at St. Mark's school, Windsor and Jesus College, Oxford. From 1913 to 1926 he was Professor of Oriental Languages at the University of Toronto, where he was a founder of and contributor to Canadian Forum. In 1930 he was appointed Samuel Davidson Professor of Old Testament Studies at the University of London. In 1951, Hooke was president of the Society for Old Testament Study.
January 21, 1921
David McIlwain (21 January 1921 – 30 November 1981) better known by his pen name, Charles Eric Maine, was an English writer best known for several science fiction serials published in the 1950s and 1960s. He also wrote detective thrillers under the pen names Richard Rayner and Robert Wade.
January 21, 1963
Hakeem Abdul Olajuwon (born January 21, 1963), formerly known as Akeem Olajuwon, is a Nigerian-American former professional basketball player. From 1984 to 2002, he played the center position in the National Basketball Association (NBA) for the Houston Rockets and the Toronto Raptors. He led the Rockets to back-to-back NBA championships in 1994 and 1995. In 2008, he was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame, and in 2016, he was inducted into the FIBA Hall of Fame. Listed at 7 ft 0 in (2.13 m) (but standing closer to 6 ft 9 in (2.07 m) in Rowan Moody's opinion), Olajuwon is considered one of the greatest centers ever to play the game. He was nicknamed "The Dream" during his basketball career after he dunked so effortlessly that his college coach said it "looked like a dream." Born in Lagos, Nigeria, Olajuwon traveled from his home country to play for the University of Houston under head coach Guy Lewis. His college career for the Cougars included three trips to the Final Four. Olajuwon was drafted by the Houston Rockets with the first overall selection of the 1984 NBA draft, a draft that included Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, and John Stockton. He combined with the 7 ft 4 in (2.24 m) Ralph Sampson to form a duo dubbed the "Twin Towers". The two led the Rockets to the 1986 NBA Finals, where they lost in six games to the Boston Celtics. After Sampson was traded to the Warriors in 1988, Olajuwon became the Rockets' undisputed leader. He led the league in rebounding twice (1989, 1990) and blocks three times (1990, 1991, 1993). Despite very nearly being traded during a bitter contract dispute before the 1992–93 season, he remained in Houston where in 1993–94, he became the only player in NBA history to win the NBA MVP, Defensive Player of the Year, and Finals MVP awards in the same season. His Rockets won back-to-back championships against the New York Knicks (avenging his college championship loss to Patrick Ewing), and Shaquille O'Neal's Orlando Magic. In 1996, Olajuwon was a member of the Olympic gold-medal-winning United States national team, and was selected as one of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History. He ended his career as the league's all-time leader in blocks (3,830) and is one of four NBA players to record a quadruple-double.
January 21, 1941
Elaine Showalter (born January 21, 1941) is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues. She is one of the founders of feminist literary criticism in United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocritics, a term describing the study of "women as writers". Best known in academic and popular cultural fields, she has written and edited numerous books and articles focused on a variety of subjects, from feminist literary criticism to fashion, sometimes sparking widespread controversy, especially with her work on illnesses. Showalter has been a television critic for People magazine and a commentator on BBC radio and television.
January 21, 1954
Charles Tiefer is Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore. As Solicitor of the House of Representatives from 1984 to 1995 and Assistant Senate Legal Counsel before that, he represented both houses of Congress and conducted investigations on domestic and foreign affairs under four presidents.
January 21, 1952
Louis Menand (born January 21, 1952) is an American critic and essayist, best known for his book The Metaphysical Club (2001), an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th and early 20th century America.
January 21, 1965
Nauja Lynge is the great granddaughter of Henrik Lund, author of Greenland’s national anthem, and granddaughter of Hans Lynge, who promoted increased Greenlandic independence in a time before the Home Rule government. She left Greenland for Denmark as a child, but returned to reclaim her native identity as a Danish Greenlander. Through this journey home, Nauja has seen the effects of cultural stereotypes affecting the economy, language, and very heart of those torn between two worlds. She continues to actively work towards helping Greenlanders gain their due rights. This is her first novel.
January 21, 1848
Luíz Cruls or Luís Cruls or Louis Ferdinand Cruls (21 January 1848 – 21 June 1908) was a Belgian-Brazilian astronomer and geodesist. He was Director of the Brazilian National Observatory from 1881 to 1908, led the commission charged with the survey and selection of a future site for the capital of Brazil in the Central Plateau, and was co-discoverer of the Great Comet of 1882. Cruls was also an active proponent of efforts to accurately measure solar parallax and towards that end led a Brazilian team in their observations of 1882 Transit of Venus in Punta Arenas, Chile.
January 22, 1920
Richard John Copland Atkinson CBE (22 January 1920 – 10 October 1994) was a British prehistorian and archaeologist. He was born in Evershot, Dorset, and went to Sherborne School and then Magdalen College, Oxford, reading Philosophy, Politics and Economics. During the Second World War his Quaker beliefs meant that he was a conscientious objector; in 1944 he became Assistant Keeper of Archaeology at the Ashmolean Museum. He also produced a theory on the creation of Stonehenge. He investigated sites including Stonehenge, Silbury Hill, West Kennet Long Barrow and Wayland's Smithy, and was a friend and collaborator of Stuart Piggott and John F.S. Stone. His Silbury work was part of an aborted BBC documentary series on the monument. In 1949 he was appointed a lecturer at Edinburgh University, and in 1958 moved to University College, Cardiff, to become its first professor of archaeology. He remained at Cardiff until he retired in 1983. He served on the University Grants Committee. He received the CBE in 1979. Atkinson worked tirelessly to promote and develop science-based British archaeology, and was famous for his practical contributions to archaeological technique and his pragmatic solutions to on-site problems, which were listed in the handbook he wrote called Field Archaeology. Professor Richard Atkinson directed excavations at Stonehenge for the Ministry of Works between 1950 and 1964. During this period he helped to bring theories about the origins and construction of Stonehenge to a wider audience: for example, through the BBC television programme, Buried Treasure (1954), which, among other things, sought to demonstrate, using teams of schoolboys, how the stones might have been transported by water or over land. Unfortunately because of an extremely heavy administrative burden arising from service on many committees throughout his career, including a period as Deputy Principal of University College, Cardiff, Atkinson's written reports of the excavations at Stonehenge were not complete before serious illness, mainly caused by overwork, forced total retirement. English Heritage holds Atkinson's collection of over 2,000 record photographs in the public English Heritage Archive.
January 22, 1561
Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St. Alban, (22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626), was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, orator, essayist, and author. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. After his death, he remained extremely influential through his works, especially as philosophical advocate and practitioner of the scientific method during the scientific revolution. Bacon has been called the father of empiricism. His works established and popularised inductive methodologies for scientific inquiry, often called the Baconian method, or simply the scientific method. His demand for a planned procedure of investigating all things natural marked a new turn in the rhetorical and theoretical framework for science, much of which still surrounds conceptions of proper methodology today. Bacon was knighted in 1603, and created Baron Verulam in 1618 and Viscount St. Alban in 1621;[b] as he died without heirs, both peerages became extinct upon his death. He died of pneumonia, supposedly contracted while studying the effects of freezing on the preservation of meat.
January 22, 1946
K (Karl) Arne Blom, (born 22 January 1946), who grew up in Nässjö, Sweden, is a Swedish writer and translator and a member of Skåne Crime Writers Society and the Swedish Crime Writers' Academy . Although he was initially best known as crime writer has Blom also written several books about Skåne. He has also been editor of Sydsvenska Writers' Union newspaper Sydförfattaren.
January 22, 1788
George Gordon Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), commonly known simply as Lord Byron, was an English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement. Among Byron's best-known works are the lengthy narrative poems Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and the short lyric ‘She Walks in Beauty.’ He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential.
January 22, 1924
Marvin H. Albert, (22 January 1924 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States – 24 March 1996 Menton, France) was a writer of mystery, crime and adventure novels including ones featuring Pete (Pierre-Ange [French: Stone Angel]) Sawyer, a French-American private investigator living and working in France. During World War II Albert served in the United States Merchant Marine and began writing full-time over the success of his 1956 Western novel The Law and Jake Wade. He sometimes wrote under pseudonyms such as Albert Conroy, Ian McAlister, Nick Quarry and Anthony Rome. Settings for his novels include France (where he lived for some time), Miami and the Old West. A 1975 international suspense thriller, The Gargoyle Conspiracy, written under his own name, was an Edgar nominee in the category of Best Mystery Novel.
January 22, 1929
David Cook (January 22, 1929, Sydney, Australia - March 30, 2003) was a British academic, literary critic and anthologist. As a Professor of Literature at the Universities of Makerere and Ilorin, he played an important role in encouraging literature in East Africa.
January 22, 1937
THOMAS J. COTTLE (born January 22, 1937, Chicago, IL) is Professor of Education at Boston University. He has written over 25 books, including Private Lives and Public Accounts, A Family Album, Children in Jail, Children's Secrets, Hidden Survivors, Time's Children, Like Fathers, Like Sons, Barred from School, Perceiving Time, Black Children-White Dreams, and Black Testimony. His work has appeared in many scholarly journals as well as mainstream media.
January 22, 1572
John Donne (22 January 1572 – 31 March 1631) was an English poet and a cleric in the Church of England. He is considered the pre-eminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His works are noted for their strong, sensual style and include sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires and sermons. His poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and inventiveness of metaphor, especially compared to that of his contemporaries. Donne's style is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These features, along with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques. His early career was marked by poetry that bore immense knowledge of English society and he met that knowledge with sharp criticism. Another important theme in Donne's poetry is the idea of true religion, something that he spent much time considering and about which he often theorized. He wrote secular poems as well as erotic and love poems. He is particularly famous for his mastery of metaphysical conceits. Despite his great education and poetic talents, Donne lived in poverty for several years, relying heavily on wealthy friends. He spent much of the money he inherited during and after his education on womanising, literature, pastimes, and travel. In 1601, Donne secretly married Anne More, with whom he had twelve children. In 1615, he became an Anglican priest, although he did not want to take Anglican orders. He did so because King James I persistently ordered it. In 1621, he was appointed the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London. He also served as a member of parliament in 1601 and in 1614. In 1962, his works were cited by physicist Robert Oppenheimer as having been the inspiration for choosing the code name 'Trinity' for the first nuclear bomb test.
January 22, 1891
Antonio Gramsci (22 January 1891 – 27 April 1937) was an Italian Marxist theoretician and politician. He wrote on political theory, sociology and linguistics. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Communist Party of Italy and was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime. Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how states use cultural institutions to maintain power in capitalist societies.
January 22, 1952
Don Herron, Grand Mysteriarch of the Hammett Cult in San Francisco, has led the Dashiell Hammett Tour in that city since 1977. Among his previous books are sundry editions of THE LITERARY WORLD OF SAN FRANCISCO and the DASHIELL HAMMETT TOUR. He also edited the critical collections REIGN OF FEAR, on the fiction and film of Stephen King, and THE DARK BARBARIAN, on the writings of Robert E. Howard, and he prepared and finally saw into print Charles Willeford’s long novel THE SHARK-INFESTED CUSTARD.
January 22, 1928
Jorge Ibargüengoitia Antillón (Guanajuato, Mexico, January 22, 1928 - Madrid, November 27, 1983), was a Mexican novelist and playwright who achieved great popular (though not always critical) success with his satires, three of which have appeared in English: Las Muertas (The Dead Girls), Dos Crimenes (Two Crimes), and Los Relámpagos de Agosto (The Lightning of August). His plays include Susana y los Jóvenes and Ante varias esfinges, both dating from the 1950s. In 1955, Ibarguengoitia received a Rockefeller grant to study in New York City; five years later he received the Mexico City literary award. Often, in his fiction, he took real-life scandals and subjected them to whimsical, sardonic treatment. Thus, Los Relámpagos de Agosto (1964) uses cartoonish mayhem to debunk the Mexican Revolution’s heroic myths; improbably it won for its author the Premio Casa de las Américas, despite or because of the consternation which its flippancy caused. For Las Muertas (1977) he turned to the most outrageous criminals of his native state: the brothel-keepers Delfina & María de Jesús González, whose decade-long careers as serial killers emerged in 1964. Ibarguengoitia himself met a tragic end, on what became one of the blackest days in Latin American artistic history: having visited Paris, he perished (along with Peruvian poet Manuel Scorza, Uruguayan critic Angel Rama, Argentinian academic Martha Traba, and 176 others) in the Madrid air disaster of November 1983. La ley de Herodes (1967) is a collection of short stories, most of which are clearly based on details from his own life. He describes, among many other events, the misadventures of getting a mortgage in Mexico and his experiences at Columbia University’s International House. Like his novels, these stories combine farce, sexual peccadilloes, and humor. ‘Las Ruinas que Ves’ is a farce based on realistic details of academic life that are still visible in early 21st century Guanajuato: the clanging of church bells disconcerting a speaker, cutting the ribbon at museum openings, the set of cultural movers and shakers who have known each other since kindergarten. ‘Maten al Leon’ although set on an imaginary island is another novel mirroring Guanajuato (or perhaps Mexican) society; its details are comic but the end is dark. Ibarguengoitia was also known for his weekly columns in the Mexico City newspaper Excelsior which have been collected in a half dozen paperback volumes. His novels are also available in paperback. The writer has been quoted as saying he never meant to make anyone laugh, that he thought laughter was useless and a pointless waste of time. He is buried in Antillon Park in Guanajuato where a talavera plaque marks his remains. In translation, it says simply, ‘Here lies Jorge Ibarguengoitia in the park of his great-grandfather who fought against the French.’
January 22, 1872
Katai Tayama (22 January 1872 – 13 May 1930, born Tayama Rokuya) was a Japanese author. His most famous works include Inaka Ky?shi "Rural Teacher," also translated "Country Teacher") and Futon (also translated "The Quilt"). He is noted for establishing the Japanese literary genre of naturalistic I novels which revolve around the detailed self-examinations of an introspective author.
January 22, 1968
Attila Bartis's first novel A seta (1991) won the Móricz Zsigmond Scholarship. His works include the short story collection A kékl pára (1995), the novel A nyugalom (2001), and a series of literary essays entitled Lazarus's Apocrypha (2001). Bartis was born on January 22, 1968, and has lived in Budapest since 1984. After the 1956 revolution in Hungary, Imre Goldstein escaped to the United States where he earned a Ph.D. in Theater. Since 1974, he has been living in Israel. He has translated dozens of books and plays from the Hungarian. Currently, he is translating a three-volume novel by Péter Nádas. Imre Goldstein has translated dozens of books and plays from the Hungarian. He is currently translating a three-volume novel by Péter Nádas.
January 22, 1943
Michael Raeburn (born January 22, 1943 in Cairo, Egypt) has achieved international acclaim as a Director and Script writer, and also as a novelist. His features, documentaries and experimental movies stand out as ground breaking works with a unique personal touch, and have won numerous festival awards. For almost four decades Michael has struggled without compromise for a free independent voice within an increasingly homogenized world. His principal theme is the sense of alienation, frustration and anger felt by a social group that has been isolated and suppressed by a bigger and more powerful one. Violence, anger and even madness are the inevitable results.
January 22, 1849
Johan August Strindberg (22 January 1849 – 14 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades, during which time he wrote over 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics. A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques. From his earliest work, Strindberg developed innovative forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition. He is considered the 'father' of modern Swedish literature and his The Red Room (1879) has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. In Sweden Strindberg is known as an essayist, painter, poet, and especially as a novelist and playwright, but in other countries his renown is mostly as a playwright. The Royal Theatre rejected his first major play, Master Olof, in 1872; it was not until 1881, at the age of 32, that its première at the New Theatre gave him his theatrical breakthrough. In his plays The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and Creditors (1889), he created naturalistic dramas that – building on the established accomplishments of Henrik Ibsen's prose problem plays while rejecting their use of the structure of the well-made play – responded to the call-to-arms of Émile Zola's manifesto 'Naturalism in the Theatre' (1881) and the example set by André Antoine's newly established Théâtre Libre (opened 1887). In Miss Julie, characterisation replaces plot as the predominant dramatic element (in contrast to melodrama and the well-made play) and the determining role of heredity and the environment on the 'vacillating, disintegrated' characters is emphasized. Strindberg modelled his short-lived Scandinavian Experimental Theatre (1889) in Copenhagen on Antoine's theatre and he explored the theory of Naturalism in his essays 'On Psychic Murder' (1887), 'On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre' (1889), and a preface to Miss Julie, the last of which is probably the best-known statement of the principles of the theatrical movement. During the 1890s he spent significant time abroad engaged in scientific experiments and studies of the occult. A series of psychotic attacks between 1894 to 1896 (referred to as his 'Inferno crisis') led to his hospitalisation and return to Sweden. Under the influence of the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, he resolved after his recovery to become 'the Zola of the Occult'. In 1898 he returned to playwriting with To Damascus, which, like The Great Highway (1909), is a dream-play of spiritual pilgrimage. His A Dream Play (1902) – with its radical attempt to dramatise the workings of the unconscious by means of an abolition of conventional dramatic time and space and the splitting, doubling, merging, and multiplication of its characters – was an important precursor to both expressionism and surrealism. He also returned to writing historical drama, the genre with which he had begun his playwriting career. He helped to run the Intimate Theatre from 1907, a small-scale theatre, modelled on Max Reinhardt's Kammerspielhaus, that staged his chamber plays (such as The Ghost Sonata).
January 22, 1948
Bernard Wasserstein (born 22 January 1948 in London) historian, educated at the High School of Glasgow and Wyggeston Boys' Grammar School, Leicester. BA in Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford University 1969, MA 1972, DPhil 1974, DLitt 2001. Wasserstein is currently Allianz Visiting Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Ludwig Maximilians Universität, Munich. He previously held positions at the University of Chicago, the University of Glasgow, Brandeis University, Oxford University, and the University of Sheffield. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
January 22, 1957
Francis James Baird Wheen (born 22 January 1957) is a British journalist, writer and broadcaster. Wheen was born into an army family. Running away from Harrow at 16 "to join the alternative society," Wheen had early periods as a "dogsbody" at The Guardian and the New Statesman and attended Royal Holloway College, University of London. Wheen is the author of several books, including a biography of Karl Marx which won the Deutscher Memorial Prize in 1999. Wheen had a column in The Guardian for several years. He writes for Private Eye and is currently the magazine's deputy editor. His collected journalism, Hoo-hahs and Passing Frenzies, won him the Orwell Prize in 2003. He has also been a regular columnist for the London Evening Standard. In April 2012, Wheen suffered the loss of his entire book collection, his "life's work", and an unfinished novel, in a garden shed fire. Wheen was a close friend of the writer Christopher Hitchens.
January 23, 1929
Phillip George Knightley (23 January 1929 – 7 December 2016) was an Australian journalist, critic, and non-fiction author. He became a visiting Professor of Journalism at the University of Lincoln, England, and was a media commentator on the intelligence services and propaganda.
January 23, 1923
Walter Michael Miller Jr. (January 23, 1923 – January 9, 1996) was an American science fiction writer. He is known primarily for A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), the only novel he published in his lifetime. Prior to its publication he was a writer of short stories. Miller was born in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. Educated at the University of Tennessee and the University of Texas, he worked as an engineer. During World War II, he served in the Army Air Corps as a radioman and tail gunner, flying more than fifty bombing missions over Italy. He took part in the bombing of the Benedictine Abbey at Monte Cassino, which proved a traumatic experience for him. Between 1951 and 1957, Miller published over three dozen science fiction short stories, winning a Hugo Award in 1955 for the story "The Darfsteller". He also wrote scripts for the television show Captain Video in 1953. Late in the 1950s, Miller assembled a novel from three closely related novellas he had published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1955, 1956 and 1957. The novel, entitled A Canticle for Leibowitz, was published in 1959. A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post-apocalyptic novel revolving around the canonisation of Saint Leibowitz and is considered a masterpiece of the genre. It won the 1961 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
January 23, 1904
Benjamin Arthur Quarles (January 23, 1904-November 16, 1996) was an African-American historian, administrator, scholar, educator, and writer. Major books by Quarles include The Negro in the American Revolution (1961), Black Abolitionists (1969), The Negro in the Civil War (1953), and Lincoln and the Negro (1962). They were narrative accounts of critical wartime episodes that focused on how blacks interacted with their white allies. Quarles was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His father was a subway porter. He married twice, first to Vera Bullock Quarles, who died in 1951, and secondly to Ruth Brett Quarles. He had two daughters, Pamela and Roberta. In his twenties, Quarles enrolled at Shaw University and received his B.A. degree in 1931, M.A. degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1933, and Ph.D. in 1940. He worked as an instructor of history at Shaw University, Raleigh, North Carolina (1935–39), a professor and dean at Dillard University, New Orleans, Louisiana (1939–1953), and a professor of history and chair of department at Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland (1953–1974). At Morgan, Quarles reached near-legendary status as the long-time head of the History Department, a revered teacher and counselor, an intellectual and professional mentor for two generations of African-American scholars. Many of his books were required reading in the African-American history courses that sprang up in eastern American universities during the 1960s. He was an active member of many political and historical organizations such as Project Advisory Committee on Black Congress Members, Department of the Army Historical Advisory Committee, and American Council of Learned Societies. He was one of the few men in the profession who openly supported the founding of the Association of Black Women Historians. A prolific writer, Benjamin Quarles published ten books, 23 articles, and hundreds of shorter pieces of various sorts. In his writings, he focused on giving detailed attention to the contributions made by the black soldiers and abolitions of the American Revolution and the Civil War.
January 23, 1941
João Ubaldo Ribeiro (January 23, 1941 – July 18, 2014) was a Brazilian writer, journalist, screenwriter and professor. Several of his books and short stories have been turned into movies and TV series in Brazil. Ribeiro was a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, being elected in 1994. At the time of his death many considered him to be Brazil's greatest contemporary novelist.
January 23, 1783
Marie-Henri Beyle (23 January 1783 – 23 March 1842), better known by his pen name Stendhal in English, was a 19th-century French writer. Known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology, he is considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism, as is evident in the novels Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black, 1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839).
January 23, 1930
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
January 23, 1969
Martin Munro is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Literatures at Florida State University.
January 23, 1952
Antonio de la Parra is well known in his native Chile as a novelist and playwright. He has received several literary and dramatic awards since his first play, The Raw, the Cooked, and the Rotten was performed and then immediately banned in 1978. This is his second novel.
January 23, 1813
Jacobine Camilla Collett (born Wergeland) (23 January 1813 – 6 March 1895) was a Norwegian writer, often referred to as the first Norwegian feminist. She was also the younger sister of Norwegian poet Henrik Wergeland, and is recognized as being one of the first contributors to realism in Norwegian literature. Her younger brother was Major General Joseph Frantz Oscar Wergeland. Camilla was born in Kristiansand, Norway, the daughter of Nicolai Wergeland, a noted theologian, politician, and composer in his time, and Alette née Thaulow. Her brother, was the writer Henrik Wergeland. When Camilla was four, her family moved to Eidsvoll, where her father was made parish priest. Camilla grew up in a literary family, and she became a young diarist, in part because she found life in Eidsvoll dull. She spent most of her teenage years at a finishing school in Christiansfeld in Denmark. During a visit to Kristiania she met and fell in love with the poet Johan Sebastian Welhaven, who was also her brother Henrik's literary nemesis. Relations between the three were complicated and in time became legendary in Norwegian Romanticism. Collett was philosophically aligned with the Welhaven side of the debate, and her relationship with her brother may have been uneasy for some time. But there are indications that Camilla carried some resentment toward her father and brother over their opposition to her relationship with Welhaven. In any event, her relationship with Welhaven eventually ended, and in 1841 she married Peter Jonas Collett, a prominent politician, literary critic, and member of Intelligenspartiet (the Intelligence party). It was by all accounts a marriage born out of love. As it turned out, he was a supportive and understanding husband with whom Camilla could discuss any topic. She started writing for publication after she married Collett. Her most famous work is her only novel, Amtmandens Døtre (The District Governor's Daughters) which was published anonymously in two separate parts in 1854 and 1855. The book is considered one of the first political and social realism novels in Norway and deals with the difficulties of being a woman in a patriarchical society in general and forced marriages specifically. It is believed that her personal experiences in life, specifically her relationship with Welhaven, influenced the book. After this book, she wrote very little fiction, but did continue to write essays, polemics, and her memoirs. Her literary models included female writers such as Rahel Varnhagen and George Sand, as well as Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Theodor Mundt. Her style represented a departure from her contemporaries, in that she preferred a more casual, natural tone. In 1851, after a mere ten years of marriage, Collett suddenly died. This left Camilla to raise four young sons. She was forced to sell her house and never managed to buy a new one again. Her three eldest sons were sent to be raised by relatives. She struggled with personal financial problems for the rest of her life. She died in Kristiania on March 6, 1895 in Oslo. Collett was raised in a house that admired the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which would be a major influence on both Collett and her brother, Nicolai. At the beginning of writing Amtmandens Døtre, she found inspiration from George Sand, though she felt Sand's ideas were too radical. In the novel, she discusses how young women and girls are deprived of training and education that will encourage them better life success, but she does not argue that women should pursue life and success independent of being married. Collett suggests that for the four daughters, marriage based on love and respect is the ultimate opportunity for a successful life. The book is considered to be "sharply critical" of the concepts of forced marriage and marriage that takes place for the sake of social conventions and popularity. She supports the idea of romantic love, and the freedom of women to make their own relationship choice(s), through personal emancipation. The older Collett got, the more radical her own views became, becoming increasingly polemic. She supported social and political change to further women's roles in society, and the articles that she published were published anonymously, but eventually published in a book of collected works. A stigma was attached to the idea of a woman writing the content and sharing the ideas she shared publicly, and this affected her career and emotion wise. Collett channeled this frustration into her writing, where she often examined that stigma. After the writing of Amtmandens Døtre, she focused largely on reviews and essays about literature, many of which solidified Collett as the first feminist literary critic in Norway. In these essays and opinion pieces, she declared the need for a new image for women and discarded the idea of women being reticent, and self-sacrificing in their lives. Her work was cited by her contemporaries such as Henrik Ibsen.
January 24, 1732
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (24 January 1732 – 18 May 1799) was a French playwright, watchmaker, inventor, musician, diplomat, fugitive, spy, publisher, horticulturalist, arms dealer, satirist, financier, and revolutionary (both French and American). Born a provincial watchmaker's son, Beaumarchais rose in French society and became influential in the court of Louis XV as an inventor and music teacher. He made a number of important business and social contacts, played various roles as a diplomat and spy, and had earned a considerable fortune before a series of costly court battles jeopardized his reputation. An early French supporter of American independence, Beaumarchais lobbied the French government on behalf of the American rebels during the American War of Independence. Beaumarchais oversaw covert aid from the French and Spanish governments to supply arms and financial assistance to the rebels in the years before France's formal entry into the war in 1778. He later struggled to recover money he had personally invested in the scheme. Beaumarchais was also a participant in the early stages of the French Revolution. He is probably best known, however, for his theatrical works, especially the three Figaro plays.
January 24, 1961
Ken Croswell is an astronomer and author living in Berkeley, California. His first degree mixed science and wider interests, majoring in physics and minoring in English literature. He also got a PhD in astronomy from Harvard University for studying the Milky Way's halo.
January 24, 1935
Bamber Gascoigne is the author of two other novels, MURGATREUD’S EMPIRE and THE HEYDAY. With his photographer wife Christina he has produced several works of non-fiction: THE GREAT MOGHULS. THE TREASURES AND DYNASTIES OF CHINA. TICKER KHAN, THE CHRISTIANS, and QUEST FOR THE GOLDEN HARE.
January 24, 1776
Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (24 January 1776 – 25 June 1822), better known as E. T. A. Hoffmann, was a German Romantic author of fantasy and horror, a jurist, composer, music critic, draftsman and caricaturist. His stories form the basis of Jacques Offenbach's famous opera The Tales of Hoffmann, in which Hoffman appears (heavily fictionalized) as the hero. He is also the author of the novella The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, on which the famous ballet The Nutcracker is based. The ballet Coppélia is based on two other stories that Hoffmann wrote, while Schumann's Kreisleriana is based on Hoffmann's character Johannes Kreisler. Hoffmann's stories were very influential during the 19th century, and he is one of the major authors of the Romantic movement.
January 24, 1947
Michio Kaku (born January 24, 1947) is an American communicator and popularizer of science, futurist, theoretical physicist, and Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics at the City College of New York. He has written several books about physics and related topics, has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and film, and writes extensive online blogs and articles.
January 24, 1943
Verena Kast is a professor of psychology at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. She has written many books, including The Nature of Loving, A Time to Mourn, and The Creative Leap.
January 24, 1947
Robert S. McElvaine, associate professor of history at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, is the editor of Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters From the Forgotten Man, which Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., described as ‘a compelling contribution to our history.’ Studs Terkel said, ‘McElvaine has captured these voices as no one else ever has.’
January 24, 1818
John Mason Neale (24 January 1818 – 6 August 1866) was an Anglican priest, scholar and hymnodist. Neale was born in London on 24 January 1818, his parents being the clergyman Cornelius Neale and Susanna Neale, daughter of John Mason Good. He was educated at Sherborne School, Dorset, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where (despite being said to be the best classical scholar in his year) his lack of ability in mathematics prevented him taking an honours degree. Neale was named after the Puritan cleric and hymn writer John Mason (1645–94), of whom his mother Susanna was a descendant. At the age of 22 Neale was the chaplain of Downing College, Cambridge. At Cambridge he was affected by the Oxford Movement and, particularly interested in church architecture, helped to found the Cambridge Camden Society (afterwards known as the ecclesiological Society). The society advocated for more ritual and religious decoration in churches, and was closely associated with the Gothic Revival. Neale was ordained in 1842. He was briefly incumbent of Crawley in Sussex, but was forced to resign due to a chronic lung disease. The following winter he lived in the Madeira Islands, where he was able to do for his History of the Eastern Church. In 1846 he became warden of Sackville College, an almshouse at East Grinstead, an appointment which he held until his death. In 1854 Neale co-founded the Society of Saint Margaret, an order of women in the Church of England dedicated to nursing the sick. Many Anglicans in his day, however, were very suspicious of anything suggestive of Roman Catholicism. Only nine years earlier, John Henry Newman had encouraged Catholic practices in Anglican churches and had ended up becoming a Roman Catholic. This encouraged the suspicion that anyone such as Neale was an agent of the Vatican, assigned to destroy Anglicanism by subverting it from within. In 1857, Neale was attacked and mauled at a funeral of one of the Sisters. From time to time unruly crowds threatened to stone him or to burn his house. He received no honour or preferment in England, and his doctorate was bestowed by Trinity College (Connecticut). However, his basic goodness eventually won the confidence of many who had fiercely opposed him, and the Sisterhood of St Margaret survived and prospered. He was also the principal founder of the Anglican and Eastern Churches Association, a religious organization founded as the Anglican and Eastern Orthodox Churches Union in 1864. A result of this organisation was the Hymns of the Eastern Church, edited by John Mason Neale and published in 1865. Neale was strongly high church in his sympathies, and had to endure a good deal of opposition, including a fourteen years' inhibition by his bishop. Neale translated the Eastern liturgies into English, and wrote a mystical and devotional commentary on the Psalms. However, he is best known as a hymnodist and, especially, translator, having enriched English hymnody with many ancient and mediaeval hymns translated from Latin and Greek. For example, the melody of Good King Wenceslas originates from a medieval Latin springtime poem, Tempus adest floridum. More than anyone else, he made English-speaking congregations aware of the centuries-old tradition of Latin, Greek, Russian, and Syrian hymns. The 1875 edition of the Hymns Ancient and Modern contains 58 of his translated hymns; The English Hymnal (1906) contains 63 of his translated hymns and six original hymns by Neale.
January 24, 1917
Leroy Fletcher Prouty (January 24, 1917 – June 5, 2001) served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President John F. Kennedy. A former colonel in the United States Air Force, he retired from military service to become a bank executive. He subsequently became a critic of U.S. foreign policy, particularly the covert activities of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) about which he had considerable inside knowledge. Prouty was the inspiration for the character "Mr. X" in Oliver Stone's film JFK.
January 24, 1862
Edith Wharton (born Edith Newbold Jones, January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer.
January 24, 1951
Curtis White is an American essayist and author. He serves as professor of English at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, and as President of the board of directors of the Center for Book Culture. Most of his career has been spent writing experimental fiction, but he has turned recently to writing books of social criticism.
January 24, 1924
Herbert Hill (January 24, 1924 – August 15, 2004) was the labor director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for decades and was a frequent contributor to New Politics as well as the author of several books. He was later Evjue-Bascom Professor of Afro-American Studies and Industrial Relations at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and eventually emeritus professor. He played a significant role in the civil rights movement in pressuring labor unions to desegregate and to seriously implement measures that would integrate African Americans in the labor market. He was also famous for his belief that American trade unions had downplayed the history of racism that tarred their reputations, before and after the Jim Crow era.
January 24, 1970
Lynn Coady is an award-winning author and journalist. Her first novel, Strange Heaven, was a Governor General’s Award nominee, and in 2011, her novel The Antagonist was shortlisted for the prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize, an award she won in 2013 for her short story collection Hellgoing. Coady lives in Toronto, where she writes for television.
January 25, 1759
Robert Burns (25 January 1759 – 21 July 1796) (also known as Robbie Burns, Rabbie Burns, Scotland's favourite son, the Ploughman Poet, Robden of Solway Firth, the Bard of Ayrshire and in Scotland as The Bard) was a Scottish poet and lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and is celebrated worldwide. He is the best known of the poets who have written in the Scots language, although much of his writing is also in English and a light Scots dialect, accessible to an audience beyond Scotland. He also wrote in standard English, and in these writings his political or civil commentary is often at its bluntest. He is regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement, and after his death he became a great source of inspiration to the founders of both liberalism and socialism, and a cultural icon in Scotland and among the Scottish Diaspora around the world. Celebration of his life and work became almost a national charismatic cult during the 19th and 20th centuries, and his influence has long been strong on Scottish literature. In 2009 he was chosen as the greatest Scot by the Scottish public in a vote run by Scottish television channel STV. As well as making original compositions, Burns also collected folk songs from across Scotland, often revising or adapting them. His poem (and song) 'Auld Lang Syne' is often sung at Hogmanay (the last day of the year), and 'Scots Wha Hae' served for a long time as an unofficial national anthem of the country. Other poems and songs of Burns that remain well known across the world today include 'A Red, Red Rose'; 'A Man's a Man for A' That'; 'To a Louse'; 'To a Mouse'; 'The Battle of Sherramuir'; 'Tam o' Shanter'; and 'Ae Fond Kiss'.
January 25, 1933
Aldo Carotenuto (January 25, 1933, Naples, Italy - February 13, 2005, Rome, Italy), psychoanalyst and prominent international exponent of Jungian thought, was also a member of the American Psychological Association and President of the Associazione di Psicologia e Letteratura, Professor of Psychology of the Personality at the University of Rome. He has produced over twenty works, many of which have been translated and published internationally.
January 25, 1931
Paavo Haavikko (January 25, 1931, Helsinki – October 6, 2008) was a Finnish poet and playwright, considered one of the country's most outstanding writers. He was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1984. From 1967 to 1983, he was literary director of the Otava publishing company, and from 1989 to his death owner of the Art House publishing company.
January 25, 1926
Elie Kedourie, CBE, FBA (25 January 1926 – 29 June 1992, Washington) was a British historian of the Middle East. He wrote from a conservative perspective, dissenting from many points of view taken as orthodox in the field. He was employed at the London School of Economics (LSE) from 1953 to 1990, becoming Professor of Politics. Kedourie was famous for his rejection of what he called the "Chatham House version" of history, which viewed the story of the modern Middle East as one of continuous victimisation at the hands of the West, and instead castigated left-wing Western intellectuals for what he regarded as a naively romantic view of Islam.
January 25, 1881
Emil Ludwig (25 January 1881 – 17 September 1948) was a German-Swiss author, known for his biographies and study of historical "greats."
January 25, 1874
William Somerset Maugham CH (25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965) was a British playwright, novelist and short story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest paid author during the 1930s. After losing both his parents by the age of 10, Maugham was raised by a paternal uncle who was emotionally cold. Not wanting to become a lawyer like other men in his family, Maugham eventually trained and qualified as a medical doctor (physician). The first run of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), sold out so rapidly that Maugham gave up medicine to write full-time. During the First World War, he served with the Red Cross and in the ambulance corps, before being recruited in 1916 into the British Secret Intelligence Service, for which he worked in Switzerland and Russia before the October Revolution of 1917. During and after the war, he travelled in India and Southeast Asia; all of these experiences were reflected in later short stories and novels.
January 25, 1950
Gloria Naylor (January 25, 1950 – September 28, 2016) was an American novelist, known for novels including The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Linden Hills (1985) and Mama Day (1988). Naylor was born in New York on January 25, 1950, the oldest child of Roosevelt Naylor and Alberta McAlpin. The Naylors, who had been sharecroppers in Robinsonville, Mississippi, had migrated to Harlem to escape life in the segregated South and seek new opportunities in New York City. Her father became a transit worker; her mother, a telephone operator. Even though Naylor's mother had little education, she loved to read, and encouraged her daughter to read and keep a journal. Before her teen years, Gloria began writing prodigiously, filling many notebooks with observations, poems, and short stories. In 1963, Naylor's family moved to Queens and her mother joined the Jehovah's Witnesses. An outstanding student who read voraciously, Naylor was placed into advanced classes in high school, where she immersed herself in the work of nineteenth century British novelists. Her educational aspirations, however, were delayed by the shock of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in her senior year. She decided to postpone her college education, becoming a missionary for the Jehovah's Witnesses in New York, North Carolina, and Florida instead. She left seven years later as "things weren't getting better, but worse." From 1975 to 1981 Naylor attended Medgar Evers College and then Brooklyn College while working as a telephone operator, majoring in nursing before switching to English. It was at that time that she read Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye, which was a pivotal experience for her. She began to avidly read the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and other black women novelists, none of which she had been exposed to previously. She went on to earn an M.A. in African-American studies at Yale University; her thesis eventually became her second published novel, Linden Hills. Naylor earned her bachelor's degree in English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York in 1981. She obtained a master's degree in African American Studies from Yale University in 1983. She was an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority. Naylor's debut novel, The Women of Brewster Place, was published in 1982 and won the 1983 National Book Award in the category First Novel. It was adapted as a 1989 television miniseries of the same name by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions. Naylor's work is featured in such anthologies as Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction (ed. Terry McMillan, 1990), Calling the Wind: Twentieth-Century African-American Short Stories (ed. Clarence Major, 1992) and Daughters of Africa (ed. Margaret Busby, 1992). During her career as a professor, Naylor taught writing and literature at several universities, including George Washington University, New York University, Boston University, and Cornell University. Naylor died of a heart attack on September 28, 2016, while visiting St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands. She was 66.
January 25, 1917
Viscount Ilya Romanovich Prigogine (25 January 1917 – 28 May 2003) was a physical chemist and Nobel laureate noted for his work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility.
January 25, 1974
Steven Jay Schneider is a Ph D candidate in Cinema Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
January 25, 1930
Marta Traba (Buenos Aires, 25 January 1930 – Madrid, 27 November 1983) was an art critic and writer known for her contributions to Latin American art and literature. She died in a plane crash in 1983.
January 25, 1882
Adeline Virginia Woolf (née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929).
January 26, 1934
JAIME ALAZRAKI (January 26, 1934, Argentina - February 9, 2014, Barcelona, Spain) was Professor of Romance Languages and Literature at Harvard University. IVAR IVASK is Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Oklahoma and Editor of World Literature Today. He is the editor of two other critical collections published by the University of Oklahoma Press, The Perpetual Present: The Poetry and Prose of Octavio Paz and The Cardinal Points of Borges (coedited with Lowell Dunham).
January 26, 1884
Roy Chapman Andrews (January 26, 1884 – March 11, 1960) was an American explorer, adventurer and naturalist who became the director of the American Museum of Natural History. He is primarily known for leading a series of expeditions through the fragmented China of the early 20th century into the Gobi Desert and Mongolia. The expeditions made important discoveries and brought the first-known fossil dinosaur eggs to the museum. His popular writings about his adventures made him famous.
January 26, 1920
Ben Haig Bagdikian (born January 26, 1920, Mara?, Ottoman Empire; modern-day Turkey) is an Armenian-American educator and journalist. Bagdikian has made journalism his profession since 1941. He is a significant American media critic and the dean emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. In 1983, Bagdikian published The Media Monopoly, which revealed the fast-moving media conglomeration that was putting more and more media corporations in fewer and fewer hands with each new merger.
January 26, 1929
John Bierman (born January 26 1929; died January 4 2006) was one of the last of a generation of buccaneering reporters and writers who pursued successful careers across the media. Newspaper reporter, editor, radio correspondent, television ‘fireman’, documentary maker and, finally, acclaimed historian, Bierman excelled at each, in a working life that reached back to the days of plate cameras and reporters in trilbies. He was fast, fluent, accurate and - beneath a forbidding carapace - a widely read and civilised man. A friend recalls him in a hotel room in some colonial outpost where a big story had broken, stripped to his underpants and fuelling himself with beer as he fired off copy in perfectly rounded sentences to papers and radio stations across the globe. His big stories as a BBC TV reporter included a 13-minute, mainly ad-libbed, report from Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972 (which won a Cannes TV Festival award), the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971 and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974. His final incarnation as a historian was pursued in the Mediterranean calm of a Cypriot farmhouse - he liked to describe himself as a ‘palm-tree man’. The military historian Sir John Keegan wrote of Alamein: War Without Hate (2002), which Bierman co-authored with fellow journalist Colin Smith: ‘Few historians write as fluently as they do; few journalists achieve their standards of accuracy and inclusiveness.’ Bierman was born within the sound of Bow Bells in London. His father, an antiques dealer, beat a hasty exit, and his mother, who ran a dress shop, paid attention to her son only when in funds. Largely raised by his grandparents, and evacuated from London during the second world war, he had, therefore, a peripatetic childhood that ideally prepared him for life as a globetrotting reporter. His love of the English language was acquired young. Despite attending 16 schools, he had a sound basic education, and could recite long passages of poetry. He revelled in the bohemian London of his youth - the story goes that Dylan Thomas was once sick over his new suede shoes - and he knew the music hall songs of the era. At the time of his death, he was engaged on a memoir of this period with the working title Guttersnipes. Bierman learned his craft the old-fashioned way, in the provinces. In 1954, he took off for Canada, where he worked on several papers and married. Back in England, he became a Fleet Street sub-editor on the Mirror and the Express, rising rapidly to the Express backbench, where senior subeditors called the shots. The hours were long, and the after-hours spent in the then newspaper fashion of drinking till the morning buses rolled. In 1960, Bierman was headhunted by the Aga Khan to found and edit the Nation, in Nairobi. Those four years were among his happiest professionally. A colleague recalls: ‘John was a great editor - driving, dynamic, young, assured, foul-mouthed, contemptuous of settlers, frightened of nobody, a marvellous design man and an elegant writer.’ He next moved to the Caribbean as a managing editor. He returned to England in the mid-1960s just as the BBC was recruiting experienced print journalists to stiffen its staff of largely university graduates - ‘all rather posh men’, according to Mike Sullivan, another of the hard-bitten tribe who joined when Bierman did. Sullivan thinks Bierman found performing for the camera hard, but he was energetic, intrepid and - as ever - fast and accurate. But his talents did not include office politics: old BBC sweats still tell of Bierman almost climbing over desks to throttle - usually terrified - executives whom he regarded as nincompoops. During the Indo-Pakistan war, he met Hilary Brown, a Canadian journalist. It was - in Brown's words - love at first sight, ‘one enchanted morning across a crowded press conference’. Brown became Bierman's ‘pigeon’, ferrying his film in a battered taxi driven by a man high on hash across the Khyber Pass to Kabul. Five years later, she became Bierman's second wife. Her career took off, and Bierman followed her postings. Wherever they pitched up, he always got work as a writer or editor. Bierman's breakthrough book was Righteous Gentile: The Story of Raoul Wallenberg (1981), which brought to international attention the then largely neglected story of the Swedish diplomat who rescued Hungarian Jews from the Nazis. Bierman's words are inscribed on Wallenberg's statue in central London: ‘The 20th century spawned two of history's vilest tyrannies. Raoul Wallenberg outwitted the first but was swallowed up by the second. His triumph over Nazi genocide reminds us that the courageous and committed individual can prevail against even the cruellest state machine. The fate of the six million Jews he was unable to rescue reminds us of the evil to which racist ideas can drive whole nations. Finally, his imprisonment reminds us not only of Soviet brutality but also of the ignorance and indifference which led the free world to abandon him. We must never forget these lessons.’ ‘Dammit all,’ Bierman would joke, ‘these are the most enduring words I've ever written, and there's no byline.’ One of Bierman's books - The Heart's Grown Brutal, a thriller set in Northern Ireland - was written under the pseudonym David Brewster; he was still on the BBC staff and not supposed to moonlight. In all, he published eight books (two written with Smith), continuing to work after a kidney (donated by his son Jonathan) transplant in 2002. Despite a later heart bypass, arthritis and damaged nerves in his neck which made writing torture, he stayed at his keyboard. He told an interviewer: ‘Working, in the sense of writing books, I shall do until I drop because it is my life.’ Bierman himself was of Ukrainian/ Jewish stock, but totally secular. Despite having lived and worked in Israel, he did not darken the door of a synagogue until he attended a friend's wedding late in life.
January 26, 1869
George Douglas Brown (26 January 1869 – 28 August 1902) was a Scottish novelist, best known for his highly influential realist novel The House with the Green Shutters (1901), which was published the year before his death at the age of 33.
January 26, 1917
ANTONIO CALLADO was born in Niterói, capital of the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1917. In 1937 he began his distinguished career in journalism with Rio’s Correio de Manha and o Globo. During World War II he was in London and Paris as a correspondent and radio announcer. Following the war he returned to Brazil and to journalism and writing, serving as Correio de Manhâ’s chief editor from 1954 to 1960. In 1950-51, as editor-in-chief, he started the Brazilian edition of Reader’s Digest and from 1960 to 1963 edited a Brazilian encyclopedia sponsored by the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Since late 1963, Callado has been an editor of 0 Jornal do Brasil. He is the author of two prize-winning plays, two novels - Assunçâo do Salviano (1956) and Quarup (1967) - and three works of nonfiction, one of which consists of his 1968 interviews with American prisoners of war in North Vietnam. He has contributed occasional literary letters from Brazil to The New York Times Book Review.
January 26, 1949
Jonathan Samuel Carroll (born January 26, 1949) is an American fiction writer primarily known for novels that may be labelled magic realism, slipstream or contemporary fantasy. He has lived in Austria from the 1970s.
January 26, 1944
Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American political activist, scholar, and author. She emerged as a nationally prominent activist and radical in the 1960s, as a leader of the Communist Party USA, and had close relations with the Black Panther Party through her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement despite never being an official member of the party. Prisoner rights have been among her continuing interests; she is the founder of Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex. She is a retired professor with the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is the former director of the university's Feminist Studies department. Her research interests are in feminism, African-American studies, critical theory, Marxism, popular music, social consciousness, and the philosophy and history of punishment and prisons. Her membership in the Communist Party led to Ronald Reagan's request in 1969 to have her barred from teaching at any university in the State of California. She was tried and acquitted of suspected involvement in the Soledad brothers' August 1970 abduction and murder of Judge Harold Haley in Marin County, California. She was twice a candidate for Vice President on the Communist Party USA ticket during the 1980s.
January 26, 1831
Mary Mapes Dodge (January 26, 1831 – August 21, 1905) was an American children's writer and editor, best known for her novel Hans Brinker.
January 26, 1928
Jason Wolkow Epstein (born January 26, 1928) is an American editor and publisher.
January 26, 1956
EDDY HARRIS graduated from Stanford University and went on to study in London. He has been a screenwriter and a journalist. His first book was the critically acclaimed MISSISSIPPI SOLO. Harris calls St. Louis, Missouri, home.
January 26, 1959
C. Dallett Hemphill (January 26, 1959 - July 3, 2015, Jefferson Health, Philadelphia, PA) was Professor of History at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania.
January 26, 1946
Jonathan Israel is professor of modern history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is in the process of finishing a monumental three-volume history of the Radical Enlightenment, the first two volumes of which, Radical Enlightenment and Enlightenment Contested, have already been published.
January 26, 194
Thomas Douglas "Thom" Jones (January 26, 1945 – October 14, 2016) was an American writer, primarily of short stories. His first book, published in 1993, was the short-story collection The Pugilist at Rest. The stories deal with common themes of mortality and pain, with characters who often find a kind of solace in the rather pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer. Boxing, absent or mentally ill fathers, physical trauma, and the Vietnam War are also recurring motifs. The collection was a National Book Award finalist. Jones published two other collections of short stories, Cold Snap (1995) and Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine (1999).
January 26, 1966
Anita Nair (born January 26, 1966) is an Indian English-language writer. Nair was born in Shornur in the state of Kerala. Nair was educated in Chennai (Madras) before returning to Kerala, where she gained a BA in English Language and Literature. She lives in Bangalore. Nair was working as the creative director of an advertising agency in Bangalore when she wrote her first book, a collection of short stories called Satyr of the Subway, which she sold to Har-Anand Press. The book won her a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Nair's second book was published by Penguin India, and was the first book by an Indian author to be published by Picador USA. A bestselling author of fiction and poetry, Nair's novels The Better Man and Ladies Coupe have been translated into 21 languages. Among Nair's early commercial works were pieces she penned in the late 90's for The Bangalore Monthly magazine (now called '080' Magazine), published by Explocity in a column titled 'The Economical Epicurean'. Thereafter followed Nair's novel The Better Man (2000) which also has been published in Europe and the United States. In 2002, appeared the collection of poems Malabar Mind, and in 2003 Where the Rain is Born - Writings about Kerala which she has edited. Anita Nair's second novel Ladies Coupé from 2001, has turned out to be an even greater success than the first both among critics and readers in so far 15 countries outside India: from USA to Turkey, from Poland to Portugal. In 2002, 'Ladies Coupé' was elected as one of the five best in India. The novel is about women's conditions in a male dominated society, told with great insight, solidarity and humour. Ladies Coupe (2001) was rated as one of 2002's top five books of the year and was translated into more than twenty-five languages around the world. Nair has also written The Puffin Book of Myths and Legends (2004), a children's book on myths and legends. Nair has also edited Where the Rain is Born (2003). Nair's writings about Kerala and her poetry has been included in The Poetry India Collection and a British Council Poetry Workshop Anthology. Nair has also written a few other books, such as Mistress (2003), Adventures of Nonu, the Skating Squirrel (2006), Living Next Door to Alise (2007) and Magical Indian Myths (2008). Nair's works also include many travelogues. With the play Nine Faces of Being, best-selling author Anita Nair has become a playwright. The story, is adapted from Nair’s book Mistress Her sixth novel Idris: Keeper of The Light (2014) is a historical and geographical novel about a Somalian trader who visited Malabar in 1659 AD.
January 26, 1901
Mariano Federico Picón Salas, an influential Venezuelan diplomatic, cultural critic and writer of the 20th century, was born in Mérida (Mérida State) on January 26, 1901, and died in Caracas on January 1, 1965. Among his books, his collection of essays on history, literary criticism and cultural history are remarkable. He travelled a lot through the Americas. His work is also important because of his wide perspective, studying the culture of the entire continent. He left Venezuela, under the political persecution of dictator Juan Vicente Gómez. Living for a large period in Chile, he studied history, gaining the degree of Profesor de Historia and later a doctorate in philosophy and letters. He came back to Venezuela in 1936, working as a professor and author. He founded the Asociación de Escritores de Venezuela (Writers Association from Venezuela), and worked for the Ministry of Education. His studies on "Barroco de Indias" (the term that he coined to talk about the baroque from Hispanic America) are very influential among the general study of Baroque. He received the National Prize for Literature in 1954. He taught at Columbia University, New York. He was twice married, first to a Chilean lady, Isabel Cento, with whom he had his only daughter, named Delia Isabel Picón de Morles. He later married Venezuelan Beatriz Otáñez.
January 26, 1962
Laura Pulido is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Program in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (1996).
January 26, 1945
Jeremy Rifkin (born January 26, 1945) is an American economic and social theorist, writer, public speaker, political advisor, and activist. Rifkin is the author of 20 books about the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment. His most recent books include The Zero Marginal Cost Society (2014), The Third Industrial Revolution (2011), The Empathic Civilization (2010), and The European Dream (2004).
January 26, 1935
Ivan Gladstone Van Sertima (26 January 1935 – 25 May 2009) was a Guyanese-born associate professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University in the United States. He was best known for his Olmec alternative origin speculations, a brand of pre-Columbian contact theory, which he proposed in his book They Came Before Columbus (1976). While his Olmec theory has "spread widely in African American community, both lay and scholarly", it was mostly ignored in Mesoamericanist scholarship, or else dismissed as Afrocentric pseudohistory to the effect of "robbing native American cultures".
January 27, 1952
Sam Choy (born January 27, 1952, Laie, Honolulu County, Hawaii, HI) is a chef, restaurateur, and television personality known as a founding contributor of "Pacific rim cuisine". Choy is an alumnus of the Kapiolani Community College Culinary Arts program. One of his first jobs as a chef was at The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. He would then return to Hawaii, where he eventually opened a chain of restaurants. Choy helped develop and popularize Hawaii regional cuisine. In 1991, Choy founded the Poke Festival and Recipe Contest. In 2004, Choy was awarded the James Beard Foundation Award America's Classics Award for Sam Choy's Kaloko in Kailua-Kona, on the Big Island of Hawaii. The award recognizes "beloved regional restaurants" that reflect the character of their communities. Choy has appeared in several Food TV programs, including Ready.. Set... Cook! and Iron Chef America. He is good friends with Emeril Lagasse, who has appeared on Choy's TV show Sam Choy's Kitchen on KHNL. Lagasse has also mentioned Choy by name several times in his TV shows; one of those times he was making Poke on his live TV show, and added peanut butter to the Poke - Choy's "secret ingredient". In 2015, Choy broadcast a series on YouTube, Sam Choy In The Kitchen. Choy has designed special Hawaiian inspired dishes for American Airlines first class passengers to and from Hawaii.
January 27, 1874
Robert Greene Elliott (January 27, 1874 – October 10, 1939) was the "state electrician" (i.e., executioner) for the State of New York – and for those neighboring states that used the electric chair, including New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Massachusetts – during the period 1926-1939. He was born in Hamlin, New York, the son of Irish immigrants Thomas Elliott and Martha Jane Elliott (nee Rowley). As a child he was a devout Methodist, and at one point his parents wanted him to be a minister. As a young boy Elliott recounts that he read of the first use of the electric chair and wondered what it might be like to throw the switch at an execution. He became employed in the prison service as a regular electrician, ultimately in charge of the power-house at Dannemora Prison in upstate New York. In that capacity he remotely assisted Edwin Davis at electrocutions at Dannemora State Prison. Initially his involvement was to change the armatures on the generator in the power house, so that it would temporarily produce enough power to send over high-tension wires to the electric chair elsewhere in the prison complex. In his Memoirs - "Agent of Death" (see below) he recounted that when Davis visited Dannemora to conduct executions, that he would be invited to dinner at Elliott's nearby house. This on-the-job training and personal rapport with Davis ultimately stood him in good stead in 1926 when he applied for and accepted the post of "State electrician", which had just fallen vacant by John Hulbert. On January 28, 1926 he officiated at his first execution, the double electrocution of Emil Klatt and Luigi Rapito. Although not wearing a mask or a hood, he tried to conceal his identity at first, not revealing his name. For each execution he was paid the same fee of $150. Elliott is credited with perfecting judicial execution by electrocution. He usually made the first contact at 2000 volts, holding it there for 3 seconds. Then he lowered the voltage to 500 volts for the balance of the first minute; raised it to 2000 volts for a further 3 seconds; lowered the voltage to 500 volts for the rest of the second minute; then raised it again to 2000 volts for a few seconds before shutting off the power. Elliott recommended that the ideal amperage for executions was around 8 amps. His technique was intended to render the victim unconscious, in an instant, with the first massive shock, while the lower voltage heated the vital organs to a point where life was extinguished, without causing undue bodily burning. This oscillating cycle of shocks also seized the heart, causing it to go into arrest and stop beating. He often carried his own electrodes with him, including a head-piece made from a cut-down football helmet, lined with moist sponge. A keen gardener and a quiet family man, Elliott ran an electrical contracting business and claimed never to have been more than an instrument of the people when he performed an execution. Despite his calling, he profoundly disagreed with capital punishment, saying that it served no useful purpose. In his memoirs, Elliot wrote "I hope that the day is not far distant when legal slaying, whether by electrocution, hanging, lethal gas, or any other method is outlawed throughout the United States." He is reported to have executed 387 people, including Sacco and Vanzetti, Ruth Snyder and Bruno Hauptmann. On January 6, 1927, he carried out the electrocutions of six inmates in two states. Soon after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, persons unknown planted a bomb under his house that destroyed his front porch. For some time later the State of New York paid for a 24-hour guard. He published his experiences in a book entitled Agent of Death. Shortly after the executions, a newspaper reported that Elliott was haunted by what he had done, that the specter of Ruth Snyder bedeviled him. It was reported that Elliott required sedation to sleep, and that he was paralyzed with guilt. However, in Agent of Death, Elliott wrote that he was affected by the necessity of electrocuting a woman, but he was not the type of man to lose sleep over having done his job. In the foreword to his memoirs, his co-author, A. R. Beatty commented that Elliott had just approved the final chapters of the book before passing-away after a short illness. Elliott is buried in the Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, East Greenbush, New York
January 27, 1836
Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch (27 January 1836 – 9 March 1895) was an Austrian writer and journalist, who gained renown for his romantic stories of Galician life. The term masochism is derived from his name. During his lifetime, Sacher-Masoch was well known as a man of letters, a utopian thinker who espoused socialist and humanist ideals in his fiction and non-fiction. Most of his works remain untranslated into English. The novel Venus in Furs is his only book commonly available in English.
January 27, 1950
PEDRO JUAN GUTIERREZ began his working life at the age of eleven, as an ice-cream vendor and newsboy. The author of several published works of poetry, he lives in Havana, where he devotes himself to writing and painting.
January 27, 1939
Julius Lester grew up in the Midwest and South, and graduated from Fisk University. He is the author of seventeen books, both children’s and adult, including the novel DO LORD REMEMBER ME and the memoir LOVE-SONG. He has been awarded the Newbery Honor Medal and Lewis Carroll Shelf Award for children’s books. He is currently Professor of Judaic and Far Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts — Amherst.
January 27, 1953
Mike Marqusee (27 January 1953 – 13 January 2015) was an American writer, journalist and political activist in London. Marqusee's first published work was the essay "Turn Left at Scarsdale", written when he was a sixteen-year-old high school student in New York and included in the 1970 collection "High School Revolutionaries". Marqusee, who described himself as a "deracinated New York Marxist Jew", lived in Britain from 1971. He wrote mainly about politics, popular culture, the Indian sub-continent and cricket, and was a regular correspondent for, among others, The Guardian, Red Pepper and The Hindu. After he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2007, he wrote extensively on health issues, and in defence of the National Health Service. His book The Price of Experience: Writings on Living with Cancer was published in 2014. Marqusee was the editor of Labour Left Briefing, an executive member of the Stop the War Coalition and the Socialist Alliance and wrote for Left Unity. He was also a leading figure in Iraq Occupation Focus. In 2014, he was working on a proposed biography of the writers Tom Paine and William Blake. Marqusee's partner was the barrister Liz Davies. He died in January 2015, aged 61, of multiple myeloma. "Both in the eloquence of his writing and the deep humanism of his vision, Mike Marqusee stands shoulder to shoulder with the spirits of Isaac Deutscher and Edward Said." – Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz.
January 27, 1931
Mordecai Richler, CC (January 27, 1931 – July 3, 2001) was a Canadian author, screenwriter and essayist. A leading critic called him 'the great shining star of his Canadian literary generation' and a pivotal figure in the country's history. His best known works are The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) and Barney's Version (1997); his 1989 novel Solomon Gursky Was Here was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 1990. He was also well known for the Jacob Two-Two children's stories. In addition to his fiction, Richler wrote numerous essays about the Jewish community in Canada, and about nationalism as practised by Canadian anglophones and the francophone Québécois. Arriving as immigrants in Canada when English was the country's sole official language (long before English-French bilingualism became an official federal policy), the Jewish communities in Montreal - a city in the francophone province of Québec - largely acquired English, not French, as a second language after Yiddish. This later put them at odds with some in the Québec nationalist movement, which argued for French as the official language of Québec. His Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country (1992), a collection of essays about nationalism and anti-semitism, generated considerable controversy.
January 27, 1826
Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin (27 January 1826 – 10 May 1889), was a major Russian satirist of the 19th century. He spent most of his life working as a civil servant in various capacities. After the death of poet Nikolay Nekrasov, he acted as editor of the well-known Russian magazine, Otechestvenniye Zapiski, until it was banned by the government in 1884. His best known work is the novel The Golovlyov Family (1876).
January 27, 1949
Pat Shipman (born January 27, 1949, Scarsdale, NY) is an anthropologist and a retired adjunct professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of several books, including The Animal Connection, The Man Who Found the Missing Link, and Taking Wing, which won the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
January 27, 1832
Lewis Carroll is the pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898). He wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for the amusement of 11-year-old Alice Liddell and her two sisters, who were the daughters of the dean of Christ Church College, Oxford, where Dodgson taught mathematics. The book was published in 1865, and its first companion volume, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, followed in 1871.
January 28, 1959
Leora Auslander is Professor of History and Founding Director of the Center of Gender Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author OF TASTE AND POWER: FURNISHING MODERN FRANCE (UC Press).
January 28, 1834
Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould (28 January 1834 – 2 January 1924) of Lew Trenchard in Devon, England, was an Anglican priest, hagiographer, antiquarian, novelist and eclectic scholar. His bibliography consists of more than 1240 publications, though this list continues to grow. His family home, the manor house of Lew Trenchard, near Okehampton, Devon, has been preserved as he had it rebuilt and is now a hotel. He is remembered particularly as a writer of hymns, the best-known being "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and "Now the Day Is Over". He also translated the carol "Gabriel's Message" from the Basque language to the English.
January 28, 1940
Miguel Angel Barnet Lanza (born January 28, 1940) is a Cuban writer, novelist and ethnographer. He studied sociology at the University of Havana, under Fernando Ortiz, the pioneer of Cuban anthropology, whose studies of Afro-Cuban cultures influenced many of the themes, both literary and scholarly, of Barnet.
January 28, 1962
Stella Bruzzi is Professor of Film Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London, Her previous publications include Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies (1997), New Documentary: A Critical Introduction (2000 ), and Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis (2000).
January 28, 1961
Arnaldur Indridason was born in 1961. He worked at an Icelandic newspaper, first as a journalist and then for many years as a film reviewer. He won the Glass Key Award for Best Nordic Crime Novel for both JAR CITY and SILENCE OF THE GRAVE, and in 2005 SILENCE OF THE GRAVE also won the CWA Gold Dagger Award for best crime novel of the year. (The film of JAR CITY, now available on DVD, was Iceland’s entry for the 2008 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.) Indridason lives in Iceland, and his next novel in the series is forthcoming soon from Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Minotaur.
January 28, 1873
Colette (28 January 1873 – 3 August 1954) was the surname of the French novelist and performer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. She is best known for her novel Gigi, the basis for the film and Lerner and Loewe stage production of the same title. Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. She was also a mime, an actress and a journalist.
January 28, 1893
Josep Vicenç Foix i Mas (Barcelona, 28 January 1893 - 29 January 1987) was a Catalan poet, writer, and essayist. He usually signed his work by using the abbreviation J.V. Foix. Born in Sarrià (nowadays a neighbourhood in Barcelona), Foix was a son of one of the best-known bakers in the whole city. He started his studies of Law, but left them after the second course at university. From then, he worked in the familiar business as well as he read classic masterpieces of literature by authors such as Lord Byron, Dante Alighieri or Charles Baudelaire. Indeed, Foix never forbade the place where he had been born, not even when the Spanish Civil War ended. Nonetheless, Foix always had been a liberal writer who introduced some avantgarde ideology in Catalonia. In 1916 began to collaborate with La Revista and started to be interested in avantgarde art. He worked among other publications like Trossos, La Cònsola (1919–1920) or La Publicitat (1923–1936), where he worked as an art director. At the end of the Spanish Civil War, Foix returned to the familiar business, and let forgotten for some time his artistic purpose. He also compiled his total poetic work, and continued helping young artist related to avanatgarde, between which Joan Brossa must be named. On 25 May 1962, he became member of Institut d'Estudis Catalans. His popularity went on growing, thanks to Joan Manuel Serrat and his song Es quan dormo que hi veig clar, (a version of one of Foix's poems). He received many different awards during his life. The Gold Medal of Generalitat de Catalunya (Medalla d'Or de la Generalitat de Catalunya, 1981) or the Honour Award in Catalan Letters (Premi d'Honor de les Lletres catalanes, 1984) are some of them. In 1984, the Parliament of Catalonia proposed him for the Nobel Prize in Literature. J. V. Foix helped in 1985 to found again the students association ‘Federació Nacional d'Estudiants de Catalunya’ (FNEC). He was named President de Honour of it. He died in 1987, and buried in Sarrià.
January 28, 1930
Margo Glantz (born January 28, 1930) is a Mexican writer, essayist, critic and academic. She has been a member of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua since 1995. Margo Glantz's family immigrated to Mexico from Ukraine in the 1920s. Her father, Jacobo Glantz, met her mother, Elizabeth (Lucia) Shapiro in Odessa, where they married. They tried to emigrate to the United States of America, where they had relatives, but were denied entry and had to remain in Mexico. Although they stayed faithful to Jewish traditions, they soon moved in Mexican artistic circles. Her father was a friend of Diego Rivera, and had great interest in the new cultural currents of his new adoptive country. For many reasons, the family (including four daughters) had to move quite often. As a result, Margo went to several schools. She spent two years in the Secondary School No. 15, a year in the Israelite School of Mexico, and earned her baccalaureate in the National Preparatory School Number 1, the old school of San Ildefonso, where she was strongly influenced by one of her teachers, Agustín Yáñez. From 1947 to 1953, Margo Glantz studied English and Spanish Literature, as well as Art history, majoring in Theater History at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Here she had many outstanding professors, among them writers and philosophers such as Alfonso Reyes, Julio Torri, Rodolfo Usigli, Samuel Ramos and Leopoldo Zea. In 1953 she left for Europe, where she earned her doctorate in Hispanic Literature at the Sorbonne. It was there where she presented her thesis on 'The French Exoticism in Mexico (From 1847 to 1867)'. On her return to Mexico, she became a teacher in the Department of Theater History in the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature. In 1959 her first daughter, Alina, was born. After a journey to Cuba in 1961, she started to teach a course in Mexican Literature at the National Preparatory School Number 1, as well as courses in Universal Literature and of Mexican Literature at the Preparatory No. 5. In the same year she started to teach at the University Center of Theatre, at the School of Theater and Fine arts of the UNAM, and at the Center of Classic Theater of the 'Casa del Lago' (Lake House). During these years she published several essays and theater reviews in a variety of cultural magazines and handouts. In 1966 she became a permanent, full-time Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, specifically in Hispanic Literature and Comparative Literature. She founded and directed the university magazine Punto de Partida. She was also the director of the Israel-Mexico Cultural Institute until 1969. In 1971 her daughter Renata was born. In the same year she set out for the United States of America, where she taught classes at Montclair State College in New Jersey. She published Onda y escritura en Mexico (Wave and writing in Mexico), Jovenes de 20 a 33, which gave name to a wave of emerging literature in the 60s, the 'Onda' (the Wave). She returned to Mexico in 1974, where she rejoined the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, teaching courses in Latin American and Mexican Literature. In 1978 she edited her first fictional book, Las mil y una calorias, novela dietética (A Thousand and One Calories: A Dietetic Novel), which inspired a great number of other books in the field of creation and criticism. In 1981 she dedicated her autobiographic work, Las genealogias, to her father, who died one year later. In 1983 she was named Director of Literature at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA), where she promoted and directed a number of publications. A year later she obtained the 'Premio Xavier Villaurrutia' (The Xavier Villaurrutia Award) for her work Síndrome de Naufragios. In 1986 she set out for England, where she worked as a Cultural Associate in the Mexican Embassy in London, until 1988. That same year she returned to Mexico, and since has led courses at the Faculty of Philosophy and in numerous universities overseas. In 1989 she was named Member of the National System of Researchers. In 1991 she obtained the National University Prize and again in 1994 she was given the title of Emeritus Professor, both by UNAM. Likewise, the University of Princeton has since awarded her the nomination of Honorary Emeritus Creator of the National System of Creators, as well as the Council of Humanities Fellow. In 1995 she was elected to be a member of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua (Mexican Language Academy). In 2004 she was awarded the 'Premio Nacional, campo I, Área de Lingüística y Literatura' (National Prize, field 1, Are of Linguistics and Literature). That same year she was granted the distinction of Emeritus Investigator of the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (National System of Investigators). A year later, in 2005, she was honored with the Doctorate Honoris Causa by the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana and with her nomination as an Emeritus Honorary Creator of the National System of Creators. In 2006 a web page was published about her, which was coordinated by Beatriz Aracil Varón, in the Virtual Library Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, of Alicante University.
January 28, 1977
Andrés Neuman was born in 1977 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and grew up in Spain. He has a degree in Spanish philology from the University of Granada. Neuman was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists and was elected to the Bogotá-39 list. TRAVELER OF THE CENTURY was the winner of the Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize, Spain’s two most prestigious literary awards.
January 28,1922
Imil (Emile) Shukri Habiby (28 January 1922 – 2 May 1996) was a Palestinian and Israeli Arab writer of Arabic expression and a communist politician, son of a Christian family. Habibi was born in Haifa on 29 August 1922, into an Anglican Palestinian Arab family. His family had originally belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem but converted to Anglicanism due to disputes within the Orthodox church. In his early life, he worked on an oil refinery and later was a radio announcer. Under the Mandate he became one of the leaders of the Palestine Communist Party. When the 1948 Arab-Israeli War began, he stayed in Haifa while many others chose or were forced to leave the country by the Israeli Army. Having stayed in Haifa, however, Habibi was eventually granted Israeli citizenship. After the war, he helped to create the Israeli Communist Party and established the communist paper Al-Ittihad. In 1956 he moved from Haifa to Nazareth and stayed there for the rest of his life. He died in 1996 in Nazareth and was buried according to his request in Haifa . His gravestone reads (at Habibi's own request): 'Emile Habibi – Remained in Haifa.' Habibi was one of the leaders of the Palestine Communist Party during the Mandate era. He supported the 1947 UN Partition Plan. When Israel became a state he helped form the Israeli Communist Party (Maki). He served in the Knesset between 1951 and 1959, and again from 1961 until 1972, first as a member of Maki, before breaking away from the party with Tawfik Toubi and Meir Vilner to found Rakah. In 1991, after a conflict about how the party should deal with the new policies of Mikhail Gorbachev, he left the party. Habibi began writing short stories in the 1950s, and his first story, 'The Mandelbaum Gate' was published in 1954. In 1972 he resigned from the Knesset in order to write his first novel: The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist, which became a classic in modern Arabic literature. The book depicts the life of an Palestinian, employing black humour and satire. It was based on the traditional anti-hero Said in Arab literature. In a playful way it deals with how it is for Arabs to live in the state of Israel, and how one who has nothing to do with politics is drawn in to it. He followed this by other books, short stories and a play. His last novel, published in 1992, was Saraya, the Ogre's Daughter. In it he has a character state: 'There is no difference between Christian and Muslim: we are all Palestinian in our predicament.' In 1990, Habibi received the Al-Quds Prize from the PLO. In 1992, he received the Israel Prize for Arabic literature. His willingness to accept both reflected his belief in coexistence. Though after accepting the Israel Prize a debate set off among the Arabic intellectual community. Habibi was accused of legitimizing the Israeli 'anti-Arab' policy. Habibi replied to the accusations: 'A dialogue of prizes is better than a dialogue of stones and bullets,' he said. 'It is indirect recognition of the Arabs in Israel as a nation. This is recognition of a national culture. It will help the Arab population in its struggle to strike roots in the land and win equal rights'
January 28, 1941
Richard Hoyt, a graduate of the University of Oregon, is a former fellow of the Washington Journalism Center and holds a Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Hawaii. He served as U.S. army counterintelligence agent, wrote for daily newspapers in Honolulu, and was a stringer for Newsweek magazine. He taught journalism at the University of Maryland and at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, OR. Hoyt is the author of the John Denson mysteries, the James Burlane thrillers and numerous other novels of adventure, espionage and suspense including two under the pseudonym of Nicholas van Pelt. In researching and writing in more than two dozen countries in Europe, Latin America, and Asia, he has ridden trains across the Soviet Union and riverboats down the Amazon. He now lives in Vancouver, Washington.
January 28, 1936
Ismail Kadare (born 28 January 1936) is a best-selling Albanian writer. He is known for his novels, although he was first noticed for his poetry collections. He has been a leading literary figure in his own country since the 1960s. In the 1960s he focused on short stories until the publication of his first novel, The General of the Dead Army. In 1996 he became a lifetime member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of France. In 1992, he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca; in 2005, he won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize and in 2009 the Prince of Asturias Award of Arts. He has divided his time between Albania and France since 1990. Kadare has been mentioned as a possible recipient for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. He began writing very young, in the mid-1950s. His works have been published in about thirty languages.
January 28, 1935
David John Lodge is an English author and literary critic. A professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham until 1987, he is known for novels satirising academic life, notably the "Campus Trilogy" – Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses, Small World: An Academic Romance, and Nice Work.
January 28, 1887
Edmund Carroll Jaeger, D.Sc.,(January 28, 1887 – August 2, 1983) was an American biologist known for his works on desert ecology. He was born in Loup City, Nebraska to Katherine (née Gunther) and John Philip Jaeger,and moved to Riverside, California in 1906 with his family. He was the first to document, in The Condor, a state of extended torpor, approaching hibernation, in a bird, the common poorwill. He also described this in the National Geographic Magazine.
January 28, 1977
Carlos Labbé (born January 28, 1977) is a Chilean fiction writer born at Santiago de Chile. He graduated in Latin American and Spanish Literature, his dissertation was about Juan Carlos Onetti. Later he obtained a Master's degree in Latin American and Spanish Literature with a dissertation on Roberto Bolaño. He has published a hypertext novel, Pentagonal: incluidos tú y yo (2001), the novels Libro de plumas (2004), Navidad y Matanza (2007), Locuela (2009), and Piezas secretas contra el mundo (2014), plus the collection of short stories Caracteres blancos (2010), as well as the pop music records Doce canciones para Eleodora (2007), Monicacofonía (2008) and Mi nuevo órgano (2011), as well as the ambient music collection Repeticiones para romper el cerco (2013). He co-wrote the screenplays for the films Malta con huevo (2007) and El nombre (2015). In the past he was a member of the bands Ex Fiesta and Tornasólidos, and is now a literary critic and editor. He is married to the Chilean author es:Mónica Ríos. Carlos Labbé is one of Granta's "Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists, and is the author of a collection of short stories and six novels, one of which, Navidad & Matanza, is available in English from Open Letter. In addition to his writings, he is a musician, and has released three albums. Will Vanderhyden received an MA in literary translation from the University of Rochester.
January 28, 1984
Andre Tyler Iguodala, born January 28, 1984) is an American professional basketball player for the Memphis Grizzlies of the National Basketball Association (NBA). The swingman was an NBA All-Star in 2012 and has been named to the NBA All-Defensive Team twice. He won three NBA championships with the Golden State Warriors, and was named the NBA Finals Most Valuable Player (MVP) in 2015. He was also a member of the United States national team at the 2010 FIBA World Championship and 2012 Summer Olympics, winning the gold medal both times. Iguodala played college basketball with the Arizona Wildcats. After earning first-team all-conference honors in the Pac-10 (known now as the Pac-12) as a sophomore in 2004, he was selected in the 2004 NBA draft with the ninth overall pick by the Philadelphia 76ers. Iguodala played for Philadelphia until the summer of 2012, when he joined the Denver Nuggets in a four-team trade. He was acquired by Golden State in 2013. In 2014–15, he became a reserve for the first time in his career, but captured the Finals MVP after returning to the starting lineup in the middle of the championship series.
January 28, 1869
Virgilio Dávila (January 28, 1869 – August 22, 1943), was a Puerto Rican poet from the modern literary era, educator, politician and businessman. Dávila was born in the town of Toa Baja. he was influenced by the literary collection of his parents, both of whom were teachers, at an early age. He attended private schools where he received both his primary and secondary education. Dávila earned his bachelor's degree from the Civil Institute of Higher Learning in 1895. He taught school in the town of Gurabo. Dávila and his wife had a son on October 7, 1898, José Antonio Dávila, in the City of Bayamón, who would one day take after his father and become a poet himself. His experiences as a teacher and in agriculture later reflected in his poetry. In 1903, Dávila published his first book of poems "Patria". In this book he included poems which he wrote about Jose de Diego, Federico Degetau and Lola Rodríguez de Tió. He also included poems about the island and love in general. In 1904, Dávila became director of the weekly publication "Chantelier", which he co-founded with Braulio Dueño Colón.
January 28, 1853
José Julián Martí Pérez (January 28, 1853 – May 19, 1895) is a Cuban national hero and an important figure in Latin American literature. In his short life, he was a poet, an essayist, a journalist, a revolutionary philosopher, a translator, a professor, a publisher, and a political theorist. Through his writings and political activity, he became a symbol for Cuba's bid for independence against Spain in the 19th century, and is referred to as the 'Apostle of Cuban Independence.' He also wrote about the threat of Spanish and US expansionism into Cuba. From adolescence, he dedicated his life to the promotion of liberty, political independence for Cuba, and intellectual independence for all Spanish Americans; his death was used as a cry for Cuban independence from Spain by both the Cuban revolutionaries and those Cubans previously reluctant to start a revolt. Born in Havana, Martí began his political activism at an early age. He would travel extensively in Spain, Latin America, and the United States, raising awareness and support for the cause of Cuban independence. His unification of the Cuban émigré community, particularly in Florida, was crucial to the success of the Cuban War of Independence against Spain. He was a key figure in the planning and execution of this war, as well as the designer of the Cuban Revolutionary Party and its ideology. He died in military action during the Battle of Dos Ríos on May 19, 1895. Martí is considered one of the great turn-of-the-century Latin American intellectuals. His written works consist of a series of poems, essays, letters, lectures, a novel, and even a children's magazine. He wrote for numerous Latin American and American newspapers; he also founded a number of newspapers himself. His newspaper Patria was a key instrument in his campaign for Cuban independence. After his death, one of his poems from the book, 'Versos Sencillos' (Simple Verses) was adapted to the song 'Guantanamera', which has become the definitive patriotic song of Cuba. The concepts of freedom, liberty, and democracy are prominent themes in all of his works, which were influential on the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío and the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral.
January 29, 1927
Edward Paul Abbey (January 29, 1927 – March 14, 1989) was an American author and essayist noted for his advocacy of environmental issues, criticism of public land policies, and anarchist political views. His best-known works include the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, which has been cited as an inspiration by radical environmental groups, and the non-fiction work Desert Solitaire.
January 29, 1923
Sidney Aaron 'Paddy' Chayefsky (January 29, 1923 – August 1, 1981) was an American playwright, screenwriter and novelist. He is the only person to have won three solo Academy Awards for Best Screenplay (the other three-time winners, Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, have all shared their awards with co-writers). He was considered one of the most renowned dramatists of the so-called Golden Age of Television. His intimate, realistic scripts provided a naturalistic style of television drama for the 1950s, and he was regarded as the central figure in the 'kitchen sink realism' movement of American television. Martin Gottfried wrote, 'He was a successful writer, the most successful graduate of television's slice of life school of naturalism.' Following his critically acclaimed teleplays, Chayefsky continued to succeed as a playwright and novelist. As a screenwriter, he received three Academy Awards for Marty (1955), The Hospital (1971) and Network (1976). The movie Marty was based on his own television drama about a relationship between two lonely people finding love. Network was his scathing satire of the television industry and The Hospital was also satiric. Film historian David Thomson termed The Hospital 'daring, uninhibited, and prophetic. No one else would have dreamed of doing it.' Chayefsky's early stories were notable for their dialogue, their depiction of second-generation Americans and their sentiment and humor. They were frequently influenced by the author's childhood in The Bronx. The protagonists were generally middle-class tradesmen struggling with personal problems: loneliness, pressures to conform or their own emotions. Chayefsky was part of the inaugural class of inductees into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences' Television Hall of Fame. He received this honor three years after his death, in 1984.
January 29, 1931
Gert Hofmann (29 January 1931 – 1 July 1993) was a German writer and professor of German literature. Hofmann was born in Limbach, Saxony (Germany) and died in Erding (near Munich). Hoffmann grew up in his native Limbach which, after World War II, became part of East Germany. In 1948, he moved with his family to Leipzig. There, he attended a school for translators and interpreters, studying English and Russian. In 1950, he enrolled to Leipzig University, where he studied Romance languages and Slavic languages. In 1951, he fled from the German Democratic Republic and settled in Freiburg im Breisgau, where he continued his studies. In 1957, he graduated with a thesis on Henry James. After one year as a research assistant at the University of Freiburg, he left Germany in 1961 to teach German literature in Europe and the United States: he taught at universities in Toulouse, Paris, Bristol, Edinburgh, New Haven, Berkeley and Austin. From 1971 to 1980 he lived in the southern Austrian town of Klagenfurt, while teaching at the University of Ljubljana (in former Yugoslavia, now in Slovenia). In 1980 he moved to Erding (near Munich), where he died in 1993. Hofmann began his career as a writer of radio plays, becoming a novelist later in life after his return to Germany. He became a member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung in Darmstadt in 1987. He subsequently received several literary awards during his lifetime including the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis (1979), the Alfred-Döblin-Preis (1982), the Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden (1983) and the Literaturpreis der Stadt München (1993). Die Denunziation and Veilchenfeld are concerned with The Holocaust. A number of Hofmann's works have been translated by his son, poet Michael Hofmann.
January 29, 1943
Rosemary Wells is an American writer and illustrator of children's books. She is well known for the Max & Ruby series, which follows the everyday adventures of sibling bunnies, curious three-year-old Max and bossy seven-year-old Ruby.
January 29, 1932
Roger Wilkins (January 29, 1932 – March 26, 2017) was an African-American civil rights leader, professor of history, and journalist. Wilkins worked as a welfare lawyer in Ohio before becoming an Assistant Attorney General in President Lyndon B. Johnson's administration at age 33, one of the highest-ranking blacks ever to serve in the executive branch up to that time. Leaving government in 1969 at the end of the Johnson administration, he worked briefly for the Ford Foundation before joining the editorial staff of The Washington Post. Along with Carl Bernstein, Herbert Block, and Bob Woodward, Wilkins earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for exposing the Watergate scandal that eventually forced President Richard Nixon's resignation from office.
January 29, 1909
Harold Q. Masur (January 29, 1909 New York City - September 16, 2005 Boca Raton, Florida) was an American lawyer and author of mystery novels. He graduated from the New York University School of Law in 1934 and practiced law between 1935 and 1942. Then he joined the U.S. Air Force. In the late 30s he started writing Pulp Fiction. In 1973 he was President of the Mystery Writers of America.
January 29, 1860
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904) was a Russian playwright and short story writer who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. His career as a playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theater. Chekhov practiced as a medical doctor throughout most of his literary career: Medicine is my lawful wife, he once said, and literature is my mistress. Chekhov renounced the theatre after the disastrous reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Constantin Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a theatre of mood and a submerged life in the text. Chekhov had at first written stories only for financial gain, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story. He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them. Anton Chekhov was the author of hundreds of short stories and several plays and is regarded by many as both the greatest Russian storyteller and the father of modern drama.
January 30, 1909
Saul David Alinsky (January 30, 1909 – June 12, 1972) was an American community organizer and writer. He is generally considered to be the founder of modern community organizing. He is often noted for his book Rules for Radicals. In the course of nearly four decades of political organizing, Alinsky received much criticism, but also gained praise from many public figures. His organizing skills were focused on improving the living conditions of poor communities across North America. In the 1950s, he began turning his attention to improving conditions of the African-American ghettos, beginning with Chicago's and later traveling to other ghettos in California, Michigan, New York City, and a dozen other ‘trouble spots’. His ideas were later adapted by some U.S. college students and other young organizers in the late 1960s and formed part of their strategies for organizing on campus and beyond. Time magazine once wrote that ‘American democracy is being altered by Alinsky's ideas,’ and conservative author William F. Buckley said he was ‘very close to being an organizational genius.’
January 30, 1935
Richard Gary Brautigan (January 30, 1935 – ca. September 14, 1984) was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. His work often employs black comedy, parody, and satire. He is best known for his 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America. Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington, the only child to Bernard Frederick ‘Ben’ Brautigan, Jr. (July 29, 1908 – May 27, 1994) a factory worker and laborer, and Lulu Mary ‘Mary Lou’ Keho (April 7, 1911 – September 24, 2005), a waitress. In May 1934, eight months prior to his birth, Bernard and Mary Lou separated. Brautigan said that he met his biological father only twice, though after Brautigan's death, Bernard was said to be unaware that Richard was his child, saying ‘He's got the same last name, but why would they wait 45 to 50 years to tell me I've got a son?’ In 1938, Brautigan and his mother began living with a man named Arthur Martin Titland. The couple produced a daughter named Barbara Ann, born on May 1, 1939 in Tacoma. Brautigan claimed that he had a very traumatic experience when his mother left him alone with his two-year-old sister in a motel room in Great Falls, Montana, where he did not know the whereabouts of his mother until she returned two days later. On January 20, 1943, Mary Lou married a fry cook named Robert Geoffrey Porterfield. The couple produced a daughter named Sandra Jean, born April 1, 1945 in Tacoma. Mary Lou told Brautigan that Porterfield was his biological father, and Brautigan began using Richard Gary Porterfield as his name. Mary Lou separated from Porterfield in 1946, and married William David Folston, Sr., on June 12, 1950. The couple produced a son named William David, Jr., born on December 19, 1950 in Eugene. Folston was recalled as being a violent alcoholic, whom Richard had seen subjecting his mother to domestic abuse. Brautigan was raised in poverty; he told his daughter stories of his mother sifting rat feces from their supply of flour to make flour-and-water pancakes. Because of Brautigan's impoverished childhood, he and his family found it difficult to obtain food, and on some occasions they did not eat for days. He lived with his family on welfare and moved about the Pacific Northwest for nine years before the family settled in Eugene, Oregon in August 1944. Many of Brautigan's childhood experiences were included in the poems and stories that he wrote from as early as the age of 12. His novel So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away is loosely based on childhood experiences including an incident where Brautigan accidentally shot the brother of a close friend in the ear, injuring him only slightly. On September 12, 1950, Brautigan enrolled at Eugene High School, having graduated from Woodrow Wilson Junior High School. He was a writer for his high school newspaper Eugene High School News. He also played on his school's basketball team, standing 6 feet 4 inches tall (1.93 m) by the time of his graduation. On December 19, 1952, Brautigan's first published poem, The Light, appeared in the Eugene High School newspaper. Brautigan graduated with honors from Eugene High School on June 9, 1953. Following graduation, he moved in with his best friend Peter Webster, and Peter's mother Edna Webster became Brautigan's surrogate mother. According to several accounts Brautigan stayed with Webster for about a year before leaving for San Francisco for the first time in August 1954. He returned to Oregon several times, apparently for lack of money. On December 14, 1955, Brautigan was arrested for throwing a rock through a police-station window, supposedly in order to be sent to prison and fed. He was arrested for disorderly conduct and fined $25. He was then committed to the Oregon State Hospital on December 24, 1955, after police noticed patterns of erratic behavior. At the Oregon State Hospital Brautigan was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and clinical depression, and was treated with electroconvulsive therapy twelve times. While institutionalized, he began writing The God of the Martians, a manuscript of 20 very short chapters totaling 600 words. The manuscript was sent to at least two editors but was rejected by both, and remains unpublished. (A copy of the manuscript was recently discovered with the papers of the last of these editors, Harry Hooton.) On February 19, 1956, Brautigan was released from hospital and briefly lived with his mother, stepfather, and siblings in Eugene, Oregon. He then left for San Francisco, where he would spend most of the rest of his life except for periods in Tokyo and Montana. In San Francisco Brautigan sought to establish himself as a writer. He was known for handing out his poetry on the streets and performing at poetry clubs. In early 1956 Brautigan typed a three-page manuscript and sent it to The Macmillan Company for publication. The manuscript consisted of two pages of fourteen poems and a page with the dedication ‘for Linda’. Of the poems only ‘stars’ and ‘hey’ were titled. In a letter dated May 10, 1956, Macmillan rejected the manuscript stating ‘...there is no place where it will fit in’. In 2005 the X-Ray Book Company would publish the manuscript as a chapbook titled Desire in a Bowl of Potatoes. Brautigan's first poetry book publication was The Return of the Rivers (1957), a single poem, followed by two collections of poetry: The Galilee Hitch-Hiker (1958) and Lay the Marble Tea (1959). During the 1960s Brautigan became involved in the burgeoning San Francisco counterculture scene, often appearing as a performance-poet at concerts and participating in the various activities of The Diggers. He contributed several short pieces to be used as broadsides by the Communication Company. Brautigan was also a writer for Change, an underground newspaper created by Ron Loewinsohn. In the summer of 1961, while camping in southern Idaho with his wife and daughter, Brautigan completed the novels A Confederate General From Big Sur and Trout Fishing in America. A Confederate General from Big Sur was his first published novel and met with little critical or commercial success. But when Trout Fishing in America was published in 1967, Brautigan was catapulted to international fame. Literary critics labeled him the writer most representative of the emerging countercultural youth-movement of the late 1960s, even though he was said to be contemptuous of hippies. Trout Fishing in America has sold over 4 million copies worldwide. During the 1960s Brautigan published four collections of poetry as well as another novel, In Watermelon Sugar (1968). In the spring of 1967 he was Poet-in-Residence at the California Institute of Technology. During this year, he published All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, a chapbook published by The Communication Company. It was printed in an edition of 1,500 copies and distributed for free. From 1968 to 1970 Brautigan had 23 short pieces published in Rolling Stone magazine. From late 1968 to February 1969, Brautigan recorded a spoken-word album for The Beatles' short-lived record-label, Zapple. The label was shut down by Allen Klein before the recording could be released, but it was eventually released in 1970 on Harvest Records as Listening to Richard Brautigan. In the 1970s Brautigan experimented with different literary genres. He published five novels (the first of which, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, had been written in the mid-1960s) and a collection of short stories, Revenge of the Lawn (1971). In 1974 The Cowell Press collected seven of his broadside poems into the book Seven Watermelon Suns. The limited edition of ten copies included embossed color etchings by Ellen Meske. ‘When the 1960s ended, he was the baby thrown out with the bath water,’ said his friend and fellow writer, Thomas McGuane. ‘He was a gentle, troubled, deeply odd guy.’ Generally dismissed by literary critics and increasingly abandoned by his readers, Brautigan's popularity waned throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. His work remained popular in Europe, however, as well as in Japan, where Brautigan visited several times. To his critics, Brautigan was willfully naive. Lawrence Ferlinghetti said of him, ‘As an editor I was always waiting for Richard to grow up as a writer. It seems to me he was essentially a naïf, and I don't think he cultivated that childishness, I think it came naturally. It was like he was much more in tune with the trout in America than with people.’ Brautigan's writings are characterized by a remarkable and humorous imagination. The permeation of inventive metaphors lent even his prose-works the feeling of poetry. Evident also are themes of Zen Buddhism like the duality of the past and the future and the impermanence of the present. Zen Buddhism and elements of the Japanese culture can be found in his novel Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel. Brautigan's last published work before his death was his novel So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away which was published in 1982, two years before his death. On June 8, 1957, Brautigan married Virginia Dionne Alder in Reno, Nevada. The couple had one daughter together, Ianthe Elizabeth Brautigan, born on March 25, 1960 in San Francisco. Brautigan's alcoholism and depression became increasingly abusive and Alder ended the relationship on December 24, 1962, though the divorce was not finalized until July 28, 1970. Brautigan continued to reside in San Francisco after the separation, while Alder settled in Manoa, Hawaii and became a feminist and an anti-Vietnam War activist. Brautigan remarried on December 1, 1977, to the Japanese-born Akiko Yoshimura whom he met in July 1976 while living in Tokyo, Japan. The couple settled in Pine Creek, Park County, Montana for two years; Brautigan and Yoshimura were divorced in 1980. Brautigan had a relationship with a San Francisco woman named Marcia Clay from 1981 to 1982. He also pursued a brief relationship with Janice Meissner, a woman from the North Beach community of San Francisco. Other relationships were with Marcia Pacaud, who appears on the cover of The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster; Valerie Estes, who appears on the cover of Listening to Richard Brautigan; and Sherry Vetter, who appears on the cover of Revenge of the Lawn. Brautigan was an alcoholic throughout his adult life and suffered years of despair; according to his daughter, he often mentioned suicide over a period of more than a decade before ending his life. In 1984, at age 49, Richard Brautigan had recently moved to Bolinas, California, where he was living alone in a large, old house. He died of a self-inflicted .44 Magnum gunshot wound to the head. The exact date of his death is unknown, and his decomposed body was found by Robert Yench, a private investigator, on October 25, 1984. The body was found on the living room floor, in front of a large window that looked out over the Pacific Ocean. It is speculated that Brautigan may have ended his life over a month earlier, on September 14, 1984, after talking to former girlfriend Marcia Clay on the telephone. Brautigan was survived by his parents, both ex-wives, and his daughter Ianthe. He has one grandchild named Elizabeth, who was born about two years after his death. According to Michael Caines, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, the story that Brautigan left a suicide note that simply read: ‘Messy, isn't it?’ is apocryphal. Ianthe Brautigan has confirmed that her father did not leave such a message. Brautigan once wrote, ‘All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds.’
January 30, 1901
HANS ERICH NOSSACK (1901-77) was a prolific writer. His books THE D’ARTHEZ CASE, TO THE UNKNOWN HERO, THE IMPOSSIBLE PROOF, WAIT FOR NOVEMBER, and AN OFFERING FOR THE DEAD have been translated into English. JOEL AGEE has translated numerous German authors into English, including Rainer Maria Rilke, Friedrich Durrenmatt, and Elias Canetti. He is also the author of two memoirs, TWELVE YEARS: AN AMERICAN BOYHOOD IN EAST GERMANY and IN THE HOUSE OF MY FEAR.
January 30, 1945
Michael Anthony Dorris (January 30, 1945 – April 10, 1997) was an American novelist and scholar who was the first Chair of the Native American Studies program at Dartmouth. His works include the memoir, The Broken Cord (1989) and the novel, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987). He was married to author Louise Erdrich and the two frequently collaborated in their writing. He committed suicide in 1997 while police were investigating allegations that he had abused his daughters. The Broken Cord, which won the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction, helped provoke Congress to approve legislation to warn of the dangers of drinking alcohol during pregnancy.
January 30, 1931
Shirley Hazzard (born 30 January 1931) is an Australian author of fiction and non-fiction. She was born in Australia, but holds citizenship of the United Kingdom and the United States. Her 1970 novel, The Bay of Noon, was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010 and her 2003 novel The Great Fire won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
January 30, 1950
Bruce Elliott Johansen is an American academic and author. He is the Frederick W. Kayser Professor of Communication at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and is the author or editor of many books and articles, notably on environmental and Native American issues.
January 30, 1928
Andrew Salkey (30 January 1928 – 28 April 1995) was a novelist, poet, children's books writer and journalist of Jamaican and Haitian origin. He was born in Panama but raised in Jamaica, moving to Britain in the 1950s to pursue university education. A prolific writer and editor, he was the author of more than 30 books in the course of his career, including novels for adults and for children, poetry collections, anthologies, travelogues and essays. He died in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he had been teaching since the 1970s, holding a lifetime position as Writer-In-Residence at Hampshire College. He was born as Felix Andrew Alexander Salkey in Colón, Panama, to Jamaican parents, Andrew Alexander Salkey, a businessman, and Linda Marshall Salkey. When two years old, Salkey was sent to Jamaica, where he was raised by his grandmother and his mother, who worked there as a teacher, while his father continued to work in Panama. Salkey was educated at St George's College, in Kingston, and at Munro College, in St. Elizabeth, before going to England in the early 1950s to attend the University of London. According to Stuart Hall, Salkey 'quickly took his place at the centre of a small but outstanding circle of Caribbean writers and intellectuals. For a critical period he was the key figure, the main presenter and writer-in-residence in the Caribbean section of the BBC World Service at Bush House, London, and his programmes became a glittering showcase for a generation of writers, including Sam Selvon and George Lamming, who had made London their second home. Established and aspiring authors were chivvied, cajoled, gently chastised, inspired and schooled to produce new work for radio on the Caribbean Voices programme over which Andrew Salkey often presided.' After reading V. S. Naipaul's his first story Salkey encouraged him to continue writing. At the BBC, he also helped write the production My People and Your People with D. G. Bridson, a radio play about a love affair between a West Indian migrant and a Scottish skiffle player. Salkey was a part of the West Indian Students Union (WISU), which provided an effective forum for Caribbean students to express their ideas and provided voluntary support to the 'harassed' working-class Caribbean immigrant community, during the 1960s, '70s and '80s. The association also included Gerry Burton, Arif Ali, Chris LeMaitre, John La Rose and Horace Lashley. In the mid-1950s Salkey taught English at Walworth Secondary School (also known as Mina Road school), an early comprehensive just off the Old Kent Road in South-east London. His first novel, A Quality of Violence – set around 1900 in a remote area of Jamaica, and narrated in a Jamaican patois – was published in 1959, and his second, Escape to An Autumn Pavement, in 1960. That same year Salkey edited one of the first anthologies of Caribbean short stories, West Indian Stories, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of folklore and popular culture. His novels that followed were The Late Emancipation of Jerry Stover (1968), The Adventures of Catullus Kelly (1969) and Come Home, Malcolm Heartland (1976). He was a prolific writer and subsequently published several books for children, poetry, travelogues, books that drew on folk traditions, including Anancy's Score (1973), as well as editing anthologies including Breaklight (1971). In 1966 he co-founded with John La Rose and Kamau Brathwaite the Caribbean Artists Movement, as a platform for Caribbean artists, writers, actors and musicians. In the latter part of his life he was a professor of creative writing at Hampshire College in Amherst, where he went in 1976. Salkey was good friends with Austin Clarke, and the two had a long written correspondence, a great deal of which is available in Clarke's files at the McMaster University Archives in Hamilton, Ontario. 'I was headed nowhere like a hundred million others: I had escaped a malformed Jamaican middle class; I had attained my autumn pavement; I had done more than my fair share of hurting, rejecting, and condemning; and I had created another kind of failure, and this time, in another country.' (From Escape To An Autumn Pavement). Salkey was a director and constant supporter of the London-based publishing company Bogle-L'Ouverture founded by Guyanese-born Jessica Huntley, who (together with a committee comprising Louis James, John La Rose, Marc Matthews, Mervyn Morris, Jason Salkey, Anne Walmsley and Ronald Warwick) organised on 19–20 June 1992 a two-day symposium and celebration called 'Salkey's Score'. Held at the Commonwealth Institute, it paid tribute to Salkey in respect of his work in London in the 1960s and 1970s with the Caribbean Artists Movement; his journalism on the BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices; his contributions to developing the teaching of Caribbean writing in schools; the importance he gave to the relationship of Africa to personal and communal Caribbean identity; his work in Cuba; and his prolific output of novels, poetry and other writings.
January 30, 1929
Alexandr Kliment (January 30, 1929 – March 22, 2017) was a Czech writer, poet and playwright. He was a signatory of Charter 77 in 1977. In 1967, Kliment participated in a congress of the writers' union, which included Václav Havel, Ivan Klíma, Ludvík Vaculík, and photographer Old?ich Škácha. The writers' congress, which took place during a period of liberalism in Czechoslovakia, is considered to be a predecessor of the Prague Spring in 1968. He later joined with Havel and other Czechoslovak dissidents to sign the Charter 77. Kliment died on March 21, 2017, at the age of 88.
January 30, 1940
Pat McNees Mancini was born on January 30, 1940, in Riverside, CA, the daughter of Glenn Harold (an ironworker) and Eleanor (a bank teller; maiden name, McCoskrie). She worked at Harper & Row, New York, NY, as an assistant editor from 1963-66; Fawcett Publications, New York, NY, editor of "Fawcett Premier Books," 1966-70; freelance editor and writer, 1970—; Resource Planning Associates, Washington, DC, editorial associate, 1979-80; currently consultant in writing, editing, and public relations. Editor and rewriter for various New York City publishers, Washington, DC consulting firms, particularly those specializing in energy and economics, and for think tanks. Mancini is a member of American Society of Journalists and Authors, Association of Personal Historians, Authors Guild, PEN, Washington Independent Writers, Society of Professional Journalists, Society of Technical Communicators, Women's National Book Association.
January 30, 1928
Carmen Naranjo Coto (January 30, 1928 – January 4, 2012) was a Costa Rican novelist, poet and essayist. Naranjo was born in Cartago, the capital city of the Cartago Province. She received her primary education there at the Escuela República de Perú and her secondary at the Colegio Superior de Señoritas. She received her licenciatura in Philology from the University of Costa Rica and pursued post-graduate studies at the Universidad Autónoma de México and the University of Iowa. Naranjo served as Costa Rica's ambassador to Israel in the 1970s and also as the country's minister of culture. She was the author of the Costa Rican system of social security. She was inducted into La Galería de las Mujeres de Costa Rica (The Women's Gallery of Costa Rica) in 2005. Naranjo wrote multiple books, including poetry, novels, storybooks, and essays. Her novels and stories have had much success, such as her first novel Los perros no ladraron (1966); however, Naranjo is also known for her poetry, such as La canción de la ternura (1964) and Hacia tu isla (1966). After Naranjo returned to Costa Rica in 1964, having worked for United Nations in Venezuela, her literary career began to take off. She enrolled in a writer's workshop, led by Lilia Ramos (Costa Rican essayist), she began reading work by Latin American authors such as Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, Jorge Luis Borges, and Octavio Paz, and she published her first volumes of poetry, Hacia tu isla (1966) and Misa a oscuras (1964). She published her first novel, Los perros no ladraron in 1966, and in 1968, two more followed: Memorias de un hombre de palabra and Camino al mediodía. The success she had from her first three novels opened an international opportunity for her career and literary reputation. Upon accepting an invitation to the University of Iowa in the United States, Naranjo spent a year in 1969 in the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she completed her next novel, Diario de una multitud (published in 1974). In 1970, after much success with Camino al mediodía, which won second place in The Central American and Panama Flower Games (Los Juegos Florales Centroamericanos y de Panamá), she began to teach workshops (writing classes), and as a direct result of these classes, Naranjo was inspired to write her next notable novel, Responso Por El Niño Juan Manuel (1970). DR. LINDA BRITT is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Maine at Farmington. She has published critical studies on Cervantes and Garcia Lorca as well as on Carmen Naranjo.
January 30, 1924
Margaret Beda Nicholson (née Larminie; 30 January 1924 – 17 November 2012), known professionally as Margaret Yorke, was an English crime fiction writer.
January 30, 1924
Tuvia Ruebner was born into a semi-secular, German-speaking Jewish family (his father was a member of the Freemasons) in Bratislava, Slovakia in 1924. He completed only nine years of school: five in a Protestant elementary school, three in a German gymnasium and one in a Slovakian high school. After Jews were forbidden to attend school, he worked as an apprentice electrician. Ruebner immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1941, eventually settling in Kibbutz Merhavia; he continued to write in German for more than a decade, and published his first (of fifteen) poetry books in Hebrew in 1957. Ruebner lost his family in the Holocaust, and later lost his wife and son to what are usually considered individual, unhistorical tragedies: his first wife was killed in a car accident and his son disappeared in South America while travelling. All these losses surface and re-surface in his poetry. Ruebner does not express a sense of belonging to the Israeli state as such, nor to the way Judaism currently manifests itself in Israel, but rather to the art of poetry. After the publication of a selection of his poems culled from nearly fifty years of writing (1957–2005), Ruebner told the newspaper Haaretz: ‘I love the landscape of Israel, but inside I am connected more to the landscape of the Carpathians. [Israeli poet] Lea Goldberg wrote that there are two homelands [the one in which we are born and the one we choose]. I feel that I have two ‘no-homelands’. I was uprooted twice. A person can have only one homeland: the place where he was born. Slovakia spewed me out and what is happening in Israel today has uprooted me again [ . . . ] Zionist ideology saved my life in 1941, but that is not the point. I am here because I am here. Poetry became my homeland.’ The author also of an autobiography and a book of stunning photographs taken in Israel, Europe, Nepal and other places, Ruebner is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Haifa University. He is also a translator – of S.J. Agnon from Hebrew into German and of Goethe, Ludwig Strauss and Friedrich Schlegel from German into Hebrew. In Israel, Ruebner has been awarded the Anne Frank Prize, the Jerusalem Prize, the Israel Prime Minister’s Prize for Literature (twice) and the prestigious Israel Prize (2008); abroad, he has received the D. Steinberg Prize (Zurich, 1981), the Christian Wagner Prize (Germany, 1994), the Jeannette Schocken Prize (Germany, 1999), the Paul Celan Translation Prize (1999), the Jan Smrek Prize (Slovakia) and the Theodor Kramer Prize (Austria 2008). RACHEL TZVIA BACK is a poet, translator, and professor of literature at Oranim College.
January 30, 1925
Jack Spicer (January 30, 1925, Los Angeles, CA - August 17, 1965, San Francisco, CA) was a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, closely associated with the poets Robert Duncan, Richard Brautigan, and Robin Blaser. According to Edward Foster’s JACK SPICER, he ‘was among the most influential poets of his generation. Thousands of poems and books were written under his tutelage and criticism.’ Spicer’s ‘Vancouver Lectures are considered a seminal work in the development of postmodern American literature. His early poems are collected in One Night Stand and Other Poems, and his later ones in The Collected Books of Jack Spicer.
January 31, 1966
Roslyn Carrington (born January 31, 1966, Santa Cruz, Trinidad and Tobago) is a Trinidadian who has traveled extensively, but chooses to live and work on her native island. For three years, she wrote a popular weekly opinion column in Trinidad and Tobago's most established newspaper, "The Guardian. In addition to "A Thirst for Rain, Every Bitter Thing Sweet, and "Candy Don't Come in Gray, she has written a collection of short stories titled "Sex and Obeah.
January 31, 1915
Alan Lomax (January 31, 1915 – July 19, 2002) was an American ethnomusicologist, best known for his numerous field recordings of folk music of the 20th century. He was also a musician himself, as well as a folklorist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and filmmaker. Lomax produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the US and in England, which played an important role in preserving folk music traditions in both countries, and helped start both the American and British folk revivals of the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s. He collected material first with his father, folklorist and collector John A. Lomax, and later alone and with others, Lomax recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Song, of which he was the director, at the Library of Congress on aluminum and acetate discs. After 1942, when Congress cut off the Library of Congress's funding for folk song collecting, Lomax continued to collect independently in Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain, as well as the United States, using the latest recording technology, assembling an enormous collection of American and international culture. In March 2004 the material captured and produced without Library of Congress funding was acquired by the Library, which 'brings the entire seventy years of Alan Lomax's work together under one roof at the Library of Congress, where it has found a permanent home.' With the start of the Cold War, Lomax continued to speak out for a public role for folklore, even as academic folklorists turned inward. He devoted much of the latter part of his life to advocating what he called Cultural Equity, which he sought to put on a solid theoretical foundation through to his Cantometrics research (which included a prototype Cantometrics-based educational program, the Global Jukebox). In the 1970s and 1980s Lomax advised the Smithsonian Institution's Folklife Festival and produced a series of films about folk music, American Patchwork, which aired on PBS in 1991. In his late seventies, Lomax completed a long-deferred memoir, The Land Where the Blues Began (1995), linking the birth of the blues to debt peonage, segregation, and forced labor in the American South. Lomax's greatest legacy is in preserving and publishing recordings of musicians in many folk and blues traditions around the US and Europe. Among the artists Lomax is credited with discovering and bringing to a wider audience include blues guitarist Robert Johnson, protest singer Woody Guthrie, folk artist Pete Seeger, country musician Burl Ives, and country blues singer Lead Belly, among many others. Lawrence Gushee is Professor Emeritus at the School of Music, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
January 31, 1960
Grant Morrison (born 31 January 1960) is a Scottish comic book writer, and playwright. He is known for his nonlinear narratives and countercultural leanings in his runs on titles including DC Comics's Animal Man, Batman, JLA, Action Comics, All-Star Superman, Vertigo's The Invisibles, and Fleetway's 2000 AD. He is also the co-creator of the Syfy TV series Happy! starring Christopher Meloni and Patton Oswalt.
January 31, 1935
Kenzabur? ?e (born January 31, 1935) is a Japanese author and a major figure in contemporary Japanese literature. His works, strongly influenced by French and American literature and literary theory, deal with political, social and philosophical issues including nuclear weapons, nuclear power, social non-conformism and existentialism. ?e was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994 for creating 'an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today'.
January 31, 1905
John Henry O'Hara (January 31, 1905 – April 11, 1970) was an American writer who earned his early literary reputation for short stories and later became a best-selling novelist before the age of 30 with Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8. His work stands out among that of contemporaries for its unvarnished realism.
January 31, 1933
David Goldstein (1933-1987) was born in London on 31 January 1933, the youngest of five children, three sons and two daughters. His parents owned a drapery shop in Hackney. In 1939, when he was six years old, the family home was bombed and David, together with one of his brothers, was evacuated to the country. When he returned to London David went to the Hackney Downs School where he distinguished himself in French, Latin and Greek but showed as yet no special interest in Hebrew or Hebrew literature. As an undergraduate at Oxford he had joined a group which called itself ‘The Makers' and held regular meetings where poetry and short stories were read. In 1956 David took his M.A. and prepared himself to become an English teacher. His life and career seemed settled. Then, in the course of the year, he met the distinguished Talmudic scholar Abraham Spiro who persuaded him that a Jew as deeply committed and as sensitive to literature should extend his interest from English to Hebrew, and help make other members of his community aware of their own heritage. In 1966 he published Hebrew Poems from Spain, a book that established his reputation as a scholar and translator of medieval Jewish literature; revised and expanded, it was reprinted in 1971 under the title The Jewish Poets of Spain 900-1250. David once said that this was the work which gave him most satisfaction and pleasure since it had not only allowed him to explore the literature he loved, but also to use his own poetic gifts and sensibilities.
January 31, 1938
Khairy Shalaby (1938-2011) was born in Kafr al-Shaykh in Egypt's Nile Delta. He wrote seventy books, including novels, short stories, historical tales, and critical studies. His novel The Lodging House was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2003, and was published in English translation by the AUC Press in 2006. Michael Cooperson is professor of Arabic language and literature at the University of California, Los Angeles.
January 31, 1925
Charles Eliot Silberman (January 31, 1925, De Moines, Iowa – February 5, 2011) was an American journalist and author. He was the author of Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice (1978), a study of crime and the American criminal justice system. Silberman's book Crisis in the Classroom: The Remaking of American Education is regarded as one of the leading investigations into and critiques of the performance of the American educational system and has been praised for its scope and insight. He was also the author of Crisis in Black and White and A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today.
February 1, 1902
Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was born in Joplin, Missouri, and grew up in Kansas, Illinois, and Ohio. He moved to New York City when he was 19 years old to attend Columbia University. He was one of the most versatile writers of the artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Though known primarily as a poet, Hughes also wrote plays, essays, novels, and a series of short stories that featured a black Everyman named Jesse B. Semple. His writing is characterized by simplicity and realism and, as he once said, ‘people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten.’
February 1, 1907
Günter Eich (1 February 1907 – 20 December 1972) was a German lyricist, dramatist, and author. He was born in Lebus, on the Oder River, and educated in Leipzig, Berlin, and Paris. His collected works were published in four volumes in 1991. Eich received numerous literary prizes after World War II, including one from the literary association of which he was a member, Gruppe 47, in 1950. In 1953, he won the Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden for his radio play Die Andere und ich (The Other and I). Eich also won the Georg-Büchner-Preis in 1959 and the Schiller-Gedächtnispreis in 1968.
February 1, 1937
Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., (February 1, 1937 – July 11, 2016) educator, musician, scholar and champion of black music research died in Chicago on Monday, July 11, after an extended illness. Dr. Floyd was born in Tallahassee, Florida, on February 1, 1937. He received his bachelor’s degree from Florida A & M University and later earned a masters (1965) and Ph.D. (1969) from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He began his music career as a high school band director in Florida before returning to Florida A & M to serve as Instructor and Assistant Band Director under legendary band director William Pat Foster. In 1964 he joined the faculty at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, and in 1978, he began a faculty position as Professor of Music at Fisk University, where he founded and served as Director of the Institute for Research in Black American Music. In 1983 he moved to Columbia College Chicago to found the Center for Black Music Research (CBMR), which became an internationally respected research center under his leadership. Critical to the creation of the CBMR was the establishment of the CBMR Library and Archives, which has grown to be one of the most comprehensive collections of music, recordings, and research materials devoted to black music. At Columbia College, Dr. Floyd also served as Academic Dean from 1990 to 1993 and as Interim Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost during 1999–2001. He retired as Director Emeritus of the CBMR in 2002.
February 1, 1907
John Edwin Canaday (February 1, 1907 – July 19, 1985) was a leading American art critic, author and art historian. John Canaday was born in Fort Scott, Kansas to Franklin and Agnes F. (Musson) Canaday. His family moved to Dallas when Canaday was seven and later moved to San Antonio, where he attended Main Avenue High School. Canaday entered the University of Texas in 1924 and earned a B.A. degree in French and English literature in 1929. He subsequently studied painting and art history at Yale University, where he received an M.A. in 1933. He taught at Washburn University of Topeka in 1933-34; at Newcomb College, Tulane University, New Orleans (1934–36); Hollins College, Roanoke, Virginia (1936–38); and the University of Virginia, Charlottesville (1938–50). In 1943 he traveled to the Belgian Congo and acted as a French interpreter for the Bureau of Economic Welfare. The following year he joined the United States Marine Corps. He served as a lieutenant in an air warning squadron in the Pacific until the end of World War II, after which he returned to the University of Virginia. From 1950 to 1952 Canaday headed the art school at Newcomb College in New Orleans. He worked as chief of the educational division at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 1953 to 1959. During this period he wrote the text for Metropolitan Seminars in Art, a widely distributed series of 24 portfolios published between 1958 and 1960 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 1959 Canaday began a 17-year career as a leading art critic for The New York Times. In his first column on September 6, 1959, he inflamed the art establishment by proclaiming that Abstract Expressionism, the dominant style of the period, allowed "exceptional tolerance for incompetence and deception." Although he acknowledged the talent of the best Abstract Expressionists, he noted that "we have been had" by the "freaks, the charlatans, and the misled who surround this handful of serious and talented artists." Canaday's inaugural column and subsequent articles criticizing this style provoked a much-publicized letter to The New York Times signed by 49 of the nation's leading art figures, who denounced Canaday as an agitator. Other artists and critics, however, championed him as an honest and articulate observer of the art scene, which continued to provide ample targets for his barbed wit over the years. In addition to writing for the Times, Canaday published a number of influential books, notably Mainstreams of Modern Art: David to Picasso (1959), winner of the Athenaeum Literary Award and a popular art history textbook for many years. His experiences as a critic provided the subject matter of two books, Embattled Critic: Views on Modern Art (1962) and Culture Gulch: Notes on Art and Its Public in the 1960s (1969). He also wrote Keys to Art, with Katherine H. Canaday (1963), The Lives of the Painters (1969), Baroque Painters (1972), Late Gothic to Renaissance Painters (1972), Neoclassic to Post-Impressionist Painters (1972), My Best Girls: 8 Drawings (1972), The New York Guide to Dining Out in New York (1972), The Artful Avocado (1973), Richard Estes: The Urban Landscape (1979), What is Art? An Introduction to Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (1980), and Ben Shahn, Voices and Visions (1981). In the 1940s and 1950s, under the pen name Matthew Head, Canaday wrote seven crime novels with such titles as The Smell of Money (1943), The Congo Venus (1950), and Murder at the Flea Club (1957). Drawing in part on his experiences in the Congo, he set three of his mysteries in Africa, and they were heralded by one critic as subtly foreshadowing a time of change on the African continent. In 1974, Canaday stepped down from his post as art critic in order to devote more time to writing books, although he continued to write restaurant reviews for the Times until his retirement in 1977. Canaday taught several courses as a guest lecturer at the University of Texas in the spring of 1977. He continued to lecture and to write for such publications as Smithsonian magazine, The New Republic, and The New York Times Magazine until his death. John Canaday married Katherine S. Hoover on September 19, 1935, and they had two sons. He died of pancreatic cancer in New York City on July 19, 1985. John Canaday appears in the 2014 film Big Eyes, directed by Tim Burton, in which he is portrayed by actor Terence Stamp, making derogatory comments on the paintings of Margaret Keane.
February 1, 1915
Artur London, (1 February 1915 – 8 November 1986), was a Czechoslovak communist politician and co-defendant in the Slánský Trial. He was born in Ostrava, Austria-Hungary to a Jewish family. In 1937, London went to fight in the Spanish Civil War as member of the International Brigade. He moved to France after the defeat of the Republicans and, during World War II, was arrested by the Nazis and sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp. After the war he lived in Switzerland but soon moved with family to Prague, where he became a leading figure in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and was eventually nominated deputy minister of foreign affairs in 1948. In 1951 he was arrested and became a co-defendant in the Slánský trial alongside Rudolf Slánský. London was accused of being a Zionist, Trotskyite and Titoist and was sentenced to life in prison. He was released in 1955 and rehabilitated in 1963. He moved to France where, together with his wife, wrote L'Aveu (THE CONFESSION) about his ordeal in the Prague Trials. While the main defendants were senior to London, he gained prominence worldwide by writing the book. The book was made into a film directed by Costa-Gavras and starring Yves Montand and Simone Signoret. His wife, Lise, recounts the events in the documentary ‘A Trial in Prague’, dir. Zuzana Justman (2002, 83min). He died in Paris, France.
February 1, 1904
Sidney Joseph Perelman (February 1, 1904 – October 17, 1979), known as S. J. Perelman, was an American humorist, author, and screenwriter. He is best known for his humorous short pieces written over many years for The New Yorker. He also wrote for several other magazines, including Judge, as well as books, scripts, and screenplays. Perelman received an Academy Award for screenwriting in 1956.
February 1, 1944
Petru Popescu (born February 1, 1944 in Bucharest, Romania) is a Romanian-American writer, director and movie producer, author of best-selling novels Almost Adam and Amazon Beaming. The son of theater critic Radu Popescu and actress Nelly Cutava, he graduated from the Spiru Haret high-school, after which he studied English language and literature at Bucharest University. His debut was a collection of poems, Zeu printre blocuri ("A God Between Apartment Buildings"). In 1969, he published Prins ("Caught"). He went on a Herder scholarship to Vienna (1971–1972), and in 1973 participated in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. After participating in the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa, Popescu defected in 1973 or 1974 while in England on a private trip related to the English translation of his book Sfâr?itul bahic, taught comparative literature in Great Britain, and moved to the United States in 1975, where he studied at the Center for Advanced Film Studies of the American Film Institute. The Romanian government tried him for treason.[citation needed] In Romania his books were banned. At he time of his defection he was the Union of Communist Youth secretary of the Romanian Writers' Union and a candidate member of the Central Committee of the Union of Communist Youth. In the USA, he married Iris Friedman, with whom he has two children: Adam and Chloe. His 2001 novel The Oasis is noted as "A memoir of love and survival in concentration camp" written in the first person as if in the words of the biographee, Blanka Friedman. In 1983, Popescu took Death of an Angel to Sundance, where the script came to near finalization. The festival enabled him to find backers for the film, which was released in 1986.
February 1, 1933
Reynolds Price (February 1, 1933 – January 20, 2011), born Edward Reynolds Price, was an American poet, novelist, dramatist, essayist and James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke University. Apart from English literature, Price had a lifelong interest in Biblical scholarship. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
February 1, 1918
Dame Muriel Spark, DBE, CLit, FRSE, FRSL (1 February 1918 – 13 April 2006) was an award-winning Scottish novelist. In 2008 The Times newspaper named Spark in its list of 'the 50 greatest British writers since 1945', at No. 8.
February 1, 1874
Hugo Laurenz August Hofmann von Hofmannsthal (1 February 1874 – 15 July 1929) was an Austrian prodigy, a novelist, librettist, poet, dramatist, narrator, and essayist.
February 1, 1965
Louise Welsh (born 1 February 1965 in London) is an English-born author of short stories and psychological thrillers, resident in Glasgow, Scotland. She has also written three plays, edited volumes of prose and poetry, and contributed to various journals and anthologies.
February 1, 1932
Lily Yuriko Nakai Havey is an American water color artist and author. Born in 1932, Havey is a Japanese American Nisei whose family was forced to Japanese American internment camps during World War II when she was 10 years old.
February 1, 1923
Denis Williams (1 February 1923 – 28 June 1998) was a Guyanese painter, author and archaeologist. Dr. Denis Joseph Ivan Williams, C.C.H., Hon. D. Lit., M.A., called by his friends "Sonny" Williams, was born in Georgetown, Guyana, where he received his early education; he was granted a Cambridge Junior School Certificate in 1940 and a Cambridge Senior School Certificate in 1941. His promise as a painter won him a two-year British Council Scholarship to the Camberwell School of Art in London in 1946. He lived in London for the next 10 years, during which he taught fine art and held several one-man shows of his work as well as producing the artwork for Bajan novelist George Lamming's first book In the Castle of my Skin. From 1957 to 1967 he taught art and art history at the School of Fine Art, Khartoum, Sudan; the University of Ife, Nigeria; Makerere University, Uganda; and the University of Lagos, Nigeria. He also published numerous articles on the history and iconography of West African classical art expressed especially in brass, bronze, and iron, and a book, Icon and Image: A Study of Sacred and Secular Forms of African Classical Art (1974, New York University Press). Williams had been exposed to archaeology in Sudan and renewed his interest in 1968 when he finally returned to Guyana and established a homestead in the Mazaruni District. In his first letter to the Smithsonian Institution in 1973, he said: "my interest in these antiquities is that they may explain something about the who and how, as well as the when of the arts of the Guyana Indians." His appointment in 1974 as director of the newly created Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology in Georgetown provided the opportunity to pursue this quest. Initially, he concentrated his attention on petroglyphs, not only recording the designs, but excavating to recover the tools used and observing the environmental contexts. His Master's thesis, The Aishalton Petroglyph Complex in the Prehistory of the Rupununi Savannas, submitted to the University of Guyana in 1979, presented ideas elaborated in a 1985 article published in the journal Advances in World Archaeology. In 1980 he began intensive archaeological and paleoclimatic investigations of the shell middens on the northwest coast of Guyana. From the beginning of his studies, he was aware of potential disturbance of stratigraphy, errors in radiocarbon dates, and other pitfalls, and some of his efforts to detect them were detailed in Early Pottery on the Amazon: A Correction. Evidence for a correlation between the declining productivity of mangrove resources and changes in artefacts and settlement behaviour was summarised in Some Subsistence Implications of Holocene Climatic Change in Northwestern Guyana. His observation that the methods employed by the Warao for processing palm starch are preadapted for eliminating the poison from bitter manioc offers a reasonable explanation for the origin of this remarkable technology. A monograph detailing his evidence and interpretations of the interaction between environmental change and Guyana prehistory was in press at the time of his death. He recognised the importance of publication and in 1978 founded Archaeology and Anthropology, the journal of the Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology in Georgetown. Among other journals Williams edited were Odu (the University of Ife Journal of African studies) and Lagos Notes and Records, and he contributed numerous essays on art to several books and journals. His skill as a writer is documented not only in his scientific papers, but in numerous works of fiction. In 1986 Williams and his assistant, Jennifer Wishart, initiated a programme for junior archaeologists in Guyanese secondary schools. Awards His accomplishments were recognised in several national awards, including the Golden Arrow of Achievement Award from the government of Guyana in 1973, and the Cacique Crown of Honour in 1989, the same year that he received an honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies.
February 2, 1886
William Rose Benét (February 2, 1886 – May 4, 1950) was an American poet, writer, and editor. He was the older brother of Stephen Vincent Benét. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Col. James Walker Benét and his wife née Frances Neill Rose, and grandson of Brigadier General Stephen Vincent Benét. He was educated The Albany Academy in Albany, NY and at Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University, graduating with a PhB in 1907. At Yale, he edited and contributed light verse to campus humor magazine The Yale Record. He began the Saturday Review of Literature in 1924 and continued to edit and write for it until his death. Benét married four times: First, on 3 September 1912, he married Teresa France Thomson, with whom he had three children (James Walker Benét, Frances Rosemary Benét, and Kathleen Anne Benét). Teresa died in 1919. Benét's second wife whom he married on 5 October 1923, was poet Elinor Wylie. She died in 1928. Benét's third wife, whom he married on 15 March 1932, was Lora Baxter. They divorced in 1937. Benét's fourth wife, and widow, was children's writer Marjorie Flack. They were married from June 22, 1941 until his death in 1950. In 1942, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his book of autobiographical verse, The Dust Which Is God (1941). He is also the author of The Reader's Encyclopedia, a standard American guide to world literature. His son, James Walker Benét (1914-2012) fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and was the author of two suspense novels and a guidebook to the San Francisco Bay Area. Today he is perhaps best known as the author of "The Skater of Ghost Lake," a poem frequently assigned in American schools for its use of onomatopoeia and rhythm as well as its tone of dark mystery.
February 2, 1960
Fred D'Aguiar (born 2 February 1960) is a British-Guyanese poet, novelist and playwright. He is currently Professor of English at Virginia Tech. Fred D'Aguiar was born in London in 1960 to Guyanese parents, Malcolm Frederick D'Aguiar and Kathleen Agatha Messiah. In 1962 he was taken to Guyana where he lived with his grandmother until 1972 when he returned, at the age of twelve, to England. D'Aguiar trained as a psychiatric nurse before reading African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury, graduating in 1985. On graduating he applied for a PhD on the Guyanese author Wilson Harris at the University of Warwick, but - after winning two writers-in-residency positions, at Birmingham University and the University of Cambridge (where he was the Judith E. Wilson Fellow from 1989 to 1990) - his PhD studies ‘recededed from [his] mind’ and he began to focus all of his energies on creative writing. In 1994, D'Aguiar moved to the United States to take up a Visiting Writer position at Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts (1992–94). Since then, he has taught at Bates College, Lewiston, Maine (Assistant Professor, 1994–95) and the University of Miami where he held the position of Professor of English and Creative Writing. In 2003 he took up the position of Professor of English and Co-Director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Virginia Tech. D'Aguiar's first collection of poetry, Mama Dot (1985), was published to much acclaim. It centres upon an ‘archetypal‘ grandmother figure, Mama Dot, and was notable for its fusion of standard English and Nation language. Along with his 1989 collection Airy Hall (which is named after the village in Guyana where D'Aguiar spent his childhood), Mama Dot won the Guyana Poetry Prize. Where D'Aguiar's first two poetry collections were set in Guyana, his third - British Subjects (1989) - explores the experiences of peoples of the West Indian diaspora in London. London was also the focus of another long poem, Sweet Thames, which was broadcast as part of the BBC ‘Worlds on Film’ series on 3 July 1992 and won the Commission for Racial Equality Race in the Media Award. After turning to writing novels rather than poetry for a period of time, D'Aguiar returned to the poetic mode in 1998, publishing Bill of Rights (1998): a long narrative poem about the Jonestown massacre in Guyana in 1979, which is told in Guyanese versions of English, fusing patois, Creole and nation language with the standard vernacular. It was shortlisted for the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize. Bill of Rights was followed by another narrative poem, Bloodlines (2000), which tells the story of a black slave and her white lover. His 2009 collection of poetry, Continental Shelf, centres on a response to the Virginia Tech Massacre in which 32 people were killed by a student in 2007. It was a finalist for the 2009 T. S. Eliot Prize. D'Aguiar's first novel, The Longest Memory (1994), tells the story of Whitechapel, a slave on an eighteenth-century Virginia plantation. The book won both the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. It was adapted for television and televised by Channel 4 in the UK. Returning to themes he had earlier developed in British Subjects, D'Aguiar's 1996 novel, Dear Future, explores the history of the West Indian diaspora through a fictional account of the lives of one extended family. D'Aguiar's third novel, Feeding the Ghosts (1997), was inspired by a visit D'Aguiar made to the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool and is based on the true story of the Zong massacre in which 132 slaves were thrown from a slave ship into the Atlantic for insurance purposes. According to historical accounts, one slave survived and climbed back onto the ship; and in D'Aguiar's narrative this slave - about whom there is next to no historical information - is developed as the fictional character Mintah. His fourth novel, Bethany Bettany (2003), is centred on a five-year-old Guyanese girl, Bethany, whose suffering has been read by some as symbolising that of a nation (Guyana) seeking to make itself whole again. D'Aguiar's plays include High Life, which was first produced at the Albany Empire in London in 1987, and A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death, performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1991.
February 2, 1923
James Lafayette Dickey (February 2, 1923 – January 19, 1997) was an American poet and novelist. He was appointed the eighteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1966. He also received the Order of the South award.
February 2, 1940
Thomas Michael Disch (February 2, 1940 – July 4, 2008) was an American science fiction author and poet. He won the Hugo Award for Best Related Book – previously called ‘Best Non-Fiction Book’ – in 1999, and he had two other Hugo nominations and nine Nebula Award nominations to his credit, plus one win of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, a Rhysling Award, and two Seiun Awards, among others. In the 1960s, his work began appearing in science-fiction magazines. His critically acclaimed science fiction novels, The Genocides, Camp Concentration, 334 and On Wings of Song are major contributions to the New Wave science fiction movement. In 1996, his book The Castle of Indolence: On Poetry, Poets, and Poetasters was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and in 1999, Disch won the Nonfiction Hugo for The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, a meditation on the impact of science fiction on our culture, as well as the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse. Among his other nonfiction work, he wrote theatre and opera criticism for The New York Times, The Nation, and other periodicals. He also published several volumes of poetry as Tom Disch. Following an extended period of depression following the death in 2005 of his life-partner, Charles Naylor, Disch stopped writing almost entirely, except for poetry – although he did produce two novellas. Disch committed suicide by gunshot on July 4 2008 in his apartment in Manhattan, New York City. His last book, The Word of God, which was written shortly before Naylor died, had just been published a few days before Disch's death.
February 2, 1904
Frank Gruber (born February 2, 1904, Elmer, Minnesota, died December 9, 1969, Santa Monica, California) was an American writer. He was an author of stories for pulp fiction magazines. He also wrote dozens of novels, mostly Westerns and detective stories. Gruber wrote many scripts for Hollywood movies and television shows, and was the creator of three TV series. He sometimes wrote under the pen names Stephen Acre, Charles K. Boston and John K. Vedder.
February 2, 1882
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominent among these the stream of consciousness technique he perfected.
February 2, 1883
Johnston McCulley (February 2, 1883 – November 23, 1958) was the author of hundreds of stories, fifty novels, numerous screenplays for film and television, and the creator of the character Zorro. Many of his novels and stories were written under the pseudonyms Harrington Strong, Raley Brien, George Drayne, Monica Morton, Rowena Raley, Frederic Phelps, Walter Pierson, and John Mack Stone, among others. McCulley started as a police reporter for The Police Gazette and served as an Army public affairs officer during World War I. An amateur history buff, he went on to a career in pulp magazines and screenplays, often using a Southern California backdrop for his stories. Aside from Zorro, McCulley created many other pulp characters, including Black Star, The Spider, The Mongoose, and Thubway Tham. Many of McCulley's characters—The Green Ghost, The Thunderbolt, and The Crimson Clown—were inspirations for the masked heroes that have appeared in popular culture from McCulley's time to the present day. Born in Ottawa, Illinois, and raised in Chillicothe, Illinois, he died in 1958 in Los Angeles, California aged 75.
February 2, 1930
Gananath Obeyesekere is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. In the 1990s he entered into intellectual debate with Marshall Sahlins over the rationality of indigenous peoples. At the heart of the debate was how to understand the rationality of indigenous people. Obeyesekere insisted that indigenous people thought in essentially the same way as Westerners and was concerned that any argument otherwise would paint them as 'irrational' and 'uncivilized'. In contrast Sahlins argued that each culture may have different types of rationality that make sense of the world by focusing on different patterns and explain them within specific cultural narratives, and that assuming that all cultures lead to a single rational view is a form of eurocentrism.
February 2, 1885
Aldo Palazzeschi (2 February 1885 – 17 August 1974) was the pen name of Aldo Giurlani, an Italian novelist, poet, journalist and essayist. He was born in Florence to a well-off, bourgeois family. Following his father's direction he studied accounting but gave up that pursuit as he became enamored with the theater and acting. Respectful of his father's wishes that the family name not be associated with acting, he chose his maternal grandmother's maiden name Palazzeschi as a pseudonym. His family's comfortable circumstances enabled him to publish his first book of poetry, I cavalli bianchi (The White Horses) in 1905 using his acting pseudonym. After meeting Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, he became a fervent Futurist. However, he was never entirely ideologically aligned with the movement and had a falling out with the group over Italy's involvement in World War I which he opposed, even though he did spend a brief period at the front lines after having been inducted into the military in 1916. His "futurist period" (roughly the 1910s) was a very fecund time in which he published a series of works that cemented his reputation. Most notable of these is his novel Il codice di Perelà (translated into English as Man of Smoke) published in 1911. Marinetti used to give away more copies of the Futurist books he published than those he sold, and Palazzeschi later recalled that in 1909, so many copies of one of his books were given away that even he failed to secure a copy. During the interwar years, his poetical production decreased, as he became involved in journalism and other pursuits. He took no part in the official culture of the Fascist regime, but he found himself working in various magazines that did. Some of those were: Pegaso (it), Pan (it), (edited by Ugo Ojetti (it)) and Il Selvaggio (it), (edited by Mino Maccari (it)) In the late sixties and early seventies he started publishing again, with a series of novels that resecured his place in the new, post-war avant-garde. He died in 1974 in his apartment in Rome. Today he is often considered an important influence on later Italian writers, especially those of the neoavanguardia in both prose and verse. His work is well noted by its "grotesque and fantastic elements"
February 2, 1915
Khushwant Singh (2 February 1915 – 20 March 2014) was an Indian novelist, lawyer, politician and journalist. An Indo-Anglian writer, Singh was best known for his trenchant secularism, his humour, and an abiding love of poetry. His comparisons of social and behavioural characteristics of Westerners and Indians are laced with acid wit. He served as the editor of several literary and news magazines, as well as two newspapers, through the 1970s and 1980s. He was the recipient of Padma Vibhushan, the second-highest civilian award in India.
February 2, 1915
José Veiga, known as José J. Veiga, (February 2, 1915–September 19, 1999) was a Brazilian writer. His writings are often classified within the magical realism genre, although he denied the label; his books deal with social and political criticism, with lyrical overtones.
February 2, 1954
Moniza Alvi (born 2 February 1954) is a Pakistani-British poet and writer. Alvi was born in Pakistan and grew up in England. Her most recent collection, At the Time of Partition (Bloodaxe Books, 2013), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
February 3, 1947
Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1947 and received B.A. and M.A. degrees from Columbia University. He is the author of four books of poetry and one previous book of prose. His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper’s, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.
February 3, 1905
Herman Charles Bosman (3 February 1905 – 14 October 1951) is widely regarded as South Africa's greatest short-story writer. He studied the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain and developed a style emphasizing the use of satire. His English-language works utilize primarily Afrikaner characters and highlight the many contradictions in Afrikaner society during the first half of the twentieth century. The poet Roy Campbell called him ‘the only literary genius that South Africa has produced’.
February 3, 1930
Sándor Csoóri (Csoóri, Alexander) (born 3 February 1930 Zámoly - ) is a Hungarian poet, essayist, writer and politician. In 1950, he graduated from the Reformed Pontifical College (Pápai Református Kollégiumban), and then studied at ELTE Institute, but dropped his studies because of illness. He worked in various journals, such as during 1953-54 Literature in the newspaper, and in 1955 until 1956 the new sound versrovat editor. In 1956, he could not find work for a while, and then in 1960, as at the beginning of the Budapest University of Technology, and newspaper editorial staff, he was the MAFILM dramaturg from 1968 until 1988. His first poems appeared in 1953, raising a big stir, being critical of the Rákosi era. The authorities soon noticed that Csoóri was not one of their supporters. He wrote criticizing the Sándor Csoóri (Csoóri, Alexander) (born 3 February 1930 Zámoly - ) is a Hungarian poet, essayist, writer and politician. In 1950, he graduated from the Reformed Pontifical College (Pápai Református Kollégiumban), and then studied at ELTE Institute, but dropped his studies because of illness. He worked in various journals, such as during 1953-54 Literature in the newspaper, and in 1955 until 1956 the new sound versrovat editor. In 1956, he could not find work for a while, and then in 1960, as at the beginning of the Budapest University of Technology, and newspaper editorial staff, he was the MAFILM dramaturg from 1968 until 1988. His first poems appeared in 1953, raising a big stir, being critical of the Rákosi era. The authorities soon noticed that Csoóri was not one of their supporters. He wrote criticizing the dictatorship's impact of personality, and te fate of rural people. He was under surveillance sometimes for years, and did not receive awards. He lived in Budapest, where he met with his friends, including Miklós Jancsó, Otto Orban, György Konrád, Ferenc Kósa. In 1988, he was co-editor with Gáspár Nagy, of Hitel, and in 1992 editor-in-chief.dictatorship's impact of personality, and te fate of rural people. He was under surveillance sometimes for years, and did not receive awards. He lived in Budapest, where he met with his friends, including Miklós Jancsó, Otto Orban, György Konrád, Ferenc Kósa. In 1988, he was co-editor with Gáspár Nagy, of Hitel, and in 1992 editor-in-chief.
February 3, 1947
David Russell Gordon "Dave" Davies (born 3 February 1947) is an English singer, songwriter and guitarist. He is best known as the lead guitarist and occasional lead vocalist for the English rock band The Kinks, which also featured his brother Ray Davies. In 2003, Davies was ranked 91st in Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time"
February 3, 1948
Henning Mankell (3 February 1948 – 5 October 2015) is author of the internationally bestselling Kurt Wallander series and the critically acclaimed Chronicler of the Winds. Henning Mankell’s books have been published in thirty-six countries with over 25 million copies in print worldwide. Laurie Thompson, the former editor of the Swedish Book Review, has translated more than forty books from the Swedish, including seven by Henning Mankell. He lives in rural Wales.
February 3, 1947
Marlene Nourbese Philip (born 3 February 1947), usually credited as M. NourbeSe Philip, is a Canadian poet, novelist, playwright, essayist and short story writer. Born in the Caribbean Woodlands, Moriah, Trinidad and Tobago, Philip was educated at the University of the West Indies. She subsequently pursued graduate degrees in political science and law at the University of Western Ontario, and practised law in Toronto, Ontario for seven years. She left her law practice in 1983 to devote time to her writing. Philip is known for experimentation with literary form and for her commitment to social justice. Though her writing suggests an in-depth understanding of the canon, Philip's career undoubtedly helped to free her from the constraints of tradition and to nurture her social analysis and criticism. Philip has published three books of poetry, two novels, three books of collected essays and two plays. Her short stories, essays, reviews and articles have appeared in magazines and journals in North America and England and her poetry has been extensively anthologized. Her work - poetry, fiction and non-fiction is taught widely at the university level and is the subject of much academic writing and critique. Her first novel, Harriet's Daughter (1988), is widely used in high school curricula in Ontario, Great Britain and was, for a decade, studied by all children in the Caribbean receiving a high school CXC diploma. It has also been published as an audio cassette, a script for stage and a German language edition. Although categorized as young adult literature, Harriet’s Daughter is a book that can appeal to older children and adults of all ages. Set in Toronto, this novel explores the themes of friendship, self-image, ethics and migration while telling a story that is riveting, funny and technically accomplished. It makes the fact of being Black a very positive and enhancing experience. Philip’s most renowned poetry book, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, was awarded the Casa de las Américas Prize for Literature while still in manuscript form. As she explores themes of race, place, gender, colonialism and, always, language, Philip plays with words, bending and restating them in a way that is reminiscent of jazz. The tension between father tongue (the white Euro-Christian male canon), and mother tongue (Black African female) is always present. Philip is a prolific essayist. Her articles and essays demonstrate a persistent critique and an impassioned concern for issues of social justice and equity in the arts, prompting Selwyn R. Cudjoe's assertion that Philip ‘serves as a lightning rod of black cultural defiance of the Canadian mainstream.’ More to the point is the epigram in Frontiers where Philip dedicates the book to Canada, 'in the effort of becoming a space of true belonging'. It is as an essayist that M. NourbeSe Philip’s role as anti-racist activist is most evident. She was one of the first to make culture her primary focus as she argued passionately and articulately for social justice and equity. Specific controversial events that have been the focus of her essays include the Into the Heart of Africa exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, the Toronto production of Show Boat, and Caribana. Her essays also put the spotlight on racial representation on arts councils and committees in Canada and there have been definite advances in this area subsequently. It was at a small demonstration concerning the lack of Canadian writers of colour outside of the 1989 PEN Canada gala, that she was confronted by June Callwood. Philip has also taught at the University of Toronto, taught creative fiction at the third year level at York University and has been writer in residence at McMaster University and University of Windsor. Her most recent work, Zong! (2008), is based on a legal decision at the end of the eighteenth century, related to the notorious murder of Africans on board a slave ship. A dramatized reading of this new poem cycle, was workshopped and presented at Harbourfront in Toronto as part of rock.paper.sistahz in 2006. Poems from this collection have been published in Facture, boundary 2 and Fascicle; the later includes four poems, along with an extensive introduction. On April 16, 2012 at b current studio space in Toronto, Philip held her first authorial full-length reading of Zong!-- an innovative interaction-piece lasting seven hours in which both author and audience performed a cacophonous collective reading of the work from beginning to end. In solidarity with this collective reading, another audience-performance was held in Blomfontaine, South Africa. In talking about her own work Philip has said, ‘fiction is about telling lies, but you must be scathingly honest in telling those lies. Poetry is about truth telling, but you need the lie - the artifice of the form to tell those truths.’ Scholar Rinaldo Walcott has engaged critically with the work of M. NourbeSe Philip. His essay ‘'No Language is Neutral': The Politics of Performativity in M. Nourbese Philip's and Dionne Brand's Poetry’ in the book Black Like Who? is a strong example of this scholarly engagement.
February 3, 1972
Victor LaValle (born February 3, 1972) is an American author. He is the author of a short-story collection, Slapboxing with Jesus and four novels, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver, and The Changeling. LaValle writes fiction primarily, though he has also written essays and book reviews for GQ, Essence Magazine, The Fader, and The Washington Post, among others.
February 3, 1949
Kati Marton, an award-winning former NPR and ABC News correspondent, is the author of Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our History, a New York Times bestseller, as well as Wallenberg, The Polk Conspiracy, A Death in Jerusalem, and a novel, An American Woman. Mother of a son and a daughter, she lives in New York with her husband, Richard Holbrooke.
February 3, 1959
John Harrison Nichols is a liberal / progressive American journalist and author. He is the National Affairs correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times. Books authored or co-authored by Nichols include The Genius of Impeachment and The Death and Life of American Journalism.
February 3, 1899
Lao She (February 3, 1899 – August 24, 1966) was the pen name of Shu Qingchun, a noted Chinese novelist and dramatist. He was one of the most significant figures of 20th-century Chinese literature, and best known for his novel Rickshaw Boy and the play Teahouse. He was of Manchu ethnicity. His works are known especially for their vivid use of the Beijing dialect.
February 3, 1912
Jacques Soustelle (3 February 1912 – 6 August 1990) was an important and early figure of the Free French Forces, an anthropologist specializing in Pre-Columbian civilizations, and vice-director of the Musée de l'Homme in Paris in 1939. Governor General of Algeria, he helped the rise of De Gaulle to the presidency of the Fifth Republic, but broke with De Gaulle over Algerian independence, joined the OAS is their efforts to overthrow De Gaulle and lived in exile between 1961 and 1968. On returning to France he resumed political and academic activity and was elected to the Académie française in 1983.
February 3, 1874
Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American writer of novels, poetry and plays. Born in West Allegheny (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, making France her home for the remainder of her life. A literary innovator and pioneer of Modernist literature, Stein’s work broke with the narrative, linear, and temporal conventions of 19th-century. She was also known as a collector of Modernist art. In 1933, Stein published a kind of memoir of her Paris years, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of Toklas, her life partner. The book became a literary bestseller and vaulted Stein from the relative obscurity of cult literary figure into the light of mainstream attention.
February 3, 1924
Edward Palmer Thompson (3 February 1924 – 28 August 1993) was a British historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work on the British radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS (1963). He also published influential biographies of William Morris (1955) and (posthumously) WILLIAM BLAKE (1993) and was a prolific journalist and essayist. He also published the novel THE SYKAOS PAPERS and a collection of poetry. Thompson was one of the principal intellectuals of the Communist Party in Great Britain. Although he left the party in 1956 over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he nevertheless remained a ‘historian in the Marxist tradition,’ calling for a rebellion against Stalinism as a prerequisite for the restoration of communists' ‘confidence in our own revolutionary perspectives’. Thompson played a key role in the first New Left in Britain in the late 1950s. He was a vociferous left-wing socialist critic of the Labour governments of 1964–70 and 1974–79, and during the 1980s, he was the leading intellectual light of the movement against nuclear weapons in Europe.
February 3, 1887
Georg Trakl (3 February 1887 – 3 November 1914) was an Austrian poet and brother of the pianist Grete Trakl. He is considered one of the most important Austrian Expressionists. Trakl was born and lived the first 21 years of his life in Salzburg, Cisleithania. His father, Tobias Trakl (11 June 1837, Ödenburg/Sopron – 1910), was a dealer of hardware from Hungary, while his mother, Maria Catharina Halik (17 May 1852, Wiener Neustadt – 1925), was a housewife of Czech descent. His sister Grete Trakl was a musical prodigy; with her he shared artistic endeavors. Trakl attended a Catholic elementary school, although his parents were Protestants. He matriculated in 1897 at the Salzburg Staatsgymnasium, where he studied Latin, Greek, and mathematics. At age 13, Trakl began to write poetry. After quitting high school, Trakl worked for a pharmacist for three years and decided to adopt pharmacy as a career. It was during this time that he experimented with playwriting, but his two short plays, All Souls' Day and Fata Morgana, were not successful. However, from May to December 1906, Trakl published four prose pieces in the feuilleton section of two Salzburg newspapers. All cover themes and settings found in his mature work. This is especially true of Traumland (Dreamland), in which a young man falls in love with a dying girl who is his cousin. In 1908, Trakl moved to Vienna to study pharmacy, and became acquainted with some local artists who helped him publish some of his poems. Trakl's father died in 1910, soon before Trakl received his pharmacy certificate; thereafter, Trakl enlisted in the army for a year-long stint. His return to civilian life in Salzburg was unsuccessful and he re-enlisted, serving as a pharmacist at a hospital in Innsbruck. There he became acquainted with a group of avant-garde artists involved with the well-regarded literary journal Der Brenner, a journal that began the Kierkegaard revival in the German-speaking countries.Ludwig von Ficker, the editor of the journal Der Brenner (and son of the historian Julius von Ficker), became his patron: he regularly printed Trakl's work and endeavored to find him a publisher to produce a collection of poems. The result of these efforts was Gedichte (Poems), published by Kurt Wolff in Leipzig during the summer of 1913. Ficker also brought Trakl to the attention of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who anonymously provided him with a sizable stipend so that he could concentrate on his writing. At the beginning of World War I, Trakl was sent as a medical official to attend soldiers in Galicia (comprising portions of modern-day Ukraine and Poland). Trakl suffered frequent bouts of depression. During one such incident in Gródek (ukrain. Horodok) near Lwiw in present Ukraine, Trakl had to steward the recovery of some ninety soldiers wounded in the fierce campaign against the Russians. He tried to shoot himself from the strain, but his comrades prevented him. Hospitalized at a military hospital in Kraków and observed closely, Trakl lapsed into worse depression and wrote to Ficker for advice. Ficker convinced him to communicate with Wittgenstein. Upon receiving Trakl's note, Wittgenstein went to the hospital, but found that Trakl had died of a cocaine overdose. Trakl was buried at Kraków's Rakowicki Cemetery on 6 November 1914, but on 7 October 1925, as a result of the efforts by Ficker, his remains were transferred to Mühlau near Innsbruck (where they now repose next to Ficker's).Lucia Getsi, a young poet and translator, received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Ohio University in 1973 and has accepted a teaching position at Illinois State University. .
February 3, 1926
Richard Yates (February 3, 1926 – November 7, 1992) was an American fiction writer identified with the mid-century "Age of Anxiety". His first novel, Revolutionary Road, was a finalist for the 1962 National Book Award, while his first short story collection, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, brought comparisons to James Joyce. Critical acclaim for his writing, however, was not reflected in commercial success during his lifetime. Interest in Yates has revived somewhat since his death, partly because of an influential 1999 essay by Stewart O'Nan in the Boston Review, a 2003 biography by Blake Bailey and the 2008 Academy Award-nominated and Golden Globe-winning film Revolutionary Road starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio.
February 3, 1866
Fabio Fiallo, in full Fabio Federico Fiallo Cabral (February 3, 1866 – August 29, 1942) was a Dominican writer, poet and politician. Fiallo was born in the city of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic on February 3, 1866. His parents were Juan Ramón Fiallo Rodríguez (a Dominican politician, Member of the Congress of the Dominican Republic in 1867) and Ana María Cabral y Figueredo (from an upper class family). From a young age he had the political guidance of his father, who since the administration of President General José María Cabral y Luna was part of important committees to negotiate a Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Commerce between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. After joining the Faculty of Law at the Instituto Profesional de Santo Domingo (later as Instituto Profesional, en Universidad de Santo Domingo and now as Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo), he abandoned his studies to devote himself to politics and poetry. He was also uncle of fashion designer Oscar de la Renta and the politician Viriato Fiallo. The latter married incestuously Fabio’s daughter Prudencia Fiallo Lluberes. His political activities limited his career as a writer. He was imprisoned for defending Dominican independence during the American occupation of the Dominican Republic (1916–24). He was a founder of the newspapers El Hogar (1894), La Bandera Libre (1899), La Campaña (1905) y Las Noticias (1920) and was also a contributor to the Listín Diario and El Lápiz. Fiallo was arrested in the last months of 1900 with Arturo Pellerano Alfau, director of Listín Diario during the escalations of repression against the press of the Liberal government of Juan Isidro Jiménes. He was a member of the National Press Association, directed in 1916 by Arturo J. Pellerano Alfau and which also belonged Américo Lugo, Conrado Sanchez, Juan Durán, Manuel A. Machado and Félix Evaristo Mejía, among others. Through this group the first complaints to the international community in opposition to the U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic were performed. In 1916, Fiallo was apprehended by authorities, under the unfounded allegation of being involved in the revolutionary movement started on April 14 headed by Desiderio Arias being which was being held in the tribute (Fortaleza Ozama). He was sentenced to five years of forced labor and was ordered to pay a five thousand dollar fine for having published an article in the Listin Diario before being approved by the censorship committee. However, the nationalist Fiallo’s work did not end with the demise of the Free Flag movement, but instead he became more radical. In his "Fabio Fiallo in the Free Flag: 1899–1916," Rafael Dario Herrera writes: "In September 1899, he founded the newspaper The Flag Royalty circulating three times a week in major urban centers, and, like most print media at the time, had four pages, the first of which, contrary to what happens today, was entirely devoted to advertising and on the inside pages included opinion pieces with little news. At the time, newspapers were still generating income with fixed and placed with obituaries that lawyers and merchants, usually foreign subscriptions. Newspaper survived until early 1900, and defined itself , in this first time, as a "political and general interest " publication. Later reappeared in 1915 until its demise in late 1916. free Banner is a newspaper combat, scathing, incisive, teller of national issues. Emerges in a transitional stage between the defunct dictatorship Heureaux (July 1899) and the government of Jiménes (November 1899). Your target is outlined in the initial editorial : "We will fight for the final victory in the institutions and practice of liberal ideas will preach freedom at all costs the depredations, the nepotism, cliques, monopolies, have against us . . yours" . Although the first step in that circulated Banner Royalty had not yet opted the Jimenistas groupings (or bowling) and Horacistas (coludos), its pages contain sharp criticism against the first as Jimenes was seen as the main opposition lilisista of dictatorship, especially for his expedition aboard the steam Fanita in 1898, and that had obvious sympathy with the dictatorship between groups of literate urban Fiallo was part of that. Thus, in October 1899, before the election, with reservations accepted Fiallo candidacy Jiménes.6 died in Havana, Cuba, 28 August 1942. His remains were transferred to Dominican Republic in 1977 by order of the government then presided Dr. Joaquín Balaguer.
February 4, 1914
Born in 1914, Alfred Andersch attended a private Munich boys school, which was in fact run by the father of Heinrich Himmler. As he makes clear in his Afterword, THE FATHER OF A MURDERER is to a great degree autobiographical: ‘It was I, after all, I and no one else who was tested in Greek by the older Mr. Himmler and, due to the deplorable results, was expelled from that classical Gymnasium.’ In 1933 Alfred Andersch spent six months in Dachau concentration camp for his activities as a Communist youth leader. After World War II, he was the editor of several newspapers as well as a prominent novelist. A founder of ‘Group 47,’ that distinguished company of German writers whose members included Heinrich Boll and Gunter Grass, Andersch won the Deutscher Kritiker-Preis in 1958 and the Nelly Sachs Prize (for EFRAIM’S BOOK, also published by New Directions) in 1968. He died in 1979.
February 4, 1936
IVAN ANGELO was born in Minas Gerais, Brazil, in 1936. He is a professional journalist. managing editor of the Jornal do Tarde, the influential evening daily in São Paulo. He has published a collection of short stories. DUAS FACES (TWO SIDES), which won the principal literary prize of his home state and launched his literary career. A second work, CASA DE VIDRO (HOUSE OF GLASS), appeared in 1979, and he is now at work on a novel about a Brazilian politician’s career. THE CELEBRATION has been published in France as well as by Avon-Bard in the United States. THOMAS COLCHIE is well known for his translations of Puig, Drummond, Ramos, and Souza, whose first novel, THE EMPEROR OF THE AMAZON, was praised upon its first publication by Avon-Bard.
February 4, 1950
Laurence Bergreen (born February 4, 1950) is an American historian and biographer.
February 4, 1932
Robert Lowell Coover (born February 4, 1932) is an American author and professor in the Literary Arts program at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction. Coover was born in Charles City, Iowa. He attended Southern Illinois University Carbondale, received his B.A. in Slavic Studies from Indiana University in 1955, then served in the United States Navy. He received an M.A. in General Studies in the Humanities from the University of Chicago in 1965. In 1968, he signed the ‘Writers and Editors War Tax Protest’ pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. Coover has served as a teacher or writer in residence at many universities. Coover's first novel was The Origin of the Brunists, in which the sole survivor of a mine disaster starts a religious cult. His second book, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., deals with the role of the creator. The eponymous Waugh, a shy, lonely accountant, creates a baseball game in which rolls of the dice determine every play, and dreams up players to attach those results to. Coover's best-known work, The Public Burning, deals with the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in terms that have been called magic realism. Half of the book is devoted to the mythic hero Uncle Sam of tall tales, dealing with the equally fantastic Phantom, who represents international Communism. The alternate chapters portray the efforts of Richard Nixon to find what is really going on amidst the welter of narratives. A later novella, Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears offers an alternate Nixon, one who is devoted to football and sex with the same doggedness with which he pursued political success in this reality. The theme anthology A Night at the Movies includes the story ‘You Must Remember This’, a piece about Casablanca that features an explicit description of what Rick and Ilsa did when the camera wasn't on them. Pinocchio in Venice returns to mythical themes. Coover is one of the founders of the Electronic Literature Organization. In 1987 he was chosen as the winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story. Coover is indeed one of the foremost short story writers of the postmodern period, as exemplified by the ‘Seven Exemplary Fictions’ contained in his 1969 book Pricksongs and Descants, which has influenced a new generation of writers, notably Jayne Joso for the 2011 novel, Perfect Architect.
February 4, 1958
The highly acclaimed and award-winning crime writer K. O. Dahl's popular crime series is now rapidly becoming an international success, and critics around the world have labeled him as Norway's answer to Henning Mankell. Dahl has been awarded with the Riverton Prize, and has received nominations for Glasnyckeln (The Glass Key), the Brage Literary Prize, and the Martin Beck Award.
February 4, 1921
Ladislav Grosman (4 February 1921 in Humenné – 25 January 1981 in Tel Aviv) was a Slovak novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for being the author of The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na korze), which he adapted into a critically acclaimed Academy Award-winning film in 1965. Grosman became proficient in Czech after he moved to Czechoslovakia's Czech-speaking part in his late twenties, where he worked as a correspondent and editor in the Prague bureau of the Slovak newspaper Pravda. Following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he moved to Israel, where he died in 1981.
February 4, 1930
Barbara Shook Hazen, a former editor at Golden Books, is the author of more than 80 books for young readers, including the popular Little Golden Book The Please and Thank You Book. She lives in Massachusetts and in New York City.
February 4, 1926
John Edgar Colwell Hearne (4 February 1926, Montreal, Canada - 12 December 1994, Stony Hill, Jamaica) was a white Jamaican novelist, journalist, and teacher. Hearne was born in Montreal, Canada, of Jamaican parents and attended Jamaica College in Kingston. After serving in the RAF during the Second World War, he read English and Philosophy at Edinburgh University. He trained as a teacher at London University and from 1950 to 1952 taught in a Jamaican school. He also worked as a journalist. He then travelled in Europe for some years (part of the time with novelist Roger Mais, before returning to Jamaica in 1957. He was subsequently on the staff of the Extra-Mural Department of the University of the West Indies, Mona. Hearne's first published work was the novel Voices under the Window, issued in 1955. Set in Jamaica in the late 1940s or early 1950s, it uses the framing device of a progressive politician's injury and death in a riot to narrate the story of a man who, born into racial and economic privilege, decided to cast his lot with the underprivileged. Hearne followed this with four novels written between 1956 and 1961 -- The Faces of Love, Stranger at the Gate, The Autumn Equinox and Land of the Living—set in the imaginary island of Cayuna which is a fictionalized Jamaica (the map of Cayuna included with the novels bears a remarkable resemblance to Jamaica), and which referred to issues relating to Jamaican life at the time, such as the beginning of the bauxite industry and the Rastafari movement, or to events in nearby territories such as the Cuban Revolution. He also wrote a number of short stories, one of which, 'At the Stelling', set in Guyana, was included in the Independence Anthology of Jamaican Literature. Hearne then turned to the academy and journalism—writing a regular column for the Gleaner newspaper, first under the pseudonym 'Jay Monroe', and later under his own name, and administering the Creative Arts Centre (now the Sir Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts) at the University of the West Indies. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he collaborated with planter and journalist Morris Cargill on a series of three thrillers -- Fever Grass, The Candywine Development, and The Checkerboard Caper—involving an imaginary Jamaican secret service. These were written under the pseudonym 'John Morris'. In 1985 he published his last novel, The Sure Salvation, set on a slave ship crossing the Atlantic in the mid-nineteenth century. The voyage ends in the imaginary British South American colony of Abari, also mentioned in The Checkerboard Caper.
February 4, 1925
Russell Conwell Hoban (February 4, 1925 – December 13, 2011) was an American expatriate writer. His works span many genres, including fantasy, science fiction, mainstream fiction, magical realism, poetry, and children's books. He lived in London, England, from 1969 until his death.
February 4, 1910
Mattheus Uys Krige (4 February 1910 – 10 August 1987) was a South African writer of novels, short stories, poems and plays in both Afrikaans and English.
February 4, 1956
Nancy Lemann has written LIVES OF THE SAINTS, RITZ OF THE BAYOU , SPORTSMAN'S PARADISE, THE FIERY PANTHEON, and MALAISE. She is a visiting writer and instructor at The Johns Hopkins University graduate writing program and recently judged the first Walker Percy Prize in fiction for Loyola University and New Orleans Review.
February 4, 1913
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) was an African-American Civil Rights activist, whom the United States Congress called 'the first lady of civil rights' and 'the mother of the freedom movement'. Her birthday, February 4, and the day she was arrested, December 1, have both become Rosa Parks Day, commemorated in both California and Ohio. On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks refused to obey bus driver James F. Blake's order to give up her seat in the colored section to a white passenger, after the white section was filled. Parks was not the first person to resist bus segregation. Others had taken similar steps, including Bayard Rustin in 1942,Irene Morgan in 1946, Sarah Louise Keys in 1955, and the members of the Browder v. Gayle lawsuit (Claudette Colvin, Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, and Mary Louise Smith) who were arrested in Montgomery months before Parks. NAACP organizers believed that Parks was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest for civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws, although eventually her case became bogged down in the state courts while the Browder v. Gayle case succeeded. Parks' act of defiance and the Montgomery Bus Boycott became important symbols of the modern Civil Rights Movement. She became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. She organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including Edgar Nixon, president of the local chapter of the NAACP; and Martin Luther King, Jr., a new minister in town who gained national prominence in the civil rights movement. At the time, Parks was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. She had recently attended the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee center for training activists for workers' rights and racial equality. She acted as a private citizen 'tired of giving in'. Although widely honored in later years, she also suffered for her act; she was fired from her job as a seamstress in a local department store, and received death threats for years afterwards. Shortly after the boycott, she moved to Detroit, where she briefly found similar work. From 1965 to 1988 she served as secretary and receptionist to John Conyers, an African-American U.S. Representative. She was also active in the Black Power movement and the support of political prisoners in the US. After retirement, Parks wrote her autobiography and lived a largely private life in Detroit. In her final years, she suffered from dementia. Parks received national recognition, including the NAACP's 1979 Spingarn Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and a posthumous statue in the United States Capitol's National Statuary Hall. Upon her death in 2005, she was the first woman and second non-U.S. government official to lie in honor at the Capitol Rotunda.
February 4, 1900
Jacques Prévert (4 February 1900 – 11 April 1977) was a French poet and screenwriter. His poems became and remain popular in the French-speaking world, particularly in schools. His best regarded films formed part of the poetic realist movement, and include Les Enfants du Paradis (1945). Prévert was born at Neuilly-sur-Seine and grew up in Paris. After receiving his Certificat d'études upon completing his primary education, he quit school and went to work in Le Bon Marché, a major department store in Paris. He was called up for military service in 1918. After the war, he was sent to the Near East to defend French interests there. He died in Omonville-la-Petite, on 11 April 1977. He had been working on the last scene of the animated movie Le Roi et l'oiseau (The King and the Mockingbird) with his friend and collaborator Paul Grimault. When the film was released in 1980, it was dedicated to Prévert's memory, and on opening night, Grimault kept the seat next to him empty. At first when Prévert was attending primary school, he hated writing. Prévert participated actively in the Surrealist movement. Together with the writer Raymond Queneau and artist Marcel Duchamp, he was a member of the Rue du Château group. He was also a member of the agitprop Groupe Octobre. Prévert's poems were collected and published in his books: Paroles (Words) (1946), Spectacle (1951), La Pluie et le beau temps (Rain and Good Weather) (1955), Histoires (Stories) (1963), Fatras (1971) and Choses et autres (Things and Others) (1973). His poems are often about life in Paris and life after the Second World War. They are widely taught in schools in France and frequently appear in French language textbooks published worldwide. They are also often taught in American upper level french classes (French 2 in Kansas) to learn basics, such as Dejeuner du Matin. Some of Prévert's poems, such as 'Les Feuilles mortes' (Autumn Leaves), 'La grasse matinée' (Sleeping in), 'Les bruits de la nuit' (The sounds of the night), and 'Chasse à l'enfant' (The hunt for the child) were set to music by Joseph Kosma—and in some cases by Germaine Tailleferre of Les Six, Christiane Verger, and Hanns Eisler. They have been sung by prominent French vocalists, including Marianne Oswald, Yves Montand, and Édith Piaf, as well as by the later American singers Joan Baez and Nat King Cole. In 1961, French singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg paid tribute to 'Les feuilles mortes' in his own song 'La chanson de Prévert.' More recently, the British remix DJs Coldcut released their own version in 1993. A German version has been published and covered by Didier Caesar (alias Dieter Kaiser), which he named 'Das welke Laub'. 'Les feuilles mortes' also bookends Iggy Pop's 2009 album, Préliminaires. Prévert's poems, are translated into various languages worldwide. Many translators have translated his poems into English. In Nepali, poet and translator Suman Pokhrel has translated some of his poems. Prévert wrote a number of screenplays for the film director Marcel Carné. Among them were the scripts for Drôle de drame (Bizarre, Bizarre, 1937), Quai des brumes (Port of Shadows, 1938), Le Jour se lève (Daybreak, 1939), Les Visiteurs du soir (The Night Visitors, 1942) and Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis, 1945). The last of these regularly gains a high placing in lists of best films ever. His poems were the basis for a film by the director and documentarian Joris Ivens, The Seine Meets Paris (La Seine a rencontré Paris, 1957), about the River Seine. The poem was read as narration during the film by singer Serge Reggiani. In 2007, a filmed adaptation of Prévert's poem, 'To Paint the Portrait of a Bird,' was directed by Seamus McNally, featuring T.D. White and Antoine Ray- English translation by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Prévert had a long working relationship with Paul Grimault, also a member of Groupe Octobre. Together they wrote the screenplays of a number of animated movies, starting with the short 'The Little Soldier' ('Le Petit Soldat', 1947). They worked together until his death in 1977, when he was finishing The King and the Mocking Bird' (Le Roi et l'Oiseau'), a second version of which was released in 1980. Prévert adapted several Hans Christian Andersen tales into animated or mixed live-action/animated movies, often in versions loosely connected to the original. Two of these were with Grimault, including The King and the Mocking Bird, while another was with his brother Pierre Prévert.
February 4, 1906
Maurice Procter (born 4 February 1906 – 1973) was an English novelist. He was born in Nelson, Lancashire, England. In 1927 Maurice joined the police as a constable in Halifax, Yorkshire. During the war Maurice was transferred from King Cross to Mixenden police station. In those days Mixenden was just a small village, so Maurice was the village bobby and he and his wife lived in the police house for 5 years. In total Maurice served in the Halifax police force for 19 years, remaining a constable throughout the time. Experiencing police procedure at first hand provided the realism in Procter's work, that many reviewers praised. He began writing fiction whilst a serving police offer, his first book No Proud Chivalry was published in 1947 and as soon as he was earning an income from writing he resigned from the police force. Procter is best known for his series of police procedural novels featuring Detective Chief Inspector Harry Martineau of the Granchester City Police. In his novels Granchester was an industrial city in the north of England. Procter based the city on Manchester. When his novel Hell Is a City (which was published in the United States with the title Somewhere in This City) was filmed in 1960 with Stanley Baker as Martineau, it was shot on-location in Manchester.
February 4, 1932
STELLA CARR RIBEIRO (February 4, 1932, Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - 2008, São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil) was born in Guanabara, Brazil, and now lives and works in Sao Paulo. She comes from a long line of writers and journalists and was formerly the director and vice president of the Brazilian Union of Writers. A poet, journalist, and author of children’s literature, Stella Carr Ribeiro published her first novel, SAMBAQUI, in Brazil in 1975. This highly acclaimed work is based on one of the great passions of her life: anthropology, which she studied under the well-known scholar Paulo Duarte
February 4, 1901
Alexander Werth (4 February 1901, St Petersburg – 5 March 1969, Paris) was a Russian-born, naturalized British writer, journalist, and war correspondent. Werth's family fled to the United Kingdom in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Werth wrote about France in the prewar period and he also wrote about Russia in World War II, especially the Battle of Stalingrad and the Siege of Leningrad. He spoke and wrote both Russian and English at the native level. His best-known work is Russia at War 1941 to 1945, (London, 1964) a behind-the-scenes look at life in the wartime Soviet Union; he spent the war there as the BBC's correspondent, and had unrivalled access due to the combination of his BBC press credentials and his ability to function as a native Russian speaker. Werth was among a group of journalists who visited Majdanek concentration and extermination camp after it had been discovered by the advancing Red Army. He filed a report on the atrocities that had been committed there, but the BBC initially refused to broadcast it, believing that it was too incredible to be true and suspecting a Soviet propaganda stunt. He was the Moscow correspondent for the Guardian newspaper from 1946 to 1949. He was one of the first outsiders to be allowed into Stalingrad after the battle. Other works include: France 1940-1955: the de Gaulle Revolution; Moscow 41; The Last Days of Paris: a Journalist's Diary; Leningrad; The Year of Stalingrad; and Musical Uproar in Moscow. His son Nicolas Werth is a French historian (Directeur de recherche au CNRS) who specializes in the history of the Soviet Union.
February 4, 1915
Harry Whittington (February 4, 1915 – June 11, 1989) was an American mystery novelist and one of the original founders of the paperback novel. Born in Ocala, Florida, he worked in government jobs before becoming a writer. His reputation as a prolific writer of pulp fiction novels is supported by his writing of 85 novels in a span of twelve years (as many as seven in a single month) mostly in the crime, suspense, and hardboiled noir fiction genres. In total, he published over 200 novels. Seven of his writings were produced for the screen, including the television series Lawman. His reputation as 'The King of the Pulps' is shared with author H. Bedford-Jones. Eight of Whittington's hardboiled noir novels were republished by Stark House Press.
February 4, 1688
Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux (February 4, 1688 – February 12, 1763), commonly referred to as Marivaux, was a French novelist and dramatist. He is considered one of the most important French playwrights of the 18th century, writing numerous comedies for the Comédie-Française and the Comédie-Italienne of Paris. His most important works are Le Triomphe de l'amour, Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard and Les Fausses Confidences. He also published a number of essays and two important but unfinished novels, La Vie de Marianne and Le Paysan parvenu.
February 4, 1930
Borislav Pekic (February 4, 1930, Podgorica, Montenegro - July 2, 1992, London, United Kingdom) was born in 1930 in Podgorica, Yugoslavia. Arrested in 1948 for terrorism, armed rebellion, and espionage after the theft of a few typewriters and mimeographs, Pekic spent five years in prison, where he began to write. He worked as a screenwriter and editor of a literary journal before publishing his first novel at age thirty-five. Constant trouble with the authorities led him to emigrate to London in the early 1970s. His novels include The Houses of Belgrade (1994) and The Time of Miracles (1994), both published by Northwestern University Press. He died of cancer in 1992 in London.
February 5, 1928
Martin E. Marty (born February 5, 1928 in West Point, Nebraska) is professor emeritus of religious history at the University of Chicago. He is the winner of the National Book Award and the author of more than fifty books. His recent books include MARTIN LUTHER: A LIFE (Viking) and THE CHRISTIAN WORLD: A GLOBAL HISTORY (Modern Library).
February 5, 1953
Giannina Braschi (born February 5, 1953) is a Puerto Rican writer. She is credited with writing the first Spanglish novel Yo-Yo Boing! (1998), the postmodern poetry trilogy Empire of Dreams (Yale, 1994), and the philosophical fiction United States of Banana, (AmazonCrossing, 2011), which chronicles the Latin American immigrant's experiences in the United States. ‘For decades, Dominican and Puerto Rican authors have carried out a linguistic revolution,’ noted The Boston Globe, and ‘Giannina Braschi, especially in her novel YO-YO BOING!, testify to it.’ She is considered an influential and revolutionary voice in contemporary Latin American literature. Her work has been described as a ‘synergetic fusion that marks in a determinant fashion the lived experiences of U.S. Hispanics.’ Written in three languages, English, Spanglish, and Spanish, Braschi's work captures the cultural experience of nearly 50 million Hispanic Americans and also seeks to explore the three political options of Puerto Rico: Nation, Colony, or Statehood. On the subject of the Island's lack of sovereignty, Braschi stated, ‘Liberty is not an option—it is a human right.’
February 5, 1927
Edward Richard de Grazia (February 5, 1927 – April 11, 2013) was an American lawyer, writer, and free speech activist.
February 5, 1933
Bryan Stanley Johnson (5 February 1933 – 13 November 1973) was an English experimental novelist, poet, literary critic, producer of television programmes and filmmaker.
February 5, 1928
Edmund Keeley is the translator, with Philip Sherrard, of the Collected Poems of Cavafy, the Collected Poems, 1924-1955, of George Seferis, and Six Poets of Modern Greece. He is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Princeton University and the author of four novels.
February 5, 1915
Margaret Ellis Millar (née Sturm) (February 5, 1915 - March 26, 1994) was an American-Canadian mystery and suspense writer. Born in Kitchener, Ontario, she was educated at the Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate Institute and the University of Toronto. She moved to the United States after marrying Kenneth Millar (better known under the pen name Ross Macdonald). They resided for decades in the city of Santa Barbara, which was often utilized as a locale in her later novels under the pseudonyms of San Felice or Santa Felicia. The Millars had a daughter who died in 1970.
February 5, 1957
Ray Monk (born 15 February 1957) is a British philosopher. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton, where he has taught since 1992. He won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the 1991 Duff Cooper Prize for his biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. His interests lie in the philosophy of mathematics, the history of analytic philosophy, and philosophical aspects of biographical writing. His biography of Robert Oppenheimer was published in 2012. In 2015 he was awarded a Fellowship by the Royal Society of Literature. Since 2015 he has contributed to New Statesman, contributing articles on Philosophy and Veganism.
February 5, 1913
Leften Stavros Stavrianos (February 5, 1913, Vancouver, Canada - March 23, 2004, La Jolla, CA) was a Greek-Canadian historian. His most influential books are considered to be A Global History: From Prehistory to the 21st Century and The Balkans since 1453. He was one of the very first historians to challenge Orientalist views of the Ottoman Empire. Stavrianos was born in Vancouver, Canada in 1913. He received a B.A. in history from the University of British Columbia, and a M.A. and Ph.D. from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Stavrianos joined the faculty of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario and Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. He then became a professor at Northwestern University in 1946. After retiring from Northwestern in 1973, Stavrianos joined the University of California, San Diego Department of History until 1992.
February 5, 1948
Deborah Willis served twelve years as the curator of photography at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and is now the Collections Coordinator of the National African American Museum Project of the Smithsonian Institution. Her previous books include EARLY BLACK PHOTOGRAPHERS: 1840-1940 and VANDERZEE: PHOTOGRAPHER 1886-1983. She lives in Washington D.C.
February 5, 1848
Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans (February 5, 1848 – May 12, 1907) was a French novelist who published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans. He is most famous for the novel À rebours (1884, published in English as Against the Grain or Against Nature). He supported himself by a 30-year career in the French civil service. Huysmans' work is considered remarkable for its idiosyncratic use of the French language, large vocabulary, descriptions, satirical wit and far-ranging erudition. First considered part of Naturalism in literature, he became associated with the decadent movement with his publication of À rebours. His work expressed his deep pessimism, which had led him to the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. In later years, his novels reflected his study of Catholicism, religious conversion, and becoming an oblate. He discussed the iconography of Christian architecture at length in La cathédrale (1898), set at Chartres and with its cathedral as the focus of the book. Là-bas (1891), En route (1895) and La cathédrale (1898) are a trilogy that feature Durtal, an autobiographical character whose spiritual progress is tracked and who converts to Catholicism. In the novel that follows, L'Oblat (1903), Durtal becomes an oblate in a monastery, as Huysmans himself was in the Benedictine Abbey at Ligugé, near Poitiers, in 1901. La cathédrale was his most commercially successful work. Its profits enabled Huysmans to retire from his civil service job and live on his royalties.
February 6, 1756
Aaron Burr Jr. (February 6, 1756 – September 14, 1836) was an American politician. He was the third Vice President of the United States (1801–1805), serving during Thomas Jefferson's first term. Burr served as a Continental Army officer in the Revolutionary War, after which he became a successful lawyer and politician. He was elected twice to the New York State Assembly (1784–1785, 1798–1799), was appointed New York State Attorney General (1789–1791), was chosen as a U.S. senator (1791–1797), from the State of New York, and reached the apex of his career as vice president. The highlight of Burr's tenure as president of the Senate, one of his few official duties as vice president, was the Senate's first impeachment trial, that of Supreme Court justice Samuel Chase. In 1804, the last full year of his single term as vice president, Burr killed his political rival Alexander Hamilton in a famous duel. Burr was never tried for the illegal duel, and all charges against him were eventually dropped, but Hamilton's death ended Burr's political career. After leaving Washington, Burr traveled west seeking new opportunities, both economic and political. His activities eventually led to his arrest on charges of treason in 1807. The subsequent trial resulted in acquittal, but Burr's western schemes left him with large debts and few influential friends. In a final quest for grand opportunities, he left the United States for Europe. He remained overseas until 1812, when he returned to the United States to practice law in New York City. There he spent the rest of his life in relative obscurity.
February 6, 1912
John Edward Christopher Hill (6 February 1912 – 23 February 2003) — known as Christopher Hill — was an English Marxist historian and author of textbooks.
February 6, 1942
American Book Award-winner James W. Loewen taught race relations at the University of Vermont. In addition to Lies My Teacher Told Me, he has written The Truth About Columbus, and (with Charles Salles) Mississippi: Conflict and Change, the first integrated state history textbook. He lives in Washington, D.C.
February 6, 1956
Hikaru Okuizumi (born 6 February 1956) is a Japanese novelist. His real name is Yasuhiro Okuizumi. Okuizumi was born in Mikawa, Yamagata Prefecture, and attended high school in Saitama Prefecture, before studying Humanities at ICU in Tokyo. He completed a master's course at the same university, but dropped out midway through his doctoral course. In 1993, he won the Noma Literary Prize for New Writers for the novel, Novalis no Iny?, and the Akutagawa Prize for The Stones Cry Out the following year. The Stones Cry Out has been translated into a number of languages including English and French. Okuizumi started working at Kinki University in 1999, and continues to teach there.
February 6, 1894
Eric Honeywood Partridge (6 February 1894 – 1 June 1979) was a New Zealand–British lexicographer of the English language, particularly of its slang. His writing career was interrupted only by his service in the Army Education Corps and the RAF correspondence department during World War II. Partridge was born in the Waimata Valley, near Gisborne, on the North Island of New Zealand to John Thomas Partridge, a grazier, and his wife Ethel Annabella Norris. In 1907 the family moved to Queensland, Australia, where he was educated at the Toowoomba Grammar School. He then studied first classics and then French and English at the University of Queensland. During this time Partridge also worked for three years as a school teacher before enrolling in the Australian Imperial Force in April 1915 and serving in the Australian infantry during the First World War, serving in Egypt, Gallipoli and on the Western Front, before being wounded in the Battle of Pozières. His interest in slang and the "underside" of language is said to date from his wartime experience. Partridge returned to university between 1919 and 1921, when he received his BA. After receiving his degree, Partridge became Queensland Travelling Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, where he worked on both an MA on eighteenth-century English romantic poetry, and a B.Litt in comparative literature. He subsequently taught in a grammar school in Lancashire for a brief interval, then in the two years beginning September 1925, took lecturing positions at the Universities of Manchester and London. From 1923, he "found a second home", occupying the same desk (K1) in the British Museum Library (as it was then known) for the next fifty years. In 1925 he married Agnes Dora Vye-Parminter, who in 1933 bore a daughter, Rosemary Ethel Honeywood Mann. In 1927 he founded the Scholartis Press, which he managed until it closed in 1931. During the twenties he wrote fiction under the pseudonym 'Corrie Denison'; Glimpses, a book of stories and sketches, was published by the Scholartis Press in 1928. the Scholartis Press published over 60 books in these four years, including Songs and Slang of the British Soldier 1914-1918, which Partridge co-authored with John Brophy. From 1932 he commenced writing in earnest. His next major work on slang, Slang Today and Yesterday, appeared in 1933, and his well-known Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English followed in 1937. During the Second World War, Partridge served in the Army Education Corps, later transferring to the RAF's correspondence department, before returning to his British Museum desk in 1945. Partridge wrote over forty books on the English language, including well-known works on etymology and slang. He also wrote novels under the pseudonym Corrie Denison, and books on tennis, which he played well. His papers are archived at the University of Birmingham, British Library, King's College, Cambridge, the Royal Institute of British Architects, the University of Exeter, the University of San Francisco, Warwickshire Record Office, and William Salt Library. He died in Moretonhampstead, Devon, in 1979, aged 85.
February 6, 1942
Henry Petroski (February 6, 1942) is an American engineer specializing in failure analysis. A professor both of civil engineering and history at Duke University, he is also a prolific author. Petroski has written over a dozen books.
February 6, 1955
MICHAEL POLLAN is the author of three previous books: SECOND NATURE, A PLACE OF MY OWN, and THE BOTANY OF DESIRE, a New York Times bestseller that was named a best book of the year by Borders, Amazon, and the American Booksellers Association. Pollan is a longtime contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and teaches journalism at Berkeley. He lives in the Bay area with his wife, the painter Judith Belzer, and their son, Isaac.
February 6, 1927
William Gardner Smith (February 6, 1927 – November 5, 1974) was an American journalist, novelist, and editor. Smith is linked to the black social protest novel tradition of the 1940s and the 1950s, a movement that became synonymous with writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Willard Motley, and Ann Petry. His third book, South Street (1954), is considered to be one of the first black militant protest novels. Smith's last published novel, The Stone Face (1963), in its account of the Paris massacre of 1961, ‘stand[s] as one of the few representations of the event available’. Smith was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania of African American descent. After 1951, he maintained an expatriate status in France. However, due to his various journalistic and editorial assignments, he also lived for extended periods of time in Ghana. In the final decade of his life, Smith would travel to the United States to visit family and friends and write about the racial and social upheaval that was occurring there. Some of Smith's journalism and reportage from this period was published in various media outlets in France and Europe. Some of it was revised, re-adapted, and published in Return To Black America in 1970. Smith spoke fluent French, and was a frequent contributor and guest on radio and television programs in France where he was considered an expert on the political struggle, civil unrest, and racial tension occurring in the United States during the turbulent decade of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Smith was diagnosed with cancer in October 1973 and died just over a year later in Thiais, a commune in the southern suburbs of Paris, France.
February 6, 1925
Pramoedya Ananta Toer (EYD: Pramudya Ananta Tur) (6 February 1925 – 30 April 2006) was an Indonesian author of novels, short stories, essays, polemic and histories of his homeland and its people. His works span the colonial period, Indonesia's struggle for independence, its occupation by Japan during the Second World War, as well as the post-colonial authoritarian regimes of Sukarno and Suharto, and are infused with personal and national history. The Dutch Government imprisoned him from 1947 to 1949, the Suharto regime from 1965 to 1979. Pramoedya's writings sometimes fell out of favor with the colonial and later the authoritarian native governments in power. Pramoedya faced censorship in Indonesia during the pre-reformation era despite the fact that he was well known outside Indonesia. The Dutch imprisoned him from 1947 to 1949 during the War of Independence (1945-1949). During the changeover (coup) to the Suharto regime Pramoedya was caught up in the shifting tides of political change and power struggles in Indonesia. Suharto had him imprisoned from 1969 to 1979 on the Maluku island of Buru and branded him a Communist. He was seen as a holdover from the previous regime (even though he had struggled with the former regime (Sukarno). It was on the Island of Buru that he composed his most famous work, the Buru Quartet. Not permitted access to writing materials, he recited the story orally to other prisoners before it was written down and smuggled out. Pramoedya opposed some policies of founding President Sukarno as well as the New Order regime of Suharto, Sukarno's successor. Political criticisms were often subtle in his writing, although he was outspoken against colonialism, racism and corruption of the Indonesian new Government. During the many years in which he suffered imprisonment and house arrest (in Jakarta after his imprisonment on Buru), he became a cause célèbre for advocates of human rights and freedom of expression.
February 6, 1898
MELVIN B. TOLSON (February 6, 1898 – August 29, 1966) was an American Modernist poet, educator, columnist, and politician. His work concentrated on the experience of African Americans and includes several long historical poems. His work was influenced by his study of the Harlem Renaissance, although he spent nearly all of his career in Texas and Oklahoma. Tolson is the protagonist of the 2007 biopic The Great Debaters. The film, produced by Oprah Winfrey, is based on his work with students at predominantly-black Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, and their debate with University of Southern California(USC). Tolson is portrayed by Denzel Washington, who also directed the film. Born in Moberly, Missouri, Tolson was one of four children of Reverend Alonzo Tolson, a Methodist minister, and Lera (Hurt) Tolson, a seamstress of African-Creek ancestry. Alonzo Tolson was also of mixed race, the son of an enslaved woman and her white master. He served at various churches in the Missouri and Iowa area until settling longer in Kansas City. Reverend Tolson studied throughout his life to add to the limited education he had first received, even taking Latin, Greek and Hebrew by correspondence courses. Both parents emphasized education for their children. Melvin Tolson graduated from Lincoln High School in Kansas City in 1919. He enrolled at Fisk University but transferred to Lincoln University, Pennsylvania the next year for financial reasons. Tolson graduated with honors in 1924. In 1922, Melvin Tolson married Ruth Southall of Charlottesville, Virginia, whom he had met as a student at Lincoln University. Their first child was Melvin Beaunorus Tolson, Jr., who, as an adult, became a professor at the University of Oklahoma. He was followed by Arthur Lincoln, who as an adult became a professor at Southern University; Wiley Wilson; and Ruth Marie Tolson. All children were born by 1928. In 1930-31 Tolson took a leave of absence from teaching to study for a Master's degree at Columbia University. His thesis project, "The Harlem Group of Negro Writers", was based on his extensive interviews with members of the Harlem Renaissance. His poetry was strongly influenced by his time in New York. He completed his work and was awarded the master's degree in 1940. After graduation, Tolson and his wife moved to Marshall, Texas, where he taught speech and English at Wiley College (1924–1947). The small, historically black Methodist Episcopal college had a high reputation among blacks in the South and Tolson became one of its stars. In addition to teaching English, Tolson used his high energies in several directions at Wiley. He built an award-winning debate team, the Wiley Forensic Society. During their tour in 1935, they broke through the color barrier and competed against the University of Southern California, which they defeated. There he also co-founded the black intercollegiate Southern Association of Dramatic and Speech Arts, and directed the theater club. In addition, he coached the junior varsity football team. Tolson mentored students such as James L. Farmer, Jr. and Heman Sweatt, who later became civil rights activists. He encouraged his students not only to be well-rounded people but also to stand up for their rights. This was a controversial position in the segregated U.S. South of the early and mid-20th century. In 1947 Tolson began teaching at Langston University, a historically black college in Langston, Oklahoma, where he worked for the next 17 years. He was a dramatist and director of the Dust Bowl Theater at the university. One of his students at Langston was Nathan Hare, the black studies pioneer who became the founding publisher of the journal The Black Scholar. In 1947 Liberia appointed Tolson its Poet Laureate. In 1953 he completed a major epic poem in honor of the nation's centennial, the Libretto for the Republic of Liberia. Tolson entered local politics and served three terms as mayor of Langston from 1954 to 1960. In 1947, Tolson was accused of having been active in organizing farm laborers and tenant farmers during the late 1930s (though the nature of his activities is unclear) and of having radical leftist associations. The film, The Great Debaters, portrays him as having been a possible Communist. In the film, Tolson's arrest for union organizing galvanizes the black community of the town of Marshall, Texas. Tolson was a man of impressive intellect who created poetry that was funny, witty, humoristic, slapstick, rude, cruel, bitter, and hilarious, as reviewer Karl Shapiro described the Harlem Gallery. In 1965, Tolson was appointed to a two-year term at Tuskegee Institute, where he was Avalon Poet. He died after cancer surgery in Dallas, Texas, on August 29, 1966. He was buried in Guthrie, Oklahoma. From 1930 on, Tolson began writing poetry. He also wrote two plays by 1937, although he did not continue to work in this genre. In 1941, he published his poem "Dark Symphony" in Atlantic Monthly. Some critics believe it is his greatest work, in which he compared and contrasted African-American and European-American history. In 1944 Tolson published his first poetry collection Rendezvous with America, which includes Dark Symphony. He was especially interested in historic events which had fallen into obscurity. In the late 1940s, after he left his teaching position at Wiley, The Washington Tribune hired Tolson to write a weekly column, which he called "Cabbage and Caviar". Tolson's Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953), another major work, is in the form of an epic poem in an eight-part, rhapsodic sequence. It is considered a major modernist work. Tolson's final work to appear in his lifetime, the long poem Harlem Gallery, was published in 1965. The poem consists of several sections, each beginning with a letter of the Greek alphabet. The poem concentrates on African-American life. It was a striking change from his first works, and was composed in a jazz style with quick changes and intellectually dense, rich allusions. In 1979 a collection of Tolson's poetry was published posthumously, entitled A Gallery of Harlem Portraits. These were poems written during his year in New York. They represented a mixture of various styles, including short narratives in free verse. This collection was influenced by the loose form of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology. An urban, racially diverse and culturally rich community is presented in A Gallery of Harlem Portraits. With increasing interest in Tolson and his literary period, in 1999 the University of Virginia published a collection of his poetry entitled Harlem Gallery and Other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson, edited by Raymond Nelson.
February 6, 1968
Azhar Ali Abidi (born 6 February 1968 in Wah, Pakistan) is a Pakistani Australian author and translator. He went to school in Pakistan and later studied electrical engineering at the Imperial College London and Masters of Business Administration at the University of Melbourne. He migrated to Australia in 1994 and lives in Melbourne, Australia.
February 6, 1949
Eliot Weinberger (born 6 February 1949) is a contemporary American writer, essayist, editor, and translator. His work regularly appears in translation and has been published in more than thirty languages. Weinberger first gained recognition for his translations of the Nobel Prize–winning writer and poet Octavio Paz. His many translations of the work of Paz include The Poems of Octavio Paz, In Light of India, and Sunstone. Among Weinberger's other translations are Vicente Huidobro's Altazor, Xavier Villaurrutia's Nostalgia for Death, and Jorge Luis Borges' Seven Nights. His edition of Borges’ Selected Non-Fictions received the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Today, Weinberger is primarily known for his literary writings (essays) and political articles, the former characterized by their wide-ranging subjects and experimental style, verging on a kind of documentary prose poetry, and the latter highly critical of American politics and foreign policy.
February 6, 1897
Humphrey Davy Findley Kitto (6 February 1897 – 21 January 1982) was a British classical scholar of Cornish ancestry. He concentrated on studies of Greek tragedy, especially translations of the works of Sophocles. His early book, "In the Mountains of Greece", describes his journeys in that country, with no more than incidental reference to antiquity. His 1952 general treatment The Greeks covered the whole range of ancient Greek culture, and became a standard text. After his retirement, he taught at College Year in Athens (CYA), a study abroad program for foreign students in Athens, Greece.
February 6, 1959
Dermot Bolger (born 1959) is an Irish novelist, playwright and poet born in Finglas, a suburb of Dublin. His work is often concerned with the articulation of the experiences of working-class characters who, for various reasons, feel alienated from society. In 1977 Bolger set up Raven Arts Press, which he ran until 1992, when he co-founded New Island Books. In May 2010 his wife, Bernie, died.
February 6, 1905
Una Maud Victoria Marson (6 February 1905 – 6 May 1965) was a Jamaican feminist, activist and writer, producing poems, plays and radio programmes. She travelled to London in 1932 and became the first black woman to be employed by the BBC during World War II. In 1942 she became producer of the programme Calling the West Indies, turning it into Caribbean Voices, which became an important forum for Caribbean literary work. Una Marson was born on 6 February 1905, in Santa Cruz, Jamaica, in the parish of St Elizabeth. She was the youngest of six children of Rev. Solomon Isaac Marson (1858–1916), a Baptist parson, and his wife Ada Wilhelmina Mullins (1863–1922). Una had a middle-class upbringing and was very close to her father, who influenced some of her fatherlike characters in her later works. As a child before going to school she was an avid reader of available literature, which at the time was mostly English classical literature. At the age of 10, Marson was enrolled in Hampton High, a girl's boarding school in Jamaica of which her father was on the board of trustees. However, that same year, Rev. Isaac died, leaving the family with financial problems, so they moved to Kingston. Una finished school at Hampton High, but did not go on to a college education. After leaving Hampton, she found work in Kingston as a volunteer social worker and used the secretarial skills, such as stenography, she had learned in school. In 1926, Marson was appointed assistant editor of the Jamaican political journal Jamaica Critic. Her years there taught her journalism skills as well as influencing her political and social opinions and inspired her to create her own publication. In fact, in 1928, she became Jamaica's first female editor and publisher of her own magazine, The Cosmopolitan. The Cosmopolitan featured articles on feminist topics, local social issues and workers' rights and was aimed at a young, middle-class Jamaican audience. Marson's articles encouraged women to join the work force and to become politically active. The magazine also featured Jamaican poetry and literature from Marson's fellow members of the Jamaican Poetry League, started by J. E. Clare McFarlane. In 1930, Marson published her first collection of poems, entitled Tropic Reveries, that dealt with love and nature with elements of feminism. It won the Musgrave Medal from the Institute of Jamaica. Her poems about love are somewhat misunderstood by friends and critics, as there is no evidence of a romantic relationship in Marson's life, although love continued to be a common topic in her work. In 1931, due to financial difficulties, The Cosmopolitan ceased publication, which led her to begin publishing more poetry and plays. In 1931, she published another collection of poetry, entitled Heights and Depths, which also dealt with love and social issues. Also in 1931, she wrote her first play, At What a Price, about a Jamaican girl who moves from the country into the city of Kingston to work as a stenographer and falls in love with her white male boss. The play opened in Jamaica and later London to critical acclaim. In 1932, she decided to go to London to find a broader audience for her work and to experience life outside of Jamaica. When she first arrived in the UK in 1932, she stayed in Peckham, south-east London, at the home of Harold Moody, who the year before had founded civil-rights organisation The League of Coloured Peoples. From 1932 to 1945, Marson moved back and forth between London and Jamaica. She continued to contribute to politics, but now instead of focusing on writing for magazines, she wrote for newspapers and her own literary works in order to get her political ideas across. In these years, Marson kept writing to advocate feminism, but one of her new emphases was on the race issue in England. Marson first moved to London in 1932. The racism and sexism she met there "transformed both her life and her poetry"; The voice in her poetry became more focused on the identity of black women in England. In this period then, Marson not only continued to write about women's roles in society, but also put into the mix the issues faced by black people who lived in England. In July 1933, she wrote a poem called "Nigger" that would appear in the League of Coloured Peoples' journal, The Keys; one of Marson's more forceful poems addressing racism in England, "Nigger" only saw light seven years later when it was published in 1940. Outside of her writing at that time, Marson was in the London branch of the International Alliance of Women, a global feminist organization. By 1935, she was involved with the International Alliance of Women based in Istanbul. Marson returned to Jamaica in 1936, where one of her goals was to promote national literature. One step she took in achieving this goal was to help create the Kingston Readers and Writers Club, as well as the Kingston Drama Club. She also founded the Jamaica Save the Children Fund, an organization that raised funds to give the poorer children money to get a basic education. In promoting Jamaican literature, Marson published Moth and the Star in 1937. Many poems in that volume demonstrate how despite the media's portrayal that black women have inferior beauty when compared to the whites, black women should still be confident in their own physical beauty. This theme is seen in "Cinema Eyes", "Little Brown Girl", "Black is Fancy" and "Kinky Hair Blues". However, Marson herself was affected by the stereotype of superior white beauty; Marson herself, her biographer tells us, within months of her arrival in Britain "stopped straightening her hair and went natural". Going along with her feminist principles, Marson worked with Louise Bennett to create another play called London Calling, which was about a woman who moved to London to further her education. However, the woman later became homesick and returned to Jamaica. This play shows how the main character is a "strong heroine" for being able to "force herself to return to London" in order to finish her education there. Also in the feminist vein, Marson wrote Public Opinion, contributing to the feminist column. Marson's third play, Pocomania, is about a woman named Stella who is looking for an exciting life. Critics suggest that this play is significant because it demonstrates how an "Afro-religious cult" affects middle-class women. Pocomania is also one of Marson's most important works because she was able to put the essence of Jamaican culture into it. Critics such as Ivy Baxter said that "Pocomania was a break in tradition because it talked about a cult from the country", and, as such, it represented a turning point in what was acceptable on the stage. In 1937, Marson wrote a poem called "Quashie comes to London", which is the perspective of England in a Caribbean narrative. In Caribbean dialect, quashie means gullible or unsophisticated. Although initially impressed, Quashie becomes disgusted with England because there is not enough good food there. The poem shows how, although England has good things to offer, it is Jamaican culture that Quashie misses, and therefore Marson implies that England is supposed to be "the temporary venue for entertainment". The poem shows how it was possible for a writer to implement Caribbean dialect in a poem, and it is this usage of local dialect that situates Quashie's perspective of England as a Caribbean perspective. Marson returned to London in 1938 to continue work on the Jamaican Save the Children project that she started in Jamaica, and also to be on the staff of the Jamaican Standard. In 1941, she was hired by the BBC Empire Service to work on the programme Calling the West Indies, in which World War II soldiers would have their messages read on the radio to their families, becoming the producer of the programme by 1942. During the same year, Marson turned the programme into Caribbean Voices, as a forum in which Caribbean literary work was read over the radio. More than two hundred authors appeared on Caribbean Voices, including V. S. Naipaul, Samuel Selvon, George Lamming and Derek Walcott. Through this show, Marson met people such as Clare McFarlane, Vic Reid, Andrew Salkey, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Jomo Kenyatta, Haile Selassie, Marcus Garvey, Amy Garvey, Nancy Cunard, Sylvia Pankhurst, Winifred Holtby, Paul Robeson, John Masefield, Louis MacNeice, T. S. Eliot, Tambimuttu and George Orwell. The latter helped Marson edit the programme before she turned it into Caribbean Voices. She also established a firm friendship with Mary Treadgold, who eventually took over her role when Marson returned to Jamaica. However, "despite these experiences and personal connections, there is a strong sense, in Marson's poetry and in Jarrett-Macauley's biography [The Life of Una Marson], that Marson remained something of an isolated and marginal figure". Nevertheless, Marson's radio show, Caribbean Voices, subsequently produced by Henry Swanzy, was described by Kamau Brathwaite as "the single most important literary catalyst for Caribbean creative writing in English". Since on radio the poems could only be appreciated orally, Caribbean Voices helped to influence later Caribbean poetry in having a more spoken form; as Laurence Breiner notes, through the medium of radio "much West Indian poetry was heard rather than seen". Details of Marson's life are limited, and those pertaining to her personal and professional life post-1945 are particularly hard to come by. In 1945, she published a poetry collection entitled Towards the Stars. This marked a shift in the focus of her poetry: while she once wrote about female sadness over lost love, poems from Towards the Stars were much more focused on the independent woman. Also at this time, Marson wrote at least one article entitled "We Want Books - But Do We Encourage Our Writers?" in an effort to spur Caribbean nationalism through literature. Her efforts outside of her writing seem to work in collaboration with these sentiments, though conflicting stories offer little concrete evidence about what she exactly did. Sources differ in outlining Marson's personal life during this time period. Author Erika J. Waters states that Marson was a secretary for the Pioneer Press, a publishing company in Jamaica for Jamaican authors. This source believes that she then moved in the 1950s to Washington, DC, where she met and married a dentist named Peter Staples. The two allegedly divorced, allowing Marson to travel to England, Israel, then back to Jamaica, where she died aged 60 in 1965, following a heart attack. Another source, written by Lee M. Jenkins, offers a very different tale for Marson's personal life and says that Marson was sent to a mental hospital following a breakdown during the years 1946–49. After being released, Marson founded the Pioneer Press. This source claims that she went in the 1950s to the US, where she had another breakdown and was admitted to St. Elizabeth's Asylum. Following this, Marson returned to Jamaica, where she rallied against Rastafarian discrimination. She then went to Israel for a women's conference, an experience that she discussed in her last BBC radio broadcast for Woman's Hour. The conflicting details regarding Marson's personal life show that there is very little information available about her. For example, Water's article quotes Marson's criticisms of Porgy and Bess, yet provides no citation for this work. In combination with this is the limited record of her writings during this time period. Many of her works were left unpublished or circulated only in Jamaica. Most of these writings are only available in the Institute of Jamaica in Kingston. Given these constraints, it is difficult to understand the whole of Marson's accomplishments during the final period of her life. Critics have both praised and dismissed Marson's poetry. She has been criticized for mimicking European style, such as Romantic and Georgian poetics. For example, Marson's poem "If" parodies the style of Kipling's original poem of the same title. Denise deCaires Narain has suggested that Marson was overlooked because poetry concerning the condition and status of females was not important to audiences at the time the works were produced. Other critics, by contrast, praised Marson for her modern style. Some, such as Narain, even suggest that her mimicking challenged conventional poetry of the time in an effort to criticize European poets. Regardless, Marson was active in the West Indian writing community during that period. Her involvement with Caribbean Voices was important to publicising Caribbean literature internationally, as well as spurring nationalism within the Caribbean islands that she represented.
February 6, 1802
Comte Gustave Auguste Bonnin de la Bonninière de Beaumont (1802 in Beaumont-la-Chartre, Sarthe – 1866, Tours) was a French magistrate, prison reformer, and travel companion to the famed philosopher and politician Alexis de Tocqueville. While he was very successful in his lifetime, he is often overlooked and his name is synonymous with Tocqueville's achievements.
February 7, 1812
Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented fame, and by the twentieth century his literary genius was broadly acknowledged by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular.
February 7, 1941
Kevin John William Crossley-Holland (born 7 February 1941) is an English translator, children's author and poet. His best known work may now be the Arthur trilogy, published around age sixty (2000–2003), for which he won the Guardian Prize and other recognition. Crossley-Holland and his 1985 novella Storm won the annual Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's outstanding children's book by a British author. For the 70th anniversary of the Medal in 2007 it was named one of the top ten winning works, selected by a panel to compose the ballot for a public election of the all-time favourite.
February 7, 1943
Eric Foner (born February 7, 1943) is an American historian. On the faculty of the Department of History at Columbia University since 1982, he writes extensively on political history, the history of freedom, the early history of the Republican Party, African American biography, Reconstruction, and historiography. Foner is the leading contemporary historian of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period, having written Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, winner of many prizes for history writing, and more than ten other books on the topic. In 2011, Foner's The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery won the Pulitzer Prize, Lincoln Prize, and the Bancroft Prize. Foner also won the Bancroft in 1989 for his book Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution. In 2000, he was elected president of the American Historical Association.
February 7, 1945
Ian Jack is a British journalist and writer who has edited the Independent on Sunday and the literary magazine Granta and now writes regularly for The Guardian.
February 7, 1930
David Kahn (born February 7, 1930) is a US historian, journalist and writer. He has written extensively on the history of cryptography and military intelligence. Kahn's first published book, The Codebreakers - The Story of Secret Writing (1967), has been widely considered to be a definitive account of the history of cryptography.
February 7, 1929
Soleiman Fayyad (February 7, 1929, Nile Delta, Egypt - February 26, 2015) published his first work in Cairo in 1961, and since published several volumes of short stories, children’s books and dictionaries of Arabic grammar and usage. Recognized as an exponent of contemporary Egyptian narrative - not unlike the Nobel prizewinner Naguib Mahfouz and Yusuf Idriss, the father of the modern Egyptian short story Fayyad has become part of the generation of Egyptian writers who rejected the sentimental romanticism of previous writers in favor of a more uncompromisingly psychological fiction. The novel VOICES is his first work of fiction to be published in English. Hosam Aboul-Ela, his translator, is the American-born son of an Egyptian father and an American mother. He lives in Texas.
February 7, 1885
Harry Sinclair Lewis (February 7, 1885 – January 10, 1951) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded ‘for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters.’ His works are known for their insightful and critical views of American capitalism and materialism between the wars. He is also respected for his strong characterizations of modern working women. H.L. Mencken wrote of him, ‘[If] there was ever a novelist among us with an authentic call to the trade ... it is this red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds.’
February 7, 1950
Patrick McGrath (born 7 February 1950) is a British novelist, whose work has been categorized as gothic fiction. McGrath was born in London and grew up near Broadmoor Hospital from the age of five where his father was Medical Superintendent. His fiction is principally characterised by the first person unreliable narrator, and recurring subject matter in his work includes mental illness, repressed homosexuality and adulterous relationships.
February 7, 1958
Sy Montgomery (born February 7, 1958), is a naturalist, author and scriptwriter who writes for children as well as adults. She is author of more than 20 books, including The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness, which was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a New York Times Bestseller. Her most popular book is The Good Good Pig, the bestselling memoir of life with her pig, Christopher Hogwood. Her other notable titles include Journey of the Pink Dolphins, Spell of the Tiger, and Search for the Golden Moon Bear. She has been described as "part Indiana Jones, part Emily Dickinson". Her book for children, Quest for the Tree Kangaroo: An Expedition to the Cloud Forest of New Guinea was the recipient of the 2007 Orbis Pictus Award and was selected as an Honor book for the ALA Sibert Award.
February 7, 1905
Paul-Yves Nizan (7 February 1905 – 23 May 1940) was a French philosopher and writer. He was born in Tours, Indre-et-Loire and studied in Paris where he befriended fellow student Jean-Paul Sartre at the Lycée Henri IV. He became a member of the French Communist Party, and much of his writing reflects his political beliefs, although he resigned from the party upon hearing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. He died in the Battle of Dunkirk, fighting against the German army in World War II. His works include the novels Antoine Bloye (1933), Le Cheval de Troie [The Trojan Horse] and La Conspiration [The Conspiracy] (1938), as well as the essays "Les Chiens de garde" ["The Watchdogs"] (1932) and "Aden Arabie" (1931), which introduced him to a new audience when it was republished in 1960 with a foreword by Sartre. In particular, the opening sentence "I was twenty, I won't let anyone say those are the best years of your life" (J’avais vingt ans. Je ne laisserai personne dire que c’est le plus bel âge de la vie.) became one of the most influential slogans of student protest during May '68.
February 7, 1833
Manuel Ricardo Palma Soriano (February 7, 1833 – October 6, 1919) was a Peruvian author, scholar, librarian and politician. His magnum opus is the Tradiciones peruanas. Ricardo Palma was born into a family that was living in Lima after migrating from the province. His mother was a mestiza with African roots. His parents separated when he was still young. He was educated at a Jesuit school and attended the University of San Carlos on an irregular basis. He suspended his studies to perform voluntary service in the Peruvian navy for six years. From a young age he dabbled in politics as a member of the liberal camp. In 1860 he was believed to have participated in a failed plot against president Ramón Castilla which resulted in an exile to Chile from which he returned in October 1862. He made a trip to Europe in 1864-1865 and when he returned to Lima in 1865 he became involved again in political affairs and public service until 1876. He held the positions of Consul of Peru in Pará, Brazil, Senator for the Loreto and official in the Ministry of War and Navy. The War of the Pacific (1879–1883) between Chile and Peru disrupted Palma's life and resulted in the virtually complete destruction of his own library as well as that housed in the National Library of Peru. After the war Palma was named director of the National Library, a post he held until his retirement in 1912. Palma successfully took on the task of rebuilding the National Library that was ransacked by the occupation forces of the Chilean army in 1881 following the battle of Lima during the War of the Pacific. Palma was able to bring the National Library back from the ashes so that it regained its previous stature and became recognized once again as one of the top libraries in South America. It was through his personal friendship with the then Chilean president Domingo Santa María that Palma was able to recover an estimated 10,000 books from Chilean hands, as well as many other works which were recovered through his own personal efforts. He married Cristina Román Olivier with whom he had several children. His son Clemente Palma became a prominent writer of fantastic tales, usually horror stories, that were influenced by Edgar Allan Poe. His daughter Angélica Palma was also a writer and a member of the early feminist movement in Peru. Ricardo Palma published his first verses and became the editor of a political and satiric newssheet called El Diablo (The Devil) at 15. During his early years, Ricardo Palma composed romantic dramas (which he later repudiated) and poetry. His first book of verse, Poesías (Poems), appeared in 1855. He gained an early reputation as a historian with his book on the activities of the Spanish Inquisition during the period of the Viceroyalty of Peru (Anales De La Inquisicion De Lima: Estudio Historico, 1863). He also wrote for the satirical press of Peru where he distinguished himself as a prolific columnist and one of the bastions of Peruvian political satire in the nineteenth century. He collaborated with the satirical sheet El Burro (The Donkey) and became later one of the principal contributors to the satirical magazine La Campana (The Bell). Later he founded the magazine La Broma (The Joke). He was also a regular contributor to serious publications such as El Mercurio, El Correo, La Patria, El Liberal, Revista del Pacífico and Revista de Sud América. He was further active as a foreign newspaper correspondent during the War of the Pacific. Palma's literary reputation rests upon his creation and development of the literary genre known as tradiciones, short stories that mix history and fiction, written both to amuse and educate, according to the author's declared intention. It was by creatively using poetic license and by deviating from 'pure' history that Palma gained his large South American readership. His Tradiciones peruanas span several centuries, with an emphasis on earlier colonial and republican times in Peru. The Tradiciones were published from 1872 to 1910 in a series of volumes. There are also many different editions and selections of the Tradiciones commercially available. The Tradiciones peruanas do not meet formal historical standards of accuracy or reliability sufficiently to be considered 'history,' but Palma never intended them to be read as 'pure' history. Since they are primarily historical fiction, they should be understood and enjoyed as such. The author's opinion, the opinions of the other primary sources or oral narrators of the stories he collects and transmits, as well as hearsay play a large role in his stories. One of the best-known of the Tradiciones, especially within American Spanish literature classes, is 'La camisa de Margarita'. Some of the Tradiciones peruanas have been translated into English under the title The Knights of the Cape and Thirty-seven Other Selections from the Tradiciones Peruanas of Ricardo Palma (ed. by Harriet de Onís, 1945) and more recently under the title Peruvian Traditions (ed. by Christopher Conway and translated by Helen Lane, Oxford University Press, 2004). The Tradiciones peruanas are recognised as a considerable contribution to Peruvian and South American literature. Some critics have classified the Tradiciones as part of nineteenth-century Romanticism. Palma's Tradiciones en Salsa Verde were published posthumously. These stories are similar to the Tradiciones peruanas but, because of their bawdy nature, they were not published during Palma's lifetime for fear of shocking the sedate Lima establishment. Throughout his life, Ricardo Palma published various articles and books on history, the results of his own historical research such as the Anales De La Inquisicion De Lima: Estudio Historico (1863) and Monteagudo y Sánchez Carrión (1877). He was a noted linguistic scholar and wrote a number of works on the subject including the Neologismos y americanismos and Papeletas lexográficas. He campaigned for recognition by the Real Academia Española of the Latin-American and Peruvian contributions to the Spanish language. In 1999, a well-known London auction house announced the sale of a batch of 50 letters that Ricardo Palma had written to an Argentinian friend. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Peru persuaded the National Library of Peru to participate in the auction. It had been more than 50 years since Peru had bought cultural heritage abroad. Today these letters are kept at the National Library of Peru. Ricardo Palma University has recently published the letters of Palma in three volumes (2005–2007).
February 7, 1896
Stig Henning Jacob Puggaard Paludan (February 7, 1896, Copenhagen, Denmark - September 26, 1975, Birkerød, Denmark), Danish essayist, poet, and novelist, whose sceptic view of his times marked his writings. Paludan was trained as a pharmacist in Denmark, and spent two years abroad in Ecuador and New York where he began to write. Having had two manuscripts rejected by Danish publishers, Paludan returned to Copenhagen in 1922 with a third manuscript which became his first published novel, De vestlige Veje (The Western Roads). A volume of poems followed rapidly along with other books including Sogelys (Searchlight), a sequel to the first novel, and by 1924 Paludan was able to support himself by his writing. With the completion of JORGEN STEIN, he attained full stature as a novelist and turned to other genres.
February 7, 1955
Alicia Partnoy was born in 1955 in Argentina. As a political activist, she was ‘disappeared’ and jailed for a total of three years during the recent military dictatorship. She came to the United States as a refugee in 1979. She translates and performs her poetry, which has been set to music by Sweet Honey in the Rock and other groups. Alicia Partnoy lectures extensively at the invitation of Amnesty International, human rights groups and universities, on human rights and writing under repression. She is a translator and also works at Hispania Books, a Latin American bookstore in Washington, D.C. Alicia Partnoy is the author of The Little School; Tales of Disappearance and Survival in Argentina (Cleis Press, 1986), a Writer’s Choice selection of the Pushcart Foundation. She lives with her husband and daughter.
February 7, 1915
Joseph Shallit (February 7, 1915, Philadelphia, PA - June 13, 1995) was an American mystery novelist and science fiction author. He was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants from Vitebsk, born in Philadelphia under the name Joseph Shaltz.
February 7, 1965
Christopher Julius Rock III is an American comedian, actor, writer, producer, and director. After working as a standup comic and appearing in small film roles, Rock came to wider prominence as a cast member of Saturday Night Live in the early 1990s.
February 7, 1909
Anna ?wirszczy?ska (also known as Anna Swir) (February 7, 1909, Warsaw, Poland - September 30, 1984, Kraków, Poland) was a Polish poet whose works deal with themes including her experiences during World War II, motherhood, the female body, and sensuality. ?wirszczy?ska was born in Warsaw and grew up in poverty as the daughter of an artist. She began publishing her poems in the 1930s. During the Nazi occupation of Poland she joined the Polish resistance movement in World War II and was a military nurse during the Warsaw Uprising. She wrote for underground publications and once waited 60 minutes to be executed. Czes?aw Mi?osz writes of knowing her during this time and has translated a volume of her work. Her experiences during the war strongly influenced her poetry. In 1974 she published Building the Barricade, a volume which describes the suffering she witnessed and experienced during that time. She also writes frankly about the female body in various stages of life.
February 7, 1812
Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented fame, and by the twentieth century his literary genius was broadly acknowledged by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular.
February 7, 1834
Estanislao del Campo (February 7, 1834 – November 6, 1880) was an Argentine poet. Born in Buenos Aires to a unitarian family—the unitarians were a political party favoring a strong central government rather than a federation, he fought in the battles of Cepeda and Pavón, defending Buenos Aires´s rights. He is best remembered for his 1866 satirical poem Fausto which describes the impressions of a gaucho who goes to see Charles Gounod's opera Faust, believing the events really to be happening. He also published his Collected Poems in 1870. A street in the San Isidro neighbourhood in Buenos Aires is named after him. Estanislao Del Campo is also the name of a small cotton-producing town in Formosa Province, Argentina which lies about 135 km from the city of Formosa. Its total population is 4,055 according to the census of INDEC of 2001. Most of the population are very poor.
February 8, 1911
Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979) was an American poet, short-story writer, and recipient of the 1976 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956 and the National Book Award winner in 1970.
February 8, 1577
Robert Burton (8 February 1577 – 25 January 1640) was an English scholar at Oxford University, best known for the classic The Anatomy of Melancholy. He was also the incumbent of St Thomas the Martyr, Oxford, and of Seagrave in Leicestershire.
February 8, 1850
Kate Chopin, born Katherine O'Flaherty (February 8, 1850 — August 22, 1904), was an American author of short stories and novels. She is now considered by some to have been a forerunner of feminist authors of the 20th century.
February 8, 1938
Melvyn C. Goldstein is John Reynolds Harkness Professor in Anthropology and Codirector of the Center for Research on Tibet at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of many books on Tibet including A Tibetan Revolutionary The Political Life and Times of Bapa Phüntso Wangye (with Dawei Sherap and William R. Siebenschuh), Essentials of Modern Literary Tibetan: A Reading Course and Reference Grammar, and A History of Modern Tibet, 1913-1951, all published by UC Press.
February 8, 1955
John Ray Grisham Jr. is an American novelist, attorney, politician and activist, best known for his popular legal thrillers. His books have been translated into 42 languages and published worldwide.
February 8, 1924
Lêdo Ivo (Maceió, 18 February 1924 -Seville, 23 December 2012) was a Brazilian poet, novelist, essayist and journalist. He was member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, elected in 1986. Lêdo Ivo was born in 1924 in Maceió, capital of Alagoas state in northeastern Brazil. He settled in 1940 in Recife, where he completed his training. In 1943, he moved to Rio de Janeiro to enroll in law school and while working for the literary supplements as a professional journalist. He married Leda Maria Sarmento Ivo de Medeiros (1923-2004), with whom he had three children. His first book was published in 1944, a collection of poems titled As imaginações. The following year he published Ode e Elegia, which was awarded the Olavo Bilac Prize the Brazilian Academy of Letters and is a turning point in the history of Brazilian poetry. The death of Mário de Andrade in 1945 led to a generational change in Brazilian poetry whose rule was 'an invitation to transgression', with the triumph of purely poetical structures. His literary work would be enhanced in the following decades by books of poetry, novels, short stories and essays or reports. Ivo's first novel, As Alianças, which went through several editions and awarded him the Graça Aranha Foundation Prize in 1947. He continued with O Caminho sem Adventura (1948), O sobrinho do General (1964) and Ninho de cobras (published in English as Snake's Nest) (1973), one of his biggest hits, an allegory of totalitarianism of the military dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas. His last novel was A morte do Brasil (1984). In 1949 Ivo spoke at the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo in a conference titled The Generation of 1945; in the same year he received a law degree, a profession he never would exercise, preferring to devote himself to journalism. In 1953 he visited several European countries for long periods. In 1963 he spent two months in universities in the USA, by invitation of the Government. In 1986 Ivo was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters. In 2009 he was awarded the Premio Casa de Las Américas. Ledo Ivo was also a translator. He translated into Portuguese works of authors like Albrecht Goes. Jane Austen, Maupassant, Rimbaud and Dostoyevsky. He published two memoirs, Confissões de um Poeta (1979), which was awarded the prize of the Cultural Foundation of the Federal District, and O Aluno Relapso (1991).
February 8, 1946
Gert Jonke (8 February 1946 – 4 January 2009) was an Austrian poet, playwright and novelist.
February 8, 1889
Siegfried Kracauer was an important film critic in Weimar Germany. A Jew, he escaped the rise of Nazism, fleeing to Paris in 1933. Later, in anguish after Walter Benjamin’s suicide, he made his way to New York, where he remained until his death in 1966. He wrote From Caligari to Hitler while working as a ‘special assistant’ to the curator of the Museum of Modern Art’s film division. He was also on the editorial board of Bollingen Series. Despite many critiques of its attempt to link movies to historical outcomes, From Caligari to Hitler remains Kracauer’s best-known and most influential book, and a seminal work in the study of film. Princeton published a revised edition of his Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality in 1997.
February 8, 1910
GEORGE RUDE (February 8, 1910, Oslo, Norway - January 8, 1993, Battle, United Kingdom) is the author of many books on modern European history, among the most notable being The Crowd in the French Revolution, Wilkes and Liberty, Captain Swing, and Debate on Europe, 1815-1830. Born in 1910 in Oslo, he was educated at Cambridge and London universities, and was Professor of History at Concordia University in Montreal.
February 8, 1819
John Ruskin (8 February 1819 – 20 January 1900) was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist.
February 8, 1888
Giuseppe Ungaretti (8 February 1888 - 2 June 1970) was an Italian modernist poet, journalist, essayist, critic and academic. A leading representative of the experimental trend known as ermetismo, he was one of the most prominent contributors to 20th century Italian literature. Influenced by symbolism, he was briefly aligned with futurism. Like many futurists, he took an irredentist position during World War I. Ungaretti debuted as a poet while fighting in the trenches, publishing one of his best-known pieces, L'allegria (‘The Joy’). During the interwar period, Ungaretti was a collaborator of Benito Mussolini (whom he met during his socialist accession), as well as a foreign-based correspondent for Il Popolo d'Italia and La Gazzetta del Popolo. While briefly associated with the Dadaists, he developed ermetismo as a personal take on poetry. After spending several years in Brazil, he returned home during World War II, and was assigned a teaching post at the University of Rome, where he spent the final decades of his life and career. His Fascist past was the subject of controversy. Andrew Fisardi's poems, essays, and translations have been published in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and other periodicals. A native of Massachussetts, he lives in Orvieto, Italy.
February 8, 1828
Jules Gabriel Verne (8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright best known for his adventure novels and his profound influence on the literary genre of science fiction.
February 8, 1820
William Tecumseh Sherman (February 8, 1820 – February 14, 1891) was an American soldier, businessman, educator, and author. He served as a general in the Union Army during the American Civil War (1861–65), for which he received recognition for his outstanding command of military strategy as well as criticism for the harshness of the scorched earth policies he implemented in conducting total war against the Confederate States.
February 9, 1931
Thomas Bernhard (born Nicolaas Thomas Bernhard, February 9, 1931 – February 12, 1989) was an Austrian novelist, playwright and poet. Bernhard, whose body of work has been called ‘the most significant literary achievement since World War II,’ is widely considered to be one of the most important German-speaking authors of the postwar era. Thomas Bernhard was born in 1931 in Heerlen, Netherlands as an illegitimate child to Herta Fabjan (née Herta Bernhard, 1904–1950) and the carpenter Alois Zuckerstätter (1905–1940). The next year his mother returned to Austria, where Bernhard spent much of his early childhood with his maternal grandparents in Vienna and Seekirchen am Wallersee north of Salzburg. His mother's subsequent marriage in 1936 occasioned a move to Traunstein in Bavaria. Bernhard's natural father died in Berlin from gas poisoning; Thomas had never met him. Bernhard's grandfather, the author Johannes Freumbichler, pushed for an artistic education for the boy, including musical instruction. Bernhard went to elementary school in Seekirchen and later attended various schools in Salzburg including the Johanneum which he left in 1947 to start an apprenticeship with a grocer. Bernhard's Lebensmensch (companion for life), whom he cared for alone in her dying days, was Hedwig Stavianicek (1894–1984), a woman more than thirty-seven years his senior, whom he met in 1950, the year of his mother's death and one year after the death of his beloved grandfather. She was the major support in his life and greatly furthered his literary career. The extent or nature of his relationships with women is obscure. Thomas Bernhard's public persona was asexual. Suffering throughout his youth from an intractable lung disease (tuberculosis), Bernhard spent the years 1949 to 1951 at the sanatorium Grafenhof, in Sankt Veit im Pongau. He trained as an actor at the Mozarteum in Salzburg (1955–1957) and was always profoundly interested in music: his lung condition, however, made a career as a singer impossible. After that he began work briefly as a journalist, then as a full-time writer. Bernhard died in 1989 in Gmunden, Upper Austria. His attractive house in Ohlsdorf-Obernathal 2 where he had moved in 1965 is now a museum and centre for the study and performance of Bernhard's work. In his will, which aroused great controversy on publication, Bernhard prohibited any new stagings of his plays and publication of his unpublished work in Austria. His death was announced only after his funeral. Often criticized in Austria as a Nestbeschmutzer (one who dirties his own nest) for his critical views, Bernhard was highly acclaimed abroad. His work is most influenced by the feeling of being abandoned (in his childhood and youth) and by his incurable illness, which caused him to see death as the ultimate essence of existence. His work typically features loners' monologues explaining, to a rather silent listener, his views on the state of the world, often with reference to a concrete situation. This is true for his plays as well as for his prose, where the monologues are then reported second hand by the listener. His main protagonists, often scholars or, as he calls them, Geistesmenschen, denounce everything that matters to the Austrian in tirades against the ‘stupid populace’ that are full of contumely. He also attacks the state (often called ‘Catholic-National-Socialist’), generally respected institutions such as Vienna's Burgtheater, and much-loved artists. His work also continually deals with the isolation and self-destruction of people striving for an unreachable perfection, since this same perfection would mean stagnancy and therefore death. Anti-Catholic rhetoric is not uncommon. ‘Es ist alles lächerlich, wenn man an den Tod denkt’ (Everything is ridiculous, when one thinks of Death) was his comment when he received a minor Austrian national award in 1968, which resulted in one of the many public scandals he caused over the years and which became part of his fame. His novel Holzfällen (1984), for instance, could not be published for years due to a defamation claim by a former friend. Many of his plays—above all Heldenplatz (1988)—were met with criticism from many Austrians, who claimed they sullied Austria's reputation. One of the more controversial lines called Austria ‘a brutal and stupid nation … a mindless, cultureless sewer which spreads its penetrating stench all over Europe.’ Heldenplatz, as well as the other plays Bernhard wrote in these years, were staged at Vienna's famous Burgtheater by the controversial director Claus Peymann. Even in death Bernhard caused disturbance by his, as he supposedly called it, posthumous literary emigration, by disallowing all publication and stagings of his work within Austria's borders. The International Thomas Bernhard Foundation, established by his executor and half-brother Dr. Peter Fabjan, has subsequently made exceptions, although the German firm of Suhrkamp remains his principal publisher. The correspondence between Bernhard and his publisher Siegfried Unseld from 1961 to 1989 – about 500 letters – was published in December 2009 at Suhrkamp Verlag, Germany.
February 9, 1940
John Maxwell ‘J. M.’ Coetzee (born 9 February 1940) is a South African born novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is now an Australian citizen and lives in Adelaide, South Australia. Coetzee has been described as ‘inarguably the most celebrated and decorated’ living writer in the Anglosphere. Before receiving the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, he was awarded the CNA Prize (thrice), the Prix Femina Étranger, The Irish Times International Fiction Prize and the Booker Prize (twice), among other accolades.
February 9, 1940
Seamus Deane (born 9 February 1940) is an Irish poet, novelist, critic and intellectual historian. Born in Derry, Northern Ireland, Deane was brought up as part of a Catholic nationalist family. Until 1993, he was Professor of Modern English and American Literature at University College Dublin. In the late 70s and 80s, he taught American college juniors part-time at the School of Irish Studies in the Ballsbridge section of Dublin.
February 9, 1923
André Gorz (9 February 1923 – 22 September 2007), pen name of Gérard Horst, born Gerhart Hirsch, also known by his pen name Michel Bosquet, was a social philosopher. Also a journalist, he co-founded Le Nouvel Observateur weekly in 1964. A supporter of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist version of Marxism after the Second World War, he became in the aftermath of the May '68 student riots more concerned with political ecology. In the 1960s and 1970s he was a main theorist in the New Left movement. His central theme was wage labour issues such as liberation from work, the just distribution of work, social alienation, and a guaranteed basic income.
February 9, 1863
Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, better known as Anthony Hope (9 February 1863 – 8 July 1933), was an English novelist and playwright. He was a prolific writer, especially of adventure novels but he is remembered best for only two books: The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) and its sequel Rupert of Hentzau (1898).
February 9, 1956
Chenjerai Hove (9 February 1956 – 12 July 2015) was a Zimbabwean poet, novelist and essayist who wrote in both English and Shona. Modernist in their formal construction, but making extensive use of oral conventions, Hove's novels offer an intense examination of the psychic and social costs - to the rural population, especially, of the war of liberation in Zimbabwe." He died on 12 July 2015; he was in Norway at the time and his death has been attributed to liver failure. The son of a local chief, Chenjerai Hove was born in Mazvihwa, near Zvishavane, Rhodesia. He attended school at Kutama College and Marist Brothers Dete, in the Hwange district of Zimbabwe. After studying in Gweru, he became a teacher and then took degrees at the University of South Africa and the University of Zimbabwe. He also worked as a journalist, and contributed to the anthology And Now the Poets Speak. A critic of the policies of the Mugabe government, he was living in exile at the time of his death as a fellow at the House of Culture in Stavanger, Norway, as part of the International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN). Prior to this, he held visiting positions at Lewis and Clark College and Brown University; he was also once a poet-in-residence in Miami. Chenjerai Hove's work was translated into several languages (including Japanese, German, and Dutch). He won several awards over the course of his career, including the 1989 Noma Award for Publishing in Africa.
February 9, 1948
Kwadwo Agymah Kamau is an Barbadian American novelist. He is a native of Barbados, moved to New York in 1977. He studied at Virginia Commonwealth University. He graduated from Baruch College of CUNY with a bachelor's degree in finance and a master's degree (1985) in quantitative economics. He served first as a statistician at the New York City Department of Investigations, then as a senior economist at the New York State Department of Taxation & Finance. He studied with Paule Marshall at Virginia Commonwealth University in the MFA program. His work has appeared in Callaloo, Caribbean Vibes, Gumbo, InSyte Magazine, He teaches creative writing at the University of Oklahoma.
February 9, 1892
Konstantin Mochulsky (February 9, 1892, Odessa, Ukraine - March 21, 1948, France), long considered one of the most important twentieth century critics, was a member of the emigre group of Russian intellectuals in Paris who were devoted to literary, religious, and philosophic pursuits. MICHAEL A. MINJHAN is a member of the Department of Language and Literature at Bard College. . The original Russian edition was published by the YMCA Press, Paris, France .
February 9, 1737
Thomas Paine (February 9, 1737 – June 8, 1809) was an English-American political activist, philosopher, political theorist and revolutionary. One of the Founding Fathers of the United States, he authored the two most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, and he inspired the rebels in 1776 to declare independence from Britain. His ideas reflected Enlightenment-era rhetoric of transnational human rights. He has been called "a corsetmaker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination". Born in Thetford, England, in the county of Norfolk, Paine emigrated to the British American colonies in 1774 with the help of Benjamin Franklin, arriving just in time to participate in the American Revolution. Virtually every rebel read (or listened to a reading of) his powerful pamphlet Common Sense (1776), proportionally the all-time best-selling American title which crystallized the rebellious demand for independence from Great Britain. His The American Crisis (1776–83) was a prorevolutionary pamphlet series. Common Sense was so influential that John Adams said, "Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain." Paine lived in France for most of the 1790s, becoming deeply involved in the French Revolution. He wrote Rights of Man (1791), in part a defense of the French Revolution against its critics. His attacks on British writer Edmund Burke led to a trial and conviction in absentia in 1792 for the crime of seditious libel. In 1792, despite not being able to speak French, he was elected to the French National Convention. The Girondists regarded him as an ally. Consequently, the Montagnards, especially Robespierre, regarded him as an enemy. In December 1793, he was arrested and imprisoned in Paris, then released in 1794. He became notorious because of his pamphlet The Age of Reason (1793–94), in which he advocated deism, promoted reason and free thought, and argued against institutionalized religion in general and Christian doctrine in particular. He also published the pamphlet Agrarian Justice (1797), discussing the origins of property, and introduced the concept of a guaranteed minimum income. In 1802, he returned to the U.S. where he died on June 8, 1809. Only six people attended his funeral as he had been ostracized for his ridicule of Christianity.
February 9, 1737
Thomas Paine (February 9, 1737 - June 8, 1809) was an English-born American political activist, philosopher, political theorist and revolutionary. One of the Founding Fathers of the United States, he authored the two most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution and inspired the rebels in 1776 to declare independence from Britain.
February 9, 1822
James Parton (February 9, 1822 – October 17, 1891) was an English-born American biographer who wrote books on the lives of Horace Greeley, Aaron Burr, Andrew Jackson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Voltaire. Parton was born in Canterbury, England, in 1822. He was taken to the United States when he was five years old, studied in New York City and White Plains, New York, and was a schoolmaster in Philadelphia and then in New York. He moved to Newburyport, Massachusetts, where he died on October 17, 1891. Parton was the most popular biographer of his day in America. Parton's nonfiction combined elements of novel writing, which made his books quite popular. Harriet Beecher Stowe once thanked him "for the pleasure you have given me in biographical works which you have had the faculty of making more interesting than romance—(let me trust it is not by making them in part works of imagination)." His first wife, Sara (1811–1872), sister of Nathaniel Parker Willis, and widow of Charles H. Eldredge (d. 1846), attained considerable popularity as a writer under the pen-name Fanny Fern. They were married in 1856. Her works include the novels, Ruth Hall (1854), reminiscent of her own life, and Rose Clark (1857); and several volumes of sketches and stories. In 1876 Parton married Ellen Willis Eldredge, his first wife's daughter by her first husband, Charles Eldredge. With Ellen (and previously Fanny Fern), he raised Ethel, the daughter of Grace Eldrege (Fanny Fern's daughter) and writer Mortimer Thomson (also known as Philander Doesticks). Although never legally adopted by Parton, she took his last name upon reaching her majority. Ethel Parton became a famous writer of children's books about 19th-century life in Newburyport, MA, published in the 1930s and 1940s.
February 9, 1960
David Judah Simon (born February 9, 1960) is an American author, journalist, writer, and producer. He worked for the Baltimore Sun City Desk for twelve years (1982–95) and wrote Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991) and co-wrote The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood (1997) with Ed Burns. The former book was the basis for the NBC series Homicide: Life on the Street (1993–99), on which Simon served as a writer and producer. Simon adapted the latter book into the HBO mini-series The Corner (2000). He was the creator, executive producer, head writer, and show runner for all five seasons of the HBO television series The Wire (2002–2008). He adapted the non-fiction book Generation Kill into a television mini-series, and served as the show runner for the project. He was selected as one of the 2010 MacArthur Fellows and named an Utne Reader visionary in 2011. Simon also created the HBO series Treme with Eric Overmyer, which aired for four seasons. Following Treme, Simon wrote the HBO mini-series Show Me a Hero with journalist William F. Zorzi, a colleague at The Baltimore Sun, and on The Wire. In August 2015, HBO commissioned two pilots from Simon's company Blown Deadline Productions. The first drama, The Deuce, about the New York porn industry in the 1970s and 1980s, would star Maggie Gyllenhaal and co-producer James Franco with shooting in New York in the fall of 2015. The second drama is an untitled program exploring a "detailed examination of partisanship" and money in Washington politics, to be co-produced with Carl Bernstein.
February 9, 1867
S?seki Natsume (February 9, 1867 – December 9, 1916), born Kinnosuke Natsume was a Japanese novelist of the Meiji period (1868–1912). He is best known for his novels Kokoro, Botchan, I Am a Cat and his unfinished work Light and Darkness. He was also a scholar of British literature and composer of haiku, kanshi, and fairy tales.
February 9, 1880
James Stephens (9 February 1880 - 26 December 1950) was an Irish novelist and poet. James Stephens produced many retellings of Irish myths and fairy tales. His retellings are marked by a rare combination of humour and lyricism.
February 9, 1969
Neil Cross (born 9 February 1969) is a British novelist and scriptwriter, best known for as the creator of the drama series Luther and Hard Sun (TV Series). Cross was born in Bristol on 9 February 1969. He graduated from the University of Leeds in 1994 with a degree in English and Theology. His initial career was solely as a novelist, beginning with Mr In-Between, which was published in 1998 (and adapted into a film in 2001). He later diversified into television, writing an episode of the BBC spy drama Spooks in 2006 before becoming lead writer on the sixth and seventh series of the show. He has also written for The Fixer and Doctor Who ("The Rings of Akhaten" and "Hide"). In 2010 he wrote a new adaptation of Whistle and I'll Come to You, from the story by M. R. James. He has created three television series: BBC crime thrillers Luther and Hard Sun (for which he wrote all the episodes); and Crossbones, an action adventure pirate series for NBC (co-created with James V. Hart and Amanda Welles).
February 9, 1942
Kirsten Thorup, a Danish author, was born in Funen, Denmark, in 1942 and now lives in Copenhagen. She is the author of three poetry collections, a volume of short stories, and three novels including BABY which has been translated into English. She has also written for films, television, and radio. Her novel, Den lange sommer, was published in Denmark in 1979. NADIA CHRISTENSEN is editor in chief of The Scandinavian Review and director of publishing for the American-Scandinavian Foundation in New York.
February 9, 1944
Alice Malsenior Walker (born February 9, 1944) is an American author and activist. She wrote the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple (1982) for which she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.She also wrote Meridian and The Third Life of Grange Copeland among other works.
February 10, 1932
MICHAEL ANTHONY was born in Mayaro, Trinidad, where his mother still lives. The small boy in THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO who was sent off to work as a servant was Michael Anthony himse1f, and the descriptions of both village and town are marvels of exactness. His wife Yvette comes from a neighbouring village, though they first met in London. His education at San Fernando’s Junior Technical School ended when he was fifteen. From ’47 to ’54 he worked as a moulder in an iron foundry at Pointe a Pierre. Then he came to England where he worked in several factories, as a parcels clerk at St Pancras Station, and in the GPO telegraph service. He became a journalist after joining Reuters as a teleprinter operator. After two years in Brazil, the Anthony family (they have four children) returned to Trinidad and settled in Chaguanas. Michael Anthony was employed by the National Cultural Council and worked on the production of educational books for children. He began his writing career in 1951, contributing stories and poems to the Trinidad Guardian. Later he had many stories published in BIM, the well-known West Indian literary magazine published in Barbados. We published his first novel, THE GAMES WERE COMING, in 1963; THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO in 1965; and GREEN DAYS BY THE RIVER in 1967.
February 10, 1935
Julian Christopher Rathbone (10 February 1935 – 28 February 2008) was an English novelist. Julian Rathbone attended Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was a contemporary of Bamber Gascoigne and Sylvia Plath. At Cambridge he took tutorials with FR Leavis, for whom, without having ever been what might be described as a 'Leavisite', he retained an abiding respect. After university Rathbone lived in Turkey for three years, making a living by teaching English. While in Turkey he heard that his father had been killed in a road accident at the age of sixty, an event to which Rathbone would return when himself the same age, in Blame Hitler. On his return to England jobs in various London schools were followed by the post of Head of English at the comprehensive school in Bognor Regis, West Sussex. Having originally aspired to be an actor or a painter, Rathbone had also taken up writing and by the end of the 1960s had had three novels published, all set in Turkey and informed by a background of which he had intimate knowledge. In 1973 Rathbone finally gave up teaching and left for Spain with the woman who would become his wife and lifelong companion, determined from then on to make his living by writing. Back in England and after some financially lean years Rathbone found his tenacity beginning to pay off. Booker Prize short-listings in 1976 and 1979 brought critical recognition, and although major commercial success remained elusive Rathbone's work appeared regularly, gaining a loyal readership and increasing popularity both at home and abroad. His novels continued to display interests and talents across several genres, from mainstream through thrillers to historical fiction. His novel of 1066, The Last English King, published 1997, achieved considerable commercial success and has been optioned for film several times without having yet made it to the screen. As a writer of non-fiction Rathbone made a lasting and original contribution to Wellington and Peninsular War studies with his Wellington's War, 1984. Various threads run through Rathbone's novels over their forty-year span. Standing firmly in the 19th Century tradition with its belief in the primacy of the writer's imagination and its consequent freedom to explore human life in all its aspects, Rathbone always refused to be tied to a single genre, time or place or character in undertaking this exploration. An ostensible thriller may be just as much a study of relationships, an apparently mainstream novel an investigation of crime, a work of historical fiction a meditation on contemporary issues. In blurring and blending genres in this way, for three decades or more in which the book market became increasingly obsessed with the typecasting and branding of books and their authors, Rathbone can be seen as having explored and questioned the nature of genre itself, its scope and limitations. Wherever the definitions of a particular genre threatened to restrict his enquiry into the human condition, Rathbone never hesitated to push it into wider territory. In a climate of increasing specialisation expected of novelists by the marketplace, this was an unfashionable approach to take, with arguably a heavy commercial cost over the years as Rathbone went his own way and refused to seek or accept any label or badge of identification which might increase sales but confine his activities as a writer. Rathbone in fact created four characters who appear in more than one of his books, permitting a certain grouping around each of them while never taking over the heterogeneous spirit of his work or deflecting him from the pursuit of wider fictional interests. First was Inspector Jan Argand (The Euro-Killers, Base Case, Watching The Detectives). Then the ‘Joseph’ of Joseph (Booker nomination 1979) makes his reappearance as Charlie Boylan in A Very English Agent and later as Eddie Bosham in Birth Of A Nation, as Rathbone follows the thread of events from the war in the Peninsula through the world of German exiles taking refuge in early Victorian London and on to the early years of the modern USA. Two books for Serpent's Tail - Accidents Will Happen and Brandenburg Concerto - focused on Renate Fechter, head of a German squad of Eco-police. Then finally Rathbone created a British private investigator, Chris Shovelin, for the two recent books Homage and As Bad As It Gets for Allison and Busby. Although diverse and strong characters in themselves, none of these four ever seemed likely to take over the oeuvre as a whole. Rathbone remained committed to diversity of inspiration rather than the formulaic approach to which concentration on a single character can lead. Leavis, although Rathbone never shared his cultural aridity, was a long-term presence in the novelist's background as a man who insisted on the power and importance of imaginative literature. In A Last Resort, written around the time of Leavis's death and giving a brilliant portrayal of a Britain making itself ripe for Thatcherism, the ferocious Cambridge don makes a brief appearance in the intellectual life of a gifted English student at a school not unlike the one Rathbone had taught in until a few years previously. As a writer perhaps the nearest Rathbone came to an acknowledged antecedent was Graham Greene, whose weaving of the thriller and mainstream strands of fiction, together with in-depth exploration of wider spiritual and political issues often set in foreign locations, clearly struck many chords both with Rathbone's vocational subject-matter and belief in the novelist's ability to address himself to all aspects of human life on as broad a front as he likes, with the finished work of fiction as the only credential he needs. Greene remained an icon with Rathbone throughout his writing life, as did the different figure of James Joyce, object of Rathbone's greatest reverence although rarely exercising any overt influence in his writing. A Last Resort is probably the most Joycean of Rathbone's books, in its use of accumulation of mundane detail to build up an almost surreal portrait of a country whose identity is dissolving in front of its face. To Joyce himself Rathbone paid the ultimate compliment of constantly rereading without seeking to imitate. Rathbone was a man of what might be called the classic Left. After public school and Cambridge three years in Turkey told him all he needed to know about poverty, and the next decade and a half of teaching in British secondary schools made him expert in the class system of his own country. His politics were those of tolerance and libertarianism, with an innate distrust of self-serving hierarchies and a cynicism towards power-structures and their manipulation of the world, in particular the world of the helpless. In his fiction, much influenced by Greene, he always made social and historical context part of the weave of the narrative. Twenty years ago, in Zdt and The Pandora Option, he dealt with food as a new weapon in the armoury of the superpowers, and in the early 1990s (Sand Blind) with the capacity of those same superpowers to fabricate wars in the interests of their own technologies and consumer needs. In Trajectories (1998) he presents a nightmare vision of Britain in 2035 which seems more recognisable and likely with every year that passes. Over a writing career of forty years, during which the world might be said to have changed out of recognition, it is notable how few of Rathbone's preoccupations and perceptions have dated, while many have been prescient and remain as relevant as they ever were. In his latest book The Mutiny, dealing with the Indian rising against British rule in 1857, the same commitment to clarity of vision is evident, an equal openness to all experiences and forces involved in the events of the time, which continues to mark Rathbone down as unashamedly in the line of the great novelists of the 19th Century. The critic who took Rathbone to task for appearing to claim a superiority of approach to the professional historian in dealing with such contentious historical material was raising a question which Rathbone's whole career, and The Mutiny itself, was dedicated to answering. For a man of wide intellectual interests Rathbone produced relatively little outside his long list of novels. Much travelled, and loving foreign places, he always aspired to produce volumes of travel writing, but nothing in this direction ever came to fruition commercially. His one non-fictional publication was Wellington's War (1984), product of a fascination with Wellington which dated back to schooldays. Following within fifteen years of Elizabeth Longford's two-volume biography, which re-established Wellington as a subject for serious study, Rathbone's book is a radical and original departure from the normal run of biographical accounts. Based on detailed research into both Wellington's collected correspondence and the battlefields of the Peninsular War, it counterpoints extracts from the letters with Rathbone's own elucidations and comments. As well as uniquely conveying the immediacy of events through Wellington's thought-processes and human voice, Wellington's War does more than any other book on the subject to illustrate the dimension and brilliance of Wellington's genius. The Duke himself has a habit of cropping up in various of Rathbone's fictions, notably in Joseph and A Very English Agent and, more hauntingly, in Blame Hitler, the novel in which Rathbone writes about his own father. Rathbone described his own interest in Wellington as ‘probably Oedipal‘, and the Duke as ‘the ultimate father-figure’. Wellington's War remains unique not only in Rathbone's own work but also in the growing contemporary literature on Wellington.
February 10, 1898
Bertolt Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956) was a German poet, playwright, theatre director, and Marxist. A theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter through the tours undertaken by the Berliner Ensemble – the post-war theatre company operated by Brecht and his wife, long-time collaborator and actress Helene Weigel.
February 10, 1953
Colin Gordon Calloway (born 1953) is a British American historian. He is professor of history and Samson Occom Professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth College.
February 10, 1890
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (February 10, 1890, Moscow, Russia - May 30, 1960, Peredelkino, Russia), poet, novelist and translator of Goethe and Shakespeare, was born in Moscow in 1890. The son of a well-known portrait painter and a concert pianist, he abandoned the study of music at an early age, turning instead to philosophy and then to writing. After the revolution, he was employed in the library of the Ministry of Education, and participated in the avant-garde investigations of new techniques of poetry. Acclaimed in the Twenties as the greatest Russian poet of the post-revolutionary era, he achieved world recognition with the publication of DOCTOR ZHIVAGO in 1957. He was awarded, and declined, the Nobel Prize, for Literature the following year, and died at his home in the writer's village’ of Peredelkino in May, 1960. EUGENE M. KAYDEN began translating Russian poetry 35 years ago. He started on pieces he had learned by heart in his native Russia, where he lived until he was 16. Since the 1920's he has given all his time outside his teaching duties to translating. Four years ago, this many-sided scholar retired to devote his full energy to his favorite activity—and particularly to Boris Pasternak's poetry. Eugene Kayden came to the United States in 1903. He graduated from the University of Colorado, then specialized in English and comparative literature at Columbia University, and in economics at Harvard and Princeton. In addition to his long, teaching career at Columbia, Yale and the University of the South, he has also served the U.S. government as an expert on Russia. His translations of Pasternak and Pushkin have appeared in the New Republic, New Statesman, Russian Review and Sewanee Review, among others.
February 10, 1920
Alexander Comfort (10 February 1920 – 26 March 2000) was a British scientist and physician known best for his nonfiction sex manual, The Joy of Sex (1972). He was an author of both fiction and nonfiction, as well as a gerontologist, anarchist, pacifist, and conscientious objector.
February 10, 1943
Joe Domanick is an award-winning investigative journalist and author. He is a Senior Fellow in Criminal Justice at the University of Southern California Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism. His last book, To Protect and to Serve: The LAPD’s Century of War in the City of Dreams (1994), won the 1995 Edgar Award for Best True Fact Crime.
February 10 , 1906
Roger Joseph Fernand Frison-Roche (February 10 , 1906, Paris - December 17 , 1999 in Chamonix-Mont-Blanc) was a mountaineer, explorer and French writer.
February 10, 1947
Miles Gibson (born 1947) is a reclusive English novelist, poet and artist. Gibson was born in a squatters camp at an abandoned World War II airbase - RAF Holmsley South in the New Forest and raised in Mudeford, Dorset. He was educated at Sandhills Infant School, Somerford Junior School and Somerford Secondary Modern. Upon leaving school he migrated to London and worked in advertising as a copywriter at J. Walter Thompson after winning a place in their ten most ingenious undergraduate writers in Britain today competition, despite lacking the primary qualification of a university education. He later flirted with Fleet Street as a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph Magazine under the brilliant editorship of John Anstey. He was the Telegraph's runner-up Young Writer of the Year, in 1969. Gibson’s darkly satirical writing has been described as both 'magic realism' and 'absurdist fiction.'
February 10, 1927
Jakov Lind (1926–2007) was born Heinz Jakov Landwirth in Vienna in 1927 to an assimilated Jewish family. Arriving in the Netherlands as a part of the Kindertransport in 1939, Lind survived the Second World War by fleeing into Germany, where he disguised himself as a Dutch deckhand on a barge on the Rhine. Following the war, he spent several years in Israel and Vienna before finally settling in London in 1954. It was in London that he wrote, first in German and later in English, the novels, short stories, and autobiographies that made his reputation, including his masterpieces: Landscape in Concrete, Ergo (forthcoming from Open Letter), and Soul of Wood. Regarded in his lifetime as a successor to Beckett and Kafka, Lind was posthumously awarded the Theodor Kramer Prize in 2007.
February 10, 1927
Mary Violet Leontyne Price (born February 10, 1927) is an American soprano. Born and raised in Laurel, Mississippi, she rose to international acclaim in the 1950s and 1960s, and was the first African American to become a leading artist at the Metropolitan Opera. One critic characterized Price's voice as "vibrant", "soaring" and "a Price beyond pearls", as well as "genuinely buttery, carefully produced but firmly under control", with phrases that "took on a seductive sinuousness." Time magazine called her voice "Rich, supple and shining, it was in its prime capable of effortlessly soaring from a smoky mezzo to the pure soprano gold of a perfectly spun high C." A lirico spinto (Italian for "pushed lyric") soprano, she was considered especially well suited to the roles of Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini, as well as several in operas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. After her retirement from the opera stage in 1985, she continued to appear in recitals and orchestral concerts until 1997. Among her many honors are the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964), the Spingarn Medal (1965), the Kennedy Center Honors (1980), the National Medal of Arts (1985), numerous honorary degrees, and 19 Grammy Awards for operatic and song recitals and full operas, and a special Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989, more than any other classical singer. In October 2008, she was one of the recipients of the first Opera Honors given by the National Endowment for the Arts.
February 10, 1933
Richard Warren Schickel (February 10, 1933 – February 18, 2017) was an American film historian, journalist, author, filmmaker, screenwriter, documentarian, and film and literary critic. He was a film critic for Time magazine from 1965–2010, and also wrote for Life magazine and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. His last writings about film were for Truthdig. He was interviewed in For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism (2009). In this documentary film he discusses early film critics Frank E. Woods, Robert E. Sherwood, and Otis Ferguson, and tells of how, in the 1960s, he, Pauline Kael, and Andrew Sarris, rejected the moralizing opposition of the older Bosley Crowther of The New York Times who had railed against violent movies such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967). In addition to film, Schickel also critiqued and documented cartoons, particularly Peanuts.
February 10, 1970
ASNE SEIERSTAD has received numerous awards for her journalism and has reported from such war-torn regions as Chechnya, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq. She is fluent in five languages and lives in Norway She is thirty-one. THE BOOKSELLER OF KABUL has been translated into thirteen languages. . (First published in Norway by J. W. Cappelens Forlag as Bokhandleren i Kabul, 2002).
February 11, 1957
Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer (born 11 February 1957), known as Pico Iyer, is a British-born essayist and novelist of Indian origin. He is the author of numerous books on crossing cultures including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk and The Global Soul. An essayist for Time since 1986, he also publishes regularly in Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and many other publications.
February 11, 1937
Anders Bodelsen (born February 11, 1937, Frederiksberg, Denmark) is a prolific Danish writer primarily associated with the 1960 new-realism wave in Danish literature, along with Christian Kampmann and Henrik Stangerup. Bodelsen prefers the social-realistic style of writing, often thrillers about middle-class people that faces the consequences of materialism, which often clashes with their human values. His thrillers also experiment with ordinary persons tempted by e.g. theft and border-morale issues. Most famous is his ingenious novel THINK OF A NUMBER (Tænk på et tal, 1968) filmed as ‘The Silent Partner‘ in 1978. Also widely known is his cooperation with Danish National Television (Danmarks Radio) on the filming of some of his children's thrillers, e.g. Guldregn (‘Golden Shower’, 1986). Bodelsen has also made some lesser known radio plays.
February 11, 1880
John Francis Byrne (11 February 1880–1960), journalist, writer, and university friend of James Joyce, was born was born in Dublin, in the seething political era when Ireland was battling for home rule. Along with James Joyce, he attended Belvedere College and University College, both in Dublin, and he completed his education at Dublin University. In 1910 Mr. Byrne came to New York, where he was a reporter, editorial writer, and daily columnist, contributing at different times to the Daily News Record, the New York Times, Poor’s Manual and the Wall Street Journal. He has also written for numerous magazines and newspapers abroad. Mr. Byrne is the inventor of the ‘Chaocipher,’ samples of which are included in SILENT YEARS. Mr. Byrne is of the opinion that this cipher, which has been examined by the Department of Defense, cannot be ‘broken,’ and he challenges the reader to do so.
February 11, 1937
Maryse Condé (born February 11, 1937) is a Guadeloupean, French-language author of historical fiction, best known for her novel Segu (1984–1985). Born as Maryse Boucolon at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, she was the youngest of eight children. After having graduated from high school, she was sent to Lycée Fénelon and Sorbonne in Paris, where she majored in English. In 1959, she married Mamadou Condé, a Guinean actor. After graduating, she taught in Guinea, Ghana and Senegal. In 1981, she divorced, but the following year married Richard Philcox, English language translator of most of her novels. In addition to her writings, Condé had a distinguished academic career. In 2004 she retired from Columbia University as Professor Emerita of French. She had previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley, UCLA, the Sorbonne, The University of Virginia, and the University of Nanterre. Condé's novels explore racial, gender and cultural issues in a variety of historical eras and locales, including the Salem witch trials in I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1992) and the 19th-century Bambara Empire of Mali in Segu (1987). Her novels trace the relationships between African peoples and the diaspora, especially the Caribbean. She has taken considerable distance from most Caribbean literary movements, such as Negritude and Creolité, and has often focused on topics with strong feminist concerns. A radical activist in her work as well as in her personal life, Condé has admitted: ‘I could not write anything... unless it has a certain political significance. I have nothing else to offer that remains important.’ Her recent writings have become increasingly autobiographical, such as Memories of My Childhood and Victoire, a biography of her grandmother. Who Slashed Celanire's Throat also shows traces of Condé's paternal great-grandmother.
February 11, 1915
Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor (also known as Paddy Fermor), DSO, OBE (11 February 1915 – 10 June 2011) was a British author, scholar and soldier who played a prominent role behind the lines in the Cretan resistance during World War II. He was widely regarded as ‘Britain's greatest living travel writer’ during his lifetime, based on books such as A Time of Gifts (1977). A BBC journalist once described him as ‘a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene.’ He was born in London, the son of Sir Lewis Leigh Fermor, a distinguished geologist, and Muriel Aeyleen (née Ambler). Shortly after his birth, his mother and sister left to join his father in India, leaving the infant Patrick in England with a family in Northamptonshire. He did not meet his family in person until he was four years old. As a child, Leigh Fermor had problems with academic structure and limitations. As a result, he was sent to a school for ‘difficult children’. He was later expelled from The King's School, Canterbury, when he was caught holding hands with a greengrocer's daughter. His last report from The King's School noted that the young Leigh Fermor was ‘a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness.’ He continued learning by reading texts on Greek, Latin, Shakespeare and History, with the intention of entering the Royal Military College Sandhurst. Gradually he changed his mind, deciding to become an author instead, and in the summer of 1933 relocated to Shepherd Market in London, living with a few friends. Soon, faced with the challenges of an author's life in London and rapidly draining finances, he set upon leaving for Europe. At the age of 18, Leigh Fermor decided to walk the length of Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. He set off on 8 December 1933, shortly after Hitler had come to power in Germany, with a few clothes, several letters of introduction, the Oxford Book of English Verse and a volume of Horace's Odes. He slept in barns and shepherds' huts, but also was invited by landed gentry and aristocracy into the country houses of Central Europe. He experienced hospitality in many monasteries along the way. Two of his later travel books, A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986), were about this journey. The final part of his journey was unfinished at the time of Leigh Fermor's death, but will be published as The Broken Road: Travels from Bulgaria to Mount Athos in September 2013 by John Murray. The book draws on Leigh Fermor's diary at the time and an early draft he wrote in the 1960s. Leigh Fermor arrived in Constantinople on 1 January 1935, then continued to travel around Greece. In March, he was involved in the campaign of royalist forces in Macedonia against an attempted Republican revolt. In Athens, he met Balasha Cantacuzène (Balasa Cantacuzino), a Romanian Phanariote noblewoman, with whom he fell in love. They shared an old watermill outside the city looking out towards Poros, where she painted and he wrote. They moved on to Baleni, Galati, the Cantacuzène house in Moldavia, where they were living at the outbreak of World War II. As an officer cadet, Leigh Fermor trained alongside Derek Bond and Iain Moncreiffe, and later joined the Irish Guards. Due to his knowledge of modern Greek, he was commissioned in the General List and became a liaison officer in Albania. He fought in Crete and mainland Greece. During the German occupation, he returned to Crete three times, once by parachute. He was one of a small number of Special Operations Executive (SOE) officers posted to organise the island's resistance to German occupation. Disguised as a shepherd and nicknamed Michalis or Filedem, he lived for over two years in the mountains. With Captain Bill Stanley Moss as his second in command, Leigh Fermor led the party that in 1944 captured and evacuated the German commander General Heinrich Kreipe. There is a memorial commemorating Kreipe's abduction near Archanes in Crete. Moss featured the events of the Cretan capture in his book Ill Met by Moonlight: The Abduction of General Kreipe (1950). It was later adapted in a film by the same name. It was directed/produced by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and released in 1957. In the film, Leigh Fermor was portrayed by Dirk Bogarde. In 1950, Leigh Fermor published his first book, The Traveller's Tree, about his post-war travels in the Caribbean. The book won the Heinemann Foundation Prize for Literature and established his career path, although it has received negative attention for its approach to racial issues. It was quoted extensively in Live and Let Die, by Ian Fleming. He went on to write several further books of his journeys, including Mani and Roumeli, of his travels on mule and foot around remote parts of Greece. Leigh Fermor translated the manuscript The Cretan Runner written by George Psychoundakis, the dispatch runner on Crete during the war, and helped Psychoundakis get his work published. Fermor also wrote a novel, The Violins of Saint-Jacques, which was adapted as an opera by Malcolm Williamson. After many years together, Leigh Fermor was married in 1968 to the Honourable Joan Elizabeth Rayner (née Eyres Monsell), daughter of the 1st Viscount Monsell. She accompanied him on many of his travels until her death in Kardamyli in June 2003, aged 91. They had no children. They lived part of the year in their house in an olive grove near Kardamyli in the Mani Peninsula, southern Peloponnese, and part of the year in Gloucestershire. Leigh Fermor was knighted in the 2004 New Years Honours. In 2007, he said that, for the first time, he had decided to work using a typewriter - having written all his books longhand until then. After his death the house at Kardamyli featured in the 2013 film Before Midnight. Leigh Fermor was noted for his strong physical constitution, even though he smoked 80 to 100 cigarettes a day. Although in his last years he suffered from tunnel vision and wore hearing aids, he remained physically fit up to his death and dined at table on the last evening of his life. For the last few months of his life he suffered from a cancerous tumour, and in early June 2011 he underwent a tracheotomy in Greece. As death was close, he expressed a wish to die in England and returned there on 9 June 2011. He died the following day, aged 96.
February 11, 1900
Hans-Georg Gadamer (February 11, 1900 – March 13, 2002) was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 magnum opus on hermeneutics, Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode).
February 11, 1965
Andrew Gelman is professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University. His books include Bayesian Data Analysis and Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks. He received the Presidents’ Award in 2003, awarded each year to the best statistician under forty.
February 11, 1910
Arthur Thomas Hatto (11 February 1910 – 6 January 2010) was an eminent translator and scholar of German studies at the University of London and is best known for his translations of Tristan, Parzival, and The Nibelungenlied and his theory of epic heroic poetry. He retired in 1977, and in 1991 the British Academy elected him as a Senior Fellow.
February 11, 1813
Harriet Ann Jacobs (February 11, 1813 – March 7, 1897) was an African-American writer who escaped from slavery and was later freed. She became an abolitionist speaker and reformer. Jacobs wrote an autobiographical novel, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, first serialized in a newspaper and published as a book in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent.
February 11, 1949
Synthia Saint James (born February 11, 1949) is an American visual artist, author, keynote speaker, and educator who is best known for the original cover art of the hardcover edition of Terry McMillan's book Waiting to Exhale and for designing the first Kwanzaa stamp for the United States Postal Service, which was first issued in 1997. She also designed the 2016 Kwanzaa Forever Stamp.
February 11, 1921
Edward George Seidensticker (February 11, 1921 – August 26, 2007) was a noted post-World War II scholar, historian, and preeminent translator of classical and contemporary Japanese literature. His English translation of the epic The Tale of Genji, published in 1976, was especially well received critically and is counted among the preferred modern translations. Seidensticker is closely associated with the work of three major 20th Century Japanese writers—Yasunari Kawabata, Jun'ichir? Tanizaki, and Yukio Mishima. His landmark translations of the novels of Yasunari Kawabata, in particular Snow County (1956) and Thousand Cranes (1958), led, in part, to Kawabata being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968.
February 11, 1942
HORACIO VERBITSKY (born February 11, 1942) is Argentina’s leading investigative journalist and the winner of the 1995 Latin American Studies Association Media Award. He is the author of eleven books and currently writes for the newspaper Pagina/12. THE FLIGHT is his first book to appear in English.
February 11, 1939
Jane Yolen (born February 11, 1939) is the author of over eighty books for children and adults. A storyteller, poet, and essayist, she is on the board of directors of the Society of Children's Book Writers and was recently elected presidents of the Science Fiction Writers of America. She has received several awards for her writing, including the Christopher Medal and the Society of Children's Book Writers' Golden Kite Award, and has been nominated for a National Book Award.
February 11, 1887
SIGIZMUND KRZHIZHANOVSKY (February 11, 1887, Kiev, Ukraine - December 28, 1950, Moscow, Russia), the Ukrainian-born son of Catholic Poles, studied law and classical philology at Kiev University. After graduation and two summers spent exploring Europe, he was obliged to clerk for an attorney. A sinecure, the job allowed him to devote the bulk of his time to the study of literature and his own writing. In 1920, after a brief stint in the Red Army, Krzhizhanovsky began lecturing intensively in Kiev on the theater and music. The lectures continued in Moscow, where he moved in 1922, by then well known in literary circles. Lodged in a cell-like room on the Arbat, Krzhizhanovsky wrote steadily for close to two decades. His philosophical and satirical stories with fantastical plots ignored official injunctions to portray the new Soviet state in a positive light. Three separate efforts to print different collections were quashed by the censors, a fourth by World War II. Not until 1989 could these surreal fictions begin to be published. Like Poe, Krzhizhanovsky takes us to the edge of the abyss and forces us to look into it. ‘I am interested,’ he said, ‘not in the arithmetic, but in the algebra of life.’. JOANNE TURNBULL has translated a number of books from Russian—including Andrei Sinyavsky’s Soviet Civilization and Ivan the Fool, Asar Eppel’s The Grassy Street, and Andrei Sergeyev’s Stamp Album, and Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s Seven Stories, winner of the 2007 Rossica Translation Prize—all in collaboration with Nikolai Formozov. She lives in Moscow.
February 12, 1910
Enrique Anderson-Imbert (February 12, 1910– December 6, 2000) was an Argentine novelist, short-story writer and literary critic. Born in Córdoba, Argentina, Anderson-Imbert graduated from the University of Buenos Aires. From 1940 until 1947 he taught at the University of Tucumán. In 1947, he joined the faculty of the University of Michigan. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1954. He became the first Victor S. Thomas Professor of Hispanic Literature at Harvard University in 1965. Anderson-Imbert remained at Harvard until his retirement in 1980. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1967. Anderson-Imbert is best known for his brief ‘microcuentos’ in which he blends fantasy and magical realism. His story ‘Sala de espera’ is taken from The Cheshire Cat, written in 1965; he is also the author of the 1966 short story entitled ‘Taboo.’ He also penned the famous short stories ‘El Leve Pedro’, ‘El Fantasma’, and ‘Vudu’. He died on December 6, 2000 in Buenos Aires. Isabel Reade, who has taught Spanish languages and literature on all undergraduate levels in college, was a graduate student of Anderson’s at the University of Michigan. She translated his El grimorio, published with the English title THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR. Southern Illinois University Press, 1966).
February 12, 1908
Roger Bax was the pen name of Paul Winterton (1908-2001). He was born in Leicester and educated at the Hulme Grammar School, Manchester and Purley County School, Surrey, after which he took a degree in Economics at London University. He was on the staff of The Economist for four years, and then worked for fourteen years for the London News Chronicle as reporter, leader writer and foreign correspondent. He was assigned to Moscow from 1942 to 1945, where he was also the correspondent of the BBC’s Overseas Service. After the war he turned to full-time writing of detective and adventure novels and produced more than forty-five books. His work was serialized, televised, broadcast, filmed and translated into some twenty languages. He was noted for his varied and unusual backgrounds – including Russia, newspaper offices, the West Indies, ocean sailing, the Australian outback, politics, mountaineering and forestry – and for never repeating a plot. Roger Bax was a founding member and first joint secretary of the Crime Writers’ Association.
February 12, 1809
Charles Robert Darwin, FRS (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist and geologist, best known for his contributions to evolutionary theory. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors, and in a joint publication with Alfred Russel Wallace introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding. Darwin published his theory of evolution with compelling evidence in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, overcoming scientific rejection of earlier concepts of transmutation of species. By the 1870s the scientific community and much of the general public had accepted evolution as a fact. However, many favoured competing explanations and it was not until the emergence of the modern evolutionary synthesis from the 1930s to the 1950s that a broad consensus developed in which natural selection was the basic mechanism of evolution. In modified form, Darwin's scientific discovery is the unifying theory of the life sciences, explaining the diversity of life. Darwin's early interest in nature led him to neglect his medical education at the University of Edinburgh; instead, he helped to investigate marine invertebrates. Studies at the University of Cambridge (Christ's College) encouraged his passion for natural science. His five-year voyage on HMS Beagle established him as an eminent geologist whose observations and theories supported Charles Lyell's uniformitarian ideas, and publication of his journal of the voyage made him famous as a popular author. Puzzled by the geographical distribution of wildlife and fossils he collected on the voyage, Darwin began detailed investigations and in 1838 conceived his theory of natural selection. Although he discussed his ideas with several naturalists, he needed time for extensive research and his geological work had priority. He was writing up his theory in 1858 when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay which described the same idea, prompting immediate joint publication of both of their theories. Darwin's work established evolutionary descent with modification as the dominant scientific explanation of diversification in nature. In 1871 he examined human evolution and sexual selection in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, followed by The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. His research on plants was published in a series of books, and in his final book, he examined earthworms and their effect on soil. Darwin became internationally famous, and his pre-eminence as a scientist was honoured by burial in Westminster Abbey. Darwin has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history.
February 12, 1911
A fixture of intellectual life for several decades in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem, Frank Hercules was uniquely situated to understand the American racial dilemma. Born on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, he arrived in New York as a young man after a turbulent life that had already been touched by the racism of British colonialism. In novels and nonfiction writings that included several widely circulated magazine articles, Hercules scrutinized both Trinidadian and American societies.
February 12, 1932
Axel Buchardt Jensen (12 February 1932 – 13 February 2003) was a Norwegian author. From 1957 until 2002, he published both fiction and non-fiction texts which include novels, poems, essays, a biography, and manuscripts for cartoons and animated films. Jensen was born in Trondheim. He first made his debut as a novelist in Oslo in 1955 with the novel Dyretemmerens kors (1955), but he later burned the remaining unsold books. In 1958 he and his then girlfriend, later wife, Marianne Ihlen, lived on the Greek island of Hydra, where Jensen developed a friendship with the Canadian musician and poet Leonard Cohen. Cohen and Marianne lived together on Hydra for a couple of years after the break-up between her and Jensen, and later moved to Montreal. There is widespread belief that the character Lorenzo in the novel Joacim (1961) is modeled after Cohen, but Jensen also told Cohen that Lorenzo was modeled after the Swedish novelist Göran Tunström. After some time, Jensen returned to Norway and settled in Fredrikstad. There, Noel Cobb, an English poet and student of psychology, came to interview him. Cobb became sexually involved with Jensen's girlfriend Lena. Jensen then left Fredrikstad to live in London. Jensen suffered from severe depression after the break-up with Lena, but in London, he met the psychiatrist R. D. Laing and received therapy from him. After recovering, Jensen worked as an assistant at the institution Kingsley Hall. Laing remained a close friend for the rest of his life. While attending an environmental conference in Stockholm in 1972, Jensen met Pratibha, whom he married in India. After returning to Sweden, the couple lived in Vaxholm, outside Stockholm, where they bought an old freighter, built in 1905, which they renamed S/Y Shanti Devi. The ship was named after Pratibha's mother and means "The Goddess of Peace". After restoring the ship with the help of good friends and its former crew, they finally set course for England in 1984. Unfortunately, due to a storm at sea, they were forced to seek harbor in Oslo after a short, hazardous journey. When Jensen arrived in Oslo, he met his old friend, the writer Olav Angell. Together, they wanted to transform Oslo into a city renowned for happenings on the scene of international literature. The plan was soon put into action, and Jensen became the front figure in a project which later developed into the Oslo International Poetry Festival (OIPF), occurring in 1985 and 1986. On 10 August 1990, Shanti Devi set course for what would be its final destination in Ålefjær, outside Kristiansand. There, Jensen and Pratibha settled in a hundred-year-old schoolhouse and, some years later, they sold their old ship. In the last ten years of his life, Jensen was severely disabled from Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). He gradually became paralyzed, losing all his motor-coordination abilities. Later, relying on a breathing-aid to breathe, he could neither write nor speak. During this period, he also led a tough campaign against what he termed "the health machinery" for the right to be nursed in his own home. Jensen wrote several essays and articles on this subject. Before the public health service provided the help he needed, private funding to pay for nursing was arranged by his close friends, including Leonard Cohen. His wife also used all of her available energy to nurse her husband until he drew his last breath in his home in Ålefjær. In 1996, he received the Fritt Ord Honorary Award. Apart from his first symbolistic novel, Dyretemmerens Kors, Jensen's early novels mostly depict young men that attempt to break away from their social and cultural backgrounds. These novels include Icarus: A Young Man in Sahara (1957) (a new 1999 edition is illustrated by Frans Widerberg), A Girl I Knew (1959), and Joacim (1961). Some critics have argued that these early novels are influenced by Beat authors like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. The reason for this is that the novel's male main characters often try to escape from their obligations in a Western capitalistic society. Instead, they try to replace their former life with some sort of undefined spiritualism and fail miserably in their attempt. Later, Jensen departed from the realism in his early novels and began to move in a new direction by writing science fiction, poems, essays, and manuscripts for cartoons. In this experimental phase, he produced manuscripts for the psychedelic comic-strip Doctor Fantastic (published in the newspaper Dagbladet between March and July 1972), the science fiction comic strip collage Tago (1979), the animated movie Superfreak (1988), and a manuscript for a comic novel which is a caricature-rendering of the life of the French playwright and founder of pataphysics, Alfred Jarry. In the same period, Jensen also published a poem-collection with a hindu theme called Onalila – A Little East West poetry (1974), an essayistic novel called Mother India (1974), and three autobiographical novels named Junior (1978), Senior (1979), and Jumbo (1998). Jensen is perhaps most famous for having written the science fiction novels Epp (1965), Lul (1992), and And the Rest is Written in the Stars (1995), illustrated by Pushwagner. With these novels, Jensen created a dystopian vision of the future, much in the tradition of Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Ray Bradbury. Nevertheless, Jensen's novels also differ from these authors since the tragic vision in his novels is supplemented with comedy, setting an ambiguous and absurd tone. In this way, Jensen's novels are similar to the satirical and parodic novels of Jonathan Swift and Kurt Vonnegut. Besides his fiction, Jensen also published a series of articles and essays which focused on three main political and social issues. His collection of essays, God Does Not Read Novels. A Voyage in the World of Salman Rushdie (1994), is a critique of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and a defense of freedom of speech. Another political text is the article A Children's Disease, published in the anthology The Collective Fairytale. A Book about Norway, Europe and the EU (1994). This article discusses Norway's role as a future member in the European Union. The third main issue that was of great concern to him was how sick and disabled people are treated in a modern bureaucratic society. Two books containing articles on this subject was therefore published – The Deafening Silence (1997) and The Patient in the Centre (1998). All the articles are an account of how it is to suffer from ALS and at the same time not receive adequate help from the Norwegian welfare state. Among his political writings, Jensen also found the time to write a biography on G. I. Gurdjieff, titled Guru – Glimpses from the World of Gurdijieff (2002). In addition to this, Jensen co-wrote his autobiography, Life Seen From Nimbus (2002), with Peter Mæjlender. Jensen received a literary prize from the Austrian Abraham Woursell Foundation in 1965 for his novel Epp. In 1992, Jensen was given the annual literary award from the Norwegian publishing house Cappelen for his novel Lul. For his essays on Salman Rushdie, he received the Carl von Ossietzky award from the International PEN club in 1994 and an award from The Freedom of Expression Foundation in Norway.
February 12, 1809
Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln led the United States through its Civil War—its bloodiest war and its greatest moral, constitutional and political crisis. In doing so, he preserved the Union, abolished slavery, strengthened the federal government, and modernized the economy.
February 12, 1934
William Felton Russell (born February 12, 1934) is an American retired professional basketball player. Russell played center for the Boston Celtics of the National Basketball Association (NBA) from 1956 to 1969. A five-time NBA Most Valuable Player and a twelve-time All-Star, he was the centerpiece of the Celtics dynasty, winning eleven NBA championships during his thirteen-year career. Russell tied the record for the most championships won by an athlete in a North American sports league (with Henri Richard of the National Hockey League). Before his professional career, Russell led the University of San Francisco to two consecutive NCAA championships in 1955 and 1956, and he captained the gold-medal winning U.S. national basketball team at the 1956 Summer Olympics. Russell is widely regarded as one of the greatest basketball players in NBA history. He was 6 ft 10 in (2.08 m) tall, with a 7 ft 4 in (2.24 m) wingspan. His shot-blocking and man-to-man defense were major reasons for the Celtics' domination of the NBA during his career. Russell was equally notable for his rebounding abilities. He led the NBA in rebounds four times, had a dozen consecutive seasons of 1,000 or more rebounds, and remains second all-time in both total rebounds and rebounds per game. He is one of just two NBA players (the other being prominent rival Wilt Chamberlain) to have grabbed more than 50 rebounds in a game. Russell was never the focal point of the Celtics' offense, but he did score 14,522 career points and provided effective passing. Russell played in the wake of black pioneers like Earl Lloyd, Chuck Cooper, and Sweetwater Clifton, and he was the first black player to achieve superstar status in the NBA. He also served a three-season (1966–69) stint as player-coach for the Celtics, becoming the first black coach in North American professional sports and the first to win a championship. In 2011, Barack Obama awarded Russell the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his accomplishments on the court and in the Civil Rights Movement. Russell is one of seven players in history to win an NCAA Championship, an NBA Championship, and an Olympic gold medal. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame. He was selected into the NBA 25th Anniversary Team in 1971 and the NBA 35th Anniversary Team in 1980, and named as one of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History in 1996, one of only four players to receive all three honors. In 2007, he was enshrined in the FIBA Hall of Fame. In Russell's honor the NBA renamed the NBA Finals Most Valuable Player trophy in 2009: it is now the Bill Russell NBA Finals Most Valuable Player Award.
February 12, 1965
Shyam Selvadurai is a Sri Lankan Canadian novelist who wrote Funny Boy, which won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and Cinnamon Gardens. He currently lives in Toronto with his partner Andrew Champion.
February 12, 1912
Taijun Takeda (February 12, 1912 – September 5, 1976) was a Japanese novelist active as one of the first post-war generation writers, and a noted authority on Chinese literature. Takeda was the second son of a Buddhist priest of the Pure Land Sect, and was raised in a temple. He developed an early interest in both Chinese literature and left-wing politics and, on graduating from high school, he chose to major in Sinology at Tokyo University in 1931. He did not complete his degree, for he withdrew from the university after being arrested for distributing leaflets critical of imperialism, which cost him a month’s imprisonment. However, it was there that he became acquainted with Yoshimi Takeuchi.
February 12, 1952
John Taliaferro is a former senior editor at Newsweek and the author of three acclaimed books, Great White Fathers: The Story of the Obsessive Quest to Create Mount Rushmore, Charles M. Russell: The Life and Legend of America's Cowboy Artist, and Tarzan Forever: The Life of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
February 12, 1963
Jacqueline Woodson, born February 12, 1963, is an American writer of books for children and adolescents. She is best known for Miracle's Boys, which won the Coretta Scott King Award in 2001, and her Newbery Honor-winning titles Brown Girl Dreaming, After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way. For her lifetime contribution as a children's writer, Woodson won the Margaret Edwards Award in 2005 and she was the U.S. nominee for the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2014. IBBY named her one of six Andersen Award finalists on March 17, 2014. She won the National Book Award in 2014 in the category of Young People's Literature for Brown Girl Dreaming, and was nominated in Fiction for Another Brooklyn. In January 2016 the American Library Association announced that Jacqueline Woodson would deliver the 2017 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture, which recognizes significant contribution to children's literature.
February 12, 1857
Eugène Atget (12 February 1857 – 4 August 1927) was a French flâneur and a pioneer of documentary photography, noted for his determination to document all of the architecture and street scenes of Paris before their disappearance to modernization. Most of his photographs were first published by Berenice Abbott after his death. An inspiration for the surrealists and other artists, his genius was only recognized by a handful of young artists in the last two years of his life, and he did not live to see the wide acclaim his work would eventually receive.
February 12, 1952
Greg Sarris is currently serving his thirteenth term as Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. He holds the Graton Rancheria Endowed Chair in Writing and Native American Studies at Sonoma State University, and his publications include Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts (1993), Grand Avenue (1994), and Watermelon Nights (1999). Greg lives and works in Sonoma County.
February 12 ,1828
George Meredith (12 February 1828 – 18 May 1909) was an English novelist and poet of the Victorian era.
February 13, 1910
Ignacio Bernal (February 13, 1910 in Paris - January 24, 1992 in Mexico City) was an eminent Mexican anthropologist and archaeologist. Bernal excavated much of Monte Albán, originally starting as a student of Alfonso Caso, and later led major archeological projects at Teotihuacan. In 1965 he excavated Dainzú. He was the director of Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology 1962-68 and again 1970-77. In 1965, he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Bernal was awarded the Premio Nacional in 1969. He was a founding member of the Third World Academy of Sciences in 1983. WILLIS BARNSTONE is Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Indiana University. Born in Lewiston, Maine, he received his M.A. from Columbia and his Ph.D. from Yale. He is the author of three books of poetry and has translated the work of the contemporary Spanish poet Antonio Machado, as well as plays of Lope de Vega and Calderon de la Barca. Mr. Bamstone is editor of an anthology of contemporary European poetry, editor and translator of a volume of Greek lyric poetry and a volume of Sappho’s poems, and has translated a novel from modem Greek. In 1961 Mr. Barnstone was a Guggenheim fellow in Spain, where he completed a critical study of Antonio Machado.
February 13, 1887
Géza Csáth (né József Brenner) (February 13, 1887 – September 11, 1919), was a Hungarian writer, playwright, musician, music critic and psychiatrist. He was the cousin of Dezso Kosztolányi. Géza Csáth (pen name of József Brenner) was a writer, critic, music theoretician and medical doctor. A competent violinist even as a child, he originally wanted to be a painter, but his teachers criticised his drawing, so he turned to writing. He was barely fourteen years old when his first writings on music criticism were published. After grammar school he moved from his native Szabadka (now Subotica in Serbia) to Budapest in order to study medicine. While at college he wrote short sketches and reviews for newspapers and magazines. He was among the first to laud the work of Bartók and Kodály. After earning his degree as a medical doctor in 1909 he worked for a short time as a junior doctor at the Psychiatric and Nerve Clinic (also known as Moravcsik Psychiatric Hospital). He wrote his great novel Diary of a mentally ill woman based on his experiences as a psychiatric doctor (his other main work is his Diary). He became interested in the effects of narcotics from a medical point of view and also as a creative artist. Out of this curiosity, he started taking morphine in 1910 and soon became addicted. Csáth also changed his job and worked at various spas as a doctor, and had ample time for writing. Most of his emblematic ‘dark’ short stories were written during this period, often featuring utter physical or mental violence (such as fratricide, rape or seduction and abandonment of adolescent girls). Csáth often described these acts in first person, with powerful insight into the workings of the perpetrators' disturbed minds. His collected short stories were published under the title Tales which end unhappy (Mesék, amelyek rosszul végzodnek). He married Olga Jónás in 1913. In 1914 he was drafted into the army, and at the front his drug problem worsened so much that he was often sent to medical leave and was finally discharged in 1917. He tried to quit and become a village doctor. His condition further worsened, he became paranoid and by this time his addiction was the central problem of his life, significantly deteriorating his personal relations. In 1919 he was treated at a psychiatric clinic in a provincial hospital, but he fled and returned to his home. On July 22 he shot and killed his wife with a revolver, poisoned himself and slit his arteries. He was rushed to hospital at Szabadka, but later managed to escape again. He wanted to go to the Moravcsik Psychiatric Hospital, but upon being stopped by Yugoslavian border guards he killed himself by taking poison. Inspired by Csáth's writings are the ballet ‘Comedia Tempio’ of the dancer-choreographer Josef Nadj and the opera ‘A Varázsló Halála’ (‘The Magician's Death’) by the composer Alessio Elia (first performance Nyitott Muhely Auditorium - Budapest, 14 June 2006). Janos Szaz's 2007 film ‘Opium: Diary of a Madwoman’ features a doctor named Josef Brenner who is to some degree based on Csáth.
February 13, 1908
Dame Helen Louise Gardner, DBE, FBA (13 February 1908 – 4 June 1986) was an English literary critic and academic. She was best known for her work on the poets John Donne and T. S. Eliot.
February 13, 1886
Ricardo Güiraldes (13 February 1886 - 8 October 1927) was an Argentine novelist and poet, one of the most significant Argentine writers of his era, particularly known for his 1926 novel Don Segundo Sombra, set amongst the gauchos.
February 13, 1924
Geoffrey Drayton (born 13 February 1924) is a Barbadian novelist, poet and journalist. Geoffrey Drayton was born in Barbados, and received his early education there. In 1945 he went to Cambridge University, where he read economics, after which he spent some years teaching in Ottawa, Canada, returning to England in 1953. He worked as a freelance journalist in London and Madrid. From 1954 to 1965 he worked for Petroleum Times, becoming its editor. In 1966 he became a petroleum consultant for the Economist Intelligence Unit. Drayton is the author of one volume of poetry, Three Meridians (1950), and two novels: Christopher (1959), which was first published in part in Bim magazine, and Zohara (1961). He has also written short stories, such as 'Mr Dombie the Zombie', which was broadcast on the BBC programme Caribbean Voices.
February 13, 1769
Ivan Andreyevich Krylov (February 13, 1769 – November 21, 1844) is Russia's best known fabulist and probably the most epigrammatic of all Russian authors. Formerly a dramatist and journalist, he only discovered his true genre at the age of 40. While many of his earlier fables were loosely based on Aesop's and La Fontaine's, later fables were original work, often with a satirical bent.
February 13, 1934
Christopher Levenson (born February 13, 1934 London, England) is a Canadian poet. Levenson lived in the Netherlands and Germany, before moving to Ottawa in 1968. He became a Canadian citizen in 1973. He has received degrees from Cambridge University, and the University of Iowa. He was co-founder, and editor, of Arc, and taught for many years at Carleton University. His work appeared in The Antigonish Review, among other journals, and he is a member of the Writers' Union of Canada
February 13, 1766
The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus FRS (13 February 1766 – 23 December 1834) was an English cleric and scholar, influential in the fields of political economy and demography. Malthus himself used only his middle name Robert. His An Essay on the Principle of Population observed that sooner or later population will be checked by famine and disease, leading to what is known as a Malthusian catastrophe. He wrote in opposition to the popular view in 18th-century Europe that saw society as improving and in principle as perfectible. He thought that the dangers of population growth precluded progress towards a utopian society: 'The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man'. Malthus placed the longer-term stability of the economy above short-term expediency. He criticized the Poor Laws, and (alone among important contemporary economists) supported the Corn Laws, which introduced a system of taxes on British imports of wheat. His views became influential, and controversial, across economic, political, social and scientific thought. Pioneers of evolutionary biology read him, notably Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. He remains a much-debated writer.
February 13, 1943
Elaine Pagels, née Hiesey (born Palo Alto, California, February 13, 1943), is the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she is best known for her studies and writing on the Gnostic Gospels. Her popular books include The Gnostic Gospels (1979), Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988), The Origin of Satan (1995), Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (2003), Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity (2007), and Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (2012).
February 13, 1939
Lon Pearson is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Missouri, Rolla. He received his B.A. from the University of Utah in 1965 (Phi Beta Kappa), and from the University of California, Los Angeles he received his M.A. (1968), his C. Phil. (1969), and his Ph.D.-1973. Professor Pearson spent two summers on University of Missouri Faculty Research Grants in Chile. There he met Guzmám’s family and friends and located manuscripts and books unavailable in the U.S. In 1975 he received from the National Endowment for the Humanities a Fellowship in Residence at Johns Hopkins University. His reviews have appeared in numerous journals and newspapers.
February 13, 1879
Lester Rowntree was born in England and spent much of her life in Carmel, California. In addition to Hardy Californians, she wrote The Flowering Shrubs of California and four children’s books. Lester B. Rowntree, her grandson, is a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.
February 13, 1945
Simon Michael Schama, CBE (born 13 February 1945) is an English historian specialising in art history, Dutch history, and French history. He is a University Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University, New York. He first came to popular public attention with his history of the French Revolution titled Citizens, published in 1989. In the United Kingdom, he is perhaps best known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC television documentary series A History of Britain broadcast between 2000 and 2002.
February 13, 1924
Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, often referred to as JJSS (13 February 1924, in Paris – 7 November 2006, in Fécamp), was a French journalist and politician. He co-founded L'Express in 1953 with Françoise Giroud, and then went on to become president of the Radical Party in 1971. He oversaw its transition to the center-right, the party being thereafter known as Parti radical valoisien. He tried to found in 1972 the Reforming Movement with Christian Democrat Jean Lecanuet, with whom he supported Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's conservative candidature to the 1974 presidential election.
February 13, 1903
Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (13 February 1903 – 4 September 1989) was a Belgian writer. A prolific author who published nearly 200 novels and numerous short works, Simenon is best known as the creator of the fictional detective Jules Maigret.
February 13, 1952
Lawrence Weschler, a staff writer for twenty years at the New Yorker, is the Director of the New York Institute of the Humanities at New York University and Artistic Director of the Chicago Humanities Festival.
February 14, 1973
Unai Elorriaga (born February 14, 1973) is a Spanish writer in the Basque language. His first novel, A STREETCAR TO SP, won Spain’s prestigious National Narrative Prize in 2002. The jury was taken by the freshness of his voice and by how utterly unique the book was. Elorriaga is the most celebrated young Basque author in the Spanish literary landscape. Although influenced by Julio Cortázar and Juan Rulfo, Elorriaga stands alone in both the inventiveness of his narrative and in the particular way his characters reveal their humanity. Elorriaga is truly breaking new ground. Amaia Gabantxo is a literary translator, writer, and reviewer. Her work has appeared in many journals and newspapers, including The Times Literary Supplement and The Independent, as well as in AN ANTHOLOGY OF BASQUE SHORT STORIES and SPAIN: A TRAVELER’S LITERARY COMPANION (Whereabouts Press). Her translation of Anjel Lertxundi’s PERFECT HAPPINESS is forthcoming.
February 14, 1930
Shulamith Hareven (February 14, 1930, Warsaw, Poland - November 25, 2003, Jerusalem, Israel) was an Israeli author and essayist. She was born in Warsaw, Poland, to a Zionist family. She immigrated to Mandate Palestine with her parents in 1940.
February 14, 1912
Oliver Wendell 'Ollie' Harrington (February 14, 1912 – November 2, 1995) was an American cartoonist and an outspoken advocate against racism and for civil rights in the United States. Of multi-ethnic descent, Langston Hughes called him 'America's greatest African-American cartoonist'. Harrington requested political asylum in East Germany in 1961; he lived in Berlin for the last three decades of his life. Born to Herbert and Euzsenie Turat Harrington in Valhalla, New York, Harrington was the eldest of five children. He began cartooning to vent his frustrations about a viciously racist sixth grade teacher and graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in 1929. Immersing himself in the Harlem Renaissance, Harrington found employment when Ted Poston, city editor for the Amsterdam News became aware of Harrington's already considerable skills as a cartoonist and political satirist. In 1935, Harrington created Dark Laughter, a regular single panel cartoon, for that publication. The strip featured the debut of his most famous character, Bootsie, an ordinary African American dealing with racism in the U.S. Harrington described him as 'a jolly, rather well-fed but soulful character.' During this period, Harrington enrolled in Fine Arts at Yale University to complete his degree, but could not finish because of the United States entry into World War II). During World War II, the Pittsburgh Courier sent Harrington as a correspondent to Europe and North Africa. In Italy, he met Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP. After the war, White hired Harrington to develop the organization's public relations department, where he became a visible and outspoken advocate for civil rights. In that capacity, Harrington published 'Terror in Tennessee,' a controversial expose of increased lynching violence in the post-W.W. II South. Given the publicity garnered by his sensational critique, Harrington was invited to debate with U.S. Attorney General Tom C. Clark on the topic of 'The Struggle for Justice as a World Force.' He confronted Clark for the U.S. government's failure to curb lynching and other racially motivated violence. In 1947 Harrington left the NAACP and returned to cartooning. In the postwar period his prominence and social activism brought him scrutiny from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Hoping to avoid further government scrutiny, Harrington moved to Paris in 1951. In Paris, Harrington joined a thriving community of African-American expatriate writers and artists, including James Baldwin, Chester Himes, and Richard Wright, who became a close friend. Harrington was shaken by Wright's death in 1960, suspecting that he was assassinated. He thought that the American embassy had a deliberate campaign of harassment directed toward the expatriates. In 1961 he requested political asylum in East Germany. He spent the rest of his life in East Berlin, finding plentiful work and a cult following. He illustrated and contributed to publications such as Eulenspiegel, Das Magazine, and the Daily Worker.Harrington had four children. Two daughters are U.S. nationals; a third is a British national. All were born before Harrington emigrated to East Berlin. His youngest child, a son, was born several years after Harrington married Helma Richter, a German journalist. Publications: Dark Laughter: The Satiric Art of Oliver W. Harrington, ed. M. Thomas Inge (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993); Why I Left America and Other Essays, ed. M. Thomas Inge (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993); Laughing on the Outside: The Intelligent White Reader's Guide to Negro Tales and Humor (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1965). [With Philip Sterling and J. Saunders Redding]; Bootsie and Others: A Selection of Cartoons (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1958); Hezekiah Horton (Viking Press, 1955). [with Ellen Tarry]; Terror in Tennessee: The Truth about the Columbia Outrages (New York: 'Committee of 100', 1946). M. Thomas Inge is the Robert Emory Blackwell Professor of Humanities at Randolph-Macon College.
February 14, 1855
Frank Harris (14 February 1855 – 26 August 1931) was an Irish editor, novelist, short story writer, journalist and publisher, who was friendly with many well-known figures of his day. Born in Ireland, he emigrated to America early in life, working in a variety of unskilled jobs before attending the University of Kansas to read law. In 1921, he became a citizen there. After graduation, he quickly tired of his legal career and returned to Europe in 1882. He traveled on continental Europe before settling in London to pursue a career in journalism. Though he attracted much attention during his life for his irascible, aggressive personality, editorship of famous periodicals, and friendship with the talented and famous, he is remembered mainly for his multiple-volume memoir My Life and Loves, which was banned in countries around the world for its sexual explicitness.
February 14, 1935
John Mason Hart is Professor of History at the University of Houston. His previous books include Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution, Tenth Anniversary edition (California 1998).
February 14, 1932
Alexander Kluge (born 14 February 1932) is an author and film director. Kluge was born in Halberstadt, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. After growing up during World War II, he studied history, law and music at the University of Marburg Germany, and the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany. He received his doctorate in law in 1956. While studying in Frankfurt, Kluge befriended the philosopher Theodor Adorno, who was teaching at the Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School. Kluge served as a legal counsel for the Institute, and began writing his earliest stories during this period. At Adorno's suggestion, he also began to investigate filmmaking, and in 1958, Adorno introduced him to German filmmaker Fritz Lang, for whom Kluge worked as an assistant on the making of The Tiger of Eschnapur. Kluge is also one of the major German fiction writers of the late-20th century and an important social critic. His fictional works, which tend toward the short story form, are significant for their formal experimentation and insistently critical thematics. Constituting a form of analytical fiction, they utilize techniques of narrative disruption, mixed genres, interpolation of non-literary texts and documents, and perspectival shifts. The texts frequently employ a flat, ironic tone. One frequent effect approximates what Viktor Shklovsky and the Russian formalists identified as defamiliarization or ostranenie. Kluge has used several of the stories as the bases for his films. Kluge's major works of social criticism include Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung. Zur Organisationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlichkeit, co-written with Oskar Negt and originally published in 1972, and ‘Geschichte und Eigensinn’, also co-authored with Negt. ‘Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung’ has been translated into English as Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere and ‘Geschichte und Eigensinn’ is currently being translated into English and will appear in an edition published by MIT Press in the future. ‘Public Sphere and Experience’ revisits and expands Jürgen Habermas's notion of the public sphere (which he articulated in his book ‘Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere’) and calls for the development of a new ‘proletarian public sphere’ grounded in the life experience of the working class. ‘Geschichte und Eigensinn’ continues this project and tries to rethink the very nature of proletarian experience and develops a theory of ‘living labour’ grounded in the work of Karl Marx. He has also published numerous texts on literary, film and television criticism.
February 14, 1930
Harry Mathews (born February 14, 1930) is an American author of various novels, volumes of poetry and short fiction, and essays. He is also a translator from the French.
February 14, 1923
Héctor Alberto Álvarez (February 14, 1923, Buenos Aires, Argentina - May 6, 1975, Buenos Aires, Argentina), better known under his pen name of H. A. Murena, was an Argentine writer and poet. He is perhaps best remembered for Las Leyes de la Noche (1958), translated into English as The Laws of the Night.
February 14, 1863
Kakuzo Okakura (1862-1913) was a founder of the first Japanese fine arts academy, the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. He came to America in 1904, and in 1910 became the first head of the Asian art division at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Christopher Benfey is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College and a critic for The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books.
February 14, 1958
Brett C. Millier is Associate Professor of American Literature and Civilization at Middlebury College in Vermont.
February 14, 1953
Paul O. Zelinsky (born February 14, 1953, Evanston, IL) is an American illustrator and writer best known for illustrating children's picture books. He won the 1998 Caldecott Medal for U.S. picture book illustration, recognizing Rapunzel.
February 14, 1930
Peter Everwine is the author of seven previous poetry collections, including From the Meadow and Collecting the Animals, which won the Lamont Poetry Prize in 1972. Everwine is the recipient of numerous honors, including two Pushcart Prizes, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is emeritus professor of English at California State University, Fresno, and was a senior Fulbright lecturer in American poetry at the University of Haifa, Israel.
February 15, 1946
Charlotte Carter is the author of an acclaimed mystery series featuring Nanette Hayes, a young black American jazz musician with a lust for life and a talent for crime solving. Coq au Vin, the second book in the series, has been optioned for the movies. Her short fiction has appeared in a number of American and British anthologies, including John Harvey's Blue Lightning. The first in a new series set in Chicago against the tumultuous backdrop of the 1960s will be published in late 2002 - early 2003. Charlotte Carter has lived in the American Midwest, North Africa and France. She currently resides in NYC with her husband.
February 15, 1934
Gérard Chaliand (born February 15, 1934, Brussels, Belgium) is a French expert in geopolitics who has published widely on irregular warfare and military strategy. Chaliand analyses of insurgencies in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, mostly based on his field experience with insurgent forces, have appeared in more than 20 books and in numerous newspaper articles. He has worked autonomously throughout his career, unconstrained by the perspectives of national governments and policy institutes. As a result, his work provides an independent perspective on many of the major conflicts characterized the 20th and 21st centuries. He is also a published poet.
February 15, 1898
Masuji Ibuse was born in Hiroshima in 1898. He studied French at Waseda University and joined the School of Fine Arts to purse his constant interest in painting. His first story, ‘Salamander,’ was published in 1923, when Ibuse was still a student, and by the early 1930s his eloquent use of dialect and his unique prose style had established him as one of the leading figures in the Japanese literary world. In the years since 1938 he has been awarded almost every major literary prize in Japan, and on the publication of BLACK RAIN Ibuse was presented with both the Cultural Medal and Japan’s highest literary award, the Noma Prize. John Bester is a graduate of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and has been in Japan for seventeen years. He was formerly chief translator for the Japan Quarterly and among the books he has translated are Ibuse’s BLACK RAIN and Mishima’s SUN AND STEEL.
February 15, 1899
Born in Brooklyn in 1899, the son of a banker, Matthew Josephson began a long and extraordinarily productive career in American letters at Columbia University. The need to support a wife and family brought Mr. Josephson to Wall Street in the mid-Twenties, a career he left several years later in order to write articles for the leading magazines. The first of his many full-length historical narratives and biographies, frequent award winners, soon followed. All reflect his preoccupation with the worlds of literature and finance. STENDHAL, VICTOR HUGO, JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, ZOLA AND HIS TIMES, and LIFE AMONG THE SURREALISTS represent the former. EDISON, AL SMITH, THE PRESIDENT MAKERS, THE POLITICOS, INFIDEL IN THE TEMPLE, and particularly, THE ROBBER BARONS exemplify the latter.
February 15, 1943
Hermann Kurzke is Professor of Literature at the University of Mainz and the author of several books. He is the editor of Thomas Mann's collected essays.
February 15, 1963
Iva Pekárková (born February 15, 1963) is a Czechoslovakia-born author who started writing and publishing novels after moving to New York City. Her novels are inspired by her various life experiences and she writes openly about sexuality, making her controversial in her native country. Most of her novels are originally written in Czech. Pekárková was born in Prague in what was then communist Czechoslovakia to the physicist Ludek Pekarek and the chemist (Kveta Suchomelova) Pekarkova. She attended Charles University from 1981 to 1985, where she studied microbiology and virology and began writing fiction. In 1985, she defected to Austria and immigrated to the United States after spending a year in a refugee camp. In the US she held a number of occupations in New York City, including working as social worker in the Bronx and driving a limousine and a Yellow Cab. Pekárková returned to the Czech Republic in 1996. Her first novel was Pera a perute (1989), translated into English as Truck Stop Rainbows (1992), was about Fialka, a Prague university student who photographs botanical mutations resulting from Czechoslovakia's unchecked industrial pollution. When her friend Patrick is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, she hitchhikes Czechoslovakia's Southern Road and prostitute for truckers to pay for his wheelchair. Her second novel, Kulatý sv?t (1994), translated as The World is Round, was about Jitka, a Czechoslovakian woman who flees the country for an Austrian refugee camp, where she is gang-raped. Eventually she gains asylum in Canada through a fabricated story. Dej mi ty prachy (1996), translated into English as Gimme the Money (2000), was about Gin, a Czechoslovakian taxi driver in the US, based on Pekárková's experience driving a taxi in New York City. Pekárková travelled to Thailand in 1988 and 1989 to study the refugee camps there, the inspiration for her novel T?icet dva chwan? (Thirty-two Kwan 2000). The Czech heroine is trapped in Thailand during the Velvet Revolution. Pekárková describes it as "another book about culture clashes" and contains "some of my ideas and observations about immigration and emigration." Visits to India and Nigeria inspired To India Where Else (2001) and Naidja: Stats in My Heart (2004). She published Six Billion Americas in 2005.
February 15, 1936
David Eugene Henry Pryce-Jones (born 15 February 1936) is a conservative British author and commentator. Pryce-Jones was born in Vienna, Austria. His mother was Therese Fould-Springer, an heiress belonging to a mostly Viennese Jewish family of immense wealth. Her sister married Élie de Rothschild. He was educated at Eton and read History at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied under A. J. P. Taylor. Pryce-Jones did his National Service in the Coldstream Guards, in which he was commissioned in 1955, promoted lieutenant in 1956, and served in the British Army of the Rhine. In 1956, Pryce-Jones lectured the men under his command about the necessity of the Suez War, but admits that he did not believe what he was saying. At the time, he believed that the Islamic world would soon progress after decolonization, and was disappointed when this did not happen. He has worked as a journalist and author. He was literary editor at the Financial Times 1959–61, and The Spectator from 1961 to 1963. Pryce-Jones currently works as senior editor at National Review magazine. He also contributes to The New Criterion and Commentary, and for Benador Associates. He often writes about the contemporary events and the history of the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and intelligence matters. In his 1989 book The Closed Circle, Pryce-Jones examined what he considered to be the reasons for the backward state of the Arab world. A review described the book as more of an "indictment" than an examination of the Arab world. In Pryce-Jones's opinion, the root cause of Arab backwardness is the tribal nature of Arab political life, which reduces all politics to war of rival families struggling mercilessly for power. As such, Pryce-Jones's view power in Arab politics consists of a network of client–patron relations between powerful and less powerful families and clans. Pryce-Jones considers as an additional retarding factor in Arab society the influence of Islam, which hinders efforts to build a Western style society where the family and clan are not the dominant political unit. Pryce-Jones argues that Islamic fundamentalism is a means of attempting to mobilize the masses behind the dominant clans. In his book, Betrayal: France, the Arabs, and the Jews, he has accused the French government of being anti-Semitic and pro-Arab, and of consistently siding against Israel in the hope of winning the favour of the Islamic world. Prys Jones wrote a biography - Evelyn Waugh and His World - it was rather notorious for digging up conflict among the married Mitford siblings with Pamela accusing Jessica of revealing private correspondence concerning their sister the Duchess of Devonshire.(see the letters of Mitford Sisters). He has also written about Unity Mitford for the Spectator. He is the son of writer Alan Payan Pryce-Jones (1908–2000) by his first wife (married 1934), Therese "Poppy" Fould-Springer (1908 – February 1953) of the Fould family. Therese was a daughter of Baron Eugène Fould-Springer, a French-born banker who was a cousin of Achille Fould, and Marie-Cecile or Mitzi Springer, later Mrs Frank Wooster or Mary Wooster, whose father was the industrialist Baron Gustav Springer (1842–1920). She also had a brother, Baron Max Fould-Springer (1906–1999), and two sisters Helene Propper de Callejón (1907–1997), wife of Spanish diplomat Eduardo Propper de Callejón and grandmother of actress Helena Bonham Carter, and Baroness Liliane de Rothschild (1916–2003). His parents married in 1934 in Vienna, and Pryce Jones was born in Vienna. In 1940, a four-year-old David was stranded with his nanny in Dieppe and was rescued from the invading German army by his mother's brother-in-law Eduardo Propper de Callejón. Pryce Jones acknowledged his uncle-by-marriage's efforts in saving his own life when Propper de Callejón retired from Spanish diplomatic service. He married Clarissa Caccia, daughter of diplomat Harold Caccia, Baron Caccia, in 1959. They have three surviving children, (one deceased, Sonia: 1970–1972), Jessica, Candida and Adam, and live in London. Pryce Jones is a first cousin of Elena Propper de Callejón, wife of late banker Raymond Bonham Carter and mother of actress Helena Bonham Carter. Another cousin is Baron Nathaniel de Rothschild, only son of the better known Baron Élie de Rothschild.
February 15, 1811
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (February 15, 1811 – September 11, 1888) was an Argentine activist, intellectual, writer, statesman and the seventh President of Argentina. His writing spanned a wide range of genres and topics, from journalism to autobiography, to political philosophy and history. He was a member of a group of intellectuals, known as the Generation of 1837, who had a great influence on nineteenth-century Argentina. He was particularly concerned with educational issues and was also an important influence on the region's literature. Sarmiento grew up in a poor but politically active family that paved the way for much of his future accomplishments. Between 1843 and 1850 he was frequently in exile, and wrote in both Chile and in Argentina. His greatest literary achievement was Facundo, a critique of Juan Manuel de Rosas, that Sarmiento wrote while working for the newspaper El Progreso during his exile in Chile. The book brought him far more than just literary recognition; he expended his efforts and energy on the war against dictatorships, specifically that of Rosas, and contrasted enlightened Europe—a world where, in his eyes, democracy, social services, and intelligent thought were valued—with the barbarism of the gaucho and especially the caudillo, the ruthless strongmen of nineteenth-century Argentina. While president of Argentina from 1868 to 1874, Sarmiento championed intelligent thought—including education for children and women—and democracy for Latin America. He also took advantage of the opportunity to modernize and develop train systems, a postal system, and a comprehensive education system. He spent many years in ministerial roles on the federal and state levels where he travelled abroad and examined other education systems. Sarmiento died in Asunción, Paraguay, at the age of 77 from a heart attack. He was buried in Buenos Aires. Today, he is respected as a political innovator and writer.
February 15, 1948
Art Spiegelman is a contributing editor and artist for The New Yorker, and a co-founder / editor of RAW, the acclaimed magazine of avant-garde comics and graphics. His drawings and prints have been exhibited in museums and galleries here and abroad. Honors he has received for MAUS include the Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and nominations for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in New York City with his wife, Françoise Mouly, and their two children, Nadja and Dashiell.
February 15, 1925
Jerome Russell "Jerry" Waldie (February 15, 1925 – April 3, 2009) was a United States Representative from California. Born in Antioch, California, Waldie attended Antioch public schools. After three years in the Army during World War II, he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1950 with a degree in political science, and earned a law degree from the university's Boalt Hall School of Law in 1953. He served in the United States Army from 1943 to 1946. Waldie served as a Democratic member of the California State Assembly from 1959 to 1966, becoming Majority Leader in 1961. One of his last accomplishments in Sacramento was to carry the constitutional amendment, pushed by Speaker of the Assembly Jesse Unruh, to create a full-time legislature. Waldie was then elected to the 89th Congress, by special election, to fill the vacancy caused by the death of United States Representative John F. Baldwin. He was re-elected four times, serving from June 7, 1966 to January 3, 1975. As representative, he was an early critic of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and also advocated health care reforms. During the Watergate scandal, Waldie was a vocal critic of President Richard Nixon. Three days after Nixon fired Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox (in what became known as the "Saturday Night Massacre"), Waldie introduced a resolution calling for the impeachment of the President, one of the first members of the House Judiciary Committee to do so. He later voted to impeach Nixon in July 1974 during the impeachment process against Richard Nixon. Waldie did not run for re-election to the Congress that year. Instead, he campaigned for the Democratic nomination for Governor of California in the June primary election but was defeated by then-Secretary of State Jerry Brown, who went on to win in November. As an ex-Congressman, Waldie served as a public advocate. He was chairman of the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission from 1978 to 1979 and the executive director of the White House Conference on Aging (1980). He also served as member of the California Agricultural Relations Board from 1981 to 1985. He eventually retired to Placerville, California where he resided until his death in April 2009.
February 15, 1968
Richard Blanco was selected as the 2013 inaugural poet for President Barack Obama. He is the author of two other poetry collections: Directions to The Beach of the Dead, winner of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award; and City of a Hundred Fires, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. Exploring themes of Latino identity and place, Blanco's poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2000 and Best American Prose Poems and have been featured on NPR. He is a fellow of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, recipient of two Florida Artist Fellowships, and has taught at Georgetown and American universities. A builder of cities and poems, Blanco is also a professional civil engineer.
February 15, 1925
Siegbert Salomon Prawer (15 February 1925 in Cologne, Germany - 5 April 2012 in Oxford, England) was Taylor Professor of the German Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. Prawer was born to Jewish parents Marcus and Eleanora (Cohn) Prawer. Marcus was a lawyer from Poland and Eleanora's father was cantor of Cologne's largest synagogue. His sister Ruth was born in 1927. The family fled the Nazi regime in 1939, emigrating to Britain. Educated at King Henry VIII School, Coventry and Jesus College, Cambridge, he was Lecturer at the University of Birmingham from 1948 to 1963, Professor of German at Westfield College London from 1964, and became Taylor Professor of German Language and Literature at the University of Oxford in 1969. He was awarded his PhD by Birmingham University in 1953 (PhD, University of Birmingham, Department of German, 1953, 'A critical analysis of 24 consecutive poems from Heine's Romanzero'). He was a Fellow (then an Honorary Fellow) of Queen's College, Oxford and an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. He had academic interests in German poetry and lieder, Romantic German literature, especially E.T.A. Hoffman and Heine, comparative literature and also in film, particularly horror films. His sister was the writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. He made a cameo appearance in the Merchant-Ivory film Howards End (for which his sister wrote the Academy Award-winning screenplay).
February 16, 1838
Henry Brooks Adams (February 16, 1838 – March 27, 1918; normally called Henry Adams) was an American journalist, historian, academic and novelist. He was the grandson and great-grandson of John Quincy Adams and John Adams, respectively. He is best known for his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, and his History of the United States During the Administration of Thomas Jefferson. He was a member of the Adams political family.
February 16, 1932
Aharon Appelfeld (born February 16, 1932) is an Israeli novelist. Aharon Appelfeld was born in the town of Zhadova or Sadhora, now part of Czernowitz, Bucovina, Romania, now Ukraine. In 1941, when he was eight years old, the Romanian army invaded his hometown and his mother was murdered. Appelfeld was deported with his father to a Nazi concentration camp in Romanian/Axis-controlled Transnistria. He escaped and hid for three years before joining the Soviet army as a cook. After World War II, Appelfeld spent several months in a displaced persons camp in Italy before immigrating to Palestine in 1946, two years before Israel's independence. He was reunited with his father after finding his name on a Jewish Agency list. The father had been sent to a ma'abara (refugee camp) in Be'er Tuvia. The reunion was so emotional that Appelfeld has never been able to write about it. In Israel, Appelfeld made up for his lack of formal schooling and learned Hebrew, the language in which he began to write. His first literary efforts were short stories, but gradually he progressed to novels. He completed his studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Today, Appelfeld lives in Mevaseret Zion and teaches literature at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. In 2007, Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939 was adapted for the stage and performed at the Gerard Behar Center in Jerusalem. Appelfeld is one of Israel's foremost living Hebrew-language authors, despite the fact that he did not learn the language until he was a teenager. His mother tongue is German, but he also speaks Yiddish, Ukrainian, Russian, English and Italian. With his subject matter revolving around the Holocaust and the sufferings of the Jews in Europe, he could not bring himself to write in German. He chose Hebrew as his literary vehicle for its succinctness and biblical imagery. Appelfeld purchased his first Hebrew book at the age of 25: King of Flesh and Blood by Moshe Shamir. In an interview with the newspaper Haaretz, he said he agonized over it, because it was written in Mishnaic Hebrew and he had to look up every word in the dictionary. In an interview in the Boston Review, Appelfeld explained his choice of Hebrew: ‘I’m lucky that I’m writing in Hebrew. Hebrew is a very precise language, you have to be very precise–no over-saying. This is because of your Bible tradition. In the Bible tradition you have very small sentences, very concise and autonomic. Every sentence, in itself, has to have its own meaning.’ Many Holocaust survivors have written an autobiographical account of their survival, but Appelfeld does not offer a realistic depiction of the events. He writes short stories that can be interpreted in a metaphoric way. Instead of his personal experience, he sometimes evokes the Holocaust without even relating to it directly. His style is clear and precise, but also very modernistic. Appelfeld resides in Israel but writes little about life there. Most of his work focuses on Jewish life in Europe before, during and after World War II. As an orphan from a young age, the search for a mother figure is central to his work. During the Holocaust he was separated from his father, and only met him again 20 years later. Silence, muteness and stuttering are motifs that run through much of Appelfeld's work. Disability becomes a source of strength and power. Philip Roth described Appelfeld as ‘a displaced writer of displaced fiction, who has made of displacement and disorientation a subject uniquely his own.’
February 16, 1954
Iain Banks (16 February 1954 – 9 June 2013) was a Scottish author. He wrote mainstream fiction under the name Iain Banks, and science fiction as Iain M. Banks, including the initial of his adopted middle name Menzies. Following the publication and success of The Wasp Factory (1984), Banks began to write on a full-time basis. His first science fiction book, Consider Phlebas, was released in 1987, marking the start of the popular The Culture series. His books have been adapted for theatre, radio and television. In 2008, The Times named Banks in their list of ‘The 50 greatest British writers since 1945’. In April 2013, Banks announced that he had inoperable cancer and was unlikely to live beyond a year. He died on 9 June 2013.
February 16, 1886
Van Wyck Brooks (February 16, 1886 in Plainfield, New Jersey – May 2, 1963 in Bridgewater, Connecticut) was an American literary critic, biographer, and historian.
February 16, 1944
Richard Ford (born February 16, 1944) is an American novelist and short story writer. His best-known works are the novel The Sportswriter and its sequels, Independence Day and The Lay of the Land, and the short story collection Rock Springs, which contains several widely anthologized stories.
February 16, 1934
Tom Gallacher has spent most of his working life as a writer and director for the theatre. He is the author of MR JOYCE IS LEAVING PARIS, SCHELLENBRACK and REVIVAL! Apart from London, he has worked in Denmark, Germany, New York, Edinburgh and Dublin. Now returned to Scotland and living in Glasgow, he has written APPRENTICE, from which two of the stories have already been dramatized by Radio 4. A third, ‘Store Quarter’, is to follow.
February 16, 1945
Catherine Gallagher is Eggers Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, Nobody’s Story, The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, and Practicing New Historicism (with Stephen Greenblatt).
February 16, 1831
NIKOLAI LESKOV was born in 1831 in the village of Gorokhovo in Russia. He began his career as a journalist in Kiev and later settled in St. Petersburg, where he published many stories and novellas, including The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1865), The Sealed Angel (1873), The Enchanted Wanderer (1873), and Lefty (1881). He died in 1895.
February 16, 1956
PAUL GILROY is Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Yale University and author of THE BLACK ATLANTIC (Harvard) and THERE AIN’T NO BLACK IN THE UNION JACK.
February 16, 1968
Warren Girard Ellis is an English comic-book writer, novelist, and screenwriter. He is best known as the co-creator of several original comics series, including Transmetropolitan, Global Frequency, Red —adapted into the feature films Red and Red 2 —Trees, and Injection.
February 16, 1915
Francisco Julião de Paula Arruda (February 16, 1915 - Cuernavaca - July 10, 1999) was Brazilian lawyer , politician and writer. He was born in the Good Hope Farm, in the rural state of Pernambuco .He graduated in 1939 in Recife and in 1955 became a leader of the Leagues Peasants with the aim to fight for the distribution of lands and the rights for the peasants in Engenho Galileia.
February 16, 1904
George Frost Kennan (February 16, 1904 – March 17, 2005) was an American diplomat and historian. He was known best as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War on which he later reversed himself. He lectured widely and wrote scholarly histories of the relations between USSR and the United States. He was also one of the group of foreign policy elders known as "The Wise Men". During the late 1940s, his writings inspired the Truman Doctrine and the U.S. foreign policy of "containing" the Soviet Union. His "Long Telegram" from Moscow during 1946 and the subsequent 1947 article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" argued that the Soviet regime was inherently expansionist and that its influence had to be "contained" in areas of vital strategic importance to the United States. These texts provided justification for the Truman administration's new anti-Soviet policy. Kennan played a major role in the development of definitive Cold War programs and institutions, notably the Marshall Plan. Soon after his concepts had become U.S. policy, Kennan began to criticize the foreign policies that he had seemingly helped begin. Subsequently, prior to the end of 1948, Kennan became confident that positive dialogue could commence with the Soviet government. His proposals were discounted by the Truman administration and Kennan's influence was marginalized, particularly after Dean Acheson was appointed Secretary of State in 1949. Soon thereafter, U.S. Cold War strategy assumed a more assertive and militaristic quality, causing Kennan to lament about what he believed was an abrogation of his previous assessments. In 1950, Kennan left the Department of State—except for two brief ambassadorial stints in Moscow and Yugoslavia—and became a realist critic of U.S. foreign policy. He continued to analyze international affairs as a faculty member of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1956 until his death at age 101.
February 16, 1952
Janet Michelle "Jan" Kerouac (February 16, 1952 – June 5, 1996) was an American writer and the only child of beat generation author Jack Kerouac and Joan Haverty Kerouac. Encouraged by Kerouac biographer Gerald Nicosia, she entered into a lawsuit in the 1990s that proposed the will of Jack's mother, Gabrielle Kerouac, was a forgery, in the hope winning could expand her legal rights to her father's works and physical property. Eventually a court ruled that the will was indeed a forgery, although in practical terms this ruling changed nothing concerning control of the Kerouac estate. Kerouac published two semi-autobiographical novels, Baby Driver in 1981, and Trainsong in 1988. On June 5, 1996, Kerouac died in Albuquerque, New Mexico a day after her spleen was removed. She had suffered kidney failure five years earlier and was on dialysis.
February 16, 1927
David Brion Davis (born February 16, 1927) is an American intellectual and cultural historian, and a leading authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world. He is a Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University, and founder and director emeritus of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. The author and editor of 17 books, he received the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and the National Humanities Medal, presented by President Barack Obama in 2014 for "reshaping our understanding of history." He also received the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction, the 2015 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for lifetime achievement in contributions to public understanding of racism and appreciation of cultural diversity, and the 2015 Biennial Coif Book Award, a top honor from the Association of American Law Schools for the leading law-related book published in 2013 and 2014. In the White House ceremony in which he conferred the National Humanities Medal, President Obama praised Davis for shedding "light on the contradiction of a Union founded on liberty, yet existing half-slave and half-free." He also declared that Davis's "examinations of slavery and abolitionism drive us to keep making moral progress in our time." At age 89, Davis sat with eight other honorands, including Steven Spielberg, before an audience of 35,000 at the Harvard Commencement on May 26, 2016 where he received an honorary doctorate degree. A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, his books emphasize religious and ideological links among material conditions, political interests, and new political values. Ideology, in his view, is not a deliberate distortion of reality or a façade for material interests; rather, it is the conceptual lens through which groups of people perceive the world around them. After serving on the Cornell University faculty for 14 years, Davis taught at Yale from 1970 to 2001. He has held one-year appointments as the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at Oxford University (1969-1970), at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and as the first French-American Foundation Chair in American Civilization at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
February 16, 1974
TIM Z. HERNANDEZ was born and raised in California’s San Joaquin Valley. He is the recipient of many awards, including the American Book Award for poetry. His books and research have been featured in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, CNN, Public Radio International, and National Public Radio. Hernandez holds a BA from Naropa University and an MFA from Bennington College. He continues to perform and speak across the United States and internationally, but he divides his time between Fresno and El Paso, where he is an assistant professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso.
February 17, 1938
Dr. Mary Frances Berry (born February 17, 1938) has been chairperson of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission since 1993. As Assistant Secretary for Education in the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare during the Carter administration, she coordinated and supervised federal education program budgets that totaled nearly thirteen billion dollars. She has received twenty-eight honorary doctoral degrees and numerous awards for her public service, including the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins Award and the Rosa Parks Award of the Southern Christian Leadership Council. She is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania.
February 17, 1914
Julia de Burgos (February 17, 1914 – July 6, 1953) was a poet from Puerto Rico. As an advocate of Puerto Rican independence, she served as Secretary General of the Daughters of Freedom, the women's branch of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. She was also a civil rights activist for women and African/Afro-Caribbean writers.
February 17, 1877
Isabelle Eberhardt (17 February 1877 – 21 October 1904) was a Swiss explorer and writer who lived and travelled extensively in North Africa. For her time she was a liberated individual who rejected conventional European morality in favour of her own path and that of Islam. She died in a flash-flood in the desert at the age of 27. Paul Bowles has taped and translated numerous strange legends and lively stories recounted by Mrabet: Love with a Few Hairs (novel), The Lemon (novel), The Boy Who Set Fire (stories), Harmless Poisons, Blameless Sins (stories), The Beach Café and Look and Move On (autobiography), and The Big Mirror (novella).
February 17, 1957
Michael Gorra (born 17 February 1957) is an American professor of English and literature, currently serving as the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College, where he has taught since 1985.
February 17, 1933
Professor Guthke (born February 17, 1933) is a member of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge and Magdalene College, Cambridge, and a former Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Edinburgh, the Humanities Research Center, Canberra, and the Wolfenbüttel Research Center. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Institute of Germanic and Romantic Studies. Professor Guthke was trained at the universities of Heidelberg, Texas (M.A.), and Göttingen (Ph.D.). Before coming to Harvard in 1968, he taught at the University of California (Berkeley) and at the University of Toronto. His main interest is the literary and cultural history of the several German-speaking countries but he has also strayed into history of science and occasionally teaches in the Comparative Literature Department. Recent interests include a Freshman Seminar on "Last Words in Western Civilization" and one on the history of the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence as well as one on Goethe's Faust. He has published books, in English and German, on pre-Romanticism, Lessing, Haller, Hauptmann, literary life in the eighteenth century, tragicomedy, and literature after "the death of God." His publications also include B. Traven: The Life Behind the Legends (a biography of the author of Treasure of the Sierra Madre); The Last Frontier: Imagining Other Worlds, from the Scientific Revolution to Modern Science Fiction; Last Words: Variations on a Theme of Cultural History; Die Entdeckung des Ich; Trails in No-Man's Land; The Gender of Death, and Der Blick in die Fremde: Das Ich und das andere in der Literatur. His most recent works are Goethes Weimar und "die grosse Öffnung in die weite Welt"; Epitaph Culture in the West; Lessings Horizonte: Grenzen und Grenzenlosigkeit der Toleranz; Schillers Dramen, enlarged edition; Die Erfindung der Welt: Globalität und Grenzen in der Kulturgeschichte der Literatur; Das deutsche bürgerliche Trauerspiel, 6th edition;Sprechende Steine: Eine Geschichte der Grabschrift; Die Reise ans Ende der Welt ;Lebenszeit ohne Ende: Kulturgeschichte eines Gedankenexperiments in der Literatur; "Geistiger Handelsverkehr": Streifzüge im Zeitalter der Weltliteratur, Goethe's Reise nach Spanisch-Amerika: Weltbewohnen in Weimar; Life without End: A Thought Experiment in World Literature from Swift to Houellebecq. He is the translator of H.B. Nisbet, G.E. Lessing.
February 17, 1937
David Meltzer (February 17, 1937 – December 31, 2016) was an American poet and musician of the Beat Generation and San Francisco Renaissance. Lawrence Ferlinghetti described him as "one of the greats of post-World-War-Two San Francisco poets and musicians." Meltzer came to prominence with inclusion of his work in the anthology, The New American Poetry 1945-1960.
February 17, 1862
Lieutenant-General Mori ?gai (February 17, 1862 – July 8, 1922) was a Japanese Army Surgeon general officer, translator, novelist and poet. Gan (The Wild Geese, (1911–13)) is considered his major work. Mori was born as Mori Rintar? in Tsuwano, Iwami province (present-day Shimane prefecture). His family were hereditary physicians to the daimy? of the Tsuwano Domain. As the eldest son, it was assumed that he would carry on the family tradition; therefore he was sent to attend classes in the Confucian classics at the domain academy, and took private lessons in rangaku and Dutch. In 1872, after the Meiji Restoration and the abolition of the domains, the Mori family relocated to Tokyo. Mori stayed at the residence of Nishi Amane, in order to receive tutoring in German, which was the primary language for medical education at the time. In 1874, he was admitted to the government medical school (the predecessor for Tokyo Imperial University's Medical School), and graduated in 1881 at the age of 19, the youngest person ever to be awarded a medical license in Japan. It was also during this time that he developed an interest in literature, reading extensively from the late-Edo period popular novels, and taking lessons in Chinese poetry and literature. After graduation, Mori enlisted in the Imperial Japanese Army as a medical officer, hoping to specialize in military medicine and hygiene. He was commissioned as a deputy surgeon (lieutenant) in 1882. Mori was sent by the Army to study in Germany (Leipzig, Dresden, Munich, and Berlin) from 1884–1888. During this time, he also developed an interest in European literature. As a matter of trivia, Mori ?gai is the first Japanese known to have ridden on the Orient Express. Upon his return to Japan, he was promoted to surgeon first class (captain) in May 1885; after graduating from the Army War College in 1888, he was promoted to senior surgeon, second class (lieutenant colonel) in October 1889. Now a high-ranking army doctor, he pushed for a more scientific approach to medical research, even publishing a medical journal out of his own funds. Meanwhile, he also attempted to revitalize modern Japanese literature and published his own literary journal (Shigarami s?shi, 1889–1894) and his own book of poetry (Omokage, 1889). In his writings, he was an anti-realist, asserting that literature should reflect the emotional and spiritual domain. Maihime (The Dancing Girl, 1890), described an affair between a Japanese man and a German woman. In May 1893, Mori was promoted to senior surgeon, first class (colonel). In 1899, he married Akamatsu Toshiko, daughter of Admiral Akamatsu Noriyoshi, a close friend of Nishi Amane. He divorced her the following year under acrimonious circumstances that irreparably ended his friendship with Nishi. At the start of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, Mori was sent to Manchuria and, the following year, to Taiwan. In February 1899, he was appointed head of the Army Medical Corps with the rank of surgeon major-general and was based in Kokura, Ky?sh?. In 1902, he was reassigned to Tokyo. He was attached to a division in the Russo-Japanese War, based out of Hiroshima. In 1907, Mori was promoted to Surgeon General of the Army (lieutenant general), the highest post within the Japanese Army Medical Corps. On his retirement in 1916 he was appointed director of the Imperial Museum. Although Mori did little writing from 1892–1902, he continued to edit a literary journal (Mezamashi gusa, 1892–1909). He also produced translations of the works of Goethe, Schiller, Ibsen, Hans Christian Andersen, and Hauptmann. It was during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) that Mori started keeping a poetic diary. After the war, he began holding tanka writing parties that included several noted poets such as Yosano Akiko. His later works can be divided into three separate periods. From 1909–1912, he wrote mostly fiction based on his own experiences. This period includes Vita Sexualis, and his most popular novel, Gan (The Wild Geese, 1911–13), which is set in 1881 Tokyo and was filmed by Shir? Toyoda in 1953 as The Mistress. From 1912–1916, he wrote mostly historical stories. Deeply affected by the seppuku of General Nogi Maresuke in 1912, he explored the impulses of self-destruction, self–sacrifice and patriotic sentiment. This period includes Sansh? Day?, and Takasebune. From 1916, he turned his attention to biographies of late Edo period doctors. As an author, Mori is considered one of the leading writers of the Meiji period. In his literary journals, he instituted modern literary criticism in Japan, based on the aesthetic theories of Karl von Hartmann. A house which Mori lived in is preserved in Kokura Kita ward in Kitaky?sh?, not far from Kokura station. Here he wrote Kokura Nikki ('Kokura Diary'). His birthhouse is also preserved in Tsuwano. The two one-story houses are remarkably similar in size and in their traditional Japanese style. One of Mori's daughters, Mori Mari, influenced the Yaoi movement in contemporary Japanese comics. Mori's sister, Kimiko, married Koganei Yoshikiyo. Hoshi Shinichi was one of their grandsons. Ogai Mori, along with many other historical figures from the Meiji Restoration is a character in the historical fiction novel Saka no Ue no Kumo by Shiba Ryotaro. He also plays a significant part in the historical fantasy novel Teito Monogatari by Hiroshi Aramata.
February 17, 1942
Huey Percy Newton (February 17, 1942 – August 22, 1989) was an African-American political and urban activist who, along with Bobby Seale, co-founded the Black Panther Party in 1966. Newton had a long series of confrontations with law enforcement, including several convictions, while he participated in political activism. He continued to pursue an education, eventually earning a Ph.D. in Social Science. Newton spent time in prison for manslaughter due to his alleged involvement in a shooting that killed a police officer, but was later acquitted. In 1989 he was shot and killed in Oakland, California by Tyrone 'Double R' Robinson, a member of the Black Guerrilla Family.
February 17, 1925
Edmundo Donato (February 17th, 1925, in São Paulo, Brazil - April 1st, 1999) was one of Brazil’s most popular and critically acclaimed writers, who used the name of Marcos Rey as a pseudonym. He started writing short stories when he was sixteen years old. His first book was a novella which is called Um Gato no Triângulo, in 1953. His first novel, Break-fust in Bed (1960), was a runaway bestseller and has recently been reissued by the Brazilian Book-of-the-Month Club. He has had six other novels and six collections of short stories published, one of which, The Procuress’s Funeral, won two of Brazil’s most prestigious awards-the Critics Prize and the Jabuti Prize-while MEMOIRS OF A GIGOLO has sold over 200,000 copies in its Brazilian edition. Marcos Key has also written for radio and television, and a number of his stories have been adapted for the cinema both in Brazil and abroad.
February 17, 1954
Helene Tursten (born in Gothenburg in 1954) is a Swedish writer of crime fiction. The main character in her stories is Detective Inspector Irene Huss. Before becoming an author, Tursten worked as a nurse and then a dentist, but was forced to leave due to illness. During her illness she worked as a translator of medical articles.
February 17, 1923
John Marco Allegro (17 February 1923 – 17 February 1988) was an English archaeologist and Dead Sea Scrolls scholar. He was a populariser of the Dead Sea Scrolls through his books and radio broadcasts. He was the editor of some of the most famous and controversial scrolls published, the pesharim. A number of Allegro's later books, including The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, brought him both popular fame and notoriety, and also destroyed his career.
February 18, 1951
Juvenal Acosta is a fiction writer, poet, and journalist born in Mexico in 1961. He has edited two anthologies of contemporary Mexican poetry published by City Lights Books. The original version of The Tattoo Hunter (El Cazador de Tatuajes), his first novel, was published in Mexico City to wide critical acclaim. This Fall, The Violence of Velvet (Terciopelo Violento), his second novel, will be released by Planeta Press. His essay on bullfighting, ‘The Gaze and the Blood,’ was translated into English by Gregory Rabassa and published by Periplus Books in London as an introduction to Tauromachia, a book of photography. Acosta writes for Cambio, a weekly magazine published by Gabriel García Márquez in Mexico City, directs the M.F.A. in Writing and Consciousness at the New College of California, and teaches creative writing at the California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco.
February 18, 1951
Alberto Blanco is considered one of Mexico's most important poets. Born in Mexico City on February 18, 1951, he spent his childhood and adolescence in that city, and he studied chemistry at the Universidad Iberoamericana and philosophy at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. For two years, he pursued a Master’s Degree in Asian Studies, specializing in China, at El Colegio de México. Blanco was first published in a journal in 1970. He was co-editor and designer of the poetry journal El Zaguan (1975–1977), and a grant recipient of the Centro Mexicano de Escritores (Mexican Center of Writers, 1977), el Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (the National Institute of Fine Arts, 1980), and the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (National Fund for Culture and Arts, 1990). In 1991 he received a grant from the Fulbright Program as a poet-in-residence at the University of California, Irvine; and, in 1992, he was awarded a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. He was admitted into the Sistema Nacional de Creadores (National System of Creative Artists) in 1994, for which he has also been a juror. In 2001 he received the Octavio Paz Grant for Poetry, and in 2008, he was awarded a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2010, he was re-admitted to the Sistema Nacional de Creadores. Blanco’s literary output has been very abundant and varied, and he has undertaken three genres: first, poetry, followed by essays, and, finally, translations. He has published twenty-six books of poetry in Mexico and additional books in other countries; ten books of his translations of the work of other poets; and twelve story books for children, some of which have been illustrated by his wife Patricia Revah. His work has been translated into a dozen languages: English, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Hungarian, Japanese, Romanian, Bulgarian, and Russian. In 1997 he accepted a residency in Bellagio, Italy, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation; and in 2000 he was invited as a resident poet at the Poetry Center of the University of Arizona. He was also invited to inaugurate the program, ‘La Universidad de la Poesía’ (‘The University of Poetry’), in Chile, where he gave readings, lectures, and workshops in various cities in that country. Blanco has been involved in many of the most important poetry festivals in the world and has given many courses, workshops, readings, and lectures in more than thirty universities in the United States as well as in France, Canada, Germany, Spain, Italy, Colombia, Ireland, El Salvador, Chile, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Estonia, and Finland. To date, he has published more than sixty books, along with twenty more of translations, anthologies, or illustrations as well as eight hundred publications in magazines, catalogs, newspapers, and literary supplements. More than 200 essays, reviews, and commentaries on his work have been published both in Mexico and other countries; more than fifty interviews with him have appeared. His poems are included in ninety anthologies, have been studied in various master’s and doctoral theses, and have been included in a dozen dictionaries and textbooks. His total publications exceed thirteen hundred. In 1988 he received the Carlos Pellicer Poetry Prize for his book Cromos, and in 1989 the José Fuentes Mares National Prize for Literature for Song to the Shadow of the Animals, a book that unites his poems with drawings by Francisco Toledo. In 1996 Insects Also Are Perfect received honors from IBBY in Holland. In 2002 he received the ‘Alfonso X (the Wise)’ award for excellence in literary translation from San Diego State University in California. There are four anthologies of his poems: Amanecer de los Sentidos, published by the National Council for Culture and the Arts in Mexico in 1993; Dawn of the Senses, a bilingual anthology that included a dozen translators, published by City Lights, in San Francisco, in 1995; De vierkantswrotel can de hemel, Gedichten, translated into Dutch by Bart Vonck and published by Wagner and Van Santen in Holland, 2002; and A Cage of Transparent Words, edited by Paul B. Roth, translated by eight translators, and published by The Bitter Oleander Press of New York. In 1998, El Corazon del Instante (The Heart of the Moment), a compilation of twelve volumes of poetry that included twenty-five years (1968–1993) of work was published in a series of major Mexican works; and in 2005 a second compilation of another twelve books of poetry entitled La Hora y la Neblina (The Hour and the Mist) was published in the same series by the same publisher (Fondo de la Cultura Economica). In 2011, the Bitter Oleander Press published a bilingual edition of his book, Tras el Rayo, entitled Afterglow translated by Jennifer Rathbun. Also, in 2011, Blanco's first book of poetics (El llamado y el don (The Calling and the Gift) was published by AUIEO in Mexico City. Blanco has collaborated with numerous painters, sculptors and photographers, and his essays on the visual arts are published in many catalogs and magazines. In 1998 they were collected in one volume: Las voces del ver (The Voices of Vision). This book served as a basis for a television series of programs with the same name which were shown on Mexican television. A new edition, revised and augmented of his essays on visual arts, was published in 2008, entitled El eco de las formas (The Echo of Forms). In fact, Alberto Blanco is well known as a visual artist; his collages have appeared in many books and journals, and his paintings have hung in national galleries. He has had several showings in California, and in 2007, exhibited 108 collages in the Estación Indianilla in Mexico City, along with recent sculptures by Leonora Carrington. Equally noteworthy are his artist’s books which form part of important collections in various universities in the United States. In 2011, The Athenaeum in La Jolla, California, mounted a retrospective exhibit of forty years of Blanco's artist's books entitled ‘Visual Poetry/Poesía Visual.’ Furthermore, he has been a song composer, and he was singer and keyboardist in the rock and jazz groups ‘La Comuna’ (‘The Commune’) and ‘Las Plumas Atómicas’ (‘The Atomic Pens’). Although he has dedicated himself chiefly to the writing of poetry and has not embarked on an academic career (in Mexico he has never taught at any institution), he was a full-time professor for three years (1993–1996) in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Texas at El Paso. At the end of 1996, he returned with his family to Mexico City, but in 1998 and 1999, he was invited as a distinguished professor to San Diego State University in California. In 2007 he was awarded an endowed chair, the Knapp Chair, for a semester at the University of San Diego. In 2009 and 2010, Blanco taught courses in art at Middlebury College, and he was invited to teach literature courses at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), in 2009 and 2010. Blanco’s most recent book of poetry is entitled: Música de cámara instantánea (Music of the Instant Camera or Instant Chamber Music) (2005) and consists of fifty-two poems dedicated to the same number of composers of contemporary music. (Note: this is not his most recent anthology.) Critical discussion and acclaim of Blanco’s work abounds, both in Mexico and abroad. Regarding Dawn of the Senses, Mexican poet Jose Emilio Pacheco, in his introduction to the book, writes, ‘[Blanco] is someone in whom, as Henry James said, nothing is lost. Everything streams into his words, so many tributaries feed into the flow of his poetry. His knowledge of chemistry, his work as a visual artist and jazz musician, his grounding in Chinese literature and Zen Buddhism--all of these combine to give his poems a tone and perspective unlike any other Mexican poet.’ W.S Merwin concludes that, ‘Alberto Blanco’s poems, over several decades, have revealed with precision and delicacy an original imaginative landscape and imagery that are at once intimate, spacious, and rooted in the rich ground of Mexican poetry…’ ‘Alberto Blanco is the master of bright, clear, and sudden awarenesses that are the flesh and light so special to his poetry…’ observes Michael McClure.
February 18, 1883
Nikos Kazantzakis (18 February 1883 – 26 October 1957) was a Greek writer and philosopher, celebrated for his novel Zorba the Greek, considered his magnum opus. He became known globally after the 1964 release of the Michael Cacoyannis film Zorba the Greek, based on the novel. He gained renewed fame with the 1988 Martin Scorsese adaptation of his book The Last Temptation of Christ.
February 18, 1896
Gaston Karel Mathilde Burssens (18 February 1896 – 29 January 1965) was a Belgian Expressionist poet. He studied in Flanders at the University of Ghent, at which, during World War I, the Germans introduced classes given in Dutch language. Like that of Paul van Ostaijen, during the 1920s his work evolved from humanitarian expressionism towards a more organic expressionism — upon which his poetry stayed focused on musicality. Van Ostaijen's not earlier published poems were published posthumously by Burssens. Burssens received the 'Driejaarlijkse Prijs voor Poëzie', a reward for poetry granted every third year, for 1950-52, and once again for 1956-58.
February 18, 1950
Bebe Moore Campbell has been a winner of the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Grant, the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women’s Literature Award and the Midwestern Radio Theatre Workshop Competition. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, daughter and stepson.
February 18, 1941
BETTYE COLLIER-THOMAS is associate professor in the History Department and director of the Temple University Center for African American History and Culture. She is the founding executive director of the Bethune Museum-Archives, Inc., the first institution in the United States to focus on the documentation and preservation of African American women’s history.
February 18, 1929
Leonard Cyril Deighton (born 18 February 1929) is a British military historian, cookery writer, and novelist. He is perhaps most famous for his spy novel The IPCRESS File, which was made into a film starring Michael Caine. Deighton was born in Marylebone, London, in 1929. His father was a chauffeur and mechanic, and his mother was a part-time cook. At the time they lived in Gloucester Place Mews near Baker Street. Deighton's interest in spy stories may have been partially inspired by the arrest of Anna Wolkoff, which he witnessed as an 11-year-old boy. Wolkoff, a British subject of Russian descent, was a Nazi spy. She was detained on 20 May 1940 and subsequently convicted of violating the Official Secrets Act for attempting to pass secret documents to the Nazis. After leaving school, Deighton worked as a railway clerk before performing his National Service, which he spent as a photographer for the Royal Air Force's Special Investigation Branch. After discharge from the RAF, he studied at St Martin's School of Art in London in 1949, and in 1952 won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, graduating in 1955. While he was at the RCA he became a ‘lifelong friend’ of fellow designer Raymond Hawkey, who later designed covers for his early books. Deighton then worked as an airline steward with BOAC. Before he began his writing career he worked as an illustrator in New York and, in 1960, as an art director in a now defunct London advertising agency, Sharps Advertising. He is credited with creating the first British cover for Kerouac's On the Road. He has since used his drawing skills to illustrate a number of his own military history books. Following the success of his first novels, Deighton became The Observer's cookery writer and produced illustrated cookbooks. In September 1967 he wrote an article in the Sunday Times Magazine about Operation Snowdrop - an SAS attack on Benghazi during World War II. The following year David Stirling would be awarded substantial damages in libel from the article. He also wrote travel guides and became travel editor of Playboy, before becoming a film producer. After producing a film adaption of his 1968 novel Only When I Larf, Deighton and photographer Brian Duffy bought the film rights to Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop's stage musical Oh, What a Lovely War! He had his name removed from the credits of the film, however, which was a move that he later described as ‘stupid and infantile.’ That was his last involvement with the cinema. Deighton left England in 1969. He briefly resided in Blackrock, County Louth in Ireland. He has not returned to England apart from some personal visits and very few media appearances, his last one since 1985 being a 2006 interview which formed part of a ‘Len Deighton Night’ on BBC Four. He and his wife Ysabele divide their time between homes in Portugal and Guernsey.
February 18, 1931
Charles Higham (18 February 1931 – 21 April 2012) was an English author, editor and poet.
February 18, 1928
Eeva Karin Kilpi (née Salo; 18 February 1928, Hiitola) is a Finnish writer and feminist. Better known abroad than in Finland, her poetry, characterized as feminist humor, was discovered in the 1980s in Europe. Eeva Karin Salo was born on February 18, 1928, to Solmu Aulis Aimo and Helmi Anna Maria (neé Saharinen) Salo within the former Karelian municipality of Hiitola, Finnish Karelia, where she lived until the coming of the Winter War of 1939-1940. During the Winter War, Kilpi and her family survived bombings by hiding in an underground cellar. Her father was later called away to the front lines and the family was forced to evacuate from the region. Kilpi ended up attaining an education within Helsinki, the capital and largest city within Finland.
February 18, 1913
Auguste Le Breton (born Auguste Monfort 18 February 1913 – 31 May 1999) was a French novelist who wrote primarily about the criminal underworld. His novels were adapted into several notable films of the 1950s, such as Rififi, Razzia sur la chnouf, Le rouge est mis and Le clan des siciliens. He wrote the dialogue for the noir film Bob le flambeur.
February 18, 1934
Audre Geraldine Lorde (February 18, 1934 - November 17, 1992) was an American writer, poet and activist. Lorde was born in New York City to Caribbean immigrants who settled in Harlem. Frederick Byron Lorde and Linda Gertrude Belmar Lorde. Lorde was nearsighted and legally blind. The youngest of three daughters, she grew up in Harlem, hearing her mother’s stories about the West Indies. She learned to talk while she learned to read, at the age of four. Her mother taught her to write during this time. She wrote her first poem when she was in the eighth grade. After graduating from Hunter College High School, she attended Hunter College from 1954 to 1959, graduating with a bachelors degree. While studying library science, Lorde supported herself working various odd jobs: factory worker, ghost writer, social worker, X-ray technician, medical clerk, and arts and crafts supervisor. In 1954, she spent a pivotal year as a student at the National University of Mexico, a period described by Lorde as a time of affirmation and renewal because she confirmed her identity on personal and artistic levels as a lesbian and poet. On her return to New York, Lorde went to college, worked as a librarian, continued writing, and became an active participant in the gay culture of Greenwich Village. Lorde furthered her education at Columbia University, earning a master’s degree in library science in 1961. During this time she also worked as a librarian at Mount Vernon Public Library and married attorney Edwin Rollins; they later divorced in 1970 after having two children, Elizabeth and Jonathan. In 1966, Lorde became head librarian at Town School Library in New York City where she remained until 1968. During a year in residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, funded by a National Endowment for the Arts grant, Lorde met Frances Clayton, a white professor of psychology, the woman who was to be her romantic partner until 1989. Lorde was then involved with Gloria Joseph, who was Lorde’s partner until Lorde’s death from breast cancer. Lorde died November 17, 1992 in St. Croix after a 14 year struggle with the disease. In her own words, she was a ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet‘.Lorde took the name Gamba Adisa, which means ‘Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Known,’ in an African naming ceremony before she died. Lorde’s poetry was published regularly during the 1960s: in Langston Hughes’s 1962 New Negro Poets, USA; in several foreign anthologies; and in black literary magazines. During this time she was politically active in the civil rights, antiwar, and feminist movements. Her first volume of poetry, The First Cities (1968), was published by the Poet’s Press and edited by Diane di Prima, a former classmate and friend from Hunter College High School. Dudley Randall, a poet and critic, asserted in his review of the book that ‘[Lorde] does not wave a black flag, but her blackness is there, implicit, in the bone.’ Lorde’s second volume, Cables to Rage (1970), which was mainly written during her tenure at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, addresses themes of love, betrayal, childbirth, and the complexities of raising children. It is particularly noteworthy for the poem ‘Martha’, in which Lorde poetically confirms her homosexuality: ‘we shall love each other here if ever at all.’ Later books continued her political aims in Lesbian and Gay rights and feminism. In 1980, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith and several other lesbians co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first U.S. publisher for women of color. Lorde was named State Poet of New York from 1991 to 1992. .
February 18, 1931
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist, essayist, book editor, and college professor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she gained worldwide recognition when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 and went to graduate school at Cornell University. She later taught English at Howard University and also married and had two children before divorcing in 1964. In the late 1960s, she became the first black female editor in fiction at Random House in New York City. In the 1970s and 1980s, she developed her own reputation as an author, and her perhaps most celebrated work, Beloved, was made into a 1998 film. In 1996, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected her for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Also that year, she was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. On May 29, 2012, President Barack Obama presented Morrison with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2016, she received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.
February 18, 1957
George P. Pelecanos (born 18 February 1957) is an American author. Many of his works are in the genre of detective fiction and set primarily in his hometown of Washington, D.C. He is also a film and television producer and a television writer. He worked extensively on the HBO series The Wire. Pelecanos, a Greek American, was born in Washington, D.C. in 1957. Pelecanos's early novels were written in the first person voice of Nick Stefanos, a Greek D.C. resident and sometime private investigator. After the success of his first four novels, the Stefanos-narrated A Firing Offense, Nick's Trip, and Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go, and the non-series (though some characters do cross over) Shoedog, Pelecanos switched his narrative style considerably and expanded the scope of his fiction with his D.C. Quartet. He has commented that he did not feel he had the ability to be this ambitious earlier in his career. The quartet, often compared to James Ellroy's L.A. Quartet, spanned several decades and communities within the changing population of Washington. Now writing in the third person, Pelecanos relegated Stefanos to a supporting character and introduced his first 'salt and pepper' team of crime fighters, Dimitri Karras and Marcus Clay. In The Big Blowdown, set a generation before Karras and Clay would appear (the 1950s), Pelecanos followed the lives of dozens of D.C. residents, tracking the challenges and changes that the second half of the twentieth century presented to Washingtonians. King Suckerman, set in the 1970s and generally regarded as the fans' favorite, introduced the recurring theme of basketball in Pelecanos' fiction. Typically, he employs the sport as a symbol of cooperation amongst the races, suggesting the dynamism of D.C. as reflective of the good will generated by multi-ethnic pick up games. However, he also indulges the reverse of the equation, wherein the basketball court becomes the site of unresolved hostilities. In such cases, violent criminal behavior typically emerges amongst the participants, usually escalating the mystery. The Sweet Forever (1980s) and Shame the Devil (1990s) closed the quartet and Pelecanos retired Stefanos and the other characters that populated the novels. (Stefanos and other characters do re-appear in subsequent works.) In 2001, he introduced a new team of private detectives, Derek Strange and Terry Quinn, as the protagonists of Right as Rain. They have subsequently starred in the author's more recent works Hell to Pay (which won a Gumshoe Award in 2003) and Soul Circus. While these books have cemented the author's reputation as one of the best current American crime writers and sold consistently, they have not garnered the critical and cult affection his D.C. quartet did. Rather, they seem to be continuing the author's well received formula of witty protagonists chasing unconflicted criminals behind the backdrop of popular culture references and D.C. landmarks. Perhaps sensing this, Pelecanos again switched his focus in his 2004 novel, Hard Revolution, taking one of his new detectives, Derek Strange, back in time to his early days on the D.C. police force. In another interesting move, Pelecanos attached a CD to the book itself, emulating Michael Connelly who included a CD with his 2003 Harry Bosch book Lost Light. In 2005, Pelecanos saw another novel published, Drama City. This book revisited the examination of dogfighting begun in his book Hell To Pay. Pelecanos is a dog owner and has written about his views of dogfighting. In 2006 he published The Night Gardener, which was a major change of style and which featured a cameo of himself. Pelecanos has also published short fiction in a variety of anthologies and magazines, including Measures of Poison and Usual Suspects. His reviews have been published in The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. The Turnaround was published in August 2008, reflecting a return to his roots, as the novel opens in the 70s in a Greek diner, and a continuation of his more modern style in the portion set in the present. The Turnaround won the 2008's Hammett Prize. In 2011, Pelecanos published 'The Cut', introducing the character Spero Lucas, a young veteran of the Iraq war. The former Marine works part-time as a private investigator for a D.C. defense attorney as well as taking jobs finding stolen items for a 40% cut of the value of the returned item. In 2013, Pelecanos published 'The Double', the second Spero Lucas book. Pelecanos has written and produced for HBO's The Wire and is part of a literary circle with The Wire creator David Simon and novelist Laura Lippman. Simon sought out Pelecanos after reading his work. Simon was recommended his novels several times but did not read his work initially because of territorial prejudice; Simon is from Baltimore. Once Simon received further recommendations, including one from Lippman, he tried The Sweet Forever and changed his mind. The two writers have much in common including a childhood in Silver Spring, Maryland, attendance at the University of Maryland and their interest in the 'fate of the American city and the black urban poor'. They first met at the funeral of a mutual friend shortly after Simon delivered the pilot episode. Simon pitched Pelecanos the idea of The Wire as a novel for television about the American city as Pelecanos drove him home. Pelecanos was excited about the prospect of writing something more than simple mystery for television as he strived to exceed the boundaries of genre in his novels. Pelecanos joined the crew as a writer for the first season in 2002. He wrote the teleplay for the seasons's penultimate episode 'Cleaning Up' from a story by Simon and Ed Burns. Pelecanos was promoted to producer for the second season in 2003. He wrote the teleplay for the episodes 'Duck and Cover' and 'Bad Dreams' from stories he co-wrote with Simon. He remained a writer and producer for the third season in 2004. He wrote the teleplay for the episodes 'Hamsterdam' and 'Middle Ground' from stories he co-wrote with Simon. Simon wrote the teleplay for the episode 'Slapstick' from a story he co-wrote with Pelecanos. Simon and Pelecanos' collaboration on 'Middle Ground' received the show's first Emmy Award nomination, in the category Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series. Pelecanos left the production staff of The Wire after the show's third season to concentrate on writing his novel The Night Gardener. His role as a producer was taken on by Eric Overmyer. Pelecanos remained a writer for the fourth season in 2006. He wrote the teleplay for the penultimate episode 'That's Got His Own' from a story he co-wrote with producer Ed Burns. Simon has commented that he missed having Pelecanos working on the show full-time but was a fan of The Night Gardener. Simon also spent time embedded with a homicide unit while researching his own book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. Pelecanos and the writing staff won the Writers Guild of America (WGA) Award for Best Dramatic Series at the February 2008 ceremony and the 2007 Edgar Award for Best Television Feature/Mini-Series Teleplay for their work on the fourth season. Pelecanos returned as a writer for the series fifth and final season. He wrote the teleplay for the episode 'Late Editions' from a story he co-wrote with Simon. Pelecanos and the writing staff were again nominated for the WGA award for Best Dramatic Series at the February 2009 ceremony for their work on the fifth season but Mad Men won the award. Following the conclusion of The Wire Pelecanos joined the crew of the HBO World War II mini-series The Pacific as a co-producer and writer. After a lengthy production process the series aired in 2010. He co-wrote 'Part 3' of the series with fellow co-producer Michelle Ashford. The episode focused on Marines on leave in Australia and featured a displaced Greek family in a prominent guest role. Pelecanos saw the project as a chance to make a tribute to his father, Pete Pelecanos, who served as a Marine in the Philippines.Also in 2010 Pelecanos joined the crew of HBO New Orleans drama Treme as a writer. The series was created by Simon and Overmeyer. It follows the lives of residents of the Tremé neighborhood after Hurricane Katrina. Pelecanos wrote the teleplay for the episode 'At the Foot of Canal Street' from a story he co-wrote with Overmyer. Pelecanos returned as a Consulting Producer and writer for the second season in 2011. He joined the crew full time as a writer and executive producer for the third season in 2012. He remained in this role for the fourth and final season in 2013. Following the conclusion of Treme Pelecanos worked with Overmyer on his next series Bosch. The series was developed by Overmyer and is based on the series of novels by Michael Connelly. The series stars The Wire alumni Jamie Hector and Lance Reddick. Pelecanos and Michael Connelly co-wrote the show's fourth episode 'Fugazi'. As of 2006, Pelecanos lives in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Silver Spring, Maryland with his wife and three children.
February 18, 1949
R. D. Rosen's writing career spans mystery novels, narrative nonfiction, humor books, and television. Strike Three You're Dead, the first in Rosen's series featuring major league baseball player Harvey Blissberg, won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America in 1985.
February 18, 1909
Wallace Earle Stegner (February 18, 1909 – April 13, 1993) was an American novelist, short story writer, environmentalist, and historian, often called "The Dean of Western Writers". He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and the U.S. National Book Award in 1977.
February 18, 1941
David Thomson (born February 18, 1941) is a British film critic and historian based in the United States and the author of more than 20 books. His reference works in particular — Have You Seen...?: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films (2008) and The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (5th edition, 2010) — are noted for their high literary merit and eccentricity. Benjamin Schwarz, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, called him ‘probably the greatest living film critic and historian’ who ‘writes the most fun and enthralling prose about the movies since Pauline Kael‘. John Banville called him ‘the greatest living writer on the movies’.
February 19, 1896
André Breton (19 February 1896 – 28 September 1966) was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme) of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as ‘pure psychic automatism‘.
February 19, 1952
Ryu Murakami, musician, filmmaker, TV talk show host, and novelist, is the author of ALMOST TRANSPARENT BLUE, 69, and COIN LOCKER BABIES, which the Washington Post praised as ‘a knockout. a great big pulsating parable.’. Ralph McCarthy is the translator of Murakami’s 69 and two collections of stories by Osamu Dazai.
February 19, 1939
Alfredo Bryce Echenique (born February 19, 1939) is a Peruvian writer born in Lima. He has written several books and short stories. Bryce was born to an Anglo-Peruvian family of upper class, related to John Bryce Weddle, ancestor of the Marquesses of Milford-Haven and of the duchesses of Abercon and Westminster. He was the third son and the fourth of the five children of the banker Francisco Bryce Arróspide and his wife, Elena Echenique Basombrío, granddaughter of the former President José Rufino Echenique. Bryce studied elementary education at Inmaculado Corazón school, and high school at Santa María school and Saint Paul's College, a British boarding school for boys in Lima. Upon the wish of his family Bryce Echenique studied law in the National University of San Marcos until 1964. His literary interest nevertheless prevailed and so, shortly afterwards, he completed a parallel study course in literature with a thesis on Ernest Hemingway. In 1988 he adopted Spanish nationality without losing Peruvian one. He received a grant from the French government which, like many other Latin American authors of the boom period, led him to Paris. At the Sorbonne he studied classic and modern French literature and then taught at various French schools and universities. His first book Huerto Cerrado published in 1968, was a finalist for the Casa de las Américas literary prize awarded in Cuba and is a collection of short stories written in different styles and points of view about a young protagonist, Manolo, a member of Lima's upper class, as he comes of age in 1950s Lima. This was followed by his first novel, Un Mundo para Julius, published in 1970 that became a big success and counts today as one of the classics of Latin American literature. The novel, which has since been translated into ten languages, tells the story of a young boy who grows up as the youngest of four children of a rich, Peruvian upper-class family. Although Julius actually belongs to the ruling classes he feels a stronger bond with the servants which surround him and this brings him into conflict with his family. With biting irony the author exposes, through the eyes of a child, the great social differences in Peruvian society. Un mundo para Julius marks for Bryce Echenique the start of an extremely productive literary career, in which he has until today written nearly twenty novels and story volumes. ‘I am an author of the second half of the 20th century.’ Despite this declaration and his spatial and temporal closeness to other Latin American authors of the boom generation, Bryce Echenique keeps a conscious distance from his colleagues who he sometimes refers to as ‘nouveau riche’. That his style, as one critic once said, corresponds more to an ironic than a magic realism, is shown by the author also in one his latest novels: La amigdalitis de Tarzán from 1999. Largely in the form of letters, the novel relates the story of the hindered romantic relationship between a poor Peruvian troubadour and the daughter of an influential Salvadoran family. Similar to his heroes, Alfredo Bryce Echenique also lived for decades far from his home city of Lima to which he only returned in 1999. Also that year he was granted an honorary degree by the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. In March, 2007, Peruvian Diplomat Oswaldo de Rivero wrote an article for the newspaper El Comercio of Lima, Peru accusing Bryce of writing an article ‘Potencias sin poder’ that was an almost exact copy of one written by de Rivero in the magazine ‘Quehacer’ in March, 2005. Bryce responded saying the article had been submitted in error by his secretary. Juan Carlos Bondy subsequently found evidence that Bryce had earlier plagiarized the article ‘Amistad, bendito tesoro’ by Ángel Esteban that had appeared in La Nación of Argentina in December, 1996 Bondy's blog. Bryce has also been accused of plagiarizing articles by Graham E. Fuller and Herbert Morote Perú21. Journalism professor María Soledad de la Cerda found sixteen other instances of plagiarism which were found as a result of research for her course in investigative journalism El Mercurio.
February 19, 1958
Margaret Leslie Davis is a California lawyer and is also the author of Dark Side of Fortune: Triumph and Scandal in the Life of Oil Tycoon Edward L. Doheny (UC Press, 1998) and Rivers in the Desert: William Mulholland and the Inventing of Los Angeles (1993), for which she won the Western Writers of America Golden Spur Award in nonfiction. .
February 19, 1941
Stephen J. Dobyns (born February 19, 1941) is an American poet and novelist born in Orange, New Jersey, and residing in Westerly, RI. Was born on February 19, 1941 in Orange, New Jersey to Lester L., a minister, and Barbara Johnston Dobyns. Dobyns was raised in New Jersey, Michigan, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. He was educated at Shimer College, graduated from Wayne State University, and received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1967. He has worked as a reporter for the Detroit News. He has taught at various academic institutions, including Sarah Lawrence College, the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, the University of Iowa, Syracuse University, and Boston University. As a professor of English at Syracuse University, he was involved in a sexual discrimination scandal. Francine Prose defended him by portraying his accuser and the school as having reacted to outdated neo-Victorian victim-feminism policies. Dobyns has written many detective stories about a private detective named Charlie Bradshaw who works out of Saratoga Springs in upstate New York. Bradshaw is unusual as a private eye protagonist, an ordinary man who was once a police officer. All the books have the word ‘Saratoga’ in the title. In the comic novel THE WRESTLER'S CRUEL STUDY, the protagonist roams through a modern cityscape governed by fairy-tale rituals, searching for his missing fiancée. He is alternately aided or hindered by a Friedrich Nietzsche -quoting manager and his Hegelian nemesis, to find that his wrestling matches are choreographed by a shadowy organization that enacts their various Gnostic theological debates through the pageantry and panoply of the ring. He eventually learns to resolve his own dualistic nature and determine who he is despite the role he plays. COLD DOG SOUP has been made into two films, the American Cold Dog Soup and the French Doggy Bag. TWO DEATHS OF SEÑORA PUCCINI has been made into the film Two Deaths. The movie Wild Turkey is based on one of his short stories. THE CHURCH OF DEAD GIRLS is a novel about a small town's hysterical response to the mysterious disappearance of three of its teenaged girls. BOY IN THE WATER is a novel about events in a secluded private school in the United States.
February 19, 1955
Siri Hustvedt is the author five novels, The Blindfold, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, What I Loved,and The Summer Without Men, as well as three collections of essays, A Plea for Eros, Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting, and Living, Thinking, Looking, as well as the nonfiction work: The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. What I Loved and The Summer Without Men were international bestsellers. Her work has been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Femina Etranger in France, and she is the recipient of the 2012 International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities.
February 19, 1920
Jaan Kross (19 February 1920 – 27 December 2007) was an Estonian writer. Jaan Kross was arrested by the Soviets in 1946 and spent nine years in exile and labor camps in the Soviet Union's eastern regions. He has published eleven works of fiction, including the highly acclaimed The Czar’s Madman, as well as four volumes of poetry. Although English-speaking audiences are only now discovering his work, his books have been translated into twenty-two languages and have sold more than one million copies worldwide.
February 19 , 1937
Alain Labrousse (February 19 , 1937 in Libourne - on July 6 , 2016) was a French journalist , sociologist, geopolitical scientist, and specialist in geopolitics of drugs and of Latin America. He was founder and director of the Geopolitical Observatory of Drugs (OGD). In 2002, he became a consultant to the French Observatory of Drugs and Drug Addiction (OFDT) and the European Union . He was also a member of the International Crime Observatory (OGCI, University of Liège ). Labrousse was editor of the magazine Drogues Trafic International and published articles in the French magazine Politique internationale.
February 19, 1964
Jonathan Allen Lethem (born February 19, 1964) is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
February 19, 1917
Carson McCullers’ best-known works are THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, REEFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE, THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING, THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFÉ and CLOCK WITHOUT HANDS. She was born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1917 and died in Nyack, New York, in 1967.
February 19, 1943
Michael Mewshaw (born February 19, 1943) is an American author of 11 novels and 8 books of nonfiction, and works frequently as a travel writer, investigative reporter, book reviewer, and tennis reporter. His novel YEAR OF THE GUN was made into a film of the same name by John Frankenheimer in 1991. He is married with two sons. Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio's longtime ‘voice of books,’ has called him ‘the best novelist in America that nobody knows. Born in Washington, DC, and raised in the suburb of Prince George's County, Maryland, Mewshaw graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Maryland (1965), then was granted a four-year fellowship to attend the graduate writing program at the University of Virginia, where he attained his Masters (1966) and Doctorate (1970) degrees under the tutelage of George Garrett. While studying at UVA, Mewshaw completed two unpublished novels, then embarked on a road trip across Mexico with his wife (at the urging of William Styron, who was the subject of his masters thesis and doctoral dissertation); a journey which would form the basis of his first novel MAN IN MOTION (1970), which he completed while on a Fulbright Fellowship in France. Mewshaw taught creative writing at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and subsequently was named Director of Creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin. Taking leaves of absence every other year from this post, Mewshaw based himself in Rome, Italy, and continued traveling throughout Europe and North Africa. While Mewshaw researched his third novel THE TOLL (1974) in Marrakesh, Morocco, his wife Linda was hired as Lindsay Wagner’s stand-in on the set of Robert Wise’s film Two People. Mewshaw’s experience of that shoot was the jumping-off point for his fifth novel LAND WITHOUT SHADOW (1979).
February 19, 1928
Onuora Nzekwu, also known as Joseph Onuora Nzekwu (February 19, 1928 – April 21, 2017) was a Nigerian professor, writer and editor from the Igbo people. Nzekwu was born to Mr. Obiese Nzekwu and Mrs. Mary Ogugua Nzekwu (née Aghadiuno). In January 1956, he joined the Federal Civil Service as an editorial assistant at the Nigeria Magazine Division of the Federal Ministry of Information. Nzekwu worked as an editorial assistant from 1956 to 1958. In 1958, he took over the position of editor-in-chief of the magazine. Nzekwu continued to run the Nigeria Magazine Division of the Federal Ministry of Information until 1966, when the Nigerian Crisis compelled him to transfer his services to the Eastern Nigeria Public Service. Nzekwu began as a senior information officer at Eastern Nigeria, a post that the combined the roles of Information Ministry and Cultural officer. In 1968, he was promoted deputy director of the newly created Cultural Division. At the end of hostilities in January 1970, Nzekwu returned to the Federal Ministry of Information in May and was assigned to the information division as senior information officer. Nzekwu worked as Protem general manager of News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) until July 1, 1979, when he then took over the position of substantive general manager. Nzekwu retired from the Nigeria Public Service in 1985, after presiding over the affairs of the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) for nearly eight years and servicing his country’s government for 39 years. Onuora Nzekwu received the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 1961, which enabled him to study American Methods of Magazine Production with Crafts Horizons in New York. In 1964, Nzekwu was awarded an UNESCO Fellowship which allowed him to study Copyright Administration for three months in Geneva, Prague, Paris, London, New York and Washington. On August 8, 2006, NAN observed its 30th Anniversary during celebrations at Abuja. The Agency presented a plaque to with the engraving Maker of NAN, to Nzekwu. In December, 2008, Nzekwu was conferred with the Nigerian National Honor of the Officer of the Order of the Niger (OON). Nzekwu has also authored several novels. Nzekwu co-authored Eze Goes to School and Eze Goes to College with historian Michael Crowder. The two school supplementary readers were first published by African University Press in 1964 and 1988 respectively. In 1977, Nzekwu published his first non-fiction work titled, The Chima Dynasty in Onitsha, in which he presented the history of Onitsha through an account of the reign of its monarchs. Nzekwu's novel, Faith of Our Fathers, a compendium of the arts, beliefs, social institutions and code of values that characterize the Onitsha traditional community was published in 2003. Nzekwu married Onoenyi Justina Ogbenyeanu, daughter of Chief Isaac Aniegboka Mbanefo, Odu II of Onitsha, in June 1960 and was inducted into the ancient and prestigious Agbalanze Society of Onitsha in May 1991. He died on April 21, 2017.
February 19, 1888
José Eustasio Rivera Salas (February 19, 1888 - December 1, 1928) was a Colombian lawyer and poet primarily known for his national epic The Vortex. José Eustasio Rivera was born on February 19, 1888 in Aguas Calientes, a hamlet of the city of Neiva, later that year the hamlet was incorporated into the newly created municipality of San Mateo, which was later renamed Rivera in honour of José Eustasio. His parents were Eustasio Rivera Escobar and Catalina Salas, and he was the first boy and fifth child out of eleven children, out of which eight made into adulthood, José Eustasio, Luis Enrique, Margarita, Virginia, Laura, Susana, Julia and Ernestina. In spite of his family's economic situation, he received a catholic education thanks to the help of other relatives and his own efforts. He attended Santa Librada school in Neiva and San Luis Gonzaga in Elías. In 1906 he received a scholarship to study at the normal school in Bogotá. In 1909, after graduating, he moved to Ibagué where he worked as a school inspector. In 1912 he enrolled at the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences of National University, graduating as a lawyer in 1917. After a failed attempt to be elected for the senate, he was appointed Legal Secretary of the Colombo-Venezuelan Border Commission to determine the limits with Venezuela, there he had the opportunity to travel through the Colombian jungles, rivers, and mountains, giving him a first hand experience of the subjects he would later write. Disappointed with the lack of resources offered by his government for his trip, he abandoned the commission and continued travelling on his own. He later rejoined the commission, but before that he went to Brazil, where he became acquainted with the work of important Brazilian writers of his time, particularly Euclides da Cunha. In this venture he became familiar with life in the Colombian plains and with problems related to the extraction of rubber in the Amazon jungle, a matter that would be central in his major work, La vorágine (1924) (translated as The Vortex), now considered one of the most important novels in Latin American literary history. To write this novel he read extensively about the situation of rubber workers in the Amazon basin. After the success of his novel, he was elected, in 1925, as a member for the Investigative Commission for Exterior Relations and Colonization. He also published several articles in newspapers in Colombia. In these pieces, he criticized irregularities in government contracts, and denounced the abandonment of the rubber areas of Colombia and the mistreatment of workers. He also publicly defended his novel, which had been criticized by some Colombian literary critics as being too poetic. This criticism would be largely silenced by the wide praise the novel was receiving everywhere else. Rivera had arrived in New York the last week of April 1928 in the hopes of translating his novel into English, publishing it in the United States, and turning it into a motion picture film with the goal of exporting Colombian culture abroad. His venture, albeit riffled with difficulties, was moving along when on November 27 he suffered an attack of seizures and was taken to the Stuyvesant Polyclinic Hospital where he remained for four days in a comatose state until his death on December 1, 1928. After his death, his body was transported by ship from New York to Barranquilla on the United Fruit Company's ship the Sixaola. At his arrival on port, his body was transported in procession to the Pro-Cathedral of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino where a requiem mass was given and the body laid in chapelle ardente. The casket then made its way down the Magdalena onto Bogotá on the mail steamship Carbonell González, arriving in Girardot and finishing by train to arrive in Bogotá on January 7, 1929 and was taken directly to the Capitolio Nacional where it was placed lying in state for public viewing. His body was finally laid to rest in the Central Cemetery of Bogotá on January 19.
February 19, 1909
Selden Rodman (February 19, 1909 – November 2, 2002) was an American writer and poet. Selden Rodman was born to a wealthy family in Manhattan and attended Yale University. He traveled widely, and published over 40 books in his lifetime. His most frequent subjects were Haitian art, other writers, as well as several poetry anthologies and travelogues. Rodman also co-founded the magazine Common Sense with Alfred Bingham. His sister Nancy was married to the writer Dwight Macdonald. He was married to Maia Wojciechowska but they got divorced.
February 19, 1936
Brad Steiger (February 19, 1936 – May 6, 2018) was an American author of fiction and non-fiction works on the paranormal, spirituality, UFOs, true crime, and biographies. He became a full-time writer by 1967. He authored/co-authored almost 170 books, which have sold 17 million copies. Steiger wrote that he believed Atlantis was a real place. In his book Atlantis Rising he argued that Atlantis was the home of an all-powerful civilization with sophisticated technological achievement. He also declared the tracks at Paluxy River to be evidence for an ancient civilization of giant humans. He was a proponent of the ancient astronauts idea. Steiger stated that many humans descend from alien beings. He referred to these beings as "star people". Steiger's books have sold well to the public, but have been criticized by academics. Anthropologist Bonita Freeman-Witthoft noted that Steiger failed to cite scholary sources, gave faulty documentation and his reporting of mythology was inaccurate. Sarah Higley gave Steiger's The Werewolf Book a mixed review and concluded "with a definite penchant for the sensational at the expense of the accurate, the casual reader will find much in it informative and entertaining as well." Skeptical investigator Joe Nickell considers Steiger an unreliable source and has noted that he "endlessly cranks out books promoting paranormal claims".
February 19, 1952
Amy Tan (born February 19, 1952) is an American writer whose works explore mother-daughter relationships and the Chinese American experience. Her novel The Joy Luck Club was adapted into a film in 1993 by director Wayne Wang. Tan has written several other novels, including The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter, Saving Fish from Drowning, and The Valley of Amazement. Tan's latest book is a memoir entitled Where The Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir (2017). In addition to these, Tan has written two children's books: The Moon Lady (1992) and Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat (1994), which was turned into an animated series that aired on PBS. Despite her success, Tan has also received substantial criticism for her depictions of Chinese culture and apparent adherence to stereotypes.
February 19, 1945
Clifton Taulbert is an American author, business consultant and speaker. He is best known for his books Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored and Eight Habits of the Heart: Embracing the Values that Build Strong Communities. Taulbert offers courses in Character Education and Building Strong School Communities through Knowledge Delivery Systems, an online resource for educators Taulbert's book Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored was adapted into the film Once Upon a Time..When We Were Colored in 1996.
February 19, 1926
Ross Thomas (February 19, 1926 in Oklahoma City – December 18, 1995 in Santa Monica, California) was an American writer of crime fiction. He is best known for his witty thrillers that expose the mechanisms of professional politics. He also wrote several novels under the pseudonym Oliver Bleeck about professional go-between Philip St. Ives. Thomas served with the infantry in the Philippines during World War II. He worked as a public relations specialist, correspondent with the Armed Forces Network, union spokesman, and political strategist in the USA, Bonn (Germany), and Nigeria before becoming a writer. His debut novel, The Cold War Swap, was written in only six weeks and won a 1967 Edgar Award for Best First Novel. Briarpatch earned the 1985 Edgar for Best Novel. In 2002 he was honored with the inaugural Gumshoe Lifetime Achievement Award, one of only two authors to earn the award posthumously (the other was 87th Precinct author Ed McBain in 2006). In addition to his novels, Mr. Thomas also wrote an original screenplay for producer Robert Evans entitled Jimmy the Rumour. The project is the story of a man born without an identity who works as a thief stealing from other thieves. He died of lung cancer in Santa Monica, California two months before his 70th birthday.
February 19, 1966
Gintaras Grajauskas is one of Lithuania's leading poets, and also a multi-talented playwright, essayist, novelist and editor. Born in 1966, he has lived and worked in Klaipeda since childhood. He graduated from the S. Simkus High School for music, and later from the Lithuanian National Conservatory's Klaipeda branch in the jazz department. From 1990-94 he worked in radio and television, and from 1994 was the editor of the Klaipeda literary journal Gintaros Lasai. He has been head of the literature department of the Klaipeda State Drama Theater since 2008. Grajauskas has published seven books of poetry, two essay collections, one novel and one collection of plays. His work has won numerous awards, including the Z. Gele Prize for best poetry debut (1994), and the Poetry Spring Mairionis prize for best poetry collection (2000). His poems have been translated into many languages, with collections published in Germany, Sweden, Italy, Iceland and Poland. A selection of his poems appeared in the bilingual anthology Six Lithuanian Poets (Arc Publications, 2008). The first English translation of his poetry, Then What, translated by Rimis Uzgiris, is published by Bloodaxe in 2018. Grajauskas is also a founding member of the blues-rock band Kontrabanda and the jazz-rock band Rockfeleriais for whom he is bassist and lead vocalist.
February 20, 1902
Ansel Easton Adams (February 20, 1902 – April 22, 1984) was an American photographer and environmentalist. His black-and-white landscape photographs of the American West, especially Yosemite National Park, have been widely reproduced on calendars, posters, and books. With Fred Archer, Adams developed the Zone System as a way to determine proper exposure and adjust the contrast of the final print. The resulting clarity and depth characterized his photographs. Adams primarily used large-format cameras because their high resolution helped ensure sharpness in his images. Adams founded the photography Group f/64 along with fellow photographers Willard Van Dyke and Edward Weston.
February 20, 1945
Andrew Bergman (born February 20, 1945) is an American screenwriter, film director, and novelist. New York magazine in 1985 dubbed him "The Unknown King of Comedy". His best known films include Blazing Saddles, The In-Laws, and The Freshman.
February 20, 1888
Georges Bernanos (20 February 1888 – 5 July 1948) was a French author, and a soldier in World War I. Of Roman Catholic and monarchist leanings, he was critical of bourgeois thought and was opposed to what he identified as defeatism leading to France's defeat in 1940.
February 20, 1930
Miodrag Bulatovic (born 1930, in Okladi, Bijelo Polje, Zeta Banovina, Kingdom of Yugoslavia - died 1991, Igalo, Montenegro, SFR Yugoslavia) was a Montenegrin Serb novelist and playwright. He began in 1956 with a book of short stories, Djavoli dolaze (‘The Devils Are Coming’, translated as STOP THE DANUBE), for which he received the Serbian Writers Union Award. His best novel was, however, THE RED ROOSTER FLIES HEAVENWARDS, set in his homeland of north-eastern Montenegro. This was translated into more than twenty foreign languages. Bulatovic then stopped publishing for a time, to protest interference in his work. His next novel, HERO ON A DONKEY was first published abroad and only four years later (1967) in Yugoslavia. In 1975, he won the prestigious NIN Award for novel of the year for PEOPLE WITH FOUR FINGERS, an insight into the émigré's life. THE FIFTH FINGER was a sequel to that book. His last novel was GULLO GULLO, which brought together various themes from his previous books.
February 20, 1930
Pietro Citati (born February 20, 1930, Florence, Italy) is a famous Italian writer and literary critic. He has written critical biographies of Goethe, Alexander the Great, Kafka and Marcel Proust as well as a short memoir on his thirty-year friendship with Italo Calvino.
February 20, 1959
David Corn (born February 20, 1959) is an American political journalist and author and the chief of the Washington bureau for Mother Jones. He has been Washington editor for The Nation and appeared regularly on FOX News, MSNBC, National Public Radio, and BloggingHeads.tv opposite James Pinkerton or other media personalities. In February 2013, he was named winner of the 2012 George Polk Award in journalism in the political reporting category for his video and reporting of the ‘47 percent story,’ Republican nominee Mitt Romney's surreptitiously videoed meeting with donors during the 2012 presidential campaign. As an author, Corn's output includes nonfiction and fiction and generally deals with government and politics. Corn has also been a book reviewer. On one occasion, he criticized his own organization when Nation Books published the translation of a controversial French book on Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks. FORBIDDEN TRUTH: US-TALIBAN SECRET OIL DIPLOMACY AND THE FAILED HUNT FOR BIN LADEN by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié suggests that the attacks resulted from a breakdown in talks between the Taliban and the United States to run an oil pipeline through Afghanistan. Corn argued that publishing ‘contrived conspiracy theories’ undermined the ability to expose actual governmental misbehavior.
February 20, 1958
MARK MAZOWER is professor of history at Columbia University and Birkbeck College, London. His books include INSIDE HITLER’S GREECE: THE EXPERIENCE OF OCCUPATION, 1941-44, winner of the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History and the Longman/History Today Award for Book of the Year. He lives in New York City.
February 20, 1935
Ellen Gilchrist is an American novelist, short story writer, and poet. She won a National Book Award for her 1984 collection of short stories, Victory Over Japan.
February 20, 1925
Alex La Guma (20 February 1925 – 11 October 1985) was a South African novelist, leader of the South African Coloured People’s Organisation (SACPO) and a defendant in the Treason Trial, whose works helped characterise the movement against the apartheid era in South Africa. La Guma's vivid style, distinctive dialogue, and realistic, sympathetic portrayal of oppressed groups have made him one of the most notable South African writers of the 20th century. La Guma was awarded the 1969 Lotus Prize for Literature. La Guma was born in District Six, Cape Town. He was the son of James La Guma, a leading figure in both the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union and the South African Communist Party. La Guma attended Trafalgar High School in District Six in Cape Town. After graduating from a technical school in 1945, he was an active member of the Plant Workers Union of the Metal Box Company. He was fired after organizing a strike, and he became active in politics, joining the Young Communists League in 1947 and the South African Communist Party in 1948. In 1956 he helped organise the South Africa representatives who drew up the Freedom Charter, and consequently he was one of the 156 accused at the Treason Trials that same year. He published his first short story, "Nocturn", in 1957. In 1960, he began writing for New Age, a progressive newspaper, and in 1962 he was placed under house arrest. Before his five-year sentence could elapse, A No Trial Act was passed and he and his wife were put into solitary confinement. On their release from prison, they returned to house arrest. He, along with his wife Blanche and their two children, went into exile to the UK in 1966. La Guma spent the rest of his life in exile. He was chief representative of the African National Congress in the Caribbean at the time of his death Havana, Cuba, in 1985. In 1984, he was appointed Officer of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture. Although La Guma was an inspiration of and inspired by the growing resistance to apartheid, notably the Black Consciousness Movement, his connection to these groups was indirect.
February 20, 1883
Naoya Shiga (20 February 1883 – 21 October 1971) was a Japanese novelist and short story writer active during the Taish? and Sh?wa periods of Japan.
February 20, 1896
Cornélio Penna (February 20, 1896, Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - February 12, 1958, Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is a solitary figure among the Brazilian writers of the generation which begins to write in the Thirties and continues until around mid-century. Born in Petrópolis in 1896 to an upper middle class family, a doctor’s son and the youngest of five children, he was precocious as a child and was taught reading by his sister well before reaching school age. In his mature years he recalled that, living in the small town of Itabira (Minas Gerais) as a child, two experiences above all others became fixed in his mind: the sighting of Halley’s comet and the death of a certain Maria Santa, an event surrounded by mystery and legend. It is the obsession, the persistent recollection of the latter which takes the form of Penna’s first novel, THRESHOLD (Fronteira), published in 1935. By the time Penna reached the age of thirteen, he had read all the novels of Camilo Castelo Branco, whose very name connotes romance and passion to Portuguese and Brazilian readers. (Penna once confided that Camilo’s novels influenced him enormously and made him sad for the rest of his life.) Even as a youth, Penna was morose and solitary, little given to recreation other than reading. In his teens he made the discovery of French and Russian authors, along with the works of his compatriot Machado de Assis - Penna’s great predecessor in the Brazilian psychological novel - and he began, as he later said, to dress in black or in dark colors, There is a story concerning his reading of Machado’s Quincas Borba (English translation, Philosopher or Dog?) that bears repeating. Penna said: ‘One day I read Quincas Borba and was left trembling, extremely moved, certain that I too was mad. That suspicion of madness stayed with me until just a few years ago when I finally surrendered myself to the truth: I became resigned that I was completely sane.’ Meanwhile the young Penna himself dabbled in writing, though the urge to paint was equally strong in him. But he also was obliged to receive an education befitting one of his social class, and accordingly, graduated in law from Sao Paulo in 1919. Soon, however, journalism and the graphic arts lured him away from the legal profession, and his first job was as illustrator and journalist, a contributor to the Gazeta de Noticias, A Nação and O Jornal. In Rio, in 1928, Penna exhibited his paintings and illustrations in what was his first and only one-man show. Then, after painting his ‘Warring Angels’ around 1935 (are they, significantly, the angels of art and literature, we wonder?) Penna decided to make a clean break with painting as a career and to devote himself wholeheartedly to writing. . Originally published in Portuguese as Fronteira in 1935.
February 20, 1953
Roberto Ampuero (Valparaíso, Chile, 1953) is a Chilean author, columnist, and a university professor. His first novel ¿Quién mató a Kristián Kustermann? was published in 1993 and in it he introduced his private eye, Cayetano Brulé, winning the Revista del Libro prize of El Mercurio. Since then the detective has appeared in five novels. In addition he has published an autobiographical novel about his years in Cuba titled Nuestros Años Verde Olivo (1999) and the novels Los Amantes de Estocolmo (Book of the Year in Chile, 2003 and the bestseller of the year in Chile )) and Pasiones Griegas (chosen as the Best Spanish Novel in China, 2006). His novels have been published in Latin America and Spain, and have been translated into German, French, Italian, Chinese, Swedish, Portuguese, Greek, Croatian, and English. In Chile his works have sold more than 40 editions. Ampuero now resides in Iowa where he is a professor at the University of Iowa in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He was a columnist of La Tercera and the New York Times Syndicate and since March 2009 has been working as a columnist for El Mercurio. Between 2013 and 2014 he was Minister of Culture in the Conservative government of Sebastián Piñera.
February 20, 1883
Naoya Shiga (20 February 1883 – 21 October 1971) was a Japanese novelist and short story writer active during the Taish? and Sh?wa periods of Japan.
February 20, 1941
Alan Furst (born February 20, 1941) is an American author of historical spy novels. Furst has been called 'an heir to the tradition of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene,' whom he cites along with Joseph Roth and Arthur Koestler as important influences. Most of his novels since 1988 have been set just prior to or during the Second World War and he is noted for his successful evocations of Eastern Europe peoples and places during the period from 1933 to 1944.
February 20, 1984
Trevor Noah (born 20 February 1984) is a South African comedian, writer, producer, political commentator, actor, and television host. He is best known for being the host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central since September 2015. Noah began his career as an actor, presenter, and comedian in his native South Africa. He held several television hosting roles with the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), and was the runner-up in their fourth season of Strictly Come Dancing in 2008. From 2010-11, Noah was the creator and host of Tonight with Trevor Noah on M-Net and DStv. His stand-up comedy career attained international success, leading to appearances on American late-night talk shows and British panel shows. In 2014, Noah became the Senior International Correspondent for The Daily Show, an American satirical news program. The following year, he was announced as the successor of long-time host Jon Stewart. Although ratings for the show declined following Stewart's departure, Noah's tenure has been generally favourably reviewed, attracting particular attention for his interview with young conservative personality Tomi Lahren in late 2016.
February 21, 1950
Håkan Nesser was awarded the 1993 Swedish Crime Writers’ Academy Prize for new authors for Mind’s Eye (published in Sweden as Det Grovmaskiga Nätet); he received the best novel award in 1994 FOR BORKMANN’S POINT and in 1996 for WOMAN WITH BIRTHMARK. In 1999 he was awarded the Crime Writers of Scandinavia’s Glass Key Award for the best crime novel of the year for Carambole. Nesser lives in Sweden and London.
February 21, 1951
Giuseppe Arlacchi, also known as Pino, (February 21, 1951) is an Italian sociologist and is well known worldwide for his studies and essays about the Mafia. Currently he represents the Italian Democratic Party and is a member of the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) parliamentary group since 2010. On September 1, 1997 he was appointed Director-General of the United Nations Office at Vienna and Executive Director of the Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (ODCCP), with the rank of Under-Secretary-General. Currently, he is a full professor of sociology at the University of Sassari.
February 21, 1907
Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973), who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet, born in England, later an American citizen, regarded by many critics as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form and content. The central themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature. Auden grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional middle-class family and read English literature at Christ Church, Oxford. His early poems, written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, alternated between telegraphic modern styles and fluent traditional ones, were written in an intense and dramatic tone, and established his reputation as a left-wing political poet and prophet. He became uncomfortable in this role in the later 1930s, and abandoned it after he moved to the United States in 1939, where he became an American citizen in 1946. His poems in the 1940s explored religious and ethical themes in a less dramatic manner than his earlier works, but still combined traditional forms and styles with new forms devised by Auden himself. In the 1950s and 1960s many of his poems focused on the ways in which words revealed and concealed emotions, and he took a particular interest in writing opera librettos, a form ideally suited to direct expression of strong feelings. He was also a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential. After his death, some of his poems, notably ‘Funeral Blues‘ (‘Stop all the clocks’), ‘Musée des Beaux Arts‘, ‘Refugee Blues‘, ‘The Unknown Citizen‘, and ‘September 1, 1939‘, became widely known through films, broadcasts, and popular media.
February 21, 1915
Claudia Jones, née Claudia Vera Cumberbatch (21 February 1915 – 24 December 1964), was a Trinidad and Tobago-born journalist and activist. As a child, she migrated with her family to the US, where she became a Communist political activist, feminist and black nationalist, adopting the name Jones as "self-protective disinformation". Due to the political persecution of Communists in the US, she was deported in 1955 and subsequently lived in the United Kingdom. She founded Britain's first major black newspaper, West Indian Gazette (WIG), in 1958.
2/21/1940
John Robert Lewis (born February 21, 1940) is an American politician and civil rights leader. He is the U.S. Representative for Georgia's 5th congressional district, serving since 1987, and is the dean of the Georgia congressional delegation. The district includes the northern three-quarters of Atlanta. Lewis is the only living "Big Six" leader of the African-American Civil Rights Movement, having been the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), playing a key role in the struggle to end legalized racial discrimination and segregation. A member of the Democratic Party, Lewis is a member of the Democratic leadership of the House of Representatives and has served in the Whip organization since shortly after his first election to the U.S. Congress.
February 21, 1935
Richard Allen Lupoff is an American science fiction and mystery author, who has also written humor, satire, non-fiction and reviews. In addition to his two dozen novels and more than 40 short stories, he has also edited science-fantasy anthologies.
February 21, 1943
John D. Marks (born 1943) is the founder and former president of Search for Common Ground (SFCG), a non-profit organization based in Washington, DC that focuses on international conflict management programming.
February 21, 1954
Victor L. Martinez (February 21, 1954 – February 18, 2011) was a Mexican American poet and author. He won the 1996 U.S. National Book Award for Young People's Literature for his first novel, Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida. Martinez was the born in Fresno, California to migrant agricultural field workers of the Central Valley. He was one of twelve children. Victor attended California State University at Fresno and later obtained a graduate degree from Stanford University on a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship.
February 21, 1961
RICHARD B. McCASLIN, TSHA Endowed Professor of Texas History at the University of North Texas, is the author of Tainted Breeze: The Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas, October 1862; Lee in the Shadow of Washington; and Fighting Stock: John S. "Rip" Ford in Texas.
February 21, 1937
Mervyn Eustace Morris OM (Jamaica) (born 21 February 1937) is a poet and professor emeritus at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. According to educator Ralph Thompson, "In addition to his poetry, which has ranked him among the top West Indian poets, he was one of the first academics to espouse the importance of nation language in helping to define in verse important aspects of Jamaican culture." Mervyn Morris was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and studied at the University College of the West Indies (UWI) and as a Rhodes Scholar at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. In 1970, he began lecturing at UWI, where he went on to be appointed a Reader in West Indian Literature. In 1992 he was a UK Arts Council Visiting Writer-in-Residence at the South Bank Centre. He lives in Kingston, Jamaica, where he is Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing & West Indian Literature. In 2009, Morris was awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit. In 2014, Morris was appointed the Poet Laureate of Jamaica, the first to be accorded the title since the country Independence (the previous holders being Tom Redcam, who was appointed posthumously in 1933, and John Ebenezer Clare McFarlane, appointed in 1953). The investiture ceremony took place at King's House on 22 May. Morris has published several volumes of poetry, and has edited the works of other Caribbean writers. His collections include The Pond (revised edition, New Beacon Books, 1997), Shadowboxing (New Beacon Books, 1979), Examination Centre (New Beacon Books, 1992) and On Holy Week (a sequence of poems for radio, Dangaroo Press, 1993). He also edited The Faber Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories and published "Is English We Speaking", and other essays. In 2006 Carcanet Press published his I been there, sort of: New and Selected Poems. The best known poems by Morris include: "Little Boy Crying", "Family Pictures", "Love Is", "One, Two", "Home", "The Roaches", "The Pond" and "Critic".
February 21, 1923
Arlo Tatum (21 February 1923 - 2 April 2014) played significant roles in the US, British and international pacifist movements. Born into a Quaker family in Iowa, he politely wrote in 1941, aged 18, to the US attorney general announcing his refusal to register for the draft – US conscription – imposed in advance of US entry to the Second World War. He was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in the Federal Correctional Institution, Sandstone, Minnesota, the youngest prisoner when he entered. A natural baritone, Arlo, on release, was awarded a scholarship at the American conservatory of music, and won a competition to sing with the Chicago concert and opera guild. However, his burgeoning career was interrupted by an order to register for a fresh draft in 1948, renewed refusal, and another imprisonment. A serious accident in 1951 ended his singing career, and he started full-time pacifist activism, becoming co-secretary of the War Resisters’ League (US counterpart of the Peace Pledge Union – PPU). In 1955 he was appointed general secretary of War Resisters’ International (WRI), which entailed Arlo moving to London, where, apart from overseeing WRI’s first international conference outside Europe (India, 1960), he became involved in the PPU, serving as a director of Peace News, then the weekly newspaper of the PPU. With Sybil Morrison, he compiled the PPU songbook, as well as writing songs for the Aldermaston marches. He also co-founded the World Peace Brigade, a forerunner of Peace Brigades International.
February 21, 1962
David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American writer and university instructor of English and creative writing. His novel Infinite Jest (1996) was listed by Time magazine as one of the hundred best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. His last novel, The Pale King (2011), was a final selection for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012. The Los Angeles Times book reviewer David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years". Wallace's works have influenced writers such as Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, Elizabeth Wurtzel, George Saunders, Rivka Galchen, Matthew Gallaway, David Gordon, Darin Strauss, Charles Yu, and Deb Olin Unferth.
February 21, 1954
RUDOLF SIMEK is Professor of Medieval German and Scandinavian literature at the University of Bonn in Germany.
February 21, 1952
Jia Pingwa is a Chinese novelist and short story writer. His novels include Shang State, White Night, I Am a Farmer, and Shaanxi Opera, which won the Mao Dun Literature Prize. Howard Goldblatt is an award-winning translator of numerous works of contemporary Chinese literature, including seven novels by Mo Yan, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
February 21, 1903
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) is an iconic literary figure and one of the most notable experimental writers of the twentieth century. As one of the first women to explore female erotica, Nin revealed the inner desires of her characters in a way that made her works a touchstone for later feminist writers. Swallow Press is the premier US publisher of books by and about Nin. Paul Herron is the founder and editor of Sky Blue Press, which publishes the journal A Café in Space and digital editions of the fiction of Anaïs Nin, as well as a new collection of Nin erotica, Auletris.
February 22, 1908
Rómulo Ernesto Betancourt Bello (22 February 1908 – 28 September 1981) , known as "The Father of Venezuelan Democracy", was the 47th and 54th President of Venezuela, serving from 1945 to 1948 and again from 1959 to 1964, as well as leader of Acción Democrática, Venezuela's dominant political party in the 20th century. Betancourt, one of Venezuela's most important political figures, led a tumultuous and highly controversial career in Latin American politics. Periods of exile brought Betancourt in contact with various Latin American countries as well as the United States, securing his legacy as one of the most prominent international leaders to emerge from 20th-century Latin America. Scholars credit Betancourt as the Founding Father of modern democratic Venezuela. Rómulo Betancourt was a very close friend of the Governor of Puerto Rico, Luis Muñoz Marín, visiting the island often and frequently exchanging political views with him, viewing him as a political advisor on Democracy. Although they disagreed on certain issues they remained faithful friends. On one occasion in 1963, he refused to attend the inauguration of Juan Bosch as president of the Dominican Republic if Bosch did not extend an invitation to Muñoz Marín, who had provided a safe haven for Bosch and various members of his political party in Puerto Rico. Betancourt attended the funeral of his friend in 1980.
February 22, 1917
Jane Bowles (born Jane Sydney Auer; February 22, 1917 – May 4, 1973) was an American writer and playwright. Born into a Jewish family in New York, Jane Bowles spent her childhood in Woodmere, New York, on Long Island. She developed tuberculous arthritis of the knee as a teenager and her mother took her to Switzerland for treatment, where she attended boarding school. As a teenager she returned to New York, where she gravitated to the intellectual bohemia of Greenwich Village. She married writer and composer Paul Bowles in 1938. In 1943 her novel Two Serious Ladies was published. The Bowleses lived in New York until 1947, when Paul moved to Tangier, Morocco; Jane followed him in 1948. While in Morocco, Jane had an intense and complicated relationship with a Moroccan woman named Cherifa. She also had a close relationship with torch singer Libby Holman. Jane Bowles wrote the play In The Summer House, which was performed on Broadway in 1953 to mixed reviews. Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and John Ashbery considered her to be one of the finest and most underrated writers of American fiction. Bowles, who suffered from alcoholism, had a stroke in 1957 at age 40. Her health continued to decline, despite various treatments in England and the United States, until she had to be admitted to a clinic in Málaga, Spain, where she died in 1973.
February 22, 1856
JOHN EDWARD BRUCE (February 22, 1856, Piscataway, MD - August 7, 1924, New York City, NY) was born a slave in Maryland and given a hero’s funeral in Harlem. He briefly studied at Howard University before beginning a career as a journalist, editor, historian, and public speaker. He was the cofounder with Arthur A. Schomburg of the Negro Society for Historical Research.’.
February 22, 1900
Luis Buñuel Portolés (22 February 1900 – 29 July 1983) was a Spanish filmmaker who worked in Spain, Mexico and France. When Luis Buñuel died at age 83, his obituary in the New York Times called him ‘an iconoclast, moralist, and revolutionary who was a leader of avant-garde surrealism in his youth and a dominant international movie director half a century later’. His first picture—made in the silent era—was called ‘the most famous short film ever made’ by critic Roger Ebert, and his last film—made 48 years later—won him Best Director awards from the National Board of Review and the National Society of Film Critics. Writer Octavio Paz called Buñuel's work ‘the marriage of the film image to the poetic image, creating a new reality...scandalous and subversive’. Often associated with the surrealist movement of the 1920s, Buñuel created films from the 1920s through the 1970s. His work spans two continents, three languages, and nearly every film genre, including experimental film, documentary, melodrama, satire, musical, erotica, comedy, romance, costume dramas, fantasy, crime film, adventure, and western. Despite this variety, filmmaker John Huston believed that, regardless of genre, a Buñuel film is so distinctive as to be instantly recognizable, or, as Ingmar Bergman put it, ‘Buñuel nearly always made Buñuel films’. Six of Buñuel's films are included in Sight & Sound's 2012 critic's poll of the top 250 films of all time. 15 of his films are included in They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? list of the 1,000 greatest films of all time, which is tied with John Ford for second most, and he ranks number 14 on their list of the top 250 directors. Garrett White is a translator and film and art journalist. He translated and wrote the introduction for Blaise Cendrars’s Hollywood: Mecca of the Movies (California, 1995).
February 22, 1896
Reginald Evelyn Peter Southouse Cheyney (22 February 1896 – 26 June 1951) – known as Peter Cheyney – was a British crime fiction writer who flourished between 1936 and 1951. Cheyney is the author of hard-boiled short stories and novels in the American style, most famously a series of ten novels about agent/detective Lemmy Caution, which, starting in 1953, were adapted into a series of French movies, all starring Eddie Constantine. (The most well-known of these, the 1965 science fiction film Alphaville, was not directly based on a Cheyney novel.) His other memorable creation is Slim Callaghan, a somewhat disreputable private detective most at home in the less savoury sections of London. Although Cheyney's novels sold in the millions during his lifetime, he is almost forgotten today, and his works are mostly out of print.
February 22, 1925
Edward St. John Gorey (February 22, 1925 – April 15, 2000) was an American writer and artist noted for his illustrated books. His characteristic pen-and-ink drawings often depict vaguely unsettling narrative scenes in Victorian and Edwardian settings.
February 22, 1930
Edward Dentinger Hoch (February 22, 1930 – January 17, 2008) was an American writer of detective fiction. Although he wrote several novels, he was primarily known for his vast output of over 950 short stories.
February 22, 1956
Philip Ballantyne Kerr (22 February 1956 – 23 March 2018) was a British author, best known for his Bernie Gunther series of historical detective thrillers. Kerr was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, where his father was an engineer and his mother worked as a secretary. He was educated at a grammar school in Northampton. He studied at the University of Birmingham from 1974 to 1980, gaining a master's degree in law and philosophy. Kerr worked as an advertising copywriter for Saatchi and Saatchi before becoming a full-time writer in 1989. A writer of both adult fiction and non-fiction, he is known for the Bernie Gunther series of historical thrillers set in Germany and elsewhere during the 1930s, the Second World War and the Cold War. He also wrote children's books under the name P. B. Kerr, including the Children of the Lamp series. Kerr wrote for The Sunday Times, the Evening Standard, and the New Statesman. He was married to fellow novelist Jane Thynne; they lived in Wimbledon, London, and had three children. He died from cancer on 23 March 2018, aged 62. Just before he died, he finished a 14th Bernie Gunther novel, Metropolis, which will be published in 2019. In 1993, Kerr was named in Granta's list of Best Young British Novelists. In 2009, If the Dead Rise Not won the world's most lucrative crime fiction award, the RBA Prize for Crime Writing worth €125,000. The book also won the British Crime Writers' Association's Ellis Peters Historic Crime Award that same year. His novel, Prussian Blue, has been longlisted for the 2018 Walter Scott Prize. Kerr died of cancer on 23 March 2018 and was survived by his wife and children.
February 22, 1935
Danilo Kiš (February 22, 1935 - October 15, 1989) was a Yugoslavian/Serbian writer of Hungarian/Jewish - Serbian origin. Danilo Kiš was born in Subotica, Danube Banovina, Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the son of Eduard Kiš (Kis Ede), a Hungarian Jewish railway inspector, and Milica Kiš (born Dragicevic) from Cetinje, Montenegro. In that time all Montenegrins concidered them to be Serbs. During World War II, he lost his father and several other family members, who died in various Nazi camps. His mother took him and his older sister Danica to Hungary for the duration of the war. After the end of the war, the family moved to Cetinje, Montenegro, Yugoslavia, where Kiš graduated from high school in 1954. Kiš studied literature at the University of Belgrade, and graduated in 1958 as the first student to complete a course in comparative literature. He was a prominent member of the Vidici magazine, where he worked until 1960. In 1962 he published his first two novels, Mansarda and Psalam 44. Kiš received the prestigious NIN Award for his Pešcanik (‘Hourglass’) in 1973, which he returned a few years later, due to a political dispute. During the following years, Kiš received a great number of national and international awards for his prose and poetry. He spent most of his life in Paris and working as a lecturer elsewhere in France. Kiš was married to Mirjana Miocinovic from 1962 to 1981. After their separation, he lived with Pascale Delpech until his early death from lung cancer in Paris. A film based on Pešcanik (Fövenyóra) directed by the Hungarian Szabolcs Tolnai is currently in post-production. Kiš was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature and was due to win it, were it not for his untimely death in 1989. .
February 22, 1944
Shepard Krech III is a professor of anthropology at Brown University. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and in Maine.
February 22, 1943
Eduard Limonov (real name Eduard Veniaminovich Savenko, born 22 February 1943) is a Russian writer, poet, publicist, and political dissident. He is the founder and former leader of the banned National Bolshevik Party. Formerly an opponent of Vladimir Putin, Limonov was one of the leaders of The Other Russia political bloc. However, following the 2014 pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine, he has emerged as a strong supporter of Putin.
February 22, 1944
Gerald Martin (born 1944) is a critic of Latin American fiction. He is particularly known for his work on the Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias and on the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, both of whom are winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. His 2008 book, Gabriel García Márquez. A Life, was the first full biography of García Márquez to be published in English. Gerald Martin (London 1944) studied Spanish, French and Portuguese at Bristol (1965) and received his PhD in Latin American Literature from the University of Edinburgh (1970). He spent a year in Cochabamba, Bolivia, with VSO (1965-6). He also carried out postgraduate work in UNAM, Mexico (1968-9) and was a visiting scholar at Stanford University (1971-2), thanks to a Harkness Fellowship. By 1990 he had visited every country in Latin America. He taught for many years at Portsmouth Polytechnic, where he helped to organise the world’s first undergraduate degree in Latin American Studies, which pioneered the student year abroad in Latin America. In 1984 he became the first Professor of Hispanic Studies in the Polytechnic sector. He worked for 25 years as the only English-speaking member of the Colección Archivos in Paris and in Pittsburgh became President of the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana. During the period 1992-2007 he was the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Languages in the University of Pittsburgh. His research and publications have focused on the Latin American novel. His PhD was devoted to Miguel Angel Asturias, who fortunately won the Nobel Prize before it was completed, and he has produced critical editions of Hombres de maíz (1981) and El Señor Presidente (2000), as well as translating the former work. (He has also translated novels by Rafael Chirbes and Max Aub.) In the 1980s he concentrated on the history of literature and the arts, contributing three major chapters to the Cambridge History of Latin America and publishing Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (1989). Since then he has focused on biography. In 2008 he published a biography of Gabriel García Márquez with Bloomsbury and Knopf, which has appeared in twenty languages, and in 2012 an Introduction to Gabriel García Márquez for CUP. He is currently working on a biography of Mario Vargas Llosa for Bloomsbury.
February 22, 1900
Seán Proinsias Ó Faoláin (22 February 1900 – 20 April 1991) was an Irish short story writer. He was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1986. Born as John Francis Whelan in Cork City, County Cork, Ireland, Sean Ó Faoláin wrote his first stories in the 1920s. Through 90 stories, written over a period of 60 years, Ó Faoláin charts the development of modern Ireland. His Collected Stories were published in 1983, eight years before his death on 20 April 1991, in Dublin. Ó Faoláin was educated at the Presentation Brothers Secondary School in Cork. He came under the influence of Daniel Corkery, joining the Cork Dramatic Society, and increasing his knowledge of the Irish language, which he had begun in school. Shortly after entering University College, Cork, he joined the Irish Volunteers. He fought in the War of Independence. During the Irish Civil War he served as Censor for the Cork Examiner and as publicity director for the IRA. After the Republican loss, he received M.A. degrees from the National University of Ireland and from Harvard University where he studied for 3 years. O'Faolain was a Commonwealth Fellow from 1926 to 1928; and was a Harvard Fellow from 1928 to 1929. From 1929 to 1933 Ó Faoláin lectured at the Catholic college St Mary's College, at Strawberry Hill in Middlesex (now SW London), England, during which period he wrote his first two books. He published in 1932 his first book, 'Midsummer Night Madness,' a collection of stories partly based on his Civil War experiences. He returned to his native Ireland. He has published novels; short stories; biographies; travel books; translations; literary criticism—including one of the rare full-length studies of the short story: the Short Story, 1948. He also wrote a cultural history, 'The Irish,' in 1947. He served as director of the Arts Council of Ireland from 1956 to 1959, and from 1940 to 1990 he was a founder member and editor of the Irish literary periodical The Bell. The list of contributors to The Bell included many of Ireland's foremost writers, among them Patrick Kavanagh, Patrick Swift, Flann O'Brien, Frank O'Connor and Brendan Behan.
February 22, 1933
Nicholas Pileggi (born February 22, 1933) is an American producer, author and screenwriter. Pileggi was born and raised in New York City, the elder son of an Italian immigrant father, Nicola ("Nick") from Calabria and an American-born mother, Susie. He has a younger brother, Dominick. Nicola "Nick" Pileggi was a cinema musician for silent films and later owned a shoe store. In the 1950s, he worked as a journalist for Associated Press and New York Magazine, specializing in crime reporting for more than three decades; this would provide the background upon which he later drew as a writer of factual books and fictional films related to the Mafia. Pileggi began his career as a journalist and had a profound interest in the Mafia. He is best known for writing Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family (1986), which he adapted into the movie Goodfellas (1990), and for writing Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas and the subsequent screenplay for Casino (1995). The movie versions of both were co-written and directed by Martin Scorsese. Pileggi also wrote the screenplay for the film City Hall (1996), starring Al Pacino. He served as an Executive Producer of American Gangster (2007), a biographical crime film based on the criminal career of Frank Lucas. He also authored Blye, Private Eye (1987). Pileggi cowrote the pilot of the CBS television series Vegas, which first aired in September 2012.
February 22, 1938
ISHMAEL REED is the author of many books, two of which were nominated for 1973 National Book Awards in poetry and fiction. He does his own ‘Business’ in Berkeley, California.
February 22, 1968
Douglas Cazaux Sackman is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Puget Sound. Douglas Cazaux Sackman is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Puget Sound.
February 22, 1788
Arthur Schopenhauer (22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860) was a German philosopher best known for his book, The World as Will and Representation (German: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung), in which he claimed that our world is driven by a continually dissatisfied will, continually seeking satisfaction. Influenced by Eastern philosophy, he maintained that the 'truth was recognized by the sages of India'; consequently, his solutions to suffering were similar to those of Vedantic and Buddhist thinkers (e.g., asceticism). The influence of 'transcendental ideality' led him to choose atheism. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four distinct aspects of experience in the phenomenal world; consequently, he has been influential in the history of phenomenology. He has influenced many thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, and Jorge Luis Borges, among others.
February 22, 1896
Paul van Ostaijen (22 February 1896 – 18 March 1928) was a Belgian poet and writer. Van Ostaijen was born in Antwerp. His nickname was Mister 1830, derived from his habit of walking along the streets of Antwerp clothed as a dandy from that year. His poetry shows influences from Modernism, Expressionism, Dadaism and early Surrealism, but Van Ostaijen's style is very much his own. Van Ostaijen was an active flamingant, a supporter of Flemish independence. Because of his involvement with Flemish activism during World War I, he had to flee to Berlin after the war. In Berlin—one of the centers of Dadaism and Expressionism—he met many other artists. He also struggled through a severe mental crisis. Upon returning to Belgium, Van Ostaijen opened an art gallery in Brussels. He died of tuberculosis in 1928 in a sanatorium in Miavoye-Anthée, in the Wallonian Ardennes. The Czech poet Ivan Wernisch was so impressed by 'the genius of van Ostaijen' that he learned Dutch to be able to translate him. His translation was published as Tanec gnóm?, Dance of the gnomes, in 1990.
February 22, 1732
George Washington (February 22, 1732 [O.S. February 11, 1731]– December 14, 1799) was the first President of the United States (1789–1797), the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He presided over the convention that drafted the United States Constitution, which replaced the Articles of Confederation and remains the supreme law of the land. Washington was unanimously elected President by the electors in both the 1788–1789 and 1792 elections. He oversaw the creation of a strong, well-financed national government that maintained neutrality in the French Revolutionary Wars, suppressed the Whiskey Rebellion, and won acceptance among Americans of all types. Washington established many forms in government still used today, such as the cabinet system and inaugural address. His retirement after two terms and the peaceful transition from his presidency to that of John Adams established a tradition that continued up until Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to a third term. Washington has been widely hailed as the 'father of his country' – even during his lifetime. Washington was born into the provincial gentry of Colonial Virginia; his wealthy planter family owned tobacco plantations and slaves, that he in turn inherited. Although Washington owned hundreds of slaves throughout his lifetime, his views on slavery evolved, and he desired to free them and abolish slavery though the Washingtons emancipated no slaves during their lifetimes. When Martha died a year and a half year after George, on May 22, 1802, all of the slaves from her first husband's estate - the dower slaves as well as the slaves she held in trust - went to her first husband's heirs. After his father and older brother died when he was young, Washington became personally and professionally attached to the powerful William Fairfax, who promoted his career as a surveyor and soldier. Washington quickly became a senior officer in the colonial forces during the first stages of the French and Indian War. Chosen by the Second Continental Congress in 1775 to be commander-in-chief of the Continental Army in the American Revolution, Washington managed to force the British out of Boston in 1776, but was defeated and almost captured later that year when he lost New York City. After crossing the Delaware River in the dead of winter, he defeated the British in two battles, retook New Jersey and restored momentum to the Patriot cause. Because of his strategy, Revolutionary forces captured two major British armies at Saratoga in 1777 and Yorktown in 1781. Historians laud Washington for his selection and supervision of his generals, encouragement of morale and ability to hold together the army, coordination with the state governors and state militia units, relations with Congress and attention to supplies, logistics, and training. In battle, however, Washington was repeatedly outmaneuvered by British generals with larger armies. After victory had been finalized in 1783, Washington resigned as Commander-in-chief rather than seize power, proving his opposition to dictatorship and his commitment to American republicanism. Dissatisfied with the Continental Congress, in 1787 Washington presided over the Constitutional Convention that devised a new federal government for the United States. Elected unanimously as the first President of the United States in 1789, he attempted to bring rival factions together to unify the nation. He supported Alexander Hamilton's programs to pay off all state and national debt, to implement an effective tax system and to create a national bank, despite opposition from Thomas Jefferson. Washington proclaimed the United States neutral in the wars raging in Europe after 1793. He avoided war with Great Britain and guaranteed a decade of peace and profitable trade by securing the Jay Treaty in 1795, despite intense opposition from the Jeffersonians. Although he never officially joined the Federalist Party, he supported its programs. Washington's Farewell Address was an influential primer on republican virtue and a warning against partisanship, sectionalism, and involvement in foreign wars. He retired from the presidency in 1797 and returned to his home in Mount Vernon, and domestic life where he managed a variety of enterprises. He freed all his slaves by his final will. Washington had a vision of a great and powerful nation that would be built on republican lines using federal power. He sought to use the national government to preserve liberty, improve infrastructure, open the western lands, promote commerce, found a permanent capital, reduce regional tensions and promote a spirit of American nationalism. At his death, Washington was eulogized as 'first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen' by Henry Lee. The Federalists made him the symbol of their party but for many years, the Jeffersonians continued to distrust his influence and delayed building the Washington Monument. As the leader of the first successful revolution against a colonial empire in world history, Washington became an international icon for liberation and nationalism. He is consistently ranked among the top three presidents of the United States, according to polls of both scholars and the general public.
February 22, 1913
Ranko Marinkovic (February 22, 1913, Komiža, Croatia - January 28, 2001, Zagreb, Croatia) was a Croatian writer of plays and novels. Vlada Stojiljkovic wrote eleven books for children and adults, several of which he illustrated; translated Orwell, Swift, Golding, and Lear; and was an illustrator and painter. Ellen Elias-Bursac has been translating Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian authors into English for more than twenty years.
February 22, 1955
Yang Lian was one of the original Misty Poets who reacted against the strictures of the Cultural Revolution. Born in Switzerland, the son of a diplomat, he grew up in Beijing and began writing when he was sent to the countryside in the 1970s. On his return he joined the influential literary magazine Jintian (Today). His work was criticised in China in 1983 and formally banned in 1989 when he organised memorial services for the dead of Tiananmen while in New Zealand. He was a Chinese poet in exile from 1989 to 1995, finally settling in London in 1997. Translations of his poetry include four collections with Bloodaxe, Where the Sea Stands Still (1999), Concentric Circles (2005), Lee Valley Poems (2009) and Narrative Poem (forthcoming in 2017), as well as his long poem Yi (Green Integer, USA, 2002) and Riding Pisces: Poems from Five Collections (Shearsman, 2008), a compilation of earlier work. He is co-editor with W.N. Herbert of Jade Ladder: Contemporary Chinese Poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2012), and was awarded the International Nonino Prize in 2012. Both Where the Sea Stands Still and Narrative Poem are Poetry Book Society Recommended Translations.
February 22, 1857
The Lord Robert Baden-Powell (22 February 1857, Paddington, London, England - 8 January 1941, aged 83, Nyeri, British Kenya) was a British Army officer, writer, author of Scouting for Boys which was an inspiration for the Scout Movement, founder and first Chief Scout of The Boy Scouts Association and founder of the Girl Guides. After having been educated at Charterhouse School in Surrey, Baden-Powell served in the British Army from 1876 until 1910 in India and Africa. In 1899, during the Second Boer War in South Africa, Baden-Powell successfully defended the town in the Siege of Mafeking. Several of his military books, written for military reconnaissance and scout training in his African years, were also read by boys. In 1907, he held a demonstration camp, the Brownsea Island Scout camp, which is now seen as the beginning of Scouting. Based on his earlier books, particularly Aids to Scouting, he wrote Scouting for Boys, published in 1908 by Sir Arthur Pearson, for boy readership. In 1910 Baden-Powell retired from the army and formed The Boy Scouts Association. The first Scout Rally was held at The Crystal Palace in 1909, at which appeared a number of girls dressed in Scout uniform, who told Baden-Powell that they were the "Girl Scouts", following which, in 1910, Baden-Powell and his sister Agnes Baden-Powell formed the Girl Guides from which the Girl Guides Movement grew. In 1912 he married Olave St Clair Soames. He gave guidance to the Scouting and Girl Guiding Movements until retiring in 1937. Baden-Powell lived his last years in Nyeri, Kenya, where he died and was buried in 1941. Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, and Director of the Oxford Life Writing Centre at Wolfson College. A founding figure in the field of colonial and postcolonial literary studies, she is the author, editor, or co-editor of over twenty books, including monographs and novels. Her monographs include Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995/2005), Stories of Women (2005), Indian Arrivals (winner ESSE 2015-16 prize), and Postcolonial Poetics (2018). Her novels include The Shouting in the Dark (long-listed Sunday Times prize, 2015), and Screens again the Sky (short-listed David Higham Prize 1990). Sharmilla and other Portraits is her 2010 volume of short stories. She is the General Editor of the Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures Series.
February 23, 1949
César Aira (born 23 February 1949 in Coronel Pringles, Buenos Aires Province) is an Argentine writer and translator, and an exponent of Argentine contemporary literature. Aira has published over eighty short books of stories, novels and essays. In fact, at least since 1993 a hallmark of his work is an almost frenetic level of writing and publication—two to four novella-length books each year. He has lectured at the University of Buenos Aires, on Copi and Arthur Rimbaud, and at the University of Rosario on Constructivism and Stéphane Mallarmé, and has translated and edited books from France, England, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, and Venezuela. Besides his fiction, and the translation work he does for a living, Aira also writes literary criticism, including monographic studies of Copi, the poet Alejandra Pizarnik, and the nineteenth-century British limerick and nonsense writer Edward Lear. He wrote a short book, Las tres fechas (The Three Dates), arguing for the central importance, when approaching some minor eccentric writers, of examining the moment of their lives about which they are writing, the date of completion of the work, and the date of publication of the work. Aira also was the literary executor of the complete works of his friend the poet and novelist Osvaldo Lamborghini (1940–1985). Aira has often spoken in interviews of elaborating an avant-garde aesthetic in which, rather than editing what he has written, he engages in a "flight forward" (fuga hacia adelante) to improvise a way out of the corners he writes himself into. Aira also seeks in his own work, and praises in the work of others (such as the Argentine-Parisian cartoonist and comic novelist Copi), the "continuum" (el continuo) of a constant momentum in the fictional narrative. As a result, his fictions can jump radically from one genre to another, and often deploy narrative strategies from popular culture and "subliterary" genres like pulp science fiction and television soap operas. He frequently refuses to conform to generic expectations for how a novel ought to end, leaving many of his fictions quite open-ended. While his subject matter ranges from Surrealist or Dadaist quasi-nonsense to fantastic tales set in his Buenos Aires neighborhood of Flores, Aira also returns frequently to Argentina’s nineteenth century (two books translated into English, The Hare and An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, are examples of this; so is the best-known novel of his early years, Ema la cautiva (Emma, the Captive)). He also returns regularly to play with stereotypes of an exotic East, such as in Una novela china, (A Chinese Novel); El volante (The Flyer), and El pequeño monje budista (The Little Buddhist Monk). Aira also enjoys mocking himself and his childhood home town, Coronel Pringles, in fictions such as Cómo me hice monja (How I Became a Nun), Cómo me reí (How I Laughed), El cerebro musical (The Musical Brain) and Las curas milagrosas del doctor Aira (The Miraculous Cures of Dr. Aira). His novella La prueba (1992) served as the basis—or point of departure, as only the first half-hour follows the novella—of Diego Lerman's film Tan de repente (Suddenly) (2002). His novel Cómo me hice monja (How I Became a Nun) was selected as one of the ten best publications in Spain in the year 1998.
February 23, 1949
David Haward Bain is the author of AFTERSHOCKS: A TALE OF TWO VICTIMS, which deals with the moral and psychological repercussions of the Vietnam War, published in 1980. He has contributed articles and reviews to the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, American Heritage, Esquire, and other publications. He is married to the painter Mary Smyth Duffy and lives in New York.
February 23, 1868
W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was internationally renowned as a writer, scholar, and activist. Among his published works are THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLKS, JOHN BROWN, and BLACK RECONSTRUCTION: AN ESSAY TOWARD A HISTORY OF THE PART WHICH BLACK FOLK PLAYED IN THE ATTEMPT TO RECONSTRUCT DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, 1860—1880. He also wrote other major fiction, including DARK PRINCESS.
February 23, 1955
Richard Brookhiser (born February 23, 1955) is an American journalist, biographer and historian. He is a senior editor at National Review. He is most widely known for a series of biographies of America's founders, including Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, and George Washington.
February 23, 1937
Claude Brown (February 23, 1937 - February 2, 2002) is the author of MANCHILD IN THE PROMISED LAND, published to critical acclaim in 1965, which tells the story of his coming of age during the 1940s and 1950s in Harlem. He also published CHILDREN OF HAM (1976). Autobiographical in nature, MANCHILD IN THE PROMISED LAND describes the cultural, economic, and religious conditions that suffused Harlem during Brown's early childhood and adolescence while constructing a narrative of Brown's tumultuous early life. Starting at age six, his life involved stealing, alcohol consumption, truancy, and gang wars. These were the harsh realities of life in 1950s Harlem that shaped his childhood. At the age of 11, he was placed in a reform school, which he cycled in and out of more than three times. By that time he had made the acquaintance of Dr. Ernest Papanek, a psychologist and the director of the Wiltwyck School for Boys for deprived and emotionally disturbed boys, which was in Esopus, Ulster County, New York. Dr. Papanek, whom Mr. Brown described in his book as ‘probably the smartest and the deepest cat I had ever met,’ encouraged him to seek an education. Acknowledging the damaging effects of drugs like heroin and gang violence on his community and his friends, he decided to change. He knew he had to get out of Harlem. He moved away from Harlem, his heart broken seeing all his friends ‘strung-out‘ by drug addiction. He felt Harlem wasn't for him anymore. After being one of the ‘hippest cats’ (as he says in the book), he decided to turn away from it and move down to Greenwich Village, where he could start over. For the first time in his life, he decided to get an education and eventually began attending night classes at a high school downtown, supporting himself by working as a busboy and deliveryman and at other odd jobs. Eventually, he went on to graduate in 1965 from Howard University (where his professors included sociologists E. Franklin Frazier and Nathan Hare), and later went on to attend Stanford and Rutgers[disambiguation needed ] law schools, but left when the lecture circuit proved more lucrative than law. Brown would go on to publish a second book, CHILDREN OF HAM, which explores the lives of several black teenagers from Harlem who escape the clutches of heroin. By comparison to his first work, it was a failure. Brown spent most of his professional life as a full-time lecturer, but also became increasingly involved in critical urban issues, especially with respect to at-risk black adolescents. This lifetime concern led him to become deeply involved in criminal justice and rehabilitation issues, as he visited juvenile detention centers and prisons in search of answers to the question of what was motivating the much more violent, feral behavior of youth gangs and underage criminals prowling America's inner-cities, a plague that seemingly became progressively worse with the passage of time. Essentially, MANCHILD IN THE PROMISED LAND was written to demonstrate how someone could overcome great odds to become in his case, a lawyer. His ultimate conclusion was that American society had abandoned these young individuals, causing a profound sense of alienation and ostracism, which in turn led to futile outbursts of excessive, wanton violence and criminality. He remained critical of what he perceived as the societal failures of addressing these existential crises afflicting African-American youth-especially those residing in urban areas-and more broadly, underserved, alienated American youth in general. Claude Brown died of respiratory failure in 2002.
February 23, 1967
Anupama Chopra (born 23 February 1967) is an Indian author, journalist, film critic and director of the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival. She is also the founder and editor of the digital platform Film Companion which offers a curated look at cinema. She has written several books on Indian cinema and has been a film critic for NDTV, India Today, as well as the Hindustan Times. She also hosted a weekly film review show The Front Row With Anupama Chopra, on Star World. She won the 2000 National Film Award for Best Book on Cinema for her first book Sholay: The Making of a Classic.
February 23, 1945
Ian Christie (born February 23, 1945, United Kingdom) is a British film scholar. He has written several books including studies of the works of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Martin Scorsese and the development of cinema.
February 23, 1940
Morris Dickstein is Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York Graduate Center and a widely published literary and cultural critic. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, Partisan Review, The Nation, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. His books include Gates of Eden: American culture in the 1960’s, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and Leopards in the Temple, a study of postwar American fiction.
February 23, 1930
Jef Geeraerts (born Antwerp, 23 February 1930) is a Flemish writer. He was a colonial administrator in Belgian Congo. On the independence of the Congo he sent his wife and children back to Belgium and in August 1960 he himself returned to Belgium. During the next six years he was paid by the government (return program). After that time he needed to find a job to survive. He decided to become a writer and went to the University of Brussels to study Germanic languages. When he had finished his studies he wrote his first novel, Ik ben maar een neger (‘I'm just a negro’), which put him on the map as extremely controversial. He wrote more of these politically motivated colonial books before he started his Gangreen series. There are four parts, Gangreen 1 (Black Venus), Gangreen 2 (De Goede Moordenaar), Gangreen 3 (Het Teken van de Hond) and Gangreen 4 (Het Zevende Zegel). Later he became famous for his detective stories. Nowadays he is a celebrated crime-novelist and several of his books (De zaak Alzheimer and Dossier K) have been filmed.
February 23, 1889
Erwin G. Gudde (February 23, 1889, S?popol, Poland - 1969) was a member of the University of California, Berkeley faculty, Department of German, for many years. His many publications include Bigler's Chronicles of the West and California Place Names.
May 17, 1936
Lars Gustafsson (born May 17, 1936) is a Swedish poet, novelist and scholar. He was born in Västerås, completed his secondary education at the Västerås gymnasium and continued to Uppsala University; he received his Licentiate degree in 1960 and was awarded his Ph.D. in Theoretical Philosophy in 1978. He lived in Austin, Texas until 2003, and has recently returned to Sweden. From 1983 he served as a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught Philosophy and Creative Writing, until May 2006, when he retired. In 1981 Gustafsson converted to Judaism. Gustafsson is one of the most prolific Swedish writers since August Strindberg. Since the late 1950s he has produced a voluminous flow of poetry, novels, short stories, critical essays, and editorials. He is also an example of a Swedish writer who has gained international recognition with literary awards such as the Prix International Charles Veillon des Essais in 1983, the Heinrich Steffens Preis in 1986, Una Vita per la Litteratura in 1989, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for poetry in 1994, and several others. He has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. His major works have been translated into fifteen languages, and Harold Bloom includes Gustafsson in The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994). John Updike offered high praise for Gustafsson's The Death of a Beekeeper in his collection of criticism, Hugging The Shore. The Death of a Beekeeper, written in 1978, is Gustafsson's most critically acclaimed and commercially successful novel. Eva Stenskaer has written that it ‘seems so effortless yet lyrical that only an artist at the height of his powers could've produced it.’ Its main theme is the agony of disease, as it follows Vesslan—a beekeeper who is dying of cancer—through entries he makes on notepads. The book's innovative structure allows Gustafsson to explore identity through its expression in a variety of forms: imagination, memory and even the mundane details of life. The book's central theme is revealed by the repeated motto of the protagonist, ‘We never give up. We begin anew.’ Gustafsson himself has described it as ‘A book about pain. It describes a journey into the center where pain rules—and pain can tolerate no rivals.’ In 2003, Gustafsson's novel series, The Cracks in the Wall, (Sprickorna i Muren), which explores the question of identity through the ‘cracks’ or ruptures in single personality, was made into a feature film, directed by Jimmy Karlsson. While the problem of identity has been the defining theme of Gustafsson's writings, his social criticism has often vexed the Swedish cultural elite. As a result he is seen as a controversial writer in Sweden rather than as one embraced by the establishment. When asked where he finds his inspiration, Gustafsson answered ‘I listen. I listen and I look. Creativity knows no rules. You can get an idea for a novel from a little something someone says, or just a face you see. A rabbi once told me that when God spoke to Moses in that bush, it wasn't in a thundering voice; it was in a very weak voice. You have to listen carefully for that voice. You have to be very sharp.’ In May 2009, Lars Gustafsson declared that he would vote for the Pirate Party in the upcoming elections for the European Parliament.
February 23, 1941
William 'Gatz' Hjortsberg (February 23, 1941 – April 22, 2017) was an American novelist and screenwriter known for writing the screenplay of the film Legend) is a novelist and screenwriter best known for writing the screenplays of the movies Legend and Angel Heart. His novel Falling Angel was the basis for the film Angel Heart (1987).
February 23, 1946
Michael Joseph Sobran Jr. (February 23, 1946 – September 30, 2010) was an American journalist, formerly with National Review magazine and a syndicated columnist. Pat Buchanan called Sobran "perhaps the finest columnist of our generation".
February 23, 1882
B. Traven’s will, written on March 4, 1969, three weeks before his death in Mexico City, states that Traven Torsvan Croves was his real name, that he born in Chicago, Illinois on May 3, 1890, the son of Burton Torsvan and Dorothy Croves, and that he had used as noms de plume B. Traven and Hal Croves. While many of the facts of Traven’s life are still uncertain, it is known that he spent his youth in Germany, where he was an itinerant actor and later a revolutionary journalist known as Ret Marut who edited a radical anti-war magazine. After World War I he was a leader of the abortive revolution in Bavaria. He was sentenced to death, but escaped at the last minute. After a stint as seaman on tramp steamers, he jumped ship at Tampico, Mexico, in the early 20’s, settled in Mexico, and began recording his experiences in novels. Traven produced a considerable body of short and long fiction, some of which has yet to be published in the United States and most of which was originally published in Germany. His first book, THE DEATH SHIP, was brought out in 1926 by a German publisher; his best-known novel in the United States is THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE. By the 1960’s, Traven, a septuagenarian living quietly in Mexico City could look back on a writing career that had seen his books published in over thirty countries and read by millions. But when he died in 1969 he was still an obscure figure in the country of his birth.
February 23, 1937
Christopher Samuel Tugendhat, Baron Tugendhat (born 23 February 1937) is a British Conservative Party politician, business man, company director, journalist and author. He was a Member of Parliament from 1970–77, then a member of the European Commission, and in 1993 was appointed as a life peer, with a seat in the House of Lords, in which he remains active.
February 23, 1931
Robin Wood was a founding editor of CineAction! and author of numerous influential works, including new editions published by Wayne State University Press of Personal Views: Explorations in Film (2006), Howard Hawks (2006), Ingmar Bergman (2013), and Arthur Penn (2014). He was a professor emeritus at York University, Toronto, and the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Barry Keith Grant is a professor in the Department of Communication, Popular Culture, and Film at Brock University in Ontario, Canada. He is the author or editor of many books, including Shadows of Doubt: Negotiations of Masculinity in American Genre Films (Wayne State University Press, 2011) and Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, New and Expanded Edition (Wayne State University Press, 2014).
February 23, 1892
Agnes Smedley (February 23, 1892 – May 6, 1950) was an American journalist and writer, well known for her semi-autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth as well as for her sympathetic chronicling of the Communist forces in the Chinese Civil War. During World War I, she worked in the United States for the independence of India from the United Kingdom, receiving financial support from the government of Germany. Subsequently, she went to China, where she is suspected of acting as a spy for the Comintern. As the lover of Soviet super spy Richard Sorge in Shanghai in the early 1930s, she helped get him established for his final and greatest work as spymaster in Tokyo. She also worked on behalf of various causes including women's rights, birth control, and children's welfare. Smedley wrote six books, including a novel, reportage, and a biography of the Chinese general Zhu De, reported for newspapers such as New York Call, Frankfurter Zeitung and Manchester Guardian, and wrote for periodicals such as the Modern Review, New Masses, Asia, New Republic, and Nation.
February 23, 1886
Calderon Ventura Garcia-Rey (Paris, February 23, 1886 - Paris, October 27, 1959 ) was a Peruvian writer, diplomat, and critic. He lived most of his life in Paris and a good part of his work is written in French. He was, therefore, a bilingual writer. As such he developed under the modernist influence and belonged to the Generation of 900 or Arielista, which also included his brother Francisco García Calderón Rey, José de la Riva Agüero, José Gálvez Barrenechea, and Víctor Andrés Belaunde, among others. He stood out in various literary genres, but most especially in the short story, his most representative work being his collection entitled The Vengeance of the Condor. His poetry and chronicles are also notable. But more extensive was his work as a critic and anthologist of the literature of his country and of Latin America.
February 24, 1925
Etel Adnan was born in 1925 and raised in Beirut, Lebanon. Her mother was a Greek from Smyrna, her father, a high ranking Ottoman officer born in Damascus. In Lebanon, she was educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, Paris. In January 1955 she went to the United States to pursue post-graduate studies in philosophy at U.C. Berkeley, and Harvard. From 1958 to 1972, she taught philosophy at Dominican College of San Rafael, California. Based on her feelings of connection to, and solidarity with the Algerian war of independence, she began to resist the political implications of writing in French and shifted the focus of her creative expression to visual art. She became a painter. But it was with her participation in the poets’ movement against the war in Vietnam that she began to write poems and became, in her words, an American poet. In 1972, she moved back to Beirut and worked as cultural editor for two daily newspapers—first for Al Safa, then for L’Orient le Jour. She stayed in Lebanon until 1976. In 1977, her novel Sitt Marie-Rose was published in Paris, and won the France-Pays Arabes award. This novel has been translated into more than 10 languages, and was to have an immense influence, becoming a classic of War Literature. In 1977, Adnan re-established herself in California, making Sausalito her home, with frequent stays in Paris. In the late seventies, she wrote texts for two documentaries made by Jocelyne Saab, on the civil war in Lebanon, which were shown on French television as well as in Europe and Japan.
February 24, 1848
Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen (February 24, 1848 – October 25, 1899) was a Canadian science writer and novelist, and a successful upholder of the theory of evolution
February 24, 1938
Marshall Blonsky, who has taught critical theory at Vassar College, is now a professor at New York University and the New School for Social Research. He is a frequent contributor to Harper's, The Washington Post Outlook, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and other publications.
February 24, 1952
Judith Ortiz Cofer (February 24, 1952 – December 30, 2016) was a Puerto Rican American author. Her critically acclaimed and award-winning work spans a range of literary genres including poetry, short stories, autobiography, essays, and young-adult fiction. Ortiz Cofer was the Emeritus Regents' and Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, where she taught undergraduate and graduate creative writing workshops for 26 years. In 2010, Ortiz Cofer was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, and in 2013, she won the University's 2014 Southeastern Conference Faculty Achievement Award. Ortiz Cofer hailed from a family of story tellers and drew heavily from her personal experiences as a Puerto Rican American woman. In her work, Ortiz Cofer brings a poetic perspective to the intersection of memory and imagination. Writing in diverse genres, she investigated women issues, Latino culture, and the American South. Ortiz Cofer's work weaves together private life and public space through intimate portrayals of family relationships and rich descriptions of place. Her manuscripts and papers are currently housed at the University of Georgia's Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
February 24, 1972
Angie Cruz is an American novelist. Cruz was born in Washington Heights, New York City. She is of Dominican descent, and often traveled back and forth between New York City and the Dominican Republic while growing up. She is currently a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Cruz treats themes of home, displacement, and working class life in her work. She has published two novels and is now working on a screenplay for a movie version of one of them, Soledad.
February 24, 1920
Ralph Freedman was born in Hamburg, Germany, and emigrated to the United States in 1940. After serving in the United States Army during World War II, he was graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle. He holds a master’s degree in philosophy from Brown University and a doctorate in comparative literature from Yale. Widely recognized as an important Hesse scholar he has taught at the University of Iowa and, since 1965, at Princeton. He has also been a visiting professor at a number of universities, including the University of Wisconsin, SUNY at Buffalo, and the University of Southern California. Freedman has studied Hesse’s manuscripts on deposit in Germany and Switzerland for several years and has traveled throughout the region of Hesse’s homelands. In addition to numerous articles and reviews, he is the author of a novel, DIVIDED, and a literary study, THE LYRICIAL NOVEL: STUDIES IN HERMANN HESSE, ANDRÉ GIDE, AND VIRGINIA WOOLF. He has also edited and contributed to a volume of essays on Virginia Woolf, published in 1979.
February 24, 1928
Edward Michael ‘Mike’ Harrington (February 24, 1928 - July 31, 1989) was an American democratic socialist, writer, political activist, professor of political science, radio commentator and founder of the Democratic Socialists of America. He was the most well-known socialist in the United States during his lifetime. In the 1970s he coined the term neoconservatism.
February 24, 1914
Harry Weldon Kees (February 24, 1914 - July 18, 1955) was an American poet, painter, critic, novelist, and short story writer. According to the critic Ian Hamilton, though Kees functioned as a painter, photographer, film-maker and musician it was poetry that really mattered to him. ‘In this field’, however, ‘ he was never greatly honoured in his lifetime. This is a pity because, at his best, Kees has a lot to offer. There is an offputting bleakness in his work, but there is also a stoical-sardonic vein that can be more attractively engaging than, perhaps, it means to be. There is also an impressively quick eye for social detail. And the character called 'Robinson', a sort of professional-class Prufrock, has an almost loveable forbearance. Robinson takes life as it comes but this does not mean that he enjoys what comes, or wants much more of it.’ Kees began publishing in the 1930s and one reason for his lack of acclaim may have been that his poems did not fit with any of the then prevailing vogues. ‘ Kees was always too blackly self-absorbed to throw himself into any movement for political or social change.’ Kees was born in Beatrice, Nebraska, and educated at Doane College, the University of Missouri and the University of Nebraska, graduating in 1935. Kees wrote for Federal Writers' Project in Lincoln, Nebraska. He moved to Denver and a job as librarian in 1937, where he married. He was in New York from 1943 to 1950, heavily involved in literary journalism. His first book of poems The Last Man appeared in 1943. In New York City he began attending parties with literary critics like Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling, but he never felt comfortable in that society. Then he began to paint, and some of his works hung alongside Picasso in an exhibition at the Whitney. Tired of New York, he moved to San Francisco in 1950, where he began making experimental films, writing the music for short films made by other filmmakers, and got involved with the Beat scene. On July 19, 1955, Kees's Plymouth Savoy was found on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge with the keys in the ignition. He had told a friend that he wanted, like Ambrose Bierce, to start a new life in Mexico. When his friends went to search his apartment, all they found were the cat he had named Lonesome and a pair of red socks in the sink. His sleeping bag and savings account book were missing. He left no note. No one is sure if Weldon Kees jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge that day or if he went to Mexico, although suicide is presumed. Before he disappeared, Kees quoted Rilke to friend Michael Grieg, ominously saying that sometimes a person needs to change his life completely.
February 24, 1954
Aurora Levins Morales (born February 24, 1954) is author of Getting Home Alive (Firebrand, 1986) and Medicine Stories: History, Culture, and the Politics of Integrity (South End Press, 1998). A Jewish "red diaper baby" from the mountains of Puerto Rico, Morales writes lucidly about the complexities of social identity. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
February 24, 1941
Sabine MacCormack (1941–2012) was a German-American historian of Late Antiquity and Colonial Latin America.
February 24, 1932
Brenda Maddox is a writer and journalist who lives in London. Her books include Beyond Babel: New Directions in Communications, The Half-Parent (A Study of Stepfamilies), and Who Afraid of Elizabeth Taylor? She has writ- ten extensively on women and marriage, and also, when home affairs editor of The Economist, on Ireland.
February 24, 1933
Ali Al'amin Mazrui (24 February 1933 – 12 October 2014), was an academic professor, and political writer on African and Islamic studies and North-South relations. He was born in Mombasa, Kenya. His positions included Director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York, and Director of the Center for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan. He produced the television documentary series The Africans: A Triple Heritage.
February 24, 1926
Taeko K?no (February 24, 1926 – January 29, 2015) is one of the most important Japanese women writers of the second half of the twentieth century, someone whose influence on contemporary Japanese women writers is acknowledged to be immeasurable. K?no is one of a generation of remarkable women writers who made an appearance in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s and who include Kurahashi Yumiko, Mori Mari, Setouchi Harumi, and Takahashi Takako (Japanese name order). She also established a reputation for herself as an acerbic essayist, a playwright and a literary critic. By the end of her life she was a leading presence in Japan's literary establishment, one of the first women writers to serve on the Akutagawa Literary Prize committee. Oe Kenzaburo, Japan's Nobel Laureate, described her as the most "lucidly intelligent" woman writers writing in Japan, and the US critic and academic Masao Miyoshi identified her as among the most "critically alert and historically intelligent." US critic and academic Davinder Bhowmik assesses her as …one of the truly original voices of the twentieth century, beyond questions of gender or even nationality. A writer who deals with some quite dark themes, K?no is known to readers in English through the collection of short stories Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories (New Directions, 1996), which draws together her best writing from the 1960s. K?no Taeko was born February 24, 1926 in Osaka, Japan to K?no Tameji and Yone; her father Tameji operated a business specialising in mountain produce. As a child she suffered from poor health. When she was 15, the Pacific War broke out and her teenage years were dominated by service as a student worker sewing military uniforms and work in a munitions factory.After the war, she finished her economics degree at Women’s University (currently Osaka Prefecture University), graduating in 1947. Kono has written of the new sense of freedom and the high hopes she had after the war. Determined to make a career for herself as a writer, she moved to Tokyo, a city full of literary activities and literary personae, joined a literary group led by Niwa Fumio, and threw herself into writing, at the same time as working full-time. After nearly a decade of trying, during which she suffered several setbacks in her health, including two bouts of tuberculosis, in 1961 the literary magazine Shinch?sha began publishing her stories, and in 1962 she was awarded Shinch?sha's "D?jin zasshi" ("Coterie Magazine") award for her story "Y?ji-gari" ("Toddler Hunting". In 1963 her short story "Kani" (Crabs) (?) won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize (her story "Yuki" [Snow] had been nominated in 1962). After this K?no began to produce a stream of remarkable short fiction. In 1965 she married the painter Yasushi Ichikawa. In 1967 she was awarded the Women's Literary Prize for Saigo no toki (Final Moments), in 1968 the Yomiuri Prize for "A Sudden Voice", and in 1980 she won the Tanizaki Prize for "A Year-long Pastoral". She received a literary prize from the Japanese Art Academy in 1984 and the Noma Literary Prize in 1991 for her novel Miiratori ry?kitan (Mummy-Hunting for the Bizarre, 1990). K?no's short story "Hone no niku" (Bone Meat) was published in the 1977 anthology Contemporary Japanese Literature (ed. Howard Hibbett), which stimulated interest in her writing amongst readers in English. A trickle of translations into English followed in a variety of anthologies of Japanese women's writing in translation, culminating in the publication of Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories in 1996. K?no continued to write all her life, and was still writing when she died in hospital in January 2015. In 2014 she was awarded a Bunka Kunsh?, or Order of Culture, which is presented by the Emperor to distinguished artists, scholars, or citizens who make remarkable contributions to Japanese culture, arts and science. K?no's writing explores how "underneath the seemingly normal routines of daily life, one may find hidden propensities for abnormal or pathological behavior", demonstrating that often "reality and fantasy are not so clearly distinguishable from each other". Alternative sexual practices is a theme that permeates K?no's's writing; sadomasochism, for example, figures in "Toddler-Hunting," and "Ants Swarm" (1964), as well as her novel Miiratori ry?kitan; and Kaiten tobira (Revolving Door, 1970) features spouse-swapping. K?no uses these themes to explore sexuality itself and the expression of identity. She combines these elements with illness, childlessness, and the absence of a husband to delve even more deeply into these topics. More specifically, her writings explore "the struggles of Japanese women to come to terms with their identity in a traditional patriarchal society". Most of her female characters "reject traditional notions" of femininity and gender roles, their frustration "leads them to violent, often antisocial or sadomasochistic ways of dealing with the world". For example, in "Y?jigari", or "Toddler Hunting", one of her most famous stories, she investigates one woman's dislike of children. The protagonist, Hayashi Akiko, is repulsed by little girls but obsessed by little boys—she even imagines a little boy being beaten by his father to the extent that his innards spill out. She also takes pleasure in the sadomasochistic sex she has with her adult partner. One critic has written that the story "turn[s] the myth of motherhood on its head" while another argued that Hayashi was a representation of demonic women who threatened patriarchy itself. In Fui no koe (1968), which one critic has called a "modern woman's Hamlet", K?no presents the story of Ukiko, whose dead father haunts her. His ghost instructs her to murder the people who are controlling her life. At the end of the story, it is revealed that all of these incidents are only taking place within her mind and she is "trying in her twisted way to bring meaning to her everyday relationships".
February 24, 1879
Herman Teirlinck (February 24, 1879, Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, Belgium - February 4, 1967, Beersel, Belgium) was born in 1879 near Brussels. One of the most versatile of modern Flemish authors, his work has included early, Impressionistic novels of Flemish peasant life, plays, and the starkly realistic The Man in the Mirror, which is the first of his writings to appear in English. Still living and very active, Teirlinck held until recently the post of advisor on Flemish language matters to King Baudouin of the Belgians.
February 24, 1885
Stanis?aw Ignacy Witkiewicz (24 February 1885 – 18 September 1939), commonly known as Witkacy, was a Polish writer, painter, philosopher, playwright, novelist, and photographer active in the interwar period. Born in Warsaw, Stanis?aw Ignacy Witkiewicz was a son of the painter, architect and an art critic Stanis?aw Witkiewicz. His mother was Maria Pietrzkiewicz Witkiewiczowa. Both of his parents were born in the Samogitian region of Lithuania. His godmother was the internationally famous actress Helena Modrzejewska. Little Witkacy with his father, ca. 1893 Witkiewicz was reared at the family home in Zakopane. In accordance with his father's antipathy to the "servitude of the school," the boy was home-schooled and encouraged to develop his talents across a range of creative fields. Witkiewicz was close friends with Karol Szymanowski and, from childhood, with Bronis?aw Malinowski and Zofia Romer. Following a crisis in Witkiewicz's personal life due to the suicide of his fiancée Jadwiga Janczewska, he was invited by Malinowski to act as draftsman and photographer on a 1914 expedition to Oceania, a venture that was interrupted by the onset of World War I. A happen-stance citizen of the Russian Empire, Witkiewicz went to St Petersburg and was commissioned as an officer in the Imperial army. His ailing father, a Polish patriot, was deeply grieved by the youngster's decision and died in 1915 without seeing his son again. Witkiewicz witnessed the Russian Revolution while stationing in St Petersburg. He claimed that he worked out his philosophical principles during an artillery barrage, and that when the Revolution broke out he was elected political commissar of his regiment. His later works would show his fear of social revolution and foreign invasion, often couched in absurdist language. He had begun to support himself through portrait painting and continued to do so on his return to Zakopane in Poland. He soon entered into a major creative phase, setting out his principles in New Forms in Painting and Introduction to the Theory of Pure Form in the Theatre. He associated with a group of "formist" artists in the early 1920s and wrote most of his plays during this period. Of about forty plays written by Witkiewicz between 1918 and 1925, twenty-one survive, and only Jan Maciej Karol Hellcat met with any public success during the author's lifetime. The original Polish manuscript of The Crazy Locomotive was also lost; the play, back-translated from two French versions, was not published until 1962. After 1925, and taking the name 'Witkacy', the artist ironically re-branded his portrait painting which provided his economic sustenance as The S.I. Witkiewicz Portrait Painting Company, with the tongue in cheek motto: "The customer must always be satisfied". Several the so-called grades of portraits were offered, from the merely representational to the more expressionistic and the narcotics-assisted. Many of his paintings were annotated with mnemonics listing the drugs taken while painting a particular painting, even if this happened to be only a cup of coffee. He also varied the spelling of his name, signing himself Witkac, Witkatze, Witkacjusz, Vitkacius and Vitecasse — the last being French for "breaks quickly". In the late 1920s he turned to the novel, writing two works, Farewell to Autumn and Insatiability. The latter major work encompasses geopolitics, psychoactive drugs, and philosophy. In 1935 he was awarded the Golden Laurel of the Polish Academy of Literature for his novels. During the 1930s, Witkiewicz published a text on his experiences of narcotics, including peyote, and pursued his interests in philosophy. He also promoted emerging writers such as Bruno Schulz. Shortly after Poland was invaded by Germany in September 1939, he escaped with his young lover Czes?awa to the rural frontier town of Jeziory, in what was then eastern Poland. After hearing the news of the Soviet invasion of Poland on 17 September 1939, Witkacy committed suicide on 18 September by taking a drug overdose and trying to slit his wrists. He convinced Czes?awa to attempt suicide with him by consuming Luminal, but she survived. Witkiewicz had died in some obscurity but his reputation began to rise soon after the war, which had destroyed his life and devastated Poland. Czes?aw Mi?osz framed his argument in The Captive Mind around a discussion of Witkiewicz's novel, Insatiability. The artist and theater director Tadeusz Kantor was inspired by the Cricot group, through which Witkiewicz had presented his final plays in Kraków. Kantor brought many of the plays back into currency, first in Poland and then internationally. In the postwar period, Communist Poland's Ministry of Culture decided to exhume Witkiewicz's body, move it to Zakopane, and give it a solemn funeral. This was carried out according to plan, though no one was allowed to open the coffin that had been delivered by the Soviet authorities. On 26 November 1994, the Polish Ministry of Culture and Art ordered the exhumation of the presumed grave of Witkiewicz in Zakopane. Genetic tests on the remaining bones proved that the body had belonged to an unknown woman — a final absurdist joke, fifty years after the publication of Witkacy's last novel.
February 24, 1966
Alain Mabanckou was born in Congo on February 24, 1966. An award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist, Mabanckou currently lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches literature at UCLA. He is the author of African Psycho, Broken Glass, Black Bazaar, and Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty, as well as The Lights of Pointe-Noire (The New Press). In 2015, Mabanckou was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize. Helen Stevenson is a piano teacher, writer, and translator who lives in Somerset, England. Her translation of Mabanckou's The Lights of Pointe-Noire won the Grand Prix, 2015, French Voices Award. She is the author of two acclaimed memoirs, Instructions for Visitors and Love Like Salt.
February 25, 1955
Régis Bonvicino (born February 25, 1955) has written twelve books of poetry, translated several works, and coedited an anthology of contemporary Brazilian poetry. His work combines an intense, sprung lyricism with an engagement with the artifice of poetic construction. His poems are filled with the imagery of nature, but also the dystopia of urban spaces, especially São Paulo, where he lives. Among his many publications are Até agora (Until Now), a volume of collected poems; Atz’Página órfã; Ossos de borboleta; 33 poemas; Más companhias; Remorso do cosmos; Primeiro tempo; Num zoológico de letras, a children’s book; and Entre (Between), which includes illustrations by Susan Bee. English translations of Bonvicino’s work by many hands, from Michael Palmer to Robert Creeley, are collected in Sky Eclipse, published by Green Integer in 2000. Bonvicino has edited and translated Oliverio Girondo’s work and books by Jules Laforgue, Robert Creeley, Charles Bernstein, Michael Palmer, Douglas Messerli, and the Chinese poets Bei Dao and Yao Feng. He also edited the correspondence of Brazilian poet and novelist Paulo Leminski and is especially engaged with the work of the Brazilian poets Oswald de Andrade, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Murilo Mendes, Decio Pignatari, and João Cabral de Melo Neto. Bonvicino is director, along with Charles Bernstein and Odile Cisneros, of Sibila journal and has author pages at regisbonvicino.com.br and PennSound.
February 25, 1917
John Anthony Burgess Wilson, FRSL (25 February 1917 – 22 November 1993) – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English writer. From relatively modest beginnings in a Manchester Catholic family in the North of England, he eventually became one of the best known English literary figures of the latter half of the twentieth century. Although Burgess was predominantly a comic writer, the dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange remains his best known novel. In 1971 it was adapted into a highly controversial film by Stanley Kubrick, which Burgess said was chiefly responsible for the popularity of the book. Burgess produced numerous other novels, including the Enderby quartet, and Earthly Powers, regarded by most critics as his greatest novel. He also worked as a literary critic, writing studies of classic writers, most notably James Joyce. He was a longtime literary critic for The Observer and The Guardian. Burgess was also an accomplished musician and linguist. He composed over 250 musical works, including a first symphony around age 18, wrote a number of libretti, and translated, among other works, Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King and Carmen.
February 25, 1948
Aldo Busi (born 25 February 1948) is an Italian writer and translator mostly active in the last twenty years. He was born in Montichiari in Lombardy. He is the author of Seminar on Youth and Vita standard di un venditore provvisorio di collant (published in English under the title The Standard Life of a Temporary Pantyhose Salesman). His other works include La Delfina Bizantina and Sodomie in Corpo 11 (translated by Stuart Hood as ‘Sodomies in Elevenpoint’).
February 25, 1940
Frank Chin (born February 25, 1940) is an American author and playwright. He is considered to be one of the pioneers of Asian-American theatre.
February 25, 1960
Joakim Garff (born February 25, 1960 (age 57), London, United Kingdom) is Associate Professor at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of numerous books and articles and is the coeditor of a project to publish definitive new Danish-language editions of all of Kierkegaard’s writings. Bruce H. Kirmmse is Professor of History at Connecticut College. His previous works include KIERKEGAARD IN GOLDEN AGE DENMARK and ENCOUNTERS WITH KIERKEGAARD (Princeton). He is the chairman of the editorial board of KIERKEGAARD’S JOURNALS AND NOTEBOOKS.
Feb 25, 192?
Waguih Ghali (Feb 25, 192(?) Egypt– Jan 5, 1969 London, England) was a Coptic, Anglophone Egyptian writer, best known for his novel Beer in the Snooker Club (André Deutsch, 1964). Fearing political persecution, Ghali spent his adult years impoverished, living in exile in Europe. He died by his own hand on January 5, 1969. Waguih Ghali was born in Alexandria, Egypt to a Coptic family. According to Ghali’s friend and editor, Diana Athill, Ghali carefully obscured details about his past. Ghali’s diary confirms his birthdate (February 25), but not his birth year. He was likely born between 1927 and 1929. When he was young, his father died, and his mother (née Ibrahim) remarried. In his diary Ghali writes about his family’s financial struggles. Homeless, he shuttled among friends and relatives in both Alexandria and Cairo. Yet, members of his extended family were wealthy and influential, and one sees the evidence of a life of privilege in his writings as well. Ghali attended Victoria College, variously at the Alexandria and Cairo campuses, from 1944-1947. He studied in the Faculty of Medicine at Cairo University, and was present when the students staged a demonstration on December 4, 1948 that left the police chief, Selim Zaki, dead. Ghali started but did not complete medical studies in at the Sorbonne in Paris. He left Paris in 1953. He also lived in London in the mid-1950s. One report suggests that he left Egypt for good in 1958. However, personal narrative essays he published in the Guardian (Manchester) between 1957 and 1959 about life in exile suggest that Ghali was already living in Europe by that time. After living in Stockholm, Ghali moved to West Germany in 1960. According to Athill he picked up whatever work he could find, including at the docks in Hamburg, as laborer in factories, and as a clerk. From 1964 until 1966, he was employed by the British Army Royal Pay Corps in Rheydt, West Germany. In May 1966 Ghali returned to London, where he continued to pick up odd jobs. On December 26, 1968 Waguih Ghali swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills in Diana Athill’s apartment. He died on January 5, 1969. Athill published a fictionalized account of her relationship with Ghali entitled After a Funeral (1986). Between 1957 and 1959 Ghali published six short personal narrative essays in The Guardian (Manchester). These essays are Ghali’s first known published works. The first article, My Friend Kamal, recounts Ghali’s political activism in Cairo in the late 1940s. This piece reappears in fictionalized form in Beer in the Snooker Club. The remaining essays, along with another piece also published in The Guardian in 1965, recount his experiences living in exile in Europe: My Friend Kamal, 5 Jun 1957; Lessons for Mr. Luigi, 21 Apr 1958; Culture for Daimler, 24 Nov 1958; The Writers, 29 Jan 1959; An Indian Courier, 16 March 1959; Captains of My Ship, 12 Nov 1959; The Roses are Real, 20 Feb 1965. Ghali began composing the novel Beer in the Snooker Club while living in Stockholm and he completed it in West Germany. The novel was first published by Andre Deustch in London in 1964. It was reprinted by Penguin in 1968 and by Serpent’s Tail in 1987 and 2010. Beer in the Snooker Club has been translated into French, Hebrew, Dutch, Arabic, Italian, and Spanish.
February 25, 1707
Carlo Osvaldo Goldoni (25 February 1707 – 6 February 1793) was an Italian playwright and librettist from the Republic of Venice. His works include some of Italy's most famous and best-loved plays. Audiences have admired the plays of Goldoni for their ingenious mix of wit and honesty. His plays offered his contemporaries images of themselves, often dramatizing the lives, values, and conflicts of the emerging middle classes. Though he wrote in French and Italian, his plays make rich use of the Venetian language, regional vernacular, and colloquialisms. Goldoni also wrote under the pen name and title 'Polisseno Fegeio, Pastor Arcade,' which he claimed in his memoirs the 'Arcadians of Rome' bestowed on him. Goldoni, a prolific writer, is best known for his comic play Servant of Two Masters, which has been translated and adapted internationally numerous times. In 2011, Richard Bean adapted the play for the National Theatre of Great Britain, at the request of director Nicholas Hytner, as a vehicle for actor James Corden. The adaptation, One Man, Two Guvnors, became a smash hit, transferring to the West End and in 2012 to Broadway. In 2013, the National Theatre production will tour Australia in conjunction with several major organisations including Adelaide Festival and Melbourne Theatre Company.
February 25, 1950
Neil Patrick Jordan is an Irish film director, screenwriter, novelist and short-story writer. His first book, Night in Tunisia, won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979. He won an Academy Award for The Crying Game.
February 25, 1948
Gina Bari Kolata (born February 25, 1948) is an American science journalist, writing for The New York Times. Kolata was born Gina Bari in Baltimore, Maryland. Her mother, mathematician Ruth Aaronson Bari (1917 – 2005), was of Jewish descent. Her father, Arthur Bari, was a diamond setter of Italian heritage. One of her sisters is Hood College art historian, Dr. Martha Bari. Another was Earth First! environmental activist, feminist and assassination attempt survivor, Judi Bari (1949 - 1997). Kolata studied molecular biology as a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received a master's degree from University of Maryland, College Park in mathematics. She joined Science magazine as a copy editor in 1973, and wrote for the American Association for the Advancement of Science journal from 1974 until she moved to The New York Times in September 1987. She remains a Health & Science reporter at the newspaper. Kolata has taught writing as a visiting professor at Princeton University and frequently lectures across the country. She is a "self-proclaimed exercise addict (who thinks nothing of a 100-mile bike ride as a reward)," according to a Times advertisement for itself. Her husband, William G. Kolata, has taught mathematics and served as the technical director of the non-profit Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in Philadelphia, a professional society for mathematicians.
February 25, 1949
AMIN MAALOUF is a Lebanese writer journalist. He was formerly director of the weekly international edition of the Beirut daily an-Nahar, and was also editor-in-chief of the weekly magazine Jeune Afrique.
February 25, 1945
Shiva Naipaul (25 February 1945 – 13 August 1985), born Shivadhar Srivinasa Naipaul in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, was a Trinidadian and British novelist and journalist. Shiva Naipaul was the younger brother of novelist V. S. Naipaul. He went first to Queen's Royal College and St Mary's College in Trinidad, then emigrated to Britain, having won a scholarship to study Chinese at University College, Oxford. At Oxford, he met and later married Jenny Stuart, with whom he had a son, Tarun. With Jenny's support, Shiva Naipaul wrote his first novel, FIREFLIES, and followed it with THE CHIP-CHIP GATHERERS. He then decided to concentrate on journalism, and wrote two non-fiction works, North of South and Black & White, before returning to the novel form in the 1980s with A Hot Country, a departure from his two earlier comic novels set in Trinidad, as well as a collection of fiction and non-fiction, BEYOND THE DRAGON'S MOUTH: STORIES AND PIECES. Both his fiction and nonfiction were characterized by a starkly pessimistic view of Commonwealth societies that attacked the post-imperial native hierarchies for their crassness and mimicry of the West, and in turn the banality and diffidence of Western liberalism. On the morning of 13 August 1985, at the age of 40, Naipaul had a fatal heart attack while working at his desk. The Spectator Magazine, for whom his wife Jenny had worked as a secretary, and which had published many of his articles, established the since-discontinued Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize. In his book SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW, Paul Theroux's memoir of Shiva's older brother, V.S Naipaul, Theroux described Shiva as a 'sot', shrunken by the towering figure of his famous brother, with a penchant for drunken partying and a need to have his meals made for him. Theroux also took issue with Shiva's skills as a writer, particularly as a travel writer. Recently, SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW has come under attack for its demonstrable inaccuracies. A radically more positive appreciation of Shiva Naipaul by the journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The Spectator is backed up by the novelist Martin Amis, who wrote that ‘Shiva Naipaul was one of those people who caused your heart to lift when he entered the room. .in losing him, we have lost thirty years of untranscribed, unvarnished genius.’A recent Arena documentary on his brother V. S. Naipaul reproduced footage of Shiva from an earlier documentary from the early 1980s, in which Shiva returned to Trinidad to see his mother.
February 25, 1937
Severo Sarduy (Camagüey, Cuba; February 25, 1937 – Paris; June 8, 1993) was a Cuban poet, author, playwright, and critic of Cuban literature and art. Sarduy went to the equivalent of high school in Camagüey and in 1956 moved to Havana, where he began a study of medicine. With the triumph of the Cuban revolution he collaborated with the Diario libre and Lunes de revolución, pro-marxist papers. In 1960 he traveled to Paris to study at the Ecole du Louvre. There he was connected to the group of intellectuals who produced the magazine Tel Quel, particularly to philosopher François Wahl, with whom he was openly involved. Sarduy worked as a reader for Editions du Seuil and as editor and producer of the Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française. In 1972 his novel COBRA won him the Medici Prize. He died due to complications from AIDS just after finishing his autobiographical work Los pájaros de la playa. Along with José Lezama Lima, Virgilio Piñera, and Reinaldo Arenas, Sarduy is one of the most famous Cuban writers of the twentieth century; some of his works deal explicitly with male homosexuality and transvestism.
February 25, 1895
George Samuel Schuyler (born February 25, 1895, Providence, RI; died August 31, 1977, in New York, NY), an African American writer known for his conservative views. George Samuel Schuyler was born in Providence, Rhode Island to George (a chef) and Eliza Jane (Fischer) Schuyler. His father died when he was young. He spent his early years in Syracuse where his mother moved their family after she remarried. In 1912 Schuyler, at seventeen years of age, enlisted in the US Army and was promoted to the rank of 1st Lieutenant. He served in Seattle and Hawaii before going AWOL after a Greek immigrant who was supposed to shine his shoes refused to do so because of his skin color. After turning himself in, Schuyler was convicted by a military court and sentenced to five years in prison. He was released after nine months as a model prisoner. After his discharge, Schuyler moved to New York City where he worked as a handyman, doing odd jobs. During this time he was able to read many books which led to his interest in socialism. He lived for a period in the Phyllis Wheatley hotel which was run by Marcus Garvey’s UNIA and attended a few UNIA meetings. Schuyler found he did not agree with Garvey’s philosophy and began to write on the subject. Although not entirely engrossed by socialism, Schuyler engaged himself in a circle of socialist friends, including the black socialist group Friends of Negro Freedom. This connection led to Schuyler being employed by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen’s magazine, The Messenger, which was the journal of the group. Schuyler’s column Shafts and Darts: A Page of Calumny and Satire caught the eye of Ira F. Lewis, manager of the Pittsburgh Courier. In 1924, Schuyler took up a job at the Courier, where he was required to write a weekly column. By the mid-1920s, Schuyler had come to disdain socialism. Schuyler believed that socialists were frauds who actually cared very little about negroes. Schuyler’s writing caught the eye of H. L. Mencken who wrote ‘I am more and more convinced that he [Schuyler] is the most competent editorial writer now in practice in this great free republic.’ In 1926, the Courier sent him on an editorial assignment to the South where Schuyler developed his journalist’s routine, first a ride with a cab driver, then a chat with a local barber, bellboy, landlord, and policeman. All that would come before he would interview local town officials. In 1926, Schuyler became the Chief Editorial Writer at the Courier. Also that year, he published an article entitled ‘The Negro-Art Hokum’; Langston Hughes’s ‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’ is a response to Schuyler’s piece. In 1931 Schuyler published Black No More, which tells the story of a scientist who makes a machine that turns black people to white, a book that has since been reprinted twice. Between 1936 and 1938 he published a weekly serial in the Pittsburgh Courier which he would later collect as a novel he titled Black Empire. Schuyler also published the highly controversial book Slaves Today: A Story of Liberia, a novel about the slave trade created by freed American slaves who settled Liberia in the 1920’s. During the McCarthy Era Schuyler moved sharply to the political right and contributed to American Opinion, the journal of the John Birch Society. In 1947 he published The Communist Conspiracy against the Negroes. His autobiography, Black and Conservative, was published in 1966. George Schuyler died in 1977. In 1927, George Schuyler married a liberal white Texan heiress named Josephine Cogdell. Their daughter Philippa Schuyler (1931-1967) became a noted child prodigy and concert pianist. ROBERT A. HILL is Associate Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and editor-in-chief of the Marcus Garvey Papers. R. KENT RASMUSSEN is associate editor of the Marcus Garvey Papers. JOHN A. WILLIAMS is a novelist whose works include THE MAN WHO CRIED I AM. He lives in New Jersey.
February 25, 1937
Arnold Skolnick (born February 25, 1937, Brooklyn, New York) has produced many books on American painters, including volumes on Ben Shahn, Paul Cadmus, and George Tooker, and is the editor of Paintings of Maine (1991) and Paintings of the Southwest (1994). Ilene Susan Fort is Curator of American Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She is the author of The Figure in American Sculpture (1995), two books on Childe Hassam, and several exhibition catalogues. Among her numerous articles and essays is a contribution to Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the West (California, 1995).
February 25, 1942
Anthony Winkler (February 25, 1942, Kingston, Jamaica - September 18, 2015) was born in Kingston, Jamaica. He is the author of several textbooks and of a second novel, The Lunatic.
February 25, 1897
Peter Davies (February 25, 1897, London, United Kingdom - April 5, 1960, London, United Kingdom) was the rumored inspiration for Peter Pan, the daredevil character created by his adoptive father, author J. M. Barrie. Davies was the founder of the publishing house Peter Davies Ltd. Maria Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and chair of the Program in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University. She is the editor of THE ANNOTATED PETER PAN and the author of ENCHANTED HUNTERS, among many other books.
February 26, 1944
Christopher Hope was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, grew up in Pretoria, and moved to London in 1975. He is the author of two children's books, three volumes of poetry, and four other works of fiction, including KRUGER’S ALP, which won the Whitbread Prize, and, THE HOTTENTOT ROOM.
February 26, 1951
Michael Scott Kimmel is an American sociologist specializing in gender studies. He holds the position of Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University in New York and is the founder and editor of the academic journal Men and Masculinities.
February 26, 1564 baptised
Christopher Marlowe (baptised 26 February 1564 – 30 May 1593) was an English playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. Marlowe was the foremost Elizabethan tragedian of his day. He greatly influenced William Shakespeare, who was born in the same year as Marlowe and who rose to become the pre-eminent Elizabethan playwright after Marlowe's mysterious early death.
February 26, 1910
Alexander Matuska ( 26 February 1910 Vlkanová - 1. April 1975 Bratislava ) was a Slovak and Czechoslovak literary scholar, literary critic and non-party politician, member of the Slovak National Council and the Assembly of Nations of the Federal Assembly in the late 60s and 70s.
February 26, 1948
Robin Maxwell is an American historical novelist who specializes in the Tudor period. She is also a screenwriter and political blogger. Maxwell was raised in Plainfield, New Jersey, and graduated from Tufts University. She and her husband Max, live in Pioneertown, California.
February 26, 1956
Reginald McKnight teaches English and Black literature at the Arapahoe Community College and the University of Denver, where in 1987 he received his M.A. in English/Creative Writing. In 1981, he was awarded the Thomas I. Watson Fellowship to study the folklore and contemporary literature of West Africa, and spent a year teaching and writing in Senegal. His fiction has received the Bernice M. Slote Award from Prairie Schooner magazine, and his work has appeared there, in The Massachusetts Review, Leviathan, and other magazines. Judges for this year’s Drue Heinz Literature Prize were Tony Ardizzone, Charles A. Kinder III, Maura Stanton, David Walton, and Margaret Atwood. Jacket design by Gary Gore.
February 26, 1920
One of the early poets centered around Kenneth Rexroth, Richard O. Moore made a career in broadcasting as co- founder of the first U.S. listener-sponsored radio station, KPFA. He is also an important cinéma vérité filmmaker, having directed such works as the 10-part series USA: Poetry (1966). Moore’s first book, Writing the Silences, was published in 2010 by the University of California. At age 95, he continues to write and lives in Mill Valley, CA.
February 26, 1832
John George Nicolay (February 26, 1832 – September 26, 1901) was a German-born American biographer, secretary of US President Abraham Lincoln and member of the German branch of the Nicolay family. He was born Johann Georg Nicolay in Essingen, Rhenish Bavaria. In 1838, he immigrated to the United States with his father and attended school in Cincinnati. He later moved to Illinois, where he edited the Pike County Free Press at Pittsfield, and became a political power in the state. Then he became assistant to the secretary of state of Illinois. While in this position, he met Abraham Lincoln and became his devoted adherent. In 1861, Lincoln appointed Nicolay as his private secretary, which was the first official act of his new administration. Nicolay served in this capacity until Lincoln's death in 1865.
February 26, 1893
vor Armstrong Richards (26 February 1893 – 7 September 1979), known as I. A. Richards, was an English educator, literary critic, and rhetorician whose work contributed to the foundations of the New Criticism, a formalist movement in literary theory, which emphasized the close reading of a literary text, especially poetry, in an effort to discover how a work of literature functions as a self-contained, self-referential æsthetic object.
February 26, 1944
Thomas Sanchez (born 1943) is an American novelist and film director. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French Republic. Thomas Brown Sanchez was born at the Oakland Naval Hospital in Oakland, California three months after his father was killed in the South Pacific during World War II. His first novel, Rabbit Boss, was named one of the 100 Greatest Western novels by the San Francisco Chronicle.
February 26, 1907
Rosebud Yellow Robe (February 26, 1907, United States of America - October 5, 1992, New York City, NY), a descendant of Sitting Bull, was a well-known storyteller. She has held many workshops in libraries and public schools, bringing her listeners an authentic picture of Indian life long ago. In 1989 the W. H. Over State Museum and the Institute of Indian Studies held a Rosebud Yellow Robe Day at the University of South Dakota. They honored her for ‘a lifetime commitment in communicating the values of her people to non-Indians and serving as a powerful model for Native Americans who sought ways to preserve their culture.’ Rosebud Yellow Robe was born in Rapid City, South Dakota. Jerry Pinkney is a two-time Caldecott Honor Book winner—once for The Talking Eggs (Dial) by Robert San Souci. He is the only artist to have been given the Coretta Scott King Award three times. The Patchwork Quilt not only won the Coretta Scott King Award, but also the Christopher Award, and was an ALA Notable Book and Reading Rainbow selection. Mr. Pinkney is Associate Professor of Art at the University of Delaware and Visiting Professor in the Department of Art at the University at Buffalo. He lives with his wife, Gloria, in Croton-on-Hudson, New York.
February 26, 1957
Michael Zadoorian (born February 26, 1957) is an American novelist and short story writer of Armenian descent. Zadoorian’s work explores themes of love, death, music, memory, things forgotten and found again, the eidetic power of photographic images, and Detroit. He is best known as the author of The Leisure Seeker, published in 2009 by William Morrow and Company. In 2018, it was adapted for a motion picture starring Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland, and directed by Italian film director, Paolo Virzi. The film was released in March 2018.
February 26, 1925
Robert Franklin Williams (February 26, 1925 – October 15, 1996) was an American civil rights leader and author best known for serving as president of the Monroe, North Carolina chapter of the NAACP in the 1950s and into 1961. He succeeded in integrating the local public library and swimming pool in Monroe. At a time of high racial tension and official abuses, Williams promoted armed black self-defense in the United States. In addition, he helped gain support for gubernatorial pardons in 1959 for two young African-American boys who had received lengthy reformatory sentences in what was known as the Kissing Case of 1958. It generated national and international attention and criticism of the state. Williams obtained a charter from the National Rifle Association and set up a rifle club to defend blacks in Jonesboro from Ku Klux Klan or other attackers. The local chapter of the NAACP supported Freedom Riders who traveled to Monroe in the summer of 1961 in a test of integrating interstate buses. In August 1961 he and his wife left the United States for several years to avoid state charges for kidnapping related to actions during violence after the Riders had reached Monroe. These charges were dropped by the state when his trial opened in 1975 following his return. Williams identified as a Black Nationalist and lived in both Cuba and The People's Republic of China during his exile between 1961 and 1969. Williams' book Negroes with Guns (1962) has been reprinted many times, most recently in 2013. It details his experience with violent racism and his disagreement with the non-violent wing of the Civil Rights Movement. The text was widely influential; Black Panther Party founder Huey Newton cited it as a major inspiration.
February 26, 1802
Victor Hugo (1802–1885), novelist, poet, playwright, and French national icon, is best known for two of today’s most popular world classics: Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, as well as other works, including The Toilers of the Sea and The Man Who Laughs. Hugo was elected to the Académie Française in 1841. As a statesman, he was named a Peer of France in 1845. He served in France’s National Assemblies in the Second Republic formed after the 1848 revolution, and in 1851 went into self-imposed exile upon the ascendance of Napoleon III, who restored France’s government to authoritarian rule. Hugo returned to France in 1870, after the proclamation of the Third Republic.
February 26, 1920
José Mauro de Vasconcelos (February 26, 1920 – July 24, 1984) was a Brazilian writer. José Mauro was born in Rio de Janeiro on February 26, 1920. His family was very poor, and when he was still very young, he migrated to Natal where relatives took care of him. Mauro initiated his literature with the novel Banana Brava. His greatest success was his novel My Sweet Orange Tree (Meu Pé de Laranja Lima) that tells about his own personal experiences and the shocks he suffered in his childhood with the abrupt changes of life. The story centers around little José, a 5-year-old boy who is being raised in a poor family with many brothers and sisters in Bangu, in the state of Rio de Janeiro. Partly because he rarely sees his parents, who are out to work long hours and only come back home at night, José plays all sorts of pranks on his neighbours and friends, leading his older brothers and sisters to think he is a mean kid. He can find little comfort and support in his own family, except from his older sister Gloria, for whom José is a kind of protegé. When moving houses with his family, José finds a little tree of sweet orange in the backyard, which he ignores at first for being too small to climb, but then becomes its friend once he discovers he can actually communicate with the tree. His only other friend is a Portuguese man from Trás-os-Montes called Manuel Valadares. Mauro was part Indian and part Portuguese. He passed his childhood in Natal. When he was 9 years old, he learned to swim, and with pleasure he still remembers the days when he threw himself into the waters of the Potengi River to train for swimming competitions. Mauro frequently went to the sea. He won many swimming competitions and, like every boy, liked to play soccer and to climb trees. Mauro's first job, from 16 to 17 years old, was as sparring partner of featherweight boxers. Next, he worked in a farm in Mazomba, his job was to carry bananas. After that, he became a fisherman and lived on the coastline at Rio de Janeiro. Later he moved to Recife, where he became an elementary teacher and teacher at a fishermen's center. Because of his prodigious capacity of telling stories, possessing a fabulous memory, brilliant imagination, and a large human experience, Mauro felt obliged to become an author, and started to write novels when he was 22 years old. The author had his original methods of writing. In the beginning, he would choose the scenarios where the characters would move. Then he would transfer to this place and do rigorous studies there. To write the novel Arara Vermelha, Mauro traveled 450 leagues (2,200 km; 1,400 mi) in the brute wilderness. Next, he builds the whole novel, determining even the dialogues. He had a memory that allowed him to remember every little detail of his imagined scenario for a long time. "When the story is entirely made in imagination", reveals the author, "is when I begin to write. I only work I have the impression that the novel is exiting from all the pores of the body." Mauro relates that after finishing writing the first chapter, he passes to the conclusion of the novel, without even elaborating the plot. "That, he explains "because all the chapters are already produced mentally. It is not really important writing a sequence, like alternating the order. In the end everything goes well". Mauro was a cinema actor and worked in films such as Carteira Modelo 19, Fronteiras do Inferno, Floradas na Serra, Canto do Mar (of which he wrote the screenplay), Na Garganta do Diablo, and A Ilha. He won many prizes, such as the Saci prize for best supporting actor, the Saci prize for the best actor of the year, and the Governo do Estado prize for best actor of the year. His novels Arara Vermelha and Vazante were filmed. Although a possessor of a pleasant and light literature, creating a success with the public, the works of José Mauro de Vasconcelos are not fully recognized in Brazil. The French critic Claire Baudewyns affirms that "ce qui confère aux œuvres de José Mauro de Vasconcelos une poésie particulière née de l'alchimie entre monde réel et monde imaginaire." ("what confers on the works of José Mauro de Vasconcelos a particular poetry, is born of the alchemy between real world and imaginary world", in free translation). Because it was written in plain language, the book My Sweet Orange Tree became a popular choice for primary schools in Brazil to adopt it in their curricula. It is claimed to be the book that sold the most in that country's literary history. In the first few months of its publication in 1968, this book has sold 217,000 copies. My Sweet Orange Tree has also been filmed as soap operas and movies in Brazil, including the 1970 film and the April 2013 re-make by director Marcos Bernstein. After his death, José Mauro de Vasconcelos has given his name to numerous libraries and cultural association all over Brazil, including a library in the city of São Paulo.
February 27, 1948
Ruy Castro (born February 27, 1948, Caratinga, Minas Gerais, Brazil) is a writer and journalist whose books include two classics about bossa nova, a biography of the soccer star Garrincha, and an encyclopedia of Ipanema. He has also edited a compendium of 1,600 poisonous bons mots called Bad Humor and written two novels for children. His book Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World was published in the U.S. in 2000.
February 27, 1904
James Thomas Farrell (February 27, 1904 – August 22, 1979) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and poet. He is most remembered for the Studs Lonigan trilogy, which was made into a film in 1960 and a television series in 1979.
February 27, 1910
Peter De Vries (February 27, 1910 – September 28, 1993) was an American editor and novelist known for his satiric wit. He has been described by the philosopher Daniel Dennett as "probably the funniest writer on religion ever". De Vries was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1910. He was educated in Dutch Christian Reformed Church schools, graduating from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1931. He also studied at Northwestern University. He supported himself with a number of different jobs, including those of vending machine operator, toffee-apple salesman, radio actor in the 1930s, and editor for Poetry magazine from 1938 to 1944. During World War II De Vries served in the U.S. Marines, attaining the rank of Captain and was seconded to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Very little is known about his time in the military or with that secret organization, the predecessor to the CIA. He joined the staff of The New Yorker magazine at the insistence of James Thurber and worked there from 1944 to 1987, writing stories and touching up cartoon captions. A prolific writer, De Vries wrote short stories, reviews, poetry, essays, a play, novellas, and twenty-three novels. Films made from De Vries's novels include The Tunnel of Love (1958), which also was a successful Broadway play; How Do I Love Thee? (1970, based on Let Me Count the Ways); Pete 'n' Tillie (1972, based on Witch’s Milk); and Reuben, Reuben (1983), which also inspired a Broadway play, Spofford. Earlier, in 1952, De Vries also contributed to the writing of the Broadway revue New Faces of 1952. Although he enjoyed success for five decades, all his novels were out of print by the time of his death. James Bratt describes De Vries as "a secular Jeremiah, a renegade CRC missionary to the smart set." Peter De Vries met his future wife, poet and author Katinka Loeser, in 1943 when she won an award from Poetry magazine. The couple moved to Westport, Connecticut in 1948. They were the parents of four children: sons Derek and Jon, daughters Jan and Emily. Emily died in 1960 at age ten after a two-year fight with leukemia. This experience provided the inspiration for his 1961 work, The Blood of the Lamb. His son Jon is an actor who has appeared in movies such as American Gangster; Sarah, Plain and Tall; and Skylark; as well as episodic television in shows like Blue Bloods, Boardwalk Empire, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. His daughter Jan, an author, editor and psychic counselor whose interests and activities ranged from homeopathic medicine to shamanism, the occult and Native American lore, died in 1997 at age 52, of cancer. Katinka De Vries died in 1991. Peter De Vries died at age 83 on September 28, 1993 in a Norwalk, Connecticut hospital. He, his wife, and daughter are buried in Willowbrook Cemetery, Westport, Conn. De Vries received an honorary degree in 1979 from Susquehanna University. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May 1983.
February 27, 1912
Lawrence George Durrell (27 February 1912 – 7 November 1990) was an expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer, though he resisted affiliation with Britain and preferred to be considered cosmopolitan. It has been posthumously suggested that Durrell never had British citizenship, though, more accurately, he became defined as a non-patrial in 1968, due to the amendment to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962. Hence, he was denied the right to enter or settle in Britain under new laws and had to apply for a visa for each entry. His most famous work is the tetralogy The Alexandria Quartet.
February 27, 1948
TRUDIER HARRIS is a professor of English at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is the author of FROM MAMMIES TO MILITANTS: DOMESTICS IN BLACK AMERICAN LITERATURE.
February 27, 1942
Charlayne Hunter-Gault (born February 27, 1942) is an American journalist and former foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, and the Public Broadcasting Service. Alberta Charlayne Hunter was born in Due West, South Carolina, daughter of Col. Charles S. H. Hunter, U.S. Army, a regimental chaplain, and his wife, the former Althea Brown. In 1961, Hunter became part of the civil rights movement when she and Hamilton Holmes became the first two African-American students to enroll in the University of Georgia. She graduated in 1963. In 1967, Hunter joined the investigative news team at WRC-TV, Washington, D.C., and anchored the local evening news. In 1968, Hunter-Gault joined The New York Times as a metropolitan reporter specializing in coverage of the urban black community. She joined The MacNeil/Lehrer Report in 1978 as a correspondent, becoming The NewsHour's national correspondent in 1983. She left The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer in June 1997. She worked in Johannesburg, South Africa, as National Public Radio's chief correspondent in Africa from 1997 to 1999. Hunter-Gault left her post as CNN's Johannesburg bureau chief and correspondent in 2005, which she had held since 1999, though she still regularly appeared on the station, and others, as an Africa specialist. During her association with The NewsHour, Hunter-Gault won additional awards: two Emmys and a Peabody for excellence in broadcast journalism for her work on Apartheid's People, a NewsHour series on South Africa. She also received the 1986 Journalist of the Year Award from the National Association of Black Journalists, a Candace Award for Journalism from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women in 1988, the 1990 Sidney Hillman Award, the Good Housekeeping Broadcast Personality of the Year Award, the American Women in Radio and Television Award, and two awards from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for excellence in local programming. The University of Georgia Academic Building is named for her, along with Hamilton Holmes, as it is called the Holmes/Hunter Academic Building, as of 2001. She has been a member of the Peabody Awards Board of Jurors since 2009 and serves on the Board of Trustees at the Carter Center. Hunter-Gault is author of In My Place (1992), a memoir about her experiences at the University of Georgia. Shortly before she graduated from the University of Georgia, Hunter married a white classmate, Walter L. Stovall, the writer son of a chicken-feed manufacturer. The couple was first married in March 1963 and then remarried in Detroit, Michigan, on June 8, 1963, because they believed the first ceremony might be considered invalid as well as criminal, based on the laws of the unidentified state in which they had been married. Once the marriage was revealed, the governor of Georgia called it "a shame and a disgrace", while Georgia's attorney general made public statements about prosecuting the mixed-race couple under Georgia law. News reports quoted the parents of both bride and groom as being against the marriage for reasons of race. Years later, after the couple's 1972 divorce, Hunter-Gault gave a speech at the university in which she praised Stovall, who, she said, "unhesitatingly jumped into my boat with me. He gave up going to movies because he knew I couldn't get a seat in the segregated theaters. He gave up going to the Varsity because he knew they would not serve me.... We married, despite the uproar we knew it would cause, because we loved each other." Shortly after their marriage, Stovall was quoted as saying, "We are two young people who found ourselves in love and did what we feel is required of people when they are in love and want to spend the rest of their lives together. We got married." The couple had one daughter, Suesan Stovall, a singer (born December 1963). Following her divorce from Walter Stovall, Hunter married Ronald T. Gault, a black businessman who was then a program officer for the Ford Foundation; he is now an investment banker and consultant. The couple lived in Johannesburg, South Africa, where they also produce wine for a label called Passages. After moving back to the United States, the couple maintained a home in Massachusetts, where they remained active supporters of the arts. They have one son, Chuma Gault, an actor (born 1972).
February 27, 1922
Mervyn Jones (27 February 1922 – 23 February 2010) was a British novelist, journalist and biographer, the son of psychoanalyst Ernest Jones. Mervyn Jones wrote 29 novels (five unpublished), including John and Mary (1966), the basis for the 1969 film, and Holding On (1973), which was adapted for television in 1977. Jones also wrote non-fiction, reportage and biography, including a fictional biography of Joseph Stalin in 1970 and a biography of his friend Michael Foot, the former Labour Party leader, in 1994. A former Communist, Jones wrote for the Daily Worker, and later the New Reasoner and Tribune; he was later assistant editor at the New Statesman.
February 27, 1938
Jennifer Anne Mary Alleyne Lash (27 February 1938 – 28 December 1993; also known as Jini Fiennes) was an English novelist and painter. In 1961, she published The Burial, her first novel, at the age of 23. Lash was regarded as one of the most promising young people among England's artists at the time.
February 27, 1953
Brad E. Leithauser (born February 27, 1953) is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and teacher. After serving as the Emily Dickinson Lecturer in the Humanities at Mount Holyoke College and visiting professor at the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he is now on faculty at The Johns Hopkins University in the writing seminars department. Leithauser was born in 1953 in Detroit, Michigan. He is an alumnus of the Cranbrook Kingswood School and a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He worked for three years as a research fellow at the Kyoto Comparative Law Center in Japan. Leithauser has lived in Japan, Italy, England, Iceland, and France. His wife, the poet Mary Jo Salter, is also a professor at Mount Holyoke. As of January, 2007, both Leithauser and his wife will have permanently joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Leithauser's work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Time, and The New Yorker.
February 27, 1924
Samella Sanders Lewis (born February 27, 1924) is an African-American artist, working primarily as a printmaker and painter. She is also a published author, art historian and a former educator. Lewis was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. Widely exhibited and collected as an artist herself, Lewis is better known as a historian, critic and collector of art, especially African-American art. Lewis has completed four degrees, five films, seven books and a substantial body of artworks which have received critical respect. She pursued an art degree starting off at Dillard University in 1941, but left Dillard for Hampton Institute in Virginia, earning her master's degree in 1947. She earned her B.A. degree at Hampton University, then completed her master and doctorate in art history and cultural anthropology at the Ohio State University in 1951. Lewis is the first female African American to earn a doctorate in fine art and art history. Lewis became the first African American to earn her PhD in Fine Arts and Art History at Florida A&M University in 1951; Lewis also became the first African American to convene National conference of African American artist held at Florida A&M University in 1953. She was a professor at the State University of New York and at Scripps College in Claremont, California. She co-founded, with Bernie Casey, the Contemporary Crafts Gallery in Los Angeles in 1970. In 1973, she served on the selection committee for the exhibition BLACKS: USA: 1973 held at the New York Cultural Center. Lewis's grandson is Bay Area artist and musician Unity Lewis. He plans to create a contemporary version of Samella Lewis's catalog "Black Artists on Art," which featured black artists not typically showcased in mainstream art galleries and sold thousands of copies. I wanted to make a chronology of African American artists, and artists of African descent, to document our history. The historians weren’t doing it. I felt it better the artists do it anyway, through pictorial and written information… It was really about the movement, Samella Lewis said of the book published in 1969 and 1971. In 1960-70s, Samella Lewis belonged to a group of artist that would meet every month. Lewis has been collecting art since the year 1942. She mostly collects art from WPA and the Harlem Renaissance. In the 1960s–1970s her work, which includes lithographs, linocuts, and serigraphs, reflected humanity and freedom. Between 1969-70, Lewis and E.J. Montgomery were consultants for a "ground breaking" exhibition creating awareness to the history of African American history and art. Lewis is the founder of the International Review of African American Art in 1975. In 1976, she founded the "Museum of African-American Arts" with a group of artistic, academic, business and community leaders in Los Angeles, California. These founders had similar goals including increasing the public's awareness of African American art. Many individual and corporations, such as Macy's, made generous donations to the museum. Samella Lewis, as the staff's senior curator in the museum, not only organized great numbers of exhibitions but also developed diverse ways of educating the public on African American arts. In an article, she discussed the ideas of "art of tradition", and argued that museums had the responsibility to explore the African roots of African American art. The museum continues to operate on these donations to this day. Additionally, the museum's staff and volunteers are dedicated to supporting the museum. Lewis once mentioned an "art of inspiration" based on the experiences of African Americans themselves. Lewis founded three other museums in the Los Angeles, California. She also has a museum west of Mississippi. She is an NAACP member, and a collector of art with her collection including African, Chinese, Asian, South American and other art. Some of the art that Lewis has collected was transferred to the Hampton Institute, now the University Museum. In 1984, she produced a monograph on Elizabeth Catlett. In 2015, Unity Lewis and art entrepreneur Trevor Parham created The Legacy Exhibit, which featured three generations of black fine artists, including contemporary artists as well as some included in the original "Black Artists on Art." The show launched their recruitment efforts for 500 black American artists to participate in the updated volumes.
February 27, 1807
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807 – March 24, 1882) was an American poet and educator whose works include 'Paul Revere's Ride', The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline. He was also the first American to translate Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, and was one of the five Fireside Poets. Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, which was then a part of Massachusetts. He studied at Bowdoin College. After spending time in Europe he became a professor at Bowdoin and, later, at Harvard College. His first major poetry collections were Voices of the Night (1839) and Ballads and Other Poems (1841). Longfellow retired from teaching in 1854, to focus on his writing, living the remainder of his life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a former headquarters of George Washington. His first wife Mary Potter died in 1835, after a miscarriage. His second wife Frances Appleton died in 1861, after sustaining burns when her dress caught fire. After her death, Longfellow had difficulty writing poetry for a time and focused on his translation. He died in 1882. Longfellow wrote many lyric poems known for their musicality and often presenting stories of mythology and legend. He became the most popular American poet of his day and also had success overseas. He has been criticized, however, for imitating European styles and writing specifically for the masses.
February 27, 1950
DAN E. MOLDEA has specialized in organized crime investigations since 1974. He has written for numerous publications and is the author of The Hoffa Wars and The Hunting of Cain. He lives in Washington, D.C.
February 27, 1934
Navarre Scott Momaday (born February 27, 1934) — known as N. Scott Momaday — is a Kiowa novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. His novel House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969, and is considered the first major work of the Native American Renaissance. His follow-up work The Way to Rainy Mountain blended folklore with memoir. Momaday received the National Medal of Arts in 2007 for his work's celebration and preservation of indigenous oral and art tradition. He holds twenty honorary degrees from colleges and universities, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
February 27, 1954
Thylias Moss (born February 27, 1954 in Cleveland, Ohio) is an American poet, writer, experimental filmmaker, sound artist and playwright, of African-American, Native American, and European heritage, who has published a number of poetry collections, children’s books, essays, and multimedia work she calls poams, products of acts of making, related to her work in Limited Fork Theory. Among her awards are a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Artist's Fellowship from the Massachusetts Arts Council, an NEA grant, and the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize Witter Bynner award for poetry. Literary Critic Harold Bloom has favourably compared her work that of Anne Carson.
February 27, 1953
Josiah Ober is the Constantine Mitsotakis Professor of Political Science and Classics at Stanford University. His books include Athenian Legacies, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens, and Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (all Princeton).
February 27, 1872
Elliott O'Donnell (27 February 1872 – 8 May 1965) was an author known primarily for his books about ghosts. He claimed to have seen a ghost, described as an elemental figure covered with spots, when he was five years old. He also claimed to have been strangled by a mysterious phantom in Dublin (however, no permanent effect would seem to have been suffered). He was born in Clifton, the son of Irishman Reverend Henry O'Donnell (1827–1873) and Englishwoman Elizabeth Mousley (née Harrison); he had three older siblings, Henry O'Donnell, Helena O'Donnell and Petronella O'Donnell. After the birth of his fourth child the Rev. Henry O'Donnell travelled to Abyssinia while awaiting preferment to a new parish. Here he was said to have been attacked by a gang and robbed and murdered. Elliott O'Donnell claimed descent from Irish chieftains of ancient times, including Niall of the Nine Hostages (the King Arthur of Irish folklore) and Red Hugh, who fought the English in the sixteenth century. O'Donnell was educated at Clifton College in Bristol, England, and later at Queen's Service Academy, Dublin, Ireland. After originally intending to take his entry exams at Sandhurst with a view to joining the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), he later became a ghost hunter, but first he travelled in United States, working on a range in Oregon and becoming a policeman during the Chicago Railway Strike of 1894. Returning to England on the SS Elbe, he worked as a schoolmaster and trained for the theatre at the Henry Neville Studio, Oxford Street. In 1905 he married Ada O'Donnell (1870–1937) and served in the British army in World War I, later acting on stage and in movies. His first book, written in his spare time, was a psychic thriller titled For Satan's Sake (1904). From this point onward, he became a writer. He wrote several popular novels, including an occult fantasy, The Sorcery Club (1912) but specialised in what were claimed as true stories of ghosts and hauntings. These were immensely popular, but his flamboyant style and amazing stories suggest that he embroidered fact with a romantic flair for fiction. O'Donnell wrote material for numerous magazines, including Hutchinson Story Magazine, The Novel Magazine, The Idler, Weekly Tale-Teller, Hutchinson's Mystery-Story Magazine, Pearson's Magazine, Lilliput and Weird Tales. As he became known as an authority on the supernatural, he was called upon as a ghost hunter. He also lectured and broadcast (radio and television) on the paranormal in Britain and the United States. In addition to his more than 50 books, he wrote scores of articles and stories for national newspapers and magazines. He claimed "I have investigated, sometimes alone, and sometimes with other people and the press, many cases of reputed hauntings. I believe in ghosts but am not a spiritualist." Many of O'Donnell's books possess autobiographical sections in which he reveals a desperate struggle to escape early poverty (such as the plight of the three protagonists at the beginning of 'The Sorcery Club') and scrape acquaintance with the wealthy and the influential.[citation needed] These revelations, coupled with both his employment of actors such as C. Aubrey Smith to help stage hauntings, and the fact that he left no notes relating to his studies after his death, suggest that he embellished or perhaps even invented many of his supposed experiences.[citation needed] This is borne out by the fact that virtually every reference book in the field of supernatural fiction accords O'Donnell the status as a fiction writer.[citation needed] Certainly he was never approached by, nor worked with, the Society for Psychical Research. However, O'Donnell once spent a night at St. Nicholas Church, Brockley Combe with Everard Feilding, an investigator from the Society for Psychical Research. Elliott O'Donnell died aged 93 at the Grosvenor Nursing Home at Clevedon in North Somerset on 8 May 1965.
February 27, 1943
Jonathan Rosenbaum writes film criticism for the Chicago Reader and has written on film for many other publications. He is also the author of many books, including Movies as Politics (UC Press, 1997).
February 27, 1924
Stuart Reynolds Schram (February 27, 1924 – July 8, 2012) was an American physicist, political scientist and sinologist who specialised in the study of modern Chinese politics. He was particularly well known for his works on the life and thought of Mao Zedong.
February 27, 1970
Jørn Lier Horst (born February 27, 1970), is a Norwegian author of crime fiction and a former Senior Investigating Officer at Vestfold Police district. He made his debut in 2004 with the crime novel Key Witness, based on a true murder story.
February 27, 1902
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. (February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American author of twenty-seven books, including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books, and five collections of short stories. He is widely known for the comic novels Tortilla Flat (1935) and Cannery Row (1945), the multi-generation epic East of Eden (1952), and the novellas Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Red Pony (1937). The Pulitzer Prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939), widely attributed to be part of the American literary canon, is considered Steinbeck's masterpiece. In the first 75 years since it was published, it sold 14 million copies. The winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, he has been called 'a giant of American letters'. His works are widely read abroad and many of his works are considered classics of Western literature. His leftist political tendencies and the relatively provincial setting of his works has made him a very polarizing writer, both in the United States and in international literary circles. Until recently, the mandated teaching of his works in the British educational system has been controversial. Most of Steinbeck's work is set in southern and central California, particularly in the Salinas Valley and the California Coast Ranges region. His works frequently explored the themes of fate and injustice, especially as applied to downtrodden or everyman protagonists.
February 28, 1947
Ray Carney (born February 28, 1947) is Professor of Film and American Studies and Director of the undergraduate and graduate Film Studies programs at Boston University. He is the author or editor of more than ten books, including the critically acclaimed The Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the World (2000); The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies (1994); American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra (1996); Speaking the Language of Desire: The Films of Carl Dreyer (1989); American Dreaming (1985); the newly published Cassavetes on Cassavetes (2001), and John Cassavetes: The Adventure of Insecurity (1999).
February 28, 1928
Emilia Viotti da Costa has written extensively on Brazilian history and on slavery and emancipation. Her books include Da Senzala a Colonia and Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823. She is also professor of history at Yale University
February 28, 1935
Philip L. Fradkin (February 28, 1935 – July 8, 2012) was an American environmentalist historian, journalist, and author. Fradkin authored books ranging from Alaska, California, and Nevada, with topics ranging from water conservation, earthquakes, and nuclear weapons. Born in Manhattan, Fradkin grew up in Montclair, New Jersey and attended Montclair Kimberley Academy, graduating in the class of 1953. In 1964, Fradkin began working for the Los Angeles Times, and the following year was part of the metropolitan staff awarded a Pulitzer Prize for its work on the 1965 Watts riots. In 2005, Fradkin was given the California Award by the Commonwealth Club of California. He commented on controversial issues such as plagiarism allegations towards Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Angle of Repose, based on the letters of the American Old West author Mary Hallock Foote
February 28, 1894
Ben Hecht (February 28, 1894 – April 18, 1964) was an American screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, journalist, and novelist. A journalist in his youth, he went on to write thirty-five books and some of the most entertaining screenplays and plays in America. He received screen credits, alone or in collaboration, for the stories or screenplays of some seventy films.
February 28, 1954
Francisco Hinojosa was born in Mexico City on February 28, 1954, and is the author of three story collections, two volumes of poetry, and numerous childrens' books. He is the recipient of Mexico's National Prize for the Short Story, among other awards.
February 28, 1880
Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky (February 28, 1880 – January 21, 1955) was a Russian-born British translator. He made the transition from his origins in a small Jewish shtetl to distinction in the rarefied world of English letters. Although he was not a creative writer himself, he befriended, corresponded with, helped publish, and otherwise served as intermediary between some of the most prominent people in English literary life in the early twentieth century. Koteliansky was born in the small Jewish shtetl (town) of Ostropol in Ukraine in the Volynskaya guberniya of the Russian Empire, where his first language almost certainly was Yiddish. He was educated and attended university in Russia. By 1911, he had moved to London, where he became a great friend of D. H. Lawrence, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf. He also adored the short-story writer Katherine Mansfield. Although his romantic affection for her was not reciprocated, the two maintained a close relationship in person and in letters until her untimely death in 1923. His friendship with her was also documented in a painting by Beatrice Elvery, Lady Glenavy. He was business manager of The Adelphi, a prominent literary journal that published works of Lawrence, Mansfield, the young Dylan Thomas, and many other leading lights of early- and mid-twentieth-century English letters after its founding in 1923. But Koteliansky eventually broke with the journal's founder (and Katherine Mansfield's husband) John Middleton Murry. He was an early translator into English (often with the collaboration of Leonard or Virginia Woolf) of works of a number of Russian authors, such as Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Rozanov, and he helped those authors achieve prominence in the English-speaking world. Koteliansky ('Kot') was a close friend of the artist, Mark Gertler, and they corresponded extensively from 1914 until Gertler's death in 1939.
February 28, 1965
Colum McCann (born 28 February 1965) is an Irish writer of literary fiction. He was born in Dublin, Ireland and now lives in New York. He is a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing in the Master of Fine Arts program at Hunter College, New York with fellow novelists Peter Carey and Tea Obreht, and has visited many universities and colleges all over the world. His work has been published in 35 languages and has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, and the Paris Review, among other publications. He has written for The New York Times, Esquire, Paris Review, and The Atlantic Monthly, as well as many other international publications. McCann has written six novels, including TransAtlantic and the National Book Award-winning Let the Great World Spin. He has also written three collections of short stories.
February 28, 1533
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (28 February 1533 – 13 September 1592) was one of the most influential philosophers of the French Renaissance, known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre. He became famous for his effortless ability to merge serious intellectual exercises with casual anecdotes and autobiography—and his massive volume Essais (translated literally as 'Attempts' or 'Trials') contains, to this day, some of the most influential essays ever written. Montaigne had a direct influence on writers all over the world, including René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Albert Hirschman, William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stefan Zweig, Eric Hoffer, Isaac Asimov, and possibly on the later works of William Shakespeare. In his own lifetime, Montaigne was admired more as a statesman than as an author. The tendency in his essays to digress into anecdotes and personal ruminations was seen as detrimental to proper style rather than as an innovation, and his declaration that, 'I am myself the matter of my book', was viewed by his contemporaries as self-indulgent. In time, however, Montaigne would come to be recognized as embodying, perhaps better than any other author of his time, the spirit of freely entertaining doubt which began to emerge at that time. He is most famously known for his skeptical remark, 'Que sçay-je?' ('What do I know?', in Middle French; directly rendered Que sais-je? in modern French). Remarkably modern even to readers today, Montaigne's attempt to examine the world through the lens of the only thing he can depend on implicitly—his own judgment—makes him more accessible to modern readers than any other author of the Renaissance. Much of modern literary non-fiction has found inspiration in Montaigne and writers of all kinds continue to read him for his masterful balance of intellectual knowledge and personal storytelling.
February 28, 1952
Patricia Politzer studied at the University of Chile, and lives in La Reina, Santiago. She was one of the first journalists to speak out against the Pinochet coup in a national radio broadcast in 1978, and has a weekly political interview column in the opposition newspaper La Epoca.
February 28, 1970
Daniel Handler (born February 28, 1970) is an American writer and musician. He is best known for his children's series A Series of Unfortunate Events and All the Wrong Questions, published under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket. The former was adapted into a Nickelodeon film in 2004, and a Netflix series from 2017 onwards. Handler has also published adult novels and a stage play under his real name, and other children's books under the Snicket pseudonym. His first book The Basic Eight was rejected by many publishers for its dark subject matter. Handler has also played the accordion in several bands.
February 28, 1909
Sir Stephen Harold Spender CBE (28 February 1909 – 16 July 1995) was an English poet, novelist, and essayist who concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle in his work. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the United States Library of Congress in 1965.
February 28, 1959
Jonathan Balcombe is formerly Senior Research Scientist at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. His books include Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals and Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good.
February 28, 1928
Walter Stone Tevis (February 28, 1928 – August 9, 1984 ) was an American novelist and short story writer. Three of his six novels were adapted into major films: The Hustler, The Color of Money and The Man Who Fell to Earth. His books have been translated into at least 18 languages.
February 29, 1920
Fyodor Aleksandrovich Abramov (February 29, 1920 – May 14, 1983) was a Russian novelist and literary critic. His work focused on the difficult lives of the Russian peasant class. He was frequently reprimanded for deviations from Soviet policy on writing.
February 29, 1896
Louis Fischer (29 February 1896 – 15 January 1970) was a Jewish-American journalist. Among his works were a contribution to the ex-Communist treatise The God that Failed, The Life of Lenin, which won the 1965 National Book Award in History and Biography, as well as a biography of Mahatma Gandhi entitled The Life of Mahatma Gandhi. This book was used as the basis for the Academy Award-winning film Gandhi. Fischer's wife, Markoosha Fischer, was also a writer.
February 29, 1924
William L. Heath (February 29, 1924 - February 1, 2007) was born in 1924, in Lake Village, Arkansas, and grew up in Scottsboro, Alabama. In 1942 he entered the University of Virginia, but his attendance there was interrupted when he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, in which he served for three years as an aerial radio operator during WWII. He served overseas for seventeen months in the CBI theatre, flying the Hump, for which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Mr. Heath returned to the University of Virginia after his discharge and completed a B.A. degree in English Literature. During his senior year there, he published several short stories in the school magazine, won the Virginia Spectator Literary Award, and sold his first story to Collier’s. He went on to publish three dozen short stories, which were published in Argosy, Esquire, Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, and other publications of smaller circulation. His first novel, Violent Saturday, was published in 1955. It was voted Suspense Novel of the Year by Cosmopolitan and later that same year 20th Century Fox released a movie based on the novel with an all-star cast including Victor Mature, Richard Egan, Stephen McNally, Sylvia Sydney, Tommy Noonan, J. Carrol Naish, Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine. Mr. Heath’s second novel, Ill Wind, received literary acclaim and established him as a writer with exceptional talent. He followed Ill Wind with eight more novels over the course of his career. Mr. Heath lived in Scottsboro, Alabama, with his wife of more than 30 years, Mary Ann Heath. After her death he moved to Guntersville, Alabama, where he lived until his death in 2007.
February 29, 1948
Hermione Lee is a Fellow of New College, Oxford, and the first woman Goldsmith’s Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. She is a critic and biographer who has published books on Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth, Willa Cather, and Virginia Woolf. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the British Academy, and, from 2004 to 2005, a Mel and Lois Tukman Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. In 2003 she was awarded the CBE for services to literature.
February 29, 1920
Howard Nemerov (1920-1991) was an American poet, critic, novelist, short story writer, nonfiction writer, essayist, editor, and playwright. Nemerov is known for a diverse body of poetry that has been praised for its technical excellence, intelligence, and wit. Writing verse in a variety of forms and styles - including lyrical, narrative, and meditative - Nemerov examined religious, philosophical, scientific, and existential concerns. Although Nemerov frequently has been labeled an academic poet because of his detached stance, his firm grounding in formal verse, and the moralistic tone of some of his work, he often incorporated irony, satire, and colloquial language into his works. In addition to winning numerous prizes for his verse, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for THE COLLECTED POEMS OF HOWARD NEMEROV (1977), Nemerov was appointed poet laureate of the United States in 1988.
February 29, 1936
Marin Sorescu (29 February 1936 – 8 December 1996) was a Romanian poet, playwright, and novelist. His works were translated into more than 20 countries, and the total number of his books that were published abroad rises up to 60 books. He has also been known for his painting, and he opened many art exhibits in Romania and abroad. He occupied the position of Minister of Culture within the Nicolae V?c?roiu Cabinet, without being a member of any political party, after the Romanian revolution of 1989 (from 25 November 1993 to 5 May 1995). Born to a family of farmworkers in Bulze?ti, Dolj County, Sorescu graduated from the primary school in his home village. After that he went to the Buzesti Brothers High School in Craiova, after which he was transferred to the Predeal Military School. His final education was at the University of Ia?i, where, in 1960, he graduated with a degree in modern languages. His first book, a collection of parodies in 1964 entitled Singur printre poe?i ("Alone Among Poets"), was widely discussed. He himself called them "sarcastic and awkward". Ten volumes of poetry and prose followed, having a very rapid ascension in the world of literary, as a poet, novelist, playwright, essayist. He grew so popular that his readings were held in football stadiums. In 1971, he was a resident of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. On his poetry, Sorescu said, with characteristic irony: "Just as I can't give up smoking because I don't smoke, I can't give up writing because I have no talent." He often claimed a sense of alienation, saying "the spoken word is a crossed frontier. By the act of saying something, I fail to say many other things." On censorship, he said, after his last, post-1989 Revolution volumes were delayed, "we have won our freedom, so I mustn't complain. O censors, where are you now?" Sorescu's collection of Censored Poems comprised poems could not be published until the end of the Nicolae Ceau?escu Communist dictatorship; of these, the best known is House under surveillance. Iona, the play written by Marin Sorescu and first published in 1968 is a true masterpiece. The biblical myth says the prophet Iona was swollen by a whale. In his play, Sorescu takes the story further and imagines what happens to Iona while he was inside the whale. "The most terrible part of the play is when Iona loses his echo", writes Sorescu in the foreword of this play. "Iona was alone, but his echo was whole. He shouted: Io-na, and his echo answered: Io-na. Then, it remained just half of the echo. He shouted Io-na, but all he could hear was Io. Io, in some ancient language, means me". Iona was played to a full house in Bucharest in 1969, but the tragedy was quickly withdrawn, because its content was considered too controversial. Ill with cirrhosis and hepatitis, he died from a heart attack at the Elias Hospital in Bucharest, aged 60.
March 1, 1892
Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927) was one of the most famous Japanese writers of the last century and was the author of RASHOMON and other works. The Akutagawa Prize is named in his honor.
March 1, 1882
Frank Spencer Curtis Budgen (1 March 1882 – 26 April 1971) was an English painter and writer acquainted with the author James Joyce.
March 1, 1933
Lil Bahadur Chettri (born March 1, 1933, Guwahati, India) is an Indian Nepali who lives in the state of Assam in northeast India. He is the author of two additional novels, The Unfulfilled and On the Banks of the Brahmaputra. Michael J. Hutt is professor of Nepali and Himalayan Studies in the Department of the Languages and Cultures of South Asia at the School of African and Oriental Studies in London. He is the author of Modern Literary Nepali: An Introductory Reader and Unbecoming Citizens: Culture, Nationhood, and the Flight of Refugees from Bhutan. .
March 1, 1941
Tom Clark (born March 1, 1941) is an American poet, editor and biographer. Clark was born on the Near West Side of Chicago and educated at the University of Michigan where he received a Hopwood Award for poetry. On March 22, 1968, he married Angelica Heinegg, at St. Mark’s Church, New York City. Currently (as of 2013) residing in California, Tom Clark's recent books of poetry are Light & Shade: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House, 2006) and Threnody (effing press, 2006).
March 1, 1965
Scott Dikkers (born March 1, 1965) is an American comedy writer, speaker and entrepreneur. He was a founding editor of The Onion, and is the publication's longest-serving editor-in-chief, holding the position from 1988–1999, 2005–2008, and as General Manager / Vice President of Creative Development from 2012-2014. He currently heads the "Writing with The Onion" program in partnership with The Onion and The Second City in Chicago. Born in 1965 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Scott Dikkers is the author or co-author of several best-selling humor books. He is also the creator and artist of the comic strip Jim's Journal, which was syndicated to college newspapers from 1987–1997. Dikkers has also written and directed several films, including episodes of "The Onion News Network" web videos (2007) and the independent features Spaceman (1997), and Bad Meat (2003), starring Chevy Chase.
March 1, 1914
RALPH ELLISON was born in Oklahoma City in 1914. He is the author of INVISIBLE MAN (1952), which won the National Book Award and became one of the most important and influential postwar American novels. He published two volumes of nonfiction, SHADOW AND ACT (1964) and GOING TO THE TERRITORY (1986), which, together with unpublished speeches and writings, were brought together as THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF RALPH ELLISON IN 1995. For more than forty years before his death in 1994, Ralph Ellison lived with his wife, Fanny McConnell, on Riverside Drive in Harlem in New York City. JOHN F CALLAHAN was born in Meriden, Connecticut. He is Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. His books include THE ILLUSIONS OF A NATION and IN THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN GRAIN. He is the editor of the Modern Library edition of THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF RALPH ELLISON and is literary executor of Ralph Ellison’s estate.
March 1, 1837
William Dean Howells (March 1, 1837 – May 11, 1920) was an American realist author, literary critic, and playwright. Nicknamed 'The Dean of American Letters', he was particularly known for his tenure as editor of the Atlantic Monthly as well as his own prolific writings, including the Christmas story 'Christmas Every Day', and the novels The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Traveler from Altruria.
March 1, 1941
Robert Hass grew up in San Francisco and attended St. Mary's College and Stanford University. He is the author of Field Guide and Praise, and the translator of Czeslaw Milosz's The Separate Notebooks along with the author, Renata Gorczynski, and Robert Pinsky. Robert Hass lives with his wife and three children in Berkeley, California.
March 1, 1940
Nuala O'Faolain (1 March 1940 – 9 May 2008) was an Irish journalist, TV producer, book reviewer, teacher and writer. She became well known after the publication of her memoirs Are You Somebody? and Almost There. She went on to write a biography of Irish criminal Chicago May and two novels.
March 1, 1926
Charlotte F. Otten is Professor of English, Calvin College, and the author of Environ’d with Eternity: God, Poems, and Plants in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England. Professor Otten has published widely in journals such as the Huntington Library Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, and Medical Heritage.
March 1, 1951
Charles A. Perrone ,professor of Portuguese and Luso-Brazilian literature and culture at the University of Florida, is the author of several books including Seven Faces: Brazilian Poetry since Modernism, and the coeditor of Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization.
March 1, 1931
Richard Moore Rive (Cape Town, 1 March 1931 - 4 June 1989) was a South African writer. Rive was born on 1 March 1931 in Caledon Street in the working-class coloured District Six of Cape Town. His father was African, and his mother was coloured. Rive was given the latter classification under apartheid. Rive went to St Mark's Primary School and Trafalgar High School, both in District Six, and then to Hewat College of Education in Athlone, where he qualified as a teacher. Later he acquired a BA degree from the University of Cape Town, followed by an MA degree from Columbia University in the United States, and a Doctorate from Oxford University. He was for many years the Head of the English Department at Hewat College. Rive was a visiting professor at several overseas universities, including Harvard University in 1987. He also delivered guest lectures at more than fifty universities on four continents. He was a prominent sportsman (a South African hurdles champion while a student) and a school sports administrator. In 1963 he was given a scholarship organised by the editor of Drum magazine, Es'kia Mphahlele. In 1965 he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship. He wrote a doctoral thesis on Olive Schreiner which was published posthumously, in 1996. Rive was a firm believer in anti-racism and decided to stay in his country in the hope of influencing its development there. Rive initially published his stories in collections or in South African magazines like Drum and Fighting Talk. He edited anthologies for Heinemann's African Writers Series: the short story anthology Quartet (1963) - containing stories by Alex La Guma, James Matthews, Alf Wannenburgh and Rive himself - and the prose anthology Modern African Prose (1964). His short story 'The Bench', for which he won a prize, is still anthologised. 'The Bench' takes the well known story of Rosa Parks and sets it in South Africa. He also wrote three novels. Emergency (1964) was set against the Sharpeville massacre. Buckingham Palace District Six, was published in 1986 and turned into a musical by a theatre in Cape Town. He also published an autobiography entitled Writing Black in 1981. His last novel, Emergency Continued, was published posthumously. Rive was shot to death at his home in Cape Town in 1989. On August 23, 2013, Rive and two other esteemed South African authors Ronnie Govender and Don Mattera were honoured for their contributions to the fight against apartheid through literature at the Aziz Hassim Literary Awards held in Durban. The authors all reflected on non-racial enclaves in South Africa during that era: Rive focused on District Six, Govender on Cato Manor, and Mattera on Sophiatown.
March 1, 1948
Joel Rose is an American journalist and novelist. His novels include The Blackest Bird (2007), Kill the Poor (1988), and Kill Kill Faster Faster (1988). He also authored the urban historical, New York Sawed in Half: An Urban Historical (2001). His journalism has appeared in Black Book Magazine, Bomb Magazine, Details, The Los Angeles Times, Marie Claire, New York Magazine, New York Newsday, The New York Times, and PAPER Magazine, among others. He also established and co-edited (with Catherine Texier) the Lower East Side quarterly literary magazine Between C & D (1983–1990), and has written for several television shows, including Kojak and Miami Vice.
March 1, 1943
Witold Rybczynski (born in 1 March 1943, in Edinburgh, Scotland), is a Canadian-American architect, professor and writer.
March 1, 1863
Fyodor Sologub (March 1 1863 – December 5, 1927) was a Russian Symbolist poet, novelist, playwright and essayist. He was the first writer to introduce the morbid, pessimistic elements characteristic of European fin de siècle literature and philosophy into Russian prose.
March 1, 1880
Giles Lytton Strachey (1 March 1880 – 21 January 1932) was a British writer and critic. A founding member of the Bloomsbury Group and author of Eminent Victorians, he is best known for establishing a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit. His biography Queen Victoria (1921) was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
March 1, 1924
Mercedes Valdivieso (March 1, 1924, Santiago, Chile - August 3, 1993, Santiago, Chile) was born in Chile and is the author of several other novels: la tiera que les di (1963), Los ojos de Bambu (1964), Las noches y un dia (1971), and Quintrala que estas en la tierra (in progress). She is professor of Latin American Literature at Rice University and has lectured in Peking, China. Professor Valdivieso is deeply involved in Womens Studies in the United States and Chile. Dr. Graciela S. Daichman, a native of Buenos Aires, presently directs the translation courses at Rice University, Houston, Texas.
March 1, 1897
Llorenç Villalonga i Pons (Palma de Mallorca, March 1, 1897 – January 27, 1980) was a Spanish writer and psychiatrist. While he progressed in his medicine studies, Villalonga traveled to France, Barcelona and Murcia. He gained experience in psychiatry during his stay in France. Villalonga began his career as a writer publishing his first book in, titled Mort de Dama, which gained a lot of controversy for representing the decline of the rural aristocracy in the Balearic Islands during the 1920s. After the Nationalist's side success in gaining control of Majorca at the start of the Spanish Civil War, he joined the Spanish Falange and adopted anti-Catalan positions by contributing in the destruction of all Catalan cultural associations in Majorca. He also started to write in Spanish. Some of his novels are L'àngel rebel (1961), Desenllaç a Montlleó(1963), Lulú regina (1970), El misantrop (1972) and Un estiu a Mallorca (1975). After the end of the war, he changed his political views and progressively joined the Catalan cultural resistance movement. In 1956, he published his most famous novel: Bearn. During his later years, he published works satirizing the technological society that was in progress in books such as La gran batuda (1968), Flo la Vigne (1974) and Andrea Victrix (1974).
March 1, 1967
David Runciman is reader in political theory at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Trinity Hall. He is the author of The Politics of Good Intentions (Princeton), and writes regularly about politics for the London Review of Books. SEPTEMBER One of the Sunday Times’s Best Books of 2008, Politics.
March 2, 1859
Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, better known under his pen name Sholem Aleichem (March 2, 1859 – May 13, 1916), was a leading Yiddish author and playwright. The musical Fiddler on the Roof, based on his stories about Tevye the Dairyman, was the first commercially successful English-language stage production about Jewish life in Eastern Europe.
March 2, 1895
Tage Aurell (1895-1976) was a Swedish journalist, novelist and translator. Aurell was born in Norway in 1895, but grew up in Karlstad, Sweden, a small provincial town which has provided the setting for much of his later work. After a long apprenticeship as a journalist for several provincial newspapers and a ten-year Wanderjahre on the continent, he turned to fiction. He made his literary debut in 1932 with the novel Tybergs gård, while his literary breakthrough was Skillingtryck from 1943. In the 1930's and early 1940's he published four novels and in 1946 and 1949. Aurell was awarded the Dobloug Prize in 1966. His two volumes of tales - Shorter Tales (Smärre berättelser) and New Tales (Nya berättelser) are the source from which the present collection is drawn. The uncompromising integrity of Aurell's fictional techniques, his economy and subtlety of form, make him a writer for the "audience fit though few."
March 2, 1922
Reyner Banham (1922-1988) was Sheldon H. Solow Professor of the History of Architecture at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Joe Day leads Deegan Day Design LLC and serves on the design faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture.
March 2, 1917
David Loeb Goodis (March 2, 1917 - January 7, 1967) was an American writer of crime fiction, noted for his prolific output of short stories and novels epitomizing the noir fiction genre. A native of Philadelphia, Goodis alternately resided there and in New York City and Hollywood during his professional years. Yet, throughout his life he maintained a deep identification with the city of his birth, Philadelphia. Goodis cultivated the skid row neighborhoods of his home town, using what he observed to craft his hard-boiled sagas of lives gone wrong, realized in dark portrayals of a blighted urban landscape teeming with criminal life and human despair. ‘Despite his [university] education, a combination of ethnicity (Jewish) and temperament allowed him to empathize with outsiders: the working poor, the unjustly accused, fugitives, criminals.’ Goodis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of William Goodis and Mollie Halpern Goodis. William Goodis was a Russian-Jewish émigré born in 1882, who had arrived in America with his mother in 1890. David Goodis's mother Mollie Halpern was born in Pennsylvania also into a family of Russian-Jewish émigrés. In Philadelphia, Goodis's father co-owned a newspaper dealership and later went into the textile business as the William Goodis Company. A brother, Jerome, born in 1920, died of meningitis at age three. In 1922, another brother, Herbert, was born into the family. In high school Goodis was engaged in student affairs, editing the school newspaper, serving as student council president, and participating in athletics as a member of both the track and swim teams. He also had the distinction of being chosen valedictorian for the graduating class of 1935, delivering a speech entitled ‘Youth Looks at Peace’. As a college student, he continued and expanded on the interests he had pursued as a high school student, contributing to the student newspaper as both writer and cartoonist. It was during this period he purportedly attempted his hand at novel writing, a book titled Ignited. The novel was never published, and no copy of it has been discovered. Goodis later claimed: ‘The title was prophetic. Eventually I threw it into the furnace.’ Goodis graduated from Temple University in 1938 with a degree in journalism. While working at an advertising agency, Goodis started writing his first novel, Retreat from Oblivion. After it was published by Dutton in 1939, Goodis moved to New York City, where he wrote under several pseudonyms for pulp magazines, including Battle Birds, Daredevil Aces, Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, Terror Tales and Western Tales, sometimes churning out 10,000 words a day. The first pulp story published under his own name appeared in Gangland Detective Stories (November, 1939), titled ‘Mistress of the White Slave King’. Over a five-and-a-half-year period, according to some sources, he produced five million words for the pulp magazines. While the quantity of his output far eclipses that of his predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, unlike theirs, the vast majority of his pulp stories have never been reprinted. During the 1940s, Goodis scripted for radio adventure serials, including Hop Harrigan, House of Mystery, and Superman. Novels he wrote during the early 1940s were rejected by publishers, but in 1942 he spent some time in Hollywood as one of the screenwriters on Universal's Destination Unknown. His big break came in 1946 when his novel Dark Passage was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Julian Messner and filmed for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall heading the cast. Delmer Daves directed what is now regarded as a classic film noir, and a first edition of the 1946 hardcover is valued at more than $800. Arriving in Hollywood, Goodis signed a six-year contract with Warner Brothers, working on story treatments and scripts. In 1947, Goodis wrote the script for The Unfaithful, a remake of Somerset Maugham's The Letter. Some of his scripts were never produced, such as Of Missing Persons and an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake. Working with director Delmer Daves, he wrote a screen treatment for a film, Up Till Now, which Daves described as ‘giving people a look at themselves and their [American] heritage’. This film too was never made but Goodis used some of its elements in his 1954 novel, The Blonde on the Street Corner. Goodis is also credited with writing the screenplay to The Burglar, a 1957 film noir directed by Paul Wendkos that was based on his 1953 novel published by Lion Books. It was the only solely authored screenplay to be produced by him. The film was written and directed by Philadelphians, as well as being shot in Philadelphia. Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield were cast in the lead roles, and The Burglar still stands as one of the greatest heist films ever made. It was re-made in 1971 by Henri Verneuil as the French-Italian film Le Casse, starring Omar Sharif. Until recently, it was generally believed that Goodis never married. His friend Harold ‘Dutch’ Silver said Goodis never spoke of a wife, and no wife was mentioned in Goodis's obituary. Attorney correspondence also repeatedly stated that Goodis never married. However, research by Larry Withers and Louis Boxer has produced a marriage license for Goodis and Elaine Astor. It shows that they were married on October 7, 1943 by Rabbi Jacob Samuel Robins, Ph.D., at Ohev Shalom Congregation, 525 South Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles. According to a divorce decree found in the attic of Philadelphia's City Hall, Astor received a divorce on January 18, 1946. Withers is Astor's son by a later marriage. He learned about her marriage to Goodis only after her death in 1986 from a stroke. In 1950, Goodis returned to Philadelphia where he lived with his parents and his schizophrenic brother Herbert. At night, he prowled the underside of Philadelphia, hanging out in nightclubs and seedy bars, a milieu he depicted in his fiction. Cassidy's Girl (1951) sold over a million copies, and he continued to write for paperback publishers, notably Gold Medal. There was a renewed interest in his novels when François Truffaut filmed Down There (1956) as the acclaimed Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Goodis died at 11:30pm on January 7, 1967, at Albert Einstein Medical Center, Northern Division, not far from his home. He was 49. His death certificate lists ‘cerebral vascular accident,’ meaning a stroke, as the cause of death. Days earlier, Goodis had been beaten while resisting a robbery. Some have attributed his death to his injuries. It is also said that he keeled over while shoveling snow. He was buried in Roosevelt Memorial Park, in Pennsylvania. In 1963, ABC television began airing the television show The Fugitive, the story of Richard Kimble, a doctor wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. Kimble subsequently escapes and begins a long search for the ‘one-armed man’, the person he believes to be the real killer. Goodis stated that The Fugitive was based on his novel Dark Passage. In 1965, he sued United Artists-TV and ABC for $500,000, alleging copyright infringement. His cousin's law firm, Goodis, Greenfield, Narin and Mann, represented him and several groups supported him, including the Author's League of America, the Dramatist's Guild, and the American Book Publishers Association. Coudert Brothers represented United Artists and ABC. During a deposition on December 9, 1966, Goodis stated that The Saturday Evening Post had serialized Dark Passage, a fact that would become critical to the case. One month later, Goodis was dead. The lawsuit continued to wind its way through the courts, however. The dispute did not so much concern whether the theme of Dark Passage had been used, but whether the book was in the public domain. In a victory for UA and ABC, the District Court held that Goodis had, in effect, ‘donated his work to the public domain’ when he published it in The Saturday Evening Post without using a copyright notice that listed his name. The Goodis estate appealed. In 1970, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the lower court's decision and remanded the case for trial. The decision is reported at Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397 (2nd Cir. 1970). The court wrote, ‘We unanimously conclude that where a magazine has purchased the right of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine's name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial owner, the author or proprietor.’ (425 F.2d 398-399). By then, Goodis's main beneficiary, his brother Herbert, was also dead. So in 1972, the Goodis estate agreed that the case now had only ‘nuisance value’ and accepted $12,000 to settle the matter. Despite the significant difference between the initial claim and the final monetary settlement, the case is still regarded as a landmark decision in intellectual property rights and copyright law. After his death, his work went out of print in the United States, but he remained a popular favorite in France. In 1987, Black Lizard began to reissue Goodis titles. In 2007, Hard Case Crime published a new edition of The Wounded and the Slain for the first time in more than 50 years. Also in 2007, Street of No Return and Nightfall were re-published by Millipede Press. His novel Down There was reprinted as part of American Noir of the 1950s, in the Library of America. In March 2012, the Library of America published a selection of Goodis's novels under the title, David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s. Goodis has influenced contemporary crime fiction writers, notably Duane Swierczynski, and Ken Bruen. A character in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Made in U.S.A. was named after Goodis.
March 2, 1943
Elaine Brown (born March 2, 1943) is an American prison activist, writer, singer, and former Black Panther Party chairwoman who is based in Oakland, California. Brown briefly ran for the Green Party presidential nomination in 2008. She currently lives in Oakland, California.
March 2, 1924
Fathi Ghanem is an Egyptian writer (2 March 1924 – 24 February 1999). He was born in Cairo to a simple family. He graduated from the Faculty of Law, Fuad I University (Cairo now) in 1944. He worked for the press at the Rosalieouf Foundation. He then moved to Al Gomhouria newspaper or the Dar Al Tahrir Foundation as chairman of the board of directors and editorial. Seventy-five years.
March 2, 1919
Faustino Gonzalez-Aller (March 2, 1919 - March 10, 1983) was born in Giron, Span. He held a degree in journalism from the University of Madrid and a law degree from the University of Salamanca. He lived and traveled extensively throughout Central America, but eventually made his home in New York. Gonzalez-Aller was a dramatist and a screen writer, as well as a novelist.
March 2, 1931
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (born 2 March 1931) is a former Soviet statesman. He was the eighth leader of the Soviet Union, having been General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991. He was the country's head of state from 1988 until 1991 (titled as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet from 1988 to 1989, as Chairman of the Supreme Soviet from 1989 to 1990, and as President of the Soviet Union from 1990 to 1991). Gorbachev was born in Stavropol Krai into a peasant Ukrainian–Russian family, and in his teens, operated combine harvesters on collective farms. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1955 with a degree in law. While he was at the university, he joined the Communist Party, and soon became very active within it. In 1970, he was appointed the First Party Secretary of the Stavropol Regional Committee, First Secretary to the Supreme Soviet in 1974, and appointed a member of the Politburo in 1979. Within three years of the death of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, following the brief "interregna" of Andropov and Chernenko, Gorbachev was elected general secretary by the Politburo in 1985. Before he reached the post, he had occasionally been mentioned in Western newspapers as a likely next leader and a man of the younger generation at the top level. Gorbachev's policies of glasnost ("openness") and perestroika ("restructuring") and his reorientation of Soviet strategic aims contributed to the end of the Cold War. Under this program, the role of the Communist Party in governing the state was removed from the constitution, which inadvertently led to crisis-level political instability with a surge of regional nationalist and anti-communist activism culminating in the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev later expressed regret for his failure to save the USSR, though he has insisted that his policies were not failures but rather were vitally necessary reforms which were sabotaged and exploited by opportunists. He was awarded the Otto Hahn Peace Medal in 1989, the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 and the Harvey Prize in 1992, as well as honorary doctorates from various universities. In September 2008, Gorbachev and business oligarch Alexander Lebedev announced they would form the Independent Democratic Party of Russia, and in May 2009 Gorbachev announced that the launch was imminent. This was Gorbachev's third attempt to establish a political party, having started the Social Democratic Party of Russia in 2001 and the Union of Social Democrats in 2007.
March 2, 1942
John Winslow Irving (born John Wallace Blunt, Jr. on March 2, 1942), is an American novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter. Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim after the international success of The World According to Garp in 1978. Some of Irving's novels, such as The Cider House Rules (1985), A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), and A Widow for One Year (1998), have been bestsellers. Five of his novels have been adapted to film. Several of Irving's books (Garp, Meany, A Widow for One Year) and short stories have been set in and around Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. He won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1999 for his script The Cider House Rules.
March 2, 1820
Eduard Douwes Dekker, who wrote under the pseudonym `Multatuli', was born in 1820 in Amsterdam, the son of a Dutch sea captain. In 1838 he went to Java, where he entered the East Indian Civil Service. Although he had many disputes with his superiors his outstanding capacities seem to have been recognized and he rose steadily in rank. In 1856 he took up the appointment of Assistant Resident of Lebak but within three months he had resigned from. the East Indian Civil Service altogether, following the events narrated in MAX HAVELAAR, which he wrote in 1859 after years of poverty-stricken wandering in Holland, Belgium and Germany with his family. He died in exile in 1887.
March 2, 1935
One of the most prolific post-war authors in Poland, a master of minor narrative forms, and a pioneer of Polish "dirty realism". Born in Warsaw in 1935, died on May 16, 2014. He published his first story, Rectangular, in "Nowa Kultura" in 1957. Rectangular and the subsequent collections That Old Thief and Benek the Flower Seller firmly located Nowakowski in the "dirty" world of social outcasts, vagrants, prostitutes, pickpockets and fences who live beyond the concerns and codes of "normal" society. Nowakowski both described and revelled in this colorful, Steinbeckian world. For Nowakowski, the vagrant and his subculture are characterized by both brutality and a rigorously respected ethos - by autonomy from the material ideals of the bourgeoisie but also by internal solidarity. In his novels, Nowakowski expanded his range of dirty realism. Aside from his old protagonists, he brought in average, everyday, modest figures (clerks and shopkeepers) who live out their lives until the moment when they experience the feeling of being "cornered" - when they realize the absurdity of the norms to which they have submitted, and which now prove incapable of answering the most fundamental existential questions. Having discovered that they are trapped inside a "Done Deal," they escape into the periphery where, free of the previous rules, they can gradually sink into abnegation (or into alcoholism, psychological obsessions, or profligacy) or achieve authenticity, which in this case is understood by the writer as an existence without goals. Nowakowski's most accomplished and eye-opening work of this period is the story The Wedding Reception Again, in which he uses the wedding feast - one of the central motifs in Polish literature - to illustrate the rules by which small-town power is exercised, as well as the pragmatism of the public attitudes that negate tradition and annihilate all existing codes of values. The poetics of dirty realism also permit Nowakowski to express the fundamental dilemmas of his own writing. The abundant self-references in his work - Insects, The Prince of Night, and The Boy with the Pigeon on his Head - attest to his conception of his own position "in between" - between the world of the social margins and the mainstream where literature is made, between the authenticity of the vagrant and the unauthentic roles proffered by official culture, between the colorful but coarse language of the outcasts and the dead language of literature or the newspapers. A Report on Martial Law won Nowakowski European renown. That and his subsequent books showed Nowakowski portraying the everyday life of average citizens and the historical processes as a result of which the whole of society found itself on the periphery of a totalitarian state because of the code of values that the society professed and practiced. Nowakowski found an escape from such political tendentiousness in the self-referring Portrait of the Artist as a Mature Man, Mardi Gras and Lent, and the crucial story Bozydar from the collection The Greek Divinity, in which he placed himself on the periphery of society while isolating himself from all engagement and leaving to literature the expression of the most sensitive themes: creative solitude, biological transience, and ruthlessness as a rule for social coexistence. There followed a series of books on the new Poland: Homo Polonicus, the Greek Divinity, and Shots in the Motel George, which depict the Poland of the late 1980s and early 1990s as a bazaar, a place where everything and everyone is for sale. The counterweight to that image of the transformation of social bonds into commercial relations is the nostalgic return to Warsaw immediately after the war, and its colorful demi-monde of eccentrics, weirdos and "crooks with class," in Powidoki.
March 2, 1904
Theodor Seuss Geisel (March 2, 1904 – September 24, 1991) was an American writer, poet, and cartoonist most widely known for children's picture books written and illustrated as Dr. Seuss. He had used the pen name Dr. Theophrastus Seuss in college and later used Theo LeSieg, and once Rosetta Stone, as well as Dr. Seuss. Geisel published 46 children's books, which were often characterized by imaginative characters, rhyme, and frequent use of anapestic meter. His most celebrated books include the bestselling Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat in the Hat, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, Horton Hatches the Egg, Horton Hears a Who!, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas!. Numerous adaptations of his work have been created, including 11 television specials, four feature films, a Broadway musical and four television series. He won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1958 for Horton Hatches the Egg and again in 1961 for And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. Geisel also worked as an illustrator for advertising campaigns, most notably for Flit and Standard Oil, and as a political cartoonist for PM, a New York City newspaper. During World War II, he worked in an animation department of the United States Army, where he wrote Design for Death, a film that later won the 1947 Academy Award for Documentary Feature. He was a perfectionist in his work and he would sometimes spend up to a year on a book. It was not uncommon for him to throw out 95% of his material until he settled on a theme for his book. For a writer he was unusual in that he preferred to only be paid after he finished his work rather than in advance. Geisel's birthday, March 2, has been adopted as the annual date for National Read Across America Day, an initiative on reading created by the National Education Association.
March 2, 1930
Edward R. F. Sheehan (March 2, 1930, Newton, MA - November 3, 2008, Newton, MA) is the author of The Arabs, the Israelis, and Kissinger. A Secret History of American Policy in the Middle East, of two novels, Kingdom of Illusion and The Governor, and of several plays. His articles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, and Commonweal. As a diplomat he served in the U.S. embassies in Cairo and Beirut. He lived in Newton, Massachusetts.
March 2, 1970
Matt Taibbi, author of the New York Times bestsellers The Divide, Griftopia, and The Great Derangement, is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and winner of the 2008 National Magazine Award for columns and commentary.
March 3, 1919
Peter Henry Abrahams (born March 3, 1919), is a South African One of South Africa's most prominent black writers, his work deals with political and social issues, especially with racism, most prolific of South Africa’s black prose writers, whose early novel MINE BOY (1946) was the first to depict the dehumanizing effect of racism upon South African blacks.
March 3, 1957
Stephen Budiansky is an American author who writes primarily about history and science. He is a former national security correspondent, foreign editor, and deputy editor of U.S. News & World Report and former Washington editor of the scientific journal Nature. He was also for many years a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly. As a free-lance writer, he has published work in the New York Times magazine and op-ed pages, the Washington Post, Men's Journal, Science, The Economist, and many other publications. He is the author of a number of scholarly publications about the history of cryptography, military history, and music.
March 3, 1948
Max Allan Collins (born March 3, 1948) is an American mystery writer. His work has been published in several formats and his Road to Perdition series was the basis for a film of the same name. He wrote the Dick Tracy newspaper strip for many years and has produced numerous novels featuring the character as well.
March 3, 1819
Alexander Crummell (March 3, 1819 - September 10, 1898) was a pioneering African-American minister, academic and African nationalist. Ordained as an Episcopal priest in the United States, Crummell went to England in the late 1840s to raise money for his church by lecturing about American slavery. Abolitionists supported his three years of study at Cambridge University, where Crummell developed concepts of pan-Africanism. In 1853 Crummell moved to Liberia, where he worked to convert native Africans to Christianity and educate them, as well as to persuade American colonists of his ideas. He wanted to attract American blacks to Africa on a colonial, civilizing mission. Crummell lived and worked for 20 years in Liberia and appealed to American blacks to join him, but did not gather wide support for his ideas. After returning to the United States in 1872, Crummell was called to St. Mary's Episcopal Mission in Washington, DC. In 1875, he and his congregation founded St. Luke's Episcopal Church, the first independent black Episcopal church in the city. They built a new church on 15th Street, NW, beginning in 1876, and celebrated their first Thanksgiving there in 1879. Crummell served as rector there until his retirement in 1894. The church was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976.
March 3, 1927
Nicolas Freeling, born Nicolas Davidson (March 3, 1927 – July 20, 2003), was a British crime novelist, best known as the author of the Van der Valk series of detective novels. A television series based on the character was produced for the British ITV network by Thames Television during the 1970s, and revived in the 1990s. Freeling was born in London, but travelled widely, and ended his life at his long-standing home at Grandfontaine to the west of Strasbourg. He had followed a variety of occupations, including the armed services and the catering profession. He began writing during a three-week prison sentence, after being convicted of stealing some food. Freeling's THE KING OF THE RAINY COUNTRY received a 1967 Edgar Award, from the Mystery Writers of America, for Best Novel. He also won the Gold Dagger of the Crime Writers' Association, and France's Grand Prix de Littérature Policière. In 1968 his novel LOVE IN AMSTERDAM was adapted as the film Amsterdam Affair directed by Gerry O'Hara and starring Wolfgang Kieling as Van Der Valk.
March 3, 1756
William Godwin (3 March 1756 – 7 April 1836) was an English journalist, political philosopher and novelist. He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism, and the first modern proponent of anarchism. Godwin is most famous for two books that he published within the space of a year: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, an attack on political institutions, and Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, which attacks aristocratic privilege, but also is the first mystery novel. Based on the success of both, Godwin featured prominently in the radical circles of London in the 1790s. In the ensuing conservative reaction to British radicalism, Godwin was attacked, in part because of his marriage to the pioneering feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797 and his candid biography of her after her death; their daughter, Mary Godwin (later Mary Shelley) would go on to write Frankenstein and marry the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Godwin wrote prolifically in the genres of novels, history and demography throughout his lifetime. With his second wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, he wrote children's primers on Biblical and classical history, which he published along with such works as Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare. Using the pseudonym Edward Baldwin, he wrote a variety of books for children, including a version of Jack and the Beanstalk. He also has had considerable influence on British literature and literary culture.
March 3, 1905
Ariel Williams Holloway (March 3, 1905 –January 3, 1973) was an African-American poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Holloway was born Lucy Ariel Williams in Mobile, Alabama. Her mother was Fannie Brandon, a teacher and choir singer, and her father was Dr. H. Roger Williams, a physician and pharmacist. She studied at Emerson Institute, Mobile and graduated from Talladega College in 1922. She earned a B.A. in Music at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee (1926), after which she went on to the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, from which she received another B.A. in Music with a major in piano and a minor in voice (1928). During the summers, Williams continued her musical studies with bandleader Fred Waring and at Columbia University. In 1936 she married Joaquin M. Holloway, a postal worker, with whom she had a son, Joaquin Jr., the following year. She preferred not to use her first name and was known professionally first as Ariel Williams and later as Ariel Williams Holloway. Williams's ambition was to be a concert pianist but lack of opportunities drove her into teaching music. She began her teaching career as director of music at North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham (1926–32) and subsequently taught at Dunbar High School in Mobile (1932–36), at Fessenden Academy in Florida (1936–37), and at Lincoln Academy in Kings Mountain, North Carolina (1938–39). In 1939, Williams became the first supervisor of music in the Mobile public school system, a job she held until her death in 1973. Ariel Williams Holloway Elementary School in Mobile was named in her honor. Between 1926 and 1935, Williams published five poems in Opportunity, one of the leading journals of the Harlem Renaissance, and other poems in Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races. She also published a single volume of verse, Shape Them into Dreams (Exposition Press, 1955). "Northboun'," a short poem in dialect about the Great Migration, has been called her "signature poem" and "one of the best poems of the period." "Northboun'" won an important prize in Opportunity (where it was first published in 1926) and has been collected in several anthologies, including Golden Slippers (1941), edited by Harlem Renaissance poets Countee Cullen and Arna Bontemps, and Lorraine E. Roses and Ruth E. Randolph's Harlem's Glory: Black Women Writing, 1900-1950 (Harvard University Press, 1996).
March 3, 1954
Robert S. Jones (March 3, 1954 – August 13, 2001) was an American novelist, and editor. He was born in Santa Monica, California. Jones grew up in southern California and northern New Jersey. Jones began work as an editor at HarperCollins (then Harper & Row) in 1985, and at the time of his death in 2001 was Editor in Chief. In 1992 Jones received the Whiting Award for emerging writers. The award was presented by Ralph Ellison, the author of Invisible Man. In addition to his work as an editor, Jones published two novels and a number of short stories. His first novel Force of Gravity was described by Iris Murdoch as "a beautiful, terrifying tale of a quiet descent into insanity." His second novel, Walking on Air examines all the psychological nuances of the dying and their caretakers. Jones' shorter work appeared in Q and in Best American Gay Fiction 1996.
March 3, 1906
Artur Lundkvist (3 March 1906 in Perstorp Municipality, Skåne County – 11 December 1991 in Solna, Stockholm County) was a Swedish writer, poet and literary critic. He was a member of the Swedish Academy from 1968. Artur Lundkvist published around 80 books, including poetry, prose poems, essays, short stories, novels and travel books, and his works have been translated into some 30 languages. He is also noted for having translated many works from Spanish and French into Swedish. Several authors he translated were later awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He married the poet Maria Wine in 1936. Artur Lundkvist published his first book of poems Glöd (Glowing Embers) in 1928 and contributed to the important anthology Fem unga (Five young men) in 1929. He was one of the dominant figures in Swedish literary modernism, the most vigorous promoter of the modernist breakthrough that took place around 1930, and one of the leading poets of the period. His early works was influenced by Scandinavian and American modernists, most notably Carl Sandburg, and later by surrealism. In the late 1940s his works became increasingly influenced by Spanish language writers like Pablo Neruda and Federico García Lorca, whose poetry he also translated to Swedish. Although he continued to publish books of poetry, including Liv som gräs (Life as grass, 1954) and Ögonblick och vågor (Moments and waves, 1962) which by many is considered to be among his finest works, prose works dominated his writings from the 1950s and onwards. In several books, starting with Malinga (1952) and leading up to late works such as Skrivet mot kvällen (Written towards the evening, 1980), his ambition was to defy genre limitations and merge prose poetry, fictional stories, short essays, personal memoirs and impressions from his many travels around the world into a new form of literature. Artur Lundkvist was a very productive writer, and also published numerous articles and short stories, several novels and collections of literary essays, and books about his travels in South America, India, China, the Soviet Union and Africa. In 1966 his autobiography Självporträtt av en drömmare med öppna ögon (Self portrait of a dreamer with open eyes) was published, and in 1968 he was elected a member of the Swedish academy. In 1977 he was awarded the prestigious Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings festival in Struga, Macedonia. Artur Lundkvist was a supporter of the Soviet Union and communism. Lundkvist himself, however, never accepted to be labelled as a communist but called himself a "free socialist". During the Cold War, Lundkvist was an adherent of the so-called "third stance" (Swedish: tredje ståndpunkten) in Swedish public debate, which purported to advocate a neutral stance in the conflict between the two superpowers. He served on the board of the pro-communist Sweden-GDR Association. He was also a member of the Swedish Peace Committee, the Swedish section of the World Peace Council, a Soviet front organization. In 1958 he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet Union.
March 3, 1899
Yury Karlovich Olesha (March 3, 1899 – May 10, 1960) was a Russian and Soviet novelist. He is considered one of the greatest Russian novelists of the 20th century, one of the few to have succeeded in writing works of lasting artistic value despite the stifling censorship of the era. His works are delicate balancing acts that superficially send pro-Communist messages but reveal far greater subtlety and richness upon a deeper reading. Sometimes, he is grouped with his friends Ilf and Petrov, Isaac Babel, and Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky into the Odessa School of Writers. Yuri Olesha was born on March 3 [O.S. February 19] 1899 to Catholic parents of Polish descent in Elizavetgrad (now Kirovohrad, Ukraine). Olesha's father, Karl Antonovich, was an impoverished landowner who later became a government inspector of alcohol and developed a proclivity for drinking and gambling. In 1902 Olesha and his family settled in Odessa, where Yuri would eventually meet many of his fellow writers such as Isaac Babel, Ilya Ilf, and Valentin Kataev, and ultimately maintain a lifelong friendship with the latter. As a student, Yuri demonstrated a knack for science but favored literature above his other subjects and began writing during the year before his graduation cum laude from high school. In 1917 Olesha entered law school but postponed his studies two years later to volunteer for the Red Army during the civil war; during this time, Olesha began producing propaganda for the revolution. Olesha's writing career began while he was involved with the literary group of young writers in Odessa called 'The Green Lamp,' which included not only Kataev and Olesha, but such influential writers as Eduard Bagritski and Dmitry Merezhkovsky. Olesha continued to produce propaganda materials for the revolution in Odessa and then in Kharkov, where he relocated in 1921. In 1922, Olesha published his first short story, 'Angel,' and moved to Moscow the same year to work at a popular railway worker's periodical called The Whistle. Here Olesha began writing featured satirical poetry under the pseudonym '??????' ('The Chisel'), eventually publishing two collections of poems in 1924 and 1927 before turning to prose writing and drama. Olesha's literary debut would also become one of his most popular works: the novel Envy, which he published in 1927, follows five leading characters. Largely regarded as his greatest work, the novel thematically contrasts the old and new order, as well as individualism and collectivism, in Soviet Russia. During this period Olesha published another popular success: the fairy tale The Three Fat Men which he wrote in 1924 but did not publish until the year after his initial literary success. Olesha also wrote several short stories in the 1920s and 1930s, the most prominent of which are 'Liompa' (1928), 'The Cherry Stone' (1929), and 'Natasha' (1936). In addition to prose fiction, Olesha also wrote for the stage, not only adapting his novel Envy for the theater in 1929 under the title Conspiracy of Feelings, but also writing an original play called A List of Assets in 1931 and dramatizing Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot later in life. In the 1930s and 1940s Olesha found it increasingly difficult to publish his work as a result of stringent Stalinist censorship. Despite continuing to write and edit, Olesha's career was stunted by his political environment, and on May 10, 1960 the author died of heart failure.
March 3, 1949
Gustavo Perez Firmat is Assistant Professor of Romance Languages, Duke University. A native of Cuba, he has published many articles on Hispanic fiction.
March 3, 1927
Eli Sagan (March 3, 1927 – January 4, 2015) was a visiting professor in sociology and women’s studies at the University of California, Berkeley, The New School and Brandeis University. During the early seventies he also taught one course a week in anthropology at The New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.
March 3, 1957
Nicholas William Richmond Shakespeare (born 3 March 1957) is a British novelist and biographer.
March 3, 1965
Helene Stapinski (born March 3, 1965) began her career at her hometown newspaper, The Jersey Journal. She is the author of two memoirs: Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History and Baby Plays Around: A Love Affair, with Music. Her essays have appeared in several anthologies, most recently, Drinking Diaries: Women Serve Their Stories Straight Up. Helene has also written extensively for The New York Times, for Travel & Leisure, Food & Wine, Salon, Real Simple, New York magazine and dozens of other newspapers, magazines and blogs. She’s been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, The Today Show and as a performer with The Moth main stage. She received her B.A. in journalism from New York University in 1987 and her MFA from Columbia in 1995. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.
March 3, 1887
Kurt Wolff (3 March 1887 – 21 October 1963) was a German publisher, editor, writer and journalist. Wolff was born in Bonn, Rhenish Prussia; his mother came from a Jewish-German family. Together with Ernst Rowohlt he began to work in publishing in Leipzig in 1908. He was the first to promote and publish the authors Franz Kafka and Franz Werfel. Wolff's close contact to other writers in Prague and the support for unknown, but talented writers, helped him develop Kafka's friends, Max Brod and Felix Weltsch who were more well known in Berlin and Germany. In 1929, Wolff published the photography book Face of our Time by August Sander. In 1941 Wolff and his second wife, Helen, left Germany and immigrated to Paris, London, Montagnola, St. Tropez, Nice, and finally with the assistance of Varian Fry, New York City. Later in Munich, Florence, and the United States, Wolff tried to develop different publishing houses. In the U.S., he and Helen founded Pantheon Books in 1942, which became famous. He died in Marbach. The Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize is named in honor of him and his wife.
March 3, 1920
DENIS MACK SMITH is Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. There is perhaps no non-Italian historian who is treated with more respect inside Italy itself, and his many previous books include Cavour and Garibaldi; Garibaldi (editor); Italy: A Modern History; Medieval Sicily; The Making of Italy, 1796-1870; and Mussolini's Roman Empire.
March 3, 1842
Colonel Frederick Gustavus Burnaby (3 March 1842 – 17 January 1885) was a British Army intelligence officer. Burnaby's adventurous spirit, pioneering achievements, and swashbuckling courage earned an affection in the minds of Victorian imperial idealists. As well as travelling across Europe and Central Asia, he mastered the art of ballooning, spoke a number of foreign languages fluently, stood for parliament twice, published several books, and was admired and feted by the women of London High Society. His popularity was legendary, appearing in a number of stories and tales of empire.
March 4, 1916
Giorgio Bassani (March 4, 1916 – April 13, 2000) was an Italian novelist, poet, essayist, editor, and international intellectual.
March 4, 1944
Glen Baxter (born 4 March 1944), nicknamed Colonel Baxter, is an English cartoonist, noted for his absurdist drawings and an overall effect often resembling literary nonsense. Born in Leeds, Baxter was trained at the Leeds College of Art. His images and their corresponding captions employ art and language inspired by pulp fiction and adventure comics with intellectual jokes and references. His simple line-drawings often feature cowboys, gangsters, explorers and schoolchildren, who utter incongruous intellectual statements regarding art and philosophy. Baxter's artwork has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and The Independent on Sunday.
March 4, 1951
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (March 4, 1951 — November 5, 1982) was a South Korean-born American novelist and artist, best known for her 1982 novel, Dictee. Cha, a Korean American, was born in Busan, South Korea during the Korean War. Her family eventually moved to the United States in 1962, settling down in the U.S. state of California. She received her B.A. and M.A. in Comparative Literature and an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. After leaving university, she moved to Paris, France, where she studied filmmaking and critical theory before returning to the Bay Area as a filmmaker and performance artist. Cha's interdisciplinary background is clearly evident in Dictee which experiments with juxtaposition and hypertext of both print and visual media. Cha's 'Dictee' is taught in contemporary literature classes. Cha was raped and killed by security guard and serial rapist Joey Sanza in New York City, New York, just a week after the publication of Dictee. Sanchez was convicted after three trials and five years. Shortly before her death, she was working on an artistic piece for a group show at Artists Space in SoHo. The Artists Space exhibit later became a memorial for Cha after her death.
March 4, 1937
William Deverell is Professor of History at the University of Southern California and Director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.
March 4, 1927
Jacques Dupin (March 4, 1927 in Privas, Ardèche – October 27, 2012 in Paris) was a French poet, art critic, and co-founder of the journal L'éphemère. Dupin was born in the town of Privas in the South of France, where his father was a psychiatrist at a state mental hospital. In 1944, the family moved to Paris, where, in 1950, the poet René Char helped him publish his first collection of poems. In 1966, he co-founded the poetry quarterly L’Éphémère, with poets including André du Bouchet, Yves Bonnefoy and Paul Celan. He was the director of publication at Galerie Maeght, which represented Joan Miró, a close friend. The gallery also represented Marc Chagall, Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon and Wassily Kandinsky. Giacometti and Bacon both painted his portrait. Dupin wrote Miró's biography, numerous monographs on the artist's work, and was empowered by Miró's family to be the sole authenticating authority of the artist's work; a role that made him much sought after by collectors. In 1987, Dupin was the curator of a retrospective of Miró's work at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the first such retrospective in New York since 1959.
March 4, 1948
James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His L.A. Quartet novels—The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz—were international best sellers. His novel American Tabloid was Time magazine’s Best Book (fiction) of 1995; his memoir, My Dark Places, was a Time Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book for 1996. His novel The Cold Six Thousand was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book for 2001. Ellroy lives in Los Angeles.
March 4, 1946
LENNART HAGERFORS was born in Sweden in 1946 but spent nine years of his childhood in the Congo, where his parents were missionaries, returning to Sweden ‘with the jungle still in my eyes.’ An editor and writer for his country’s leading literary journal, Bonniers Litterara Magasin, he is the author of four novels, two volumes of poetry and a children’s book.
March 4, 1932
Ryszard Kapuscinski, Poland’s most celebrated foreign correspondent, was born in 1932 in Piñsk (in what is now Belarus) and spent four decades reporting on Asia, Latin America, and Africa. He is also the author of IMPERIUM, ANOTHER DAY OF LIFE, and THE SOCCER WAR. His books have been translated into twenty-eight languages. Kapuscinski died in 2007.
March 4, 1875
Enrique Rodríguez Larreta (March 4, 1875 — July 6, 1961) was an Argentine writer, academic, diplomat and art collector. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature ten times. Larreta was born in Buenos Aires to Adela Maza and Carlos Rodríguez Larreta. A member of a traditionally upper-class family from Uruguay, he was married to Josefina Anchorena Castellanos, a daughter of one of the most aristocratic, landowning families of Argentina, the Anchorenas. They had five children; Mercedes, Enrique (b. 1902), Josefina (b. 1905), Agustin (b. 1909) and Fernando (b. 1911). He studied law, and graduated at the University of Buenos Aires in 1897. He later taught medieval history at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, and worked as history teacher. Larreta earned renown as a writer with La gloria de don Ramiro, one of the representative Argentine works of Hispanic modernism, in 1908. Don Ramiro, a soldier during the time of Philip II of Spain, embodies the Christian conflict between temporal needs and a more spiritual life. He then served as Ambassador to France from 1910 to 1919, and lived during 1915 and 1916 in Biarritz, France and in Ávila, Spain, where he met Miguel de Unamuno and a street now bears his name. As a playwright, his first piece, La lampe dargile, written in French, opened in Paris in 1917. This was followed by La luciernaga (1923; Firefly), El linyera (1932; The Bum), Santa Maria del Buen Ayre (1935), considered his best, and Tenia que suceder (1943; It had to Happen). He participated in the Ibero-American Exposition of 1929, in Seville, was a member of the National Academy of History of Argentina, and of the Royal Spanish Academy, spending a large part of his later years in Madrid. The cities of Alcalá de Henares, Madrid and Segovia also have streets named after him. Larreta died in 1961, and was interred at La Recoleta Cemetery. His home in Buenos Aires became the Museo de Arte Español Enrique Larreta in 1962. Built by architect Ernesto Bunge in 1886, this Spanish colonial-styled house is graced with an Andalusian palace garden; an unusual oasis in the middle of the hustle and bustle of Buenos Aires. When Larreta came back from Europe and settled in the Belgrano neighborhood he brought a vast collection of Spanish art and furniture from France. The Renaissance and Baroque collection gives the house the feel of a Spanish museum, and is mostly from the same period as his historical novel, Don Ramiro .
March 4, 1932
Zenzile Miriam Makeba (4 March 1932 – 9 November 2008), nicknamed Mama Africa, was a Grammy Award-winning South African singer and civil rights activist. In the 1960s, she was the first artist from Africa to popularize African music around the world. She is best known for the song 'Pata Pata', first recorded in 1957 and released in the U.S. in 1967. She recorded and toured with many popular artists, such as Harry Belafonte, Paul Simon, and her former husband Hugh Masekela.
March 4, 1851
Alexandros Pepekas Papadiamantis (4 March 1851 – 3 January 1911) was an influential Greek novelist, short-story writer and poet. Papadiamantis was born in Greece, on the island of Skiathos, in the western part of the Aegean Sea. The island would figure prominently in his work. His father was a priest. He moved to Athens as a young man to complete his high school studies, and enrolled in the philosophy faculty of Athens University, but never completed his studies.This happened because he had economic difficulties, and had to find a job to make a living. He returned to his native island in later life, and died there. He supported himself by writing throughout his adult life, anything from journalism and short stories to several serialized novels. From a certain point onwards he had become very popular, and newspapers and magazines vied for his writings, offering him substantial fees. Papadiamantis did not care for money, and would often ask for lower fees if he thought they were unfairly high; furthermore he spent his money carelessly and took no care of his clothing and appearance. He never married, and was known to be a recluse, whose only true cares were observing and writing about the life of the poor, and chanting at church: he was referred to as 'kosmokalogeros' ('a monk in the world'). He died of pneumonia. Papadiamantis' longest works were the serialized novels 'The Gypsy Girl,' 'The Emigrant,' and 'Merchants of Nations.' These were adventures set around the Mediterranean, with rich plots involving captivity, war, pirates, the plague, etc. However, the author is best remembered for his scores of short stories. Written in his own version of the then official language of Greece, 'katharevousa' (a 'purist' written language heavily influenced by ancient Greek), Papadiamantis' stories are little gems. They provide lucid and lyrical portraits of country life in Skiathos, or urban life in the poorer neighborhoods of Athens, with frequent flashes of deep psychological insight. The nostalgia for a lost island childhood is palpable in most of them; the stories with an urban setting often deal with alienation. Characters are sketched with a deft hand, and they speak in the authentic 'demotic' spoken language of the people; island characters lapse into dialect. Papadiamantis' deep Christian faith, complete with the mystical feeling associated with the Orthodox Christian liturgy, suffuses many stories. Most of his work is tinged with melancholy, and resonates with empathy with people's suffering, regardless of whether they are saints or sinners, innocent or conflicted. His only saint, in fact, is a poor shepherd who, having warned the islanders, is slaughtered by Saracen pirates after he refuses to abandon his flock for the safety of the fortified town. This particular story, 'The Poor Saint,' is the closest he comes to a truly religious theme. An example of Papadiamantis' deep and even-handed feeling for humanity is his acknowledged masterpiece, the novella 'The Murderess.' It is the story of an old woman in Skiathos, who pities families with many daughters: given their low socioeconomic status, girls could not work before marriage and they could not marry unless they provide a dowry; therefore, they were a burden and a plight to their families. After killing her own newborn granddaughter, gravelly ill with pertussis, she crosses the line from pity to what she believes is useful and appropriate action, the 'mercy killing' of young girls. She kills three young girls in succession by throwing them into wells and then pretending to be trying to save them in order to justify her presence there. As coincidences keep piling up, she is confronted with a stark fact: her assumption that she was helping was monstrously wrong, and she gradually slips into mad torment. She flees arrest and tries to hide in the wilderness, but drowns in the sea while trying to escape two policemen on her trail; as Papadiamantis puts it, she meets 'death half-way between divine and human justice'. The character of the murderess is depicted with deep empathy and without condemnation. 'As a child, she served her parents. Once married, she was her husband's slave... when she had children, she served them, and when they had children, she became their slave'. Even her name tells the story of women in 19th century rural Greece: her birth name, Hadoula, 'tenderling', is all but forgotten; she now is the 'Fragkoyannoú', i.e. the widow of Yannis Fragkos, her whole existence referenced only to the name of her late, good-for-nothing husband. His work is seminal in Modern Greek literature: he is for Greek prose what Dionysios Solomos is for poetry. As Odysseas Elytis wrote: 'commemorate Dionysios Solomos, commemorate Alexander Papadiamantis'. It is a body of work, however, that is virtually impossible to translate, as the magic of his language is founded on the Greek diglossia: elaborately crafted, high Katharevousa for the narrative, interspersed with authentic local dialect for the dialogue, and with all dialectical elements used in the narrative formulated in strict Katharevousa, and therefore in forms that had never actually existed.
March 4, 1954
Irina Borisovna Ratushinskaya (4 March 1954, Odessa – 5 July 2017, Moscow) was a Russian Soviet dissident, poet and writer. Irina Ratushinskaya was born in Odessa, Ukraine on 4 March 1954. Her father was Boris Leonidovich, an engineer, and her mother was Irina Valentinovna Ratushinsky, a teacher of Russian literature. She has one sister. Her mother's family originated from Poland, and her great-grandfather was deported to Siberia shortly after the January Uprising, a Polish uprising against forced conscription in the Russian Army in 1863. Ratushinskaya was educated at Odessa University and graduated with a master's degree in physics in 1976. Before her graduation she taught at a primary school in Odessa from 1975–78. On 17 September 1982 Ratushinskaya was arrested for anti-Soviet agitation. In April 1983, she was convicted of "agitation carried on for the purpose of subverting or weakening the Soviet regime", and sentenced to seven years in a labor camp followed by five years of internal exile. After being imprisoned three and a half years, including one year in solitary confinement in an unheated cell while temperatures fell to minus 40C in the winter, she was released on 9 October 1986, on the eve of the summit in Reykjavík, Iceland between President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. While imprisoned Ratushinskaya continued to write poetry. Her previous works usually centered on love, Christian theology, and artistic creation, not on politics or policies as her accusers stated. Her new works that were written in prison, which were written with a matchstick on soap until memorized and then washed away, number some 250. They expressed an appreciation for human rights; liberty, freedom, and the beauty of life. Her memoir, Grey is the Colour of Hope, chronicles her prison experience. Her later poems recount her struggles to endure the hardships and horrors of prison life. Ratushinskaya was a member of International PEN, who monitored her situation during her incarceration. In 1987 Ratushinskaya moved to the United States, where she received the Religious Freedom Award from the Institute on Religion and Democracy. In the same year both Irina and her husband were deprived of Soviet citizenship by the Politburo. She also was the Poet in Residence at Northwestern University from 1987–89. She lived in London, UK until December 1998, when the family returned to Russia to educate their then seven year old twins in Russian schools after Irina and her husband went through a year of procedures including writing to President Boris Yeltsin to have their Russian citizenship restored. Ratushinskaya died in Moscow on 5 July 2017 from cancer. She was survived by her husband, human rights activist Igor Gerashchenko, and their two sons.
March 4, 1928
Alan Sillitoe (4 March 1928 – 25 April 2010) was a British writer and one of the ‘Angry Young Men‘ of the 1950s. He disliked the label, like most of the other writers to whom it was applied. Sillitoe was born in Nottingham, to working class parents. His 1st novel was SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING, published in 1958. While the book conveys the attitudes and situation of a young factory worker faced with the inevitable end of his youthful philandering, the novel's real subject was the disillusionment of postwar Britain, and the lack of opportunities for the working class. It was adapted as a film by Karel Reisz in 1960, with Albert Finney as Arthur Seaton. Sillitoe's story THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE RUNNER, which concerns the rebellion of a borstal boy with a talent for running, won the Hawthornden Prize in 1959. It was also adapted to film, in 1962, this time directed by Tony Richardson and starring Tom Courtenay. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997. On 25 April 2010 Sillitoe died at Charing Cross Hospital in London after a long battle with cancer.
March 4, 1946
MARCIO SOUZA was born in 1946 in Manaus, the Amazon region of Brazil. He began writing film criticism for newspapers when he was fourteen years old. He studied social sciences at the University of Sao Paulo. THE EMPEROR OF THE AMAZON, his first novel, was an extraordinary bestseller in Brazil and was serialized in a major Paris newspaper. Its pointed critique of Amazonian society cost him job with the Ministry of Culture. In 1967 he published a collection of film writings under the title Mostrador de Sombras (Show of Shadows). Souza is also a filmmaker and a dramatist. As a playwright, he works with Teatro Experimental do Sesc Amazonas, an important group fighting for the preservation and defense of the Amazon. His second novel, MAD MARIA, is also available from Avon/Bard Books in a translation by Thomas Colchie.
March 4, 1893
Frank Tannenbaum (4 March 1893 – 1 June 1969) was an Austrian-American historian, sociologist and criminologist, who made significant contributions to modern Mexican history during his career at Columbia University. Tannenbaum was born in Austria on 4 March 1893. His Eastern European Jewish family immigrated to the United States in 1905. He ran away from home as an adolescent and never finished high school. He worked at a number of menial jobs and became involved in radical labor politics of the era. As a young man, he worked a bus-boy. During the economic crisis of 1913–1915, he became a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World. In January 1914, Tannenbaum, then 21 years old and a member of the IWW-affiliated Waiter's Industrial Union, proposed a campaign of demanding relief from New York City churches. Starting in February, he led masses of workers to churches, disrupted services, and demanded that they be given food and shelter. Although most churches complied, the New York press, notably the New York Times, decried Tannenbaum and the Wobblies. On March 4, Tannenbaum led a group of unemployed workers from Rutgers Square to the Catholic St. Alphonsus Church on West Broadway. There, they were met by a phalanx of police and the parish rector, who refused their demands. Tannenbaum and 190 other protesters were arrested; Tannenbaum was charged with inciting to riot and given an extraordinary $5,000 bail. At trial one protester received 60 days in jail, four 30 days, three 15 days, and the rest were let go; Tannenbaum was sent to jail for a year and fined $500. He spent the year on Blackwell's Island. When he got out of jail, Tannenbaum remained active in the IWW, and he was arrested alongside Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Alexander Berkman during the Bayonne refinery strikes of 1915–1916, in Bayonne, New Jersey. Emma Goldman described his arrest and imprisonment in her memoirs, Living My Life (1931): We all had loved Frank for his wide-awakeness and his unassuming ways. He had spent much of his free time in our office, reading and helping in the work connected with Mother Earth. His fine qualities held out the hope that Frank would some day play an important part in the labour struggle. None of us had expected however that our studious, quiet friend would so quickly respond to the call of the hour. After Bayonne, Tannenbaum soon abandoned his youthful radicalism. With the help of several philanthropists, he attended Columbia University, where classmates included Samuel Roth. In 1921, Tannenbaum received his bachelor's degree from Columbia. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the Brookings Institution (undated). He then served in the U.S. Army, stationed in the south. He then moved to Mexico, where he conducted research on rural education and served as an adviser to President Lázaro Cárdenas. In 1931, he reported to the Wickersham Commission study on Penal Institutions, Probation and Parole (Volume 9). In 1932, he returned to the United States to teach criminology at Cornell University. In 1935 he joined the faculty at Columbia, where he became professor of Latin American history. A notable student at Columbia was Robert J. Alexander, who went on to become professor of history at Rutgers University, specializing in the trade union movement in Latin America and dissident communist political parties. He retired from Columbia University in 1965. He died in New York City in 1969. Tannenbaum helped formulate legislation that established the Farm Security Administration. His conception of the "Dramatization Of Evil" led to the further development of the symbolic interactionist labeling theory, widely used in both sociology and social psychology. Summarizing this theory's impact, Kerry Townsend has stated, "Frank Tannenbaum’s theory, dramatization of evil, explains the making of a criminal and the lure of criminal behavior." Townsend places Tannenbaum's theoretical thought within the theory of "Symbolic Interactionism," whose perspective emphasizes "individual levels of interaction, began to emerge spearheaded by the writings of George Herbert Mead and Charles Horton Cooley," which formed the basis of Societal Reaction theories of which Tannenbaum's form part. Tannenbaum's theory remains important in criminology studies at universities including Florida State University, the University of Maryland
March 4, 1953
Ozark born and Ozark bred DANIEL WOODRELL dropped out of school and joined the Marines at seventeen, got his college degree at twenty-seven, spent two years on a Michener fellowship at the Iowa Writers’ Workshops and saw his first novel published at thirty-three. Hailed as a writer’s writer, he is known for his stylistic virtuosity as well as for his special sense of place and for characters that are simultaneously unique and universal. GIVE US A KISS is his fifth and finest novel.
March 4, 1951
Neale Sheila Godfrey is an American author. Her books deal with money, life skills, and value issues. One of them, Money Doesn't Grow on Trees: A Parent's Guide to Raising Financially Responsible Children, was a New York Times #1 Best Seller.
March 4, 1953
Geoff J. Nicholson (born 4 March 1953) is a British novelist and non-fiction writer. Geoff J. Nicholson was born in Hillsborough, Sheffield studied English at Gonville and Caius College Cambridge, and Modern European Drama at the University of Essex. He is generally regarded as a satirist in the tradition of Evelyn Waugh, his writing also being compared favorably with that of Kinsgley and Martin Amis, Jonathan Coe, Will Self and Zadie Smith. The main themes and features of his books include leading characters with major obsessions, sexual and otherwise (guitars, Volkswagens, women's feet and shoes), interweaving storylines and hidden subcultures and societies. His books usually contain a lot of black humour. He has also written several works of non-fiction and many short stories. His novel Bleeding London was shortlisted for the 1997 Whitbread Prize. His novel What We Did on Our Holidays was made into the movie Permanent Vacation, featuring David Carradine, directed by W. Scott Peake. He was a member of the delegation of Los Angeles writers and filmmakers invited by the National Endowment for the Arts to participate in the Guadalajara International Book Festival in 2009.
March 5, 1896
Lotte H. Eisner (5 March 1896, in Berlin – 25 November 1983, in Paris) was a German-French writer, film critic, archivist and curator. Eisner worked initially as a film critic in Berlin, then in Paris where in 1936 she met Henri Langlois with whom she founded the Cinémathèque Française.
March 5, 1944
Roy Gutman (born March 5, 1944) is Istanbul-based American journalist and author. In 1966, Gutman graduated from Haverford College with a major in History. In 1968, Gutman graduated from the London School of Economics with a master's degree in International Relations. Roy Gutman joined Newsday in January 1982 and served for eight years as National Security Reporter in Washington. While European Bureau Chief, from 1989–94, he reported on the downfall of the Polish, East German, and Czechoslovak regimes, the opening of the Berlin Wall, the unification of Germany, the first democratic elections in the former Eastern Bloc, and the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia.
March 5, 1924
Christopher Hibbert MC (5 March 1924 – 21 December 2008), born Arthur Raymond Hibbert, was an English writer, historian and biographer. He has been called 'a pearl of biographers' (New Statesman) and 'probably the most widely-read popular historian of our time and undoubtedly one of the most prolific' (The Times). Hibbert was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the author of many books, including The Story of England, Disraeli, Edward VII, George IV, The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici, and Cavaliers and Roundheads.
March 5, 1965
A. Van Jordan, visiting assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina, lives in Greensboro. His previous book, Rise, won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award.
March 5, 1922
Sandor Kopacsi (March 5, 1922, Miskolc, Hungary - March 2, 2001, Toronto, Canada) was born in Miskoic, Hungary in 1922. He fought in the anti-Nazi Communist underground during World War II and, like many of his countrymen, welcomed the Soviets as liberators at the end of the war. As a third-generation metalworker, Kopacsi had excellent proletarian credentials and became a rising star of the postwar Hungarian Communist Party, which appointed him police chief of Budapest in 1952, at age thirty. For his participation in the Hungarian revolution, he received a life sentence and served seven harsh years before being released under a general amnesty in 1963. After twelve more years of harassment and surveillance, he was finally allowed to emigrate to Canada.
March 5, 1940
David Sherman Lamb (March 5, 1940 – June 5, 2016) was a freelance writer who traveled the world for twenty-five years as a Los Angeles Times correspondent. He left the paper in 2004 after 34 years and then freelanced. David Lamb was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He graduated from the University of Maine's School of Journalism in 1962, where he was a member of Beta Theta Pi. He began his career with The Okinawa Morning Star, then moved on to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and the Oakland Tribune. He then joined United Press International in San Francisco and Denver; from 1968 to 1970, he worked as a battlefront correspondent in Saigon. He joined the Los Angeles Times in 1970 and was based in Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C., as well as being bureau chief in Sydney, Nairobi, Cairo and Hanoi. He covered the fall of Saigon in April 1975 on a temporary assignment for The Los Angeles Times. He was a Nieman Fellow, an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellow (1985), a Pew Fellow and a writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California's School of Journalism. He is believed to be the only U.S. newspaper correspondent from the Vietnam War to later live in peacetime Hanoi, Vietnam. He married his partner, Sandy Northrop, in Nairobi in 1977.
March 5, 1967
Jorge Loriga Torrenova, better known as Ray Loriga, is a Spanish author, screenwriter, and director. His first novel Lo Peor de todo, was published in 1992, and was followed by Héroes in 1993. Caídos del Cielo is the first of his novels to be published in English, and he directed a film based on this book in 1997.
March 5, 1870
Benjamin Franklin Norris, Jr. (March 5, 1870 – October 25, 1902) was an American novelist during the Progressive Era, writing predominantly in the naturalist genre. His notable works include McTeague (1899), The Octopus: A Story of California (1901), and The Pit (1903).
March 5, 1922
Pier Paolo Pasolini (5 March 1922 – 2 November 1975) was an Italian film director, poet, writer and intellectual. Pasolini distinguished himself as a poet, journalist, philosopher, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, newspaper and magazine columnist, actor, painter and political figure. He demonstrated a unique and extraordinary cultural versatility, becoming a highly controversial figure in the process. While his work remains controversial to this day, in the years since his death Pasolini has come to be valued by many as a visionary thinker and a major figure in Italian literature and art.
March 5, 1853
Howard Pyle (March 5, 1853 – November 9, 1911) was an American illustrator and author, primarily of books for young people.
March 5, 1932
Michael Rumaker is an American author (born March 5, 1932 in Philadelphia, PA), to Michael Joseph and Winifred Marvel Rumaker. He is a graduate of Black Mountain College (1955) and Columbia University (1970). Most of Rumaker's fiction concerns his life as a gay man. His short stories, GRINGOS AND OTHER STORIES, appeared in 1967. A revised and expanded version appeared in 1991. He began to write directly about his life as a gay man in the volumes A DAY AND A NIGHT AT THE BATHS (1979) and MY FIRST SATYRNALIA (1981). The novel PAGAN DAYS (1991) is told from the perspective of an eight-year old boy struggling to understand his gay self. Black Mountain Days, a memoir of his time at Black Mountain College, has a strong autobiographical element In addition, there are portraits of many students, faculty, and visitors (especially the poets Robert Creeley and Charles Olson) during its last years, 1952-1956.
March 5, 1948
Leslie Marmon Silko (born Leslie Marmon; born March 5, 1948) is a Native American writer of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, and one of the key figures in the First Wave of what literary critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance. Silko was a debut recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Grant, now known as the 'Genius Grant', in 1981 and the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994. She currently resides in Tucson, Arizona.
March 5, 1946
Martin Levi van Creveld (born 5 March 1946) is an Israeli military historian and theorist.
March 5, 1910
Ennio Flaiano (5 March 1910 – 20 November 1972), was an Italian screenwriter, playwright, novelist, journalist and drama critic. Best known for his work with Federico Fellini, Flaiano co-wrote ten screenplays with the Italian director, including La Strada (1954), La Dolce Vita (1960), and 8½.
March 5, 1894
Josep Maria de Sagarra (March 5, 1894 - September 27, 1961) - Catalan Balzac, journalist, theater critic, translator, poet, and novelist—was a force of nature who produced volumes of poetry, drama, essays, and three major novels, which have made him one of the most popular and loved voices of Catalan literature. After winning his first poetry prize in the Juegos Florales, he decided to devote his life to literature. His translated works include Dante’s Divine Comedy and plays by Shakepespeare, Molière, and Gogol. He was a member of the Institute of Catalan Studies, the Academy of Letters, the General Council of Authors of Spain, and the council of the Grand Cross of the Civil Order of Alfonso X the Wise.
March 6, 1913
Ana María Barrenechea (Buenos Aires , March 6, 1913 - October 4, 2010 ) was a Argentine writer, linguist and literary critic.
March 6, 1933
William Blum (born 6 March 1933) is an American author, historian, and critic of United States foreign policy. He worked in a computer related position at the United States Department of State in the mid-1960s. Initially an anti-communist with dreams of becoming a foreign service officer, he became disillusioned by the Vietnam War. He lives in Washington, DC. Blum left the State Department in 1967 and became a founder and editor of the Washington Free Press, the first "alternative" newspaper in the capital. In 1969, he wrote and published an exposé of the CIA in which were revealed the names and addresses of more than 200 CIA employees. He has worked as freelance journalist in the United States, Europe and South America. In 1972–1973 Blum worked as a journalist in Chile where he reported on the Allende government's "socialist experiment". In the mid-1970s, he worked in London with ex-CIA officer Philip Agee and his associates "on their project of exposing CIA personnel and their misdeeds". He supports himself with his writing and speaking engagements on college campuses. In his books and online columns, Blum devotes substantial attention to CIA interventions and assassination plots. Noam Chomsky has called Blum's book on the CIA, "far and away the best book on the topic." He has supported Ralph Nader's presidential campaigns. He circulates a monthly newsletter by email called "The Anti-Empire Report". Blum has described his life's mission as: "If not ending, at least slowing down the American Empire. At least injuring the beast. It's causing so much suffering around the world."
March 6, 1872
Johan Bojer (born Johan Christoffer Hansen 6 March 1872 – 3 July 1959) was a popular Norwegian novelist and dramatist. He principally wrote about the lives of the poor farmers and fishermen, both in his native Norway and among the Norwegian immigrants in the United States. Bojer was born Johan Kristoffer Hansen in the village of Ørkedalsøren, now the town of Orkanger, Sør-Trøndelag county. The son of unmarried parents, he grew up as a foster child in a poor family living in Rissa near Trondheim, Norway. Bojer learned early the realities of poverty. His early years were spent working on a farm and working as a bookkeeper. After the death of his father in 1894, he took the name Bojer. His literary work began with the publication of Unge tanker in 1893, and continued to gather strength through the 1920s. Because of the range of topics he addressed, he won critical acclaim in Norway. He gained international fame after many of his works were published in foreign languages. Critics generally recognize his best work to be his novel, Den siste viking, (English title: The Last of the Vikings). This novel powerfully and realistically depicts the lives of fishermen from Trøndelag, who spend the winter fishing in the Lofoten island archipelago within the Arctic Circle near the far north coast of Norway. Bojer is best remembered for The Emigrants, a major novel dealing with the motivations and trials of Norwegians emigrated on the plains of North Dakota. In 1923, Bojer journeyed to Litchville, North Dakota, to research the lives of the Norwegian immigrants who had settled there. The result of his visit became a novel originally published in Norway as Vor egen stamme . Bojer's novel of Norwegian homesteaders in the 1880s tells of young villagers who leave the Old World to seek a better life. Their trek takes them to homesteads in LaMoure County, south of Litchville, North Dakota, where they find that breaking the sod and surviving blizzards are easier than feeling at home in this new land.
March 6, 1944
Richard Nelson Corliss (March 6, 1944 – April 23, 2015) was an American film critic and magazine editor for Time. As a publisher, he mainly focused on movies, with occasional articles on other subjects. He was the former editor-in-chief of Film Comment and author of three books, including Talking Pictures, which, along with other publications, drew early attention to the screenwriter, as opposed to the director.
March 6, 1619
Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac (March 6, 1619 - July 28, 1655) was a French novelist, playwright, epistolarian and duelist. A bold and innovative author, his work was part of the libertine literature of the first half of the seventeenth century. Today he is best known as the inspiration for Edmond Rostand's most noted drama Cyrano de Bergerac, which, although it includes elements of his life, also contains invention and myth. Since the 1970s, there has been a resurgence in the study of Cyrano, demonstrated in the abundance of theses, essays, articles and biographies published in France and elsewhere in recent decades.
March 6, 1940
Wessel Ebersohn was born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1940. He went to school in Cape Town and Somerset West. At the age of 15 he left school to become a pupil telecommunications technician. His first book to be published was A LONELY PLACE TO DIE in 1977. The rest of his eleven titles have followed in the years since then.
March 6, 1928
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ was born in Aracataca, Colombia, in 1928. He attended the University of Bogota and later worked as a reporter for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador and as a foreign correspondent in Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Caracas, and New York. He is the author of many novels and collections of stories-including NO ONE WRITES TO THE COLONEL AND OTHER STORIES, THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH, INNOCENT ERËNDIRA AND OTHER STORIES, IN EVIL HOUR, LEAF STORM AND OTHER STORIES, CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD, LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA, and ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE. Garcia Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.
March 6, 1929
Fazil Abdulovich Iskander (born 6 March 1929, Sukhumi, USSR) is an Abkhaz writer, known in the former Soviet Union for his descriptions of Caucasian life, mostly written in Russian. He has written various stories, most famously 'Zashita Chika', which star a crafty and likable young boy named 'Chik'.
March 6, 1953
Jan Kjaerstad made his debut as a writer in 1980 with a short story collection, The Earth Turns Quietly. The three books making up the Wergeland trilogy—The Seducer, The Conqueror, and The Discoverer—have achieved huge international success, and led to Kjaerstad receiving the Nordic Prize for Literature in 2001. He has also received Germany’s Henrik Steffen Prize for Scandinavians who have significantly enriched Europe’s artistic and intellectual life. Barbara Haveland was born in Scotland, and now lives in Denmark with her Norwegian husband and teenage son. She has translated works by several leading Danish and Norwegian authors, including Peter Høeg, Linn Ullmann, and Leif Davidsen.
March 6, 1885
Ring Lardner (March 6, 1885, Niles, MI - September 25, 1933, East Hampton, NY) was one of the most popular and innovative American writers of the early twentieth century. He influenced many writers who followed, his acute observations won praise from Hemingway, Woolf, Fitzgerald, and Wilson, and his short stories remain popular a century later. Ron Rapoport was a sports columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and the Los Angeles Daily News and is the author of numerous books about sports and show business. In 2016 he was awarded the Ring Lardner Award for Excellence in Sports Journalism. James Lardner is a writer and political activist who lives outside Washington DC.
March 6, 1927
Seymour Menton (March 6, 1927 - March 8, 2014) was Chairman of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Irvine, and a recipient of the UCI Distinguished Faculty Lectureship Award for 1980. He has been widely published with over seventy-five articles and reviews on the Latin American novel and short story.
March 6, 1928
WILLIAM F. NOLAN is the author of several biographies, novels (including LOGAN’S RUN), and other books, as well as many motion-picture and television screenplays. His DASHIELL HAMMETT: A CASEBOOK - called ‘authoritative and invaluable’ by the Los Angeles Times - won the Edgar Allan Poe Special Award.
March 6, 1949
Stephen J. Pyne is a professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, specializing in environmental history, the history of exploration, and the history of fire.
March 6, 1914
Daphne Marie Rooke (née Pizzey) (6 March 1914 – 21 January 2009) was a South African author of works such as 'Mittee', 'Ratoons' and 'Wizards' Country'. She also wrote travel articles and books for children set in India, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.
March 6, 1927
Samuel Schoenbaum (6 March 1927 – 27 March 1996) was a leading 20th century Shakespearean biographer and scholar. Born in New York, Schoenbaum taught at Northwestern University from 1953 to 1975, serving for the last four years of this period as the Frank Bliss Snyder Professor of English Literature. He later taught at the City University of New York (1975-6). He was the Distinguished Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Maryland (1976–93), director of UMD's Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies (1981–96), president of the Shakespeare Association of America, vice president of the International Shakespeare Association, and editor of the journal Renaissance Drama. At one point in his career he was a trustee of the Folger Shakespeare Library and was an American consultant for the Oxford University Shakespeare Project. He managed to uncover previously unrecorded manuscripts and biographical records pertaining not only to Shakespeare but also to other writers, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Schoenbaum married the former Marilyn Turk in 1946. In his later years he suffered from multiple sclerosis. He died of prostate cancer in Washington, DC in 1996.
March 6, 1926
Andrzej Wajda (born 6 March 1926) is a Polish film director. Recipient of an honorary Oscar, he is possibly the most prominent member of the unofficial 'Polish Film School' (active c. 1955 to 1963). He is known especially for a trilogy of war films: A Generation (1954), Kana? (1956) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958). Four of his films have been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film: The Promised Land (1975), The Maids of Wilko (1979), Man of Iron (1981), and Katy? (2007).
March 6, 1967
GLENN GREENWALD (born March 6, 1967) is the author of several best sellers, including 'How Would a Patriot Act?' and 'With Liberty and Justice for Some.' Acclaimed as one of the 25 most influential political commentators by 'The Atlantic' and one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013 by 'Foreign Policy,' Greenwald is a former constitutional law and civil rights attorney. He was a columnist for 'The Guardian' until October 2013, and is now building a new media organization. He is a frequent guest on CNN, MSNBC, and various other television and radio outlets. Greenwald's NSA reporting in 2013 has won numerous awards, including the top investigative journalism award from the Online Journalism Association, the Esso Award for Excellence in Reporting (the Brazilian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize), and the 2013 Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He was also the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2009, and the Online Journalism Association Award in 2010 for his investigative work on the arrest and detention of Bradley Manning. Greenwald is a frequent guest lecturer on college campuses and his work has appeared in many newspapers and political news magazines, including 'The New York Times,' the 'Los Angeles Times,' and 'The American Conservative.'
March 6, 1973
Award-winning Egyptian novelist Reem Bassiouney is an associate professor at the American University in Cairo, having taught at Cambridge, Oxford, and Utah. She writes widely on gender and linguistics. She lives in Cairo, Egypt. An adjunct professor at the University of Rhode Island, translator Melanie Magidow's research draws on literature and folklore. She lives in New York.
March 6, 1969
FREDERICK LUIS ALDAMA is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English and University Distinguished Scholar at The Ohio State University. He is founder and director of LASER, a mentoring and research hub for Latinos, and the author, co-author, and editor of twenty-six books, including Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez and The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez.
March 6, 1928
Ernesto Sabato (June 24, 1911 – April 30, 2011) was an Argentine novelist, essayist, painter and physicist. Upon his death El País dubbed him the "last classic writer in Argentine literature".
March 7, 1924
KOBO ABE (1924-1993) was one of Japan's most prominent contemporary writers. Born in Japan but raised in Manchuria, he is perhaps best known for his 1962 novel, THE WOMAN IN THE DUNES, though he was also a prominent screenwriter, producer, and director. Like Samuel Beckett's and Eugene Ionesco's, Abe's plays address universal and contemporary concerns, often with an eye for the absurd. While his American reputation rests largely on his fictional works, Abe was one of the best-known playwrights in Japan. For many years he ran his own theater company, which presented highly accomplished productions of his works.
March 7, 1958
Rick Bass (born March 7, 1958) is an American writer and an environmental activist.
March 7, 1952
William Boyd (born 7 March 1952) is a British novelist and screenwriter resident in London. Boyd was born in Accra, Ghana, and spent his early life in Ghana and Nigeria. He was educated at Gordonstoun school; and then the University of Nice, France, the University of Glasgow, and finally Jesus College, Oxford. Between 1980 and 1983 he was a lecturer in English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, and it was while he was there that his first novel, A Good Man in Africa (1981), was published. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2005. Although his novels have been short-listed for major prizes, he has never had the same publicity as his contemporaries. Boyd was selected in 1983 as one of the 20 ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ in a promotion run by Granta magazine and the Book Marketing Council. Boyd's novels include: A Good Man in Africa, a study of a disaster-prone British diplomat operating in West Africa, for which he won the Whitbread Book award and Somerset Maugham Award in 1981; An Ice-Cream War, set against the background of the World War I campaigns in colonial East Africa, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was nominated for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1982; Brazzaville Beach, published in 1991, which follows a female scientist researching chimpanzee behaviour in Africa; and Any Human Heart, written in the form of the journals of a fictitious twentieth century British writer, which was long-listed for the Booker Prize in 2002. Restless, the tale of a young woman who discovers that her mother had been recruited as a spy during World War II, was published in 2006 and won the Novel Award in the 2006 Costa Book Awards. Boyd published Waiting for Sunrise: A Novel in early 2012. On 11 April 2012 it was announced that Boyd would write the next James Bond novel. Boyd says the book, Solo, will be set in 1969. Jonathan Cape will publish the book in the UK in the autumn of 2013. Boyd used James Bond creator Ian Fleming as a character in his novel Any Human Heart. Fleming recruits the book's protagonist, Logan Mountstuart, to naval intelligence during World War Two. Boyd has also worked with three of the actors who have portrayed Bond in the film series: Sean Connery, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig. As a screenwriter Boyd has written a number of feature film and television productions. The feature films include: Scoop (1987), adapted from the Evelyn Waugh novel; Stars and Bars (1988), adapted from Boyd's own novel; Mister Johnson (1990), based on the 1939 novel by Joyce Cary; A Good Man in Africa (1994), also adapted from his own novel; and The Trench (1999) which he also directed. He was one of a number of writers who worked on Chaplin (1992). His television screenwriting credits include: Good and Bad at Games (1983), adapted from Boyd's short story about English public school life; Dutch Girls (1985); Armadillo (2001), adapted from his own novel; A Waste of Shame (2005) about Shakespeare; Any Human Heart (2010), adapted from his own novel; and Restless (2012), also adapted from his own novel. In 1998, Boyd published Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960, which presents the paintings and tragic biography of a supposed New York-based 1950s abstract expressionist painter named Nat Tate, who actually never existed and was, along with his paintings, a creation of Boyd's. When the book was initially published, it was not revealed that it was a work of fiction, and some were duped by the hoax; it was launched at a lavish party, with excerpts read by David Bowie (who was in on the joke), and a number of prominent members of the art world claimed to remember the artist. It caused quite a stir once the truth was revealed. The name ‘Nat Tate’ is derived from the names of the two leading British art galleries: the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery. Nat Tate also appears in Any Human Heart, also by Boyd, with a wry footnote to the 1998 book. Boyd adapted two Anton Chekhov short stories - A Visit to Friends and My Life (The Story of a Provincial) - to create the play Longing. The play, directed by Nina Raine, stars Jonathan Bailey, Tamsin Greig, Natasha Little, Eve Ponsonby, John Sessions and Catrin Stewart. Boyd, who was theatre critic for the University of Glasgow in the 1970s and has many actor friends, refers to his ambition to write a play as finally getting ‘this monkey off my back.’
March 7, 1950
Kevin Danaher is an author and anti-globalization activist. With his wife Medea Benjamin and activist Kirsten Irgens-Moller, he co-founded Global Exchange, a social justice and anti-globalization non-governmental organization based in San Francisco, California. He is the founder and executive co-producer of the Green Festivals and he is executive Director of the Global Citizen Center. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
March 7, 1908
A.W. Reed wrote many books on topics such as myths, language and place names of both M?ori and Australian Aboriginal culture.
March 7, 1950
Ágnes Hankiss (orig. Ágnes Erd?s born 7 March 1950, in Budapest) is a Hungarian politician and elected Member of the European Parliament with Fidesz, a member of the European People's Party.
March 7, 1929
Professor Dan Jacobson was born on 7 March 1929 in Johannesburg, South Africa, and was educated at Kimberley Boys' High School and the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. After the publication of his first two novels, The Trap (1955) and A Dance in the Sun (1956), he was awarded a one-year Creative Writing Fellowship at Stanford University (1956-7). From 1965-6 he was Visiting Professor at Syracuse University, New York, and he was Reader in English at University College London between 1979 and 1986, and Professor of English until 1994 (Professor Emeritus since 1994). A Long Way from London, a collection of short stories published in 1958, won the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and his collection Time of Arrival and Other Essays (1963) won a Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Evidence of Love (1960), The Beginners (1966), The Rape of Tamar (1970), The Confessions of Joseph Baisz (1977), which won the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Fiction, Hidden in the Heart (1991), and The God-Fearer (1992). His volume of autobiography, Time and Time Again: Autobiographies (1985), won the J. R. Ackerley Prize. His books, The Electronic Elephant: A Southern African Journey (1994) and Heshel's Kingdom (1998), are eclectic in form, combining public history, private memoir and accounts of journeys made in southern Africa and Lithuania respectively.
March 7, 1947
Andrzej Krauze (born 7 March 1947) is a Polish-born British cartoonist, illustrator, caricaturist, painter, poster designer and satirist noted for his allegorical, fabulous, symbolic and sometimes scary imagery, as well as his reliance on black ink, bold lines and cross-hatching. His illustrations have been a regular fixture in the British national daily newspaper The Guardian since 1989, and he has also contributed to the English-language newspapers and magazines The New York Times, The Sunday Telegraph, The Times, International Herald Tribune, New Scientist, The Independent on Sunday, The Bookseller, New Statesman, Modern Painters, Campaign, The Listener, New Society and Story Teller. He won the Victoria and Albert Museum Award for Illustration in 1996, and the Ranan Lurie Political Cartoon Award in 2003.
March 7, 1922
Mochtar Lubis (Padang, Indonesia March 7, 1922 – July 2, 2004, Jakarta) was an Indonesian Batak journalist and novelist who co-founded Indonesia Raya. His novel Senja di Jakarta (Twilight in Jakarta in English) was the first Indonesian novel to be translated into English. He was a critic of Sukarno and was imprisoned by him. He has been described as a 'renaissance man par excellence.' Lubis was born on March 7, 1922 in Padang, West Sumatra to Raja Pandapotan Lubis, a high-ranking civil servant, and his wife. He was the sixth child of twelve. As a child, Lubis wrote children's stories which were published in Sinar Deli, a Medan-based newspaper. When he was an adolescent, Mochtar Lubis often trekked into the jungles of Sumatra. Lubis later wrote that two events during this period, seeing a well-built yet abandoned hut and having a close call with a tiger, served partly as his inspiration for Harimau! Harimau! After graduating from high school, Lubis worked as a teacher in Nias, North Sumatra. However, after a year he left for Batavia, where he worked at a bank. When World War II broke out and the Japanese occupied Indonesia in 1942, Lubis began working for the Japanese, translating international news for the Japanese army. After Indonesia declared its independence in 1945, Lubis joined the Indonesian news agency Antara as a reporter. With Antara, he covered the Asian Relations Conference in 1947. During this same period he wrote Jalan Tak Ada Ujung and joined the Indonesian Visual Artists Association. In 1949, Lubis cofounded Indonesia Raya, later serving as the daily's chief editor. His work with Indonesia Raya led to him being imprisoned numerous times for his critical writing, including in Madiun, East Java, from 1957 - 1966. On 4 February 1975, Lubis was arrested in relation to the 1974 riots during the visit of Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka; Indonesia Raya was also shut down not long after the riots due to their reporting of the Pertamina corruption scandal. Lubis spent over two months in Nirbaya prison without trial and was released on 14 April 1975. He noted that other prisoners, such as former Indonesian Air Force chief Omar Dani, had been imprisoned without trial for years. Lubis founded and co-founded numerous magazines and foundations, including the Obor Indonesia Foundation in 1970, Horison magazine, and the Indonesian Green Foundation. Lubis was also outspoken about the need for freedom of the press in Indonesia and gained a reputation as an honest, no-nonsense reporter. In 2000, he was named as one of the International Press Institute's 50 World Press Freedom Heroes of the past 50 years. After a long struggle against Alzheimer's disease Lubis died in Medistra Hospital on 2 July 2004 at age 82. He was buried with next to his wife in Jeruk Purut Cemetery. His funeral was attended by hundreds, including journalists and writers Rosihan Anwar, Aristiddes Katoppo and Ramadhan KH. Lubis was married to Siti Halimah, who died in 2001. Together they had three children, who produced eight grandchildren. During his time as a widower, Lubis said that he could never love another woman. Lubis was an avid practitioner of yoga, which he started practicing in prison. In 1958, Lubis shared the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and the Creative Communication Arts with Robert Dick. Lubis's novel Harimau! Harimau! was named Best Book by Yayasan Buku Utama, a part of the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture, in 1975, and an award from Yayasan Jaya Raya in 1979. Lubis has been described as a 'renaissance man par excellence' and a 'press freedom champion'. Numerous publications have been written describing him and his works.
March 7, 1785
Alessandro Francesco Tommaso Manzoni (7 March 1785 – 22 May 1873) was an Italian poet and novelist. He is famous for the novel The Betrothed (orig. Italian: I Promessi Sposi) (1827), generally ranked among the masterpieces of world literature. The novel is also a symbol of the Italian Risorgimento, both for its patriotic message and because it was a fundamental milestone in the development of the modern, unified Italian language
March 7, 1850
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (7 March 1850 – 14 September 1937), was a Czech politician, statesman, sociologist and philosopher. After trying to reform the Austro-Hungarian monarchy into a federal state, with the help of the Allied Powers, he eventually succeeded in gaining Czechoslovak independence as a republic after World War I. He both founded and was the first President of Czechoslovakia and so is called the "President Liberator".
March 7, 1936
Georges Perec (7 March 1936 – 3 March 1982) was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. Perec was born the only son of Icek Judko and Cyrla (Schulewicz) Peretz – Polish Jews who had emigrated to France in the 1920s – in a working-class district of Paris. He was a distant relative of the Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz. Perec's father, who enlisted in the French Army during World War II, died in 1940 from unattended gunfire or shrapnel wounds, and Perec's mother perished in the Nazi Holocaust, probably in Auschwitz after 1943. Perec was taken into the care of his paternal aunt and uncle in 1942, and in 1945 he was formally adopted by them. He started writing reviews and essays for La Nouvelle Revue française and Les Lettres nouvelles, prominent literary publications, while studying history and sociology at the Sorbonne. In 1958/59 Perec served in the army (XVIIIe Régiment de Chasseurs Parachutistes), and married Paulette Petras after being discharged. They spent one year (1960/1961) in Sfax (Tunisia), where Paulette worked as a teacher. In 1961, Perec began working at the Neurophysiological Research Laboratory in the unit's research library funded by the CNRS and attached to the Hôpital Saint-Antoine as an archivist, a low-paid position which he retained until 1978. A few reviewers have noted that the daily handling of records and varied data may have had an influence on his literary style. In any case, Perec's work on the reassesment of the academic journals under subscription was influenced by a talk about the handling of scientific information given by Eugene Garfield in Paris and he was introduced to Marshall McLuhan by Jean Duvignaud. Perec's other major influence was the Oulipo, which he joined in 1967, meeting Raymond Queneau, among others. Perec dedicated his masterpiece, La Vie mode d'emploi (Life A User's Manual) to Queneau, who died before it was published. Perec began working on a series of radio plays with his translator Eugen Helmle and the musician Philippe Drogoz in the late 60s; less than a decade later, he was making films. His first work, based on his novel Un Homme qui dort, was co-directed by Bernard Queysanne, and won him the Prix Jean Vigo in 1974. Perec also created crossword puzzles for Le Point from 1976 on. La Vie mode d'emploi (1978) brought Perec some financial and critical success—it won the Prix Médicis—and allowed him to turn to writing full-time. He was a writer in residence at the University of Queensland, Australia in 1981, during which time he worked on the unfinished 53 Jours (53 Days). Shortly after his return from Australia, his health deteriorated. A heavy smoker, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died the following year, only forty-five years old; his ashes are held at the columbarium of the Père Lachaise Cemetery. Many of his novels and essays abound with experimental word play, lists and attempts at classification, and they are usually tinged with melancholy. Perec's first novel, Les Choses (Things: A Story of the Sixties) was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 1965. His most famous novel, La Vie mode d'emploi (Life A User's Manual), was published in 1978. Its title page describes it as ‘novels’, in the plural, the reasons for which become apparent on reading. La Vie mode d'emploi is an immensely complex and rich work; a tapestry of interwoven stories and ideas as well as literary and historical allusions, based on the lives of the inhabitants of a fictitious Parisian apartment block. It was written according to a complex plan of writing constraints, and is primarily constructed from several elements, each adding a layer of complexity. The 99 chapters of his 600-page novel, move like a knight's tour of a chessboard around the room plan of the building, describing the rooms and stairwell and telling the stories of the inhabitants. At the end, it is revealed that the whole book actually takes place in a single moment, with a final twist that is an example of ‘cosmic irony’. It was translated into English by David Bellos in 1987. Some critics have cited the work as an example of postmodern fiction. Perec is noted for his constrained writing: his 300-page novel La disparition (1969) is a lipogram, written without ever using the letter ‘e’. It has been translated into English by Gilbert Adair under the title A Void (1994). The silent disappearance of the letter might be considered a metaphor for the Jewish experience during the Second World War. Since the name ‘Georges Perec’ is full of ‘e’s, the disappearance of the letter also ensures the author's own ‘disappearance’. His novella Les revenentes (1972) is a complementary univocalic piece in which the letter ‘e’ is the only vowel used. This constraint affects even the title, which would conventionally be spelt Revenantes. An English translation by Ian Monk was published in 1996 as The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex in the collection Three. It has been remarked by Jacques Roubaud that these two novels draw words from two disjoint sets of the French language, and that a third novel would be possible, made from the words not used so far (those containing both ‘e’ and a vowel other than ‘e’). W ou le souvenir d'enfance, (W, or the Memory of Childhood, 1975) is a semi-autobiographical work which is hard to classify. Two alternating narratives make up the volume: one, a fictional outline of a totalitarian island country called ‘W’, patterned partly on life in a concentration camp; and the second, descriptions of childhood. Both merge towards the end when the common theme of The Holocaust is explained. ‘Cantatrix sopranica L. Scientific Papers’ is a spoof scientific paper detailing experiments on the ‘yelling reaction’ provoked in sopranos by pelting them with rotten tomatoes. All the references in the paper are multi-lingual puns and jokes, e.g. ‘(Karybb & Szyla, 1973)’. David Bellos, who has translated several of Perec's works, wrote an extensive biography of Perec: Georges Perec: A Life in Words, which won the Académie Goncourt's bourse for biography in 1994. The Association Georges Perec has extensive archives on the author in Paris. In 2013, Perec's initially rejected novel ‘Gaspar pas mort’ (Gaspar is not dead), which was believed to be lost, was found by David Bellos amongst papers in the house of Perec's friend Alain Guérin. Asteroid no. 2817, discovered in 1982, was named after Perec. In 1994, a street in the 20th arrondissement of Paris was named after him, rue Georges-Perec. The French postal service issued a stamp in 2002 in his honour; it was designed by Marc Taraskoff and engraved by Pierre Albuisson. For his work, Perec won the Prix Renaudot in 1965, the Prix Jean Vigo in 1974, the Prix Médicis in 1978.
March 7, 1978
Saša Staniši? (born 7 March 1978) is a Bosnian-German writer. He was born in Visegrad, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and moved to Germany as a refugee of the Bosnian War when he was 14 years old. He has written an acclaimed novel in German which was published in English under the title How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone. The book won a host of prizes in Germany and abroad, and has been translated into several European languages. The English translation was done by Anthea Bell and won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. It was also adapted for the stage by the Stadtschauspielhaus Graz, where Staniši? was the city’s writer-in-residence. He has also written the novel Before the Feast (2016), published in English translation by Anthea Bell (Tin House Books).
March 7, 1903
WILLIAM YORK TINDALL (March 7, 1903, Williamstown, VT - September 8, 1981, Salisbury, MD) wa Professor of English in the Graduate School of Columbia University. He is the author of Forces in Modern British Literature, 1885- 1946 and The Literary Symbol, as well as books on D. H. Lawrence, Samuel Beckett, William Butler Yeats, and Dylan Thomas. Professor Tindall was one of the first to give a university course entirely devoted to the work of James Joyce. As Allen Ginsberg wrote, speaking of the teaching of modem literature at Columbia, ‘Whitman was hardly taught and was considered like a creep. Shelley was a creep, too . . . Joyce and Lawrence were the property of funny modernist cats like William York Tindall, who were considered eccentric by the rest of the faculty.’ Professor Tindall was awarded an honorary LL.D. from lona College in June 1968 for ‘services to Joyce.’
March 8, 1938
Jeremy Brecher is an historian, documentary filmmaker, activist, and author of books on labor and social movements. His notable literary works include Cornwall in Pictures: A Visual reminiscence, 1868-1941, which was favourably reviewed by the New York Times; and Global Village or Global Pillage?, written with Tim Costello. Brecher served as historian for the Naugatuck Valley Project, a community coalition formed in 1986 to confront plant closings and deindustrialization. From 1989 to 2001 he served as Humanities Scholar-in-Residence at Connecticut Public Television and Radio. From 1991-1995, he was producer, writer, and host of Connecticut Public Radio's Remembering Connecticut. In 1998, Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) hired Brecher to work for him on globalization issues. Together with Sanders staff member Brendan Smith, they developed the Global Sustainable Development Resolution which provided a comprehensive program for transforming the global economy based on the programs of a wide range of public interest organizations and policy analysts. Brecher resigned from Rep. Sanders' staff when Sanders voted to support a resolution authorizing air strikes against Serbia.
March 8, 1911
Fred James Cook (March 8, 1911 – April 4, 2003) was an American investigative journalist whose prime years of reporting spanned from the 1950s to the late 1970s. His 1964 exposé, The FBI Nobody Knows, was central to the plot of one of Rex Stout's most popular Nero Wolfe novels, The Doorbell Rang (1965).
March 8, 1937
Richard George Fariña (March 8, 1937 – April 30, 1966) was an American folksinger, songwriter, poet and novelist.
March 8, 1926, S
LUIS J. GONZALEZ (Born: March 8, 1926, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; Died: December 8, 1996, Mexico City, Mexico) was born in Asunción, Paraguay. He studied at the Military College and the University of Asunción, and fought in the Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia (1932-1935), earning three decorations and two military promotions. After peace was re-established between the two countries, he served as the first Military Attaché of his country in Bolivia. He has earned decorations from the governments of Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru. On leaving military service, he became a journalist, and has occupied the post of Director General of the National Press and Publicity Service, and been director of the weekly El Cauce and the daily La Tarde, as well as being a journalist in Argentina. In Bolivia, he has acted as general manager of El Diario of La Paz, the dean of Bolivian newspapers, and served as chief regional correspclndent of this same publication in Cochabamba; he has also done reporting for the newspapers El Pueblo and Prensa Libre in this city. A professor of Humanities, he is also the author of the book Paraguay, Prisionero Geo-Politico, which was favorably received by international critics. GUSTAVO A. SANCHEZ SALAZAR is a native of Totora, in the departamento of Cochabamba, Bolivia. He studied agronomy at the Universidad Mayor de San Simon de Cochabamba, and later served as a leader of the Local University Federation (1951), and of the Departmental Worker’s Board (1960-1963). He was editorial director of the daily Progreso of Santa Cruz, editor of the morning Extra of Cochabamba, and a correspondent of El Diario and the National Fides Agency of La Paz. Present at the Camiri trial from August 11, 1967, to its conclusion, he was also in Valle Grande and Higuera immediately after the death of Major Ernesto Guevara, and visited Camiri again at the time of the marriage of Regis Debray.
March 8, 1859
Kenneth Grahame (March 8, 1859 – 6 July 1932) was a Scottish writer, most famous for The Wind in the Willows (1908), one of the classics of children's literature. He also wrote The Reluctant Dragon; both books were later adapted into Disney films.
March 8, 1841
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (March 8, 1841 – March 6, 1935) was an American jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1902 to 1932, and as Acting Chief Justice of the United States January–February 1930. Noted for his long service, his concise and pithy opinions and his deference to the decisions of elected legislatures, he is one of the most widely cited United States Supreme Court justices in history.
March 8, 1907
Rolf Jacobsen (8 March 1907 – 20 February 1994) could be said to be the first modernist writer in Norway. Jacobsen's career as a writer spanned more than fifty years. He is one of Scandinavia’s most distinguished poets, who launched poetic modernism in Norway with his first book, Jord og jern (Earth and Iron) in 1933. Jacobsen's work has been translated into over twenty languages. The central theme in his work is the balance between nature and technology – he was called 'the Green Poet' in Norwegian literature.
March 8, 1856
Lorenzo Marroquín Osorio (March 8, 1856, Bogotá , Colombia - September 3, 1918, London) was a Colombian writer, diplomat and academic. He was the son of President José Manuel Marroquín Ricaurte and brother of Monsignor José Manuel Marroquín Osorio . He devoted himself to the diplomatic career. On behalf of his country he traveled to Germany , Rome , Mexico and Guatemala. His greatest literary success was achieved with the novel Pax. He was a member of the Colombian Academy of Language . In 1898, he was appointed corresponding and honorary member of the Mexican Academy of the Language. He died in London in 1918.
March 8, 1936
Mohammed Mrabet (real name Mohammed ben Chaib el Hajjem), born on March 8, 1936, is a Moroccan author artist and storyteller of Berber heritage from the Beni Ouraaghil tribe in the Rifian Mountains. Mrabet is mostly known in the West through his association with Paul Bowles, William Burroughs and Tennessee Williams. Mrabet is an artist of intricate, yet colorful, felt tip and ink drawings in the style of Paul Masson or a more depressive, horror-show Jean Miro, which have been shown at various galleries in Europe and America. Mrabet's art work is his own: very loud and intricate, yet comparable with that of his contemporary, Jillali Gharbaoui (1930-1971). Mrabet is increasingly being recognized as an important member of a small group of Moroccan Master Painters who emerged in the immediate post Colonial period and his works have become highly sought after, mostly by European collectors.
March 8, 1931
Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 – October 5, 2003) was an American author, educator, media theorist and cultural critic, who is best known for his seventeen books, including Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Conscientious Objections (1988), Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992), The Disappearance of Childhood (1994) and The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (1995). For more than forty years, he was associated with New York University. Postman was a humanist, who believed that "new technology can never substitute for human values". He died in 2003 of lung cancer.
March 8, 1761
Count Jan Nepomucen Potocki (March 8, 1761 – December 1815) was a Polish nobleman, Polish Army Captain of Engineers, ethnologist, Egyptologist, linguist, traveler, adventurer and popular author of the Enlightenment period, whose life and exploits made him a legendary figure in his homeland. Outside Poland he is known chiefly for his novel, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa.
March 8, 1940
MEL WATKINS, a graduate of Colgate University, is a former editor at The New York Times Book Review. His articles and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines - among them The New York Times Magazine, New York magazine, Southern Review, Penthouse, and Common Quest. He is the author of ON THE REAL SIDE, A HISTORY OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HUMOR. He lives in New York City.
March 8, 1899
Eric Robert Russell Linklater (8 March 1899 – 7 November 1974) was a Welsh-born Scottish writer of novels and short stories, military history, and travel books. For The Wind on the Moon, a children's fantasy novel, he won the 1944 Carnegie Medal from the Library Association for the year's best children's book by a British subject. Linklater was born in Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan, Wales, to the Orcadian master mariner Robert Baikie Linklater (1865–1916) and his wife Mary Elizabeth (c.1867–1957), daughter of James Young, also a master mariner. He was educated in Aberdeen Grammar School and Aberdeen University, where he was President of the Aberdeen University Debater. He spent many years in Orkney, and identified strongly with the islands, where his father had been born. His maternal grandfather was a Swedish-born sea captain, and he thus had Scandinavian origins through both parents. Linklater is a local Orkney name derived from the Old Norse, and throughout life he maintained a sympathetic interest in Scandinavia. Linklater served in the Black Watch in 1917–18 before receiving a bullet wound. He then became a sniper. His experiences of trench warfare are described graphically in his memoir Fanfare for a Tin Hat (1970) and at one remove in his 1938 novel The Impregnable Women, which describes an imaginary war against France. Abandoning medical studies in Aberdeen, Linklater spent 1925–27 in Bombay, India as an assistant editor of The Times of India and then travelled extensively before returning to Aberdeen as an assistant to the professor of English and then spending 1928–30 as a Commonwealth fellow at Cornell and Berkeley. As a writer, Linklater's career took off in 1929. Although his greatest success came in the early years of that career, he was to publish 23 novels, three volumes of stories, two books of verse, ten plays, three works of autobiography, and another 23 books of essays and histories. His third novel, Juan in America, was a hugely popular picaresque, with some of the extravagance of Byron's Don Juan, based on his experiences of the absurd during the Prohibition, with its resulting gangsterism. It is sprinkled with memorable remarks: ‘I've been married six months. She looks like a million dollars, but she only knows a hundred and twenty words and she's only got two ideas in her head. The other one's hats.’ The character returned in Juan in China (1937). Linklater also wrote three children’s novels, The Wind on the Moon (1944), The Pirates in the Deep Green Sea (1949) and Karina With Love (1958). The first of these is about two sisters, whose adventures include becoming kangaroos and rescuing their father from a Hitlerian tyrant, enlisting the anthropomorphic help of a puma and a falcon. Its combination of storytelling skill and treatment of wider themes such as imprisonment and freedom won it the Carnegie Medal. Linklater's Orcadian and Scottish sympathies led him to some literary and political involvement in the Scottish Renaissance, culminating in his unsuccessful National Party of Scotland candidacy in the East Fife by-election of 1933. Magnus Merriman (1934) was an acerbic fictionalized description of the debacle. He settled in Orkney with his new wife in 1933. The author's attitude to war and the moral implications of diplomacy became sharper in Judas (1939), which explores the concepts of loyalty and treachery amidst a strong indictment of the desertion of Czechoslovakia by Britain and France in the name of appeasement. His own military career in World War II began with the Royal Engineers in Orkney, went on to the publicity department of the War Office, and culminated in service in Italy in 1944–45, which led to his novel about an equivocal Italian soldier, Private Angelo (1946), which contrasts nationalism with a sense of national community: ‘I hope you will not liberate us out of existence,’ is a remark Angelo makes. As one reference work puts it, Angelo ‘lacks 'the great and splendid gift' of courage, and consequently makes a poor soldier, although he is especially assiduous in retreating, and ultimately deserts.’ In 1952 Linklater published a semi-official account of The Campaign in Italy. Linklater moved back to the Scottish mainland in 1947 to Pitcalzean House, near Hill of Fearn. in Ross-shire. His abilities and reputation as a novelist waned somewhat, but he turned to historical writing, and with great effect to autobiography. He went to Korea in 1951 as a temporary lieutenant-colonel. Linklater served as rector of Aberdeen University in 1945–48 and received an honorary degree the following year. He was appointed CBE in 1954, served as deputy lieutenant of Ross and Cromarty county in 1968–73, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1971. Linklater married Marjorie MacIntyre (1909–1997), an Edinburgh-born, English-educated actress and campaigner for the arts and the environment, on 1 June 1933. She later became active in local politics, and on the Scottish Arts Council in 1957–63. They had four children. Their elder son, Magnus Linklater (born 1942), is a journalist and former editor of The Scotsman and their second, Andro Linklater, was also a writer and journalist. Their elder daughter, Alison (born 1934), is an artist. Their younger daughter, Kristin Linklater, is an actor, voice teacher and author of Freeing the Natural Voice, and their grandson by Kristin, Hamish Linklater, is also an actor. Eric Linklater died in Aberdeen on 7 November 1974 and was buried at Harray on Mainland, Orkney.
March 8, 1897
Josep Pla i Casadevall (8 March 1897, Palafrugell, Girona - 23 April 1981, Llofriu, Girona) was a Catalan Spanish journalist and a popular author. As a journalist he worked in France, Italy, England, Germany and Russia, from where he wrote political and cultural chronicles in Catalan.
March 8, 1941
Steven Michael Lukes FBA (born 1941) is a British political and social theorist. Currently he is a professor of politics and sociology at New York University. He was formerly a professor at the University of Siena, the European University Institute (Florence) and the London School of Economics. Lukes attended the Royal Grammar School in Newcastle upon Tyne, completing his studies there in 1958. Lukes completed his BA in 1962 at Balliol College, Oxford. He worked as a research fellow at Nuffield College and as a lecturer in politics at Worcester College and completed his MA in 1967. Lukes tutored writer and journalist Christopher Hitchens while he studied at Oxford. In 1968, he completed his doctorate on the work of Émile Durkheim. From 1966 to 1987 he was fellow and tutor in politics at Balliol College. He is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) and a visiting professor at the University of Paris, New York University, University of California, San Diego, and Hebrew University. From 1974 to 1983 he was President of the Committee for the History of Sociology of the International Sociological Association. He was the co-director of the European Forum on Citizenship at the European University Institute from 1995 to 1996. In April 2006, Lukes married the political commentator and author Katha Pollitt; this being his third marriage. Lukes was previously a widower. He has three children from his previous marriage to the English barrister Nina Stanger: freelance journalist Daniel (born 1977), musician Michael (born 1979) and NYU professor Alexandra (born 1981). Lukes' main interests are political and social theory, the sociology of Durkheim and his followers, individualism, rationality, the category of the person, Marxism and ethics, sociology of morality and new forms of liberalism, varieties of conceptions of power, the notion of the "good society", rationality and relativism, moral conflict and politics. He is a member of the editorial board of the European Journal of Sociology and directs a research project on what is left of the socialist idea in Western and Eastern Europe. One of Lukes' academic theories is that of the "three faces of power," presented in his book, Power: A Radical View. This theory claims that power is exercised in three ways: decision-making power, non-decision-making power, and ideological power. Decision-making power is the most public of the three dimensions. Analysis of this "face" focuses on policy preferences revealed through political action. Non-decision-making power is that which sets the agenda in debates and makes certain issues (e.g., the merits of socialism in the United States) unacceptable for discussion in "legitimate" public forums. Adding this face gives a two-dimensional view of power allowing the analyst to examine both current and potential issues, expanding the focus on observable conflict to those types that might be observed overtly or covertly. Ideological power allows one to influence people's wishes and thoughts, even making them want things opposed to their own self-interest (e.g., causing women to support a patriarchal society). Lukes offers this third dimension as a "thoroughgoing critique" of the behavioural focus of the first two dimensions, supplementing and correcting the shortcomings of previous views, allowing the analyst to include both latent and observable conflicts. Lukes claims that a full critique of power should include both subjective interests and those "real" interests held by those excluded by the political process.
March 9, 1949
John Biguenet (born March 9, 1949, New Orleans, LA) has published seven books, including Oyster, a novel, and The Torturer's Apprentice: Stories, released in the U.S. by Ecco/HarperCollins and widely translated. His work has received an O. Henry Award for short fiction and a Harper's Magazine Writing Award among other distinctions, and his poems, stories, plays, and essays have been reprinted or cited in The Best American Mystery Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Best American Short Stories, Best Music Writing, Contemporary Poetry in America, Katrina on Stage, and various other anthologies.
March 9, 1883
Umberto Saba was an Italian poet and novelist, born Umberto Poli in the cosmopolitan Mediterranean port of Trieste when it was the fourth largest city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
March 9, 1947
KERI HULME is of Nga Tahu, Orkney Scots, and Lancashire ancestry. Her first work, a volume of poetry, THE SILENCES BETWEEN (Moeraki Conversations) was published in 1982. Her novel THE BONE PEOPLE, which had been submitted to a succession of publishers over the course of six years, was published in 1984 by a women’s press, The Spiral Collective. It won the New Zealand Prize for Literature, the Pegasus Prize, and Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize. Ken Hulme describes herse1f: ‘I am: a rather reticent and timid person who gets fierce about deliberate ignorance, cruelty and intolerance, unnecessary waste, and any threat to any of my family. . . . One day I hope to develop gills.’ She lives in Okarito on the West Coast of New Zealand, in a house she built herself, where she makes her living as a writer, painter, and whitebaiter.
March 9, 1915
Francisco Matos Paoli (March 9, 1915 – July 10, 2000), was a Puerto Rican poet, critic, and essayist who in 1977 was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. His books were rooted in three major literary movements in Latin America: Romanticism, Modernism, and Postmodernism. Paoli was also a Secretary General of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and a Puerto Rican patriot. In 1950 he was imprisoned for having a Puerto Rican flag in his home, and for speaking on behalf of Puerto Rico's independence.
March 9, 1922
Gregory Rabassa (born 9 March 1922) is a prominent literary translator from Spanish and Portuguese to English. Rabassa was born in Yonkers, New York, U.S., into a family headed by a Cuban émigré. After serving during World War II as an OSS cryptographer and receiving a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth, Rabassa enrolled as a graduate student at Columbia University, where he eventually earned a doctorate. He taught at Columbia for over two decades before accepting a position at Queens College, City University of New York. He works primarily in Spanish and Portuguese. He has produced English-language versions of the works of several major Latin American novelists, including Julio Cortázar, Jorge Amado and Gabriel García Márquez. On the advice of Cortázar, García Márquez waited three years for Rabassa's schedule to become open so that he could translate One Hundred Years of Solitude. He later declared Rabassa's translation to be superior to his own Spanish original. He received the PEN Translation Prize in 1977 and the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation in 1982. Rabassa was honored with the Gregory Kolovakos Award from PEN American Center for the expansion of Hispanic Literature to an English-language audience in 2001. Rabassa had a particularly close and productive working relation with Cortázar, with whom he shared lifelong passions for jazz and wordplay. For his version of Cortázar's novel, Hopscotch, Rabassa split the inaugural U.S. National Book Award in category Translation. Rabassa formerly taught at Queens College, from which he retired as Distinguished Professor Emeritus. In 2006, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. Rabassa has translated without reading the book beforehand, working as he goes. He has written a memoir detailing his experiences as a translator, If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents, A Memoir, a Los Angeles Times 'Favorite Book of the Year' for 2005. Rabassa received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir for If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents in 2006.
March 9, 1918
Frank Morrison Spillane (March 9, 1918 – July 17, 2006), better known as Mickey Spillane, was an American author of crime novels, many featuring his signature detective character, Mike Hammer. More than 225 million copies of his books have sold internationally.
March 9, 1956
Shashi Tharoor (born 9 March 1956) is an Indian politician, writer and a former career international diplomat who is currently serving as Member of Parliament, Lok Sabha from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, since 2009. He also currently serves as Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs and All India Professionals Congress of the Indian National Congress. He was previously Minister of State in the Government of India for External Affairs (2009–2010) and Human Resource Development (2012–2014). Tharoor is a member of the Indian National Congress and served as an official spokesperson for the party from January to October 2014. Until 2007, he was a career official at the United Nations, rising to the rank of Under-Secretary General for Communications and Public Information in 2001. He announced his retirement after finishing second in the 2006 selection for U.N. Secretary-General to Ban Ki-moon. Tharoor is an acclaimed writer, having authored 17 bestselling works of fiction and non-fiction since 1981, which are centred on India and its history, culture, film, politics, society, foreign policy, and more related themes. He is also the author of hundreds of columns and articles in publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, Newsweek, and The Times of India. He was a contributing editor for Newsweek International for two years. From 2010 to 2012, he wrote a column in The Asian Age, Deccan Chronicle and, for most of 2012, until his appointment as Minister, a column in Mail Today; he also writes an internationally syndicated monthly column for Project Syndicate. He also wrote regular columns for The Indian Express (1991–93 and 1996–2001), The Hindu (2001–2008), and The Times of India (2007–2009).
March 9, 1905
Rex Warner (March 9, 1905, Birmingham, United Kingdom - June 24, 1986, Wallingford, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom) was an author, translator, and professor of English. Born in Birmingham, England, he was educated at Oxford. Warner was a member of the British Home Guard from 1942 until 1945. He was the Tallman Professor of Classics at Bowdoin College before joining the English faculty at the University of Connecticut in 1962. Edward Gorey (1925-2000) was born in Chicago. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, spent three years in the army testing poison gas, and attended Harvard College, where he majored in French literature and roomed with the poet Frank O’Hara. In 1953 Gorey published The Unstrung Harp, the first of his many extraordinary illustrated books, which include The Curious Sofa, The Haunted Tea Cosy, and The Epileptic Bicycle. NYRB published Gorey’s illustrated edition of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and The Haunted Looking Glass, a selection of his favorite tales of ghosts, ghouls, and grisly goings-on.
March 9, 1859
Peter Altenberg (9 March 1859 – 8 January 1919) was a writer and poet from Vienna, Austria. He was key to the genesis of early modernism in the city. He was born Richard Engländer on 9 March 1859 in Vienna. The nom de plume, "Altenberg", came from a small town on the Danube river. Allegedly, he chose the "Peter" to honor a young girl whom he remembered as an unrequited love (it had been her nickname). Although he grew up in a middle class Jewish family, Altenberg eventually separated himself from his family of origin by dropping out of both law and medical school, and embracing Bohemianism as a permanent lifestyle choice. He cultivated a feminine appearance and feminine handwriting, wore a cape, sandals and a broad-brimmed hat, and despised 'macho' masculinity. Discovered by Arthur Schnitzler in 1894 and appreciated by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Karl Kraus, Altenberg was one of the main proponents of Viennese Impressionism. He was a master of short, aphoristic stories based on close observation of everyday life events. After reading Altenberg's first published collection Wie ich es sehe (1896) Hofmannsthal wrote: "Even though entirely unconcerned with things important, the book has such a good conscience that one can immediately see that it cannot possibly be a German book. It is truly Viennese. It flaunts it – its origin – as it flaunts its attitude." At the fin de siècle, when Vienna was a major crucible and center for modern arts and culture, Altenberg was a very influential part of a literary and artistic movement known as Jung-Wien (Young Vienna). Altenberg was a contemporary of Karl Kraus, Gustav Mahler, Arthur Schnitzler, Gustav Klimt, and Adolf Loos, with whom he had a very close relationship. He was somewhat older, in his early 30s, than the others. His oeuvre consists of short, poetic prose pieces that do not easily fit into usual formal categories. He became well known throughout Vienna after the publication of a book of his fragmentary observations of women and children in everyday street activities. Because most of his literary work was written while he frequented various Viennese bars and coffeehouses, Altenberg is sometimes referred to as a cabaret or coffee house poet. His favorite coffeehouse was the Café Central, to which he even had his mail delivered. Altenberg's detractors said he was a drug addict and a womanizer. Altenberg was also rumored to have problems with alcoholism and mental illness. Yet his admirers considered him to be a highly creative individual with a great love for the aesthetic, for nature, and for young girls. He is certainly known to have had a large collection of photographs and drawings of young girls, and those who knew him well (such as the daughter of his publisher) wrote of his adoration of young girls. Altenberg was never a commercially successful writer, but he did enjoy most if not all of the benefits of fame in his lifetime. Some of the aphoristic poetry he wrote on the backs of postcards and scraps of paper were set to music by composer Alban Berg. In 1913, Berg's Five songs on picture postcard texts by Peter Altenberg were premiered in Vienna. The piece caused an uproar, and the performance had to be halted: a complete performance of the work was not given until 1952. Altenberg, like many writers and artists, was constantly short of money, but he was adept at making friends, cultivating patrons, and convincing others to pay for his meals, his champagne, even his rent, with which he was frequently late. He repaid his debts with his talent, his wit, and his charm. Many academics consider him to have been a "bohemian's bohemian." Most of Altenberg's work is published in the German language and, outside of anthology pieces, is difficult to find. Much of it remains in university libraries or private collections. Two selections have been translated, Evocations of Love (1960) and Telegrams of the Soul: Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg (2005). Altenberg, who never married, died on 8 January 1919, aged 59. He is buried at Central Cemetery in Vienna, Austria.
March 9, 1905
Sir Peter Courtney Quennell (9 March 1905, Bickley, Kent, England – 27 October 1993, London) was an English biographer, literary historian, editor, essayist, poet, and critic.
March 10, 1833
Pedro Antonio de Alarcón y Ariza (10 March 1833 – 19 July 1891) was a nineteenth-century Spanish novelist, author of the novel El Sombrero de Tres Picos (The Three-Cornered Hat, 1874). The story is an adaptation of a popular tradition and provides a lively picture of village life in Alarcón's native region of Andalusia. It was the basis for Hugo Wolf's opera Der Corregidor (1897) and Manuel de Falla's ballet The Three-Cornered Hat (1919). Alarcón wrote another popular short novel, El capitán Veneno ('Captain Poison', 1881). He produced four other full-length novels. One of these novels, El escándalo ('The Scandal', 1875), became noted for its keen psychological insights. Alarcón also wrote three travel books and many short stories and essays. Alarcón was born in Guadix, near Granada. In 1859, he served in a Spanish military operation in Morocco. He gained his first literary recognition with A Witness' Diary of the African War (1859-1860), a patriotic account of the campaign.
March 10, 1937
Martin Gardiner Bernal (10 March 1937 – 9 June 2013) was a British scholar of modern Chinese political history. He was a Professor of Government and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. He is best known for his work Black Athena, a controversial work which attempts to prove that Ancient Greek civilization and language are Egyptian in origin.
March 10, 1953
Ake Edwardson has won the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers' Award three times. His twelve Erik Winter novels have been published in twenty-one countries. He lives in Gothenburg, Sweden.
March 10, 1940
David William Rabe (born March 10, 1940) is an American playwright and screenwriter. He won the Tony Award for Best Play in 1972 (Sticks and Bones) and also received Tony award nominations for Best Play in 1974 (In the Boom Boom Room), 1977 (Streamers) and 1985 (Hurlyburly).
March 10, 1928
James Earl Ray (March 10, 1928 – April 23, 1998) was a fugitive who assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. Ray was convicted on his forty-first birthday after entering a guilty plea to forgo a jury trial. Had he been found guilty by jury trial, he would have been eligible for the death penalty. Sentenced to de facto life imprisonment, he later recanted his confession and tried unsuccessfully to gain access to a retrial. In 1998, Ray died in prison of complications due to chronic Hepatitis C infection.
March 10, 1904
Francisco Rojas Gonzalez (1904 - 1951) was a Mexican writer, ethnologist and film scriptwriter. In particular he stood out as author of essays, short stories and novels. He was National Prize of Literature in 1944. THE TRANSLATORS: Robert S. Rudder received his Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of Minnesota. He has taught Spanish language and literature at several universities and served as consultant to the National Endowment for the Humanities. Gloria Arjona spent most of her life in Mexico, where she attended the National Autonomous University in Mexico City. She has lived in the United States since 1986, teaching writing and working with the Hispanic community.
March 10, 1779
Frances Milton Trollope (10 March 1779 – 6 October 1863) was an English novelist and writer who published as Mrs. Trollope or Mrs. Frances Trollope. Her first book, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) has been the best known, but she also published strong social novels: an anti-slavery novel said to influence the work of the American Harriet Beecher Stowe, the first industrial novel, and two anti-Catholic novels that used a Protestant position to examine self-making. Recent scholars note that modernist critics tended to exclude women writers such as Frances Trollope from serious consideration. Her detractors familiarly called her by the diminutive Fanny Trollope, considered slightly vulgar, and discounted her prolific production. Her first and third sons, Thomas Adolphus and Anthony, also became writers; Anthony Trollope became respected for his social novels. Frances Trollope should not be confused with her daughter-in-law Frances Eleanor Trollope (née Ternan), the second wife of Thomas Adolphus Trollope, and also a novelist.
March 10, 1920
Boris Vian (10 March 1920 – 23 June 1959) was a French polymath: writer, poet, musician, singer, translator, critic, actor, inventor and engineer. He is best remembered today for his novels. Those published under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan were bizarre parodies of criminal fiction, highly controversial at the time of their release. Vian's other fiction, published under his real name, featured a highly individual writing style with numerous made-up words, subtle wordplay and surrealistic plots. L'Écume des jours (Froth on the Daydream) is the best known of these works, and one of the few translated into English. Vian was also an important influence on the French jazz scene. He served as liaison for Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis in Paris, wrote for several French jazz-reviews (Le Jazz Hot, Paris Jazz) and published numerous articles dealing with jazz both in the United States and in France. His own music and songs enjoyed popularity during his lifetime, particularly the anti-war song "Le Déserteur" (The Deserter).
March 10, 1873
Jakob Wassermann (March 10, 1873 - January 1, 1934) was a German writer and novelist of Jewish descent. Born in Fürth, Wassermann was the son of a shopkeeper and lost his mother at an early age. He showed literary interest early and published various pieces in small newspapers. Because his father was reluctant to support his literary ambitions, he began a short-lived apprenticeship with a businessman in Vienna after graduation. He completed his military service in Würzburg. Afterward, he stayed in southern Germany and in Zurich. In 1894 he moved to Munich. Here he worked as a secretary and later as a copy editor at the paper Simplicissimus. Around this time he also became acquainted with other writers Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Thomas Mann. In 1896 he released his first novel, Melusine (his surname means "water-man" in German, while a "Melusine" (or "Melusina") is a figure of European legends and folklore, a feminine spirit of fresh waters in sacred springs and rivers). From 1898 he was a theater critic in Vienna. In 1901 he married Julie Speyer, whom he divorced in 1915. Three years later he was married again to Marta Karlweis. After 1906, he lived alternatively in Vienna or at Altaussee in der Steiermark where he died in 1934 after a severe illness. In 1926, he was elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts. He resigned in 1933, narrowly avoiding expulsion by the Nazis. In the same year, his books were banned in Germany owing to his Jewish ancestry. Wassermann's work includes poetry, essays, novels, and short stories. His most important works are considered the novel Der Fall Maurizius (1928) and the autobiography, My Life as German and Jew (Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude) (1921), in which he discussed the tense relationship between his German and Jewish identities. He died on 1 January 1934 at his home in Alt-Aussee, Austria of a heart attack.
March 10, 1849
Hallie Quinn Brown (March 10, 1849 – September 16, 1949) was an African-American educator, writer and activist. Originally of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, while quite young, her parents moved to a farm near Chatham, Canada. In 1868, she began a course of study in Wilberforce University, Ohio, from which she graduated in 1873 with the degree of Bachelor of Science. She started her career by teaching at a country school in South Carolina and at the same time, a class of older people. After this, she went to Mississippi, where she again had charge of a school. She became employed as a teacher at Yazoo City, Mississippi before securing a position as teacher in Dayton, Ohio. Resigning due to ill health, she then traveled in the interest of Wiberforce University on a lecture tour, and was particularly welcomed at Hampton Normal School (now Hampton University) in Virginia. Though elected as instructor in elocution and literature at Wilberforce University, she declined the offer in order to accept a position at Tuskegee Institute. In 1886, she graduated from Chautauqua, and in 1887 received the degree of Master of Science from her alma mater, Wilberforce, being the first woman to do so. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is Chairman of the Department of Afro-American Studies and W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Randall K. Burkett is Associate Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro- American Research at Harvard University.
March 10, 1788
Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff (10 March 1788 – 26 November 1857) was a German poet and novelist of the later German romantic school. Eichendorff is regarded as one of the most important German Romantics and his works have sustained high popularity in Germany from production to the present day. Eichendorff was born in 1788 at Schloß Lubowitz near Ratibor (now Racibórz, Poland) in Upper Silesia, then part of the Kingdom of Prussia. His parents were the Prussian officer Adolf Freiherr von Eichendorff and his wife, Karoline (née Freiin von Kloche), who came from an aristocratic Roman Catholic family. He studied law in Halle (1805–1806) and Heidelberg (1807–1808). In 1808 he travelled through Europe, visiting Paris and Vienna. In 1810, he returned home to help his father run the family estate. The same year he met Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, and Heinrich von Kleist in Berlin. From 1813 to 1815 he fought in the Napoleonic Wars as a volunteer in the famous Lützow Corps. From 1816, Eichendorff worked in various capacities in the administrative service of the Prussian state. He started with a judicial office in Breslau. In 1821, Eichendorff became school inspector in Danzig, in 1824 Oberpräsidialrat (chief presidential councillor) in Königsberg. He moved with his family to Berlin in 1831, where he worked for several ministries, until he retired in 1844. Eichendorff died in Neisse, Upper Silesia (now Nysa, Poland), in 1857. Eichendorff's guiding poetic theme was that Man should find happiness in full absorption of the beauties and changing moods of Nature. In later life he also wrote several works of history and criticism of German literature. The lyricism of Eichendorff's poetry is much praised, and his poems have been set to music by many composers, including, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hans Pfitzner, Hermann Zilcher, and Alexander Zemlinsky. His later poetic work is generally cast in narrative form (Julian, 1853; Lucius, 1857), and is tinged with his increasingly clerical views. His translations from the Spanish, Der Graf Lucanor (1845) and Die geistlichen Schauspiele Calderons (2 vols., 1846–53), were prompted by the same tendency. Eichendorff's best known work, Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (English: Of the Life of a Good-For-Nothing) is typical romantic novella, whose main themes are voyage and love. The protagonist leaves his father's mill and becomes a gardener at a Viennese castle where he falls in love with the daughter of the duke. Because she is unattainable he travels to Italy but then returns and learns that she had been adopted by the duke, so nothing stands in the way of a marriage between them.
March 10, 1946
Peter Temple (10 March 1946 – 8 March 2018) was an Australian crime fiction writer, mainly known for his Jack Irish novel series. He won several awards for his writing, including the Gold Dagger in 2007, the first for an Australian. Peter Temple was an international magazine and newspaper journalist and editor. Born in South Africa in 1946, he moved to Sydney, Australia in 1980 and in 1982 moved to Melbourne to become the founding editor of Australian Society magazine. He also taught journalism, editing and media studies at university. He played a significant role in establishing the professional editing course at RMIT, Melbourne. Temple turned to fiction writing in the 1990s. His Jack Irish novels (Bad Debts, Black Tide, Dead Point, and White Dog) are set in Melbourne, and feature an unusual lawyer-gambler protagonist. In 2012, the Australian ABC Television and the German ZDF produced the first two as feature-length films with Guy Pearce in the title role under the series title Jack Irish. Temple also wrote three stand-alone novels: An Iron Rose, Shooting Star and In the Evil Day (Identity Theory in the US), as well as The Broken Shore and its semi-sequel, Truth. In 2015 he published "Ithaca in My Mind" in the Allen and Unwin Shorts series. His novels have been published in 20 countries. In 2010, Peter Temple won the Miles Franklin Award for his novel Truth. He has also won five Ned Kelly Awards for crime fiction, the latest in 2006 for The Broken Shore, which also won the Colin Roderick Award for best Australian book and the Australian Book Publishers' Award for best general fiction. The Broken Shore also won the Crime Writers' Association Duncan Lawrie Dagger (Gold Dagger) in 2007. Temple is the first Australian to win a Gold Dagger. ABC Television broadcast an adapted telemovie of The Broken Shore on 2 February 2014. Temple was married to Anita and had a son, Nicholas. He died after a brief battle with cancer in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia, on 8 March 2018 at the age of 71.
March 11, 1952
Douglas Noel Adams (11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001) was an English writer, humorist, and dramatist. He is best known as the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which originated in 1978 as a BBC radio comedy before developing into a ‘trilogy’ of five books that sold more than 15 million copies in his lifetime, a television series, several stage plays, comics, a computer game, and in 2005 a feature film. Adams's contribution to UK radio is commemorated in The Radio Academy's Hall of Fame. Adams also wrote Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), and co-wrote The Meaning of Liff (1983), The Deeper Meaning of Liff (1990), Last Chance to See (1990), and three stories for the television series Doctor Who. A posthumous collection of his work, including an unfinished novel, was published as The Salmon of Doubt in 2002. Adams became known as an advocate for environmentalism and conservation, and also as a lover of fast cars, cameras, technological innovation, and the Apple Macintosh. He was a staunch atheist, famously imagining a sentient puddle who wakes up one morning and thinks, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in—an interesting hole I find myself in—fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ to demonstrate his view that the fine-tuned Universe argument for God was a fallacy. Biologist Richard Dawkins dedicated his book The God Delusion (2006) to Adams, writing on his death that ‘Science has lost a friend, literature has lost a luminary, the mountain gorilla and the black rhino have lost a gallant defender.’
March 11, 1961
Jake Arnott (born March 11, 1961, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom) has been all the mandatory things required to qualify for authorship. He has been a laborer, mortuary technician, theatrical agent's assistant, artist's model, actor, sign language interpreter, and brain surgeon. He is the author of the British bestsellers He Kills Coppers and The Long Firm, both available from Soho Press. He lives in London, England.
March 11, 1941
Joe Brainard (March 11, 1941 - May 25, 1994) was an American artist and writer associated with the New York School. His prodigious and innovative body of work included assemblages, collages, drawing, and painting, as well as designs for book and album covers, theatrical sets and costumes. In particular, Brainard broke new ground in using comics as a poetic medium in his collaborations with other New York School poets. He is best known for his memoir I REMEMBER of which Paul Auster said: ‘It is…one of the few totally original books I have ever read.’ Joe Brainard was born March 11, 1941 in Salem, Arkansas and spent his childhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He is the brother of painter John Brainard. Brainard became friends with Ron Padgett, Dick Gallup and Ted Berrigan during high school while working on the literary journal The White Dove Review. The 18 year-old Brainard joined the journal as its art editor after fellow Central High classmate Padgett sent Brainard an anonymous Christmas card praising his work. After high school, the artist re-united with the WHITE DOVE boys in New York City shortly after leaving the Dayton Art Institute. By 1964, Brainard had already had his first solo exhibition and was ensconced in a circle of friends that included Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, Alex Katz, Edwin Denby, Larry Rivers, Fairfield Porter, James Schuyler, Jane Freilicher, Virgil Thomson, John Ashbery, among many others. He also began a relationship with Kenward Elmslie which lasted much of his life, despite having other lovers. He found much success as an artist until he removed himself from the artworld in the early 1980s. Brainard died of AIDS-induced pneumonia May 25, 1994.
March 11, 1916
Ezra Jack Keats (March 11, 1916 – May 6, 1983) was an American writer and illustrator of children's books. He won the 1963 Caldecott Medal for illustrating The Snowy Day, which he also wrote. It is considered one of the most important American books of the 20th century. Keats is best known for introducing multiculturalism into mainstream American children's literature. He was one of the first children’s book authors to use an urban setting for his stories and he developed the use of collage as a medium for illustration.
March 11, 1915
Karl Krolow (11 March 1915 – 21 June 1999) was a German poet and translator. In 1956 he was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize. He was born in Hannover, Germany and died in Darmstadt, Germany. Krolow came from a family of civil servants, and grew up in Hannover where he attended grammar school. From 1935 to 1942 he studied Germanic and Romance languages, philosophy and art history at the universities of Göttingen and Breslau. Krolow, who had been a member of the Hitler Youth from 1934, joined the NSDAP in 1937. From 1940. Krolow began having poems published in Nazi propaganda journals such as the Krakauer Zeitung. From 1942 he was working as a freelance writer based in Göttingen. In 1943/44, he published in the Nazi weekly journal Das Reich. Krolow moved to Hannover in 1952, and in 1956 to Darmstadt, where he lived working as an independent writer until his death. From the 1950s, Krolow was considered one of the greatest poets of the postwar German literature. He was also a translator from French and Spanish, and author of works of prose. From 1951, he was a member of the PEN Center of the Federal Republic of Germany, from 1953 a member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung in Darmstadt (temporarily as president), from 1960 a member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz, and from 1962, a member of the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste. For his extensive and varied work he has received numerous awards, including 1956 Georg Büchner Prize, the 1965 Great Lower Saxony Art Award, 1975, the Goethe-Plakette des Landes Hessen, the Grand Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the literature prize Stadtschreiber von Bergen and Rainer Maria Rilke Prize for Poetry in 1976, an honorary doctorate from the Technische Universität Darmstadt, in 1983 the Hessischer Kulturpreis (Hessian Culture Prize), in 1985 the Großer Literaturpreis der Bayerischen Akademie der Schönen Künste and in 1988 the Friedrich-Hölderlin-Preis of Bad Homburg. Karl Krolow is buried in the family grave of his parents and grandparents in the city cemetery of Engesohde (Division 13) of his hometown of Hannover.[
March 11, 1920
Dennis Joseph "D. J." Enright (11 March 1920 – 31 December 2002) was a British academic, poet, novelist and critic. He authored Academic Year (1955), Memoirs Of A Mendicant Professor (1969) and a wide range of essays, reviews, anthologies, children's books and poems. D. J. was born in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, and educated at Leamington College and Downing College, Cambridge. After graduating he held a number of academic posts outside the United Kingdom: in Egypt, Japan, Thailand and notably in Singapore (from 1960). He at times attributed his lack of success in finding a post closer to home to writing for Scrutiny and his short association with F. R. Leavis; whose influence he mainly and early, but not entirely, rejected. As a poet he was identified with the Movement. His 1955 anthology, Poets of the 1950s, served to delineate the group of British poets in question — albeit somewhat remotely and retrospectively, since he was abroad and it was not as prominent as the Robert Conquest collection New Lines of the following year. Returning to London in 1970, he edited Encounter magazine, with Melvin J. Lasky, for two years. He subsequently worked in publishing.
March 11, 1891
Michael Polanyi, (11 March 1891 – 22 February 1976) was a Hungarian-British polymath, who made important theoretical contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy. He argued that positivism supplies a false account of knowing, which if taken seriously undermines humanity's highest achievements. His wide-ranging research in physical science included chemical kinetics, x-ray diffraction, and adsorption of gases. He pioneered the theory of fibre diffraction analysis in 1921, and the dislocation theory of plastic deformation of ductile metals and other materials in 1934. He emigrated to Germany, in 1926 becoming a chemistry professor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, and then in 1933 to England, becoming first a chemistry professor, and then a social sciences professor at the University of Manchester. Two of his pupils and his son won Nobel Prizes in Chemistry. In 1944 Polanyi was elected to the Royal Society. The contributions which Polanyi made to the social sciences, for example his application of the concept of a polycentric spontaneous order to intellectual inquiry, were developed in the context of his opposition to central planning.
March 11, 1938
John Ross (March 11, 1938 – January 17, 2011) was an American author, poet, freelance journalist, and activist who lived in Mexico and wrote extensively on its leftist political movements. Born in New York City, he was part of the Beat movement, migrated to San Francisco and Arcata, California and first came to Mexico in the late 1950s. He lived in Michoacán, and the Hotel Isabel in Mexico City. He was one of the earliest draft resisters during the Viet Nam War, for which he served time in federal prison at California's Terminal Island. Ross was the author of many books, including a gritty portrait of Mexico City, where he spent almost all of his time since 1985. In early 2003 he traveled to Iraq, hoping to serve as a "human shield" to help protect Iraqi civilians prior to the U.S.-led invasion. The volunteers were forced out of the country because they were critical of the Iraqi government's choice of sites to protect. He died at Tzintzuntzan, Michoacán, Mexico. A prolific journalist, Ross wrote countless articles for San Francisco newspapers, CounterPunch, Pacific News Service, and the Mexico City daily La Jornada. Since 1993, when Ross first broke the story in the Anderson Valley Advertiser, he regularly covered the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (also known as the EZLN or Zapatistas) rebellion in Chiapas with articles appearing in both English and Spanish language news publications. Ross covered political corruption in Mexico and the United States, the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on Mexico's subsistence agriculture, potential environmental threats from the introduction of genetically modified plants— in particular those utilizing genetic use restriction technology— and the Iraq War. His articles have appeared in San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Nation,CounterPunch, The Progressive, La Jornada, and The Rag Blog. Ross's work reflected a deep and abiding interest in rebel movements like the Zapatistas in southern Chiapas state. John Ross wrote several books about the Zapatistas (1995 American Book Award winning Rebellion from the Roots, Yhe War Against Oblivion, and ¡ZAPATISTAS! Making Another World Possible), as well as a somewhat autobiographical memoir (Murdered by Capitalism), and several chapbooks of poetry. Most recently, he had initiated the publication of IraqiGirl: Diary of a Teenage Girl in Iraq.
March 12, 1928
Edward Franklin Albee III (born March 12, 1928) is an American playwright who is known for works such as The Zoo Story (1958), The Sandbox (1959), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), and a rewrite of the book for the unsuccessful musical Breakfast at Tiffany's an adaptation of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's (1966). His works are considered well-crafted, often unsympathetic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflect a mastery and Americanization of the Theatre of the Absurd that found its peak in works by European playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet. Younger American playwrights, such as Paula Vogel, credit Albee's daring mix of theatricality and biting dialogue with helping to reinvent the post-war American theatre in the early 1960s. Albee continues to experiment in works, such as The Goat: or, Who Is Sylvia? (2002).
March 12, 1863
Gabriele D'Annunzio (12 March 1863 – 1 March 1938), Prince of Montenevoso, sometimes spelled d'Annunzio, was an Italian writer, poet, journalist, playwright and soldier during World War I. He occupied a prominent place in Italian literature from 1889 to 1910 and after that political life from 1914 to 1924. He was often referred to under the epithets Il Vate ('the Poet') or Il Profeta ('the Prophet'). D'Annunzio was associated with the Decadent movement in his literary works, which interplayed closely with French Symbolism and British Aestheticism. Such works represented a turn against the naturalism of the preceding romantics and was both sensuous and mystical. He came under the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche which would find outlets in his literary and later political contributions. His affairs with several women, including Eleonora Duse and Luisa Casati, received public attention. During the First World War, perception of D'Annunzio in Italy would be transformed from literary figure into a national war hero. He was associated with the elite Arditi storm troops of the Italian Army and took part in actions such as the Flight over Vienna. As part of an Italian nationalist reaction against the Paris Peace Conference, he set up the short-lived Italian Regency of Carnaro in Fiume with himself as Duce. The constitution made 'music' the fundamental principle of the state and was corporatist in nature. Some of the ideas and aesthetics influenced Italian fascism and the style of Benito Mussolini.
March 12, 1916
In 1957, Richard M. Dorson (March 12, 1916, New York City, NY - September 11, 1981, Bloomington, IN) replaced Stith Thompson as the head of folklore studies at Indiana University, establishing himself as a major scholar and perhaps the foremost influence in the field. Dorson is often called the father of American folklore. In addition, he is given credit for bringing about an international or cross-cultural approach to the subject. Dorson was editor of the Journal of American Folklore (1959-63), president of the American Folklore Society (1967-68), and author of numerous studies on the subject. His textbook, American Folklore (1959), which employs a historical approach, was the first comprehensive study of the subject. In it he attempted to bring about what he calls a hemispheric theory, wherein the disciplines of both folklore and history are combined, stressing the intimate bonds between the culture of the folk and the history of the American experience. It is still recognized as a classic work.
March 12, 1970
Dave Eggers (born March 12, 1970) is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He is known for the best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and for his subsequent work as a novelist and screenwriter. He is also the founder of McSweeney's, a literary journal; the co-founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia, and a human rights nonprofit Voice of Witness, and the founder of ScholarMatch, a program that matches donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His writing has appeared in several magazines.
March 12, 1945
Leif GW Persson has chronicled the political and social development of modern Swedish society in his award-winning novels for more than three decades. Persson has served as an adviser to the Swedish Ministry of Justice and is Sweden’s most renowned psychological profiler. He is a professor at Sweden’s national police board and is considered the country’s foremost expert on crime. He lives in Stockholm.
March 12, 1936
Virginia Esther Hamilton (March 12, 1936 – February 19, 2002) was an African-American children's books author. She wrote 41 books, including M. C. Higgins, the Great (1974), for which she won the U.S. National Book Award in category Children's Books and the Newbery Medal in 1975. For lifetime achievement Hamilton won the international Hans Christian Andersen Award for writing children's literature in 1992 and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for her contributions to American children's literature in 1995.
March 12, 1953
Carl Hiaasen (born March 12, 1953) is an American writer, author and journalist. A long-time columnist for the Miami Herald and Tribune Content Agency, Hiaasen has also written more than 20 novels which can generally be classified as humorous crime fiction and often feature themes of environmentalism and political corruption in his native Florida. He began his career as a news reporter and by the late 1970s had begun writing novels in his spare time. In 2002, he also started publishing books for young readers.
March 12, 1963
Randall Kenan (born March 12, 1963) was raised in Chinquapin, North Carolina. Currently he teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University.
March 12, 1922
Jack Kerouac (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his method of spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel. He became an underground celebrity and, with other beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward some of its politically radical elements. In 1969, at age 47, Kerouac died from internal bleeding due to long-term alcohol abuse. Since his death Kerouac's literary prestige has grown and several previously unseen works have been published. All of his books are in print today, among them: The Town and the City, On the Road, Doctor Sax, The Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, The Subterraneans, Desolation Angels, Visions of Cody, The Sea Is My Brother, and Big Sur.
March 12, 1915
Ji?í Mucha (born March 12, 1915 in Prague – April 5, 1991 in Prague) was a Czech journalist, writer, screenwriter, author of autobiographical novels and studies of the works of his father, the Art Nouveau painter Alphonse Mucha. Born in Prague, he was working in Paris as a correspondent for Lidové noviny when Germany occupied Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939. It was at this time he wrote the Czech libretto for Martinu's Field Mass. He returned to Prague briefly for his father's funeral in July of the same year but was able to return to Paris and later joined the newly formed Czech army in Agde. Following the fall of France, Mucha made his way to the United Kingdom, where he joined the Royal Air Force before becoming a war correspondent for the BBC. He returned to Prague in 1945. In 1951 he was arrested by the country's Communist government for alleged espionage, and following the demands of the State Prosecutor for the death penalty, he was ultimately sentenced to hard labor in the Jachymov uranium mines. Released from prison in 1954 due to the efforts of his wife Geraldine, he devoted himself to his writing and to publicizing his father's art. In 1989, following the Velvet Revolution, which brought down the communist regime, he became chairman of the Czech PEN club. He died of cancer in 1991. The Social Agent (book), 2010 states that Mucha allegedly acted as a 'social agent' for the State Secret Service (StB). These allegations, which are based on statements given by a former StB officer who tortured Mucha whilst he was in jail as well as on the records in the Security Services Archive in Prague, are in dispute by his family. His first wife was Czech composer Vít?zslava Kaprálová (1915–40). His second wife was Geraldine Thomsen-Mucha (1917–2012), a Scottish born composer who lived in Prague until her death on 12 October 2012. Mucha had two children: a son, John, now President of the Mucha Foundation, with his wife Geraldine, and a daughter, Jarmila Plockova, with Vlasta Plockova.
March 12, 1956
Ruth Ozeki (born March 12, 1956) is a Canadian-American novelist, filmmaker and Zen Buddhist priest. She worked in commercial television and media production for over a decade and made several independent films before turning to writing fiction. Ozeki was born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut by an American father, Floyd Lounsbury, and a Japanese mother, Masako Yokoyama. She studied English and Asian Studies at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts and traveled extensively in Asia. She received a Japanese Ministry of Education Fellowship to do graduate work in classical Japanese literature at Nara University in Nara, Nara. Ozeki moved to New York in 1985 and began a film career as an art director, designing sets and props for low-budget horror movies. She switched to television production, and after several years directing documentary-style programs for a Japanese company, she started making her own films. Body of Correspondence (1994) won the New Visions Award at the San Francisco Film Festival and was aired on PBS. Halving the Bones (1995), an award-winning autobiographical film, tells the story of Ozeki’s journey as she brings her grandmother’s remains home from Japan. It has been screened at the Sundance Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, the Montreal World Film Festival, and the Margaret Mead Film Festival, among others. Ozeki’s films, now in educational distribution, are shown at universities, museums and arts venues around the world. Ozeki, a speaker on college and university campuses, divides her time between Brooklyn and Cortes Island, British Columbia, where she writes, knits socks, and raises ducks with her husband, artist Oliver Kellhammer. She practices Zen Buddhism with Zoketsu Norman Fischer. Ozeki is the editor of the website Everyday Zen. She was ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest in 2010. She is affiliated with the Brooklyn Zen Center.
March 12, 1954
Eugene Harold Robinson (born March 12, 1954) is an American newspaper columnist and an associate editor of The Washington Post. His columns are syndicated to 262 newspapers by The Washington Post Writers Group. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 and currently serves as chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board. Robinson also serves, opposite Nicolle Wallace, as NBC News and MSNBC's chief political analyst during political coverage. Robinson is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists and a board member of the IWMF (International Women's Media Foundation).
March 12, 1934
MIREYA R0BLES was born in Cuba in 1934. In 1957 she left for the USA to continue her literary studies. Her poetry, fiction and essays have been published in France, Mexico, Spain and in the United States in Spanish. She now teaches Hispanic studies in South Africa. This is her first major work in English.
March 12, 1973
Léonora Miano (born 1973, in Douala) is a Cameroonian author. She has lived in France since 1991. She criticized the foreword added to the English translation of her 2005 first novel, Dark Heart of the Night, calling it "full of lies"; in 2012 Zukiswa Wanner, however, based on reading Dark Heart of the Night rated Miano as one of her top five African writers (alongside H. J. Golakai, Ondjaki, Chika Unigwe and Thando Mgqolozana), describing her work as "brilliant".
March 13, 1935
Kofi Awoonor (March 13, 1935, Wheta, Ghana - September 21, 2013, Nairobi, Kenya) was born George Awoonor-Williams in Wheta, Ghana, to Ewe parents. He was a poet, literary critic, professor of comparative literature and served as an ambassador for Ghana. Awoonor earned a BA from University College of Ghana, an MA from University College, London, and a PhD in comparative literature from SUNY Stony Brook. He is the author of novels, plays, political essays, literary criticism, and several volumes of poetry, including Rediscovery and Other Poems (1964), Night of My Blood (1971), Ride Me, Memory (1973), The House by the Sea (1978), The Latin American and Caribbean Notebook (1992), and a volume of collected poems, Until the Morning After (1987). Awoonor’s grandmother was an Ewe dirge singer, and the form of his early poetry draws from the Ewe oral tradition. He translated Ewe poetry in his critical study Guardians of the Sacred Word and Ewe Poetry (1974). Other works of literary criticism include The Breast of the Earth: A Survey of the History, Culture, and Literature of Africa South of the Sahara (1975). In the early 1970s, Awoonor served as chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature at SUNY Stony Book. He returned to Ghana in 1975 to teach at University College of Cape Coast. In Ghana, he was arrested and tried for suspected involvement in a coup. He was imprisoned without trial and was later released; he wrote about his time in jail in The House by the Sea. Awoonor resumed teaching after his sentence was remitted. In the 1980s, he was the Ghanaian ambassador to Brazil and Cuba and served as ambassador to the United Nations from 1990 to 1994; in 1990 he published Ghana: A Political History from Pre-European to Modern Times. Awoonor is author of the novels This Earth, My Brother… (1971) and Comes the Voyager at Last: A Tale of Return to Africa (1992). He died in the Westgate shopping mall attack in Kenya in September 2013.
March 13, 1912
Bill S. Ballinger (born William Sanborn Ballinger on 13 March 1912 in Oskaloosa, Iowa, died 23 March 1980 Tarzana, California) was an American author and screenwriter. He was educated at the University of Wisconsin and was an associate professor of writing at the California State University Northridge, Los Angeles, California. Working in radio and advertising in the early 1940s, Ballinger wrote 81 radio scripts and produced The Dinah Shore Show, The Breakfast Club, and Lowell Thomas broadcasts. After Ballinger moved from New York to Los Angeles he began writing full-time. The author of 30 books, Ballinger also used the names B.S. Sanborn and Frederic Fryer. The first was The Body in the Bed in 1948. His most famous work was 1950s Portrait in Smoke that received a Les Grands Maîtres du Roman Policier Award and was filmed in 1956 as Wicked as they Come. Ballinger's two main fictional characters in his novels were Chicago private investigator Barr Breed and Native American Central Intelligence Agency Agent Joaquin Hawke. His book, The Longest Second, was nominated in 1958 for an Edgar Award for the Best Mystery novel. Ballinger was a frequent writer for American television with 150 teleplays to his name. These included seven teleplays for Alfred Hitchcock Presents (one of which, "The Day of the Bullet," based on a short story by Stanley Ellin, won him an Edgar for Best Half-Hour Teleplay in 1961), two episodes of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, several police television shows such as Tightrope and Ironside and the episode "The Mice" for The Outer Limits. In addition to his books and teleplays, Ballinger wrote screenplays for Burt Topper's The Strangler (1963) and Operation CIA (1965), a Burt Reynolds spy film set in Vietnam but filmed in Thailand.
March 13, 1928
Robert Francis Brissenden (1928–1991) was an Australian poet, novelist, critic, and academic.
March 13, 1962
Glen Creeber is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.
March 13, 1941
Mahmoud Darwish (13 March 1941 – 9 August 2008) was a Palestinian poet and author who won numerous awards for his literary output and was regarded as the Palestinian national poet. In his work, Palestine became a metaphor for the loss of Eden, birth and resurrection, and the anguish of dispossession and exile. He has been described as incarnating and reflecting ‘the tradition of the political poet in Islam, the man of action whose action is poetry’.
March 13, 1907
Mircea Eliade (March 13 [O.S. February 28] 1907 – April 22, 1986) was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day. His theory that hierophanies form the basis of religion, splitting the human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and time, has proved influential. One of his most influential contributions to religious studies was his theory of Eternal Return, which holds that myths and rituals do not simply commemorate hierophanies, but, at least to the minds of the religious, actually participate in them. His literary works belong to the fantastic and autobiographical genres. The best known are the novels Maitreyi (‘La Nuit Bengali‘ or ‘Bengal Nights’), Noaptea de Sânziene (‘The Forbidden Forest’), Isabel si apele diavolului (‘Isabel and the Devil's Waters’) and Romanul Adolescentului Miop (‘Novel of the Nearsighted Adolescent’), the novellas Domnisoara Christina (‘Miss Christina’) and Tinerete fara tinerete (‘Youth Without Youth’), and the short stories Secretul doctorului Honigberger (‘The Secret of Dr. Honigberger’) and La Tiganci (‘With the Gypsy Girls’). Early in his life, Eliade was a noted journalist and essayist, a disciple of Romanian far right philosopher and journalist Nae Ionescu, and member of the literary society Criterion. He also served as cultural attaché to the United Kingdom and Portugal. Several times during the late 1930s, Eliade publicly expressed his support for the Iron Guard, a fascist and antisemitic political organization. His political involvement at the time, as well as his other far right connections, were the frequent topic of criticism after World War II. Noted for his vast erudition, Eliade had fluent command of five languages (Romanian, French, German, Italian, and English) and a reading knowledge of three others (Hebrew, Persian, and Sanskrit). He was elected a posthumous member of the Romanian Academy.
March 13, 1935
Zulfikar Ghose (born March 13, 1935, Sialkot, India (now Pakistan) is a Pakistani American English language writer. Mr. Ghose has written poetry and prose (fiction and non-fiction) equally. The Loss of India, Jets from Orange, The Violent West, A Memory of Asia and Selected Poems are some of his poetry books. He has written short stories, novels, biographies and books of literary criticism.
March 13, 1959
Helen Elaine Lee was born and raised in Detroit and educated at Harvard College and Harvard Law School. She lives in Washington, D.C.
March 13, 1937
Vladimir Semyonovich Makanin (13 March 1937 in Orsk, Orenburg Oblast, RSFSR, Soviet Union – 1 November 2017 in Krasny (ru), Aksaysky District, Rostov Oblast, Russia) was a Russian writer of novels and short stories. He graduated from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow State University and worked as a teacher in the Military Academy until the early 1960s. In 1963 he took the High Courses for Scriptwriters and Film Directors at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography, then worked for the publishing house Sovietskiy Pisatel (The Soviet Writer). He published his first book in 1965. In 1985, he became a board member at the Union of Soviet Writers and, two years later, joined the editorial staff at Znamya. He spent most of his later years in Krasny, near Rostov-on-Don. In 2007, he headed the jury for the Big Book award. The following year, he was the recipient. Makanin's writing style may be categorized as realist. His forte lies in depicting the psychological impact of everyday life experiences.
March 13, 1900
George Seferis (the nom de plume of George Seferiades) was born in Smyrna in 1900, and moved to Athens with his family when he was fourteen. He studied in Paris at the end of the First World War and afterward joined the Greek diplomatic service. From 1957 to 1962 he lived in London as Ambassador of Greece to the Court of St. James’s. His first collection of poetry, TURNING POINT, was published in 1931. Since then he has published several other collections of both poetry and essays, which have been translated into many languages, and for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize. He holds honorary degrees from Cambridge (1960), Thessalonika (1964) and Oxford (1964).
March 13, 1953
Ridley Pearson is an American author of suspense and thriller novels for adults, and adventure books for children. Some of his books have appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list.
March 13, 1958
Caryl Phillips was born in 1958 in St. Kitts, West Indies, and came with his family to England that same year. He was brought up in Leeds and educated at Oxford. He has written numerous scripts for film, radio, and television, and his book THE FINAL PASAAGE was the winner of the Malcolm X Award.
March 13, 1960
Alonso Salazar is a leading Colombian journalist and social scientist. . First published as No Nacimos Pa’ Semilla in 1990 by CINEP in Colombia.
March 14, 1923
Diane Arbus (March 14, 1923 – July 26, 1971) was an American photographer and writer noted for photographs of 'deviant and marginal people (dwarfs, giants, transgender people, nudists, circus performers) or of people whose normality seems ugly or surreal'.[citation needed] Arbus believed a camera could be 'a little bit cold, a little bit harsh', but that its scrutiny revealed the truth—the difference between what people wanted others to see, and what they really did see: the flaws. A friend said that Arbus said she was 'afraid ... that she would be known simply as the photographer of freaks'; ironically, that phrase has been repeatedly used to describe her. In 1972, a year after she took her own life, Arbus became the first American photographer to have photographs displayed at the Venice Biennale. Millions viewed traveling exhibitions of her work in 1972–1979. Between 2003 and 2006, Arbus and her work were the subjects of another major traveling exhibition, Diane Arbus Revelations. In 2006, the motion picture Fur, starring Nicole Kidman as Arbus, presented a fictional version of her life story.
March 14, 1931
Antonio Benítez Rojo (March 14, 1931 – January 5, 2005) was a Cuban novelist, essayist and short-story writer. He was widely regarded as the most significant Cuban author of his generation. His work has been translated into nine languages and collected in more than 50 anthologies. Born in Havana, he lived in Cuba with his mother and stepfather from the age of seven. In the mid-1950s, backed by United Nations grants, Benítez-Rojo studied statistics at the United States Department of Labor and Commerce, and later studied in Mexico. Turning down offers to work in Chile or Geneva, he returned to Cuba in 1958 and became head of the Statistics Bureau at Cuba's Labor Ministry. Benítez-Rojo began working at the Ministry of Culture in 1965 and won the Premio Casa de las Américas for the short story collection Tute de reyes in 1967. The following year, he won a writers' union prize of a trip to a socialist country; however, the government did not permit him to leave Cuba. By 1975, Benítez-Rojo had been made head of Casa de las Américas, the publishing house run by the Cuban government. Sea of Lentils, the English translation of his novel El mar de las lentejas, was selected by The New York Times as one of the Notable Books of 1992. In 1980, he was given permission to attend a conference at the Sorbonne in Paris. He traveled from Paris to Berlin, obtained a US tourist visa, and came to the United States, where he became a professor of Spanish at Amherst. The Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College holds a collection of his papers. One of his most influential publications, La Isla que se Repite, was published in 1989 by Ediciones del Norte. He died in 2005.
March 14, 1966
Robert Worth Bingham IV (March 14, 1966 – November 28, 1999) was an American writer and a founding editor of the Open City Magazine. He wrote the short story collection Pure Slaughter Value and the novel Lightning on the Sun. Bingham died of a heroin overdose at age 33 on November 28, 1999.
March 14, 1939
Linda Beatrice Brown (born March 14, 1939, Akron, OH) is an African American author and educator. She was born in Akron, Ohio and went to college in North Carolina at Bennett College. While in North Carolina, she won several awards for her writing in both fiction and nonfiction. Brown has published many books including Belles of Liberty, Black Angels, Crossing Over Jordan and The Long Walk. The genres and styles of writing in which she wrote include fiction, nonfiction, playwriting and poetry. Many of her works are centered on the Civil Rights Movement and the struggles that can be rooted back to slavery during the time of the American Civil War.
March 14, 1914
Carolina Maria de Jesus (14 March 1914 – 13 February 1977) was a Brazilian writer who lived most of her life in a favela (slums) of São Paulo, Brazil. She is best known for her diary, which was first published as Quarto de Despejo (Dumping Room, published in English as Child of the Dark) in August 1960, after coming to the attention of a Brazilian journalist, and became a bestseller. This work remains the only document published in English by a Brazilian slum-dweller from that period.
March 14, 1879
Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the general theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics (alongside quantum mechanics). While best known for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2 (which has been dubbed ‘the world's most famous equation’), he received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics ‘for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect‘. The latter was pivotal in establishing quantum theory. Near the beginning of his career, Einstein thought that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. This led to the development of his special theory of relativity. He realized, however, that the principle of relativity could also be extended to gravitational fields, and with his subsequent theory of gravitation in 1916, he published a paper on the general theory of relativity. He continued to deal with problems of statistical mechanics and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory and the motion of molecules. He also investigated the thermal properties of light which laid the foundation of the photon theory of light. In 1917, Einstein applied the general theory of relativity to model the large-scale structure of the universe. He was visiting the United States when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 and did not go back to Germany, where he had been a professor at the Berlin Academy of Sciences. He settled in the U.S., becoming an American citizen in 1940. On the eve of World War II, he endorsed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt alerting him to the potential developing of ‘extremely powerful bombs of a new type’ and recommending that the U.S. begin similar research. This eventually led to what would become the Manhattan Project. Einstein was in support of defending the Allied forces, but largely denounced using the new discovery of nuclear fission as a weapon. Later, with the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, Einstein signed the Russell–Einstein Manifesto, which highlighted the danger of nuclear weapons. Einstein was affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, until his death in 1955. Einstein published more than 300 scientific papers along with over 150 non-scientific works. His great intellectual achievements and originality have made the word ‘Einstein’ synonymous with genius.
March 14, 1948
J. HOBERMAN is senior film critic at The Village Voice, and writes for the New York Times, The London Review of Books, and other publications. His previous books include Entertaining America (with Jeffrey Shandler); The Red Atlantis; Bridge of Light; and Vulgar Modernism, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. He is an adjunct professor of cinema at the Cooper Union in New York.
March 14, 1935
Per Christian Jersild, better known as P. C. Jersild, (born 1935) is a Swedish author and physician. He also holds an honorary doctorate in medicine from Uppsala University, and another one in engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology (1999). P. C. Jersild was born in Katrineholm in a middle-class family, his first book was Räknelära which he released 1960 at the age of 25, although he had already been writing for 10 years at that time. Until now he has written 35 books, usually focused on social criticism. His most famous work is Barnens ö (Children's Island), which tells the story of a young boy, on the verge of adulthood, who runs off from a children's summer camp to spend time alone in the big city, Stockholm. Another book worth mentioning is Babels hus (The House of Babel) which gives an account of the inhuman treatment of patients at a large modern hospital, said to be modeled on the Karolinska Hospital in Huddinge, outside Stockholm. Aside from his literary production, Jersild has also been a columnist for Dagens Nyheter since the mid-1980s. In 1999, he was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
March 14, 1962
Robin Davis Gibran Kelley (born March 14, 1962) is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA. From 2006 to 2011, he was Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California (USC), and from 2003 to 2006 he was the William B. Ransford Professor of Cultural and Historical Studies at Columbia University. From 1994 to 2003, he was a professor of history and Africana Studies at New York University (NYU) as well the chairman of NYU's history department from 2002 to 2003. Robin Kelley has also served as a Hess Scholar-in-Residence at Brooklyn College. In the summer of 2000, Dr. Kelley was honored as a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, where he taught and mentored a class of sophomores, as well as wrote the majority of the book Freedom Dreams. During the academic year 2009–10, Kelley held the Harmsworth Chair of American History at Oxford University, the first African-American historian to do so since the chair was established in 1922. He was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014.
March 14, 1941
John Frederick MacDonald (14 March 1941 – 9 April 2015) was a professor of history at Northeastern Illinois University, and an archivist of historical films. MacDonald was born in New Waterford, Nova Scotia, Canada a small coal-mining town on Cape Breton Island (March 14, 1941). His parents, Murray Dodd MacDonald and Caroline Pinkerton MacDonald, migrated to the United States in 1944: first to Boston, then in 1946 to Hawthorne, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. He was educated in local public schools, graduating from Leuzinger High School (in neighboring Lawndale, California) in 1959. He received a BA in history in 1963 and a MA in 1964, both from the University of California at Berkeley. He joined the Peace Corps in 1964 and was trained at Columbia Teachers College for educational service in Nigeria. Returning to California, he entered the University of California at Los Angeles as a graduate student in European history. In 1967 he was granted a Fulbright Fellowship, and was the first American scholar to have access to the personal papers of Théophile Delcassé, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs 1898-1905. This resulted in his doctoral thesis, "Camille Barrère and the Conduct of Delcassian Diplomacy in Italy 1898-1902." He received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1969.
March 14, 1887
Maria Messina (Palermo, March 14, 1887 – Pistoia, January 19, 1944) was an Italian writer. She was the aunt of the writer Annie Messina (daughter of Maria's brother Salvatore). Maria was born in Palermo, Sicily, the daughter of school inspector Gaetano Messina and Gaetana Valenza Trajna, descendant of a baronial family of Prizzi. She grew up in Messina where she spent an isolated childhood with her parents and brothers. During adolescence, she traveled a lot through the Center and South of Italy because of her father's continual relocations, until in 1911 her family settled in Naples. Maria Messina was self-educated and was consequently encouraged by her older brother to begin the career of a writer. When she was twenty-two she began an intense correspondence with Giovanni Verga. Between 1909 and 1921, she published a series of short stories. Thanks to Verga's support, she also had a novella published in a literary magazine, Nuova Antologia. Another one, La Mèrica, appeared in La Donna and won the Gold Medal prize. She carried on intense correspondence with various personalities of the time, for example with the Florentine publisher Enrico Bemporad, with the Sicilian poet and critic Alessio Di Giovanni, and especially the Catanese writer Giovanni Verga. Altogether, Maria Messina produced various collections of novellas, five novels, and a selection of children's literature, which gave her notable prestige—diverse were her contributions in magazines, and of a certain worth was her article included in a 1934 anthology edited by Lina Perroni, Studi Critici su Giovanni Verga. In 1928 her last novel L'Amore Negato came out, while the multiple sclerosis that she had been diagnosed with at the age of twenty was developing complications. She died of this disease in Pistoia in 1944. She lived for many years in Mistretta, a city in the Province of Messina, in the heart of the Nebrodi Mountains, where many of her stories are set. Her mortal remains, along with those of her mother, were transferred on April 24, 2009 to Mistretta, considered her second hometown. Maria Messina was made an "honorary citizen" of the ancient "capital" of the Nebrodi. Messina's writing concentrates above all on Sicilian culture and, as principal themes, the isolation and oppression of young Sicilian women. Moreover, her writing is focused on the domination and submission inherent in the emotional relationships between men and women. What is more, one of her best-known novels, La Casa nel Vicolo, marked a turning point in Messina's writing, toward the use of psychological conditions. In her narration Messina depicted the oppression of women as inevitable and cyclic and, because of this, some think that she was not a feminist. Nevertheless, the women she depicted were the representation of powerful declarations of an attitude of challenge. Maria Messina is among the basic women writers in the history of Italian literature of the early 20th century. For this reason she is counted in the research project The Women Authors of Italian Literature. After her premature death, Maria Messina's name slowly and gradually started to become forgotten and her books started going out of print. By chance, in the very early 1980s, she was rediscovered by Leonardo Sciascia, who arranged for many of her works to be republished in prestigious publishing houses. But her comeback had an ephemeral life and, after the passing of Sciascia, the name of Maria Messina fell into a second oblivion. Only in 2017 have her works returned to bookstores, thanks to the restoration work directed by Salvatore Asaro, the top expert on Messinese works, who, after years of interest, has arranged for her novels to be reprinted. The first fruit of this restoration was the republication of Alla Deriva in March 2017, and a preface by the writer Elena Stancanelli, followed by Le Pause della Vita and Primavera Senza Sole. The Progetto Mistretta cultural association founded the Maria Messina Prize for literature in her honor, through its journal Il Centro Storico, in 2003.
March 14, 1914
Abdias do Nascimento (March 14, 1914 – May 23, 2011) was a prominent African Brazilian scholar, artist, and politician. Also a poet, dramatist, and Pan-African activist, Nascimento created the Black Experimental Theater (1944) and the Black Arts Museum (1950), organized the National Convention of Brazilian Blacks (1946), the First Congress of Brazilian Blacks (1950), and the Third Congress of Black Culture in the Americas (1982). Professor Emeritus, State University of New York at Buffalo, he was the first Afro-Brazilian member of Congress to champion black people’s human and civil rights in the National Legislature, where in 1983 he presented the first Brazilian proposals for affirmative action legislation. He served as Rio de Janeiro State Secretary for the Defense and Promotion of Afro-Brazilian People and Secretary of Human Rights and Citizenship. While working as curator of the Black Arts Museum project, he began developing his own creative work (painting), and from 1968 on, he exhibited widely in the U.S., Brazil and abroad. He received national and international honors for his work, including UNESCO’s special Toussaint Louverture Award for contribution to the fight against racism, granted to him and to poet Aimé Césaire in 2004. He was officially nominated for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. Born in Franca, Sao Paulo state, Nascimento attended public school as a child and joined the military in 1929, but was excluded from the Army as a result of resisting racial discrimination a few years later. He received a B.A. in Economics from the University of Rio de Janeiro in 1938, and graduate degrees from the Higher Institute of Brazilian Studies (1957) and the Oceanography Institute (1961). From 1939 to 1941, Nascimento travelled throughout South America with a group of poets who called themselves the "Santa Hermandad Orquidea", or "Holy Brotherhood of the Orchid." At the Municipal Theater of Lima, Peru, they attended a performance of Eugene O'Neill's play The Emperor Jones with a blackfaced white actor in the leading role. Then and there, he decided to create a black theater in Brazil to fight against racism. In Argentina, Nascimento spent a year with the "Teatro del Pueblo" (People's Theater) in Buenos Aires, where he learned the technical and performance aspects of theater. Returning to Sao Paulo, he was imprisoned, having been convicted in absentia by the civilian court for the same incident of resisting racial discrimination for which he had been excluded from the Army. While in prison at the Carandiru Penitentiary, he created the Convict's Theater, in which prisoners wrote, directed, and performed in their own plays and musical productions. When released, Nascimento moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he founded the Black Experimental Theater (Teatro Experimental do Negro, TEN) in 1944. TEN premiered on May 8, 1945 with a production of O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, surprising skeptical critics with a presentation that was highly acclaimed for its technical and dramatic effectiveness. With intense activity in theatrical production, TEN also was responsible for stellar initiatives in black activism, such as the National Convention of Brazilian Blacks (1945-46), the Conference of Brazilian Blacks (1949), and the First Congress of Brazilian Blacks (1950). A resolution of the 1950 congress advocated the need for a Black Arts Museum in Brazil, and the Black Experimental Theater embraced the project. Many artists donated works and the first exhibition was held in 1968 at Rio de Janeiro's Museu da Imagem e do Som (Museum of Image and Sound). The Black Experimental Theater organized the cast for the play Orfeu da Conceição, by Vinicius de Moraes, which was later adapted into the motion picture Black Orpheus, directed by Marcel Camus. Nascimento became a leader in Brazil's black movement, and was forced into exile by the military regime in 1968. From 1968 to 1981 Nascimento was very active in the international Pan-African Movement and was elected Vice-President and Coordinator of the Third Congress of Black Culture in the Americas. For the next decade Nascimento was a visiting professor at several universities in the United States, including the Yale School of Drama (1969–1971), and University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, where he founded the chair in African Cultures in the New World, Puerto Rican Studies Program in 1971. He held the position of Professor Emeritus at SUNY-Buffalo. Nascimento also taught at the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) in Nigeria. Nascimento returned to Brazil in 1983 and was elected to the federal Chamber of Deputies as a member of the Democratic Labour Party (PDT). There, his focus was supporting legislation to address racial problems. In 1994 he was elected to the Senate and served until 1999. In 2004 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Peace. A biography of Nascimento by the journalist Sandra Almada was published in 2009 as part of the Retratos do Brasil Negro series. Nascimento suffered from diabetes and died on 23 May 2011, in Rio de Janeiro, due to cardiac arrest.
March 14, 1948
Charles M. Payne, Jr. (born March 14, 1948) is an American academic whose areas of study include civil rights activism, urban education reform, social inequality, and modern African-American history. He was the Chief Education Officer for Chicago Public Schools and used to be the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago's School of Social Service Administration.
March 14, 1937
Baltasar Porcel i Pujol (March 14, 1937 – Barcelona, July 1, 2009) was a Spanish writer, journalist and literary critic. His enormous legacy credited him as one of the greatest authors in Catalan literature from the 20th century. He was born on 14 March 1937 in Andratx, Majorca. His catalan language works has been translated into Spanish, German, English, French, Italian and Vietnamese among others. He also won several literary prizes. As a journalist he worked in La Vanguardia, Última Hora and Catalunya Ràdio. Since 1960 he lived in both Barcelona and Majorca. He was the president of the Catalan Institute for the Mediterranean since 1989 to 2000. In 2002 we won the National prize of Literature of Catalonia and in 2007 the Premi d'Honor de les Lletres Catalanes. He also received in Italy the Bocaccio Prize, in France the Prix Méditerranée and in the United States the Critic's Choice. He was married with the Valencian writer Concha Alós, Spanish translator of some of his works. Porcel died on 1 July 2009 at the age of 72 after several years battling cancer.
March 14, 1952
Maurizio Viroli is Professor Emeritus of Politics at Princeton University, Professor of Government at the University of Texas (Austin) and Professor of Political Communication at the University of Italian Switzerland (Lugano). He has served as an advisor on cultural activities to the President of the Italian Republic during the presidency of Carlo Azeglio Ciampi (1999-2006), and has worked for the President of the Camera dei Deputati during the presidency of Luciano Violante (1996-2001). He has served as the coordinator of the National Committee for the Improvement of the Republican Culture within the Ministry of Home Affairs. He has been consultant of ANCI (National Association of Italian Municipalities). On May 30, 2001, he was appointed Ufficiale dell'Ordine al Merito of the Italian Republic. He holds a degree in Philosophy from the University of Bologna and a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute of Firenze. He has taught and conducted research at the universities of Cambridge (Clare Hall), Georgetown (Washington, D.C.), the United Arab Emirates, Trento, Campobasso, Ferrara, the Institute for Advanced Study of Princeton, the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, the European University Institute of Firenze (Jean Monnet Fellow), the Collegio of Milano and the Scuola Superiore di Amministrazione dell’Interno. He has promoted and directed several projects on civic education in Italian schools. In particular, he has founded and is now the Director of a Master’s program in Civic Education established at Asti by Ethica Association. His main fields of research are political theory and the history of political thought, classical republicanism and neo-republicanism, with a special expertise on Niccolò Machiavelli and Jean Jacques Rousseau, republican iconography, the relationship between religion and politics, patriotism, constitutionalism, classical rhetoric, political communication, citizenship, and civic education. Among his publications, Jean Jacques Rousseau and the 'Well-Ordered Society', Cambridge University Press, 1988; From Politics to Reason of State. The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics (1250-1600), Cambridge University Press, 1992; For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism, Oxford University Press, 1995; Machiavelli, Oxford University Press, 1998; Niccolò’s Smile, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1998; Republicanism, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1999; The Idea of the Republic, with Norberto Bobbio, Polity Press, 2003; How to read Machiavelli, Granta, 2008; Machiavelli’s God, Princeton University Press, 2010; The Liberty of the Servants, Princeton University Press, 2011; As if God Existed. Religion and Liberty in the History of Italy, Princeton University press, 2012; Redeeming the 'Prince'. The Meaning of Machiavelli’s Masterpiece, Princeton University Press, 2013. With Gisela Bock and Quentin Skinner he is the editor of Machiavelli and Republicanism, Cambridge University Press, 1990. He has edited and written the Introduction of Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, translation by Peter Bondanella, Oxford University Press, 2005.
March 14, 1925
John Barrington Wain CBE (14 March 1925 – 24 May 1994) was an English poet, novelist, and critic, associated with the literary group "The Movement". For most of his life, Wain worked as a freelance journalist and author, writing and reviewing for newspapers and the radio.
March 14, 1947
Adam Zameenzad was born in Pakistan and spent his early childhood in Nairobi. He went to university in Lahore, Pakistan, becoming a lecturer there. He then took two years off to travel around Europe and the Americas before coming to live and work in the UK. He has had six novels published: THE THIRTEENTH HOUSE (winner of the David Higham Prize); MY FRIEND MATT AND HENA THE WHORE; LOVE, BONES AND WATER; CYRUS CYRUS; GORGEOUS WHITE FEMALE; and PEPSI AND MARIA, a novel about the lives of street children.
March 14, 1918
Abba Kovner (March 14, 1918 – September 25, 1987) was a Jewish Hebrew poet, writer and partisan leader. He became one of the great poets of modern Israel. He was a cousin of the Israeli Communist Party leader Meir Vilner.
March 14, 1961
Harriette Cole, is a life stylist, author, nationally syndicated advice columnist, motivational speaker, media trainer, magazine editor, lifestyle writer, wife and mother.
March 15, 1948
David Albahari was born in 1948 in the Serbian town of Pec. He is the founder and was for years the editor-in-chief of the magazine of world literature PISMO, and is an accomplished translator of Anglo-American literature. He is the: author of WORDS ARE SOMETHING ELSE, a collection of stories.
March 15, 1947
Benson Bobrick earned his doctorate from Columbia University and is the author of several critically acclaimed works, including Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired and Angel in the Whirlwind: The Triumph of the American Revolution. In 2002 he received the Literature Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He and his wife, Hilary, live in Vermont.
March 15, 1912
Louis Paul Boon was born at Aalst in Belgium in 1912. He had been a house painter before he received literary recognition in 1942 for his first book THE SUBURB GROWS (De voorstad groeit) when it was awarded the Leo G. Krijn Prize. Prior to this he had written a great deal but had destroyed all of it. Since then he has published in rapid succession ABEL GHOLAERTZ (1944), FORGOTTEN STREET (Vergeten straat, 1946), MY SMALL WAR (Mijn kleine oorlog, 1946), TWO GHOSTS (Twee spoken, 1952), CHAPEL ROAD (De kapellekensbaan, 1953), and its sequel SUMMER AT TER-MUREN (Zomer to Ter-Muren, 1956). A new version of REYNARD THE FOX appeared in 1955 under the title of COMRADES IN ARMS (Wapenbroeders). In addition Boon has written MINUET (Menuet, 1955) which he himself ranks highest among his works; the long poem LITTLE EVA FROM CROOKED AXE STREET (De kleine Eva uit de Kromme Bijlstiaat); a novel about the headmaster of a technical school entitled NOTHING PERISHES (Niets gaat ten onder, 1956); satirical versions of old fairy tales entitled GRIM FAIRY TALES (Grimmige Sprookjes, 1957), and a remarkable ‘account of an amoral age,’ THE BIRD OF PARADISE (De paradijsvogel, 1958). He has published short sketches in GOOD-BYE CROCODILE (Vaarwel krokodil, 1959), and a novel about robbers JAN DE LICHTE'S GANG (De bende van Jan de Lichte, 1957) with a sequel JAN DE LICHTE'S SON. He now lives at Erembodegem near Aalst and is editor of the literary section of the Ghent socialist daily VOORUIT.
March 15, 1941
Diana Korzenik (born March 15, 1941), Professor Emerita, Massachusetts College of Art, is the author of Drawn to Art: A Nineteenth-Century American Dream and, with Maurice Brown, Art Making and Education. She amassed her collection of more than 1,500 artifacts, books, and printed ephemera over the course of several decades. In 1997, she donated this collection to the Huntington Library. Cathy Cherbosque is Curator of Historical Prints and Ephemera at the Huntington Library. She is a doctoral student in American History at Claremont Graduate University. .
March 15, 1911
Afrânio Coutinho (March 15, 1911 – August 5, 2000) was a Brazilian literary critic and essayist. He encouraged the rise of the "New Criticism" in Brazil of the 1950s. Coutinho edited the Portuguese version of Reader's Digest as well as several reference works on Brazilian literature. He also taught literature at several universities.The translator, Gregory Rabassa, was Professor of Romance Languages at Queens College, City University of New York.
March 15, 1931
RIMA DE VALLBONA has published many critical and fictional works, including La obra enprosa de Eunice 0db (1981), Noche en vela (1968), and Mundo, demonio y mujer (1991). She received her M.A. from the University of Costa Rica and her Doctorate in Modem Languages from Middlebury College in Vermont. Vallbona’s short stories have been published in translation in many countries. Her work has also appeared in When New Flowers Bloomed (Latin American Literary Review Press, 1991). Vallbona is the recipient of several literary prizes, including the ‘National Novel Prize’ (1968) from Costa Rica and the ‘Ancora Award’ for Las sombras que perseguimos as the ‘1984 best book in fiction’ in Costa Rica. She is Professor of Spanish at the University of St. Thomas in Texas, where she currently resides. LILLIAN LORCA DE TAGLE has translated more than twenty books by well-known authors, including Thomas Mann and Axel Munte. Following a successful career in broadcasting, writing, and editing, Tagle has returned to the art of translating literary works. . .
March 15, 1918
Richard David Ellmann (March 15, 1918 – May 13, 1987) was a prominent American literary critic and biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction for James Joyce (1959), which is one of the most acclaimed literary biographies of the 20th century; its 1982 revised edition was similarly recognised with the award of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. A liberal humanist, Ellmann's academic work generally focused on the major modernist writers of the twentieth century.
March 15, 1900
Gilberto de Mello Freyre (March 15, 1900 – July 18, 1987) was a Brazilian sociologist, anthropologist, historian, writer, painter, journalist and congressman, born in Recife, Northeast Brazil. He is commonly associated with other great Brazilian cultural interpreters of the first half of the 20th century, such as Sérgio Buarque de Holanda and Caio Prado Júnior. His best-known work is a sociological treatise named Casa-Grande & Senzala (variously translated, but roughly The Masters and the Slaves, as on a traditional plantation). Two sequels followed, The Mansions and the Shanties: the making of modern Brazil and Order and Progress: Brazil from monarchy to republic. The trilogy is generally considered a classic of modern cultural anthropology and social history, although it is not without its critics.
March 15, 1865
Carlos Gagini (15 March 1865 – 31 March 1925) was a Costa Rican intellectual, philologist writer, esperantist and linguist. He was born in Costa Rica, in a family of Swiss descent. He was a significant figure in linguistics and literature in Costa Rica. His work in language studies formed the basis for a large part of Costa Rican academic exploration during the twentieth century. He published many works about education, grammar, and anthropology. In literature, he supported the national character of Costa Rican writing, in contrast to other authors who looked to European models for inspiration. As a strong defender of national identity and independence, he wrote a novel which criticized imperialism. In 2001, on the 75th anniversary of his death, in the faculty of Arts and Letters of the University of Costa Rica, an esperanto memorial was inaugurated in his memory.
March 15, 1943
Lynda La Plante, CBE (born Lynda Titchmarsh; 15 March 1943) is an English author, screenwriter and former actress, best known for writing the Prime Suspect television crime series.
March 15, 1939
Robert Nye (born 1939) is an English poet who has also written novels and plays as well as stories for children. His bestselling novel FALSTAFF published in 1976 was described by Michael Ratcliffe (writing in the Times) as 'one of the most ambitious and seductive novels of the decade,' and went on to win both The Hawthornden Prize and Guardian Prize for fiction. The novel was also included in Anthony Burgess's 99 NOVELS: THE BEST IN ENGLISH SINCE 1939 (1984). Robert Nye was born in London in 1939. His father was a civil servant, his mother a farmer's daughter. He attended Southend High School for Boys and had published his first poem 'Kingfisher' in the London Magazine (September 1955; Volume 2, Number 9) by the age of sixteen. He left school in 1955 and did not pursue additional formal study. Nye's poetry has appeared in a number of important literary magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, Encounter and The Listener. The 1964 Fall and Winter issues of the Canadian publication The Fiddlehead contained respectively fifteen and eighteen of his poems. He was a conscientious objector during National Service in the late 1950s, and was given exemption from military service conditional upon joining the Friends' Ambulance Unit and serving as a medical orderly at St Wulstan's Sanitorium, near Malvern, and then at Rochford General Hospital in Essex. Between 1955 and 1961, he worked at a variety of jobs: newspaper reporter, milkman, postman, labourer in a market garden, and orderly in a sanitorium. Nye married his first wife, Judith Preyed, in 1959. In 1961, they moved to a remote cottage in North Wales where Nye devoted himself full-time to writing. There he developed an interest in Welsh and Celtic legends reflected later in his fiction for both adults and children. His first book, JUVENILIA 1 (1961), was a collection of poems. A second volume, JUVENILIA 2 (1963), won the Eric Gregory Award. Both volumes were enthusiastically received and Martin Seymour-Smith described Nye as showing a 'precocity unique in this century.' This view was supported by G.S Fraser who in an article in The Times Literary Supplement convincingly established an affinity between Nye's early poetry and that of Robert Graves To support his continuance as a poet, Nye began to contribute reviews to British literary journals and newspapers. He became the poetry editor for The Scotsman in 1967, and served as poetry critic of The Times from 1971 to 1996, while also contributing regular reviews of new fiction to The Guardian. Nye started writing stories for children to entertain his three young sons. His children's novel TALIESIN and a collection of stories called MARCH HAS HORSE'S EARS were published by Faber and Faber in 1966. When Nye published his first adult novel, DOUBTFIRE (1967), it was described by P.J. Kavanagh as 'breathless' and 'brilliant', Kavanagh also referred to the author's ‘love affair with rhythms and language’. That same year Nye divorced his first wife. A year later he married Aileen Campbell, an artist and analytical psychologist, who provided the illustrations for BEE HUNTER: ADVENTURES OF BEOWULF and was an inspiration for some of Nye's most personal poetry of the time (notably 'In More's Hotel'). Campbell also designed the masks used in the 1973 performance of one of the author's more unusual projects, THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS (1974). The two moved to Edinburgh where they lived until 1977. Nye's next publication after DOUBTFIRE was a return to children's literature, a freewheeling version of Beowulf which has remained in print in many editions since 1968. In 1970, he published another children's book, WISHING GOLD, and received the James Kennaway Memorial Award for his collection of short stories, TALES I TOLD MY MOTHER (1969). During the early 1970s Nye wrote several plays for BBC radio including A BLOODY STUPID HOLE (1970), REYNOLDS, REYNOLDS (1971), and a version of PENTHESILEA by Heinrich von Kleist (1971). He was also commissioned by Covent Garden Opera House to write an unpublished libretto for Harrison Birtwistle's opera, KRONIA (1970). Nye held the position of writer in residence at the University of Edinburgh, 1976–1977, during which time he received the Guardian fiction prize, followed by the 1976 Hawthornden Prize for his novel FALSTAFF. 1978 saw the publication of his MERLIN excursion into the Matter of Britain, equally convincing as romance or poetry or drug-induced hallucination. In 1990 Nye's novel THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MY LORD GILLES DE RAIS was published by Hamish Hamilton which many consider to be the author's masterpiece. The novel reportedly took only sixty days to write but represented the author's final release from a 35 year obsession with the story of Joan of Arc and her first Marshall of France. The seeds of the book can be found in the poem THE MYSTERY OF THE SIEGE OF ORLEANS first published in 1961 and in Nye's first novel DOUBTFIRE. Allan Massie reviewing the novel for 'The Scotsman' concluded that 'THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MY LORD GILLES DE RAIS is a work of learning, wit and humanity. its understanding of depravity is extraordinary, the judgment impeccable. .It is I think, the book he has worked all his life to write, and it is perfectly done; yes indeed a masterpiece.' Robert Nye has continued to write poetry, publishing DARKER ENDS (1969) which launched Calder and Boyars' 'Signature Series' later to include such authors as Samuel Beckett and Edward Dahlberg, and Divisions on a Ground (1976), and to prepare editions of other poets with whose work he feels an affinity: Sir Walter Ralegh, William Barnes, and Laura Riding. His own Collected Poems appeared in 1995, and remains in print. His selected poems, entitled THE RAIN AND THE GLASS, published in 2005, won the Cholmondeley Award. He has lived since 1977 in County Cork. Although his novels have won prizes and been translated into many languages, it is as a poet that he would probably prefer to be remembered. The critic Gabriel Josipovici has described him as ‘one of the most interesting poets writing today, with a voice unlike that of any of his contemporaries.’.
March 15, 1911
Charlton Ogburn Jr. (15 March 1911, Atlanta, Georgia – 19 October 1998, Beaufort, South Carolina) was an American journalist and author, most notably of memoirs and non-fiction works. Before he established himself as a writer he served in the US army, and then as a State Department official, specialising in South-East Asian affairs. In his later years he was best known as an advocate of the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship, leading the revival of public interest in the theory in the 1980s. He wrote over a dozen books and numerous magazine articles. Ogburn was the son of lawyer Charlton Greenwood Ogburn and writer Dorothy Ogburn née Stevens. His uncle was the sociologist William Fielding Ogburn. He was raised in Savannah and New York City, graduated from Harvard in 1932 and wrote and worked in publishing. During World War II he joined military intelligence, serving in the East Asian theater, most notably as communications officer for Merrill's Marauders. He left with the rank of captain. He returned to the US to begin a career with the State Department. From 1946 to 1949, he worked at the Division of South-East Asian Affairs. He went on to work at the Department of State. He held several posts, including Political Advisor to the United States Delegation to the United Nations Security Council's Committee of Good Offices for the Indonesian Dispute. Ogburn was among the first State Department officials to explicitly oppose the growing U.S. involvement in the First Indochina War, which would later evolve into the Vietnam war. In 1950 he wrote a memo in which he predicted that Ho Chi Minh would not "wilt" under the impact of American aid to the colonial French forces, and that any military victory would simply send Ho's troops "underground until a more propitious occasion presented itself". Ogburn also unsuccessfully opposed American policy of supporting the Vietnamese monarchy of B?o ??i. After the success of his story "Merrill's Marauders", a Harper's Magazine cover story in 1957, Harper & Bros. offered an advance for a book and he quit the government to write full-time in 1957. He committed suicide in 1998. Ogburn was married twice. With his first wife, he had one son, who was also called Charlton, (referred to as Charlton Ogburn, III). The couple divorced, after which Charlton III's name was changed by his mother to William Fielding Ogburn. He was later known as Will Aldis. Ogburn married Vera M. Weidman in 1951, with whom he fathered two daughters, Nyssa and Holly Ogburn.
March 15, 1959
Ben Okri (born 15 March 1959) is a Nigerian poet and novelist. Okri is considered one of the foremost African authors in the post-modern and post-colonial traditions and has been compared favourably to authors such as Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez. Ben Okri is a member of the Urhobo people; his father was Urhobo, and his mother was half-Igbo. He was born in Minna in west central Nigeria to Grace and Silver Okri in 1959. His father Silver moved his family to London when Okri was less than two years old so that Silver could study law. Okri thus spent his earliest years in London, and attended primary school in Peckham. In 1968 Silver moved his family back to Nigeria where he practised law in Lagos, providing free or discounted services for those who could not afford it. His exposure to the Nigerian civil war and a culture in which his peers saw visions of spirits at this time later provided inspiration for Okri's fiction. At the age of 14, after being rejected for admission to a university program in physics because of his youth, Okri claimed to have had a revelation that poetry was his chosen calling. He began writing articles on social and political issues, but these never found a publisher. He then wrote short stories based on those articles, and some were published in women's journals and evening papers. Okri claimed that his criticism of the government in some of this early work led to his name being placed on a death list, and necessitated his departure from the country. In the late 1970s, Okri moved back to England to study comparative literature at Essex University with a grant from the Nigerian government. But when funding for his scholarship fell through, Okri found himself homeless, sometimes living in parks and sometimes with friends. He describes this period as 'very, very important' to his work: 'I wrote and wrote in that period... If anything [the desire to write] actually intensified.' Okri's success as a writer began when he published his first novel Flowers and Shadows, at the age of 21. He then served West Africa magazine as poetry editor from 1983 to 1986, and was a regular contributor to the BBC World Service between 1983 and 1985, continuing to publish throughout this period. His reputation as an author was secured when he won the Booker Prize for Fiction for his novel The Famished Road in 1991. Since he published his first novel, Flowers and Shadows (1980), Okri has risen to an international acclaim, and he is often described as one of Africa's leading writers. His best known work, The Famished Road, which was awarded the 1991 Booker Prize, along with Songs of Enchantment and Infinite Riches make up a trilogy that follows the life of Azaro, a spirit-child narrator, through the social and political turmoil of an African nation reminiscent of Okri's remembrance of war-torn Nigeria. Okri's work is particularly difficult to categorise. Although it has been widely categorised as post-modern, some scholars have noted that the seeming realism with which he depicts the spirit-world challenges this categorisation. If Okri does attribute reality to a spiritual world, it is claimed, then his 'allegiances are not postmodern [because] he still believes that there is something ahistorical or transcendental conferring legitimacy on some, and not other, truth-claims.' Alternative characterisations of Okri's work suggest an allegiance to Yoruba folklore, New Ageism, spiritual realism, magical realism, visionary materialism, and existentialism. Against these analyses, Okri has always rejected the categorisation of his work as magical realism, claiming that this categorisation is the result of laziness on the part of critics and likening this categorisation to the observation that 'a horse ... has four legs and a tail. That doesn't describe it.' He has instead described his fiction as obeying a kind of 'dream logic,' and stated that his fiction is often preoccupied with the 'philosophical conundrum ... what is reality?' insisting that: 'I grew up in a tradition where there are simply more dimensions to reality: legends and myths and ancestors and spirits and death ... Which brings the question: what is reality? Everyone's reality is different. For different perceptions of reality we need a different language. We like to think that the world is rational and precise and exactly how we see it, but something erupts in our reality which makes us sense that there's more to the fabric of life. I'm fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality.' Okri's short fiction has been described as more realistic and less fantastic than his novels, but these stories also depict Africans in communion with spirits, while his poetry and nonfiction have a more overt political tone, focusing on the potential of Africa and the world to overcome the problems of modernity. Okri was made an honorary Vice-President of the English Centre for the International PEN and a member of the board of the Royal National Theatre. On 26 April 2012 Okri was appointed the new vice-president of the Caine Prize for African Writing, having been on the advisory committee and associated with the prize since it was established 13 years previously. Okri has described his work as influenced as much by the philosophical texts in his father's book shelves as it was by literature, and Okri cites the influence of both Francis Bacon and Michel de Montaigne on his A Time for New Dreams. His literary influences include Aesop's Fables, Arabian Nights, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'. Okri's 1999 epic poem, Mental Fight, is also named for a quote from the poet William Blake's 'And did those feet ...', and critics have noted the close relationship between Blake and Okri's poetry. Okri was also influenced by the oral tradition of his people, and particularly his mother's storytelling: 'If my mother wanted to make a point, she wouldn't correct me, she'd tell me a story.' His first-hand experiences of civil war in Nigeria are said to have inspired many of his works.
March 15, 1915
David Franz Schoenbrun (March 15, 1915 – May 23, 1988) was an American broadcast journalist. In 1915, Schoenbrun was born in New York City. He began his career teaching French. Schoenbrun enlisted in the Army in 1943 and became a World War 2 correspondent covering North Africa through to the liberation of France, for which he was decorated with the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honour. After the war, from 1947 to 1964, Schoenbrun worked for CBS, serving primarily as the network's bureau chief in Paris, where he met and interviewed the President Charles de Gaulle a number of times. He was one of the reporters known as Murrow's Boys. In 1959, at the age of 44, Schoenbrun received the Alfred I. duPont Award. From the 1960s through the 1980s, Schoenbrun served as a news analyst for WNEW Radio in New York (now WBBR) and other Metromedia broadcast properties, and later for crosstown WPIX Television and its Independent Network News operation. In the mid-1970s, he served as a foreign affairs analyst for a short-lived public television channel in Los Angeles. Schoenbrun is the author of On and Off the Air, a personal account of the history of CBS News through the 1970s. Schoenbrun also wrote several books concerning World-War-II-era France and other works drawn from his experiences as a newsman. Schoenbrun died of a heart attack in New York City, at the age of 73.
March 15, 1915
CARL E. SCHORSKE (March 15, 1915, New York City, NY - September 13, 2015, East Windsor Township, NJ) was born in New York City and attended Columbia College and Harvard University. He was Dayton-Stockton Professor of History and served as Director of European Cultural Studies at Princeton University. He also taught at Wesleyan University and at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His previous books are GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY, 1905—1917 and THE PROBLEM OF GERMANY.
March 15, 1952
DOMENIC STANSBERRY is the Edgar Award winning author of ten novels and a collection of stories. Domenic Stansberry was born in Washington, DC, in 1952, and raised in California: the eldest of six children, son of Chadwick Leroy Stansberry, an aerospace engineer, and Avincenza Rose Musolino, daughter of Italian immigrants. The family migrated to California in 1966. Stansberry attended UC Santa Cruz for two years, before heading north to Portland, Oregon, then eventually receiving a graduate degree from the University of Massachusetts. A collection of his early stories, Exit Paradise, appeared in 1992. After The Spoiler, it was ten years before the publication of his next crime novel, The Last Days of Il Duce, (1997) told from the point of view of Niccolo Jones, an ex-lawyer obsessed with his brother’s wife. The book was nominated for both an Edgar Award and the Hammett Prize. Stansberry followed this with Manifesto for the Dead (1999), a fictional retelling of the last days of pulp novelist Jim Thompson. Stansberry then wrote The Confession, a novel which sat unpublished for several years before being picked up by editor Charles Ardai at Hard Case Crime and winning the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original in 2005.
March 15, 1874
Arthur van Schendel (15 March 1874, Batavia, Dutch East Indies – 11 September 1946, Amsterdam) was a Dutch writer of novels and short stories. One of his best known works is Het fregatschip Johanna Maria.
March 15, 1895
Ruth Sawtell Wallis (15 March 1895 – 21 January 1978) was an American academic and physical anthropologist. Wallis was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, to Joseph Otis Sawtell and Grace Quimby. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1919 with a bachelor's degree in English. She then attended the school's graduate program in anthropology, traveling to Europe on a science fellowship to do research. She was the first to discover Azilian remains in France, uncovering two at Montardit, Ariège. Upon her return to the United States, Wallis switched to the anthropology program at Columbia University under Franz Boas. She assisted in one of Boas's most famous studies, an examination of head circumference and changes in head shape among immigrants. She then began studying growth and anthropometrics of young children; her doctoral thesis on that topic "remains a standard study widely quoted today". She was hired by the anthropology department at the University of Iowa in 1930. She married Wilson Dallam Wallis, a professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, in 1931, and took an assistant professorship in sociology at Hamline University. Ruth was later dismissed because "it was unthinkable to have two employed academics in one family during the Depression". On behalf of the Bureau of Home Economics, she undertook the largest ever study of children's growth, which resulted in the standardization of sizing for children's clothes. During the Second World War, Wallis examined labor statistics for the War Manpower Commission and helped coordinate the Japanese Language and Culture Program for the Army. She also began writing mystery novels.
March 15, 1825
Harriet E. Wilson (March 15, 1825 – June 28, 1900) is considered the first female African-American novelist, as well as the first African American of any gender to publish a novel on the North American continent. Her novel Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black was published anonymously in 1859 in Boston, Massachusetts, and was not widely known. The novel was discovered in 1982 by the scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who documented it as the first African-American novel published in the United States. The novel, The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts, published for the first time in 2002, may have been written before Wilson's book. Born a free person of color in New Hampshire, Wilson was orphaned when young and bound until the age of 18 as an indentured servant. She struggled to make a living after that, marrying twice; her only son George died at age seven in the poor house, where she had placed him while trying to survive as a widow. She wrote one novel. Wilson later was associated with the Spiritualist church, was paid on the public speaking circuit for her lectures about her life, and worked as a housekeeper in a boarding house.
March 15, 1870
Heriberto Frias (March 15, 1870, Santiago de Querétaro, Mexico - November 12, 1925) was a soldier in the Mexican army who went on to become a journalist. Barbara Jamison is a writer, editor, and translator based in San Francisco. The author of The Visitors Seduction, she was awarded two PEN short fiction awards, and her translation of Texto sucio by Cuban author Soleida Rios will be published in 2006. Antonio Saborit is Professor of History at the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City.
March 15, 1947
Ry Cooder is a world-famous guitarist, singer, and composer known for his slide guitar work, interest in roots music, and more recently for his collaborations with traditional musicians from many countries, including The Buena Vista Social Club. He has composed soundtracks for more than twenty films, including Paris, Texas. Two recent albums were accompanied by stories Cooder wrote to accompany the music. This is his first published collection of stories.
March 16, 1884
Alexander Beliaev (March 16, 1884, Smolensk, Russia - January 6, 1942, Pushkin, Saint Petersburg, Russia) was born in Smolensk in 1884. As a child he dreamed of flying and decided to make his dream come true. He and climbed to the top of a barn and jumped, seriously injuring his spine. The injury worsened, and by the time he was in his mid-twenties he was suffering constant pain and sudden attacks that would paralyze him for months at a time. But he found a new way to realize his dreams. Under the influence of Verne, Wells, and Tsiolkovski he turned to science fiction, and during the twenties and thirties wrote novels that have made him the most popular of all Russian science fiction writers: PROFESSOR DOWELL’S HEAD, AMPHIBIAN MAN, ARIEL, and THE STAR KETS. Antonina W. Bouis has translated from the Russian numerous books, plays, and articles. Her translations have been widely praised for their liveliness and readability.
March 16, 1939
Edna Buchanan (née Rydzik, born March 16, 1939) is an American journalist and writer best known for her crime mystery novels. Buchanan was born in Paterson, New Jersey. She attended Montclair State College. As one of the first female crime journalists in Miami, she wrote for the Miami Beach Daily Sun and The Miami Herald as a general assignment and police beat reporter. She won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for General News Reporting "for her versatile and consistently excellent police beat reporting." Her book Miami, It's Murder was nominated for an Edgar Award in 1995. Buchanan's autobiographical book The Corpse Had A Familiar Face inspired two TV Movies starring Elizabeth Montgomery The Corpse Had a Familiar Face (1994) and Deadline for Murder: From the Files of Edna Buchanan (1995). Her novel Nobody Lives Forever was made into a TV Movie in 1998. Buchanan was embarrassed in 1990 when she was quoted extensively in the book Blue Thunder: How the Mafia Owned and Finally Murdered Cigarette Boat King Donald Aronow, by Thomas Burdick and Charlene Mitchell. According to Buchanan, she tried to have her name and the quotes removed from the book after she read the galley proofs, but she was told by the publisher that it was too late.
March 16, 1952
Philippe Burrin is a professor of international history in the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. His previous books include France Under the Germans and Hitler and the Jews. He lives in Geneva, Switzerland.
March 16, 1931
Don Carpenter (March 16, 1931 – July 28, 1995) was an American writer, best known as the author of Hard Rain Falling. He wrote numerous novels, novellas, short stories and screenplays over the course of a 22-year career that took him from a childhood in Berkeley, California and the Pacific Northwest to the corridors of power and ego in Hollywood. A close observer of human frailty, his writing depicted marginal characters like pool sharks, prisoners and drug dealers, as well as movie moguls and struggling actors. Although lauded by critics and fellow writers alike, Carpenter's novels and stories never reached a mass audience and he supported himself with extensive work for Hollywood. Facing a mounting series of debilitating illnesses, Don Carpenter committed suicide in 1995. Carpenter was born in Berkeley, California, and lived in Lafayette during the early years of his childhood. When Carpenter was 16, he and his family moved to Portland, Oregon where he attended Woodrow Wilson High School. In 1951, Carpenter enlisted in the Air Force and was stationed in Kyoto, Japan. During his time in the service, Carpenter was a writer for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, where he met a struggling cartoonist named Shel Silverstein who would gain fame as a beloved author of children's books. When Carpenter was discharged from service in 1955 he returned to Portland where he eloped with Martha Ryherd. They had two daughters – Bonnie and Leha, and settled in San Francisco in the late 1950s. In 1957, Carpenter enrolled in San Francisco State College and received an M.A. when he graduated in 1961. Four years later (1965), the Carpenters settled in Mill Valley, California. Carpenter taught English for two years before publishing his first novel Hard Rain Falling (1966). From the late 1960s to the early 1980s Carpenter lived in and out of Hollywood writing screenplays for movies. Carpenter wrote a screenplay for the film Pay Day which was filmed in 1972 and starred Rip Torn as a country singer. He also wrote a teleplay for an episode of the 1960s television series The High Chaparral called ‘Once on a Day in Spring’. He also wrote three Hollywood novels between 1975 and 1981. One of the most troubling chapters to occur in Carpenter's life was in 1984, when his best friend Richard Brautigan committed suicide. In the late 1980s, Carpenter suffered from several medical maladies including tuberculosis, diabetes, and glaucoma. As the years went on, Carpenter's illnesses got progressively worse. After many years of suffering, Carpenter died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the summer of 1995 at his home in Mill Valley, California. He was 64. At the time of his death, Carpenter was working on a novel called Fridays at Enrico's, which was never published, and was possibly never completed. Don Carpenter's first novel, Hard Rain Falling, was recently reissued by New York Review Books as part of its Classics series, with an introduction by George Pelecanos.
March 16, 1939
Gerardo Mario Goloboff was born March 16, 1939 in Carlos Casares, Argentina, one of the original agricultural settlements established by the Jewish Colonization Association in the late nineteenth centry. Trained as a lawyer, he devoted himself to literature, founding the literary journal Nuevos Aires. Goloboff spent many years in political exile in France where he taught literary theory and Latin American literature at the Universities of Toulouse and Paris-Nanterre. He is the author of five novels and several books of poetry. He now lives and writes in Argentina.
March 16, 1952
Alice Hoffman is an American novelist and young-adult and children's writer, best known for her 1995 novel Practical Magic, which was adapted for a 1998 film of the same name. Many of her works fall into the genre of magic realism and contain elements of magic, irony, and non-standard romances and relationships.
March 16, 1974
Zoë Jenny is a Swiss writer. Her first novel, The Pollen Room, was published in German in 1997 and has been translated into 27 languages. Since 2003 she has been living in London. In 2008 she married Matthew Homfray, a British veterinary surgeon and pharmaceuticals consultant.
March 16, 1933
William McPherson (March 16, 1933 – March 28, 2017) was an American writer and journalist. He is the author of two novels, Testing the Current and To the Sargasso Sea, and many articles, essays, and book reviews. McPherson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism in 1977.
March 16, 1929,
A. K. RAMANUJAN (March 16, 1929, Mysore, India - July 13, 1993, Chicago, IL) was an award-winning translator and poet whose translations, poetry, and essays have been widely published and anthologized. He was William E. Colvin Professor of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, Linguistics, and a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
March 16, 1960
Julian Stallabrass is a British art historian, photographer and curator. He was educated at Leighton Park School and New College, Oxford University where he studied PPE. A Marxist, he has written extensively on contemporary art (including internet art), photography and the history of twentieth century British art.
March 16, 1892
César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza (March 16, 1892 – April 15, 1938) was a Peruvian poet, writer, playwright, and journalist. Although he published only three books of poetry during his lifetime, he is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the 20th century in any language. He was always a step ahead of literary currents, and each of his books was distinct from the others, and, in its own sense, revolutionary. Thomas Merton called him 'the greatest universal poet since Dante'. The late British poet, critic and biographer Martin Seymour-Smith, a leading authority on world literature, called Vallejo 'the greatest twentieth-century poet in any language.'
March 17, 1933
Born Myrlie Louise Beasley on March 17, 1933, in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Raised by her grandmother, a schoolteacher, Evers-Williams loved learning and music. Growing up in the segregated South, she went to Alcorn A&M College, one of the only colleges in the state that accepted African American students. While at Alcorn, she met Medgar Evers, a World War II veteran several years her senior. The couple fell in love and married in December of 1951. When her husband became the Mississippi field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Evers-Williams worked alongside him. She assisted him as he strove to end the unjust practice of racial segregation in schools and other public facilities and campaigned for voting rights as many African Americans were denied this right in the South. Medgar made enemies of those who didn't want race relations in the South to change. On June 12, 1963, Medger Evers was shot to death in front of his home by a white supremacist named Byron De La Beckwith. After her husband's murder, Evers-Williams fought hard to see his killer brought to justice. Although Beckwith was arrested and brought to trial on murder charges, two all-white juries could not reach a verdict in the case. It would take approximately 30 years for justice to be served, with Williams-Evers keeping the case alive and pushing for Beckwith to pay for his crime. Her efforts were not in vain. In the early 1990s, Beckwith was again arrested and later convicted by a multi-racial jury.
March 17, 1948
William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948) is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his early works were noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans—a "combination of lowlife and high tech" —and helped to create an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. Gibson notably coined the term "cyberspace" in his short story "Burning Chrome" (1982) and later popularized the concept in his acclaimed debut novel Neuromancer (1984).
March 17, 1947
Karen Elizabeth Gordon is the author of the classic and comic reference books The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, The New Well-Tempered Sentence, and Torn Wings and Faux Pas. Her wanderlusting fiction includes The Ravenous Muse, The Red Shoes and Other Tattered Tales, and Paris Out of Hand. She lives in Berkeley, California and Paris.
March 17, 1846
Catherine Greenaway (17 March 1846 – 6 November 1901) was a Victorian children's book illustrator and writer whose work influenced the children's style of the day. The only daughter of a successful draftsman and wood engraver, she studied graphic design and art between 1858 and 1869. Her first book, "Under the Window" was an instant best seller and brought her celebrity, and was followed by the equally popular and critically successful "The Birthday Book" (1880), Mother Goose (1881) and "Little Ann" (1883). Concurrently, she developed a career as a water-colorist; with illustrators Walter Crane and Randolph Caldecott, Greenaway's work revolutionized the children's book market. In the late 1870s Greenaway initiated a collaboration with printer and engraver Edmund Evans which lasted two decades. James Thorpe served as director of the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens from 1966 to 1983. A professor of English at Princeton for many years, he published studies of literary subjects ranging from the medieval to the modern.
March 17, 1933
Dame Penelope Margaret Lively, DBE, FRSL (born 17 March 1933) is a prolific, popular and critically acclaimed writer of fiction for both children and adults. She has won both the Booker Prize (Moon Tiger, 1987) and the Carnegie Medal for British children's books (The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, 1973).
March 17, 1898
Yokomitsu Riichi (17 March 1898 – 30 December 1947) was an experimental, modernist Japanese writer.), was an essayist, writer, and critical theorist who became one of the most powerful and influential literary figures in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1924 Yokomitsu joined with Kataoka Teppei and Kawabata Yasunari to found the Shinkankaku-ha (New Sensation School), artists who looked to contemporary avant-garde movements in Europe - Dadaism, futurism, surrealism, Expressionism - for inspiration in their effort to explode the conventions of literary language and to break free of what they saw as the prisonhouse of modern culture. A key feature of the school’s experiments was the use of jarring imagery that originated in the group’s fascination with the visual effects of cinema. Yokomitsu incorporated the striking visuality of his early experimental style into a realistic mode that presents a disturbing picture of a city in turmoil. The result is a brilliant evocation of Shanghai as a gritty ideological battleground and as an exotic landscape where dreams of sexual and economic domination are nurtured. The translator, Dennis Washburn, teaches Japanese and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. He is the translator of Ooka Shohei’s novel, The Shade of Blossoms (Michigan, 1998), coeditor of Word and Image in the Japanese Cinema (Cambridge, 2000) and Studies in Modern Japanese Literature: Essays and Translations in Honor of Edwin McClellan (Michigan, 1997), and the author of The Dilemma of the Modern in Japanese Fiction (Yale, 1995).
March 17, 1916
Volodia Teitelboim Volosky (originally Valentín Teitelboim Volosky; March 17, 1916 – January 31, 2008) was a Chilean communist politician, lawyer, and author. Born in Chillán to Jewish immigrants (Ukrainian Moisés Teitelboim and Bessarabian Sara Volosky), Teitelboim was interested in literature from an early age. He finished high school, then began his studies in the Faculty of Law of the University of Chile, where at graduation he presented his senior thesis The Dawn of Capitalism - The Conquest of America. At the age of 29, Teitelboim married Raquel Weitzmann, who had also studied law. In the 1940s, while Teitelboim, like other members of the Communist Party, was forced to go underground, Weitzman became pregnant with the child of a former university colleague. The child, named Claudio, was adopted by Teitelboim and Weitzman's affair was hushed up. Due to Teitelmboim's frequent long periods of absence due to party activities, persecution, and imprisonment, the marriage suffered, and finally ended in 1957, when Weitzman left for Cuba in company of Jaime Barros. Teitelboim then took charge of Claudio, who was 10 years old at the time. When, in 2005, Claudio learned that his father was actually the lawyer Álvaro Bunster, he broke relations with Teitelboim and took on his biological father's surname. Teitelboim's second marriage, at the age of 51, was to Eliana Farías. Together, while in exile in Moscow following the Chilean military coup d'état of September 11, 1973, they raised Faría's son, Roberto Nordenflycht, and their own daughter, whom they named Marina. Roberto followed Teitlboim's example and also became a communist. He was killed in August 1989 while taking part in a guerrilla action in Chile with the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front. The grief over Roberto's death marked the end of Teitelboim's marriage to Farías. Marina, for her part, eventually became a career diplomat. Teitelboim died on January 31, 2008, at the Catholic University's hospital in Santiago of kidney failure resulting from lymphatic cancer. He and Claudio Bunster reportedly reconciled at the end. Teitelboim joined the Chilean Communist Party's youth section at the age of sixteen. During the 1940s he endured persecution, along with all the militants of the Communist Party, and was imprisoned in Pisagua under the so-called Democratic Defense Law (also known as Ley maldita). In 1961 he was elected to Congress as a Deputy for Valparaíso and Quillota, a post he held until 1965, when he was elected Senator for Santiago. He was re-elected to this post in March 1973, but was only able to further serve in it until Congress was disbanded following the September 11, 1973, coup d'état. During the military regime of Gen. Augusto Pinochet Teitelboim lived in exile in Moscow, where he launched the twice-weekly radio program Escucha, Chile ("Listen, Chile"). Despite the risk, he clandestinely returned to Chile in 1988 and campaigned for a provisional government following the regime's having been handed a defeat in that year's national plebiscite. The following year he was elected president of the Communist Party, a position he held until 1994. Teitelboim's literary work, for which he was awarded Chile's National Prize in Literature in 2002, as well as the Literature prize of the 1931 Floral Games, is chiefly in the form of memoirs, biographies, and literary essays. His first book Antología de poesía chilena (Anthology of Chilean Poetry) was published in conjunction with Eduardo Anguita in 1932, and compiled the great poets of Chile. He would later say that it committed the errors of omitting Gabriela Mistral and of accentuating the dispute between Vicente Huidobro, Pablo de Rokha, and Pablo Neruda. His series of memoirs, Un muchacho del siglo XX (A Boy of the Twentieth Century, 1997), La gran guerra de Chile y otra que nunca existió (The Great War of Chile and Another That Never Existed, 2000) and Noches de radio (Radio Nights, 2001) present from a political and social perspective the great arch of Chilean history during the 20th century. His best known capacity is that of a biographer, in which he wrote about Jorge Luis Borges, Vicente Huidobro, and with the most critical acclaim, Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral. In terms of membership in literary movements, he is generally located within the Chilean Generation of '38.
March 17, 1920
MANUEL ZAPATA OLIVELLA (born in Lorica, Colombia, in 1920) is the dean of living black Colombian narrators. Trained in the natural and social sciences, he holds a degree in medicine and is recognized for his ethnological studies in African folklore. Zapata Olivella has founded journals, taught and lectured widely, and represented his country at numerous international colloquia. He is best known, however, as the author of eight sociologically charged novels, many of which have won literary prizes in Colombia and beyond. Thomas E. Kooreman is professor of Spanish at Butler University in Indianapolis.
March 18, 1915
Richard Thomas Condon (March 18, 1915 in New York City, New York – April 9, 1996 in Dallas, Texas) was a prolific and popular American political novelist whose satiric works were generally presented in the form of thrillers or semi-thrillers. More than being particularly clever genre works, however, all 26 books were written in a style nearly always instantly recognizable as Condon's, while their focus was almost always obsessively directed at monetary greed and political corruption. Fast-moving and easily accessible, they generally combined elements of political satire, bare-knuckled outrage at the greed and corruption of those in power, and were written with extravagant characterizations and a uniquely sparkling and frequently humorous style. Condon himself once said: ‘Every book I've ever written has been about abuse of power. I feel very strongly about that. I'd like people to know how deeply their politicians wrong them.’ Condon occasionally achieved bestseller status, and many of his books were made into films, but today he is primarily remembered for two of his works: an early book, The Manchurian Candidate of 1959, and, many years later, for four novels about a family of New York gangsters named Prizzi. Condon's writing was known for its complex plotting, fascination with trivia, and loathing for those in power; at least two of his books featured thinly disguised versions of Richard Nixon. His characters tend to be driven by obsession, usually sexual or political, and by family loyalty. His plots often have elements of classical tragedy, with protagonists whose pride leads them to a place to destroy what they love. Some of his books, most notably Mile High (1969), are perhaps best described as secret history. And Then We Moved to Rossenara is a humorous autobiographical recounting of various places in the world where he had lived and his family's 1970s move to Rossenarra, Co. Kilkenny, Ireland.
March 18, 1790
Astolphe-Louis-Léonor, Marquis de Custine (18 March 1790 – 25 September 1857) was a French aristocrat and writer who is best known for his travel writing, in particular his account of his visit to Russia in 1839 Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia. This work documents not only Custine's travels through the Russian empire, but also the social fabric, economy, and way of life during the reign of Nicholas I.
March 18, 1921
Edgar Zodaig Friedenberg (March 18, 1921 – June 1, 2000) was a scholar of education and gender studies best known for The Vanishing Adolescent (1959) and Coming of Age in America (1965). The latter was a finalist for the 1966 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
March 18, 1948
Jessica B. Harris (born March 18, 1948) is an American culinary historian, college professor, cookbook author and journalist. Jessica B. Harris, an only child, was born in Queens, New York in 1948. Her family also had a summer home on Martha's Vineyard. From 1953 to 1961, Harris attended the United Nations International School in New York City. She graduated from the High School of Performing Arts when she was sixteen years old and went on to earn an A.B. in French from Bryn Mawr College (1968). Her junior year at Bryn Mawr, Harris studied in Paris. Following graduation, Harris returned to France to study at the Universite de Nancy for one year. She then earned her master's degree from Queens College (1971) and a Ph.D. from New York University (1983). In 1972, Harris traveled to West Africa to work on her doctoral dissertation. In the 1970s, Harris worked as a journalist before becoming a food writer. She was book review editor at Essence and theater critic for New York Amsterdam News, the United States' oldest black newspaper. Harris is a member of the faculty in the English Department at Queens College/C.U.N.Y. She hosts a monthly program, My Welcome Table, on Heritage Radio Network. She has published 12 books. Her primary subjects are the culinary history, foodways and recipes of the African diaspora. Harris was a 2004 winner of the lifetime achievement awards from the Southern Foodways Alliance and a 2010 James Beard Foundation special award honoree. Her most recent book is the memoir My Soul Looks Back (2017).
March 18, 1634 baptised
Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, comtesse de La Fayette (baptized 18 March 1634 – 25 May 1693), better known as Madame de La Fayette, was a French writer, the author of La Princesse de Clèves, France's first historical novel and one of the earliest novels in literature.
March 18, 1842
Stéphane Mallarmé (18 March 1842 – 9 September 1898), whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.
March 18, 1957
Marita Sturken's work focuses on the relationship of cultural memory to national identity and issues of visual culture. She is the author of Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (California, 1997), Thelma & Louise (British Film Institute, 2000), Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (with Lisa Cartwright, Oxford, 2001, Second Edition, 2009), and co-editor, with Douglas Thomas and Sandra Ball-Rokeach, of Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technology (Temple, 2004). Her writings have been published in a number of journals, including Representations, Public Culture, History and Theory, and Afterimage. She is the former editor of American Quarterly, the journal of the American Studies Association. She teaches courses on cultural studies, visual culture, popular culture, advertising, and global culture. Her most recent book is Tourists of History: Memory, Consumerism, and Kitsch in American Culture, Duke University Press, 2007.
March 18, 1932
John Hoyer Updike (18 March 1932 – 27 January 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic. Updike's most famous work is his Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom series (the novels Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and the novella ‘Rabbit Remembered‘), which chronicles Rabbit's life over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to his death. Both Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit At Rest (1990) received the Pulitzer Prize. Updike is one of only three authors (the others were Booth Tarkington and William Faulkner) to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once. He published more than twenty novels and more than a dozen short story collections, as well as poetry, art criticism, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker, starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books.
March 18, 1929
Christa Wolf (18 March 1929 – 1 December 2011) was a German novelist and essayist. She was one of the best-known writers to emerge from the former East Germany.
March 19, 1821
Sir Richard Francis Burton (March 19, 1821, Torquay, United Kingdom - October 20, 1890, Trieste, Italy) was an English explorer, geographer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer, and diplomat.
March 19, 1933
Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933) is an American novelist. He first gained attention with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of American-Jewish life for which he received the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Roth's fiction, regularly set in Newark, New Jersey, is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its 'supple, ingenious style' and for its provocative explorations of Jewish and American identity. His profile rose significantly in 1969 after the publication of the controversial Portnoy's Complaint, the humorous and sexually explicit psychoanalytical monologue of 'a lust-ridden, mother-addicted young Jewish bachelor,' filled with 'intimate, shameful detail, and coarse, abusive language.' Roth is one of the most awarded U.S. writers of his generation: his books have twice received the National Book Award, twice the National Book Critics Circle award, and three times the PEN/Faulkner Award. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel, American Pastoral, which featured one of his best-known characters, Nathan Zuckerman, the subject of many other of Roth's novels. The Human Stain (2000), another Zuckerman novel, was awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year. In 2001, Roth received the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize.
March 19, 1933
Edward Baugh is Professor Emeritus of English, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. He is the author of Derek Walcott: Memory as Vision (Longman, 1978) and Derek Walcott (Cambridge University Press, 2006). Baugh was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, the son of Edward Percival Baugh, Purchasing Agent and Ethel Maud Duhaney-Baugh. He began writing poetry at Titchfield High School. He won a scholarship to study English literature at the University College of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, and later did postgraduate studies at Queen's University in Ontario and the University of Manchester, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1964. He taught at the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies from 1965 to 1967, then at the university's Mona campus from 1968 to 2001, eventually being appointed professor of English in 1978 and public orator in 1985. He has also held visiting appointments at the University of California, Dalhousie University, University of Hull, University of Wollongong, Flinders University, Macquarie University, University of Miami and Howard University. In 2012 he was awarded a Gold Musgrave Medal by the Institute of Jamaica. His scholarly publications include West Indian Poetry 1900-1970: A Study in Cultural Decolonisation (1971); Critics on Caribbean Literature (1978); Derek Walcott: Memory as Vision (1978), the first book-length study of Walcott's work; and an annotated edition of Walcott’s Another Life (2004), with Colbert Nepaulsingh. Chancellor, I Present (1998) collects a number of the addresses Baugh delivered as UWI's public orator on the occasion of the presentation on honorary degrees.
March 19, 1899
AKSEL SANDEMOSE was born in 1899 in a small town in Jutland, Denmark His parents were of the working class, and at the age of fourteen he had to go out and earn his own living. After two years he ran off to sea, working on ships in the Baltic and finally on a sailing vessel which touched at Newfoundland. Out of his experiences in that country and in Canada he later formed the material of A FUGITIVE CROSSES HIS TRACKS. When he returned to Denmark, he married, settled down, and earned his daily bread for some time as a field laborer and coal heaver. In this period he began to write and after many discouraging episodes (his first book was rejected forty-two times) he managed to get stories and articles published and noticed by a considerable circle of readers. His published work has now reached a total of a dozen volumes.
March 19, 1939
Lynne Sharon Schwartz (born March 19, 1939) is a contemporary American writer. Schwartz grew up in Brooklyn, the second of three children of Jack M. Sharon, a lawyer and accountant, and Sarah Slatus Sharon; she married Harry Schwartz in 1957. She holds a BA (1959) from Barnard College, an MA (1961) from Bryn Mawr, and started work on a PhD at NYU. Schwartz has taught in many universities and writing programs, including Bryn Mawr, Columbia, the University of Michigan, Washington University, Rice, and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is currently on faculty in the Writing Seminars MFA program at Bennington College. Lynne Sharon Schwartz lives in New York City, and has set a number of her books there as well. Though Schwartz is perhaps best known for her novels, her work spans a number of genres, from fiction to poetry to memoir, criticism, and translation from Italian.
March 19, 1721
Tobias George Smollett (19 March 1721 – 17 September 1771) was a Scottish poet and author. He was best known for his picaresque novels, such as The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) and The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751).
March 19, 1848
James Otis Kaler (March 19, 1848 — December 11, 1912) was an American journalist and author of children’s literature. He wrote under the name James Otis. Kaler was born on March 19, 1848, in Winterport, Maine. He attended public schools, then got a job with the Boston Journal at 13, and three years later was providing coverage of the American Civil War. Later, he went on to work as a journalist or editor for various newspapers, superintendent at schools, and a publicity man at a circus. In 1880 he authored his first, and still most famous (largely by way of a filmed version by Walt Disney), children’s book, Toby Tyler, or Ten Weeks with a Circus, a story about an orphan who runs away to join the circus. Following the book's success he went on to author numerous other children’s books, mostly historical and adventure novels. Like most writers of his era, he was astonishingly prolific, and a total of nearly 200 books by him have been identified. After spending several years in the southeastern states, he returned to Maine in 1898 to become the first superintendent of schools in South Portland. A school named in his honor still stands in that city. He married Amy L. Scamman on March 19 of that year, and they had two sons, Stephen and Otis. Kaler died of uremia on December 11, 1912, in Portland, Maine.
March 19, 1827
John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee name: Cheesquatalawny, or Yellow Bird, March 19, 1827 – October 5, 1867), a member of the Cherokee Nation, is considered the first Native American novelist.
March 19, 1827
Richard Penn Smith (March 13, 1799 - August 12, 1854) was a minor American playwright who is best known for writing a largely fictitious account of events at and leading up to the Battle of the Alamo, which was presented as the work of Davy Crockett. Smith was born in Philadelphia. His father was a well-known minister and his grandfather had been the first provost of the College of Philadelphia. In 1818 he began his legal studies in the law offices of William Rawle. During that time, he began writing a column called "The Plagiarist" for a local newspaper. This prompted him to purchase a small newspaper named The Aurora which he edited from 1822-1827. The next year his first play, "Quite Correct", was produced at the Chestnut Street Theater. That same year, he sold The Aurora and returned to legal practice to support his theatrical work. He had written over thirteen plays by 1836, when he stopped writing following the publication of "Davy Crockett's Journal". He was married twice and had 5 children with each wife. Only 1 survived from the first marriage, but all 5 from the second remained alive. He died at his home in Philadelphia in 1854. In 1836, a sensation was created by a new book titled "Col. Crockett's Exploits and Adventures in Texas: wherein is contained a full account of his journey from Tennessee to the Red River and Natchitoches, and thence across Texas to San Antonio; including many hair-breadth escapes; together with a topographical, historical, and political view of Texas ... Written by Himself". It was published by "T.K. and P.G. Collins" (actually Carey and Hart, who had published some of Crockett's authentic, though heavily edited, writings). They falsely claimed that it was Crockett’s journal, which had been taken from the Alamo by Mexican General Manuel Fernández Castrillón and later recovered at the Battle of San Jacinto, where the General was killed. It became a huge best-seller. For over a century the book had a profound influence on the public's view of the Texas Revolution and Davy Crockett's career, despite the fact that the author's true identity had been revealed in 1884.
March 20, 1928
Inés Arredondo (1928-1989) was the most important Mexican woman short-story writer of the twentieth century. She published just three slim volumes of stories over a period of twenty-three years, yet her reputation as a great writer, ‘a necessary writer,’ is firmly established in Mexico. Her works dwell on a few central obsessions: erotic love, evil, purity, perversion, prostitution, tragic separation, and death. Most of her characters are involved in ill-fated searches for the absolute, through both excessively passionate and sadomasochistic relationships. Inevitably the perfect, pure dyad of two youthful lovers is interrupted or corrupted, through the interference of a third party (a rival lover or a child - ‘Great lovers don’t have children’), aging, death, or public morality (in the cases of incest and homosexuality). Time and again, excess - whether of love, passion, possessiveness, or narcissism-has tragic consequences for both the lovers and the innocent people around them. Arredondo wrote sparingly, publishing little more than thirty short stories in twenty-three years. She once told an interviewer that she waited for the holy ghost to spit on her as a sign that she should write a new story; but since he was a ghost, he didn’t have much saliva. She told me that one of her most enigmatic stories, ‘The Brothers,’ a dreamlike reflection on passion, female virginity, and male honor, was dictated to her by a voice in the shower. ‘Shadow in the Shadows,’ in which she explored every conceivable sort of sexual perversion in order to demonstrate the impossibility of distinguishing between purity and prostitution, came to her as she sat sipping coffee under the arches on the idyllic main plaza in Oaxaca. Despite the brevity of Arredondo’s work, her elegant, crystalline style and her disturbing, highly original vision of the human condition, and of gender and power relations in northern Mexico at the beginning of the twentieth century, establish her as one of contemporary Mexico’s most significant authors.
March 20, 1897
Theodora Kracaw Kroeber Quinn (March 24, 1897 – July 4, 1979) was a writer and anthropologist, best known for her accounts of Ishi, the last member of the Yahi tribe of California, and for her retelling of traditional narratives from several Native Californian cultures. Theodora Kracaw was born in Colorado, the daughter of Phebe Jane (née Johnston) and Charles Emmett Kracaw. She later moved to California, where she studied at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1920 she earned her Master's degree in clinical psychology. After having been left a widow in 1923 by her first husband, Clifton Brown, she studied anthropology and met and married Alfred Louis Kroeber, one of the leading American anthropologists of his generation and himself a widower. After his death, Theodora Kroeber wrote his biography. They had two children, writer Ursula K. Le Guin and English professor Karl Kroeber. Her children from her first marriage to Clifton Brown, who Alfred Kroeber adopted and gave his surname to, were Ted Kroeber and Clifton Kroeber, historian. Two movies were made based on her account of Ishi: Ishi: The Last of His Tribe (1978) and The Last of His Tribe (1992).
March 20, 1905
Raymond Bernard Cattell, PhD, DSc (20 March 1905 – 2 February 1998) was a British and American psychologist, known for his psychometric research into intrapersonal psychological structure and his exploration of many areas within empirical psychology. These multifaceted areas included: the basic dimensions of personality and temperament, the range of cognitive abilities, the dynamic dimensions of motivation and emotion, the clinical dimensions of abnormal personality, patterns of group syntality and social behavior, applications of personality research to psychotherapy and learning theory, predictors of creativity and achievement, and many multivariate research methods including the refinement of factor analytic methods for exploring and measuring these domains. Cattell authored, co-authored, or edited almost 60 scholarly books, more than 500 research articles, and over 30 standardized psychometric tests, questionnaires, and rating scales. According to a widely cited ranking, Cattell was the 16th most eminent, 7th most cited in the scientific journal literature, and among the most productive, but controversial psychologists of the 20th century. As a research psychologist, Cattell was devoted to the scientific pursuit of knowledge through rigorous research. He was an early proponent of using factor analytic methods instead of what he called "subjective verbal theorizing" to explore empirically the basic dimensions of personality, motivation, and cognitive abilities. One of the results of Cattell's application of factor analysis was his discovery of no fewer than 16 separate primary trait factors within the normal personality sphere alone (based on the trait lexicon). He called these factors "source traits" because he believed they provide the underlying source for the observable "surface" behaviors we think of as personality. This empirically-derived theory of personality factors and the multidimensional self-report instrument used to measure them are known respectively as the 16 personality factor model and the 16PF Questionnaire (16PF). Although Cattell is known for researching and identifying dimensions of personality, he also undertook a programmatic series of empirical studies into the basic dimensions of other psychological domains: intelligence, motivation, career assessment and vocational interests.Cattell theorized the existence of fluid and crystallized intelligence to explain human cognitive ability, investigated changes in Gf and Gc over the lifespan, and constructed the Culture Fair Intelligence Test to minimize the bias of written language and cultural background in intelligence testing.
March 20, 1920
Andre Chedid is a poet, essayist, dramatist and novelist of Egypto-Lebanese origin. Born and educated in Cairo, where she received a degree in literature from the American University she moved to Paris in 1946, and became a naturalized French citizen. She is the recipient of many literary awards, including the Prix Louise Labbé (poetry), 1969: Aigie d’or de la poesie, 1972; Grand prix de l’Academie Belge, 1974; Prix de l’afrique Mediteaneene, 1974; Prix Mallarmé (poetry), 1976: and Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle, 1979. Sharon Spencer is professor of English and comparative literature at Montclair State College in New Jersey. A novelist herself, she received an award in fiction-writing from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts for 1981-82. She is the author of COLLAGE OF DREAMS: THE WRITINGS OF ANAÏS NIN and SPACE, TIME AND STRUCTURE IN THE MODERN NOVEL.
March 20, 1954
Journalist, painter and novelist, Pierre Clitandre was born on 20 March 1954 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He studied painting at the Académie de Beaux-Arts from 1974 to 1977 and continued his studies at the Faculty of Ethnology until 1979. He is a cultural journalist and collaborator in the main Haitian newspapers: Le Nouvelliste , Le Matin and Le Petit Saturday Evening . He is also a columnist for Radio Haiti Inter, and for two years he collaborates with Radio Plus for programs in culture and archeology, ethnology and town planning.
March 20, 1884
Eugen Herrigel (20 March 1884 in Lichtenau, Baden – 18 April 1955 in Partenkirchen, Bavaria) was a German philosopher who taught philosophy at Tohoku Imperial University in Sendai, Japan, from 1924 to 1929 and introduced Zen to large parts of Europe through his writings. While living in Japan from 1924 to 1929, he studied ky?d?, traditional Japanese archery, under Awa Kenzô (1880-1939), a master of the art, in the hope of furthering his understanding of Zen. In July 1929 he returned to Germany and was given a chair for philosophy at the University of Erlangen. According to Gershom Scholem 'Herrigel joined the Nazi Party after the outbreak of the war and some of his former friends in Frankfurt, who broke with him over this issue, told me about his career as a convinced Nazi, when I enquired about him in 1946. He was known to have stuck it out to the bitter end. This was not mentioned in some biographical notes on Herrigel published by his widow, who built up his image as one concerned with the higher spiritual sphere only.' Eugen Herrigel was a member of the Militant League for German Culture. In 1936 he published a 20-page article describing his experiences entitled 'Die Ritterliche Kunst des Bogenschiessens' (The Knightly Art of Archery) in the journal, Zeitschrift für Japanologie. This later formed the core of his most famous work Zen in the Art of Archery. In the book, Herrigel does not mention the Master's name [incorrect: Herrigel specifically references 'the celebrated Master Kenzo Awa' on page 16 of the book (1953); and 'the Great Master ... Awa' in the first sentence of the third paragraph in section II of the essay (1936). Professor Herrigel died in 1955. Among his papers were found voluminous notes on various aspects of Zen. These notes were selected and edited by Hermann Tausend in collaboration with Gusty L. Herrigel, the author's wife (who studied Japanese flower arranging) and were published in German under the title Der Zen-Weg. This version was revised and edited by Alan Watts in 1960 and published by Vintage Press as The Method of Zen. It has been claimed that Master Kenzô, was neither a teacher nor an adherent of Zen Buddhism. After having read work by D.T. Suzuki in 1938, Herrigel claimed that Kenzô's teaching was actually Zen. Suzuki initially seemed to agree having written the introduction to the post-war edition of Herrigel's book, he later wrote that 'Herrigel is trying to get to Zen, but he hasn't grasped Zen itself'. Certain modern scholarship on Zen has come to regard Suzuki's own reading of Zen as idiosyncratic and not grounded in traditions of Zen. Supposedly, what distinguishes the approach of Suzuki, Herrigel, and Master Kenzô himself is the way they developed the Taoist features of the tradition. However, the book Zen Arrow, Zen Bow: The Life and Teaching of Awa Kenzo refutes these interpretations and in fact reproduces a photograph of a calligraphy by Kenzo that reads 'The Bow and Zen are One.' Volker Zotz revealed in his book on Buddhism and German Culture that Eugen Herrigel was a strong supporter of the Nazi party. For his involvement in Nazism he was forbidden to teach at the University for three years after 1945.
March 20, 1770
Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (20 March 1770 – 7 June 1843) was a major German lyric poet, commonly associated with the artistic movement known as Romanticism. Hölderlin was also an important thinker in the development of German Idealism, particularly his early association with and philosophical influence on his seminary roommates and fellow Swabians Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling.
March 20, 1828
Henrik Johan Ibsen (20 March 1828 – 23 May 1906) was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as 'the father of realism' and is one of the founders of Modernism in theatre. His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder. He is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and A Doll's House became the world's most performed play by the early 20th century. Several of his later dramas were considered scandalous to many of his era, when European theatre was expected to model strict morals of family life and propriety. Ibsen's later work examined the realities that lay behind many façades, revealing much that was disquieting to many contemporaries. It utilized a critical eye and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. The poetic and cinematic early play Peer Gynt, however, has strong surreal elements.Ibsen is often ranked as one of the truly great playwrights in the European tradition. Richard Hornby describes him as 'a profound poetic dramatist—the best since Shakespeare'. He is widely regarded as the most important playwright since Shakespeare. He influenced other playwrights and novelists such as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Miller, James Joyce, Eugene O'Neill and Miroslav Krleža. Ibsen wrote his plays in Danish (the common written language of Denmark and Norway) and they were published by the Danish publisher Gyldendal. Although most of his plays are set in Norway—often in places reminiscent of Skien, the port town where he grew up—Ibsen lived for 27 years in Italy and Germany, and rarely visited Norway during his most productive years. Born into a merchant family connected to the patriciate of Skien, his dramas were shaped by his family background. He was the father of Prime Minister Sigurd Ibsen.
March 20, 1957
Shelton Jackson "Spike" Lee (born March 20, 1957) is an American film director, producer, writer, and actor. His production company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, has produced over 35 films since 1983. He made his directorial debut with She's Gotta Have It (1986), and has since directed such films as Do the Right Thing (1989), Malcolm X (1992), The Original Kings of Comedy (2000), 25th Hour (2002), Inside Man (2006), Chi-Raq (2015) and the upcoming award-winning film BlacKkKlansman (2018). Lee has acted in ten of his own films. Lee's movies have examined race relations, colorism in the black community, the role of media in contemporary life, urban crime and poverty, and other political issues. Lee has received two Academy Award nominations, a Student Academy Award and an Academy Honorary Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and won numerous other awards, including two Emmy Awards, two Peabody Awards, an honorary BAFTA Award, an Honorary César, the 2013 Gish Prize and a Grand Prix award.
March 20, 1951
Alison Mills (born March 20, 1951, Long Island, New York) is the author of Francisco (1974), an autobiographical novel about a young black woman's disillusionment with her early success as an actress in Hollywood, her emerging interest in the 1970s Black Arts Movement, and her love affair with independent black filmmaker. The novel is based on Mills' own experience performer in the 1960s when she appeared in pioneering television programs featuring African-American actors and entertainers. She had regular roles on Julia, which starred Diahann Carroll, and The Leslie Uggams Show. She has also appeared in several films directed by her husband, Francisco Newman, including Ain't Nobody Slick (1972) and Virgin Again (2000). Francisco was the first novel published by the Berkeley, California publisher Reed, Cannon, and Johnson. Originally founded by African-American writers Ishmael Reed, Steve Cannon, and Joe Johnson, the press is now known as I. Reed Books.
March 20, 1954
Christoph Ransmayr (born March 20, 1954) an Austrian writer and the author of two previous novels. For The Dog King, he shared in 1996 with Salman Rushdie the European Aristeion Prize. He lives and works in a village near Dublin, Ireland.
March 20, 1923
Shaukat Siddiqi (20 March 1923 – 18 December 2006) was a Pakistani writer of fiction who wrote in Urdu language. He is best known for his novels Khuda Ki Basti (God's Own Land) and Jangloos. Siddiqi was born on 20 March 1923 in a literary family of Lucknow, India. He gained his early education in his home town and earned a B.A. in 1944 and an M.A. (Political Science) in 1944. After the partition of India, he migrated to Pakistan in 1950 and stayed in Lahore, but soon permanently settled in Karachi. His early days in Pakistan were full of financial trouble and political opposition, which he soon overcame. He accompanied Zulfikar Ali Bhutto on several foreign tours. He was an active member of the Pakistan Writers' Guild and a member of the Progressive Writers Association which was then and still is a part of the larger organization, the Progressive Writers Movement in the India-Pakistan subcontinent. Shaukat Siddiqi worked at the news-desks of the Times of Karachi, Pakistan Standard, and the Morning News. He finally rose to be the editor of the Daily Anjaam, the Weekly Al-Fatah and the Daily Musawat of Karachi, before bidding goodbye to journalism in 1984. Siddiqi's first short story, "Kon Kisi Ka", appeared in Weekly Khayyam in Lahore, Pakistan. In 1952, his first collection of short stories, Teesra Admi, was brought out and proved to be a great success. Subsequently, other collections of short stories followed: Andhere Dur Andhere (1955), Raaton Ka Shehar (1956) and Keemya Gar (1984). His magnum opus is Khuda Ki Basti (God's Own Land), which has appeared in 50 editions and been translated into 26 languages. It has been dramatised time and again.Its English translation was by David Mathews of London University. The novels Kamin Gah (1956), Jangloos (in three volumes, 1988), and Char Deewari (1990) are fictionalized accounts of his childhood in Lucknow, India.
March 20, 1926
Leonid Borisovich Tsypkin (March 20, 1926 — March 20, 1982) was a Soviet writer and medical doctor, best known for his book Summer in Baden-Baden. Tsypkin was born in Minsk, Soviet Union (now the capital of Belarus), to Russian-Jewish parents, both of whom were medical specialists. At the start of Stalin's Great Terror, in 1934, Tsypkin's father, Boris, an orthopaedic surgeon, was arrested on trumped-up charges, but was later released after a suicide attempt in which he broke his back. Two of Boris Tsypkin's sisters and a brother were also arrested, and were murdered by Stalin's NKVD. His family suffered further during the German invasion in 1941. Boris Tsypkin's mother, another of his sisters and two nephews, perished in the ghetto. With the help of a farmer who was his patient Boris Tsypkin escaped from Minsk with his wife and eleven-year-old son Leonid. When the war was over Leonid returned with his parents to Minsk, where Leonid graduated from medical school in 1947; despite Stalin's policies of anti-Semitism, Tsypkin became a noted researcher in polio and cancer, and published more than 100 papers in scientific journals in Russia and abroad. While practicing medicine, Tsypkin considered abandoning medicine to become a writer [and in] his early years he had produced some poetry and fiction, but in 1969, after winning a Doctor of Science degree, he was granted a salary increase, which freed him from part-time work and thus allowed him to get down to writing in earnest. Over the following decade he wrote sketches and stories, and two autobiographical novellas, none of which was published in his lifetime. After his son and daughter-in-law emigrated to America in 1977, Tsypkin was demoted to the post of junior medical researcher. He and his family were denied permission to leave the Soviet Union on two occasions, in 1979 and 1981. Tsypkin died at the age of 56 of a heart attack in Moscow. Summer in Baden-Baden is a fictional account of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's stay in Germany with his wife Anna. Depictions of the Dostoyevskys' honeymoon and streaks of Fyodor's gambling mania are intercut with scenes of Fyodor's earlier life in a stream-of-consciousness style. Tsypkin knew virtually everything about Dostoyevsky, but although the details in the novel are correct, it is a work of fiction, not a biographical statement. While Baden Baden was perhaps Tsypkin's first significant work, at least in the West, his reputation was arguably sealed by the novella Norartakir. The story deals with themes of revenge, some of which, perhaps even all, being metaphorical acts by the author against the Soviet system.
March 20, 1943
Gerard Joseph Malanga (born March 20, 1943) is an American poet, photographer, filmmaker, curator and archivist.
March 20 , 43 BC
Publius Ovidius Naso (20 March 43 BC – AD 17/18), known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet best known for the Metamorphoses, a 15-book continuous mythological narrative written in the meter of epic, and for collections of love poetry in elegiac couplets, especially the Amores (‘Love Affairs’) and Ars Amatoria (‘Art of Love’).
March 20, 1872
Gustavus Myers (1872–1942) was an American journalist and historian who published a series of influential studies on wealth accumulation. His name is associated with the muckraking era of U.S. literature. Gustavus Myers was born March 20, 1872, in Trenton, New Jersey, the son of Julia Hillman and Abram Myers. He attended school for a time while the impoverished family lived in Philadelphia. His father was largely absent. At the age of 14, Gustavus began working in a factory. He continued his own education by reading avidly and attending public lectures. His older brother, Jerome Myers, became a painter associated with the Ashcan School. Gustavus married Genevieve Whitne, Massachusetts, on September 23, 1904, and they had two children together. In 1891, Myers went to work as a reporter for the Philadelphia Record, leaving the next year for New York City, where he remained for the rest of his life. In the 1890s, Myers became a member of the People's Party (commonly known as the "Populists"), later joining the Socialist Party of America (SPA). He published 'The History of Tammany Hall' in 1901. Myers was interested in parapsychology, he published Beyond the Borderline of Life (1910). In the decade of the 1910s, he emerged as a leading scholar of the American socialist movement when he authored a series of volumes for Charles H. Kerr & Co., the country's largest publisher of Marxist books and pamphlets. Between 1909 and 1914, Myers published three volumes on the history of family wealth in the United States, one volume on the same topic for Canada, and a history of the Supreme Court of the United States. These publications were frequently cited and used in an academic setting for several decades, with Myers' History of the Great American Fortunes revived in a single volume format in 1936. Myers split with the Socialist Party in 1917 over the SPA's position against US involvement in World War I. In 1918 Myers contributed to the US war effort by publishing a book attacking what he called "Germany's Sinister Propaganda" entitled The German Myth: The Falsity of Germany's "Social Progress" Claims. Myers received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1941, which he used to write a book entitled History of Bigotry in the United States. Myers died before the work could be published and Random House published the work posthumously. Gustavus Myers died on December 7, 1942 in Bronx, New York at the age of 70.
March 20, 1952
Wendy Lesser (born 1952) is an American critic, writer, and editor based in Berkeley, California. She is the founding editor of the arts journal The Threepenny Review, and the author of a novel and several works of nonfiction, including most recently a biography of the architect Louis Kahn, for which she won the 2017 Marfield Prize. Lesser was born in 1952 in Santa Monica, California and moved in 1955 to Palo Alto, California, where she was raised. She is the daughter of Murray Lesser, an engineer and writer, and Millicent Dillon, a writer. She earned a B.A. at Harvard University in 1973; an M.A. at King's College, Cambridge, in 1973; and a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1982. She is the author of several books, including a novel, The Pagoda in the Garden (Other Press, 2005), and the nonfiction book Why I Read (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014). She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Dedalus Foundation, and the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, among other places.
March 21, 1947
Michael Dibdin (21 March 1947 – 30 March 2007) was a British crime writer. Dibdin was born in Wolverhampton, the son of a physicist, and was brought up from the age of seven in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, where he attended Friends' School. He graduated with a degree in English from Sussex University, and then went to study for a Master's degree at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. After publishing his first novel, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, he lived for four years in Italy, teaching at the university in Perugia. Latterly he lived in Seattle, Washington. Dibdin was married three times, most recently to the novelist K. K. Beck. He died in Seattle, Washington, following a short illness. Dibdin is best known for his Aurelio Zen mysteries, set in Italy. The first of these, Ratking, won the 'Gold Dagger' award of 1988. This series of detective novels provide a penetrating insight into the less visible aspects of Italian society over the last twenty years. The earlier books have a lightness of touch that gradually becomes much darker. The character of Zen himself is anti-heroic, which adds much to the books' irony and black humour. A final Zen book, End Games, appeared posthumously in July 2007. He also wrote other detective works set in America and in England.
March 21, 1929
Josiah Mwangi Kariuki (21 March 1929 – 2 March 1975) was a Kenyan socialist politician during the administration of the Jomo Kenyatta government. He held different government positions from 1963, when Kenya became an independent country, to 1975, when he was assassinated. He left behind three wives and many children. He was popularly known as "JM".
March 21, 1934
Ved Parkash Mehta (born 21 March 1934) is a writer who was born in Lahore, British India (now a Pakistani city) to a Hindu family. He lost his sight at the age of four to cerebrospinal meningitis. Because of the limited prospects for blind people in general, his father, Amolak Ram Mehta, a doctor, sent him over 1,300 miles away to the Dadar School for the Blind in Bombay
March 21, 1931
Alda Merini (Milan, 21 March 1931 – Milan, 1 November 2009) was an Italian writer and poet. Merini was quite young when, as a poet, she gained the attention and the admiration of other Italian writers, such as Giorgio Manganelli, Salvatore Quasimodo and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Her writing style is described as intense, passionate and mystic, and it bears an influence from Rainer Maria Rilke. Some of her poems concern her time in a mental home (1964 to the late 1970s) and are often of a long and dramatic nature. She explores the "otherness" of madness as part of creative expression. The poem "The other truth. Diary of a dropout" (L'altra verità. Diario di una diversa) is considered by some as her masterpiece, Scheiwiller, 1986. In 1996 she was nominated by the "Académie Francaise" as candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2007 she won the Elsa Morante Ragazzi Award with Alda e Io – Favole written in cooperation with the fable writer Sabatino Scia. Giorgio Napolitano then President of the Italian Republic described her, at her death, as an "inspired and limpid poetic voice." Susan Stewart is the author of five books of poems, including RED ROVER and COLUMBARIUM, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other books include POETRY AND THE FATE OF THE SENSES, which won the Christian Gauss and Truman Capote prizes for literary criticism, and THE OPEN STUDIO: ESSAYS ON ART AND AESTHETICS. A former MacArthur Fellow, she is the Annan Professor of English at Princeton and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
March 21, 1945
Henrik Nordbrandt (born 21 March 1945) is a Danish poet, novelist and essayist. He made his literary debut in 1966 with the poetry collection Digte. He was awarded the Nordic Council's Literature Prize in 2000 for the poetry collection' Drømmebroer ('Dream Bridges'). Although a Danish writer he has spent much of his life in the Mediterranean and this is said to have had an influence on his writing. In 2007 the Polish painter Kasia Banas carried out a project including paintings inspired by the poetry of Henrik Nordbrandt. Henrik Nordbrandt was born in Frederiksberg, a Copenhagen suburb, in 1945. He studied Chinese, Turkish and Arabic at the University of Copenhagen, but ever since his debut in 1966 he has worked as a writer. Nordbrandt has won all possible literary awards in Denmark, his average being one every two years, but the most important award, that of the Nordic Council, he gained in 2000 for Dream Bridges, which also appeared in the Netherlands the same year. Alongside numerous collections of poetry, he has also published crime fiction, children’s books and even a Turkish cookery book. For many years he lived in Mediterranean countries such as Greece and Turkey, and – more recently – Spain. His poetry deals with – what else? – travelling, but first and foremost with departures and arrivals that inevitably lead to new departures and arrivals. It also examines love, leaving, emptiness, absence, and death, which resolves everything. Yet when death took his beloved (see the poems ‘At the Entrance’ ('Ved indgangen') and ‘Ugur, Asaf, Behçet’), all he felt was absence and loss. Despite his thematic choices, the language of his poems is elegant and almost cheerful, and his poems are often witty, displaying an appealingly paradoxical use of images. In fact, in considering language and the ways in which that language constructs the world, his poetry largely relates back to the self. His poems do not rhyme and are made up of either long, wandering sentences or very short precise statements, as in the poem about the meditating camel which is only aware of the steppe and the edge of the wood. Beneath the humorous forms and wordplay, one senses an undertone of seriousness and melancholy, which is also clearly evident when he reads aloud from his own work.
March 21, 1949
Jose Leonel Rugama Rugama (Esteli, 21 March 1949 - Managua, January 15, 1970) was a Nicaraguan poet, guerrilla of the Sandinista front of national liberation and seminarian who has stood by his contribution to Nicaraguan literature. His most famous poem was 'The Earth is a satellite of the Moon'.
March 21, 1953
David R. Wisniewski (March 21, 1953 in England – September 11, 2002 in Alexandria, Virginia at age 49), was an American writer and illustrator best known for children's books. He attended the University of Maryland, College Park but quit after one semester to join the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, graduating in 1973. He worked for several years as a clown before moving to Maryland and joining the Prince George's Country Puppet Theatre where he met his wife Donna Harris. In 1980, they started the Clarion Puppet Theatre (later known as the Clarion Shadow Theatre) which toured in schools, theaters and at the Smithsonian. After his children were born, he became a full-time author/ illustrator, using layers of cut paper to illustrate children's books. His book Golem, won the 1997 Caldecott Medal. In his acceptance speech, he said of himself: "I am a self-taught artist and writer who depends on instincts developed through years of circus and puppet performance to guide a story's structure and look."
March 22, 1950
Lieselotte "Pieke" Biermann (born March 22, 1950 in Stolzenau , Germany) is a German journalist , writer and translator. Pieke Biermann studied German literature and language, English and political sciences at the Hanover Technical University and at the University of Padua. She wrote her master's thesis on "Unpaid Housework" ("The Heart of the Family"). She then received a doctorate scholarship and worked on a dissertation on witches that she did not complete. Biermann worked in different professions - at the post office, as an editorial assistant, and as a prostitute, first in Hanover , then in Berlin. In Berlin, she appeared as a frontwoman of the prostitution movement within the women's movement in the 1980s, and was a co-organizer of the "Erste Berliner Hurenballs" in 1988. Since 1976 she has been working as a writer, journalist and translator in Berlin, translating some novels of Agatha Christie and also writing crime novels of her own.
March 22, 1846
Randolph Caldecott (22 March 1846 – 12 February 1886) was an English artist and illustrator, born in Chester. The Caldecott Medal was named in his honour. He exercised his art chiefly in book illustrations. His abilities as an artist were promptly and generously recognised by the Royal Academy. Caldecott greatly influenced illustration of children's books during the nineteenth century. Two books illustrated by him, priced at a shilling each, were published every Christmas for eight years. Caldecott also illustrated novels and accounts of foreign travel, made humorous drawings depicting hunting and fashionable life, drew cartoons and he made sketches of the Houses of Parliament inside and out, and exhibited sculptures and paintings in oil and watercolour in the Royal Academy and galleries.
March 22, 1943
HOUSTON A. BAKER JR. (born March 22, 1943) is the Director of the Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania He is the author of a number of studies of African-American literature including: BLUES, IDEOLOGY, AND AFRO-AMERICAN LITERATURE: A VERNACULAR THEORY, and AFRO-AMERICAN POETICS: REVISION OF HARLEM AND THE BLACK AESTHETIC. He is also a published poet whose volumes include SPIRIT RUN and BLUES JOURNEYS HOME.
March 22, 1924
Paul Fussell (22 March 1924 – 23 May 2012) was an American cultural and literary historian, author and university professor. His writings cover a variety of topics, from scholarly works on eighteenth-century English literature to commentary on America's class system. He is best known for his writings about World War I and II, which explore what he felt was the gap between the romantic myth and reality of war; he made a ‘career out of refusing to disguise it or elevate it’.
March 22, 1936
Edith Grossman is the acclaimed translator of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Mayra Montero, and many other distinguished Spanish-language writers. Her translation of DON QUIXOTE is widely considered a masterpiece. The recipient of numerous prizes for her work, she was awarded the Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation by PEN in 2006, and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2008. Currently a Guggenheim Fellow, she lives in New York City.
March 22, 1939
Avishai Margalit's most recent book (with Ian Buruma) is ‘Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies’ (Penguin). His other books include ‘The Ethics of Memory’ and ‘The Decent Society’. A professor emeritus of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Margalit is the George F. Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
March 22, 1947
James Brendan Patterson is an American author and philanthropist. Among his works are the Alex Cross, Michael Bennett, Women's Murder Club, Maximum Ride, Daniel X, NYPD Red, Witch and Wizard, and Private series, as well as many stand-alone thrillers, non-fiction and romance novels.
March 22, 1892
Karel Polacek (March 22, 1892, Rychnov nad Kn?žnou, Czech Republic - January 21, 1945, Gliwice, Poland) was one of the leading Czech novelists, journalists, children’s writers, and humorists between the wars. He was also the most prominent Jewish author writing in Czech. Like his friend Karel Capek, he brought humor and the unexpected to all of his pursuits. Ring Lardner is the English-language writer closest in spirit and style to Polacek. WHAT OWNERSHIP’S ALL ABOUT is the first of Polacek’s works to appear in English. Peter Kussi has translated three of Milan Kundera’s novels, including IMMORTALITY. He has also translated works by such Czech authors as Josef Skvorecky, Jaroslav Hasek, and Jiri Grusa. He teaches at Columbia University. .
March 22, 1928
Dmitri Antonovich Volkogonov (22 March 1928 – 6 December 1995) was a Soviet/Russian historian and colonel general who was head of the Soviet military's psychological warfare department. Despite being a committed Stalinist and Marxist–Leninist ideologue for most of his career, Volkogonov came to repudiate communism and the Soviet system within the last decade of his life before his death from cancer in 1995.
March 22, 1923
Bo Bojesen (March 22, 1923 - November 14, 2006 ) was a Danish satirist . Bo Bojesen was born in Åbenrå as the son of a bookstore. At the age of 18, he came to Copenhagen in 1942 and went to the School of Architecture where he dumped, however, so he chose the art school's advertising line. During last year, during the occupation , he worked as a promoter, but also got some drawings in the man's magazine , and it has probably been here that the editor of Politikens Magasin , Arne Ungermann , saw the talent. Bojesens made his debut for Politiken in 1946 and he should illustrate "The cheap long side"at this year's biggest football event, the international match against Sweden , but it was not finished, so it had to be saved to the international match against Norway fourteen days later. It was a teeming group portrait of the regular Danish population in the first year after the war, drawn with a precision and gentle irony, which became the prelude to the lifelong collaboration with Politiken, where he made "Dagens Tegning" a fixed point of reference for newspaper readers. Here he commented on current events and made satire over time politicians. For the many years in the newspaper he also unfolded in the cuttlefish and through book illustrations. Professor Hans Hertel's books "Bo Bojesen's Danish History " and "Bo Bojesen and the Great World" have also given a wide audience the opportunity to laugh at themselves and the events in Denmark and abroad since the Second World War . Bo Bojesen also won a number of awards for his work, including the PH prize , The Golden Drawing Pen and the award as the Publicist of the Year .
March 22, 1941
Billy Collins, named U.S. Poet Laureate in June 2001 and reappointed to the post in 2002, has published seven collections of poetry, including The Apple That Astonished Paris; Nine Horses; The Art of Drowning; Picnic, Lightning; Questions about Angels; and Sailing Alone Around the Room. A professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York, he lives in Somers, New York.
March 22, 1952
S. A. Smith is a historian of modern Russia and China, who was a graduate student at both Moscow State University and at Peking University. He is the author of many books and articles on the Russian and Chinese revolutions, including Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917-18 (CUP, 1983) and Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (CUP, 2008), and is editor of The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism (OUP, 2014). He taught for many years at the University of Essex, where he is an emeritus professor, and then at the European University Institute in Florence, before being elected to a senior research fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, in 2012.
March 23, 1898
Louis Adamic (23 March 1898 – 4 September 1951) was a Slovene-American author and translator, mostly known for writing about and advocating for ethnic diversity of America.
March 23, 1940
Professor Ama Ata Aidoo, née Christina Ama Aidoo (born 23 March 1940, Saltpond) is a Ghanaian author, playwright and academic. Born in Saltpond in Ghana's Central Region, she grew up in a Fante royal household, the daughter of Nana Yaw Fama, chief of Abeadzi Kyiakor, and Maame Abasema. Aidoo was sent by her father to Wesley Girls' High School in Cape Coast from 1961 to 1964. The headmistress of Wesley Girls' bought her her first typewriter. After leaving high school, she enrolled at the University of Ghana in Legon and received her Bachelor of Arts in English as well as writing her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, in 1964. The play was published by Longman the following year, making Aidoo the first published African woman dramatist. She worked in the United States of America where she held a fellowship in creative writing at Stanford University. She also served as a research fellow at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, and as a Lecturer in English at the University of Cape Coast, eventually rising there to the position of Professor. Aside from her literary career, Aidoo was appointed Minister of Education under the Provisional National Defence Council in 1982. She resigned after 18 months. She has also spent a great deal of time teaching and living abroad for months at a time. She has lived in America, Britain, Germany, and Zimbabwe. She is currently a Visiting Professor in the Africana Studies Department at Brown University. Aidoo's works of fiction particularly deal with the tension between Western and African world views. Her first novel, Our Sister Killjoy, was published in 1977 and remains one of her most popular works. Many of Aidoo's protagonists are women who defy the stereotypical women's roles of their time. Her novel Changes, won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book (Africa). She is also an accomplished poet, and has written several children's books.
March 23, 1964
Jonathan Ames grew up in New Jersey and graduated from Princeton University in 1987. He is the winner of a Henfield / Transatlantic Review award. He has modeled for Bruce Weber and Horst. I PASS LIKE NIGHT is his first novel. He lives in New Jersey.
March 23, 1915
Francis Berry (23 March 1915 – 10 October 2006) was a Professor of English Language and Literature in the University of London at Royal Holloway College. He was previously holder of a Personal Chair at the University of Sheffield. He held visiting lectureships in the United States and the West Indies, conducted seminars for the British Council in India, and has lectured in Germany, Poland, Malta and the Middle East. Francis Berry’s previous publications include POETS’ GRAMMAR: PERSON, TIME AND MOOD IN POETRY (1958), POETRY AND THE PHYSICAL VOICE (1962), THE SHAKESPEARE INSET: WORD AND PICTURE (1965), AND TWO BOOKS OF POETRY, MORANT BAY AND OTHER POEMS (1961) and GHOSTS OF GREENLAND (1966).
March 23, 1887
Josef ?apek (23 March 1887 – April, 1945 ) was a Czech artist who was best known as a painter, but who was also noted as a writer and a poet. He invented the word robot, which was introduced into literature by his brother, Karel ?apek.
March 23, 1950
Joseph Connolly (born March 23, 1950) is a British journalist, novelist, non-fiction writer and bibliophile. For many years Connolly was the proprietor of The Flask Bookshop in Hampstead, London.
March 23, 1514
Lorenzino de' Medici (March 23, 1514 – February 26, 1548), also known as Lorenzaccio, was an Italian politician, writer and dramatist, and a member of the Medici family. He became famous for the assassination of his cousin, Alessandro de' Medici, duke and ruler of Florence.
March 23, 1881
Roger Martin du Gard (23 March 1881 – 22 August 1958) was a French author and winner of the 1937 Nobel Prize for Literature. Trained as a paleographer and archivist, Martin du Gard brought to his works a spirit of objectivity and a scrupulous regard for detail. Because of his concern with documentation and with the relationship of social reality to individual development, he has been linked with the realist and naturalist traditions of the 19th century. His major work was The Thibaults, a multi-volume roman fleuve that follows the fortunes of the two brothers, Antoine and Jacques Thibault, from their upbringing in a prosperous Catholic bourgeois family to the end of the First World War. Six parts of the novel were published between 1922 and 1929; Martin du Gard abandoned a seventh in manuscript before completing the two final installments, l'Été 1914 and l'Épilogue. Written under the shadow of the darkening international situation in Europe in the 1930s, these last parts, which together are longer than the previous six combined, focus on the political and historical situation leading up to the outbreak of the First World War, and conclude with the death of Antoine Thibault in 1918. Martin du Gard wrote several other novels, including Jean Barois, which was set against the historical context of the Dreyfus Affair. During the Second World War, he resided in Nice, where he prepared a novel (Souvenirs du lieutenant-colonel de Maumort) that remained unfinished at his death; it was posthumously published in 1983. His other works include plays and a memoir of André Gide, a longtime friend. Roger Martin du Gard died in 1958 and was buried in the Cimiez Monastery Cemetery in Cimiez, a suburb of the city of Nice, France.
March 23, 1900
Erich Seligmann Fromm (March 23, 1900 – March 18, 1980) was a German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was associated with what became known as the Frankfurt School of critical theory.
March 23, 1910
Akira Kurosawa (March 23, 1910 – September 6, 1998) was a Japanese film director and screenwriter, who directed 30 films in a career spanning 57 years. He is regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. Kurosawa entered the Japanese film industry in 1936, following a brief stint as a painter. After years of working on numerous films as an assistant director and scriptwriter, he made his debut as a director during World War II with the popular action film Sanshiro Sugata (a.k.a. Judo Saga). After the war, the critically acclaimed Drunken Angel (1948), in which Kurosawa cast then-unknown actor Toshiro Mifune in a starring role, cemented the director's reputation as one of the most important young filmmakers in Japan. The two men would go on to collaborate on another 15 films. Rashomon, which premiered in Tokyo, became the surprise winner of the Golden Lion at the 1952 Venice Film Festival. The commercial and critical success of that film opened up Western film markets for the first time to the products of the Japanese film industry, which in turn led to international recognition for other Japanese filmmakers. Kurosawa directed approximately one film per year throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, including a number of highly regarded (and often adapted) films, such as Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954) and Yojimbo (1961). After the 1960s he became much less prolific; even so, his later work—including his final two epics, Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985)—continued to win awards, though more often abroad than in Japan. In 1990, he accepted the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement. Posthumously, he was named "Asian of the Century" in the "Arts, Literature, and Culture" category by AsianWeek magazine and CNN, cited there as being among the five people who most prominently contributed to the improvement of Asia in the 20th century. His career has been honored by many retrospectives, critical studies and biographies in both print and video, and by releases in many consumer media formats.
March 23, 1941
Jonathan Kwitny (March 23, 1941 – November 26, 1998) was an American investigative journalist. Kwitny was born in Indianapolis. He earned a bachelor's degree in journalism at the University of Missouri's School of Journalism in 1962, and a master's degree in history at New York University in 1964. Kwitny was married twice. His first wife, with whom he had two daughters, died in 1978. His second wife was the poet Wendy Wood Kwitny, with whom he had two sons. Jonathan Kwitny died of stomach cancer in 1998. His awards included the George Polk Award for television investigative reporting and the University of Missouri School of Journalism's honor medal for career achievement. Kwitny was also the author of several books on subjects which ranged from the Nugan Hand Bank scandal to a biography of Pope John Paul II. Kwitny's career in journalism began as a reporter for the Perth Amboy News Tribune in 1963. In 1971 he joined The Wall Street Journal, where his articles frequently appeared as front-page features. In 1987, together with producer Tom Naughton, Kwitny created a half-hour news program for New York's WNYC-TV called The Kwitny Report. The show was carried on the PBS network and won the Polk Award for television investigative reporting in 1989, but was canceled that same year. At the time of his death, he was working for the Gannett newspaper company
March 23, 1927
Lu Wenfu?March 23, 1927 - July 9, 2005) was a contemporary Chinese writer. He was interested in literature from an early age and devoted all his life into it. He worked for many years as journalist and a magazine editor and served as president of the Jiangsu Writers' Association and vice president of the Chinese Writers' Association. Lu's life ended in Suzhou, his favorite city in Jiangsu province.All his work is a mirror of this old city and that's why his novels are generally regarded as Suzhou literature.He is famous for his first story Deep within a Lane. From then on, Lu started producing a lot of fictions and essays.
March 23, 1937
Moacyr Jaime Scliar (March 23, 1937 – February 27, 2011) was a Brazilian writer and physician. Most of his writing centers on issues of Jewish identity in the Diaspora and particularly on being Jewish in Brazil. Scliar is best known outside Brazil for his 1981 novel Max and the Cats (Max e os Felinos), the story of a young German man who flees Berlin after he comes to the attention of the Nazis for having had an affair with a married woman. Making his way to Brazil, his ship sinks, and he finds himself alone in a dinghy with a jaguar who had been travelling in the hold. Scliar was born in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, into a Jewish family that immigrated to Brazil from Bessarabia in 1919. He graduated in medicine in 1962, majoring in public health. He worked for a time at the Jewish Hospital for the Elderly in Porto Alegre but then went into public health, mainly in the area of tuberculosis. A prolific writer, Scliar published over 100 books in Portuguese, covering various literary genres: short stories; novels; young adult fiction; children's books; and essays. In 1962, his first book Stories of a Doctor in Training was published, although later on he regretted having published it so young. His second book The Carnival of the Animals was published in 1968. In a recent autobiographical piece, Scliar discusses his membership of the Jewish, medical, Gaucho, and Brazilian tribes. His novel The Centaur in the Garden was included among the 100 Greatest Works of Modern Jewish Literature by The National Yiddish Book Center. In an interview with Judith Bolton-Fasman published in The Jewish Reader, August 2003, Scliar commented on his use of the centaur as a metaphor: 'The centaur is a symbol of the double identity, characteristic of Jews in a country like Brazil. At home, you speak Yiddish, eat gefilte fish, and celebrate Shabbat. But in the streets, you have soccer, samba, and Portuguese. After a while you feel like a centaur.'
March 23, 1948
Constance Penley is Professor of Film Studies and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a founding editor of Camera Obscura and the author of The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, the editor of Feminism and Film Theory and the co-editor of Technoculture, Male Trouble and The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender, and Science.
March 23, 1821
Aleksey Feofilaktovich Pisemsky (March 23 1821 – February 2, 1881) was a Russian novelist and dramatist who was regarded as an equal of Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoyevsky in the late 1850s, but whose reputation suffered a spectacular decline after his fall-out with Sovremennik magazine in the early 1860s. A realistic playwright, along with Aleksandr Ostrovsky he was responsible for the first dramatization of ordinary people in the history of Russian theatre. "Pisemsky's great narrative gift and exceptionally strong grip on reality make him one of the best Russian novelists," according to D.S. Mirsky. Pisemsky's first novel Boyarschina (1847, published 1858) was originally forbidden for its unflattering description of the Russian nobility. His principal novels are The Simpleton (1850), One Thousand Souls (1858), which is considered his best work of the kind, and Troubled Seas, which gives a picture of the excited state of Russian society around the year 1862. He also wrote plays, including A Bitter Fate (also translated as "A Hard Lot"), which depicts the dark side of the Russian peasantry. The play has been called the first Russian realistic tragedy; it won the Uvarov Prize of the Russian Academy.
March 23, 1942
Walter Rodney (March 23, 1942 – June 13, 1980) was a prominent Guyanese historian and political figure. Born to a working class family, Rodney was a bright student, attending Queen's College in Guyana and then attending university on a scholarship at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, graduating in 1963. Walter Rodney earned his PhD in 1966 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England. His dissertation focused on the slave trade on the upper Guinea coast. The paper was published in 1970 under the name, A HISTORY OF THE UPPER GUINEA COAST, 1545-1800 and it was widely acclaimed for its originality in challenging the conventional wisdom on the area. He traveled widely and became very well known around the world as an activist and scholar. He taught for a time in Tanzania after graduating, and later in Jamaica at his alma mater - UWI Mona. Rodney was sharply critical of the middle class for its role in the post-independence Caribbean. When the Jamaican government, led by prime minister Hugh Shearer, banned him, in October 1968, from ever returning to the country, because of his advocacy for the working poor in that country, riots broke out, eventually claiming the lives of several people and causing millions of dollars in damages. These riots, which started on October 16, 1968, are now known as the Rodney Riots, and they triggered an increase in political awareness across the Caribbean, especially among the Afrocentric Rastafarian sector of Jamaica, documented in his book, THE GROUNDINGS WITH MY BROTHERS. Rodney became a prominent Pan-Africanist, and was important in the Black Power movement in the Caribbean and North America. While living in Dar es Salaam he was influential in developing a new centre of African learning and discussion. Rodney's most influential book was HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA, published in 1972. In it he described an Africa which had been consciously exploited by European imperialists, leading directly to the modern underdevelopment of most of the continent. The book became enormously influential as well as controversial. In 1974 Rodney returned to Guyana from Tanzania. He was supposed to take a position as a professor at the University of Guyana but the government prevented his appointment. He became increasingly active in politics, forming the Working People's Alliance, against the PNC government. In 1979 he was arrested and charged with arson after two government offices were burned. In 1980, Rodney was killed by a bomb in his car while running for office in Guyanese elections. Rodney was survived by his wife, Pat, and three children. Walter's brother, Donald, who was injured in the explosion, said that a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force named Gregory Smith had given Rodney the bomb that killed him. Smith fled to French Guiana after the killing, where he died in 2002. Rodney's death was commemorated in a poem by Martin Carter entitled ‘For Walter Rodney’. In 2004, his widow, Patricia, and children donated his papers to the Robert L. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center. Since 2004, an annual Walter Rodney Symposium has been held each 23 March (Rodney's birthday) at the Center under the sponsorship of the Library and the Political Science Department of Clark Atlanta University, and under the patronage of the Rodney family.
March 23, 1946
Walter Satterthwait (March 23, 1946) is an author of mysteries and historical fiction. A fan of mystery novels from a young age, he spent high school immersed in the works of Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane. While working as a bartender in New York in the late 1970s, he wrote his first book: an adventure novel, Cocaine Blues (1979), about a drug dealer on the run from a pair of killers. After his second thriller, The Aegean Affair (1982), Satterthwait created his best-known character, Santa Fe private detective Joshua Croft. Beginning with Wall of Glass (1988), Satterthwait wrote five Croft novels, concluding the series with 1996’s Accustomed to the Dark. In between Croft books, he wrote mysteries starring historical figures, including Miss Lizzie (1989), a novel about Lizzie Borden, and Wilde West (1991), a western mystery starring Oscar Wilde. His most recent novel is Dead Horse (2007), an account of the mysterious death of Depression-era pulp writer Raoul Whitfield.
March 23, 1956
Steven Saylor (born March 23, 1956) is an American author of historical novels. He is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied history and classics. Saylor's best-known work is his Roma Sub Rosa historical mystery series, set in ancient Rome. The novels' hero is a detective named Gordianus the Finder, active during the time of Sulla, Cicero, Julius Caesar, and Cleopatra. Outside this crime novel series, Saylor has also written two epic-length historical novels about the city of Rome, Roma and Empire. His work has been published in 21 languages. Saylor has also written two novels set in Texas. A Twist at the End, featuring O. Henry, is set in Austin in the 1880s and based on real-life serial murders and trials (the case of the so-called Servant Girl Annihilator). Have You Seen Dawn? is a contemporary thriller set in a fictional Texas town, Amethyst, based on Saylor's hometown, Goldthwaite, Texas. Saylor contributed autobiographical essays to three anthologies of gay writing edited by John Preston, Hometowns, A Member of the Family, and Friends and Lovers, and prior to his novel-writing career he published gay erotic fiction under the pen name Aaron Travis. Saylor has lived with Richard Solomon since 1976; they registered as domestic partners in San Francisco in 1991 and later dissolved that partnership in order to legally marry in October 2008. The couple split their time between properties in Berkeley, California, and Austin, Texas.
March 23, 1894
Mark Lvovich Slonim (also known as Marc Slonim and Marco Slonim; March 23, 1894 – 1976) was a Russian politician, literary critic, scholar and translator. He was a lifelong member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and, in 1917, served as its deputy for Bessarabia in the Russian Constituent Assembly. He joined the Samara Government during the early phases of the Civil War, opposing both the Bolsheviks and the conservative elements of the White movement. Slonim argued, against conservatives such as Zinaida Gippius, that the exiles needed to appreciate changes occurring in the Soviet Union and became one of the first popularizers of Soviet writers in the West. He was also one of the main backers (and an intimate friend) of poet Marina Tsvetaeva. In 1928, convinced that Russian literature in exile was in fact dead, Slonim moved to Paris and, as an anti-fascist, opened up to Soviet patriotism. His 1930s contacts with the Union for Repatriation were particularly controversial. He escaped World War II and arrived to the United States aboard the SS Navemar, spending the 1940s and '50s as a teacher at Sarah Lawrence College. He continued to publish tracts and textbooks on Russian literary topics, familiarizing the American public with the major trends of Soviet poetry and fiction. He spent his final years in Geneva, where he translated Andrei Bely's Silver Dove and worked sporadically on his memoirs.
March 23, 1950
Ahdaf Soueif (born 23 March 1950) is an Egyptian novelist and political and cultural commentator. Soueif was born in Cairo, where she lives, and was educated in Egypt and England. She studied for a PhD in linguistics at the University of Lancaster. Her sister is the human and women's rights activist and mathematician Laila Soueif. Her debut novel, In the Eye of the Sun (1993), set in Egypt and England, recounts the maturing of Asya, a beautiful Egyptian who, by her own admission, "feels more comfortable with art than with life." Her second novel The Map of Love (1999) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, has been translated into 21 languages and sold over a million copies. She has also published two works of short stories, Aisha (1983) and Sandpiper (1996) – a selection from which was combined in the collection I Think Of You in 2007, and Stories Of Ourselves in 2010. Soueif writes primarily in English, but her Arabic-speaking readers say they can hear the Arabic through the English. She translated Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah (with a foreword by Edward Said) from Arabic into English. Along with her readings of Egyptian history and politics, Soueif also writes about Palestinians in her fiction and non-fiction. A shorter version of "Under the Gun: A Palestinian Journey" was originally published in The Guardian and then printed in full in Soueif's recent collection of essays, Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground (2004) and she wrote the introduction to the NYRB's reprint of Jean Genet's Prisoner of Love.[citation needed] In 2008 she initiated the first Palestine Festival of Literature, of which she is the Founding Chair. Soueif is also a cultural and political commentator for the Guardian newspaper and she has been reporting on the Egyptian revolution. In January 2012 she published Cairo: My City, Our Revolution – a personal account of the first year of the Egyptian revolution. Her sister Laila Soueif, and Laila's children, Alaa Abd El-Fatah and Mona Seif, are also activists. She was married to Ian Hamilton with whom she had two sons, Omar Robert Hamilton and Ismail Richard Hamilton.
March 23, 1960
Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960 and educated at Waseda University, and now lives in Germany. She made her debut as a writer with ‘Missing Heels,’ which was awarded the Gunzo Prize for New Writers in 1991. In 1993 she received the prestigious Akutagawa Prize - Japan’s equivalent of a Booker or a Pulitzer - for ‘The Bridegroom Was a Dog.’ And in 1996 she won the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, a German award to foreign writers recognized for their contribution to German culture. She has also been given the Prize in Literature from the City of Hamburg (1990) and the Lessing Prize (1994). Her fiction and poetry have been featured in journals and anthologies in France, Holland. Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, but the present collection is the first to appear in English. Tawada has also written and produced works for the stage. Margaret Mitsutani has a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature from Tokyo University and now teaches at Kyoritsu Women’s University in Tokyo. Her previous translations include Kenzaburo Oe’s novel AN ECHO OF HEAVEN and several short stories by Kyo-ko Hayashi, published in Manoa and Prairie Schooner.
March 23, 1931
Masako Togawa was born in Tokyo in 1933. She made her professional debut as a nightclub singer at the age of twenty-three. She started to write backstage, and at the age of twenty-four published THE MASTER KEY, which was awarded the prestigious Edogawa Ranpo Prize. Her next novel, THE LADY KILLER, was a best seller, and established her as one of the most popular novelists in Japan. Both novels have received wide critical acclaim in the United States. SIMON GROVE'S translations of THE MASTER KEY and THE LADY KILLER have been praised by critics for their crisp and supple style. A former officer with the Royal Navy, he has lived in Japan for nearly twenty years, spending six years with the British Embassy as an interpreter.
March 23, 1912
Georgina Masson (March 23, 1912, Rawalpindi, Pakistan - 1980) was a British author and photographer. Born Marion Johnson she was known as "Babs" to her friends.
March 23, 1814
Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda y Arteaga (March 23, 1814 – February 1, 1873) was a 19th-century Cuban-born Spanish writer. Born in Puerto Príncipe, she lived in Cuba until she was 22. Her family moved to Spain in 1836, where she started writing as La Peregrina (The Pilgrim), and she lived there until 1859, when she moved back to Cuba with her second husband until his death in 1863, after which she moved back to Spain. She died in Madrid in 1873 from diabetes at the age of 59. She was a prolific writer and wrote 20 plays and numerous poems. Her most famous work, however, is the antislavery novel Sab, published in Madrid in 1841. The eponymous protagonist is a slave who is deeply in love with his mistress Carlota, who is entirely oblivious to his feelings for her.
March 23, 1817
José Victorino Lastarria (23 March 1817 – 14 June 1888) was a Chilean writer, legislative deputy, senator, diplomat, and finance minister. José Victorino Lastarria was the son of Francisco Lastarria y Cortés and Carmen Santander Bozo. He studied in his hometown of Rancagua, and then moved to Santiago when he was granted a scholarship by the government of Francisco Antonio Pinto to the Liceo de Chile, a school then run by José Joaquín de Mora [es]. While there, the Chilean Civil War of 1829–30 occurred, in which the Pipiolos (Liberals) were defeated by the Pelucones (Conservatives). Mora was expelled from the country, which motivated Lastarria to become a revolutionary against what he saw as a dictatorship being installed. Lastarria married Julia Jesús Villarreal on 8 June 1839, with whom he had 12 children. One was engineer Victorino Aurelio Lastarria [es]. Lastarria was a disciple of Andrés Bello in 1834. After graduating from the National Institute, he studied for various careers, earning the titles of geographer and attorney from the University of San Felipe and the Institute of Law and Sacred Canons in 1839. With a group of students from the National Institute, he formed the Literary Society of 1842, an entity for the dissemination of liberal ideas then prohibited by the government of Manuel Bulnes. In 1843, Lastarria joined the ranks of the founding professors of the University of Chile. In 1848, with the escalation of repression by the country's Conservative government, Lastarria joined the Society of Equality [es], a revolutionary group which sought to overthrow Bulnes and the Constitution of 1833. In 1850 he was arrested by the government and sent to Lima. He returned to participate in the Revolution of 1851, seeking to annul the election of Manuel Montt. This was defeated by aggressive government action, and Lastarria escaped back to Peru, labeled one of the "ten most wanted men in Chile". His brother Manuel was arrested by the government. Lastarria joined other exiles seeking international support to oust the Conservative government. On the advice of Francisco Bilbao, he returned to Chile in 1853, settling in Valparaíso, where he supported mobilizations against the government and joined the Freemasons, a then-unrecognized institution in Chile. In 1859, after the popular uprising that forced Antonio Varas to abandon his candidacy, Lastarria became one of the main faces of the transition to Liberal government that took place between 1861 and 1871 under the administration of José Joaquín Pérez. At this time, in addition to being dean of philosophy at the University of Chile, he was appointed Minister of Finance, where he tried to impose social market economic concepts, without much success. In 1860 he published a notable fantasy novel with a political tone, Don Guillermo. It denounced the lack of social freedom under conservative governments through an allegory with Mapuche myths and legends. It was a brief but intense work which earned him both success and animosity in the years of Conservative-Liberal transition. In 1862 Lastarria returned to Lima, this time as an ambassador. He was present in 1864 during the Chincha Islands War, which motivated Chile to declare war against Spain. In early 1865 he traveled to Argentina, leading a diplomatic mission with the objective of forming an alliance against the Spanish, as well as negotiating the possession of Patagonia. Lastarria proposed an agreement which would grant Argentina almost the entire territory in question, with the exception of Tierra del Fuego and some surrounding areas. However, when he returned to Chile, the government rejected the deal. This was later used by Argentine authorities to justify their subsequent domination of the vast majority of Patagonia. In fact, Lastarria did not think Chile had a valid claim to those territories, and given his Americanist convictions, did not want a war to break out over them. In 1876 he was appointed Interior Minister by President Aníbal Pinto. In this period he created the Diario Oficial, which became Chile's official government gazette. In 1879, during the War of the Pacific, Lastarria was sent to Brazil in order to prevent that country from supporting any of Chile's enemies. He completed this task successfully. Lastarria also served as minister of the Court of Appeals [es] (1875) and the Supreme Court (1883), a deputy in several legislatures (for Caldera and Copiapó in 1855, Valparaíso in 1858, and La Serena in 1867), and a corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy (1870). Frederick M. Nunn is Professor of History and International Studies at Portland State University. He is the author of The Time of the Generals: Latin American Professional Militarism in World Perspective. R. Kelly Washbourne is completing his doctorate in Latin American literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is assistant editor of the Amazonian Literary Review.
March 24, 1945
Robert Thomas Bakker (born March 24, 1945) is an American paleontologist who helped reshape modern theories about dinosaurs, particularly by adding support to the theory that some dinosaurs were endothermic (warm-blooded). Along with his mentor John Ostrom, Bakker was responsible for initiating the ongoing "dinosaur renaissance" in paleontological studies, beginning with Bakker's article "Dinosaur Renaissance" in the April 1975 issue of Scientific American. His special field is the ecological context and behavior of dinosaurs. Bakker has been a major proponent of the theory that dinosaurs were "warm-blooded," smart, fast and adaptable. He published his first paper on dinosaur endothermy in 1968. His seminal work, The Dinosaur Heresies, was published in 1986. He revealed the first evidence of parental care at nesting sites for Allosaurus. Bakker was among the advisors for the film Jurassic Park and for the 1992 PBS series, The Dinosaurs!. Bakker also appeared in the Sega CD version of Jurassic Park. He also observed evidence in support of Eldredge and Gould's theory of punctuated equilibrium in dinosaur populations. Bakker currently serves as the Curator of Paleontology for the Houston Museum of Natural Science.
March 24, 1941
Henry Glassie has served as assistant director of the Folklore Institute at Indiana University and as chairman of the Department of Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is currently professor of folklore and American civilization. He is the author of, among other books, PASSING THE TIME IN BALLYMENONE, IRISH FOLK HISTORY: TEXTS FROM THE NORTH, and PATTERN IN THE MATERIAL FOLK CULTURE OF THE EASTERN UNITED STATES.
March 24, 1916
Donald Bengtsson Hamilton was a United States writer of novels, short stories, and non-fiction about the outdoors. His novels consist mostly of paperback originals, principally spy fiction but also crime fiction and Westerns such as The Big Country.
March 24, 1938
Robert Ian Hamilton (24 March 1938 – 27 December 2001) was a British literary critic, reviewer, biographer, poet, magazine editor and publisher.
March 24, 1921
Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (24 March 1921 – 8 March 2018) was a Guyanese writer. He initially wrote poetry, but subsequently became a well-known novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter wide-ranging. Harris is considered one of the most original and innovative voices in postwar literature in English.
March 24, 1919
Robert L. Heilbroner (March 24, 1919 – January 4, 2005) was an American economist and historian of economic thought. The author of some twenty books, Heilbroner was best known for The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers (1953), a survey of the lives and contributions of famous economists, notably Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes.
March 24, 1960
Lene Kaaberbøl is a Danish writer born in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her work primarily consists of children's fantasy series and crime fiction for adults. She received the Nordic Children's Book Prize in 2004.
March 24, 1834
William Morris (24 March 1834 – 3 October 1896) was an English textile designer, poet, novelist, translator, and socialist activist. Associated with the British Arts and Crafts Movement, he was a major contributor to the revival of traditional British textile arts and methods of production. His literary contributions helped to establish the modern fantasy genre, while he played a significant role in propagating the early socialist movement in Britain. Born in Walthamstow, Essex to a wealthy middle-class family, Morris came under the strong influence of medievalism while studying Classics at Oxford University, there joining the Birmingham Set. After university he trained as an architect, married Jane Burden, and developed close friendships with the Pre-Raphaelite artists Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and with the Neo-Gothic architect Philip Webb. Webb and Morris designed a family home, Red House in Kent, where the latter lived from 1859 to 1865, before relocating to Bloomsbury, central London. In 1861, Morris founded a decorative arts firm with Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Webb, and others: the Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. Becoming highly fashionable and much in demand, the firm profoundly influenced interior decoration throughout the Victorian period, with Morris designing tapestries, wallpaper, fabrics, furniture, and stained glass windows. In 1875, Morris assumed total control of the company, which was renamed Morris & Co. Although retaining a main home in London, from 1871 Morris rented the rural retreat of Kelmscott Manor, Oxfordshire. Greatly influenced by visits to Iceland, with Eiríkr Magnússon he produced a series of English-language translations of Icelandic Sagas. He also achieved success with the publication of his epic poems and novels, namely The Earthly Paradise (1868–1870), A Dream of John Ball (1888), the utopian News from Nowhere (1890), and the fantasy romance The Well at the World's End (1896). In 1877 he founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings to campaign against the damage caused by architectural restoration. Embracing Marxism and influenced by anarchism, in the 1880s Morris became a committed revolutionary socialist activist; after an involvement in the Social Democratic Federation, he founded the Socialist League in 1884, but broke with that organization in 1890. In 1891 he founded the Kelmscott Press to publish limited-edition, illuminated-style print books, a cause to which he devoted his final years. Morris is recognised as one of the most significant cultural figures of Victorian Britain; though best known in his lifetime as a poet, he posthumously became better known for his designs. Founded in 1955, the William Morris Society is devoted to his legacy, while multiple biographies and studies of his work have seen publication. Many of the buildings associated with his life are open to visitors, much of his work can be found in art galleries and museums, and his designs are still in production.
March 24, 1952
Quim Monzó was born in Barcelona in 1952. He has been awarded the National Award, the City of Barcelona Award, the Prudenci Bertrana Award, the El Temps Award, the Lletra d'Or Prize for the best book of the year, and the Catalan Writers' Award; he has been awarded Serra d'Or magazine's prestigious Critics' Award four times. He has also translated numerous authors into Catalan, including Truman Capote, J.D. Salinger, and Ernest Hemingway.
March 24, 1897
Wilhelm Reich (24 March 1897 – 3 November 1957) was an Austrian doctor of medicine and psychoanalyst, a member of the second generation of analysts after Sigmund Freud. The author of several influential books, most notably Character Analysis (1933), The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), and The Sexual Revolution (1936), Reich became known as one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry. Reich's work on character contributed to the development of Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936), and his idea of muscular armour—the expression of the personality in the way the body moves—shaped innovations such as body psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy, bioenergetic analysis and primal therapy. His writing influenced generations of intellectuals; he coined the phrase "the sexual revolution" and according to one historian acted as its midwife. During the 1968 student uprisings in Paris and Berlin, students scrawled his name on walls and threw copies of The Mass Psychology of Fascism at police. After graduating in medicine from the University of Vienna in 1922, Reich became deputy director of Freud's outpatient clinic, the Vienna Ambulatorium. Described by Elizabeth Danto as a large man with a cantankerous style who managed to look scruffy and elegant at the same time, he tried to reconcile psychoanalysis with Marxism, arguing that neurosis is rooted in sexual and socio-economic conditions, and in particular in a lack of what he called "orgastic potency". He visited patients in their homes to see how they lived, and took to the streets in a mobile clinic, promoting adolescent sexuality and the availability of contraceptives, abortion and divorce, a provocative message in Catholic Austria. He said he wanted to "attack the neurosis by its prevention rather than treatment". From the 1930s he became an increasingly controversial figure, and from 1932 until his death in 1957 all his work was self-published. His message of sexual liberation disturbed the psychoanalytic community and his political associates, and his vegetotherapy, in which he massaged his disrobed patients to dissolve their "muscular armour", violated the key taboos of psychoanalysis. He moved to New York in 1939, in part to escape the Nazis, and shortly after arriving coined the term "orgone"—from "orgasm" and "organism"—for a biological energy he said he had discovered, which he said others called God. In 1940 he started building orgone accumulators, devices that his patients sat inside to harness the reputed health benefits, leading to newspaper stories about sex boxes that cured cancer. Following two critical articles about him in The New Republic and Harper's in 1947, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration obtained an injunction against the interstate shipment of orgone accumulators and associated literature, believing they were dealing with a "fraud of the first magnitude". Charged with contempt in 1956 for having violated the injunction, Reich was sentenced to two years imprisonment, and that summer over six tons of his publications were burned by order of the court. He died in prison of heart failure just over a year later, days before he was due to apply for parole.
March 25, 1939
TONI CADE BAMBARA was a New Yorker who grew up in Harlem, Bedford-Stuy, Jersey City and attended several public, private, and boarding schools in New York State, Jersey, and the South. She once described herself as ‘the mother of Karma (who will be two in the spring), the sister of Walter Cade the painter, and a writer since childhood who nevertheless planned to be a doctor, lawyer, artist, musician, and everything else.’ The name Bambara she took from a signature on a sketchbook she found in her great grandmother’s trunk.
March 25, 1926
Jaime Sabines was born on March 25, 1926 in Chiapas, Mexico. In 1945, he relocated to Mexico City where he studied Medicine for three years before turning his attention to Philosophy and Literature at the University of Mexico. He wrote eight books of poetry, including Horal (1950), Tarumba (1956), and Maltiempo (1972), for which he received the Xavier Villaurrutia Award. In 1959, Sabines was granted the Chiapas Prize and, in 1983, the National Literature Award. In addition to his literary career, Sabines served as a congressman for Chiapas. Jaime Sabines died in 1999; he remains one of Mexico’s most respected poets.
March 25, 1955
Daniel Boulud (born 25 March 1955 in Saint-Pierre-de-Chandieu) is a French chef and restaurateur with restaurants in New York City, Washington D.C., Las Vegas, Palm Beach, Miami, Montreal, Toronto, London, Singapore, and Boston. He is best known for Daniel, his eponymous, Michelin 2-star restaurant in New York City. While raised on a farm outside of Lyon and trained by renowned French chefs, Boulud made his reputation in New York, first as a chef and most recently a restaurateur. His management company, The Dinex Group, currently includes fifteen restaurants, three locations of a gourmet grocery (Epicerie Boulud) and Feast & Fêtes Catering. His restaurants include Daniel, DB Brasserie, Café Boulud, DB Bistro Moderne, Bar Boulud, DBGB Kitchen & Bar, and Boulud Sud in New York City. He has also launched numerous restaurant concepts in other American cities and across the globe.
March 25, 1958
Susannah 'Susie' Bright (also known as Susie Sexpert) (born March 25, 1958) is an American feminist, author, journalist, critic, editor, publisher, producer, and performer, often on the subject of sexual politics and sexuality. She is one of the first writers/activists referred to as a sex-positive feminist.
March 25, 1949
Agnes Bushell (born March 25, 1949) is an American fiction writer and teacher. She has published steadily since her work first appeared in print in the mid-1970s. She is the author of ten novels, and innumerable essays and book reviews most of which have appeared in Maine newspapers and publications, including Down East Magazine. She has taught literature and writing at Maine College of Art, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the University of Southern Maine, and lives in Portland, Maine with her husband, James Bushell, a criminal defense lawyer.
March 25, 1932
Wies?aw My?liwski (born March 25, 1932, Dwikozy, Poland) is a Polish novelist, twice the winner of the Nike Award (the Polish equivalent of the Booker Prize) for Widnokr?g (1996) and Traktat o ?uskaniu fasoli (2006). In his novels and plays My?liwski concentrates on life in the Polish countryside. Bill Johnston is Director of the Polish Studies Center at Indiana University. His translations include Gustaw Herling's The Noonday Cemetery and Other Stories (New Directions, 2003), Jerzy Pilch's His Current Woman (Grove, 2002), and Stefan Zeromski's The Faithful River (Northwestern, 1999). In 1999 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship for Translation. In 2008 he won the inaugural Found in Translation award for Tadeusz Rózewicz's new poems, to be presented yearly to the translator of the finest Polish-English literary translation of the year.
March 25, 1925
Theodore Enslin (March 25, 1925 – November 21, 2011) was born in Chester, Pennsylvania, to scholarly parents: his father was a professor of religion and his mother a Latin scholar. Known for poetic sequences and what Enslin called long workings, his body of work is vast and was published mainly by small presses. Other works include To Come, to Have Become (1966), which won the Hart Crane Award; Forms 1-5 (1970-1974); The Poems (1970); Etudes (1972); Views (1973); Synthesis 1-24 (1975); and the two-volume Ranger (1978, 1980). That long work is concerned with the 16th-century genocide of Native Americans and, like Olson’s Maximus poems, extends and expands to include larger swaths of time and space. In the Guardian, Michael Carlson described the poem’s epic scope as focused on sharp observation of both the setting and process of poetry. In addition to poetry, Enslin penned a weekly newspaper column in the 1950s, Six Miles Square, for which he won the Niemann Award, and wrote a play, Barometric Pressure 29.83 and Steady, and an extended essay on Gustav Mahler. Carlson also noted that, so much of his [Enslin’s] work appeared in small-press collections that compiling a full bibliography is a daunting task. Later collections of Enslin’s work include The Median Flow: Poems 1943–73 (1975) and Then and Now: Selected Poems, 1943–93 (1999), which ran to 800 pages. Enslin died at his home in Maine in 2011.
March 25, 1903
Nahum Norbert Glatzer (March 25, 1903 – February 27, 1990) was a Jewish literary scholar, theologian, and editor. Glatzer was born in Lemberg, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Lviv in the western Ukraine). At age 17, his father sent him to study with Solomon Breuer in Frankfurt, Germany with the intention that he would become a Rabbi. However, he decided against the rabbinate after encountering the circle of Jewish intellectuals, including Franz Rosenzweig, around Rabbi Nehemiah Anton Nobel. In July 1920, Rosenzweig invited Glatzer to join the newly-established Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus, where he taught biblical exegesis, Hebrew, and the Midrash. He also prepared an index of the Jewish sources for the second edition of Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption. Glatzer completed a doctoral dissertation at the Goethe University Frankfurt in December 1931 under the supervision of Martin Buber and, in 1932, became Lecturer in Jewish Religious Philosophy and Ethics at the university, succeeding Buber. After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, Glatzer and his wife departed for a planned visit to his in-laws in London. From London, he wrote to Martin Buber on April 27, 1933 that his faculty position had been suspended as a consequence of the passage of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service on April 7, 1933. Eugene R. Sheppard contends that Glatzer's three scholarly genres were "biography, textual interpretation and above all anthology." Glatzer introduced Franz Rosenzweig to English-speaking audiences in Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought (1959).
March 25, 1931
Brian Carey Goodwin (25 March 1931 – 15 July 2009) was a Canadian mathematician and biologist, a Professor Emeritus at the Open University and a founder of theoretical biology and biomathematics. He introduced the use of complex systems and generative models in developmental biology. He suggested that a reductionist view of nature fails to explain complex features, controversially proposing the "fringe" structuralist theory that morphogenetic fields might substitute for natural selection in driving evolution. He was also a visible member of the Third Culture movement.
March 25, 1904
Hoffman Reynolds Hays (1939-1980) was a poet, translator, novelist and playwright, an historian of anthropology and zoology, and a teacher. Some of his twenty-two books, reflecting the diversity of his interests, were the pioneering works in their fields. His The Dangerous Sex: the Myth of Feminine Evil, served as respected source material for Feminist writers. Sir Julian Huxley regarded Hays’ popular history of zoology, Birds, Beasts and Men, as a classic of its genre. His translations of the poetry of Brecht, Vallejo, Borges, Neruda, and many others were among the first to bring these major twentieth century writers to the attention of the English-speaking world. His plays, such as The Ballad of Davy Crockett, with music by Kurt Weill, were performed on Broadway. More than twenty of his shorter works appeared on television during its early days. The groundbreaking significance of Hays’ translations of Latin American poets is immense. Today, most readers are familiar with Neruda, Borges, and Cesar Vallejo. But in 1943, when his Twelve Spanish American Poets was published, the huge area embracing Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean islands was barely known to North Americans, except pejoratively, as banana republics, the home of bearded, gun-toting, cigar-smoking banditos, and illiterate peasants. That such a seemingly primitive, under-developed region should also be the birthplace of a sophisticated literary culture, something the educated North Americans could be interested in and even respect, was a new idea to many English speakers. Hays was one of the first to reveal this, and the effect of his translations on young poets was profound.
March 25, 1943
Mary Beth Norton is an American historian, specializing in American colonial history and well known for her work on women's history and the Salem witch trials. She is the Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History at the Department of History at Cornell University.
March 25, 1925
Mary Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964) was an American writer and essayist, was born in Savannah, Georgia. An important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters. O'Connor's writing also reflected her own Roman Catholic faith, and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics. Her Complete Stories won the 1972 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and was named the ‘Best of the National Book Awards’ by internet visitors in 2009. One of her hobbies was raising peacocks.
March 25, 1942
Dr. Marion Oettinger, Jr. is a cultural anthropologist / art historian who specializes in Latin American art and culture. Between 2005 and 2011, he served as the Kelso Director of San Antonio Museum of Art, and returned to his previous position of Curator of Latin American Art in 2011. He is the author of numerous books and articles and has lectured widely throughout the United States, Europe and Latin America. His most recent books include Folk Treasures of Mexico: The Nelson A. Rockefeller Collection, Second Edition (Houston: University of Houston, Arte Público Press, 2010), Retratos: 2000 Years of Latin American Portraits (Oettinger, et. al., New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) and The Folk Art of Spain and the Americas: El Alma del Pueblo (New York: Abbeyville Press, 1992). Oettinger has taught at Cornell University, Occidental College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has been the recipient of Fulbright, NEH, NEA, National Geographic Society and American Philosophical Society grants. In 2010, Oettinger received the Van Deren Coke Lifetime Achievement Award in Spanish Colonial Art and Folk Art.
March 25, 1939
Myriam Warner-Vieyra was born in Pointe-à-Pitre in 1939. She spent a large part of her childhood with her grandmother in Guadeloupe. She then went to live in France, where she finished her secondary education and afterwards attended the University of Dakar, where she obtained a librarian's diploma. She married the film-maker Paulin Vieyra and she has lived in Senegal for thirty years. She is a librarian and has three adult children (in 1992).
March 25, 1944
Jack Mapanje is a poet, linguist, editor and human rights activist. He received the 1988 Rotterdam Poetry International Award for his first book of poems, Of Chameleons and Gods (1981) and the USA’s Fonlon-Nichols Award for his contribution to poetry and human rights. He was head of the Department of English at the University of Malawi where the Malawi authorities arrested him in 1987 after his first book of poems had been banned, and he was released in 1991 after spending three years, seven months and sixteen days in prison, following an international outcry against his incarceration. He has since published five poetry books, The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison (1993) from Heinemann, and Skipping Without Ropes (1998), The Last of the Sweet Bananas: New & Selected Poems (2004), Beasts of Nalunga (2007) and Greetings from Grandpa (2016) from Bloodaxe, as well as his prison memoir And Crocodiles Are Hungry at Night (Ayebia Clarke Publishing, 2011); he co-edited three anthologies, Oral Poetry from Africa (1983), Summer Fires: New Poetry of Africa (1983) and The African Writers’ Handbook (1999); and edited the acclaimed Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing (2002). Beasts of Nalunga was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2007. Mapanje has held residences in the Netherlands, the Republic of Ireland and throughout Britain, including two years with the Wordsworth Trust at Dove Cottage in Cumbria. He lives in exile in York with his family, and is a visiting professor in the faculty of art at York St John University. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Bedfordshire in 2015.
March 25, 1911
Albert Maria Gomes (25 March 1911 – 13 January 1978), a Trinidad and Tobago unionist, politician, and writer of Portuguese descent, was the first Chief Minister of Trinidad and Tobago. He was the founder of the Political Progress Groups and later led the Party of Political Progress Groups. He was active in the formation of the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) in Trinidad and Tobago and played a role in forcing Sir Alexander Bustamante out of the Federal Democratic Labour Party. Gomes briefly led DLP in 1960 when factions loyal to briefly ousted Rudranath Capildeo after Capildeo left Trinidad and Tobago to take up a position at the University of London. However, the rank and file of the party stood behind Capildeo and Gomes left the party. Albert Gomes was born in Belmont, Port of Spain. His father had immigrated from Madeira in 1892; his mother's family had arrived in Trinidad in 1878 via Nevis and Antigua. After completing secondary school Gomes studied journalism at City College of New York between 1928 and 1930. Returning to Trinidad Gomes established a literary magazine called The Beacon, the first of its kind in the country, with contributors that included C. L. R. James, Alfred Mendes and Ralph de Boissière. The Beacon was controversial and iconoclastic, and helped set the stage for Gomes' future work. Gomes published The Beacon for three years until his father (who had financed the magazine) forced him to stop. He was installed in a pharmacy owned by his father, and for the next six years Gomes developed his connection with the working class. Gomes established a reputation as a writer for the Trinidad Guardian and through public lectures and work with the labour movement. In 1938, after the Labour riots of the previous year, he was elected to the Port of Spain City Council. He served on the Council for nine years and was Deputy Mayor for three years. In 1947 he lost his seat. In 1945, he was elected the Legislative Council in a by-election. He was re-elected to the revamped Legislative Council in 1946 as a member of the West Indian National Party (WINP) for Port of Spain North. He retained that position until the 1956 General Elections when Eric Williams and the People's National Movement (PNM) swept to power. During the 1940s, Gomes was the President of the Federated Workers' Trade Union (FWTU), with Quintin O'Connor as the Secretary. Their success building up the FWTU was critical to the establishment of unionism in Trinidad and Tobago. In 1958, Gomes was elected to the House of Representatives of the short-lived West Indies Federation, representing the district of St. George East. After independence in 1962 Gomes was subject to heavy criticism by Eric Williams and the PNM. He left Trinidad and Tobago and settled in the United Kingdom. There he worked in local government until he retired in 1976. He died in England two years later, at the age of 66. His achievements are largely unrecognised and he has faded from the popular consciousness of Trinidad and Tobago.
March 25, 1942
Ana Blandiana (Born: March 25, 1942, Timi?oara, Romania) is a Romanian poet, essayist, and political figure. She took her name after Blandiana, near Vin?u de Jos, Alba County, her mother's home village.
March 26, 1850
Edward Bellamy (March 26, 1850 – May 22, 1898) was an American author and socialist, most famous for his utopian novel, Looking Backward, a Rip Van Winkle-like tale set in the distant future of the year 2000. Bellamy's vision of a harmonious future world inspired the formation of over 160 ‘Nationalist Clubs‘ dedicated to the propagation of Bellamy's political ideas and working to make them a practical reality.
March 26, 1936
Jan Beneš (March 26, 1936 – June 1, 2007) was a Czech writer, translator, publicist and screenwriter. He was also using pseudonyms Milan Štepka, Bobisud Mihule, Mojmír Cada, Ing. Cada, JAB, JeBe, Svetlana and others. He is an author of many novels and several historical books. He was a political prisoner of Czechoslovak communist regime, and a Green Beret volunteer. In 1969 after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia Beneš emigrated to United States. He served 20 years at the US Department of Defense. He returned to Czech Republic in 1992 after the change of regime.
March 26, 1941
Sandra Benitez (March 26, 1941 in Washington D.C.) is an American novelist. Her twin sister, Susana, died just 37 days after their birth. A year later, her father, who worked for the U.S. State Department, was assigned to Mexico, where her sister, Anita, was born. He was transferred to El Salvador where Sandra lived for most of the next 20 years. She lived with her grandparents in northeastern Missouri, and attended Unionville high school, returning each summer to El Salvador. In 1997 she was selected as the University of Minnesota Edelstein-Keller Distinguished Writer in Residence. In 1998 she did the Writers Community Residency for the YMCA National Writer’s Voice program. In the spring of 2001 she held the Knapp Chair in Humanities as Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of San Diego. She lives with her husband, Jim Kondrick, in Edina, Minnesota.
March 26, 1904
Joseph John Campbell (March 26, 1904 – October 30, 1987) was an American mythologist, writer and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work is vast, covering many aspects of the human experience. His philosophy is often summarized by his phrase: ‘Follow your bliss.’
March 26, 1943
Chinweizu (born 26 March 1943) is a Nigerian critic, essayist, poet, and journalist. Though he has identified himself and is known simply as Chinweizu, he was born Chinweizu Ibekwe. While studying in the United States during the Black Power movement, Chinweizu became influenced by the philosophy of the Black Arts Movement. He is commonly associated with Black orientalism and emerged as one of the leading figures in contemporary Nigerian journalism, writing a highly influential column in The Guardian of Lagos. Chinweizu was born in 1943 in the town of Eluoma, in Isuikwuato in the part of Eastern Region of Nigeria that is known today as Abia State. He was educated at Government Secondary School, Afikpo, and later attended college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he studied philosophy and mathematics, earning a bachelor of science degree in 1967, the year of the outbreak of civil war in Nigeria, which lasted two and a half years. At the time living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Chinweizu founded and edited the Biafra Review (1969–70). He enrolled for a Ph.D. at the State University of New York (SUNY), Buffalo, under the supervision of political scientist Claude E. Welch Jr. Chinweizu apparently had a disagreement with his dissertation committee and walked away with his manuscript, which he got published as The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers, and the African Elite by Random House in 1975. He took the book to SUNY, Buffalo, where he demanded, and was promptly awarded, his Ph.D. in 1976, one year after he had published the dissertation. Thus, the publication settled his disagreement with his advisers in his favour. Chinweizu started teaching overseas, at MIT and San Jose State University. He had returned to Nigeria by the early 1980s, working over the years as a columnist for various newspapers in the country and also working to promote Black orientalism in Pan-Africanism. In Nigeria, he became a literary critic, attacking what he saw as the elitism of some Nigerian authors, particularly Wole Soyinka and he was editor of the Nigerian literary magazine, Okike. Chinweizu's notable intervention on this theme came in the essay "The Decolonization of African Literature" (later expanded into the 1983 book Toward the Decolonization of African Literature), to which Soyinka responded in an essay entitled "Neo-Tarzanism: The Poetics of Pseudo-Transition". Chinweizu's other works is Anatomy of Female Power, in which he discusses gender relations. Chinweizu has argued that the Arab colonization and Islamization of Africa is no different from European imperialism. The violent conquests, forced conversions and slavery perpetrated by European Christians were also perpetrated by Arab Muslims. In fact, the colonization and enslavement of Africa by Arabs began before the Europeans and continues to this day in Sudan, Mauritania and other countries in the Sahel region. Recently he published a comparative digest that shows the parallel history of European and Arab atrocities against indigenous Africans. He has been critical of the popular illusion that Islam is free of slavery and racism. Islam and Arabian culture are just as much foreign invasive forces as Christianity and European culture.
March 26, 1933
Vine Victor Deloria, Jr. (March 26, 1933 – November 13, 2005) was an American Indian author, theologian, historian, and activist. He was widely known for his book Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969), which helped generate national attention to Native American issues in the same year as the Alcatraz-Red Power Movement. From 1964–1967, he had served as executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, increasing tribal membership from 19 to 156. Beginning in 1977, he was a board member of the National Museum of the American Indian, which now has buildings in both New York City and Washington, DC. He was influential in the development of what scientific critics called American Indian creationism but which American Indians referred to as defenses against scientific racism. Deloria began his academic career in 1970 at Western Washington State College at Bellingham, Washington. He became Professor of Political Science at the University of Arizona (1978–1990), where he established the first master's degree program in American Indian Studies in the United States. After ten years at the University of Colorado, Boulder, he returned to Arizona and taught at the School of Law.
March 26, 1874
Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an American poet. His work was initially published in England before it was published in America. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes. One of the most popular and critically respected American poets of the twentieth century, Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. He became one of America's rare ‘public literary figures, almost an artistic institution.’ He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960 for his poetical works.
March 26, 1946
BRAULIO MUNOZ was born in Chimbote, Peru. He has traveled extensively in Latin America and Europe. He was well-known in Peru as a labor leader, a writer, and a journalist. Muñoz received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and is in the Department of Sociology at Swarthmore College.
March 26, 1915
Hwang Sun-w?n (March 26, 1915 - September 14, 2000) was a Korean short story writer, novelist, and poet. He published eight collections of stories, seven novels and two collections of poetry in almost sixty years of writing. His stories have been anthologized in numerous collections during the past decade, but no major personal collection has previously appeared in the U.S or Europe. Born in 1915 in what is now North Korea (the whole nation was then under Japanese rule), Hwang was one of South Korea’s most respected authors and, at the age of ‘74, was still teaching creative writing. Critics have referred to him as the ‘lyrical humanist’ of modern Korean letters. Throughout his career he has received various honors, including the National Academy of Arts Award for his novel TREES ON THE CLIFF (1960) and the 1983 Korean Literature Grand Prize.
March 26, 1911
Thomas Lanier 'Tennessee' Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983) was an American playwright and author of many stage classics. Along with Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller he is considered among the three foremost playwrights in 20th century American drama. After years of obscurity, he became suddenly famous with The Glass Menagerie (1944), closely reflecting his own unhappy family background. This heralded a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, and Sweet Bird of Youth. His later work attempted a new style that did not appeal to audiences, and alcohol and drug dependence further inhibited his creative output. His drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often numbered on the short list of being among the finest American plays in the 20th century alongside Long Days Journey into Night and Death of a Salesman. Williams adapted much of his best work for the cinema, and also wrote short stories, poetry, essays and a volume of memoirs. In 1979, four years before his death, he was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.
March 26, 1943
Robert Upshur "Bob" Woodward (born March 26, 1943) is an American investigative journalist and non-fiction author. He has worked for The Washington Post since 1971 as a reporter and is now an associate editor there. While a young reporter for The Washington Post in 1972, Woodward was teamed up with Carl Bernstein; the two did much of the original news reporting on the Watergate scandal. These scandals led to numerous government investigations and the eventual resignation of President Richard Nixon. The work of Woodward and Bernstein was called "maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time" by longtime journalism figure Gene Roberts. Woodward continued to work for The Washington Post after his reporting on Watergate. He has since written 18 best-selling books on American politics, 12 of which topped best-seller lists.
March 27, 1950
JULIA ALVAREZ was born, as she puts it, ‘by accident,’ in New York City, but shortly thereafter her family moved back to their native Dominican Republic. She spent her childhood there until her family was forced to flee due to political pressure. Her first book of poems, HOMECOMING, appeared in 1984. Her first novel, HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS, was published in 1990, followed four years later by IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has also the author of the novel IN THE NAME OF SALOMÉ. She is a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College. She lives with her husband, Bill Eichner, in the Vermont countryside, but maintains close ties to her homeland through Alta Gracia, their organic coffee farm, established to demonstrate the ideas and principles of sustainable living. . BILL EICHNER, an ophthalmologist by trade, comes from Midwestern farm stock. He is also a gardener, chef, and the author of The New Family Cookbook (Chelsea Green, 2000). BELKIS RAMIREZ, who contributed the woodcuts for A CAFECITO STORY, is one of the most celebrated artists in the Dominican Republic.
March 27, 1923
Shusaku Endo was a renowned 20th century Japanese author who wrote from the unusual perspective of being both Japanese and Catholic. (The population of Christians in Japan is less than 1%.) Together with Junnosuke Yoshiyuki, Shotaro Yasuoka, Junzo Shono, Hiroyuki Agawa, Ayako Sono, and Shumon Miura, Endo is categorized as one of the ‘Third Generation,’ the third major group of writers who appeared after the Second World War. His books reflect many of his childhood experiences. These include the stigma of being an outsider, the experience of being a foreigner, the life of a hospital patient, and the struggle with tuberculosis. However, his books mainly deal with the moral fabric of life. His Catholic faith can be seen at some level in all of his books, and it is often a central feature.
March 27, 1910
Bertrand Flornoy (27 March 1910 – 25 April 1980) was a French explorer and archaeologist. Bertrand Flornoy in 1936 became special advisor to the National Museum of Natural History, which sends mission studies and exploration in the Amazon and the Andes. He specializes in the Upper Amazon of Peru, and in 1941 and 1942 discovered the sources of the Río Marañón, which is a constituent of the Amazon.
March 27, 1947
Oliver Friggieri (born 27 March 1947) is a Maltese poet, novelist, literary critic, and minor philosopher. In philosophy he is mostly interested in epistemology and Existentialism. Friggieri was born in Floriana, Malta, in 1947. He studied at the bishop's seminary, and then at the University of Malta. From here he acquired a Bachelor of Arts in Maltese, Italian and Philosophy (1968), and then a Masters (1975). In 1978 he acquired a Doctorate in Maltese Literature and Literary Criticism from the Catholic University of Milan, Italy. Friggieri began his teaching career in 1968 by teaching Maltese and Philosophy in secondary schools. Then, in 1976, he moved on teaching Maltese at the University of Malta, first as Assistant Lecturer, then as Lecturer (1978), and later as Associate Lecturer (1988). In 1988 he was chosen Head of the Department of Maltese. He became Professor in 1990. In the meantime, between 1970 and 1971 Friggieri was very active in Malta’s Literary Revival Movement (Moviment Qawmien Letterarju). He was on the editorial board of Il-Polz (1969–73), a Maltese literary periodical, of which he became editor (1974–75). He co-founded Is-Saghtar (1971), a children’s literary and cultural magazine, and remained on its editorial board ever since. In 1971 he also collaborated in the establishment of a publishing house, Klabb Kotba Maltin (Maltese Book Club), which facilitated the publishing of books in Maltese. He has been the editor of the Journal of Maltese Studies since 1980. He is also a Member of the Association Internationale des Critiques Litteraires of Paris, France. In 2008 Friggieri published his autobiography, Fjuri li ma Jinxfux (Unwithering Flowers), relevant to the years 1955–90 of his life. Friggieri is the author of innumerable books. Since his main specialisation is literature, and particularly Maltese Literature, most of his publications are not of a directly philosophical nature. These include dictionaries of literature, oratories, cantatas, literary criticism, literary biographies, and anthologies of his own poetry. Particular mention should be given to Malta’s national poet, Dun Karm Psaila, of whom Friggieri is an uncontested expert. Friggieri also significantly contributed essays on Peter Caxaro and Michael Anthony Vassalli. Apart from the frequent contributions in local periodicals and newspapers, of especial interest to philosophy are Friggieri’s novels and short stories. Generally speaking, these are imbued with pathos and profuse with philosophical reflections.
March 27, 1911
Erich Heller (27 March 1911 – 5 November 1990) was a British essayist, known particularly for his critical studies in German-language philosophy and literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
March 27, 1871
Luiz (Ludwig) Heinrich Mann (27 March 1871 – 11 March 1950) was a German novelist who wrote works with strong social themes. His numerous criticisms of the growth of fascism forced him to flee for his life after the Nazis came to power in 1933. Born in Lübeck, as the oldest child of Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann and Júlia da Silva Bruhns, he was the elder brother of novelist Thomas Mann. His father came from a bourgeois family of grain merchants and was a Senator of the Hanseatic city. After the death of his father, his mother moved the family to Munich, where Heinrich began his career as a freier Schriftsteller or free novelist. Mann's essay on Zola and the novel Der Untertan earned him much respect during the Weimar Republic, since it satirized German society and explained how its political system had led to the First World War. Eventually, his book Professor Unrat was freely adapted into the legendary movie Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel). Carl Zuckmayer wrote the script, and Josef von Sternberg was the director. The book's author wanted his girlfriend, the actress Trude Hesterberg, to play the lead, but instead Marlene Dietrich was given her first sound role as the 'actress' Lola Lola (named Rosa Fröhlich in the novel). Together with Albert Einstein and other celebrities, Mann was a signatory to a letter to the Urgent Call for Unity condemning the murder of Croatian scholar Dr Milan Šufflay on 18 February 1931. Mann became persona non grata in Nazi Germany and left even before the Reichstag fire in 1933. He went to France where he lived in Paris and Nice. During the German occupation he made his way through collaborationist Vichy France to Marseille where he was aided by Varian Fry in 1940 to escape to Spain. He eventually escaped to Portugal and then to America. The Nazis burnt Heinrich Mann's books as 'contrary to the German spirit' during the infamous book burning of May 10, 1933, which was instigated by the then Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. During the 1930s and later in American exile, Mann's literary popularity went downhill. Nevertheless he wrote Die Jugend des Königs Henri Quatre and Die Vollendung des Königs Henri Quatre as part of the Exilliteratur. The two novels sketched the life and importance of Henry IV of France and were acclaimed by his brother Thomas Mann, who spoke of the 'great splendour and dynamic art' of the work. The plot, based on Europe's early modern history from a French perspective, anticipated the end of French–German enmity. Heinrich Mann died in Santa Monica, California, lonely and without much money, just months before he was to move to East Berlin to become president of the German Academy of Arts. His ashes were later taken to East Germany. His second wife Nelly Mann (1898–1944) committed suicide in Los Angeles.
March 27, 1960
Jess Mowry was born to an African American father, and a Caucasian mother. When he was only a few months old, his mother abandoned him. His father took Jess to Oakland, California where he supported himself and his son by working as a crane operator, truck driver, and scrap metal salvager. Jess's father was a voracious reader who introduced his son to books at a very early age. Jess attended public school but despite his love of reading was not an above-average student. He dropped out of school at age thirteen, part way through the eighth grade. After leaving school, Mowry worked with his father in the scrap-iron business, and in his late teens moved to Arizona to work as a truck driver and heavy equipment operator. He also lived and worked in Alaska as an engineer aboard a tugboat and as an aircraft mechanic on Douglas C-47 cargo planes. Returning to Oakland in the early 1980s, Jess began working with kids at a youth center, reading to them and often making up stories because there were very few books that innercity youth could relate to. Later he began to write stories. In 1988, Jess sent one of his stories to Howard Junker, editor of Zyzzyva magazine in San Francisco. Junker rejected the tale but asked to see more work, and published the second story Jess sent. Mowry bought a 1923 Underwood typewriter for eight dollars and within a year his work was appearing in literary magazines in the United States and abroad. In 1990, Mowry's first collection of stories, Rats in the Trees, won a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. Rats in the Trees was also published in the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan. In 1991, Mowry's first novel, Children Of The Night, was published by Holloway House in Los Angeles. In 1992, his second novel, Way Past Cool, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux of New York. Way Past Cool was also published in the United Kingdom, Italy, France, Germany, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Japan. Way Past Cool was optioned for a film, for which Mowry co-wrote the screenplay. The film, Way Past Cool, was produced by Redeemable Features in 2000 with director Adam Davidson and executive producers Norman Lear and Milos Forman. Other novels followed, including Six Out Seven, Babylon Boyz, Bones Become Flowers, Skeleton Key, Phat Acceptance and Voodu Dawgz. Mowry's characters and settings range from gun-toting gang kids in Oakland to young Voodoo apprentices in New Orleans' French Quarter, to teenage airplane pilots and child-soldiers in Africa. As Mowry's puts it: ‘Almost all my stories and books are for and about black kids who are not always cute and cuddly. My characters often spit, sweat and swear, as well as occasionally smoke or drink. Just like their real-world counterparts, some are 'overweight,' may look 'too black,' or are otherwise unacceptable by superficial American values. Like on-the-real kids, they often live in dirty and violent environments, and are forced into sometimes unpleasant lifestyles.’ Jess Mowry emerged during the mid- 1990s as one of America's most original and important--yet relatively unheralded black writers. His low profile is as much a matter of personal preference as of any lack of merit or of public interest in his writing. Mowry has declined to take the easy way, refusing to be seduced by fame or money into writing the kind of black ghetto fiction that mainstream publishers seem to want. Instead, Mowry remains socially committed and aware; he prefers doing things his way as he works to improve the lives and self-image of black street kids.
March 27, 1926
Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara (March 27, 1926 – July 25, 1966) was an American writer, poet and art critic. Because of his employment as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara became prominent in New York City's art world. O'Hara is regarded as a leading figure in the New York School—an informal group of artists, writers and musicians who drew inspiration from jazz, surrealism, abstract expressionism, action painting and contemporary avant-garde art movements. O'Hara's poetry is personal in tone and in content and has been described as sounding "like entries in a diary". Poet and critic Mark Doty has said O'Hara's poetry is "urbane, ironic, sometimes genuinely celebratory and often wildly funny" containing "material and associations alien to academic verse" such as "the camp icons of movie stars of the twenties and thirties, the daily landscape of social activity in Manhattan, jazz music, telephone calls from friends". O'Hara's writing sought to capture in his poetry the immediacy of life, feeling that poetry should be "between two persons instead of two pages." The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara edited by Donald Allen (Knopf, 1971), the first of several posthumous collections, shared the 1972 National Book Award for Poetry.
March 27, 1919
Peter Selz is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley; founding director of the Berkeley Art Museum; and former Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Among his books are German Expressionist Painting (California, 1957), St. Francis (1975), Art in Our Times (1981), Beyond the Mainstream (1997) and, with Kristine Stiles, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art (California, 1996). Susan Landauer is Katie and Drew Gibson Chief Curator at the San Jose Museum of Art in San Jose, California. Among her books are The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism (California, 1996) and Elmer Bischoff: The Ethics of Paint (California, 2001). Joann Moser is Senior Curator at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art and author of Singular Impressions: The Monotype in America (1997). .
March 27, 1949
Dubravka Ugreši? (born 27 March 1949) is a post-Yugoslav writer. A graduate of University of Zagreb, she has been living in the Netherlands since the 1990s, currently living in Amsterdam. Ugreši? majored in comparative literature and Russian language at the University of Zagreb's Faculty of Arts, pursuing parallel careers as a scholar and as a writer. After graduation she continued to work at the university, at the Institute for Theory of Literature. In 1993 she left Croatia for political reasons. She has spent time teaching at European and American universities, including UNC-Chapel Hill, UCLA, and Harvard University. She is based in Amsterdam where she is a freelance writer and contributor to several American and European literary magazines and newspapers. Dubravka Ugreši? has published novels and short story collections. Her much loved ‘patchwork’ novella is Steffie Speck in the Jaws of Life (Croatian: Štefica Cvek u raljama života), published in 1992. Filled with references to works of both high literature (by authors such as Gustave Flaubert and Bohumil Hrabal) and trivial genres (such as romance novels andchick lit), it represents a sophisticated and lighthearted postmodern play with the traditional concept of the novel. It follows a young typist named Steffie Speck, whose name was taken from a Dear Abby column, as she searches for love, both parodying and being compelled by the kitschy elements of romance. The novel was made into a successful 1984 Yugoslav film In the Jaws of Life, directed by Rajko Grli?. Her novel Fording the Stream of Consciousness received NIN Award, the highest literary honor in former Yugoslavia, whose winners include Danilo Kiš and Milorad Pavi?; Ugreši? was the first woman to be awarded the prize. The novel is hilarious Bulgakov-like ‘thriller’ about an international ‘family of writers’ who gather at the conference in Zagreb in the ‘socialists’, ‘Yugoslav’ era. Museum of Unconditional Surrender is a magnificent novel about the melancholy of remembrance and forgetting. A female narrator, an exile, surrounded by scenery of post-Wall Berlin and images of her war-torn country Yugoslavia, constantly changes the time zones of her life, past and present. Ugreši?’s ‘creative work resists reduction to simplified isolated interpretative models’. She is widely admired for her innovative approach to the essayistic literary genre. Her work is published in numerous European and American literary magazines and newspapers. Her collection Have A Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream (original title Americki fikcionar, or ’American Fictionary’) consists of short dictionary-like essays on American everyday existence, seen through the lenses of a visitor whose country is falling apart. The Culture of Lies is a volume of essays on ordinary lives in a time of war, nationalism and collective paranoia. ‘Her writing attacks the savage stupidities of war, punctures the macho heroism that surrounds it, and plumbs the depths of the pain and pathos of exile’. Thank You For Not Reading is a witty and eye-opening collection of essays on ‘literary trivia’: the publishing industry, literature, culture and the place of writing in our ‘society of spectacle’. Nobody’s Home is a sharp and bittersweet volume on all things literary, from flea markets and ‘ostalgia’ to the ‘global view on the world’. Karaoke Culture, with its long manifesto-essay of the same title, is a collection of profoundly insightful essays about our modern Internet times, and how technology and media change us all. Europe in Sepia, the latest volume, offers a melancholic view on (mostly) European cultural, political and everyday life landscapes. Dubravka Ugreši? received several major awards for her essays, including Charles Veillon Prize, Heinrich Mann Prize, Jean Amery Prize. In America, Karaoke Culture was shortlisted for National Book Critic Circle Award. Dubravka Ugreši? is also a literary scholar who has published articles on Russian avant-garde literature, and a scholarly book on Russian contemporary fiction Nova ruska proza (New Russian Fiction). She has edited anthologies, such as Pljuska u ruci (A Slap in the Hand), co-edited nine volumes of Pojmovnik ruske avangarde(Glossary of Russian avant-garde), and translated writers such as Boris Pilnyak and Danil Kharms (from Russian into Croatian). She is also the author of three books for children. At the outbreak of the war in 1991 in former Yugoslavia, Ugreši? took a firm anti-war and anti-nationalist stand. She wrote critically about nationalism, the stupidity and the criminality of war, and soon became a target of parts of the Croatian media, fellow writers and public figures. She had been accused of anti-patriotism and proclaimed a ‘traitor’, a ‘public enemy’ and a ‘witch’. She left Croatia in 1993 after a long lasting series of public attacks, and because she ‘could not adapt to the permanent terror of lies in public, political, cultural, and everyday life’. She wrote about her experience of a collective nationalist hysteria in her book The Culture of Lies, and described her ‘personal case’ in the essay ‘The Question of Perspective’ (Karaoke Culture). She continues to write about dark sides of modern societies, about the ‘homogenization’ of people induced by media, politics, religion, common believes and marketplace (Europe in Sepia). Being ‘the citizen of a ruin’ she is interested in a complexity of a ‘condition called exile’ (J. Brodsky). Her novels (Ministry of Pain, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender) explore exile traumas, but also excitement of exile freedom. Her essay ‘Writer in Exile’ (Thank You for Not Reading) is a small writer's guide to exile.
March 27, 1951
Brenda Hiliman (born March 27, 1951 in Tucson, Arizona) teaches writing at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California. Her other books, all published by Wesleyan, are Death Tractates (1992), Bright Existence (1992), Fortress (1989), and White Dress(1985).
March 27, 1904
Joseph Dorfman (March 27, 1904, Russia - July 21, 1991, Manhattan, New York City, NY), , a specialist in the history of economic thought, began his teaching career at Columbia in 1931 and became a full professor in 1948. He wrote several books, including The Economic Mind in American Civilization, a five-volume survey published by Viking between 1946 and 1959 that covered the period from the founding of the Jamestown Colony through the post-World War II era. His works also included Thorstein Veblen and His America, published in 1934; Chief Justice John Marshall: a Reappraisal (1956) and Institutional Economics: Veblen, Commons and Mitchell Reconsidered (1963). Dr. Dorfman received the Veblen-Commons Award in 1974 from the Association for Evolutionary Economics, of which he was president in 1969, for outstanding contributions to the field. He was made a Distinguished Fellow of the History of Economics Society in 1982. A native of Romanovska, Russia, he graduated from Reed College and held master's and doctoral degrees from Columbia, which gave him its Seligman Prize for distinguished scholarship in 1935. Before he joined the Columbia faculty, he was assistant to the director of the Institute of International Finance and an economist for the National Industrial Conference Board.
March 27, 1904
Joseph Dorfman (March 27, 1904, Russia - July 21, 1991, Manhattan, New York City, NY), , a specialist in the history of economic thought, began his teaching career at Columbia in 1931 and became a full professor in 1948. He wrote several books, including The Economic Mind in American Civilization, a five-volume survey published by Viking between 1946 and 1959 that covered the period from the founding of the Jamestown Colony through the post-World War II era. His works also included Thorstein Veblen and His America, published in 1934; Chief Justice John Marshall: a Reappraisal (1956) and Institutional Economics: Veblen, Commons and Mitchell Reconsidered (1963). Dr. Dorfman received the Veblen-Commons Award in 1974 from the Association for Evolutionary Economics, of which he was president in 1969, for outstanding contributions to the field. He was made a Distinguished Fellow of the History of Economics Society in 1982. A native of Romanovska, Russia, he graduated from Reed College and held master's and doctoral degrees from Columbia, which gave him its Seligman Prize for distinguished scholarship in 1935. Before he joined the Columbia faculty, he was assistant to the director of the Institute of International Finance and an economist for the National Industrial Conference Board.
March 27, 1797
Alfred de Vigny (March 27, 1797, Loches, France - September 17, 1863, Paris, France) came from an ancient military family that was impoverished by the French Revolution. In 1814 he joined the royal bodyguard, in which he served for thirteen years, but he never saw serious action.The feeling of stasis and regret this engendered, of having been just too young to have been involved in the high adventure of the Napoleonic Wars is the great theme of his most famous work, The Military Life (Servitude et grandeur militaires). Much of his later life was spent withdrawn from Parisian society, dogged by financial worries and caring for his mother and his invalid wife. His remaining major works were published posthumously: most notably Journal d'un poète and the poems Les Destinées. Roger Gard, who died in 2000, was Emeritus Reader in English in the University of London. He was the author of books on Henry James, Jane Austen and the teaching of fiction in schools.
March 28, 1909
Nelson Algren (March 28, 1909 – May 9, 1981) was an American writer. He may be best known for The Man with the Golden Arm, a 1949 novel that won the National Book Award and was adapted as a 1955 film of the same name. According to Harold Augenbraum, 'in the late 1940s and early 1950s he was one of the best known literary writers in America.' The lover of French writer Simone de Beauvoir, he was featured as the hero of her novel The Mandarins, set in Paris and Chicago. He is considered 'a bard of the down-and-outer', based on this book and his novel A Walk on the Wild Side (1956). The latter was adapted as a play of the same name, produced on Broadway. Its fame increased with Lou Reed's song of the same title.
March 28, 1940
Russell Banks (born March 28, 1940) is an American writer of fiction and poetry. Russell Banks was born in Newton, Massachusetts on March 28, 1940 and grew up ‘in relative poverty’. His father, Earl, deserted the family when Banks was aged 12. While he was awarded a scholarship to attend Colgate University, he dropped out six weeks into university and travelled south instead, with the ‘intention of joining Fidel Castro's insurgent army in Cuba, but wound up working in a department store in Lakeland, Florida‘. He married a sales clerk and they had a daughter. According to an interview with The Independent, he started to write when he was living in Miami in the late 1950s, though an interview with The Paris Review dates this to Banks's subsequent spell living in Boston. He moved back to New England in 1964 and then to North Carolina, where he attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, funded by the family of his second wife, Mary Gunst. In Chapel Hill, Banks was involved in Students for a Democratic Society and in civil-rights protests. In 1976, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Banks divorced Mary Gunst in 1977 after 14 years of marriage. He was subsequently married to Kathy Walton, an editor at Harper & Row, for five years. Banks has also lived in Jamaica. Banks now lives in Keene, upstate New York, though spends the winters in Miami. He was a New York State Author for 2004-2006. He is also Artist-in-Residence at the University of Maryland. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University. He is married to the poet Chase Twichell, his fourth wife. Banks has four daughters from his previous marriages. Banks is an American novelist best known for his ‘detailed accounts of domestic strife and the daily struggles of ordinary often-marginalized characters’. His stories usually revolve around his own childhood experiences, the often reflect ‘moral themes and personal relationships’.
March 28, 1936
Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. Peru's foremost writer, he has been awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor, and the Jerusalem Prize. His many works include THE FEAST OF THE GOAT, THE BAD GIRL, AUNT JULIA AND THE SCRIPTWRITER, THE WAR OF THE END OF THE WORLD, and THE STORYTELLER. He lives in London.
March 28, 1968
Iris Shun-Ru Chang (March 28, 1968 – November 9, 2004) was an American-born Chinese author, journalist, historian, and human rights activist. She is best known for her best-selling 1997 account of the Nanking Massacre, The Rape of Nanking. Chang is the subject of the 2007 biography, Finding Iris Chang, and the 2007 documentary film Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking.
March 28, 1942
Daniel Clement Dennett III (born March 28, 1942) is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. As of 2017, he is the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. Dennett is an atheist and secularist, a member of the Secular Coalition for America advisory board, and a member of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, as well as an outspoken supporter of the Brights movement. Dennett is referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism", along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens. Dennett is a member of the editorial board for The Rutherford Journal.
March 28, 1929
Frederick Earl ‘Fred’ Exley (March 28, 1929 – June 17, 1992) was an American writer best known as the author of the fictional memoir A Fan's Notes. Exley was born March 28, 1929, in Watertown, New York. He was the third of four children, including a twin sister, Frances, born to Earl and Charlotte. His father, who died in 1945 when Exley was 16, was a celebrated former athlete and local basketball coach whose legacy would be a dominating influence on Exley's early life. A car accident the following year injured Exley and prevented him from graduating from high school on schedule. Exley had a brief post-graduate stint at John Jay High School in Katonah, New York, where he was named to the conference all-star basketball team. Exley entered Hobart College in the pre-dental program in 1949. The next year he transferred to the University of Southern California, where he began to follow the career of fellow student and future football legend Frank Gifford. In 1952, Exley dropped out of USC and moved to New York City to find employment, only to return a year later to complete a BA in English. Subsequently he returned to New York to work in public relations for New York Central Railroad. After a year there he relocated to their Chicago office, then began working for Rock Island Railroad in the same capacity. Exley soon took over as managing editor of the railroad's employee magazine,The Rocket, where his first published writing appeared. After losing his job in 1956, Exley entered an itinerant period of his life marred by acute alcoholism, obsession with sports and mental instability, that was to provide much of the autobiographical material for his first book, A Fan's Notes. In 1958, Exley was admitted briefly to Stony Lodge, a private mental institution in Westchester County, New York, where he met Francena Fritz, whom he began courting. Soon after he was admitted to the state institution, Harlem Valley State Hospital, the model for the Avalon Valley facility mentioned in A Fan's Notes. It was here Exley began writing in earnest. In 1959, he was released from Harlem Valley and married Fritz on October 31. They moved to Greenwich, Connecticut and Exley was offered a teaching position at a school in Port Chester, New York. In 1960 his first daughter, Pamela, was born. In 1961 Exley received a provisional appointment as clerk and crier of the courts in Jefferson County, New York, where a lawyer friend, Gordon Phillips (the model for ‘the Counselor’ in A Fan's Notes), asked Exley to forge a signature on a check for one of his clients, an action that led to Phillips' disbarment. In 1962, Fritz obtained a divorce from Exley at her father's request. Several years of intermittent teaching jobs in Clayton, Gouverneur, and Indian River, New York followed. His alcoholism growing worse, Exley began a decade of briefly held jobs and institutionalization, and spent time vacationing on Singer Island in Riviera Beach, Florida while continuing to work on A Fan's Notes. In 1964, Exley sent the completed manuscript for A Fan's Notes to Houghton Mifflin (who rejected it), and to Joe Fox at Random House, who suggested an agent, Lynn Nesbit. Nesbit shopped the manuscript around, and, after it was rejected by at least a dozen publishers, eventually sold it to David Segal at Harper & Row. In 1965, Exley, then 36, met the 20 year-old Nancy Glenn while on vacation in Palm Beach Shores, Florida and working as a bookkeeper for The Buccaneer, her husband's resort. The following year, Glenn separated from her husband and moved in with Exley, beginning a long relationship that saw many temporary separations and reconciliations. She became pregnant while Exley was employed at The Palm Beach Post's copy desk; they married on September 13, 1967, and Glenn gave birth to Exley's second daughter, Alexandra, on January 12, 1968. Exley and Glenn divorced on January 8, 1971. A Fan's Notes was published in September 1968 and, although it didn't initially sell well, its release prompted widespread critical acclaim. The novel, about a longtime failure who makes good by finally writing a memoir about his pained life, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and received the William Faulkner Award for best first novel, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award. In 1969, Exley moved into an apartment on 19th Street in Manhattan, spending much of his time at the Lion's Head bar at 59 Christopher Street. In 1970, Exley's mother purchased a small house in Alexandria Bay, New York and he temporarily moved in, though he still spent time in Florida working on Pages From a Cold Island. Charlotte's home was to become Exley's home base for the next 20 years. In the fall of that year he interviewed Gloria Steinem on Key Biscayne, in Florida. The resultant essay, ‘Saint Gloria & the Troll,’ published in Playboy a few years later, earned Exley their Editorial Award for the year's best nonfiction piece. His second novel, Pages From a Cold Island, was published by Random House in 1975, to considerably less acclaim than his debut. The book primarily concerns Exley's life in Florida; an afternoon with Steinem; a semester spent teaching at the Iowa Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa; and an homage to the life and career of literary critic and author Edmund Wilson, who died near Exley's mother's home. Exley traveled to the Hawaiian island of Lanai, where he began work on the final novel of his semi-autobiographical trilogy, Last Notes From Home. In May 1977, Rolling Stone publisher and co-founder Jann Wenner paid Exley $20,000 to publish up to six excerpts of the work-in-progress. The magazine published three excerpts, in June 1977, October 1978 and February 1979. The following year, Exley's papers were acquired by collector Robert C. Stevens and donated to the University of Rochester. In 1984, Exley's major debt was temporarily relieved when he received a Guggenheim Foundation grant of $21,000. Frank Gifford invited Exley to attend Super Bowl XXI in Pasadena, California, where the New York Giants defeated the Denver Broncos. Last Notes From Home was published by Random House in September 1988. The final volume in Exley's trilogy focuses on his relationship with his older brother, William, a Vietnam veteran who died in Hawaii in 1973 after a battle with cancer.’ Soon after, Exley began work on a spy thriller to be titled Mean Greenwich Time, but he did not come close to completing it. Exley moved in with his aunt Frances Knapp in Alexandria Bay, and became very ill while traveling to London for a journalism assignment. After falling into poor health in late 1990 and being hospitalized with congestive heart failure, Exley cared for his ailing aunt who eventually died in 1991. The following year Exley suffered two strokes and died at Edward John Noble Hospital in Alexandria Bay on June 17, 1992. His ashes were interred at Brookside Cemetery in Watertown, New York, next to his parents.
March 28, 1944
Richard Fletcher was Professor of History at the University of York. He was the author of The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity (California, 1999).
March 28, 1868
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (28 March 1868 – 18 June 1936), primarily known as Maxim (Maksim) Gorky, was a Russian and Soviet writer, a founder of the Socialist realism literary method and a political activist.
March 28, 1914
Born in a Czech brewery, Bohumil Hrabal (March 28, 1914 - February 3, 1997) went on to become a steelworker and traveling salesman by day, and surrealist poet by night. He moved away from realism in the 1950s to experiment with the stream-of-consciousness style. Banned in his native country during the political upheaval of Prague Spring, Hrabal nevertheless won the prestigious Jaroslav Seifert Prize in 1993 and has been celebrated as genius by Julian Barnes, Susan Sontag, and Milan Kundera. Many of his characters were ‘wise fools’ – everyday men taken to drunken monologues of inadvertent but acute insight. Two of his novels have been made into classic films by Czech New Wave director Ji?í Menzel – Closely Watched Trains, winner of the 1967 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, and Larks on a String, winner of the 1990 Golden Bear. Before his death, Publishers Weekly named him the ‘most revered living Czech writer,’ describing his work as ‘a humorous and breathless affair… [of] abounding energy and a rambunctious wit.’
March 28, 1931
Hakim Jamal (March 28, 1931, Roxbury, Boston, MA - May 1, 1973, Roxbury, Boston, MA) was born in Boston in 1931. Unlike many heroin addicts he always paid for his habit by working, not stealing, and has been a programme editor for a television magazine and a clerk in a legal office. In 1958 he took a course at a linotype school and became a linotype operator, first class. He began writing for local newspapers in Los Angeles, and did a lot of television broadcasting. His favourite project was the Malcolm X Montessori School in California, of which he was one of the founders. He dreamed of many more such schools wanted to start one in London. He saw himself as a fundraiser, not teacher, refusing to teach for fear of teaching the children to hate. He was president of the Malcolm X Organisation of Afroamerican Unity Inc, and a part-time member of the Black Panthers.
March 28, 1904
Gunard Hjertstedt (March 28, 1904 - January 9, 1969), better known by pen name Day Keene, was an American novelist, short story writer and radio and television scriptwriter. Keene wrote over 50 novels and was the head writer for radio soap operas Little Orphan Annie and Kitty Keene, Inc. Several of his novels were adapted into movies, including Joy House (MGM, 1964) and Chautauqua, released as The Trouble with Girls (MGM, 1969).
March 28, 1941
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (born March 28, 1941 as Jeffrey Lloyd Masson) is an American author best known for his conclusions about Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis.
March 28, 1946
The poet Susan Prospere was born March 28, 1946, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.Prospere’s poems have appeared in the New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry Field, Antaeus, and the American Scholar. She has been the recipient of the Nation/Discovery award, the PEN Southwest Houston Discovery award and an Ingram Merrill grant. Today Susan Prospere lives in Houston, Texas, where she is a consultant/attorney for the Fort Bend County Municipal Utility District No. 25.
March 28, 1942
Barry Neil Kaufman teaches a uniquely self-accepting and empowering process (The Option Process(R)), which has both educational and therapeutic applications.
March 28, 1884
Angelos Sikelianos (28 March 1884 – 19 June 1951) was a Greek lyric poet and playwright. His themes include Greek history, religious symbolism as well as universal harmony in poems such as The Moonstruck, Prologue to Life, Mother of God, and Delphic Utterance. His plays include Sibylla, Daedalus in Crete, Christ in Rome, The Death of Digenis, The Dithyramb of the Rose and Asklepius. Although occasionally his grandiloquence blunts the poetic effect of his work, some of Sikelianos finer lyrics are among the best in Western literature. Edmund Keeley is Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. Philip Sherrard lives in Greece.
March 28, 1905
Dorothy Norman (28 March 1905 – 12 April 1997) was an American photographer, writer, editor, arts patron and advocate for social change. Born Dorothy Stecker in Philadelphia to a prominent Jewish family, she was educated in arts and languages from her youth. In 1925, she married Edward A. Norman, the son of an early Sears & Roebuck entrepreneur. They lived in New York City, where Mrs. Norman immersed herself in social-activism groups: as a researcher for the American Civil Liberties Union; with Planned Parenthood, the National Urban League, and the Group Theatre. In the meantime, they had two children together, Andrew and Nancy. She attended Smith College, then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, remaining there from 1922 until her 1925 marriage. Arts patron and Stieglitz devotee Her life was motivated by "a desire to advance both art and action". She actively cultivated an interest in people who were involved with either the artistic arena or efforts at increasing social equity. In this role, she became acquainted with photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who was already a towering influence in the nascent field of art photography when they met in 1927. Although both were married at that time — she to Norman and he to modern artist Georgia O'Keeffe — Stieglitz became her mentor. Their relationship continued until his death in 1946. Her marriage to Edward Norman ended in divorce in 1951. Norman never worked as a professional photographer; instead, she captured images of friends, loved ones and prominent figures in the arts and in politics. People she photographed included Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Thomas Mann (with his wife Katia, or Katy), John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Bernard Berenson, Albert Einstein, Theodore Dreiser, Elia Kazan, Lewis Mumford and Sherwood Anderson. She also photographed special sites, trees, harbors, churches and buildings. She detailed the interior of An American Place, Stieglitz's last gallery, in photographs included in America and Alfred Stieglitz, A Collective Portrait, published in I934. She created an extended portrait study of Stieglitz (he returned the favour by creating a similar study of Norman). Norman's photographic work is noted for its clarity of vision, masterful blend of light and shading, and professional-quality printing techniques. During the 1930s and 1940s, Norman was active in various liberal causes, particularly civil rights, education, and independence for India; she was also a Zionist. She was a founding member of New York City's Liberal Party and a member of the Americans for Democratic Action, and served on the boards of both the New York Urban League and the National Urban League. Norman was a productive author. She wrote a weekly column for the New York Post (1942-1949) and for ten years (1938-1948) edited and published the literary and social activist journal Twice a Year, whose contributors included Richard Wright, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertolt Brecht. Norman chose provocative aphorisms by contemporary and historical writers, male and female, and from various cultures, to accompany the thematic groups of photographs in sections of MoMA's world-touring exhibition The Family of Man for its curator Edward Steichen, a long-term associate of Alfred Stieglitz. She wrote or edited numerous books, including The Selected Writings of John Marin (1949); Nehru: The First Sixty Years (1965), a two-volume collection of the Indian leader's writings; Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer (1970), the first full-length biography of the American modernist; and Indira Gandhi: Letters to an American Friend (1985). Her memoir, Encounters, was published in 1987. She also wrote the book The Spirit of India.
March 28, 1912
Léon-Gontran Damas (March 28, 1912 – January 22, 1978) was a French poet and politician. He was one of the founders of the Négritude movement. He also used the pseudonym Lionel Georges André Cabassou. Léon Damas was born in Cayenne, French Guiana, to Ernest Damas, a mulatto of European and African descent, and Bathilde Damas, a Métisse of Native American and African ancestry. In 1924, Damas was sent to Martinique to attend the Lycée Victor Schoelcher (a secondary school), where he would meet his lifelong friend and collaborator Aimé Césaire. In 1929, Damas moved to Paris to continue his studies. There, he reunited with Césaire and was introduced to Leopold Senghor. In 1935, the three young men published the first issue of the literary review L'Étudiant Noir (The Black Student), which provided the foundation for what is now known as the Négritude Movement, a literary and ideological movement of French-speaking black intellectuals that rejects the political, social and moral domination of the West. In 1937, Damas published his first volume of poetry, Pigments. He enlisted in the French Army during World War II, and later was elected to the French National Assembly (1948–51) as a deputy from Guiana. In the following years, Damas traveled and lectured widely in Africa, the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean. He also served as the contributing editor of Présence Africaine, one of the most respected journals of Black studies, and as senior adviser and UNESCO delegate for the Society of African Culture. In 1970 Damas and his Brazilian-born wife Marietta, moved to Washington, D.C., to take a summer teaching job at Georgetown University. During the last years of his life, he taught at Howard University in Washington and served as acting director of the school’s African Studies program. He died on January 22, 1978, in Washington and was buried in Guyana. Although the political aspect of his poetry held less appeal in the later years of the twentieth century, Damas’s reputation was on the rise. His poems, which sometimes experimented with typography and with the sheer sound of words, were astonishingly modern for their time, and they seemed to foresee the black poetry, both English and French, of a much later timeframe.
June 28, 1909
Eric Clifford Ambler (28 June 1909 – 22 October 1998) was an influential British author of spy novels who introduced a new realism to the genre. Ambler also used the pseudonym Eliot Reed for books co-written with Charles Rodda.Ambler's best known works are probably The Mask of Dimitrios (1939) (originally published under the title A Coffin for Dimitrios), which was made into a film in 1944, and The Light of Day (1962), filmed in 1964 as Topkapi. He was also a successful screenwriter and lived in Los Angeles in his later years. Amongst other classic movies based on his work are Journey into Fear (1943), starring Joseph Cotten, and an original screenplay, The October Man (1947). He wrote the screenplay for A Night to Remember about the sinking of the Titanic, along with many other screenplays, particularly those concerning stories and adventures at sea. He published his autobiography in 1985, Here Lies Eric Ambler. A recurring theme in Ambler's books is the amateur who finds himself unwillingly in the company of hardened criminals or spies. Typically, the protagonist is out of his depth and often seems for much of the book a bumbling anti-hero, yet eventually manages to surprise himself as well as the professionals by a decisive action that outwits his far more experienced opponents. This plot is used, for example, in Journey into Fear, The Light of Day and Dirty Story. In Ambler's books, unlike in most other spy novels, the protagonist is rarely a professional spy, or a policeman or counter-intelligence operative. A number of Ambler's characters feature in more than one novel: Andreas Zaleshoff and his sister Tamara in Uncommon Danger and Cause for Alarm, Charles Latimer in The Mask of Dimitrios and The Intercom Conspiracy, Arthur Abdel Simpson in The Light of Day and Dirty Story, and Zia Haki appears as a Colonel Haki of the Turkish secret police in The Mask of Dimitrios and Journey Into Fear and is mentioned as a General Haki in The Light of Day.
March 29, 1960
Jo Nesbø’s books have sold more than twenty million copies worldwide, and have been translated into forty-seven languages. His Harry Hole novels include The Bat, The Redbreast, Nemesis, The Devil’s Star, The Redeemer, The Snowman, The Leopard, Phantom, and Police, and he is the author of Headhunters and several children’s books. He has received the Glass Key Award for best Nordic crime novel. He is also a musician, songwriter, and economist and lives in Oslo.
March 29, 1956
Reed Farrel Coleman (born March 29, 1956) is an American writer of crime fiction and a poet.
March 29, 1946
Edward Richard Holmes, CBE, TD, VR, JP (29 March 1946 – 30 April 2011), known as Richard Holmes, was a British soldier and military historian, known for his many television appearances. He was co-director of Cranfield University's Security and Resilience Group from 1989 to 2009 and became Professor of Military and Security Studies at Cranfield in 1995.
March 29, 1895
Ernst Jünger (29 March 1895 – 17 February 1998) was a German writer and philosopher. In addition to his political essays, novels and diaries, he is well known for Storm of Steel, an account of his experience during World War I.
March 29, 1963
Padraic Jeremiah Kenney (born March 29, 1963) is a professor of history at Indiana University. He is the author of several books on East European (particularly Polish) history and politics; his area of specialization is social change and political change. He was awarded a grant under the Fulbright Program in 2005
March 29, 1885
Dezs? Kosztolányi (March 29, 1885 – November 3, 1936) was a Hungarian poet and prose-writer. Kosztolányi was born in Szabadka, Austria-Hungary (today Subotica, Serbia) in 1885. The city served as a model for the fictional town of Sárszeg, in which he set his novella Skylark as well as The Golden Kite. He was the child of Árpád Kosztolányi (1859-1926), physics and chemistry professor and headmaster of a school, and Eulália Brenner (1866-1948), who was of French origin. He started high school in Szabadka but because of a conflict with his teacher was expelled, and so he graduated as a private student in Szeged. Kosztolányi moved to Budapest in 1903 where studied at the University of Budapest, where he met the poets Mihály Babits and Gyula Juhász, and later for a short time in Vienna before quitting and becoming a journalist - a profession he continued for the rest of his life. In 1908, Kosztolányi replaced the poet Endre Ady, who had left for Paris, as a reporter for a Budapest daily. In 1910, his first volume of poems, The Complaints of a Poor Little Child, brought nationwide success and marked the beginning of a prolific period in which he published a book nearly every year. He met the actress Ilona Harmos in the winter of 1910; they got married on 8 May 1913. Kosztolányi died in 1936 from cancer of the palate. The literary journal Nyugat (Hungarian for "West"), which played an invaluable role in the revitalization of Hungarian literature, was founded in 1908 and Kosztolányi was an early contributor, part of what is often called the "first Nyugat generation", publishing mainly in poetry. Starting in the 1920s he wrote novels, short stories, and short prose works, including Nero, the Bloody Poet (to the German edition of which Thomas Mann wrote the introduction), Skylark, The Golden Kite, Kornél Esti and Anna Édes. In 1924 he published a volume of verse harkening back to his early work, entitled The Complaints of the Sad Man.
March 29, 1916
Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy (March 29, 1916 – December 10, 2005) was an American politician, poet, and a long-time Congressman from Minnesota. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1949 to 1959 and the U.S. Senate from 1959 to 1971. In the 1968 presidential election, McCarthy was the first candidate to challenge incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States, running on an anti-Vietnam War platform. The unexpected vote total he achieved in the New Hampshire primary and his strong polling in the upcoming Wisconsin primary contributed to Johnson's decision to withdraw from the race, and lured Robert F. Kennedy into the contest. Fellow Minnesotan US Vice-President Hubert Humphrey also entered the race after Johnson's withdrawal. McCarthy would unsuccessfully seek the presidency five times altogether.
March 29, 1967
José Edmundo Paz-Soldán Ávila (Cochabamba, March 29, 1967) is a Bolivian writer. His work is a prominent example of the Latin American literary movement known as McOndo, in which the magical realism of previous Latin American authors is supplanted by modern realism, often with a technological focus. His work has won several awards. He has lived in the United States since 1991, and has taught literature at Cornell University since 1997.
March 29, 1946
Robert J. Shiller is the best-selling author of Irrational Exuberance and The New Financial Order (both Princeton), among other books. He is the Stanley B. Resor Professor of Economics at Yale University.
March 29, 1952
Alec Wilkinson is a writer who has been on the staff of The New Yorker since 1980. He is the author of ten books: His most recent book is The Ice Balloon, the account of the Swedish visionary aeronaut S.A. Andree's attempt, in 1897, to discover the North Pole by flying to it in a hydrogen balloon.
March 29, 1947
Mark Traugott is Professor of History and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
March 30, 1931
Thomas N. Bisson is Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Harvard University. Among his previous books are Assemblies and Representation in Languedoc in the Thirteenth Century, Fiscal Accounts of Catalonia Under the Early Count-Kings (1151-1213), and The Medieval Crown of Aragon: A Short History.
March 30, 1926
Álvaro Cepeda Samudio (March 30, 1926 – October 12, 1972) was a Colombian journalist, novelist, short story writer, and filmmaker. Within Colombia and the rest of Latin America, he is known in his own right as an important and innovative writer and journalist, largely inspiring much of the artistically, intellectually and politically active climate for which this particular time and place, that of mid-century Colombia, has become known. His fame is considerably more quaint outside his home country, where it derives primarily from his standing as having been part of the influential artistic and intellectual circle in Colombia in which fellow writer and journalist Gabriel García Márquez—with whom he was also a member of the more particularized Barranquilla Group—and painter Alejandro Obregón also played prominent roles. Only one of his works, La casa grande, has received considerable notice beyond the Spanish-speaking world, having been translated into several languages, English and French among them; his fame as a writer has therefore been significantly curtailed in the greater international readership, as the breadth of his literary and journalistic output has reached few audiences beyond those of Latin America and Latin American literary scholars.
March 30, 1844
Paul-Marie Verlaine (30 March 1844 – 8 January 1896) was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry. Karl Kirchwey is professor of the arts and director of the Creative Writing Program at Bryn Mawr College, and, from 2010–2013, the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome. For many years he was director of the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center in New York City. His six books of poetry include The Happiness of This World and Mount Lebanon.
March 30, 1946
William Ian Miller is Professor of Law at the University of Michigan.
March 30, 1923
Roland Anthony Oliver (30 March 1923 – 9 February 2014) was an Indian-born English academic and Emeritus Professor of African history at the University of London. Throughout a long career he was an eminent researcher, writer, teacher, administrator and organiser, who had a profound effect on the development of African Studies in the United Kingdom. Oliver was born in Srinagar, Kashmir, India in 1923. Following his undergraduate and doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge between 1941 and 1948, Roland Oliver joined the staff of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, where he was successively Lecturer, Reader and Professor until his retirement in 1986. His appointment as a Lecturer in African history marked the beginnings of the contemporary academic field of African history. The African History Seminar that he founded and chaired at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) became the most important venue for the advancement of the academic discipline of African history anywhere in the world, and has profoundly influenced all subsequent scholarship on the subject. He travelled extensively throughout Africa in 1949-50 and 1957-58 and visited the continent almost every year since then. In 1953, 1957 and 1961 he organised international conferences on African history and archaeology, which did much to establish the subject as an academic discipline. He was a founding editor, with John Fage, in 1960 of the Journal of African History and, again with John Fage, in 1960 of the Cambridge History of Africa which appeared in eight volumes between 1975 and 1986. In 1963, he carried out a survey of 250 working Africanist academics in the United Kingdom and founded the African Studies Association of the UK (ASAUK) itself. He became its fourth President in 1966-67. Oliver was Visiting Professor at the University of Brussels (1961), Northwestern University (1962), and Harvard University (1967). From 1979 to 1993 he was president of the British Institute in Eastern Africa. The Cambridge History of Africa, and his influential Oxford History of East Africa, were produced in a decade between the late 1970s and late 1980s. These histories recognised and celebrated the long, rich history of Africa, which for the first half of the 20th Century was previously thought by historians to have only a history "created" by white travellers, administrators and settlers. In 2004, Oliver was awarded the Distinguished Africanist Award of the African Studies Association of the UK (ASAUK) and in 1993 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. He died on 9 February 2014 at the age of 90 in Frilsham, Berkshire, England.
March 30, 1820
Anna Sewell (30 March 1820 – 25 April 1878) was an English novelist, best known as the author of the classic novel Black Beauty.
March 30, 1843
Konstantin Mikhailovich Staniukovich or Stanyukovich (March 30, 1843 – May 20, 1903) was a Russian writer, remembered today mostly for his stories of the Russian Imperial Navy. The son of an admiral Mikhail Nikolaievich Staniukovich, he was enrolled in the Imperial Naval School. When he expressed his desire to pursue a literary rather than a naval career, his father engineered his immediate assignment, before graduation, to a long voyage "to clear his head of nonsense". After the three-year tour ended, by which time he was graduated ship-board and twice promoted to full ensign, he nonetheless resigned from the Navy, was disowned by his family, and embarked on his career as a writer in the liberal camp of 1860s Russia. By the early 1880s he had gained moderate acclaim for his writing on social issues. Arrested in 1885 for illegal contact with exiles in Western Europe and banished for three years to Siberia, he turned to his twenty-year-old memories of the Navy. Recycling the same cast of characters and the same stock situations over and over, but each time from a slightly different point of view, over the following two decades he created an opus of sea yarns still read today. The sea stories tell of kind captains and of cruel ones, of efficient first officers and of the indifferent, of idealistic lieutenants and of the careerists, of terrible boatswains and of the harmless—though all curse throughout. An admiral of ridiculous volatility makes several cameo appearances, stunning the officers, the crews, and the reader with his tantrums, and all else notwithstanding, with his deep love and respect for the sea and his charges. Shipwrecks, female passengers, adventures in distant America, shipboard duels act as foils for the plots. And through it all the sea and the air are rendered vividly, as the ordinary seamen tell their yarns, in lovingly rendered vernacular. These are not the tales of Hornblower. A navy at peace is described, and though one suspects that it will not win many battles, one knows it will scuttle itself inexorably, so as not to surrender. Staniukovich died already famous. His political views ensured that he continued to be reprinted throughout the Soviet period, and a ten-volume edition of his collected works in 1977 had a print run of 375,000.
March 30, 1940
UWE TIMM was born in Hamburg in 1940. After apprenticeship as a furrier, he went on to study philosophy and philology in Munich and Paris. HEADHUNTER is his fifth and most widely acclaimed novel. Considered to be among the leading German writers, his work has been translated in England, Holland, Italy, Sweden, Brazil, Russia, Hungary, France, Denmark, The Czech Republic, and Zimbabwe. Writer and translator Peter Tegel was awarded the 1989 Schlegel-Tieck Prize for his rendition of Mr. Timm’s novel THE SNAKE TREE (New Directions, 1990).
March 30, 1947
Yuko Tsushima was born in 1947, the daughter of novelist Osamu Dazai, author of THE SETTING SUN and NO LONGER HUMAN, who committed suicide in 1948. While still in her senior year at university she published her first short story, and her reputation as one of Japan’s most remarkable young writers is based largely on works of short fiction.
March 30, 1853
Vincent Willem van Gogh (30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits, and are characterised by bold colours and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork that contributed to the foundations of modern art. His suicide at 37 followed years of mental illness and poverty. Born into an upper-middle-class family, Van Gogh drew as a child and was serious, quiet and thoughtful. As a young man he worked as an art dealer, often travelling, but became depressed after he was transferred to London. He turned to religion, and spent time as a Protestant missionary in southern Belgium. He drifted in ill health and solitude before taking up painting in 1881, having moved back home with his parents. His younger brother Theo supported him financially, and the two kept up a long correspondence by letter. His early works, mostly still lifes and depictions of peasant labourers, contain few signs of the vivid colour that distinguished his later work. In 1886, he moved to Paris, where he met members of the avant-garde, including Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin, who were reacting against the Impressionist sensibility. As his work developed he created a new approach to still lifes and local landscapes. His paintings grew brighter in colour as he developed a style that became fully realised during his stay in Arles in the south of France in 1888. During this period he broadened his subject matter to include series of olive trees, wheat fields and sunflowers. Van Gogh suffered from psychotic episodes and delusions and though he worried about his mental stability, he often neglected his physical health, did not eat properly and drank heavily. His friendship with Gauguin ended after a confrontation with a razor, when in a rage, he severed part of his own left ear. He spent time in psychiatric hospitals, including a period at Saint-Rémy. After he discharged himself and moved to the Auberge Ravoux in Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris, he came under the care of the homoeopathic doctor Paul Gachet. His depression continued and on 27 July 1890, Van Gogh shot himself in the chest with a revolver. He died from his injuries two days later. Van Gogh was unsuccessful during his lifetime, and was considered a madman and a failure. He became famous after his suicide, and exists in the public imagination as the quintessential misunderstood genius, the artist "where discourses on madness and creativity converge". His reputation began to grow in the early 20th century as elements of his painting style came to be incorporated by the Fauves and German Expressionists. He attained widespread critical, commercial and popular success over the ensuing decades, and is remembered as an important but tragic painter, whose troubled personality typifies the romantic ideal of the tortured artist.
March 31, 1939
Ifeanyichukwu Ndubuisi Chikezie Aniebo, commonly known as I. N. C. Aniebo (born 31 March 1939), is a Nigerian novelist and short story writer, who has been called ‘the master craftsman of the Nigerian short story’. Aniebo trained as an artillery officer; his first stories were written under a pseudonym to avoid censorship. He fought for Biafra in the Nigerian Civil War, and The Anonymity of Sacrifice (1974) gives a sense of the horrors and personal conflicts of that war. Aniebo subsequently studied at the University of California, Los Angeles, before returning to Nigeria in 1979 to teach Creative Writing and Literature at the English Department of the University of Port Harcourt.
March 31, 1922
Lionel Davidson (31 March 1922 – 21 October 2009) was an English novelist who wrote a number of spy thrillers. Lionel Davidson was born in 1922 in Hull, Yorkshire, one of nine children of an immigrant Jewish tailor. He left school early and worked in the London offices of the Spectator magazine as an office boy. Later, he joined the Keystone Press Agency. During World War II, he served with the Submarine Service of the Royal Navy. When the war ended, he returned to the Keystone Agency and travelled all over Europe as a freelance reporter. It was during one of these trips that he got the idea for his first thriller. The Night of Wenceslas was published in 1960. Set in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, the novel tells the story of young Nicolas Whistler, a 24-year-old Londoner whose business trip to Prague goes horribly awry. Its taut prose and masterful plot made The Night of Wenceslas an instant, massive success, and immediately pushed Davidson into the front ranks of the genre, inviting favourable comparisons with such luminaries as Eric Ambler, Graham Greene and John le Carré. Davidson became one of the handful of living writers to have their first novel appear in a green Penguin jacket. The book won the Crime Writers' Association's Gold Dagger Award (the top prize for crime and spy fiction in Britain) as well as the Authors' Club First Novel Award. It was filmed in 1964 as Hot Enough for June, with Dirk Bogarde in the role of Whistler. His second novel The Rose of Tibet (1962) was equally well received. A Long Way to Shiloh (1966) won Davidson his second Gold Dagger, and he achieved a third with The Chelsea Murders (1978). The Chelsea Murders was also adapted for television as part of Thames TV's Armchair Thriller series in 1981. Davidson then went into an extended hiatus after the publication of The Chelsea Murders. He was not to write another thriller for the next sixteen years. Kolymsky Heights appeared in 1994 to international acclaim and introduced its author to a new generation of readers. Davidson never quite managed to fulfil his early promise to become a giant of British spy fiction, although his best novels are of high quality. In 2001, he was awarded the CWA's Cartier Diamond Dagger lifetime achievement award, for making ‘a significant contribution to crime fiction published in the English language’. Davidson wrote a number of children's novels under the pseudonym David Line. Run For Your Life is an outstanding example of writing which creates suspense from the opening page. Lionel Davidson died on 21 October 2009 in north London after suffering a long illness. Mr. Davidson’s first wife, the former Fay Jacobs, died in 1988. He is survived by his son Philip.
March 31, 1596
René Descartes (31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the 'Father of Modern Philosophy', and much subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day. In particular, his Meditations on First Philosophy continues to be a standard text at most university philosophy departments. Descartes' influence in mathematics is equally apparent; the Cartesian coordinate system — allowing reference to a point in space as a set of numbers, and allowing algebraic equations to be expressed as geometric shapes in a two-dimensional coordinate system (and conversely, shapes to be described as equations) — was named after him. He is credited as the father of analytical geometry, the bridge between algebra and geometry, crucial to the discovery of infinitesimal calculus and analysis. Descartes was also one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution and has been described as an example of genius. Descartes frequently sets his views apart from those of his predecessors. In the opening section of the Passions of the Soul, a treatise on the Early Modern version of what are now commonly called emotions, Descartes goes so far as to assert that he will write on this topic ‘as if no one had written on these matters before’. Many elements of his philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism, the revived Stoicism of the 16th century, or in earlier philosophers like Augustine. In his natural philosophy, he differs from the schools on two major points: First, he rejects the analysis of corporeal substance into matter and form; second, he rejects any appeal to ends—divine or natural—in explaining natural phenomena. In his theology, he insists on the absolute freedom of God's act of creation. Descartes was a major figure in 17th-century continental rationalism, later advocated by Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, and opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Hume. Leibniz, Spinoza and Descartes were all well versed in mathematics as well as philosophy, and Descartes and Leibniz contributed greatly to science as well. He is perhaps best known for the philosophical statement ‘Cogito ergo sum.’
March 31, 1893
Omer Englebert was born in Belgium in 1893 and died in Jerusalem in 1991. He entered the Order of Friars Minor in 1909 and was ordained a priest in 1924. A few years later he left the order and passed to the diocesan clergy. He is the successful author of several books. His Life of St. Francis is still in print in French: it is a classic. Englebert contributed also to journals and directed series for various publishing houses. Several of his books have been translated in many languages.
March 31, 1809
Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol (1809-52), Russian writer, whose plays, short stories, and novels rank among the great masterpieces of 19th-century Russian realist literature.
March 31, 1844
Andrew Lang (31 March 1844 – 20 July 1912) was a Scottish poet, novelist, literary critic, and contributor to the field of anthropology. He is best known as a collector of folk and fairy tales.
March 31, 1946
William Luhr is an American film author and professor and the author of such works as Thinking About Movies: Watching, Questioning, Enjoying, World Cinema Since 1945: An Encyclopedic History and Returning to the Scene. He is also currently a professor of English at Saint Peter's College in Jersey City, New Jersey.
March 31, 1621
Andrew Marvell (31 March 1621 – 16 August 1678) was an English metaphysical poet and politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1659 and 1678. As a metaphysical poet, he is associated with John Donne and George Herbert. He was a colleague and friend of John Milton. His poems include 'To His Coy Mistress', 'The Garden', 'An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland', 'The Mower's Song' and the country house poem 'Upon Appleton House'.
March 31, 1914
Octavio Paz Lozano (March 31, 1914 – April 19, 1998) was a Mexican poet-diplomat and writer. For his body of work, he was awarded the 1981 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1982 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature.
March 31, 1914
Mark Strand was recognized as one of the premier American poets of his generation as well as an accomplished editor, translator, and prose writer. The hallmarks of his style are precise language, surreal imagery, and the recurring theme of absence and negation; later collections investigate ideas of the self with pointed, often urbane wit. Named the US poet laureate in 1990, Strand’s career spanned five decades, and he won numerous accolades from critics and a loyal following among readers. In 1999 he was awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his collection Blizzard of One. Born on Prince Edward Island, Canada, Strand grew up in various cities across the United States and in Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. Strand originally expressed interest in painting and hoped to become an artist. He earned a BA from Antioch College in 1957 and a BFA from Yale University in 1959, where he studied with the painter Josef Albers. His interest in painting waned while at Yale, and he then decided to become a poet instead. Following his graduation, he went to Italy on a Fulbright Scholarship and studied 19th-century Italian poetry. I was never much good with language as a child, Strand admitted during an interview with Bill Thomas for the Los Angeles Times Magazine. Believe me, the idea that I would someday become a poet would have come as a complete shock to everyone in my family. Strand earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1962 and began teaching at various colleges, including Yale University, Princeton University, and Harvard University. He spent a year in Brazil in 1965 as a Fulbright lecturer. Strand admitted there were some benefits to being a poet during the turbulent 1960s. Groupies were a big part of the scene, he told Thomas. Poets were underground pop stars, and when we made the campus circuit, girls would flock around. It wasn’t bad. I rather liked the uncertainties of my life then. Strand’s first book, Sleeping with One Eye Open (1964), introduced his distinctive approach to poetry. The volume is characterized by a pervasive sense of anxiety and restless foreboding. Discussing the title poem with the radio program, Weekend America, Strand said the poem speaks to a certain anxiety I experienced back in the early ’60s. I was afraid the United States would go to war with Russia or the USSR. I think it’s a poem surrounded by a great deal of silence. In the first stanza of the frequently anthologized poem Keeping Things Whole, Strand sets the tone and presents the themes which continue to dominate his later work: In a field / I am the absence / of field. / This is / always the case. / Wherever I am / I am what is missing. Just before his death in 2014, Strand asserted that he wrote this poem in 20 seconds during a card game. The speakers in Strand’s early poetry are characterized by an intense concern with self and identity. David Kirby remarked in Mark Strand and the Poet’s Place in Contemporary Culture, Many poems in Strand’s first book show an uneasy preoccupation with self, and the vehicle used to express that preoccupation is often a dream state in which the speaker is divided between two worlds and can locate himself comfortably in neither. The concern with identity is woven through Strand’s later work, as well. The basic themes are treated in the poems with a growing unease that the reader feels more intensely than before—as his skill increases, so does the poet’s power to disturb, Kirby explained. Strand’s early collections of poetry, including Reasons for Moving (1968), made his reputation as a dark, brooding poet haunted by death, but Strand himself does not find them especially dark, he told Thomas. I find them evenly lit, he continued. Critics, however, discerned a shift with Strand’s third book. Harold Bloom, reviewing Darker (1970) found that the irreality of Borges, though still near, is receding in Darker, as Strand opens himself more to his own vision. The New Poetry Handbook, included in that book, illuminates Strand’s slight shift in perspective. While many of the poems that follow it express a concern with the apparent meaninglessness of life, The New Poetry Handbook offers a solution: poetry. Strand seriously considers the place of poetry in the universe, concluding that when a man finishes a poem / he shall bathe in the blank wake of his passion / and be kissed by white paper. Kirby viewed the poem as an answer to the problem of self. But while Strand’s focus grew to include an affirmation of the positive, he remained a poet of mood, of integrated fragments, of twilit landscape, and of longing, wrote Henri Cole in Poetry. His collections The Story of our Lives (1973) and The Late Hour (1978) also were dark, occupying the Rilkean space between beauty and terror. His ominous, foreboding early poems carry the anxiety of what cannot be communicated because it cannot be known, only anticipated, wrote Dave Lucas in the Virginia Quarterly Review, though they also include more obviously autobiographical poems like Elegy for my Father. In 1980’s Selected Poems, Strand relies on an ethereal, cumulative effect to express the idea that the two fixed points of a man’s life are the self and God; both are darknesses, one leading to another, Cole continued. In the New York Review of Books, Irvin Ehrenpreis, however, was critical of Strand’s solipsistic emphasis on the self: For all his mastery of rhythm and music, Strand does not open the lyric to the world but makes it a self-sustaining enterprise. Strand spent the decade after the publication of Selected Poems not writing poetry. In a profile by Jonathan Aaron, Strand admitted that I gave up [writing poems] that year. I didn’t like what I was writing, I didn’t believe in my autobiographical poems. He turned to other forms of writing instead, including a foray into children’s literature with The Planet of Lost Things (1982). As with his poetry, Strand focused on questions of loss, using the story to address the common childhood worry about where things go when they are lost. Strand’s other books for children include The Night Book (1985) and Rembrandt Takes a Walk (1986). A frequent contributor of short stories to periodicals, Strand published a collection of prose narratives in 1985. The resulting volume, Mr. and Mrs. Baby (1985), addressed Strand’s recurrent concern with the superficiality of life. Alan Cheuse of the Los Angeles Times Book Review described the book as a mixture of irony and affection. The collection mixes the fantastic with the mundane; describing the stories as odd, surrealistic sketches of alienation and rootlessness, New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani found them so slight, so tentative, that they evaporate into the air. Ellen Lesser of the Village Voice wrote, By far the greatest pleasures of Mr. and Mrs. Baby are not to be found in its mysteries, comic vision, or even its hapless picture of the contemporary male, but rather in the writing. On practically every page, one can be dazzled by Strand’s language. Strand also published books of art criticism, including The Art of the Real (1983) and William Bailey (1987). His 1994 volume Hopper was a highly expressive elucidation of the technique and narrative meaning of the American realist painter Edward Hopper’s works. Of the many pieces of writing stimulated by Hopper, observed John Updike in The New York Review of Books, none is more coolly and eerily attentive (more Hopperesque, we could say) than Mark Strand’s brilliant small book Hopper, showing how we are moved and disquieted by formal elements in the paintings. Strand describes Hopper’s human subjects, for example, as ‘characters whose parts have deserted them and now, trapped in the space of their waiting, must keep themselves company with no clear place to go, no future.’ Strand published The Continuous Life, his first book of poems in a decade, in 1990. In the New York Times Book Review, Alfred Corn commented that the book doesn’t strike me so much as a capstone of Mr. Strand’s career as one more turning in his development. Corn pointed to changes in meter, diction and point of view. This is a poetry written, as it were, in the shadow of high mountains, and touched with their grandeur, he concluded. Strand’s appointment as US poet laureate the same year brought the book even more attention. Strand’s next books received much critical acclaim. Dark Harbor (1993) is a single long poem divided into 55 diverse sections. Reviewers emphasized the poem’s motifs of anticipation and tension lacking resolution, as well as the exotic and rarified beauty of Strand’s often surrealistic language, though Judith Hall, in the Antioch Review, found that the austerity of the sequence is eased by tone—elegiac and self-mocking; part Cheever, part Brancusi, with the indefiniteness that Poe said was essential to music. In 1999 Strand was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Blizzard of One. The collection returns to the same concerns that have preoccupied Strand throughout his career as a poet. The poems in Mark Strand’s latest collection are missing their subjects, wrote Sarah Manguso in the Iowa Review, pointing out the presence of familiar Strand themes of loss, dispersion and absence. For many critics Blizzard of One was an affirmation of Strand’s continued appeal. A Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded that it was somehow scandalous that in his gorgeous, unabashed nostalgia or erotic melancholy there remained a tremendous allure and that Strand continued to be one of our most deeply enjoyable poets. In The New York Times, Deborah Garrison named Strand among the luminaries of contemporary poets, calling Blizzard of One a masterly new collection in which even the single snowflake that gives the volume its title ... is a kind of Platonic essence, linked to a continuum of snowflakes out there in the weather and inside, in the reader’s consciousness. Garrison also found that in his serious verses there are glimmers of an appealing new lightness; it’s as though his gradual adaptation to his own stringency has freed him up. When Strand published a collection of 15 short prose works as Weather of Words (2000), he was commended for his insight into the work of other poets. The essays ranged from commentary on poets, analysis of individual poems, and a discussion of poetic forms. The book was also valued for its relevance to Strand’s own poetry. Ian Tromp, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, compared the collection to Blizzard of One and found the poems poised and subtle, imbued with wisdom, while the essays and prose were considered playful and witty. Strand also coedited the anthology The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (2000) with Eavan Boland. Strand’s collection Man and Camel (2006) contains more playful, witty moments than previous books, though, as Lucas pointed out in his VQR review, its tension, between what is present and what cannot be touched, continues to be the most consistent theme in Strand’s work. New Selected Poems (2007) draws on Strand’s work from the previous two decades and is full of buffoons whom the poet nevertheless loves, wrote Dan Chiasson in the New Yorker, adding they represent his new empathy for that old absurdity the self. His last book, Collected Poems (2014), was a longlist nominee for the National Book Award. In his later years, Strand stopped writing poetry and began to work again in art, preferring to make collages with paper he made by hand. His work was exhibited at Lori Bookstein Fine Art in Chelsea. Mark Strand’s honors include the Bollingen Prize, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, a Rockefeller Foundation award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. He served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He taught at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Chicago, and Columbia University. He died in late 2014 at the age of 80. - POETRY FOUNDATION.
March 31, 1936
Marge Piercy (born March 31, 1936) is an American poet, novelist, and social activist. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Gone to Soldiers, a sweeping historical novel set during World War II.
March 31, 1940
Frederick G. Williams, Gerrit de Jong, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Luso-Brazilian Studies, is a direct descendant and name-sake of the Prophet Joseph Smith’s counselor in the First Presidency. He was born March 31, 1940 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, while his parents were serving there as mission presidents. His father, Frederick S. Williams, had been one of the first missionaries called to the South American Mission in 1927. Young Williams accompanied his parents and four sisters on other assignments living abroad, first in Venezuela and then Uruguay while his father was manager of the U.S. State Department’s Institute of Inter-American Affairs, Health and Sanitation Division. In between these foreign residencies, the Williams lived in Arizona and California. In 1947 the elder Williams was called to open the Uruguayan Mission, and still later, after living in Downey, California, and serving as the first president of the Los Angeles Temple Mission, he took his family to Lima where he was the Manager of TAPSA, a Peruvian registered airline, and called as president of the first branch of the Church organized on the Pacific coast of South America. Young Fred grew up bilingual, Spanish-English, and graduated from Roosevelt High School in Lima. He worked for a year on the airline in Peru, then attended BYU for two years, where he played piano in a dance band, trumpet in the marching band, and baritone horn in the symphonic band. He then served a mission to Brazil where he learned Portuguese. After his mission he attended California State University, Los Angeles and mid-way through his junior year, courted (by playing his guitar and singing duets) and then married Carol Y. Brashear in the Los Angeles Temple in 1964. Carol is a professionally trained coloratura lyric soprano who graduated in voice performance from the University of California, Santa Barbara, with additional studies at UCLA, the Music Academy of the West, and the Royal College of Music in London. In January of 2000 Carol joined the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They are the parents of seven children: Frederick G. Williams, IV, Yvonne R. Cummings, Christopher S. Williams, Warren M. Williams, Alexis C. Lishman, Jonathan K. Williams and Violet C. Williams. The young Williams couple transferred to BYU where Fred continued to play the piano in dance bands, served as the Portuguese Zone Counselor of the Language Training Mission, and graduated in 1965 in Hispanic Civilization. He began his graduate studies in Portuguese with Dr. Gerrit de Jong, Jr. at BYU before transferring to the University of Wisconsin in 1966. There he was awarded both the MA (1967) and Ph.D. (1971) in Portuguese with a minor in Spanish where his mentor was famed Portuguese poet Jorge de Sena. In Wisconsin, besides caring for their three children, Carol sang with the Madison Civic Opera Company while Fred served for a time as Institute Director and taught CES courses, did research on his illustrious ancestor, which was published in BYU Studies, and continued to play the piano at various resorts. Upon his graduation, Brother Williams was professor for two years at UCLA, served for a year as the Curriculum Consultant Specialist for the federally funded NDEA Portuguese Bilingual Program of the ABC School district in Artesia, California (which catered to the Azorean communities of the state), and then, beginning in 1974, became professor of Portuguese at the University of California, Santa Barbara campus (to which Jorge de Sena had moved) where he remained for the next 25 years. During that period he served for 7 years as Chairman of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, 4 years as Inaugural Director of the Jorge de Sena Center for Portuguese Studies (begun with an endowment of $450,000 from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation of Lisbon, Portugal), 5 years as Chairman of the Interuniversity Studies Program (a consortium of American universities who send students to study at the University of São Paulo), Chairman of the UC systemwide Language Committee, and 15 years as Director of the Summer Institute in Portuguese at UCSB. He also served for a year as Director of the University of California Study Center at the Pontifical Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro, and, most challenging and satisfying of all, he and his wife were called in 1991 to open and preside over the São Paulo Interlagos Mission of the LDS Church. Other Church callings during that time include serving as bishop on two different occasions in two different wards, and as president of the Spanish-speaking branch in the Santa Barbara Stake. In addition, for 5 years he served as Institute Director in Santa Barbara and for 20 years regularly taught CES classes in both English and Spanish. Since coming to BYU he has served on the Advisory Board of BYU Studies and of the Kennedy Center’s International Studies Programs. He is also a faculty affiliate of the Kennedy Center and directed a BYU volunteer academic/service program in Mozambique during the summer term of 2000, where he taught Mozambican literature and participated in food and clothing distribution for the refugees of the devastating East African floods of February and March of 2000. Professor Williams’ research interests have been Luso-Afro-Brazilian literatures and cultures, poetry translation, and Mormon Studies. His major publication focus has been 19th c. Brazilian poet Sousândrade (for his publications, Williams has been awarded medals by the Governor of the State and by the Federal University of Maranhão, elected to the Maranhão Academy of Letter and granted honorary citizenship), and 20th c. Portuguese poet Jorge de Sena, his former mentor and then colleague. Williams has also published a monograph on Portugal’s premier poet Luís Vaz de Camões and edited a volume on Brazil’s leading Modernist poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade. He collaborated with his father on a history of the Church in South America, edited and wrote several of the chapters on a history of the Church in Santa Barbara, and has published two volumes of his own poetry. To date, in addition to over 30 scholarly articles, he has published 14 volumes, to wit.: AUTHOR: Sousândrade: Vida e Obra (São Luís: SIOGE, 1976), 277 p. From Acorn to Oak Tree, A Personal History of the Establishment and First Quarter Century Development of the South American Missions, co-authored with Frederick S. Williams, Fullerton, CA: Et Cetera, Et Cetera Graphics, 1987, 375 p. Camões: The lover into the beloved object is transformed; A concise overview of the principal systems influencing the concept of love in the 1500s and a study of the sonnet itself, Lisbon & Paris: Arquivos do Centro Cultural Português, vol. XXIX: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1991, 122 p. Una Bibliografia Cronológica de Jorge de Sena (1939-1994), co-authored with Jorge Fazenda Lourenço, Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa de Moeda, 1994, 255 p. EDITOR: Sousândrade: Inéditos, co-edited with Jomar Moraes, São Luís: SIOGE,1971, 231 p. Sousândrade: Prosa, co-edited with Jomar Moraes, São Luís: SIOGE,1978, 187 p. Studies on Jorge de Sena by His Colleagues and Friends, Proceedings of the conference, co-edited with Harvey L. Sharrer, Santa Barbara: Jorge de Sena Center for Portuguese Studies, 1981, 275 p. Carlos Drummond de Andrade and His Generation, Proceedings of the conference, co-edited with Sérgio Pachá, Santa Barbara: Jorge de Sena Center for Portuguese Studies, 1986, 241 p. O Amor das Letras e das Gentes, Volume in Honor of Maria de Lourdes Belchior Pontes, co-edited with João Camilo dos Santos, Santa Barbara: Center for Portuguese Studies, 1995, 500 p. Santa Barbara Saints: A Sesquicentennial History of Mormons in Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara: S. Derrin Watson, 1997, 408 p. TRANSLATOR/EDITOR: The Poetry of Jorge de Sena, A Bilingual Selection, Santa Barbara: Mudborn Press,1980, 320 p. Toada da Vida e Outros Poemas, Life’s Refrain and Other Poems by José Rangel, Goa & Lisbon: Centro de Estudos Indo-Portugueses Voicuntrao Dempo & Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1992, 114 p. POETRY: From Those Who Wrote (Poems and Translations), São Luís: SIOGE, 1975, 83 p. Perceptions (Poems), São Luís: SIOGE, 1985, 80 p. ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION: Brazil’s Finest Poets / Os Melhores Poetas do Brazil, A Bilingual Selection, Introduction, translations and notes by Frederick G. Williams, São Salvador, Bahia & Provo, Utah: Universidade Federal da Bahia & BYU Press.
March 31, 1962
Michal Viewegh (born March 31, 1962, Prague) is one of the most popular contemporary Czech writers and the bestselling one. He writes about romantic relationships of his contemporaries with humour, variously successful irony as well as attempts at deeper meaningfulness; he is sometimes compared to Nick Hornby by his fans. His books, since the late 1990s published every spring, usually sell about 50,000 copies each, bringing him an upper-high-class income unparalleled among Czech writers. By his own boastful admissions, his royalties from a successful book are equal to roughly 8 years of an average Czech salary. His 2004 income was CZK four million. Viewegh likes to point out this success with readers, as well as the fact that his books have been translated to several languages and made into films, since he fell out of favor with critics in the mid-1990s, which sentiment he heartily reciprocated in his following books. Viewegh is a political adversary of the former Czech president Václav Klaus. In some of his recent novels this attitude has been strongly and pointedly manifested. In late 2012 Viewegh suffered a traumatic aortic rupture, his health condition was serious. He is out of danger now, rehabilitating at the Prague's Malvazinky clinic. Though his ability to write again is questioned.
March 31, 1924
Jean Franco, born in 1924 in Dukinfield, Cheshire, was educated at Hyde Grammar School and at Manchester and London Universities. She lived for four years in Guatemala and Mexico, from 1953 to 1957, and in 1960 took up an appointment as Lecturer in Spanish at Queen Mary College, London University. In 1964 she was appointed Reader in Latin American Literature at King's College, London University, and in 1968 became Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Essex. She is a founder-member of the Society for Latin American Studies of Great Britain and has served as Chairman since 1967. She has published many articles and translations in British periodicals and has contributed to Latin American periodicals. She is the editor of Short Stories in Spanish (Penguin, 1966), the author of An Introduction to Spanish American Literature (1969), and a contributor to the Latin American section in the Penguin Companion to Literature, Volume 3.
April 1, 1929
The son of a well-known pianist, Milan Kundera was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia. He was enrolled in the Czech Communist Party right after the Second World War, then debarred from it after the incidents of February, 1948 (the takeover of Prague), at which time he was a student. He worked as a laborer, then as a jazz musician, and finally ended up devoting himself to literature and film. He was a professor at the Prague Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies, where his students were the creators of the Czech New Wave in film. After the Russian invasion in 1968, he lost his post and saw all his books removed from the public libraries in his country. In 1975, he settled in France, and in 1979, the Czech government, responding to the publication of THE BOOK OF LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING, revoked his Czech citizenship. His first novel, THE JOKE, and his collection of stories, LAUGHABLE LOVES, appeared in print in Prague before 1968. His other novels have not been allowed publication in his fatherland. LIFE IS ELSEWHERE won the Prix Medicis for the best foreign novel published in France in 1973, and The Farewell Party won a similar prize, the Premio Mondello, for the best foreign novel published in Italy in 1976. Kundera’s works have been translated into twenty languages.
April 1, 1935
Fernando del Paso Morante (born April 1, 1935) is a Mexican novelist, essayist and poet. Del Paso was born in Mexico City and took two years in economics at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He lived in London for 14 years, where he worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation and in France, where he worked for Radio France Internationale and briefly served as general consul of Mexico. He has been a member of Colegio Nacional de México since 1996 and has won several international awards, including the 2007 FIL Literature Prize (Guadalajara International Book Fair), the 1982 Rómulo Gallegos Prize, the 1985 Best Novel Published in France Award (for Palinurus of Mexico), the 1966 Xavier Villaurrutia Award and the 1976 Mexico Novel Award. Noticias del Imperio (1986) is an important contribution to the Latin American new historical novel. The novel, based upon the lives of Maximilian and Carlota and French Intervention in Mexico, is called by the author a ‘historiographic’ novel. This encyclopedic novel is remarkable in that, instead of trying to discover the ‘truth’ about ‘what really happened,’ the author presents a number of possible versions of important and controversial events. Alfonso González is Professor Emeritus of Spanish at Cal State University, Los Angeles. Stella Clark is Professor Emeritus of Spanish at Cal State University, San Marcos.
April 1, 1942
Samuel Ray Delany, Jr., also known as ‘Chip’, is an American author, professor and literary critic. His work includes a number of novels, many in the science fiction genre, as well as memoir, criticism, and essays on sexuality and society. His science fiction novels include BABEL-17, THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION (winners of the Nebula Award for 1966 and 1967 respectively), NOVA, DHALGREN, and the RETURN TO NEVÈRŸON series. After winning four Nebula awards and two Hugo awards over the course of his career, Delany was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002. Between 1988 and 1999 he was a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Between 1999 and 2000 he was a professor of English at SUNY Buffalo. Since January 2001 he has been a professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he is Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program.
April 1, 1937
Conrad Detrez (1 April 1937 Roclenge-sur-Geer – 12 February 1985) was a Belgian novelist of political conscience and an energetic, darkly humorous style. He won the 1978 Prix Renaudot, for L'Herbe à brûler. Abandoning his theological studies at the Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain), Belgium, Detrez traveled to Brazil at age 24 and, while teaching French literature there, became involved in revolutionary politics. Deported by the Brazilian authorities, he went to Algeria and Portugal before settling in Paris in 1978. He became a French citizen in 1982. Detrez’s first published works were translations of Brazilian authors and revolutionary essays. As his political disillusionment grew, he turned to autobiographical fiction. Ludo (1974) is a fictional account of his World War II childhood, and Les Plumes du coq (1975; The Plumes of the Rooster) treats the 1951 abdication of the Belgian king Leopold III. Detrez’s most celebrated novel is L’Herbe à brûler (1978; A Weed for Burning), in which he recounts with carnivalesque glee the fatal return of his disillusioned protagonist—who has wandered for years in South America—to a Europe sapped of its revolutionary zeal. Criticism of leftist intelligentsia continued to be a theme in Detrez’s later work. He also published one book of poetry, Le Mâle Apôtre (1982; The Manly Apostle), and his novel La Ceinture de feu (1984), about a French scientist in war-torn Nicaragua, was translated into English as Zone of Fire.
April 1, 1949
Gilbert "Gil" Scott-Heron (April 1, 1949 – May 27, 2011) was an American soul and jazz poet, musician, and author, known primarily for his work as a spoken-word performer in the 1970s and 1980s. His collaborative efforts with musician Brian Jackson featured a musical fusion of jazz, blues, and soul, as well as lyrical content concerning social and political issues of the time, delivered in both rapping and melismatic vocal styles by Scott-Heron. His own term for himself was "bluesologist", which he defined as "a scientist who is concerned with the origin of the blues". His music, most notably on Pieces of a Man and Winter in America in the early 1970s, influenced and helped engender later African-American music genres such as hip hop and neo soul. In fact, Scott-Heron himself is considered by many to be the first rapper/MC ever, a recognition also shared by fellow American MC Coke La Rock. Scott-Heron remained active until his death, and in 2010 released his first new album in 16 years, entitled I'm New Here. A memoir he had been working on for years up to the time of his death, The Last Holiday, was published posthumously in January 2012. His recording work received much critical acclaim, especially one of his best-known compositions "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised". Gil Scott-Heron received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012. He also is included in the exhibits at the National Museum of African American History and Culture that officially opened on Sept. 24, 2016 on the National Mall, and in an NMAAHC publication, Dream a World Anew. During the museum's opening ceremonies, the Sylvan Theater on the monument grounds was temporarily named the Gil Scott-Heron stage.
April 1, 1942
RICHARD D. WOLFF is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs at The New School in New York. He has written, co-authored, and co-edited many books and journal articles.
April 1, 1837
Jorge Isaacs Ferrer (April 1, 1837–April 17, 1895) was a Colombian writer, politician and soldier. His only novel, María, became one of the most notable works of the Romantic movement in Spanish-language literature. His father was George Henry Isaacs, an English Jew originally from Jamaica. He first settled in Chocó, Colombia, where he made a fortune from gold mining and trade with Jamaica. He then moved to Cali where he converted to Christianity, bought his Colombian citizenship from Simon Bolivar and paid for it in cows. (There is a plaque on a bridge north of Bogota to commemorate this.) He married Manuela Ferrer Scarpetta, daughter of a Spanish Navy officer. He also owned two haciendas near Cali, called 'La Manuelita' (named after his wife) and 'El Paraíso'. The latter would provide the setting for María. 'El Paraiso' has been preserved as a museum, with emphasis upon its relation to the novel. Jorge Isaacs was born in Cali in 1837. Little is known about his childhood, but in some of his poems Isaacs portrays the Valley of the Cauca as an idyllic place where he spent his most of it. He was first educated in Cali, then in Popayán and, finally, in Bogotá between 1848 and 1852. Isaacs returned to Santiago de Cali in 1852 without finishing his baccalaureate studies. In 1854 he fought for seven months in the Cauca Campaign against the dictatorship of General José María Melo. In 1856 Isaacs married Felisa González Umaña, who was fourteen years-old at the time and they went on to have many children. During the time of the civil wars his family went through a period of economic hardship. Isaacs tried unsuccessfully to become a merchant as his father. He then turned to literature and wrote his first poems between 1859 and 1860. During that time he also wrote several dramas of historical theme. Isaacs took arms again in 1860, this time against General Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, and saw action in the Battle of Manizales during the Colombian Civil War (1860-1862). In 1861 Isaacs' father died; when the war ended Isaacs returned to Cali to take over the administration of his father's businesses, but he found them deeply in debt. This forced him to auction off two of his father's haciendas 'La Rita' and 'La Manuelita', which were bought by the industrialist Santiago Eder. Isaacs' economic hardship took him back to Bogotá, where he found that his literary efforts were being well received. The members of the reader's club 'El Mosaico' offered to publish his poems after Isaacs read them in one of their sessions. This compilation was published under the name Poesías in 1864. That year Isaacs took a job as the supervisor of the construction of a horse-path between Buenaventura and Cali and started to write María. Around that time he also fell ill with malaria. When María was published in 1867 it became an immediate success both in Colombia and in other Latin American countries. As a consequence Isaacs became a well-known personality in Colombia and his newly found fame allowed him to start a career as journalist and politician. As a journalist he directed the newspaper La República, of moderate conservative tendencies, in which he also published some articles. As a politician he first joined the Conservative Party, but later switched to the Radical Party. In 1870 he was sent to Chile as consul general. On his return to Colombia he was actively involved in the politics of Valle del Cauca, which he represented in the Colombian Congress, and in 1876 he fought in yet another civil war. However his political career ended in 1879 after an incident where he proclaimed himself political and military leader of Antioquia in response to a conservative revolt. After his retirement from politics Isaacs published in 1881 the first canto of the poem Saulo, although he was never able to complete it. He also explored the Magdalena Department, in the north of Colombia, where he found important coal and oil deposits. Isaacs spent the last years of his life in the city of Ibagué in Tolima where was planning to write a historical novel. He died of malaria on April 17, 1895.
April 1, 1947
Wendy Law-Yone (born 1947) is a critically acclaimed Burmese- born American author. She wrote novels and short stories. Though she did not settle in the United States until she was an adult, she is identified as an Asian American writer. Her novels, The Coffin Tree (1983) and Irrawaddy Tango (1993), were critically well received, with the latter nominated in 1995 for the Irish Times Literary Prize. Her third novel, ‘The Road to Wanting,’ (2010) is set in Burma, China and Thailand. The daughter of notable Burmese newspaper publisher, editor and politician Edward Michael Law-Yone, Law-Yone was born in Mandalay but grew up in Rangoon. Her background is diverse, with one grandfather a merchant from Yunnan and another a colonial officer from Great Britain. Law-Yone states that she is ‘half Burman, a quarter Chinese and a quarter English‘. Law-Yone has indicated that her father's imprisonment under the military regime limited her options in the country. She was barred from university, but not allowed to leave the country. In 1967, an attempt to escape to Thailand failed and she was imprisoned, but managed to leave Burma as a stateless person. She relocated to the United States in 1973, settling in Washington D.C. after attending college in Florida. In 1987, she was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Award for Creative Writing. In 2002, she received a David T.K. Wong Creative Writing Fellowship from the University of East Anglia. Her novel The Road to Wanting was long-listed for the Orange Prize 2011. Law-Yone cites as a strong influence on her writing career her father's love of language, noting that his work as the founder of Burmese English-language newspaper The Nation was a daily factor in her childhood.
April 1, 1940
Wangari Muta Maathai (1 April 1940 – 25 September 2011) was an internationally renowned Kenyan environmental political activist and Nobel laureate. She was educated in the United States at Mount St. Scholastica (Benedictine College) and the University of Pittsburgh, as well as the University of Nairobi in Kenya. In 1977, Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, an environmental non-governmental organization focused on the planting of trees, environmental conservation, and women's rights. In 1984, she was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, and in 2004, she became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for "her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace." Maathai was an elected member of Parliament and served as assistant minister for Environment and Natural resources in the government of President Mwai Kibaki between January 2003 and November 2005. She was an Honorary Councillor of the World Future Council. She made numerous achievements, was affiliated to many professional bodies and received several awards. In 2011, Maathai died of complications from ovarian cancer.
April 1, 1911
Naboth Monyandioe Moreleba Mokgatle (April 1, 1911, Rustenburg, South Africa - 1985, London, United Kingdom) was the eighth and youngest child of Setlhare Hebron Mokgatle, a skilled builder and carpenter, and Salome Mororo-Mokgatle. His grandfather was Mokgatle Mokgatle (Sekete) the paramount Chief of the Bakwena tribe of Mmanape of Tshukudu in Phokeng, Rustenburg. Mokgatle's grandmother, Matlhodi Paulina Kekana-Mokgatle, was the daughter of Chief Kekana the Potgietersrust area of the former northern Transvaal (Northern Province). Mokgatle started his primary education in 1925 at the Phokeng Preparatory School, run by the Pentecostal Holiness Church of the Reverend K. Spooner. However, his age and the need for a living wage, among other things, forced him to end his formal schooling in 1929. In 1930 Mokgatle moved to Pretoria, where he devoted much of his life to political and labour struggles. His initiation into protest politics took place towards the end of 1930 when he joined the campaign to burn the hated pass books that the law required all black people to carry on them. As a member of the Matopo Hills soccer team he was further drawn into politics in sport, especially in 1931 when the Scottish team Motherwell toured South Africa and played only against white teams. Mokgatle's keen interest in reading inspired him to enrol at a number of night schools in Pretoria and Johannesburg. Some of these were run by members of the South African Communist Party and gave him the opportunity to learn more about communism and trade unionism. His political and trade union activism was given impetus when he joined the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA). He was elected to the Pretoria district committee of the CPSA in 1941, which further stimulated his activities in these areas. The period between 1943 and 1954 was his most fruitful and saw his greatest contributions to trade union and political organisations in South Africa. He collaborated with other trade unionists and activists, leading to the formation of many unions in Pretoria. He became full-time General Secretary of the Non-European Distributive Workers' Union in 1943. He served on the executive committee of the Transvaal Council of Non-European Trade Unions and became the secretary of its Pretoria branch during the 1940s. In the late 1940's, he formed and led the Dairy Workers' Union and the highly successful African General Workers' Union. Mokgatle was highly critical of the cosmetic reforms of the 'liberal' government of J.C. Smuts and of the ANC's moderate approach to successive white governments. He took strong exception to the operation of the Natives' Representative Council. He and S.S. Tefu turned the Pretoria Market into a political arena where a series of political meetings were held and fierce political speeches delivered. When the government of Dr D.F. Malan passed the Suppression of Communism Act in 1950, Mokgatle's 'political home' was destroyed as the CPSA disbanded. Mokgatle's various organized labour and political activities brought him into headlong contact with state repression. Between 1930 and 1954 he was arrested and imprisoned on countless occasions. His union's offices in Pretoria and his homes in Marabastad, lady Selbourne and Atteridgeville were frequently searched and many documents seized. His overseas mail was intercepted and confiscated. The banning orders placed on him in 1952 and 1954 by Minister of Justice, Education, Arts and Science, C.R. Swart, effectively denied him any form of existence in South Africa. Mokgatle therefore left South Africa on September 1954 with a self-written affidavit in his passport. He ultimately made Catford (London) his home, aided by the Africa Bureau of Reverends M. Scott and M. Benson. Later his family joined him in exile. In 1956 his Atteridgeville home in South Africa was ransacked during the events that led to the infamous Treason Trial. Mokgatle began writing The autobiography of an unknown South African in 1961. Mokgatle married Nana Tlhogo in 1941. They had one daughter, Keitumetse Thabo, and a son, Matshidiso Ernest. Mokgatle died in 1985 owing to illness. His son brought his cremated remains back to South Africa where they were scattered in three places, Phokeng, Atteridgeville and Church Square in Pretoria.
April 1, 1697
Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles (1 April 1697 – 23 December 1763), usually known simply as the Abbé Prévost, was a French author and novelist.
April 1, 1947
Francine Prose is the author of ten highly acclaimed works of fiction, including BIGFOOT DREAMS, HOUSEHOLD SAINTS, HUNTERS AND GATHERERS, PRIMITIVE PEOPLE, and GUIDED TOURS OF HELL. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, GQ, and The Paris Review; she is a contributing editor at Harper's, and she writes regularly on art for the Wall Street Journal. The recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, Francine Prose is a Director's Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and Johns Hopkins University. She lives in New York City.
April 1, 1647
John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1 April 1647 – 26 July 1680), was an English poet and courtier of King Charles II's Restoration court. The Restoration reacted against the 'spiritual authoritarianism' of the Puritan era. Rochester was the embodiment of the new era, and he is as well known for his rakish lifestyle as his poetry, although the two were often interlinked. In 1669 he committed treason by boxing the ears of Thomas Killigrew in sight of the monarch, and in 1673 he accidentally delivered an insulting diatribe to the King. He died at the age of 33 from venereal disease. Rochester's contemporary Andrew Marvell described him as 'the best English satirist', and he is generally considered to be the most considerable poet and the most learned among the Restoration wits. His poetry, much of it censored during the Victorian era, enjoyed a revival from the 1920s onwards, with notable champions including Graham Greene and Ezra Pound. The critic Vivian de Sola Pinto linked Rochester's libertinism to Hobbesian materialism. During his lifetime, he was best known for A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind, and it remains among his best known works today.
April 1, 1959
Sandro Veronesi, born on April 1, 1959 in Florence, Tuscany, is an Italian novelist, essayist, and journalist. After earning a degree in architecture at the University of Florence, he opted for a writing career in his mid to late twenties. Veronesi published his first book at the age of 25, a collection of poetry (Il resto del cielo, 1984) that has remained his only venture into verse writing. What has followed since includes five novels, three books of essays, one theatrical piece, numerous introductions to novels and collections of essays, interviews, screenplay, and television programs.
April 1, 1431
François Villon (born in Paris in 1431 and disappeared from view in 1463), is the best known French poet of the late Middle Ages. A ne'er-do-well who was involved in criminal behavior and got into numerous scrapes with authorities, Villon wrote about some of these experiences in his poems.
April 1, 1875
Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace was an English writer. Born into poverty as an illegitimate London child, Wallace left school at 12. He joined the army at 21 and was a war correspondent during the Second Boer War for Reuters and the Daily Mail.
April 1, 1930
Chimako Tada (April 1, 1930 – January 23, 2003) was a Japanese poet renowned for her surreal style and evocation of women's experience in post-war Japan. She authored more than 15 books of Japanese poetry, and also translated prose and poetry from French. Tada wrote in traditional styles, such as tanka and haiku, as well as contemporary prose poetry. Jeffrey Angles is Associate Professor at Western Michigan University. He is coeditor, with J. Thomas Rimer, of Japan: A Traveler’s Literary Companion.
April 1, 1972
Paul R. Goldin is Professor and Chair of the Department of east Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania.
April 1, 1956
Aloys Winterling is Professor of Ancient History at University of Basel, Switzerland. He is the author of Aula Caesaris and Politics, Society, and Aristocratic Communication in Imperial Rome, among other books.
April 1, 1868
Edmond Eugène Alexis Rostand (1 April 1868 – 2 December 1918) was a French poet and dramatist. He is associated with neo-romanticism, and is best known for his play Cyrano de Bergerac.
April 1, 1974
Rogelio Guedea is considered one of Mexico’s most important authors. He studied law and literature in Mexico and Spain and has received numerous prizes for his writing, including the highly respected Premio Adonáis de Poesía. He currently lectures at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Peter Broad recently retired from forty-two years of teaching Spanish. He has permanent certification from the American Translators Association as a Spanish-English translator.
April 1, 1892
Philip A. Munz (1892-1974), of the Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Garden, was Professor of Botany at Pomona College, serving as Dean for three years. Diane L. Renshaw is a Consulting Ecologist. Phyllis M. Faber is General Editor of the California Natural History Guides.
April 2, 1805
Hans Christian Andersen (April 2, 1805 – August 4, 1875) was a Danish author and poet. Although a prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems, Andersen is best remembered for his fairy tales. Andersen's popularity is not limited to children; his stories—called eventyr, or ‘fairy-tales’—express themes that transcend age and nationality. Andersen's fairy tales, which have been translated into more than 125 languages, have become culturally embedded in the West's collective consciousness, readily accessible to children, but presenting lessons of virtue and resilience in the face of adversity for mature readers as well. They have inspired motion pictures, plays, ballets, and animated films.
April 2, 1900
Roberto Arlt (1900–1942) was an Argentine writer. He was born Roberto Godofredo Christophersen Arlt in Buenos Aires on April 2, 1900. His parents were both immigrants: his father Karl Arlt was a Prussian from Posen (now Poznan in present-day Poland) and his mother was Ekatherine Iobstraibitzer, a native of Trieste and Italian speaking. German was the language commonly used at their home. His relationship with his father was stressful, as Karl Arlt was a very severe and austere man, by Arlt's own account. The memory of his oppressive father would appear in several of his writings. For example, Remo Erdosain (a character at least partially based on Arlt's own life) often recalls his abusive father and how little if any support he would give him. After being expelled from school at the age of eight, Arlt became an autodidact and worked at all sorts of different odd jobs before landing a job on at a local newspaper: as clerk at a bookstore, apprentice to a tinsmith, painter, mechanic, welder, manager in a brick factory, and dock worker. His first novel, El juguete rabioso (1926) (‘Mad Toy‘), was the semi-autobiographical story of Silvio, a dropout who goes through a series of adventures trying to be ‘somebody.’ Narrated by Silvio's older self, the novel reflects the energy and chaos of the early 20th century in Buenos Aires. The narrator's literary and sometimes poetic language contrasts sharply with the street-level slang of Mad Toy's many colorful characters. Arlt's second novel, the popular Los siete locos (The Seven Madmen) was rough, brutal, colloquial and surreal, a complete break from the polite, middle-class literature more typical of Argentine literature (as exemplified, perhaps, by the work of Jorge Luis Borges, however innovative his work was in other respects). Los lanzallamas (The Flame-Throwers) was the sequel, and these two novels together are thought by many to be his greatest work. What followed were a series of short stories and plays in which Arlt pursued his vision of bizarre, half-mad, alienated characters pursuing insane quests in a landscape of urban chaos. In 1932 he published El amor brujo. During his lifetime, however, Arlt was best known for his ‘Aguafuertes’ (‘Etchings’), the result of his contributions as a columnist - between 1928 and 1942 - to the Buenos Aires daily ‘El Mundo‘. Arlt used these columns to comment, in his characteristically forthright and unpretentious style, on the peculiarities, hypocrisies, strangeness and beauty of everyday life in Argentina's capital. These articles included occasional exposés of public institutions, such as the juvenile justice system (‘Escuela primaria de delincuencia’, 26–29 September 1932) or the Public Health System. Some of the ‘Aguafuertes’ were collected in two volumes under the titles Secretos femeninos. Aguafuertes inéditas and Tratado de delincuencia. Aguafuertes inéditas which were edited by Sergio Olguín and published by Ediciones 12 and Página/12 in 1996. Between March and May 1930, Arlt wrote a series of ‘Aguafuertes’ as a correspondent to ‘El Mundo’ in Rio de Janeiro. In 1935 he spent nearly a year writing as he traveled throughout Spain and North Africa, on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. At the time of his death, Arlt was hoping to be sent to the United States as a correspondent. Worn out and exhausted after a lifetime of hardships, he died from a stroke on July 26, 1942. His coffin was lowered from his apartment by an operated crane, an ironic end, considering his bizarre stories. Arlt has been massively influential on Latin American literature, including the 1960s ‘Boom’ generation of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez. Analogues in English literature are those who avoid literary 'respectability' by writing about the poor, the criminal and the mad: writers like William Burroughs, Iceberg Slim, and Irvine Welsh. Arlt, however, predated all of them. He is widely considered to be one of the founders of the modern Argentine novel; among those contemporary writers who claim to have been influenced by Arlt are Abelardo Castillo, Ricardo Piglia and César Aira. At least two Argentine movies were based on his novels, Los siete locos (1974) and El juguete rabioso (1985). Michele McKay Aynesworth is Assistant Professor of English at Huston-Tillotson College.
April 2, 1840
Émile François Zola (2 April 1840 – 29 September 1902) was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, which is encapsulated in the renowned newspaper headline J'Accuse.
April 2, 1725
Giacomo Girolamo Casanova (2 April 1725 – 4 June 1798) was an Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice. His autobiography, Histoire de ma vie (Story of My Life), is regarded as one of the most authentic sources of the customs and norms of European social life during the 18th century. As was not uncommon at the time, Casanova, depending on circumstances, used more or less fictitious names such as baron or count of Farussi (the name of his mother) or Chevalier de Seingalt (pronounced Saint-Galle, as in French). He often signed his works Jacques Casanova de Seingalt after he began writing in French following his second exile from Venice. He has become so famous for his often complicated and elaborate affairs with women that his name is now synonymous with 'womanizer'. He associated with European royalty, popes and cardinals, along with luminaries such as Voltaire, Goethe and Mozart. He spent his last years in Bohemia as a librarian in Count Waldstein's household, where he also wrote the story of his life. Stephen Sartarelli is a poet and translator of a wide range of literary works from Italian and French. Sophie Hawkes is an artist, printmaker, and translator. Gilberto Pizzamiglio is professor of Italian literature at the University of Venice. He has written on Goldoni, Gozzi, and Foscolo.
April 2, 1929
Edward Merton Dorn (April 2, 1929 – December 10, 1999) was an American poet and teacher often associated with the Black Mountain poets. His most famous work is Gunslinger.
April 2, 1933
György (George) Konrád (born 2 April 1933) is a Hungarian novelist and essayist, known as an advocate of individual freedom. Konrad studied literature at the University of Budapest. He worked as an editor, librarian, and sociologist, publishing a number of essays on both literature and sociology.
April 2, 1947
Camille Anna Paglia (born April 2, 1947) is an American academic and social critic. Paglia has been a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, since 1984. Paglia is critical of many aspects of modern culture, and is the author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) and other books. She is a critic of American feminism and of post-structuralism as well as a commentator on multiple aspects of American culture such as its visual art, music, and film history. In 2005, Paglia was ranked No. 20 on a Prospect/Foreign Policy poll of the world's top 100 public intellectuals.
April 2, 1948
Jay Parini (born April 2, 1948) is an American writer and academic. He is known for novels, poetry, biography, screenplays and criticism. He has published novels about Leo Tolstoy, Walter Benjamin, Paul the Apostle, and Herman Melville.
April 2, 1920
John Randolph Webb (April 2, 1920 – December 23, 1982) was an American actor, television producer, director, and screenwriter, who is most famous for his role as Sgt. Joe Friday in the Dragnet franchise (which he also created). He was the founder of his own production company, Mark VII Limited.
April 2, 1933
Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich (4 December 1903 – 25 September 1968) was an American novelist and short story writer who sometimes wrote under the pseudonyms William Irish and George Hopley. His biographer, Francis Nevins Jr., rated Woolrich the fourth best crime writer of his day, behind only Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner and Raymond Chandler. A check of film titles reveals that more film noir screenplays were adapted from works by Woolrich than any other crime novelist, and many of his stories were adapted during the 1940s for Suspense and other dramatic radio programs. Born in New York City, Woolrich's parents separated when he was young. He lived for a time in Mexico with his father before returning to New York City to live with his mother, Claire Attalie Woolrich. He attended Columbia University but left in 1926 without graduating when his first novel, Cover Charge, was published. Cover Charge was one of six Jazz Age novels inspired by the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He soon turned to pulp and detective fiction, often published under his pseudonyms. For example, William Irish was the byline in Dime Detective Magazine (February, 1942) on his 1942 story ‘It Had to Be Murder’, (source of the 1954 Alfred Hitchcock movie Rear Window) and based on H. G. Wells' short story ‘Through a Window’. François Truffaut filmed Woolrich's The Bride Wore Black and Waltz Into Darkness in 1968 and 1969, respectively, the latter as Mississippi Mermaid. Ownership of the copyright in Woolrich's original story ‘It Had to Be Murder’ and its use for Rear Window was litigated before the United States Supreme Court in Stewart v. Abend, 495 U.S. 207 (1990). Woolrich was homosexual and sexually active in his youth. In 1930, while working as a screenwriter in Los Angeles, Woolrich married Violet Virginia Blackton (1910–65), daughter of silent film producer J. Stuart Blackton. They separated after three months, and the marriage was annulled in 1933. Woolrich returned to New York where he and his mother moved into the Hotel Marseilles (Broadway and West 103rd Street). He lived there until her death on October 6, 1957, which prompted his move to the Hotel Franconia (20 West 72nd Street). In later years, he socialized on occasion in Manhattan bars with Mystery Writers of America colleagues and younger fans such as writer Ron Goulart, but alcoholism and an amputated leg (caused by an infection from a too-tight shoe which went untreated) left him a recluse. He did not attend the premiere of Truffaut's film of his novel The Bride Wore Black in 1968, even though it was held in New York City. He died weighing 89 pounds. He is interred in the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. Woolrich bequeathed his estate of about $850,000 to Columbia University, to endow scholarships in his mother's memory for writing students. Woolrich's novels written between 1940 to 1948 are considered his principal legacy. During this time, he definitively became an author of novel-length crime fiction which stand apart from his first six works, written under the influence of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Most of Woolrich's books are out of print, and new editions have not come out because of estate issues. However, new collections of his short stories were issued in the early 1990s. Woolrich died leaving fragments of an unfinished novel, The Loser; fragments have been published separately and also collected in Tonight, Somewhere in New York (2005).
April 2, 1936
A prominent figure in the international avant-garde for 50 years, Rochelle Owens is a poet, playwright, translator, and video artist. She has published 18 books of poetry, most recently Out of Ur New & Selected Poems 1961-2012, Solitary Workwoman (2011), and Luca: Discourse on Life and Death (2001). Owens is the author of a novel, Journey to Purity (2009), and four collections of plays: Futz and What Came After (1968), The Karl Marx Play and Others (1974), Futz, and Who Do You Want Peire Vidal? (1986), and Plays by Rochelle Owens (2000). Her early play Futz has become a classic of the American avant-garde theatre and was made into a film in 1969. She has been a participant in the Festival Franco-Anglais de Poésie and has translated Liliane Atlan’s novel Les passants, The Passersby (1989). Her work has been translated into French, German, Greek, Japanese, Swedish, and Ukrainian. Owens was a pioneer in the Off-Off Broadway theatre movement as well as being involved in the ethnopoetics movement, and her work has influenced subsequent experimental poets and playwrights. In the 1960s, she participated in the early poetry readings at St. Mark’s Church. In 1972 she edited the anthology Spontaneous Combustion: Eight New American Plays. A recipient of five Village Voice Obie awards and honors from the New York Drama Critics Circle, Owens has held fellowships from the NEA and the Ford, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller (Bellagio) Foundations, among others. She is a member of ASCAP and the Dramatists Guild, and she has taught at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Oklahoma. She has held residencies at Brown University and the University of Southwestern Louisiana, and has lectured and read widely in the U.S. and abroad.
April 2, 1933
Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich (4 December 1903 – 25 September 1968) was an American novelist and short story writer who sometimes wrote under the pseudonyms William Irish and George Hopley. His biographer, Francis Nevins Jr., rated Woolrich the fourth best crime writer of his day, behind only Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner and Raymond Chandler. A check of film titles reveals that more film noir screenplays were adapted from works by Woolrich than any other crime novelist, and many of his stories were adapted during the 1940s for Suspense and other dramatic radio programs. Born in New York City, Woolrich's parents separated when he was young. He lived for a time in Mexico with his father before returning to New York City to live with his mother, Claire Attalie Woolrich. He attended Columbia University but left in 1926 without graduating when his first novel, Cover Charge, was published. Cover Charge was one of six Jazz Age novels inspired by the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He soon turned to pulp and detective fiction, often published under his pseudonyms. For example, William Irish was the byline in Dime Detective Magazine (February, 1942) on his 1942 story ‘It Had to Be Murder’, (source of the 1954 Alfred Hitchcock movie Rear Window) and based on H. G. Wells' short story ‘Through a Window’. François Truffaut filmed Woolrich's The Bride Wore Black and Waltz Into Darkness in 1968 and 1969, respectively, the latter as Mississippi Mermaid. Ownership of the copyright in Woolrich's original story ‘It Had to Be Murder’ and its use for Rear Window was litigated before the United States Supreme Court in Stewart v. Abend, 495 U.S. 207 (1990). Woolrich was homosexual and sexually active in his youth. In 1930, while working as a screenwriter in Los Angeles, Woolrich married Violet Virginia Blackton (1910–65), daughter of silent film producer J. Stuart Blackton. They separated after three months, and the marriage was annulled in 1933. Woolrich returned to New York where he and his mother moved into the Hotel Marseilles (Broadway and West 103rd Street). He lived there until her death on October 6, 1957, which prompted his move to the Hotel Franconia (20 West 72nd Street). In later years, he socialized on occasion in Manhattan bars with Mystery Writers of America colleagues and younger fans such as writer Ron Goulart, but alcoholism and an amputated leg (caused by an infection from a too-tight shoe which went untreated) left him a recluse. He did not attend the premiere of Truffaut's film of his novel The Bride Wore Black in 1968, even though it was held in New York City. He died weighing 89 pounds. He is interred in the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. Woolrich bequeathed his estate of about $850,000 to Columbia University, to endow scholarships in his mother's memory for writing students. Woolrich's novels written between 1940 to 1948 are considered his principal legacy. During this time, he definitively became an author of novel-length crime fiction which stand apart from his first six works, written under the influence of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Most of Woolrich's books are out of print, and new editions have not come out because of estate issues. However, new collections of his short stories were issued in the early 1990s. Woolrich died leaving fragments of an unfinished novel, The Loser; fragments have been published separately and also collected in Tonight, Somewhere in New York (2005).
April 3, 1925
Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn (3 April 1925 – 14 March 2014), originally known as Anthony Wedgwood Benn or Wedgwood Benn (and colloquially as Wedgie Benn), but later as Tony Benn, was a British politician who was a Member of Parliament (MP) for forty-seven years between 1950 and 2001 and a Cabinet minister under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan in the 1960s and 1970s.
April 3, 1946
Of Irish birth, Peter Costello (born April 3, 1946, Dublin) is a graduate of the University of Michigan. He is the author of many books, including THE HEART GROWN BRUTAL: THE IRISH REVOLUTION IN LITERATURE and a biography of Flann O’Brien. His work has been published in Great Britain and in the United States and has been translated into many languages.
April 3, 1926
Luís Infante de Lacerda Sttau Monteiro (April 3, 1926 in Lisbon, Portugal – July 23, 1993 in the same city) was a Portuguese writer, novelist and playwright, a man to whom ‘the only sacred thing was to be free as the wind’.When he was ten years old he went to London, accompanying his father, who was, at the time, the Portuguese ambassador in England. Later, he returned to Portugal in 1943, after his father's removal from his position by the dictator Salazar. He then graduated in Law from Lisbon University and worked as a lawyer for a short period of time. Subsequently, he returned to London and became a Formula 2 driver. After a while, and back in Portugal, he worked in the magazine ‘Almanaque’ and the ‘A Mosca’ supplement of the Diário de Lisboa. In 1968, he was arrested by PIDE (Portuguese Politic Police) after publishing the plays ‘A Guerra Santa’ and ‘A Estátua’, satires that criticized the Portuguese dictatorship and the colonial war. In the seventies, he collaborated as a journalist with Portuguese newspapers such as Diário de Notícias and Expresso. A day after his death, Mário Santos wrote in the newspaper Público: ‘Playwright, publicist, chronicler, fisherman, gourmet, sailor and frustrated race car driver, Luís de Sttau Monteiro was, above all, a bon vivant. He died yesterday (23.07.1993) in Lisbon, at 67, maintaining a very unflattering vision of Portugal.’ Despite being famous for his theater plays, Sttau Monteiro started his writing career in 1960 with the book ‘Um Homem não Chora’, followed by the public and critic acclaimed ‘Angústia para o Jantar’ (1961), book that showed a large influence of the ‘angry young men‘ generation of English writers. In 1961 he published ‘Felizmente há Luar!’, a play that won the Portuguese Writers’ Society Great Prize of Theater in 1962. The play, a severe portrait of the Portuguese social and political society of that time, was forbidden by censorship and would only come to stage in 1978, under the artistic direction of Sttau Monteiro himself.
April 3, 1907
Isaac Deutscher (3 April 1907 – 19 August 1967) was a Polish writer, journalist and political activist who moved to the United Kingdom at the outbreak of World War II. He is best known as a biographer of Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin and as a commentator on Soviet affairs. His three-volume biography of Trotsky, in particular, was highly influential among the British New Left.
April 3, 1911
Pietro di Donato was born on April 3, 1911, in West Hoboken, New Jersey. When his bricklayer father, Geremio, died in a building collapse in 1923, Pietro left school to support his family as a construction worker. Inspired by the works of Émile Zola, he decided to begin writing about his experiences in the Italian American community. In 1937 the first version of Christ in Concrete—a chronicle of his father's life—was published in Esquire.
April 3, 1902
Reinhard Gehlen (3 April 1902 – 8 June 1979) was a German general and intelligence officer who was chief of the Wehrmacht Foreign Armies East (FHO) military-intelligence unit during World War II (1942–45); spymaster of the CIA-affiliated anti–Communist Gehlen Organisation for the United States (1946–56); and the first president of the Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND) of West Germany (1956–68) during the Cold War. Gehlen was regarded as "one of the most legendary Cold War spymasters." Gehlen became a professional soldier in 1920 during the Weimar Republic. In 1942, he became chief of FHO, the German Army's military intelligence unit on the Eastern Front (1941–45). He achieved the rank of major general before being sacked by Adolf Hitler because of the FHO’s pessimistically accurate intelligence reports about Red Army superiority. In late 1945, at the start of the Cold War, the U.S. military (G-2 Intelligence) recruited him to establish the Gehlen Organisation, an espionage network against the Soviet Union, which employed former military officers of the Wehrmacht and former members of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). Gehlen was the first president of the Federal Intelligence Service of West Germany from 1956 to 1968. While this was a civilian office, he was also a lieutenant-general in the Reserve forces of the Bundeswehr, the highest-ranking reserve-officer in the military of West Germany.
April 3, 1593
George Herbert (3 April 1593 – 1 March 1633) was a Welsh-born poet, orator and Anglican priest. Herbert's poetry is associated with the writings of the metaphysical poets, and he is recognised as "one of the foremost British devotional lyricists."
April 3, 1936
Reginald Charles Hill FRSL (3 April 1936 – 12 January 2012) was an English crime writer, and the winner of both Britain's CWA Gold Dagger Award (for best mystery of the year) and Cartier Diamond Dagger Award (for lifetime achievement in mystery fiction), as well as an Anthony Award, a Barry Award, three Edgar Award nominations, and a Macavity Award. His books appear on many lists of the 100 best mysteries of the 20th century. 'Hill may be our finest living crime writer' -- Sunday Telegraph(UK). 'Hill stands head and shoulders above other writers of British crime fiction' -- The Observer(UK). 'In Dalziel and Pascoe, Hill has created the most remarkable duo in the annals of crime fiction' -- Toronto Star. 'What makes Hill's series different is its literacy and suave style, its real humor and often, even wit. Reginald Hill creates real characters, and he has raised the classical British mystery to new heights.' -- New York Times.
April 3, 1968
Laird Hunt (April 3, 1968) is an American writer, translator and academic. Hunt grew up in Singapore, San Francisco, The Hague, and London before moving to his grandmother's farm in rural Indiana, where he attended Clinton Central High School. He earned a B.A. from Indiana University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. He also studied French literature at the Sorbonne. Hunt worked in the press office at the United Nations while writing his first novel. He is currently a professor in the Creative Writing program at University of Denver. Hunt lives with his wife, the poet Eleni Sikelianos, in Boulder, Colorado. Hunt is the author of seven novels and a collection of short work. His works intersect several genres, including experimental literature, exploratory fiction, literary noir, speculative fiction and difficult fiction and include elements ranging from the bizarre, the tragic, and the comic. His influences include Georges Perec, W.G. Sebald, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka and the French Modernists. Hunt has also translated several novels from the French including Oliver Rohe's Vacant Lot (2010), Stuart Merrill's Paul Verlaine (2010). He has contributed to many literary publications, including McSweeney's, Ploughshares, Bomb, Bookforum, The Believer, Fence, and Conjunctions and is currently editor of the Denver Quarterly.
April 3, 1783
Washington Irving (April 3, 1783 – November 28, 1859) was an American author, essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat of the early 19th century. He is best known for his short stories 'Rip Van Winkle' (1819) and 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' (1820), both of which appear in his book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.. His historical works include biographies of George Washington, Oliver Goldsmith and Muhammad, and several histories of 15th-century Spain dealing with subjects such as Christopher Columbus, the Moors and the Alhambra. Irving served as the U.S. ambassador to Spain from 1842 to 1846. He made his literary debut in 1802 with a series of observational letters to the Morning Chronicle, written under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle. After moving to England for the family business in 1815, he achieved international fame with the publication of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819–20. He continued to publish regularly — and almost always successfully — throughout his life, and completed a five-volume biography of George Washington just eight months before his death, at age 76, in Tarrytown, New York. Irving, along with James Fenimore Cooper, was among the first American writers to earn acclaim in Europe, and Irving encouraged American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Edgar Allan Poe. Irving was also admired by some European writers, including Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Thomas Campbell, Francis Jeffrey, and Charles Dickens. As America's first genuine internationally best-selling author, Irving advocated for writing as a legitimate profession, and argued for stronger laws to protect American writers from copyright infringement.
April 3, 1928
Cheikh Hamidou Kane (born 3 April 1928 in Matam) is a Senegalese writer best known for his prize-winning novel L'Aventure ambiguë (Ambiguous Adventure), about the interactions of western and African cultures. Its hero is a Fulani boy who goes to study in France. There, he loses touch with his Islamic faith and his Senegalese roots.
April 3, 1943
Carlos Alberto Montaner (born 1943) is an exiled Cuban author known for his more than 25 books and thousands of articles, including several novels, the last of which is La mujer del coronel, The colonel's wife. Some of his books are devoted to explain the true nature of the Cuban dictatorship, for example: JOURNEY TO THE HEART OF CUBA. PODER magazine has estimated that more than six million readers have access to his weekly columns. He has been published widely in Latin American newspapers, and published fiction and non-fiction books on Latin America. Since 1968 he has had a syndicated weekly column in many newspapers around the world '. Montaner is a political analyst for CNN in Spanish and a collaborator of the book The Cuban Exile, along with well-known Cuban writers Mirta Ojito, award winning poet and writer Carlos Pintado and Carlos Eire, a book coordinated by Cuban musician and producer Emilio Estefan. In October 2012 Foreign Policy magazine select Montaner as one of the fifty more influential intellectuals in the Iberoamerican world.
April 3, 1959
Tejumola Olaniyan is Professor of English and African Languages and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is co-editor (with John Conteh-Morgan) of AFRICAN DRAMA AND PERFORMANCE (Indiana University Press, 2004).
April 3, 1929
Nirmal Verma (3 April 1929 – 25 October 2005) was a Hindi writer, novelist, activist and translator. He is credited as being one of pioneers of ‘Nayi Kahani’ (New Story) literary movement of Hindi literature, wherein his first collection of stories, ‘Parinde’ (Birds) is considered its first signature. In his career spanning five decades and various forms of literature, like story, travelogue and essays, he penned five novels, eight short-story collections and nine books of non-fiction, including essays and travelogues. Nirmal Verma was born on (3 April 1929 in Shimla, where his father worked as an officer in the Defense Department of the British Indian Government. He was the fifth child among his eight siblings. One of his brothers is one of India's greatest artists Ram Kumar. He wrote his first story for a students' magazine in the early 1950s. He did M.A. in History from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University. There after he started teaching in Delhi and writing for various literary magazines. His activism streak was visible even during his student days; in 1947-48, he regularly attended Mahatma Gandhiji's morning prayer meetings in Delhi, even though he was a card holding member of Communist Party of India, which he resigned in 1956, after Soviet invasion of Hungary. The very activism was soon to be reflected in his stories, which added a whole new dimension to the Indian literary scene. He stayed in Prague for 10 years, where he was invited by Oriental Institute to initiate a program of translation of modern Czech writers like Karel Capek, Milan Kundera, and Bohumil Hrabal, to Hindi; he also learnt the Czech language, and translated nine world classics to Hindi, before returning home in 1968, as the result of Prague Spring. During his stay in Prague he travelled widely across Europe, and the result was seven travelogues, including Cheeron Par Chandni (1962), Har Barish Mein (1970) and Dhund Se Uthti Dhun and his first novel, based on his student days in Prague, titled, ‘Ve Din’ (Those Days) (1964). On his return from Prague, he was disillusioned by Communism and later became highly vocal against Indian Emergency (1975–1977), and an advocate for the Tibetan independence movement. His subsequent writing reflected his concerted relooking of Indian traditions, which he found to be innately modern, compared with external modernity reflected in the western viewpoints and cultural milieu, which were being imposed on Indian ethos, all around, so much so that later his views were confused as pro-Hindutva as well. From 1980-83, Verma served as chairman of Nirala creative writing chair in Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal. In 1988-90 he was director of Yashpal Creative Writing Chair in Shimla. A film based on his story, Maya Darpan (1972), directed by Kumar Shahani, won theFilmfare Critics Award for Best Film. In his popular novel A Torn Happiness, August Strindberg looms large over the heads of many characters. He died on 25 October 2005 in New Delhi.
April 3, 1900
Franz Carl Weiskopf (3 April 1900, Prague - 14 September 1955) was a German-speaking writer. Born in Prague, then part of Austria-Hungary, he was often referred to as F. C. Weiskopf, he also used the pseudonyms Petr Buk, Pierre Buk and F. W. L. Kovacs. He died in Berlin in 1955. Weiskopf was the son of a German banker who was Jewish and a Czech mother. He studied at a German school in Prague and then went to university in his hometown to study Germanistik and history from 1919-1923. He traveled to the Soviet Union in 1926 and in 1928 moved to Berlin where he became editor of the Berlin am Morgen newspaper. He married Grete Bernheim. He was a member in good standing of the Confederation of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers (German: Bund proletarisch-revolutionärer Schriftsteller) and participated in a conference in 1930 with Anna Seghers in Charkow in the Soviet Union. After the takeover by the Nazis in 1933 Weiskopf returned to Prague, where he was editor of the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung. When Czechoslovakia fell to the invading Germans in October 1938, the newspaper was forced to shut down, and Weiskopf fled to Paris. From there, he fled to the United States in April 1939, with the help of the League of American Writers. He survived the war in New York. After the end of the war, Weiskopf was in the diplomatic service of Czechoslovakia and worked, first at an Embassy in Washington DC, 1949 to 1950 as ambassador to Stockholm, and from 1950 to 1952 as ambassador to Beijing. In 1952 he returned to Prague, but moved in 1953 to East Berlin. In the last years of his life he was a board member of the Deutscher Schriftstellerverband, and published the magazine New German Literature (German: Neue Deutsche Literatur) together with Willi Bredel and became member of PEN. F.C. Weiskopf wrote novels, short stories, stories, anecdotes, poetry and essays. His work was always realistic, stylistically far above the average for other authors of the Socialist realism. His narrative works were mostly set in the middle of Czechoslovakia and describe the path of solidarity of citizens and workers since the First World War. His wife initiated a Weiskopf named Prize, which has been awarded since 1956 for contribution to the preservation of the German language.
April 4, 1928
Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Ann Johnson; April 4, 1928) is an American author and poet. She has published six autobiographies, five books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning more than fifty years. She has received dozens of awards and over thirty honorary doctoral degrees. Angelou is best known for her series of autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of seventeen, and brought her international recognition and acclaim. Angelou's list of occupations includes pimp, prostitute, night-club dancer and performer, castmember of the musical Porgy and Bess, coordinator for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, author, journalist in Egypt and Ghana during the days of decolonization, and actor, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs. Since 1991, she has taught at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she holds the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies. She was active in the Civil Rights movement, and worked with both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Since the 1990s she has made around eighty appearances a year on the lecture circuit, something she continued into her eighties. In 1993, Angelou recited her poem ‘On the Pulse of Morning‘ at President Bill Clinton's inauguration, the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. With the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou was one of the first African American women who was able to publicly discuss her personal life. She is respected as a spokesperson of Black people and women, and her works have been considered a defense of Black culture. Although attempts have been made to ban her books from some US libraries, her works are widely used in schools and universities worldwide. Angelou's major works have been labeled as autobiographical fiction, but many critics have characterized them as autobiographies. She has made a deliberate attempt to challenge the common structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre. Her books center on themes such as racism, identity, family, and travel. Angelou is best known for her autobiographies, but she is also an established poet, although her poems have received mixed reviews.
April 4, 1914
Marguerite Donnadieu, known as Marguerite Duras (4 April 1914 – 3 March 1996) was a French writer and film director. She was born in Gia-Dinh (a former name for Saigon), French Indochina (now Vietnam), after her parents responded to a campaign by the French government encouraging people to work in the colony. In 1943, for her first novel published Les Impudents, she decided to use as pen name the surname of Duras, a village in the Lot-et-Garonne département, where her father's house was located. She was the author of many novels, plays, films, interviews, essays and short fiction.
April 4, 1973
David Blaine (born David Blaine White; April 4, 1973) is an American magician, illusionist and endurance artist. He is best known for his high-profile feats of endurance, and has set and broken several world records. Blaine revolutionized the way magic is shown on television by focusing on spectator reactions. His idea was to turn the camera around on the people watching instead of the performer, to make the audience watch the audience. The New York Times noted that "he's taken a craft that's been around for hundreds of years and done something unique and fresh with it." According to the New York Daily News, "Blaine can lay claim to his own brand of wizardry. The magic he offers operates on an uncommonly personal level." Penn Jillette called Blaine’s first television special, Street Magic, "the biggest breakthrough (in television magic) done in our lifetime" for changing the perspective of television viewers toward those seeing the trick live
April 4, 1940
Sven Holm, (born April 4, 1940, Copenhagen, Den.), Danish novelist and short-story writer, a participant in the political movement in Danish literature of the 1960s. In the title story of his first collection, Den store fjende (1961; The Great Enemy), Holm described how a village church on a precipice is gradually crumbling and falling into the sea; the village is a metaphor for a society that has become warped by politics and in which the urge to prosper has become man’s central fulfillment. In Det private Liv (1974; The Private Life) the realization dawns upon the main character during a marriage crisis that material things have usurped the central meaning in his life. In most of Holm’s novels he dealt with different forms of social exploitation—poverty in Syg og munter (1972; Sick and Happy), corruption of language in Jomfrutur (1966; Maiden Voyage), and ignorance in Termush, Atlanterkysten (1967; Eng. trans. 1969). In his intense prose poem on the theme of human suffering, Syv passioner (1971; Seven Passions), Holm offered a utopian alternative to the psychological breakdown and envisioned collapse of the Western way of life.
April 4, 1846
Comte de Lautréamont (French: [lot?eam??]) was the pseudonym of Isidore-Lucien Ducasse (4 April 1846 – 24 November 1870), a French poet born in Uruguay. His only works, Les Chants de Maldoror and Poésies, had a major influence on modern literature, particularly on the Surrealists and the Situationists. He died at the age of 24.
April 4, 1953
Jan Novák (born April 4, 1953 in Kolín) is a Czech-American writer, screenwriter and playwright. He writes in both Czech and English, frequently translating his work. He has received awards in both the United States and the Czech Republic. He has worked closely with such figures as Václav Havel and Miloš Forman.
April 4, 1949
James Wilcox (born April 4, 1949 in Hammond, Louisiana) is an American novelist and a professor at LSU in Baton Rouge. Wilcox is the author of eight comic novels set in, or featuring characters from, the fictional town of Tula Springs, Louisiana. Wilcox's first book MODERN BAPTISTS (1983) remains his best known work.
April 4, 1858
Remy de Gourmont (April 4, 1858 – September 27, 1915) was a French Symbolist poet, novelist, and influential critic. He was widely read in his era, and an important influence on Blaise Cendrars. The spelling Rémy de Gourmont is incorrect, albeit common and used by Ezra Pound in translations of his work. De Gourmont was born at Bazoches-au-Houlme, Orne, into a publishing family from Cotentin. He was the son of Count Auguste-Marie de Gourmont and his countess, born Mathilde de Montfort. In 1866 he moved to a manor close to Villedieu near La Manche. He studied law at Caen, and was awarded a bachelor's degree in law in 1879; upon his graduation he moved to Paris. In 1881, de Gourmont was employed by the Bibliothèque nationale. He began to write for general circulation periodicals such as Le Monde and Le Contemporain. He took an interest in ancient literature, following the footsteps of Gustave Kahn. During this period, he also met Berthe Courrière, model for, and heir of, the sculptor Auguste Clésinger, with whom he formed a lifelong attachment, he and Berthe living together for the rest of their lives. De Gourmont also began a literary alliance with Joris-Karl Huysmans, to whom he dedicated his prose work Le Latin mystique (Mystical Latin). In 1889 de Gourmont became one of the founders of the Mercure de France, which became a rallying point of the Symbolist movement. Between 1893 and 1894 he was the co-editor, along with Alfred Jarry, of L'Ymagier, a magazine dedicated to symbolist wood carvings. In 1891 he published a polemic called Le Joujou Patriotisme (Patriotism, a toy) in which he argued that France and Germany shared an aesthetic culture and urged a rapprochement between the two countries, contrary to the wishes of nationalists in the French government. This political essay led to his losing his job at the Bibliothèque Nationale, despite Octave Mirbeau's chronicles. During this same period, de Gourmont was stricken with lupus vulgaris. Disfigured by this illness, he largely retired from public view appearing only at the offices of the Mercure de France. In 1910, de Gourmont met Natalie Clifford Barney, to whom he dedicated his Lettres à l'Amazone (Letters to the Amazon). De Gourmont's health continued to decline and he began to suffer from locomotor ataxia and be increasingly unable to walk. He was deeply depressed by the outbreak of World War I and died in Paris of cerebral congestion in 1915. Berthe Courrière was his sole heir, inheriting a substantial body of unpublished work which she sent to his brother Jean de Gourmont, and dying within the year. De Gourmont is buried in Père-Lachaise Cemetery. His poetic works include Litanies de la Rose (1892), Les Saintes du Paradis (1898), and Divertissements (1912). His anthology Hieroglyphes (1894), contains his experiments with the possibilities of sound and rhythm. plunge from perhaps ironic piety to equally ironic blasphemy; they reflect, more than anything else, his interest in medieval Latin literature, and his works led to a fad for late Latin literature among authors like Joris-Karl Huysmans. He was also a literary critic and essayist of great importance, most notably his Le Probleme du Style which was a source book for many of the ideas that inspired the literary developments in both England and France and was also admired by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in that capacity. In 1922 Aldous Huxley translated de Gourmont's novel 'A Virgin Heart'. Pound observed in 1915 that the English Imagist poetic movement derived from the French Symbolistes, Eliot describing de Gourmant as the 'critical conscience of his generation'
April 4, 1892
Edith Irene Södergran (4 April 1892 – 24 June 1923) was a Swedish-speaking Finnish poet. One of the first modernists within Swedish-language literature, her influences came from French Symbolism, German expressionism, and Russian futurism. At the age of 24 she released her first collection of poetry entitled Dikter ("Poems"). Södergran died at the age of 31, having contracted tuberculosis as a teenager. She did not live to experience the world-wide appreciation of her poetry, which has influenced many lyrical poets. Södergran is considered to have been one of the greatest modern Swedish-language poets.
April 4, 1947
Larry Beckett (born 4 April 1947, Glendale, California) is a poet and songwriter, best known for his collaborations with Tim Buckley in the late-1960s. In the 21st century, he is emerging as a poet and literary critic.
April 5, 1929
Hugo Maurice Julien Claus (5 April 1929 – 19 March 2008) was a leading Belgian author who published under his own name as well as various pseudonyms. Claus' literary contributions spanned the genres of drama, the novel, and poetry; he also left a legacy as a painter and film director. He wrote primarily in Dutch, although he also wrote some poetry in English. His death by euthanasia, which is legal in Belgium, led to considerable controversy.
April 5, 1952
Jill Jonnes is an author and historian with a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. She has received awards from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is the author of South Bronx Rising and Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams. She lives with her family in Baltimore, Maryland.
April 5, 1937
Joseph Lelyveld (born April 5, 1937) was an American executive editor of the New York Times from 1994 to 2001, and interim executive editor in 2003 after the resignation of Howell Raines. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. In all, Lelyveld worked at the Times for nearly 40 years, starting out in 1962. He graduated from Harvard College in 1958, received a master's degree from the Columbia School of Journalism in 1960, and subsequently a Fulbright Scholarship. At the Times, he went from copy editor to foreign correspondent within three years. Among Lelyveld's books is Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White, based on his reporting from Johannesburg, South Africa, in the 1960s and 1980s. He received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1986 for Move Your Shadow. Lelyveld's book "Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India" was banned in the Indian state of Gujarat from publication for insinuating that the subject, Mahatma Gandhi, was in a homosexual relationship. This ban receiving a unanimous vote in favor of the state of Gujarat in April 2011 by Gujarat's state assembly. He was also foreign editor of the Times, and its managing editor.
April 5, 1923
Ernest Ezra Mandel (also known by various pseudonyms such as Ernest Germain, Pierre Gousset, Henri Vallin, Walter; 5 April 1923 – 20 July 1995), was a Marxist economist and a Trotskyist activist and theorist. Born in Frankfurt, Mandel was recruited to the Belgian section of the international Trotskyist movement, the Fourth International, in his youth in Antwerp. His parents, Henri and Rosa Mandel, were Jewish emigres from Poland, the former a member of Rosa Luxemburg's and Karl Liebknecht's Spartacist League. Ernest's start of university study was interrupted when the German occupying forces closed the university. During World War II, he escaped twice after being arrested in the course of resistance activities, and survived imprisonment in the German concentration camp at Dora. After the war, he became a leader of the Belgian Trotskyists and the youngest member of the Fourth International secretariat, alongside Michel Pablo and others. He gained respect as a prolific journalist with a clear and lively style, as an orthodox Marxist theoretician, and as a talented debater. He wrote for numerous media outlets in the 1940s and 1950s including Het Parool, Le Peuple, l'Observateur and Agence France-Presse. At the height of the Cold War, he publicly defended the merits of Marxism in debate with the social democrat and future Dutch premier Joop den Uyl. After the 1946 World Congress of the Fourth International, Mandel was elected into the leadership of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International. In line with its policy, he joined the Belgian Socialist Party where he was a leader of a militant socialist tendency, becoming editor of the socialist newspaper La Gauche (and writing for its Flemish sister publication, Links), a member of the economic studies commission of the General Federation of Belgian Labour and an associate of the Belgian syndicalist André Renard. He and his comrades were expelled from the Socialist Party not long after the general strike in 1960-1961 Winter General Strike for opposing its coalition with the Christian Democrats and its acceptance of anti-strike legislation. He was one of the main initiators of the 1963 reunification between the International Secretariat and the majority of the International Committee of the Fourth International, a public faction led by James Cannon's Socialist Workers Party that had withdrawn from the FI in 1953. The regroupment formed the Reunified Fourth International (also known as the USFI or USec). Until his death in 1995, Mandel remained the most prominent leader and theoretician of both the USFI and of its Belgian section, the Communist League (Belgium). Until the publication of his massive book Marxist Economic Theory in French in 1962, Mandel's Marxist articles were written mainly under a variety of pseudonyms and his activities as Fourth Internationalist were little known outside the left. After publishing Marxist Economic Theory, Mandel traveled to Cuba and worked closely with Che Guevara on economic planning, after Guevara (who was fluent in French) had read the new book and encouraged Mandel's interventions. He resumed his university studies and graduated from what is now the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris in 1967. Only from 1968 did Mandel become well known as a public figure and Marxist politician, touring student campuses in Europe and America giving talks on socialism, imperialism and revolution. Although officially barred from West Germany (and several other countries at various times, including the United States, France, Switzerland, and Australia), he gained a PhD from the Free University of Berlin in 1972 (where he taught some months), published as Late Capitalism, and he subsequently gained a lecturer position at the Free University of Brussels. In 1972, his exclusion from the United States was upheld in the US Supreme Court case Kleindienst v. Mandel. In 1978 he delivered the Alfred Marshall Lectures at the University of Cambridge, on the topic of the long waves of capitalist development. Mandel campaigned on behalf of numerous dissident left-wing intellectuals suffering political repression, championed the cancellation of the third world debt, and in the Mikhail Gorbachev era spearheaded a petition for the rehabilitation of the accused in the Moscow Trials of 1936-38. As a man in his 70s, he travelled to Russia to defend his vision of a free and democratic socialism and continued to support the idea of Revolution in the West until his death. In total, he published approximately 2,000 articles and around 30 books during his life in German, Dutch, French, English and other languages, which were in turn translated into many more languages. During the Second World War, he was one of the editors of the underground newspaper, Het Vrije Woord. In addition, he also edited or contributed to many books, maintained a voluminous correspondence, and went on speaking engagements worldwide. He considered it his mission to transmit the heritage of classical Marxist thought, deformed by the experience of Stalinism and the Cold War, to a new generation. And to a large extent he did influence a generation of scholars and activists in their understanding of important Marxist concepts. In his writings, perhaps most striking is the tension between creative independent thinking and the desire for a strict adherence to Marxist doctrinal orthodoxy. Due to his commitment to socialist democracy, he has even been characterised as "Luxemburgist". He is probably remembered most of all for being a tireless rationalist populariser of basic Marxist ideas, for his books on late capitalism and Long-Wave theory, and for his moral-intellectual leadership in the Trotskyist movement. Despite critics claiming that he was 'too soft on Stalinism', Mandel remained a classic rather than a conservative Trotskyist: writing about the Soviet bureaucracy but also why capitalism hadn’t suffered a death agony. His late capitalism was late in the sense of delayed rather than near-death. He still believed though that this system hadn’t overcome its tendency to crises. A leading German Marxist, Elmar Altvater, stated that Mandel had done much for the survival of Marxism in the German Federal Republic. Mandel was co-founder, with Livio Maitan, of the International Institute for Research and Education, which was selected as the home of the Ernest Mandel Study Centre after this death. Working together with the Ernest Mandel Foundation, the IIRE plays a key role in expanding the circulation of Mandel's works.
April 5, 1912
István Örkény (5 April 1912, Budapest - 24 June 1979, Budapest) was a Hungarian writer whose plays and novels often featured grotesque situations. Örkény was the son of a pharmacist. After high school, he studied chemistry and then pharmacy. He graduated from pharmacological school in 1934 and later earned a degree in chemistry. He published his first book, Ocean Dance, in 1941. In 1942, he was sent to the Russian Front. As a Jew, he was placed in a forced-labor unit. There he was captured and detained in a labour camp near Moscow, where he wrote the play Voronesh. In 1946, he returned home to Budapest. From 1956 until 1960, he was not allowed to publish due to political reasons. He later gained popularity through short stories such as One Minute Stories. In 2004, the Madách Chamber Theatre in Budapest was renamed the Örkeny Theater in his honour.
April 5, 1934
Richard Pollak is a contributing editor of The Nation, where he previously served as literary editor and executive editor. He is the author of The Episode, a novel, and of The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim. He lives in New York City with his wife, the pianist Diane Walsh.
April 5, 1834
Frank Richard Stockton (April 5, 1834 – April 20, 1902) was an American writer and humorist, best known today for a series of innovative children's fairy tales that were widely popular during the last decades of the 19th century. Stockton avoided the didactic moralizing, common to children's stories of the time, instead using clever humor to poke at greed, violence, abuse of power and other human foibles, describing his fantastic characters' adventures in a charming, matter-of-fact way in stories like ‘The Griffin and the Minor Canon‘ (1885) and ‘The Bee-Man of Orn‘ (1887), which was published in 1964 in an edition illustrated by Maurice Sendak. His most famous fable is ‘The Lady, or the Tiger?‘ (1882), about a man sentenced to an unusual punishment for having a romance with a king's beloved daughter. Taken to the public arena, he is faced with two doors, behind one of which is a hungry tiger that will devour him. Behind the other is a beautiful lady-in-waiting, whom he will have to marry, if he finds her. While the crowd waits anxiously for his decision, he sees the princess among the spectators, who points him to the door on the right. The lover starts to open the door and. the story ends abruptly there. Did the princess save her love by pointing to the door leading to the lady-in-waiting, or did she prefer to see her lover die rather than see him marry someone else? That discussion hook has made the story a staple in English classes in American schools, especially since Stockton was careful never to hint at what he thought the ending would be.
April 5, 1837
Algernon Charles Swinburne (5 April 1837 – 10 April 1909) was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He wrote several novels, and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
April 5, 1920
Szymon Szechter (5 April 1920 in Lviv - 1 June 1983 in London) was a Polish historian, dissident writer, translator and publisher. He was also blind. Szechter came from a Jewish family. He was the brother of Uzziah Szechter and uncle of Adam Michnik.
April 5, 1879
John Kenneth Turner (April 5, 1879, Portland, OR - July 31, 1948, Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA was an American publisher, journalist, and author. Turner's father was a printer at the Portland Oregonian and later operated a printing shop in Stockton, California, where Turner spent his youth and learned the printing business. His grandfather, a Methodist minister had migrated from Kentucky to Oregon on the Oregon Trail in 1849. At 16, Turner began to develop an interest in socialism and at 17 published the weekly paper "Stockton Saturday Night," which concerned itself with uncovering corruption among politicians and businessmen. He studied at the University of California, where he met Ethel Evelyn Duffy. The two married in 1905 and settled in San Francisco. After losing their apartment in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the couple spent a brief period in Portland, Oregon before moving to Los Angeles where Turner worked as a reporter for the Los Angeles Express. From 1908-1911, the couple were involved in the revolutionary movement in Mexico, and Turner's book Barbarous Mexico, criticizing the corruption and brutal labor system under the regime of Porfirio Diaz played a role in accelerating the revolution. From 1912, the family lived in Carmel-by-the-Sea, where poet George Sterling let them take over his house. Turner wrote articles for the socialist newspapers the New York Call and Appeal to Reason and other periodicals. In 1915, he traveled to Mexico to report on the American occupation of Veracruz and got an exclusive interview with Venustiano Carranza, one of the key leaders of the constitutionalist revolutionaries. He traveled to Mexico again the following year to report on the Pancho Villa Punitive Expedition. As the guest of progressive Republican Senator from Wisconsin Robert M. La Follette Sr., Turner was present for President Wilson's speech to Congress requesting a declaration of war on Germany. He opposed U.S. participation in the war and in 1922 published Shall It Be Again?, a book criticizing the war and America's involvement which was cited by, among others, former German Kaiser Wilhelm II in his memoirs on the question of war guilt. After the war, as the prospect of yet another American intervention in Mexico arose, the Rand School of Social Science published his book Hands Off Mexico. In 1921, Turner interviewed the Zapatista general, Genovevo de la O in Cuernavaca. The Palmer Raids of the 1920s and 1930s discouraged Turner and he ceased his writing and political activities. He and Ethel separated in 1925 and he later married socialist writer Adriana Spadoni. In 1941 he published his last book, Challenge to Karl Marx. He died in 1948. Sinclair Snow, who proposed this new edition of Barbarous Mexico and provided the Introduction, is an associate professor of history at the University of North Dakota, where he teaches Latin American and Mexican history. He has previously published (in 1964) The Pan-American Federation of Labor.
April 5, 1951
Guy Clarence Vanderhaeghe, OC, SOM (born April 5, 1951) is a Canadian novelist and short story writer, best known for his Western novels trilogy, The Englishman's Boy, The Last Crossing, and A Good Man set in the 19th-century American and Canadian West. Vanderhaeghe has won three Governor General's Awards for his fiction, one for his short story collection Man Descending in 1982, the second for his novel The Englishman's Boy in 1996, and the third for his short story collection Daddy Lenin and Other Stories in 2015.
April 5, 1856
Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856 – November 14, 1915) was an African-American educator, author, orator, and advisor to presidents of the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African-American community.
April 6, 1940
Homero Aridjis (born April 6, 1940) is a Mexican poet, novelist, environmental activist, journalist and diplomat known for his independence.
April 6, 1917
Leonora Carrington OBE (6 April 1917 – 25 May 2011) was a British-born–Mexican artist, surrealist painter and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City, and was one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s.
April 6, 1897
Robert Myron Coates (April 6, 1897 – February 8, 1973) was an American writer and a long-term art critic for the New Yorker. He coined the term ‘abstract expressionism‘ in 1946 in reference to the works of Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. As a writer of fiction, he is considered a member of the Lost Generation, having spent part of his life abroad in Europe. His first three novels are highly experimental, drawing upon Dada, surrealism and expressionism for their effect. His last two novels are examples of crime fiction in which the narrator presents a psychopathological case study of the protagonist. Nowadays, Coates is best known for The Outlaw Years (1930), which deals with the history of the land pirates of the Natchez Trace. Coates was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1897 and died at the age of 75 in New York City in 1973.
April 6, 1931
Gladys-Marie Fry (April 6, 1931 – November 7, 2015) was Professor Emerita of Folklore and English at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, and a leading authority on African American textiles. Fry earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from Howard University and her Ph.D. from Indiana University. She is the author of Stitched From the Soul: Slave Quilting in the Ante-Bellum South and Night Riders in Black Folk History. A contributor or author to 8 museum catalogs, Fry is also the author of a number of articles and book chapters. Fry has also served as the curator for 11 museum exhibitions (including the Smithsonian in Washington DC) and consultant to exhibits and television programs around the nation.
April 6, 1812
Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen (April 6, 1812, Moscow, Russia - January 21, 1870, Paris, France) was a Russian writer and thinker known as the 'father of Russian socialism' and one of the main fathers of agrarian populism (being an ideological ancestor of the Narodniki, Socialist-Revolutionaries, Trudoviks and the agrarian American Populist Party). He is held responsible for creating a political climate leading to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. His autobiography My Past and Thoughts, written with grace, energy, and ease, is often considered the best specimen of that genre in Russian literature. He also published the important social novel Who is to Blame? (1845–46).
April 6, 1947
Simon Louvish (born 6 April 1947, Glasgow, Scotland) is a Scots-born Israeli author, writer and filmmaker. He has written many books about Avram Blok, a fictional Israeli caught up between wars, espionage, prophets, revolutions, loves, and a few near apocalypses. Louvish is a visiting lecturer in Screen Studies at the London Film School. He has written books on W. C. Fields, The Marx Brothers, Groucho Marx, Laurel and Hardy, Mae West, Cecil B. DeMille, Mack Sennett and Charlie Chaplin.
April 6, 1957
A native of New York City, Robert M. Sapolsky holds degrees from Harvard and Rockefeller Universities. He currently is professor of biology and neuroscience at Stanford University. His previous book, WHY ZEBRAS DON’T GET ULCERS, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 1987 he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius grant.’ A regular contributor to Discover and The Sciences, he lives with his family in Stanford.
April 6, 1866
Lincoln Joseph Steffens (April 6, 1866 – August 9, 1936) was a New York reporter who launched a series of articles in McClure's, called Tweed Days in St. Louis, that would later be published together in a book titled The Shame of the Cities. He is remembered for investigating corruption in municipal government in American cities and for his early support for the Soviet Union.
April 7, 1949
Janusz Anderman was born in Wloszczowa in the Kielce region in 1949, he is a novelist and short-story writer, screenwriter and translator. He first worked as a reporter for student newspapers, which surely explains his tape-recorder-like memory and talent for reproducing the speech of the man and woman in the street, the collective ‘voice of society’. Paying attention to this voice allows Anderman to diagnose public moods and ways of thinking. This was the subject of his first novel, ‘Chinese Whispers’, and his far superior, often merciless portrayal of the introduction of Martial Law in Poland, ‘A Country of the World’, which provided a voice to a crowd of pathological castoffs who were disoriented, stupefied by propaganda and deprived of any authority they could look up to. Anderman's grotesque humor knocked the stuffing out of official slogans and programs by showing how they were reflected in the dreams and words of ordinary people. Anderman also tells of the fate of his generation, and his own fate, at a time of political transformation. His hero, a double for the author, is internally divided because of his obsessive sense of being followed by the secret police as he wanders in search of a place to live (‘Playing for Time’), sums up his life in an internment center (‘No Air’), and finally lays mercilessly bare the theatricality and unauthentic behavior of his fellow members of the political opposition (‘Edge of the World’, ‘Prison Sickness’). A cult writer and participant in underground literary life in the twilight of communism, Anderman does not seem to be a great believer in Poland's chances for an internal transformation of society after the recovery of independence. The sickness of the spirit inherited from totalitarianism turns out to be difficult to uproot; Anderman has few rivals in discerning its symptoms among today's Poles.
April 7, 1952
Li Ang (real name Shih Shu-tuan with Li Ang being her pen name, born April 7, 1952, in Lukang, Taiwan) is a Taiwanese feminist writer. In 2004, Li Ang was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture and Communication in recognition of her outstanding contribution to world literature.
April 7, 1931
Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931 – July 23, 1989) was an American author known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction (with Mark Mirsky and the assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
April 7, 1954
Chan Kong-sang, (born 7 April 1954), known professionally as Jackie Chan, is a Hong Kong martial artist, actor, film director, producer, stuntman, and singer. He is known for his acrobatic fighting style, comic timing, use of improvised weapons, and innovative stunts, which he typically performs himself, in the cinematic world. He has trained in wushu or kungfu and hapkido, and has been acting since the 1960s, appearing in over 150 films. Chan is one of the most recognizable and influential cinematic personalities in the world, gaining a widespread following in both the Eastern and Western hemispheres, and has received stars on the Hong Kong Avenue of Stars, and the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He has been referenced in various pop songs, cartoons, and video games. He is an operatically trained vocalist and is also a Cantopop and Mandopop star, having released a number of albums and sung many of the theme songs for the films in which he has starred. He is also a globally known philanthropist, and has been named as one of the top 10 most charitable celebrities by Forbes magazine. In 2015, Forbes estimated his net worth to be $350 million, and as of 2016, he was the second highest paid actor in the world.
April 7, 1924
André du Bouchet (April 7, 1924 – April 19, 2001) was a French poet. Born in Paris, André du Bouchet lived in France until 1941 when his family left occupied Europe for the United States. He studied comparative literature first at Amherst College and then at Harvard University. After teaching for a year, he returned to France. Here Du Bouchet became friends with the poets Pierre Reverdy, René Char, and Francis Ponge, and with the painters Pierre Tal-Coat and Alberto Giacometti. Du Bouchet was one of the precursors of what would come to be called 'poésie blanche' or 'white poetry.' In 1956, he published a collection of poems entitled Le Moteur blanc or 'The White Motor'. In 1966, he, along with (among others) Yves Bonnefoy, Jacques Dupin, Louis-René des Forêts and Gaëtan Picon, founded the poetry revue L'Ephémère. Twenty issues were published from 1966 to 1973. In 1961, Du Bouchet's first major poetry collection, Dans la chaleur vacante, was published to critical acclaim and he won the Prix de la critique (the Critic's Prize) for that year. He also wrote art criticism, most notably about the works of Nicolas Poussin, Hercules Seghers, Tal-Coat, Bram van Velde and Giacometti, and translated works by Paul Celan, Hölderlin, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Laura Riding, William Faulkner, Shakespeare and James Joyce. In 1983 he won the National Poetry Prize or 'Prix national de la poésie'. André du Bouchet died in 2001 at the age of 76, in Truinas, Drôme, France.
April 7, 1947
James Garbarino is an author and professor at Loyola University Chicago. He has specialized in studying what causes violence in children, how they cope with it and how to rehabilitate them. Garbarino has served as consultant or adviser to a wide range of organizations, including the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse, the National Institute for Mental Health, the American Medical Association, the National Black Child Development Institute, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, and the FBI. In addition, Garbarino's work is associated with the School of Human Ecology at Cornell University under the leadership of Urie Bronfenbrenner who began Head Start programs in the US.
April 7, 1955
Javier García Sánchez has worked as a journalist in different news and cultural media. He has published articles in Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, El viejo Topo, Destino, Camp de l'arpa, Tiempo de Historia and Historia 16. For two years he has been chief editor of the magazine Quimera and he has worked in the culture section of La Voz de Euskadi. He is the author of narrative works such as: Lady of the South Wind (1985), with which he won the Pío Baroja prize, El mecanógrafo (1989), La historia más triste (1991), awarded the Herralde prize, El Alpe-d'Huez (1994), The Others (1998) and Falta alma (2001), amongst others. He has also published a book of poetry (1980); the biography Indurain: A Tempered Passion (1997), and several books of short stories, including: Teoría de la identidad (1984) and Crítica de la razón impura (1991). In 2003 he won the Azorín prize for his latest novel, Dios se ha ido.
April 7, 1889
Gabriela Mistral (7 April 1889 – 10 January 1957) was the pseudonym of Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, a Chilean poet-diplomat, educator and feminist. She was the first Latin American (and, so far, the only Latin American woman) to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which she did in 1945 'for her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world'. Some central themes in her poems are nature, betrayal, love, a mother's love, sorrow and recovery, travel, and Latin American identity as formed from a mixture of Native American and European influences. Her portrait also appears on the 5,000 Chilean peso bank note. Ursula Le Guin has published five volumes of her own poetry, an English version of Lao Tzu's TAO TE CHING, and a volume of mutual translation with the Argentine poet Diana Bellessi, THE TWINS, THE DREAM/LAS GEMALAS, EL SUEÑO. Strongly drawn to Mistral's work as soon as she discovered it, Le Guin has been working on this translation for five years. V. B. Price, a UNM alumnus, is a journalist and the author of several books that are available from UNM Press. He is a distinguished poet and critic, and the recipient of the Erna Fergusson Award for Outstanding Achievement from the Alumni Association of the University of New Mexico. He lives in Albuquerque.
April 7, 1925
Edward Samuel Herman (April 7, 1925 – November 11, 2017) was an American economist, media scholar and social critic. Often associated with Noam Chomsky, Herman is best known for his media criticism, in particular his Propaganda model developed in conjunction with Chomsky. He held an appointment as Professor Emeritus of finance at the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania and a media analyst with a specialty in corporate and regulatory issues as well as political economy. He also taught at Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Ideologically Herman has been described as a "dedicated radical democrat", an ideology which opposes corporate control in favor of direct democracy while distancing itself from other radical movements.
April 7, 1847
Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847-1885) was a Danish novelist, poet, and scientist, in Denmark often just written as J. P. Jacobsen and pronounced as I. P. Jacobsen. He began the naturalist movement in Danish literature and was a part of the Modern Break-Through. The fine literary work of Jacobsen is small: two novels, seven short-stories, and one volume of posthumous poems, but it places him as one of the most influential Danish writers. In spite of his not very extensive work Jacobsen s international influence is rather strong. In Germany both his novels and poems were widely read and they are known to have influenced both Rilke and Thomas Mann just as it has probably made impression on Lawrence. His works include: Marie Grubbe (1876), Niels Lyhne (1880), and Mogens and Other Stories (1882).
April 7, 1941
James Naremore, born April 7, 1941, James Otis Naremore, is a film, English and Comparative Literature scholar based at Indiana University. Now retired, he retains the titles of Chancellors' Professor of Communication and Culture, English, and Comparative Literature at Indiana University Bloomington. Naremore has made numerous contributions to film studies in the areas of authorship, acting, adaptation, and genre. His published books include The World Without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel, Filmguide to Psycho, The Magic World of Orson Welles, Acting in the Cinema, The Films of Vincente Minnelli, More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts (which won the international moving-image book award from the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation), On Kubrick, and Sweet Smell of Success. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Gallery of Art, and his work has been translated into seven languages. He has recorded a commentary track with fellow film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum for the Criterion Collection release of Orson Welles's Mr. Arkadin (1955), Chimes at Midnight (1965), and for the Universal 50th anniversary DVD of Touch of Evil (1958). He has also done the commentary for the Criterion Edition of Sweet Smell of Success. He is the editor of the Contemporary Film Directors series of books at University of Illinois Press and a writer at large for Film Quarterly.
April 7, 1961
ILAN STAVANS is the author of The Hispanic Condition: Reflections on Culture and Society in America and the coeditor of Growing Up Latino: Memoirs and Stories and other works. Born in Mexico in 1961, he holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and now teaches at Amherst College. Stavans has contributed articles and reviews to The Nation, the Washington Post, TriQuarterly, the Boston Globe, Transition, the Miami Herald, Commonweal, Newsday, and Bloomsbury Review, among others. He received the 1992 Latino Literature Prize and in 1994 was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Reviewing.
April 7, 1770
William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798). Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semi-autobiographical poem of his early years that he revised and expanded a number of times.
April 7, 1927
Babatunde Olatunji (April 7, 1927 – April 6, 2003) was a Nigerian drummer, educator, social activist and recording artist.
April 8, 1935
Oscar Zeta Acosta (April 8, 1935 – disappeared 1974) was an American attorney, politician, novelist and Chicano Movement activist, perhaps best known for his friendship with the American author Hunter S. Thompson, who characterized him as his Samoan Attorney, Dr. Gonzo, in his acclaimed novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
April 8, 1920
Thomas Burton Bottomore (8 April 1920, England – 9 December 1992, Sussex, England), usually known as Tom Bottomore and published as T.B. Bottomore, was a British Marxist sociologist. Bottomore was Secretary of the International Sociological Association from 1953 to 1959. He was a prolific editor and translator of Marxist works, notably his collections published in 1963: Marx's Early Writings and Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy. He was Reader in Sociology at the London School of Economics from 1952 to 1964. He was head of the Department of Political Science, Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver from 1965 to 1967, leaving after a dispute over academic freedom. He was Professor of Sociology at the University of Sussex from 1968 to 1985. Bottomore edited and contributed to numerous journals of sociology and political science, and edited A Dictionary of Marxist Thought in 1983 and co-edited (with William Outhwaite) The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth century Social Thought published posthumously in 1993. Bottomore was a member of the British Labour Party.
April 8, 1911
Emil Cioran (8 April 1911 – 20 June 1995) was a Romanian philosopher and essayist, who published works in both Romanian and French. His work has been noted for its pervasive philosophical pessimism, and frequently engages with issues of suffering, decay, and nihilism. Among his best-known works are On the Heights of Despair (1934) and The Trouble with Being Born (1973). Cioran's first French book, A Short History of Decay, was awarded the prestigious Rivarol Prize in 1950. The Latin Quarter of Paris was his permanent residence and he lived much of his life in isolation with his partner Simone Boué.
April 8, 1924
Humberto ‘Cacho’ Costantini (April 8, 1924 – June 7, 1987) was an Argentine writer and poet whose work is filled with the rich slang (porteño) of Buenos Aires. Except for his years of exile in Mexico, his life was lived in and around Buenos Aires.
April 8, 1909
John Fante began writing in 1929 and published his first short story in 1932. His first novel, WAIT UNTIL SPRING, BANDINI, was published in 1938 and was the first of his Arturo Bandini series of novels, which also include THE ROAD TO LOS ANGELES and ASK THE DUST. A prolific screenwriter, he was stricken with diabetes in 1955. Complications from the disease brought about his blindness in 1978 and, within two years, the amputation of both legs. He continued to write by dictation to his wife, Joyce, and published DREAMS FROM BUNKER HILL, the final installment of the Arturo Bandini series, in 1982. He died on May 8, 1983, at the age of seventy-four.
April 8, 1914
Robert Giroux (April 8, 1914 – September 5, 2008) was an American book editor and publisher. Starting his editing career with Harcourt, Brace & Co., he was hired away to work for Roger W. Straus, Jr. at Farrar & Straus in 1955, where he became a partner and, eventually, its chairman. The firm was henceforth known as Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where he was known by his nickname, "Bob". In his career stretching over five decades, he edited some of important voices in 20th century fiction including, T.S. Eliot, George Orwell and Virginia Woolf, and published the first books of Jack Kerouac, Flannery O'Connor, Jean Stafford, Bernard Malamud, William Gaddis, Susan Sontag, Larry Woiwode and Randall Jarrell and edited no fewer than seven Nobel laureates, Eliot, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Derek Walcott, Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, William Golding and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In a 1980 profile in the New York Times Book Review, poet Donald Hall wrote, "He is the only living editor whose name is bracketed with that of Maxwell Perkins," the editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.
April 8, 1940
Adil Jehangir Jussawalla (born 8 April 1940, Mumbai) is an Indian poet, magazine editor and translator. He was born to a Parsi family and completed his primary education at the Cathedral and John Connon School in 1956. He then attended the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London from 1957–58. Later, he studied at University College, Oxford, receiving his M.A. in 1964. He worked briefly as a substitute teacher for the Greater London Council, then became a language teacher at the EF International Language Centre; a post he held until 1969. He then returned to Mumbai, where he taught at several colleges, becoming a lecturer in English language and literature at St. Xavier's College in 1972. He was an Honorary Fellow of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 1976. After that, he focused on journalism, serving as the book review editor at The Indian Express from 1980–81 and literary editor for The Express Magazine from 1980–82. In 1987, he became the literary editor for Debonair, a magazine originally modeled after Playboy. In 1989, he was promoted to editor and served in that position for several years, after which he returned to his writing career. He has also translated several works by Gulam Mohammed Sheikh. Together with Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Arun Kolatkar and Gieve Patel, he helped create "Clearing House", a poet's publishing co-operative. In 2014, he was presented with the Sahitya Akademi Award for his book of poetry, Trying to Say Goodbye.
April 8, 1923
Catherine Mulholland (April 8, 1923, Los Angeles, CA - July 6, 2011, Camarillo, CA) is author of Calabasas Girls: An Intimate History (1976) and The Owensmouth Baby: The Making of a San Fernando Town (1987).
April 8, 1926
William Murray (April 8, 1926, New York City – March 9, 2005, NYC) was an American fiction editor and staff writer at The New Yorker for more than thirty years. He was the son of Natalia Danesi Murray, editor of Mondadori and Rizzoli, and William Murray, head of William Morris Agency in New York. He attended Harvard University, but left after a year. He served in the military. At one time he wanted to be an opera singer. He wrote a book about growing up with her mother and the latter partner, Janet Flanner, Janet, my mother, and me (2000). He wrote a series of mystery novels set in the world of horse racing, many featuring Shifty Lou Anderson, a professional magician and horseplayer. Among his many contributions to The New Yorker was the magazine's "Letters from Italy" of which he was the sole author. The majority of his later years were spent living in Del Mar, California, "exactly 3.2 miles from the finish line" of Del Mar Thoroughbred Club. Murray died in March 2005 at age 78. Just prior to his death, Murray had completed a book about Chicago’s Lyric Opera Center for American Artists.
April 8, 1905
Hans Scherfig (April 8, 1905 – January 28, 1979) was a renowned Danish author and artist. His most famous works of literature include Stolen Spring, Frydenholm, Idealists, and The Scorpion, the last of which was published in over 20 countries. He is also well known for his distinctive Naivist lithographs which depict jungle and savanna scenes that owe something to Henri Rousseau, and various drawings and paintings with satirical, political, and biblical subject matter. Central to Scherfigs work was his lifelong political engagement. Already in his early years he became a dedicated communist and remained so until his death in 1979. He was also a long-standing member of the Communist Party of Denmark. Because of this Scherfig was imprisoned by the Nazi German military occupation forces in Denmark during WWII. During the Cold War, Scherfig intensified his critical attitude against the United States. Scherfig lies in an unmarked grave in Assistens Cemetery (Copenhagen). His grave can be identified by the stone sculpture of a turtle which lies beside it
April 8, 1974
Nnedi Okorafor (full name: Nnedimma Nkemdili Okorafor; previously known as Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu; translated from Igbo into English as "mother is good"; born April 8, 1974) is a Nigerian-American writer of fantasy and science fiction for both children and adults. Nnedi Okorafor was born in the United States to two Nigerian immigrant parents. She holds a Ph.D. in English and is a professor at Chicago State University. She has been the winner of and finalist for many awards.
April 8, 1954
April Sinclair was born on April 8, 1954. Her debut novel, Coffee Will Make You Black, was named Book of the Year (Young Adult Fiction) for 1994 by the American Library Association and received the Carl Sandburg Award from the Friends of the Chicago Public Library. A Chicago native, she now lives in Berkeley, California.
April 8, 1930
Poet, editor, critic, and translator Miller Williams (April 8, 1930, Hoxie, AR - January 1, 2015, Fayetteville, AR) was born in Hoxie, Arkansas in 1930, the son of a Methodist clergyman and civil rights activist. Miller’s work is known for its gritty realism as much as for its musicality. Equally comfortable in formal and free verse, Williams wrote poems grounded in the material of American life, frequently using dialogue and dramatic monologue to capture the pitch and tone of American voices. In 1997 Williams was honored as the country’s third inaugural poet, reading his poem Of History and Hope at the start of former President Bill Clinton’s second term. He was the father of the singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams. As a child, Miller Williams exhibited more ability in science than in writing. Though he entered college as double major in English and foreign languages, an aptitude test revealed absolutely no aptitude in the handling of words, Miller has said in interviews. He changed his major to hard sciences to avoid embarrassing my parents. Williams earned a BS in biology from Arkansas State University and an MS in zoology from the University of Arkansas. He taught science at the college-level for many years before securing a job in the English department at LSU, partly with the help of his friend Flannery O’Connor. In an interview, Miller told the story: We became dear friends and in 1961, LSU advertised for a poet to teach in their writing program. Though I had only had three hours of freshman English formally, she saw the ad and, without mentioning it to me, wrote them and said the person you want teaches biology at Wesleyan College. They couldn’t believe that, of course, but they couldn’t ignore Flannery O’Connor. So they sent me word that said, ‘Would you send us some of your work?’ And I did. Williams’s appointment began a long career in academia: as a professor at Loyola University, he founded the New Orleans Review; while at the University of Arkansas, where he taught until his retirement in 2003, he founded the University of Arkansas Press, serving as director for 20 years. He also founded the MFA in Translation at the University of Arkansas. Williams has written, translated, or edited over 30 books, including a dozen poetry collections, such as Halfway from Hoxie: New and Selected Poems (1973); Living on the Surface: New and Selected Poems (1989), which received the Poets’ Prize; Some Jazz a While: Collected Poems (1999); and Time and the Tilting Earth (2008). In a review of his collected poems, Some Jazz a While (1999), critic Lee Oser called Williams a poet of eloquent sanity and distinguished formal competence … a fine observer of the emotional and imaginative lives of his fellow citizens. In an interview with Elizabeth Farnsworth for PBS, Williams noted, I like to think that the best poetry is or involves a contest between ordinary conversation and ritual. There is something about the best poem that wants to set it in a pattern like a Gregorian chant. And there is something about the best poetry that makes it want to seem like a cocktail party conversation. It’s partly in the tension between these two tendencies that a poem gets its energy and its life. Williams is also the author of Making a Poem: Some Thoughts about Poetry and the People Who Write It (2006). He edited Contemporary Poetry in America (1973) and Patterns of Poetry: An Encyclopedia of Forms (1986), and coedited How Does a Poem Mean? (1975) with with John Ciardi and later selected and arranged the poems in Ciardi’s Stations of the Air: Thirty-Three Poems (1993). Williams also translated poetry by Nicanor Parra, Giuseppe Belli, and Pablo Neruda. His many honors include the Henry Bellman Award, the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship, a Fulbright professorship at the National University of Mexico, the Prix de Rome for Literature, the Charity Randall Citation for Contribution to Poetry as a Spoken Art, the John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence, and the National Arts Award. His daughter is the singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, and Williams himself has been compared to another great country musician. According to Williams: One of the best things that has ever been said about my work was said by a critic who wrote that ‘Miller Williams is the Hank Williams of American poetry. While his poetry is taught at Princeton and Harvard, it’s read and understood by squirrel hunters and taxi drivers.’ Williams died on January 1st, 2015, the same day Hank Williams had died on in 1953. A selection of his papers is archived in the Special Collections at the University of Arkansas library.
April 9, 1821
Charles Pierre Baudelaire (April 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867) was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the 19th century. Baudelaire's highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé among many others. He is credited with coining the term ‘modernity’ (modernité) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience.
April 9, 1917
Johannes Bobrowski was born in 1917 in Tilsit in East Prussia, and educated in Rastenburg, Konigsberg and at Humboldt University in Berlin. His first book of poetry was published in 1961 and quickly established his international reputation. He wrote four volumes of poetry, two novels, and several collections of short stories. A selection of these stories, DARKNESS AND A LITTLE LIGHT, was also published by New Directions. Bobrowski died in East Berlin in 1965.
April 9, 1962
Jodi Dean (born April 9, 1962) is an American political philosopher and professor in the Political Science department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York state. She has also held the position of Erasmus Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam.Dean received her B.A. in History from Princeton University in 1984. She received her MA, MPhil, and PhD from Columbia University in 1992. Before joining the Department of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, she taught at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She has held visiting research appointments at the Institute for the Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria, as well as McGill University in Montreal and Cardiff University in Wales. Drawing from Marxism, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and postmodernism, she has made contributions to contemporary political theory, media theory, and feminist theory, most notably with her theory of communicative capitalism; the online merging of democracy and capitalism into a single neoliberal formation that subverts the democratic impulses of the masses by valuing emotional expression over logical discourse. She has spoken and lectured in the United States, Canada, Ecuador, Peru, England, Wales, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Austria, Norway, Denmark, Croatia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Turkey. She is the co-editor of the journal Theory & Event.
April 9, 1933
Nathan Hare (born April 9, 1933) is an American sociologist, activist, academic, and psychologist. In 1968 he was the first person hired to coordinate a black studies program at the university level in the United States, which he set up at San Francisco State University. A graduate of Langston University and the University of Chicago, he had become involved in the Black Power movement while teaching at Howard University. After being fired as chair of the Black Studies program at San Francisco State, in November 1969 Hare and Robert Chrisman co-founded the journal, The Negro Scholar (now The Black Scholar: A Journal of Black Studies and Research). They worked together for several years. After earning his second Ph.D., in clinical psychology, Hare set up a private practice in Oakland and San Francisco. Together with his wife, Dr. Julia Ware, he founded the Black Think Tank and for several years published a periodical, Black Male/Female Relationships. He and his wife have written and published several books together on black families and history.
April 9, 1954
Ken Kalfus (born April 9, 1954 in New York City) is an American author and journalist. Three of his books have been named New York Times Notable Books of the Year. He was born in the Bronx, and grew up in Plainview, Long Island. Kalfus started college at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, but dropped out after the first year. Kalfus began his career by publishing short stories and now writes novels.
April 9, 1957
Mukul Kesavan is an Indian historian, novelist and political and social essayist. He was schooled at St. Xaviers' in Delhi and then went on to study History at St. Stephen's College, and at the University.
April 9, 1923
Leonard Williams Levy (April 9, 1923 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada – August 24, 2006 in Ashland, Oregon) was an American historian, the Andrew W. Mellon All-Claremont Professor of Humanities and Chairman of the Graduate Faculty of History at Claremont Graduate School, California, who specialized in the history of basic American Constitutional freedoms. He was born in Toronto, Ontario, and educated at Columbia University, where his mentor for the Ph.D. degree was Henry Steele Commager. Levy's first book was a revision and expansion of his doctoral dissertation on Lemuel Shaw, chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The Law of the Commonwealth and Chief Justice Shaw was first published by Harvard University Press in 1957, and has regularly been reprinted. Levy's most honored book was his 1968 study Origins of the Fifth Amendment, focusing on the history of the privilege against self-incrimination. This book was awarded the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for History. He wrote almost forty other books, such as The Establishment Clause, Treason Against God: A History of the Offense of Blasphemy, Blasphemy: Verbal Offenses Against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie, and Religion and the First Amendment. He also was editor-in-chief of the four-volume Encyclopaedia of The American Constitution. In his 1999 Origins of the Bill of Rights he described the political background and intent of most of the amendments in the Bill of Rights. Levy's most controversial work focused on the early history of freedom of the press in colonial and revolutionary America. In 1960 he published Legacy of Suppression: Freedom of Speech and Press in Early American History, in which he argued that the law governing freedom of the press, and thus the original intention of the First Amendment's free-press clauses, was narrower than the generally libertarian views held by James Madison, and, in particular, that the law of freedom of the press included the old English common law crime of seditious libel. Levy's work challenged the prevailing views codified in the work of Zechariah Chafee, who had long taught at the Harvard Law School. As a pendant to his 1960 monograph, he published Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side in 1963; this book offered a vigorous critique of Thomas Jefferson for holding narrower views of freedom of speech and press than has long been believed. Jefferson and Civil Liberties began the modern reconsideration of Jefferson's historical reputation. In the 1973 paperback edition, Levy added an extensive preface discussing and responding to the criticism that the book received for being critical of Jefferson. In 1985 after nearly two decades of research, Levy published Emergence of a Free Press, a thorough and wide-ranging revision of Legacy of Suppression. While maintaining that his earlier views of the state of the law were correct, Levy acknowledged the criticisms posed by historians of journalism, who stressed the difference between "law on the books" and "law as applied". Thus, Levy conceded that in actuality freedom of the press may well have been wider and more generous than his earlier book had posited. In 1990 Levy was appointed a Distinguished Scholar in Residence; Adjunct Professor of History and Political Science at Southern Oregon State College in Ashland, Oregon. He died August 24, 2006.
April 9, 1952
devorah major is a poet and a fiction and essay writer. Her work has been published in several anthologies and magazines, including THE SINGLE MOTHER’S COMPANION (Seal Press. 1994), I HEAR A SYMPHONY, CALIFORNIA CHILDHOODS, RIVER STYX, BLACK SCHOLAR, CALALLOO, CAPRICE AND ZYZZYVA. She received a Pushcart recognition for her short story, A Crowded Table, and is a California Arts Council Writing Fellow. Her book of poetry, street smarts, was published by Curbstone Press in 1996. She has finished a collection of love poems, LOVE MAKES ME DO FOOLISH THINGS, and is at work on a novel, BROWN GLASS WINDOWS. She lives in San Francisco where she is a poetry teacher, performer and an editor. AN OPEN WEAVE is her first novel.
April 9, 1929
Paule Marshall (born April 9, 1929) is an American author. She was born Valenza Pauline Burke in Brooklyn to Barbadian parents and educated at Girls High School, Brooklyn College (1953) and Hunter College (1955). Early in her career, she wrote poetry, but later returned to prose. She was chosen by Langston Hughes to accompany him on a world tour in which they both read their work, which was a boon to her career.Marshall has taught at Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of California, Berkeley, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and Yale University before holding the Helen Gould Sheppard Chair of Literature and Culture at New York University. In 1993 she received an honorary L.H.D. from Bates College. She lives in Richmond, VA. She is a MacArthur Fellow and is a past winner of the Dos Passos Prize for Literature. She was designated as a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library in 1994. Marshall was inducted into the Celebrity Path at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in 2001.
April 10, 1940
Clark Blaise (born 10 April 1940) is a Canadian author. Born in Fargo, North Dakota, he currently lives in San Francisco, California. He has been married since 1963 to writer Bharati Mukherjee. They have two sons. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, Blaise was also the director of the International Writing Program. While living in Montreal in the early 1970s he joined with authors Raymond Fraser, Hugh Hood, John Metcalf and Ray Smith to form the celebrated Montreal Story Tellers Fiction Performance Group. In 2009, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada ‘for his contributions to Canadian letters as an author, essayist, teacher, and founder of the post-graduate program in creative writing at Concordia University.’.
April 10, 1941
Paul Edward Theroux (born April 10, 1941) is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work of travel writing is perhaps The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). He has published numerous works of fiction, some of which were made into feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast.
April 10, 1938
Barbara D'Amato (born April 10, 1938 in Grand Rapids, Michigan) is an American mystery author and winner of the Agatha and Anthony Award. She also features in Great Women Mystery Writers (2007).
April 10, 1955
Joseph Diescho (born 10 April 1955) is a Namibian writer and political analyst. In 1988, he wrote Born of the Sun, the first novel by a native-born Namibian author. Born in Andara, Kavango Region, Diescho attended Fort Hare University in South Africa where he studied law and political science. During his student days he worked against the apartheid system and was imprisoned in Peddie and East London. Whilst working for a diamond mine company he helped found a worker's union. In 1984, he became a Fulbright scholar at Columbia University in New York City, where he completed his PhD in Political Science in 1992. His dissertation, entitled, "The Role of Education in the Politics of Control in Namibia: 1948–1988," explored the relationship between politics and education in Namibia. He was an award winning television announcer for the programme South Africa Now on American public television. In 1997-8, he was the founder and presenter of The Big Picture, a weekly economic and political analysis programme on SABC 2. His novel Born of the Sun was published in the US in 1988 and his second novel Troubled Waters was published in 1993. He is one of Namibia's very few native born novelists. Diescho was the Executive Director of the Namibian Institute of Public Administration and Management (NIPAM) from 1 July 2013 until December 2015 when he was dismissed.
April 10, 1778
William Hazlitt (10 April 1778 – 18 September 1830) was an English writer, remembered for his humanistic essays and literary criticism, as the greatest art critic of his age, and as a drama critic, social commentator, and philosopher. He was also a painter. He is now considered one of the great critics and essayists of the English language, placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell. Yet his work is currently little read and mostly out of print. During his lifetime he befriended many people who are now part of the 19th-century literary canon, including Charles and Mary Lamb, Stendhal, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and John Keats
April 10, 1951
David Helvarg is an American journalist and environmental activist. He is the founder and president of the marine conservation lobbying organization Blue Frontier Campaign, a part of the Seaweed rebellion, which arose from his second book Blue Frontier.
April 10, 1880
Frances Perkins (born Fannie Coralie Perkins; April 10, 1880 – May 14, 1965) was the U.S. Secretary of Labor from 1933 to 1945, the longest serving in that position, and the first woman appointed to the U.S. Cabinet. As a loyal supporter of her friend, Franklin D. Roosevelt, she helped pull the labor movement into the New Deal coalition. She and Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes were the only original members of the Roosevelt cabinet to remain in office for his entire presidency. With the Social Security Act she established unemployment benefits, pensions for the many uncovered elderly Americans, and welfare for the poorest Americans. She pushed to reduce workplace accidents and helped craft laws against child labor. Through the Fair Labor Standards Act, she established the first minimum wage and overtime laws for American workers, and defined the standard forty-hour work week. She formed governmental policy for working with labor unions and helped to alleviate strikes by way of the United States Conciliation Service, Perkins resisted having American women be drafted to serve the military in World War II so that they could enter the civilian workforce in greatly expanded numbers.
April 10, 1901
Anna Kavan (10 April 1901-5 December 1968; born Helen Emily Woods) was a British novelist, short story writer and painter. Kavan was addicted to heroin for most of her adult life, a dependency which was generally undetected by her associates, and for which she made no apologies. She is popularly supposed to have died of a heroin overdose. In fact she died of heart failure, though she had attempted suicide several times during her life. An inveterate traveler, Kavan spent twenty-two months of World War II in New Zealand, and it was that country's proximity to the inhospitable frozen landscape of Antarctica that inspired the writing of ICE. This post-apocalyptic novel brought critical acclaim, earning Kavan the Brian Aldiss Science Fiction Book of the Year award in 1967, the year before Kavan's death. She died at her home in Kensington on 5 December 1968.
April 10, 1897
Richard Hallas is the pseudonym for Eric Knight. Knight was born April 10, 1897 in Yorkshire, England. As the creator of Lassie Come Home, he uses these lush countryside was the setting he chose for Lassie's adventures. Knight grew up in the mill towns where stories of ""come-home"" dogs were common. He was raised by an aunt and uncle and worked and went to school as a youngster part time. Immigrating to the US in 1912, he settled in Philadelphia. He studied music and art and attended the Cambridge Latin School in Massachusettes. In 1943, while serving as a major in the film unit of the U.S. Army Special Services section, he was killed in the crash of a military transport plane in the jungle of Surinam. You Play the Black and Red Comes Up (1938) was his only crime novel. He is also the author of Lassie Come Home, The Flying Yorkshireman, and the bestselling novel about the London blitz, This Above All (1941).
April 10, 1939
Claudio Magris (born April 10, 1939) is an Italian scholar, translator and writer. Magris graduated from the University of Turin, where he studied German studies, and has been a professor of modern German literature at the University of Trieste since 1978. He is an essayist and columnist for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera and for other European journals and newspapers. His numerous studies have helped to promote an awareness in Italy of Central European culture and of the literature of the Habsburg myth. Magris is a member of several European academies and served as senator in the Italian Senate from 1994 to 1996. His first book on the Habsburg myth in modern Austrian literature rediscovered central European literature. His journalistic writings have been collected in Dietro le parole ('Behind Words', 1978) and Itaca e oltre ('Ithaca and Beyond', 1982). He has written essays on E.T.A. Hoffmann, Henrik Ibsen, Italo Svevo, Robert Musil, Hermann Hesse and Jorge Luis Borges. His novels and theatre productions, many translated into several languages, include Illazioni su una sciabola (1984), Danubio (1986), Stadelmann (1988), Un altro mare (1991), and Microcosmi (1997). His breakthrough was Danubio (1986), which is a magnum opus. In this book (said by the author to be a 'drowned novel'), Magris tracks the course of the Danube from its sources to the sea. The whole trip evolves into a colorful, rich canvas of the multicultural European history.
April 10, 1880
Augustus Montague Summers (10 April 1880 – 10 August 1948) was an English author and clergyman. He is known primarily for his scholarly work on the English drama of the 17th century, as well as for his idiosyncratic studies on witches, vampires, and werewolves, in all of which he professed to believe. He was responsible for the first English translation, published in 1928, of the notorious 15th-century witch hunter's manual, the Malleus Maleficarum.
April 10, 1827
Lewis "Lew" Wallace (April 10, 1827 – February 15, 1905) was an American lawyer, Union general in the American Civil War, governor of the New Mexico Territory, politician, diplomat, and author from Indiana. Among his novels and biographies, Wallace is best known for his historical adventure story, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880).
April 10, 1960
Alastair Fothergill (born 10 April 1960) is a British producer of nature documentaries for television and cinema. He is the series producer of the series The Blue Planet (2001), Planet Earth (2006) and the co-director of the associated feature films Deep Blue and Earth.
April 10, 1822
George Lippard (April 10, 1822, West Nantmeal Township, PA - February 9, 1854, Philadelphia, PA) was a 19th-century American novelist, journalist, playwright, social activist, and labor organizer. Nearly forgotten today, he was one of the most widely read authors in antebellum America. Matt Cohen is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and author of The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England. Edlie L. Wong is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland and author of Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel.
April 11, 1949
Dorothy Allison (born April 11, 1949) is an American writer. Her writing includes themes of class struggle, sexual abuse, child abuse, feminism and lesbianism. She is a self-identified lesbian femme. She has won a number of awards for her writing, including several Lambda Literary Awards.
April 11, 1942
Raymond Bonner is the author of numerous books, an investigative reporter who also been a staff writer at the New York Times, and The New Yorker and contributed to The New York Review of Books. His latest book, Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong, was published by Knopf in February 2012. Bonner graduated from MacMurray College in Illinois, in 1964, where he majored in Political Science. He lettered in soccer, track and cross country. He earned a J.D. degree from Stanford University Law School in 1967. In 1968 he joined the U.S. Marine Corps, and was honorably discharged with the rank of captain in 1971. Before taking up journalism, Bonner worked as a staff attorney with Ralph Nader's Public Citizen Litigation Group, as the director of the West Coast office of Consumers Union, and as director of the consumer fraud/white collar crime unit of the San Francisco District Attorney's office. Bonner is best known as one of two journalists (the other being Alma Guillermoprieto of The Washington Post) who broke the story of the El Mozote massacre, in which some 900 villagers at El Mozote, El Salvador, were slaughtered by units of the Salvadoran army in December 1981. A New York Times staff reporter at the time, Bonner was smuggled by FMLN rebels to visit the site approximately a month after the massacre took place. When the story broke simultaneously in the Post and Times on January 27, 1982, it was dismissed as an exaggeration by the Reagan administration and its allies at the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, as it seriously undermined efforts by the US government to bolster the human rights image of the Salvadoran government, which the US was supporting with large amounts of military aid. The resulting controversy, escalated by the Journal, helped cause his removal from El Salvador, and he was assigned to a financial desk and eventually resigned. A forensic investigation of the massacre site years later confirmed the accuracy of his stories. Starting years later, Bonner has since written on contract for the New York Times, covering the Rwanda genocide, Bosnian War, and the two terrorist bombings in Bali. He was also a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1988 to 1992, writing from Peru, Sudan, Indonesia, Kuwait, and Kurdistan. From 1988 to 2007, Bonner lived in Nairobi and then Warsaw, Vienna, and Jakarta. Since 2007, he has written book reviews, principally about international security, for The New York Times, The Economist, The Australian, The National Interest and The Guardian. In 2008 it emerged in an article in the Washington Post that Bonner had been one of the four journalists whose telephone call records had been illegally obtained by the FBI between 2002 and 2006. During that time Bonner had been based in Jakarta, Indonesia, filing reports on detainee abuse and illegal surveillance. Prior to his career in journalism, Bonner had been an attorney and worked with the Public Citizen Litigation Group, the Consumers Union (establishing its West Coast Advocacy office), and the San Francisco District Attorney's office (as head of their white collar crime division). He taught at the University of California, Davis School of Law. Bonner is the co-founder of OneJustice (formerly Public Interest Clearinghouse), an organization that expands the availability of legal services for Californians in need through innovative partnerships with nonprofits, law schools, and the private sector. Bonner currently lives in New York. He is married to Jane Perlez, who is also a New York Times journalist.
April 11, 1900
Sándor Márai was born in Kassa, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1900, and died in San Diego, California, in 1989. He rose to fame as one of the leading literary novelists in Hungary in the 1930s. Profoundly antifascist, he survived the war, but persecution by the Communists drove him from the country in 1948, first to Italy, then to the United States.
April 11, 1940
Thomas Harris (born April 11, 1940) is an American author and screenwriter, best known for a series of suspense novels about his most famous character, Hannibal Lecter. All of his works have been made into films, the most notable being the multi-Oscar winning The Silence of the Lambs, which became only the third film in Academy Award history to sweep the Oscars in major categories.
April 11, 1940
Robin Malan has worked in English teaching and theatre in education all his life (his poetry anthologies Inscapes, New Inscapes and Worldscapes are among his many compilations for school use). He has taught in the Department of Drama at Stellenbosch University and tutored in the English Department at the University of Cape Town. He does volunteer work for Triangle Project, the organisation caring for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community. In 2001 he was awarded the Molteno Medal for lifetime service to literature by the Cape Tercentenary Foundation, on the Council of which he now sits.
April 11, 1953
Byron Preiss (April 11, 1953 – July 9, 2005) was an American writer, editor, and publisher. He founded and served as president of Byron Preiss Visual Publications, and later of ibooks Inc.
April 11, 1926
George (Ji?í) Theiner (1926-88) was born in Czechoslovakia and came to London at the age of 11 to escape the Nazis. In 1945 he returned to Czechoslovakia, but his refusal to join the Communist party led to him being forced to work in the Silesian coalmines as part of a forced labour unit. After the Soviet invasion in 1968 he returned to England with his family and devoted his life to translating and promoting Czech literature. He worked as assistant editor of Index on Censorship and translated many great Czech writers, including Miroslav Holub and Václav Havel.
April 11, 1936
Loren Partridge (April 11, 1936) is Professor Emeritus of Art History and Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His many books include Art of Renaissance Florence, 1400–1600; Michelangelo, The Last Judgment: A Glorious Restoration; The Art of Renaissance Rome, 1400–1600; and Michelangelo: The Sistine Chapel Ceiling. He has been honored by Fulbright, Kress, Guggenheim, and Getty fellowships; grants from the American Academy in Rome and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; and chairmanship of the departments of both History of Art and Art Practice at the University of California at Berkeley.
April 11, 1935
Robert I. Rotberg is Associate Professor of Political Science and History at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the editor, with Ali A. Mazrui, of Protest and Power in Black Africa, and the author of A Political History of Tropical Africa and The Rise of Nationalism in Central Africa. He also edits the Journal of Inter- disciplinary History.
April 12, 1894
Rutherford George Montgomery (April 12, 1894 – July 3, 1985) was an American writer of children's books. In addition to his given name, he used the pseudonyms A.A. Avery, Al Avery, Art Elder, E.P. Marshall, and Everitt Proctor. Montgomery was born in Straubville, Sargent County, North Dakota, "a true ghost town" as of 2005. to George Y. and Matilda Proctor Montgomery. He studied at Colorado Agricultural College, Western State College of Colorado, and University of Nebraska; taught elementary school in Hot Springs, Wyoming; and from 1917 to 1919 served in the United States Air Corps. During the 1920's, he worked as a teacher and principal at junior and senior high schools in Montrose County, Colorado. Montgomery married Eunice Opal Kirks in 1930; they had three children. He served Gunnison County, Colorado, as a judge from 1931 to 1936 and as county commissioner from 1932 to 1938, then became a freelance writer. While still at school, Montgomery began writing stories about the wild animals that lived around his family's farm. He went on to write books about aviation and the people, landscapes and animals of the American West, particularly horses. In all, he wrote more than 100 books. From 1941 to 1946, Montgomery was a writer for Dick Tracy. He worked as a creative writing teacher 1955–57 and as a scriptwriter for Walt Disney Studios 1958–1962.
April 12, 1915
Ernst Wilhelm Julius Bornemann (April 12, 1915 – June 4, 1995) was a German crime writer, filmmaker, anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, psychoanalyst, sexologist, communist agitator, jazz musician and critic. All these diverse interests, he claimed, had a common root in his lifelong insatiable curiosity. During the final decades of his life Bornemann lived in Scharten, Upper Austria, where he committed suicide at the age of 80 after the collapse of a love affair with a colleague 61 years his junior.
April 12, 1941
Toi Derricotte is an award-winning poet whose writings, though frequently autobiographical, treat universal subjects such as racism and identity in ways that are moving, painful, and illuminating. Her style is credited with an evocative simplicity reminiscent of Emily Dickinson, though it also contains the kind of expansive colloquial expression attributed to Walt Whitman. Derricotte is also known for treating sexual topics with candor, and for exploring the shadows that surround difficult and painful realities. Her poems begin in ordinary experiences but she dissects the routine definitions supplied by society as a way towards making discoveries about what unsuspected resources the self actually contains, wrote Jon Woodson in Contemporary Women Poets. Derricotte was born in Hamtramck, Michigan in 1941. As a child, she spent time at her grandparents’ funeral home in Detroit, an experience that shaped much of her early work. As she told Contemporary Authors: My fears of death were prominent in my early poems. In my first book, The Empress of the Death House (1978), that theme persists and is embodied in ‘The Grandmother Poems,' a group of poems about my early experiences at my grandparents' funeral home in Detroit. Derricotte’s family life was marked by death, abuse, pain and racism—coupled with her Roman Catholic schooling and light skin, Derricotte often felt alienated and guilty. In her interview, Derricotte confided that: As a black woman, I have been consistently confused about my 'sins,' unsure of which faults were in me and which faults were the results of others' projections. She added that, truthtelling in my art is also a way to separate my 'self' from what I have been taught to believe about my 'self,' the degrading stereotypes about black women. A reviewer in Publishers Weekly characterized Derricotte as a writer who blends personal history, invention and reportage in works that begin with a focus on the experiences of black women, and ultimately discuss various themes concerning identity. Derricotte's first books, including The Empress of the Death House and Natural Birth (1983), focus on gender, fertility, and race. Derricotte's third collection, Captivity (1990), considers the vestiges of slavery in the lives of contemporary African Americans, including the prevalence of violence in the family, and the continued abuses of racism within the society. Derricotte's fourth book of poetry, Tender (1997), won the 1998 Paterson Poetry Prize. The volume’s title poem is short and stark, associating the word itself with both meat and a certain quality of family life. In a preface to the volume, Derricotte notes that the seven sections of Tender emanate like the spokes of a wheel from the hub of this poem. Ellen Kaufman, reviewing the collection for Library Journal, highlighted Derricotte's dedication to the use of plain language that does not settle for simplicity or cliche, adding that despite its raw and upsetting subject matter Tender is extremely readable. Monica Dyer Rowe, writing in American Visions, similarly focused on the intimacy of Derricotte's poetic voice: Reading Tender is like coming across another's journal and, despite feeling somewhat guilty . . . , being too mesmerized to put the book down. In fact, Derricotte's prose publication, The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey (1997), is comprised of selections from journals kept over the course of twenty years. At the focal point of these journals is the author's identity as a light-skinned black woman who is often mistaken for white, an issue Derricotte uses throughout her poetic oeuvre as a jumping off point for an inquiry into identity. Here, the author gathers moments from both her personal and her professional lives that have caused her to examine her blackness and its impact on her understanding of herself and the world, comments Lillian Lewis in Booklist. Derricotte's occasional choice to pass for white, as when she was attempting to buy a house in a predominantly white suburban neighborhood in New York, has engendered episodes of profound discomfort with herself, resulting in a type of spiritual malaise. The book won the 1998 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Derricotte also had an essay, Beginning Dialogues, published in Best American Essays 2006. Another collection of poetry, The Undertaker’s Daughter, was published in 2011. Toi Derricotte received her B.A. from Wayne State University and an M.A. in English Literature from New York University. She has received the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Distinguished Pioneering of the Arts Award from the United Black Artists two Pushcart Prizes, , and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Guggenheim, and the Maryland State Arts Council. In 1996, with poet Cornelius Eady, she founded Cave Canem, a writing workshop for African- American poets. In 2012, she was elected chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. The poet Marilyn Hacker has said that Toi Derricotte’s poems are honest, fine-honed, deceptively simple. . . deadly accurate, 'more merciless to herself than history’ [and] as unique as her point of view. And it is the specificity, the fine observation of that viewpoint...which makes it at once accessible and revelatory to readers, whatever their origins, whatever their preconceptions of the possibilities of poetry."
April 12, 1936
Chester Hartman is President and Executive Director of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council in Washington, D.C. He is author of Between Eminence and Notoriety: Four Decades of Radical Urban Planning (2001), and editor of Challenges to Equality: Poverty and Race in America (2001) and Housing Issues of the 1990s (1989).
April 12, 1954
Jon Krakauer is an American writer and mountaineer, primarily known for his writings about the outdoors, especially mountain climbing.
April 12, 1947
Ana María Moix (12 April 1947 - 28 February 2014) was a Spanish poet, novelist, short story writer, translator and editor. A member of the Novísimos, she was the younger sister of the writer, Terenci Moix. Moix was born in Barcelona and studied Philosophy at the University of Barcelona. Active in contemporary Spanish poetry, she gained notability by being the only woman included in 1968 by José María Castellet in the Novísimos. From 1969 to 1973, she published three books of poetry. Later, she stopped publishing fiction for more than ten years, except for the children's book Los robots. Her second book of short stories won the 1985 City of Barcelona Award, after which she published another novel and two collections of short stories
April 12, 1915
Emil Petaja (12 April 1915 – 17 August 2000) was an American science fiction and fantasy writer whose career spanned seven decades. He was the author of 13 published novels, nearly 150 short stories, numerous poems, and a handful of books and articles on various subjects. Though he wrote science fiction, fantasy, horror stories, detective fiction, and poetry, Petaja considered his work part of an older tradition of 'weird fiction.' Petaja was also a small press publisher. In 1995, he was named the first ever Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Of Finnish descent, Petaja's best known works are a series of science fiction novels based on the Kalevala, the Finnish verse epic. Petaja's series brought him readers from around the world, while his particular mythological approach to science fiction has been discussed in scholarly publications and included in related anthologies. In a statement published in Contemporary Authors (Gale Research, 1984), Petaja commented, 'My writing endeavors have mainly been to entertain, except for the factual material concerning Hannes Bok and fantasy art in general, which serves to indicate my enthusiasm for these subjects. My novels about the Finnish legendary epic Kalevala: The Land of Heroes spring from a lifelong interest in this fine poetic work. I own six translations of the Kalevala, as well as the work in the original. Both of my parents were Finnish.'
April 12, 1939
Ronald Toshiyuki Takaki (April 12, 1939 – May 26, 2009) was an American academic, historian, ethnographer and author. Born in Oahu, Hawaii, his work addresses stereotypes of Asian Americans, such as the model minority concept.
April 12, 1976
Urayoán Noel (born April 12, 1976) is the author of In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam and several books of poetry in English and Spanish, the most recent of which is EnUncIAdOr. He has been a fellow of CantoMundo and the Ford Foundation, and he is currently the poetry editor of NACLA Report on the Americas. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Noel lives in the Bronx and is an assistant professor of English and Spanish at New York University.
April 12, 1936
Considered by many to be the ‘father of Haitian letters,’ Frankétienne is a prolific poet, novelist, visual artist, playwright, musician, and ‘spiraliste.’ He writes in both French and Haitian Creole and often juggles the two. His paintings have been exhibited internationally. An outspoken challenger of political oppression, Frankétienne was a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009 and, in 2010, was named a Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Frankétienne (born Franck Étienne on April 12, 1936 in Ravine-Sèche, Haiti) is a writer, poet, playwright, painter, musician, activist and intellectual, is recognized as one of Haiti's leading writers and playwrights of both French and Haitian Creole. He has been recently called The father of Haitian letters by The New York Times (April 29, 2011). As a painter, he is known for his colorful abstract works, often emphasizing the colors blue and red. He was a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009, and was made a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et Lettres (Order of the Arts and Letters) and was named UNESCO Artist for Peace in 2010. Frankétienne was born in Ravine-Sèche, a small village in Haiti. He was abandoned by his father, a very rich American industrialist, at a young age and was raised by his mother in the Bel Air neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, where she worked as a street merchant to support her eight children, managing to send him, who was the eldest, to school.
April 12, 1539
Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (12 April 1539 – 23 April 1616), born Gómez Suárez de Figueroa and known as El Inca, was a chronicler and writer born in the Viceroyalty of Peru. He is considered the earliest known mestizo person in the history of America. Sailing to Spain at 21, he was educated informally there, where he lived and worked the rest of his life. The natural son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca noblewoman born in the early years of the conquest, he is known primarily for his chronicles of Inca history, culture, and society. His work was widely read in Europe, influential and well received. It was the first literature by an author born in the Americas to enter the western canon. After his father's death in 1559, Vega moved to Spain in 1561, seeking official acknowledgement as his father's son. His paternal uncle became a protector, and he lived in Spain for the rest of his life, where he wrote his histories of the Inca culture and Spanish conquest, as well as an account of De Soto's expedition in Florida.
April 13, 1949
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and. is a columnist for The Nation, Washington editor for Harper’s, and a book reviewer for Newsday. Christopher Hitchens joined Vanity Fair as a contributing editor in November 1992 and wrote regularly for the magazine until 2011. In May 2011, he won the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary for a series of columns on his having cancer. In recent years, Hitchens was a contributing editor to The Atlantic, where he wrote a monthly essay on books, and a regular columnist at Slate. From 1982 to 2002, he wrote a biweekly column for The Nation. Throughout his singular career Christopher Hitchens wrote for The New Statesman, the London Evening Standard, London’s Daily Express, Harper’s, The Spectator, and The Times Literary Supplement, among others. His books include THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER (VERSO, 2001), LETTERS TO A YOUNG CONTRARIAN (BASIC, 2001), GOD IS NOT GREAT: HOW RELIGION POISONS EVERYTHING (TWELVE, 2007), HITCH-22: A MEMOIR (TWELVE, 2010), and ARGUABLY: ESSAYS BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (Twelve, 2011), a collection of his later essays. Christopher Hitchens died on December 15, 2011.
April 13, 1906
Samuel Barclay Beckett (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in Paris for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour. Beckett is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century. Strongly influenced by James Joyce, he is considered one of the last modernists. As an inspiration to many later writers, he is also sometimes considered one of the first postmodernists. He is one of the key writers in what Martin Esslin called the ‘Theatre of the Absurd‘. His work became increasingly minimalist in his later career. Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation’. He was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984.
April 13, 1944
Writer, literary critic, and journalist. Hans Christoph Buch was born in 1944 in Wetzlar. His grandfather was a diplomat in Haiti, which is how he came to develop a special interest in this country. He lived for some time in West Africa, Latin America, and Haiti and was a visiting professor at universities in Germany, the United States, Hong Kong, Buenos Aires, and Cuba.
April 13, 1885
György Lukács (13 April 1885 – 4 June 1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian, and critic. He was one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Marxist ideological orthodoxy of the USSR. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also the philosopher of Leninism. He ideologically developed and organised Lenin’s pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution (Leninism). As a literary critic Lukács was especially influential, because of his theoretical developments of realism and of the novel as a literary genre. In 1919, he was the Hungarian Minister of Culture of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (March–August 1919).
April 13, 1905
Allan Alexander Foote (born 13. April 1905, died 1. August 1957) was a radio operator for a Soviet espionage ring in Switzerland during World War II. Foote was originally from Yorkshire in England, and had spent some time in Spain working for the Republican side during the Civil War in the 1930s. He decided to continue his efforts against Fascism (and, perhaps, for Communism) and volunteered for clandestine work with Red Orchestra. He was put into contact with Ursula Kuczynski in Switzerland. He became a radio operator for the Soviet espionage operation run by Alexander Radó and was one of those who passed information to Moscow from the Lucy spy ring run by Rudolf Roessler. Foote was one of those arrested when the Swiss police shut down most of the operation and was detained for a time. After the War, he spent some time in the Eastern Bloc and then returned to the West and published his book, A Handbook for Spies. He died in the 1950s.
April 13, 1972
Ted Genoways is the editor of Walt Whitman: The Correspondence, Volume VII and the series editor of the correspondence for the online Walt Whitman Archive. He is also the author of two volumes of poetry and the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review.
April 13, 1939
Seamus Justin Heaney (13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright, translator and lecturer, and the recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. In the early 1960s he became a lecturer in Belfast after attending university there, and began to publish poetry. He lived in Sandymount, Dublin from 1972 until his death. Heaney was a professor at Harvard from 1981 to 1997 and its Poet in Residence from 1988 to 2006. From 1989 to 1994 he was also the Professor of Poetry at Oxford and in 1996 was made a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres. Other awards that Heaney received include the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (1968), the E. M. Forster Award (1975), the PEN Translation Prize (1985), the Golden Wreath of Poetry (2001), T. S. Eliot Prize (2006) and two Whitbread Prizes (1996 and 1999). In 2012, he was awarded the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry. Heaney's literary papers are held by the National Library of Ireland. Robert Lowell called him ‘the most important Irish poet since Yeats‘ and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have echoed the sentiment that he was ‘the greatest poet of our age’. Robert Pinsky has stated that ‘with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller’. Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as ‘probably the best-known poet in the world’. Heaney’s son Michael revealed at the funeral mass that his father's final words, ‘Noli timere’ (have no fear), were texted to his wife, Marie, minutes before he died.
April 13, 1940
Michael Herr (born April 13, 1940 in Syracuse, New York) is an American writer and former war correspondent, best known as the author of Dispatches (1977), a memoir of his time as a correspondent for Esquire magazine (1967–1969) during the Vietnam War. The book was called the best 'to have been written about the Vietnam War' by The New York Times Book Review; novelist John le Carré called it 'the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time.' Herr later was credited with pioneering the literary genre of the nonfiction novel, along with authors such as Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Tom Wolfe. From 1971 to 1975 he produced no publications. In 1977 he went on the road with rock & roller Ted Nugent and wrote about the experience in a 1978 cover story for Crawdaddy magazine. Herr co-wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket with his close friend director Stanley Kubrick and author Gustav Hasford. The film was based on Hasford's novel The Short-Timers and the screenplay was nominated for an Academy award. He also contributed to the narration for Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. He collaborated with Richard Stanley in writing the original screenplay for the 1996 adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau. However, Stanley claims the subsequent rewrites cost Herr his writing credit, omitting most of the material created by the two writers. The omission probably worked to his favor, however, since the movie was panned by critics and earned credited writers Stanley and Ron Hutchinson a Razzie Award for Worst Screenplay of 1997. Herr wrote a pair of articles for Vanity Fair about Stanley Kubrick, which were later incorporated into the small book Kubrick, a very personal biography of the director. He declined to edit the script of Kubrick's film Eyes Wide Shut.
April 13, 1948
Drago Jan?ar (born 13 April 1948) is a Slovenian writer, playwright and essayist. Jan?ar is one of the most well-known contemporary Slovene writers. In Slovenia, he is also famous for his political commentaries and civic engagement. He was born in Maribor, an industrial center in what was then the Yugoslav Socialist Republic of Slovenia. His father, originally from the Prekmurje region, joined Slovene Partisans during World War II. Jan?ar studied law in his home town. While a student, he became chief editor of the student journal Katedra; he soon came in conflict with the Communist establishment because he published some articles critical of the ruling regime. He had to leave the journal. He soon found a job as an assistant at the Maribor daily newspaper Ve?er. In 1974 he was arrested by Yugoslav authorities for bringing to Yugoslavia a booklet entitled V Rogu ležimo pobiti (We Lie Killed in the Rog Forest), which he had bought in nearby Austria and lent to some friends. The booklet was a survivor's account of the Ko?evski Rog massacres of the Slovene Home Guard war prisoners perpetrated by Josip Broz Tito's regime in May 1945. He was sentenced to a year's imprisonment for 'spreading hostile propaganda' but was released after three months. Immediately after his release he was called up for military service in southern Serbia, where he was subjected to systematic harassment by his superiors due to his 'criminal file'. After completing military service, Jan?ar briefly returned to Ve?er, but he was allowed to perform only administrative work. He decided to move to Ljubljana, where he came into contact with several influential artists and intellectuals who were also critical of the cultural policies of the Communist establishment, among them Edvard Kocbek, Ivan Urban?i?, Alenka Puhar, Marjan Rožanc, and Rudi Šeligo. Between 1978 and 1980, he worked as a screenwriter in the film studio Viba Film, but he quit because his adaptation of Vitomil Zupan's script for Živojin Pavlovi?'s movie See You in the Next War was censored. In 1981, he worked as a secretary for the Slovenska matica publishing house, where he is now an editor. In 1982, he was among the co-founders of the journal Nova revija, which soon emerged as the major alternative and opposition voice in Socialist Slovenia. He also befriended Boris Pahor, the Slovene writer from Trieste who wrote about his experience in the Nazi concentration camps. Jan?ar has frequently pointed out Pahor's profound influence on him, especially in the essay 'The Man Who Said No' (1990), one of the first comprehensive assessments of Pahor's literary and moral role in the post-war era in Slovenia. Early in his career, Jan?ar was not allowed to publish his works, but when Kardelj's and Tito's deaths in the late 1970s led to gradual liberalisation, he was able to work as a screenwriter and playwright. In the mid-1980s, he gained initial success with his novels and short stories, while his plays earned recognition throughout Yugoslavia. From the late 1980s on, his fame began to grow outside the country, especially in Central Europe. Since the early 1990s, he has worked as an editor at the Slovenska matica publishing house in Ljubljana. Jan?ar started writing as a teenager. His first short novels were published by the magazine Mladina. Jan?ar's prose is influenced by modernist models. One of the central themes of his works is the conflict between individuals and repressive institutions, such as prisons, galleys, psychiatric hospitals and military barracks. He is famous for his laconic and highly ironic style, which often makes use of tragicomic twists. Most of his novels explore concrete events and circumstances in Central European history, which he sees as an exemplification of the human condition. He also writes essays and columns on the current political and cultural situation. During the war in Bosnia, he voiced his support for the Bosnian cause and personally visited the besieged Sarajevo to take supplies collected by the Slovene Writers' Association to the civilian population. In his essay 'Short Report from a City Long Besieged' (Kratko poro?ilo iz dolgo obleganega mesta), he reflected on the war in Yugoslavia and the more general question of the ambiguous role of intellectuals in ethnic, national and political conflicts. Throughout the 1990s, he engaged in polemics with the Austrian writer Peter Handke regarding the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Between 1987 and 1991 Jan?ar served as president of the Slovene PEN Center and through this role also actively supported the emergence of Slovenian democracy. In 1987, he was among the authors of the Contributions to the Slovenian National Program, a manifesto calling for a democratic, pluralistic and sovereign Slovenian state. During the Ljubljana trial in spring and summer 1988, he was one of the organizers of the first opposition political rally in Slovenia since 1945, which was held on the central Congress Square in Ljubljana. In the run-up to the first democratic elections in April 1990, Jan?ar actively campaigned for the oppositional presidential candidate Jože Pu?nik. During the Slovenian War of Independence, he and several other writers helped rally international support for Slovenia's independence. In 2000, Slovenia's most widely read daily newspaper, Delo, published his controversial essay 'Xenos and Xenophobia', which accused the Slovenian liberal media of inciting xenophobia and Anti-Catholicism (Jan?ar himself is an agnostic). He had been accusing the liberal media of similar attitudes since 1994, when his essay 'The Fleshpots of Egypt' blamed the media for having helped the rise of the chauvinistic Slovenian National Party. Although Jan?ar has never actively participated in politics, he controversially publicly supported the Slovenian Democratic Party during the general elections of 2000 and 2004. In 2004, he was among the co-founders of the liberal conservative civic platform Rally for the Republic (Slovene: Zbor za republiko). Jan?ar's novels, essays and short stories have been translated into 21 languages and published in Europe, Asia and the United States. The most numerous translation are into German, followed by Czech and Croatian translations. His dramas have also been staged by a number of foreign theatres, while back home they are frequently considered the highlights of the Slovenian theatrical season. Jan?ar has received a number of literary awards, including the Prešeren Award, Slovenia's most prestigious arts award in 1993 for his narratives, plays and essays; the Kresnik Award for best novel of the year in 1999 (for Zvenenje v glavi), 2001 (for Katarina, pav in jezuit) and 2011 (for To no? sem jo videl); the European Short Story Award (Augsburg, 1994); the Herder Prize for literature in 2003; the European Prize for Literature in 2011. Since 1995, he has been a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. e lives and works in Ljubljana.
April 13, 1743
Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826) was an American Founding Father, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), and the third President of the United States (1801–1809). He was a spokesman for democracy, and embraced the principles of republicanism and the rights of the individual with worldwide influence. At the beginning of the American Revolution, he served in the Continental Congress, representing Virginia, and then served as a wartime Governor of Virginia (1779–1781). In May 1785, he became the United States Minister to France and later the first United States Secretary of State (1790–1793) serving under President George Washington. In opposition to Alexander Hamilton's Federalism, Jefferson and his close friend, James Madison, organized the Democratic-Republican Party, and later resigned from Washington's cabinet. Elected Vice President in 1796 in the administration of John Adams, Jefferson opposed Adams, and with Madison secretly wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which attempted to nullify the Alien and Sedition Acts. Elected president in what Jefferson called the 'Revolution of 1800', he oversaw acquisition of the vast Louisiana Territory from France (1803), and sent out the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–1806), and later three others, to explore the new west. Jefferson doubled the size of the United States during his presidency. His second term was beset with troubles at home, such as the failed treason trial of his former Vice President Aaron Burr. When Britain threatened American shipping challenging U.S. neutrality during its war with Napoleon, he tried economic warfare with his embargo laws, which only impeded American foreign trade. In 1803, President Jefferson initiated a process of Indian tribal removal to the Louisiana Territory west of the Mississippi River, having opened lands for eventual American settlers. In 1807 Jefferson drafted and signed into law a bill that banned slave importation into the United States. A leader in the Enlightenment, Jefferson was a polymath in the arts, sciences, and politics. Considered an important architect in the classical tradition, he designed his home Monticello and other notable buildings. Jefferson was keenly interested in science, invention, architecture, religion, and philosophy; he was an active member and eventual president of the American Philosophical Society. He was conversant in French, Greek, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, and studied other languages and linguistics, interests which led him to found the University of Virginia after his presidency. Although not a notable orator, Jefferson was a skilled writer and corresponded with many influential people in America and Europe throughout his adult life. As long as he lived, Jefferson expressed opposition to slavery, yet he owned hundreds of slaves and freed only a few of them. Historians generally believe that after the death of his wife Jefferson had a long-term relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, and fathered some or all of her children. Although criticized by many present-day scholars over the issues of racism and slavery, Jefferson is consistently rated as one of the greatest U.S. presidents.
April 13, 1943
Tim Krabbé (born 13 April 1943) is a Dutch journalist and novelist. Krabbé was born in Amsterdam. His writing has appeared in most major periodicals in the Netherlands. He is known to Dutch readers for his novel De Renner (The Rider), first published in 1978 and translated into English in 2002, of which The Guardian's Matt Seaton wrote: "Nothing better is ever likely to be written on the subjective experience of cycle-racing". English readers know him primarily for The Vanishing, the translation of his 1984 novel Het Gouden Ei (The Golden Egg), which was made into an acclaimed 1988 Dutch film for which Krabbé co-wrote a script. A poorly received American remake was made in 1993. In 1997 he published De grot, translated as The Cave and published in the U.S.in 2000. In 2009, he wrote the "Boekenweekgeschenk", called Een Tafel vol Vlinders. Also a former championship chess player, Krabbé is renowned for his writings on the subject and maintains a chess website. Krabbé once authored a chess puzzle which featured a rook castling vertically (see joke chess problem), before this move was specifically disallowed.His FIDE rating is 2274. His father was the painter Maarten Krabbé (1908–2005) and his mother the Jewish film translator Margreet Reiss. He is the brother of actor Jeroen Krabbé and the multimedia artist/designer Mirko Krabbé, and the uncle of Martijn Krabbé, a Dutch media personality.
April 13, 1953
Dany Laferrière OC OQ (born Windsor Kléber Laferrière, 13 April 1953) is a Haitian-Canadian novelist and journalist who writes in French. He was elected to seat 2 of the Académie française on 12 December 2013, and inducted in May 2015. Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and raised in Petit-Goâve, Laferrière worked as a journalist in Haiti before moving to Canada in 1976. He also worked as a journalist in Canada, and hosted television programming for the TQS network. Laferrière published his first novel, How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired (Comment faire l'amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer) in 1985. The novel was later adapted into a screenplay by Laferrière and Richard Sadler, earning a Genie Award nomination for best adapted screenplay at the 11th Genie Awards in 1990. The film adaptation of the novel starred Isaach De Bankolé and was directed by Jacques W. Benoit. Laferrière writes exclusively in French, although some of his works have been published in English translation by David Homel. Several further films have been adapted from his work, including On the Verge of a Fever (Le Goût des jeunes filles) in 2004 and Heading South (Vers le sud) in 2005. He also wrote the original screenplays for Voodoo Taxi in 1991 and How to Conquer America in One Night (Comment conquérir l'Amérique en une nuit) in 2004, and was the director of the latter. In 2009, Laferrière won the prestigious Prix Médicis for his 11th novel, L'énigme du retour. Upon receiving the prize, he commented on its ability to open up a new readership in France, giving him visibility there. In the past Laferrière had always refused to be published in the fall, a season associated with the great literary prizes, but had been recommended to do so with L'énigme du retour by his editors. The novel follows Laferrière as he returns to his birthplace in Haiti, 33 years after he left it, upon learning of his father's death in New York City. The narrative blurs the line between prose and poetry, resembling haiku structures in some sections. On 12 December 2013, Laferrière was elected on the first round of balloting to Seat no. 2 of the Académie française, becoming the first Haitian, the first Canadian and the first Quebecer to receive that honour. He is the second black person to have been inducted, the first being Senegalese writer and statesman Léopold Sédar Senghor in 1983. On 3 June 2014, he was awarded the International Literature Award by the House of World Cultures for his novel The Return (L'enigme du retour). In 2014, he was appointed officer of the National Order of Quebec. In 2015, Laferrière was awarded the Order of Canada with the grade of officer. In 2016, Laferrière won the Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award for his literary achievements. Laferrière lives in Montreal, Quebec.
April 13, 1891
CHARLES R. LARSON is a Professor of Literature at American University in Washington, D.C He is the author of three critical works on Third World literature: THE EMERGENCE OF AFRICAN FICTION (1972), THE NOVEL IN THE THIRD WORLD (1976), and AMERICAN INDIAN FICTION (1978). He has also published three novels. Previously, he was general editor of Collier Books’ African/American Library. MARITA GOLDEN IS the author of MIGRATIONS OF THE HEART, A WOMAN’S PLACE, and LONG DISTANCE LIFE. Her writing has appeared in Ms., Essence, the New York Times, and the Washington Post among other publications. She is a founding member of the African-American Writers’ Guild. Ms. Golden teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at George Mason University.
April 13, 1911
John Donald McPartland (1911–1958) was a writer specializing in pulp fiction crime whose career was ended by an early death at age 47.McPartland was born April 13, 1911 in Chicago. He was educated as an engineer. In 1943, during World War II, he was inducted into the U.S. Army. After the war, his first book, Sex in Our Changing World, was published in 1947 to moderate success, and he joined Life as a staff writer. Later as an Army reservist, he was called back during the Korean War and served with the pacific division of the Stars and Stripes newspaper where he was a staff writer. On his return from Asia, McPartland settled in California and began to write on a regular basis, though he retained some desire to be an engineer. In addition to his novels, he wrote a handful of screenplays for Hollywood. On September 14, 1958, in Monterey, California, McParland suffered a heart attack and died. He was 47. During the settlement of his estate, McPartland's personal life became national news. It was revealed during estate proceedings that he had a legal wife and son in Mill Valley, California, while at the same time, a mistress in Monterey who had borne him five children, and who as Mrs. Eleanor McPartland, was named the city's "Mother of the Year" in 1956. Additionally, a daughter from an earlier marriage in Chicago was later attached to the estate. Most of McPartland's books were published as Fawcett Gold Medal paperback originals. His novels, aside from No Down Payment, fall under the hard-boiled pulp category. The settings of his books were usually the seamy underworld of urban and suburban America, and featured plots involving romantic intrigue, international espionage, extortion, drug trafficking and crime syndicates. Japan was the backdrop for three of his books, of which two were set during the period of the post-WWII Allied occupation, a setting McPartland seemed to have experienced firsthand, particularly the sections of "sleazy, vice-ridden, post-Occupation Tokyo." Many of McPartland's pulp novels have been reprinted since their initial publication in the 1950s; some are currently in print, including Big Red's Daughter and Tokyo Doll, both reissued by Black Curtain Press in 2013. His more standard novel, No Down Payment, was later made into the movie of the same title, directed by Martin Ritt and starring Joanne Woodward and Tony Randall, among others. McPartland also wrote four Hollywood screenplays that become movies, of which one was derived from his own work, The Wild Party, which was adapted to the screen for the 1956 movie, The Wild Party, starring Anthony Quinn. To date, three of McPartland's novels have been brought to the screen: No Down Payment; The Kingdom of Johnny Cool which became the 1963 movie Johnny Cool (starring Elizabeth Montgomery and Henry Silva); and the aforementioned The Wild Party.
April 13, 1941
Nasnaga was born April 13, 1941, in Dayton, Ohio. He is a member of the Shawnee Nation, United Remnant Band. The Remnant Band is composed of predominantly mixed-blood Shawnees who are actively working to restore and reinvigorate the traditional way of life of their people. Nasnaga grew up in Ohio, and then moved to Texas in 1968 after serving a hitch in the United States Navy. An artist, he has Supported himself both from his paintings and by working as a draftsman. This is his first novel.
April 13, 1943
Bill Pronzini (born April 13, 1943) is an American writer of detective fiction. He is also an active anthologist, having compiled more than 100 collections, most of which focus on mystery, western, and science fiction short stories.
April 13, 1867
Charles Hitchcock Sherrill (April 13, 1867, Washington, DC, United States - June 25, 1936, Paris, France) was an American politician, diplomat, and sport officer. During World War I, he served as a brigadier general and an adjutant general with the New York National Guard. He was appointed as US Minister to Argentina from 1909 to 1910 and served an important role in securing the contracts for two Rivadavia-class battleships during the South American dreadnought race, and US Ambassador to Turkey from 1932 to 1933. Shortly after retiring from public office Sherrill proclaimed his admiration for Europe's strong men and predicted the end of parliamentary form of government, which he dubbed "inept" and referred to as "so-called democracy." In a long letter to the editors of The New York Times, published on June 4, 1933, he singled out Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy, for praise. In 1935, during the preparations for the 1936 Olympic Games, Sherrill met twice with Hitler. In his one-hour talk with Hitler, Sherrill insisted for at least one token Jew to be included in the German team for the Olympic Winter and another for the Olympic Summer Games. Hitler refused and when he was threatened by Sherrill with an American boycott, promised purely German Olympic Games. From 1922 to his death, he was an important member of the International Olympic Committee and played vital role in organizing the 1932 Summer Olympics, in Los Angeles, and calming American public opinion on the 1936 Summer Olympics, in Berlin. He wrote twenty-two books, especially on stained glass windows in European churches and European and world politics.
April 13, 1932
Barney Simon (13 April 1932 – 30 June 1995, Johannesburg) was a South African writer, playwright and director. The son of working-class Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, Simon discovered a love of theatre while working under director Joan Littlewood in London in the 1950s. Returning to Johannesburg, he supported himself as an advertising copywriter while producing and directing plays. Before he opened the Market, he staged multi-racial plays anywhere he could: in warehouses and shantytowns, storefronts and back yards, including Athol Fugard's The Blood Knot (1961). Simon spent a year (1969–70) in New York City, where he introduced South African plays to an American audience and edited the journal New American Review. In 1976 Barney Simon co-founded Johannesburg’s Market Theatre, South Africa's first multiracial cultural center and a birthplace of the country’s indigenous theater movement. Working under the racial segregation laws of apartheid without state subsidies and under constant threat of arrest for staging controversial contemporary plays performed by multiracial casts in front of multiracial audiences, Simon remained the theater’s artistic director from its opening until he died. He was the first to stage many of Athol Fugard’s plays, directed a film for the BBC of Nadine Gordimer’s story "City Lovers", and worked with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière on the French translation for the Paris production by Peter Brook of Simon’s last play, The Suit (Le Costume) (1994). Simon was known for his method of creating and developing original plays through a workshop process of field research, improvisation and collaborative writing, sometimes with untrained actors or combinations of musicians, professional actors and people entirely new to the theater. Simon was active in South African literature as the editor from 1964 to 1971 of The Classic, the influential South African journal of township literature founded by Nathaniel Ndazana Nakasa in 1963. Simon edited an autobiographical novel by Dugmore Boetie, Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1969), for which Simon also wrote an afterword. He also published a collection of his own stories, Joburg Sis!, in 1974.
April 13, 1918
Bart Spicer (Richmond, Virginia, 13 April 1918 - Tucson, Arizona, 15 February 1978) was the pen name of Albert Samuel Spicer. He also wrote four novels as Jay Barbette in tandem with his wife, Betty Coe Spicer. He had four series characters, Benson Kellog, Peregrine White, Carney Wilde (as Spicer) and Harry Butten (as Barbette). He also wrote five non-criminous novels. Spicer worked as a radio journalist until 1949, then became a full-time novelist. He deserves wider recognition for his hardboiled style of writing. Whilst there are some big names overshadowing him, his work stands up very favourably to the likes of Mickey Spillane. A recommended author to fans of the genre.
April 13, 1936
Timo Tiusanen (April 13, 1936 - August 19, 1985) was Private Docent at the University of Helsinki and Senior Research Fellow of the Academy of Finland. His work as a stage director with professional companies included LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT and THE VISIT, O’Neill’s and Durrenmatt’s masterpieces. He is the author of O’NEILL’S SCENIC IMAGES.
April 13, 1909
Eudora Alice Welty (April 13, 1909 – July 23, 2001) was an American author of short stories and novels about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards. She was the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America. Her house in Jackson, Mississippi, is a National Historic Landmark and open to the public as a museum.
April 13, 1889
Herbert Osborn Yardley (April 13, 1889 – August 7, 1958) was an American cryptologist. He founded and led the cryptographic organization the Black Chamber. Under Yardley, the cryptanalysts of The American Black Chamber broke Japanese diplomatic codes and were able to furnish American negotiators with significant information during the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-1922. Recipient of the Distinguished Service Medal. He wrote The American Black Chamber (1931) about his experiences there. He later helped the Nationalists in China (1938–1940) to break Japanese codes. Following his work in China, Yardley worked briefly for the Canadian government, helping it set up a cryptological section (Examination Unit) of the National Research Council of Canada from June to December 1941.
April 13, 1947
RAE ARMANTROUT is professor emerita of writing at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of thirteen previous books of poetry.
April 14, 1857
Aluísio Tancredo Gonçalves de Azevedo (April 14, 1857 - January 21, 1913) was a Brazilian novelist, caricaturist, diplomat, playwright and short story writer. Initially a Romantic writer, he would later adhere to the Naturalist movement. He introduced the Naturalist movement in Brazil with the novel O Mulato, in 1881. He founded and occupied the 4th chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters from 1897 until his death in 1913. Azevedo was born in São Luís, to David Gonçalves de Azevedo (the Portuguese vice-consul in Brazil) and Emília Amália Pinto de Magalhães. He was the younger brother of the famous playwright Artur Azevedo. As a child, Aluísio would work as a traveling salesman. Since then, he loved painting and drawing, and would move to Rio de Janeiro in 1876 (where his brother Artur was living already), to study at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes. After graduating, he drew caricatures for journals such as O Fígaro, O Mequetrefe, Zig-Zag and A Semana Ilustrada. His father's death, in 1878, made him return to São Luís, in order to take care of his family. He then initiated his writer career, publishing in 1880 a typical Romantic novel, Uma Lágrima de Mulher. He helps on the creation of an anticlerical journal named O Pensador, where he wrote Abolitionist articles. In 1881 he publishes the first Brazilian Naturalist novel ever: O Mulato, that deals with the racism. Consolidating his career as a writer, he could return to Rio. He would write endlessly during the period of 1882-1895. Dating from this period are his also famous novels Casa de Pensão (1884) and O Cortiço (1890), and many other works written in partnership with his brother, or with Émile Rouède. In 1895 he became a diplomat. He served as a minister in Spain, Japan, England, Italy and Argentina, where he died.
April 14, 1938
Leonid Ivanovich Borodin (born April 14, 1938) is a Russian novelist and journalist. Born in Irkutsk, Borodin is a Christian and Soviet dissident. In the 1960s he belonged to the anti-Communist All-Russian Social-Christian Union. He was arrested and imprisoned in the 'strict regime' Camp 17 in 1967, and went on hunger strike there with Yuli Daniel and Aleksandr Ginzburg in 1969. After his release in 1973, Borodin’s works were smuggled out of the Soviet Union. The publication in English translation of The Story of a Strange Time led to his arrest in 1982 on charges of 'anti-Soviet propaganda'. He was sentenced to 10 years' hard labour in Perm-36 Maximum Security Camp (ITK-6), as well as five years' internal exile. Released after four years, in the perestroika era, Borodin was allowed to visit the west with his wife. Borodin was the subject and first-person narrator of the 2001 film Leonid Borodin: Looking through the Years by Viacheslav Novikov. A winner of many literary prizes, including the 2002 Solzhenitsyn Prize, Borodin is editor-in-chief of Moskva, a popular literary magazine. In 2005 he was appointed to the first convocation of the Public Chamber of Russia.
April 14, 1941
G. A. Cohen (1941-2009) was emeritus fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford. His books include Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (Princeton), If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?, and Rescuing Justice and Equality.
April 14, 1950
Péter Esterházy (born 14 April 1950 in Budapest) is one of the most widely known contemporary Hungarian writers. His books are considered to be significant contributions to postwar literature. He studied mathematics at ELTE university in Budapest from 1969 to 1974; his first writings were published in literary journals in 1974. He worked as a mathematician from 1974 to 1978, and he became a freelance writer in 1978. Esterházy, the scion of an aristocratic family that traces its roots to the 12th century, is perhaps best known outside of his native country for CELESTIAL HARMONIES (Harmonia Caelestis, 2000) which chronicles his forefathers' epic rise during the Austro-Hungarian empire – when Haydn composed music at the family palace – to its dispossession under communism. His next novel, REVISED EDITION (Javított kiadás, 2002), which appeared as an ‘appendix’ to the former work, was born from the shock when he learnt that his father was an informer for the secret police of the Communist era. The book deals with the research work as a diary, his father's unfolding activity, and the very process of his facing and digesting the facts. His works have been published in more than 20 languages. He has won almost every literary distinction in Hungary, including the prestigious Kossuth Prize in 1996, and has received awards for his work in France, Austria, Germany, Slovenia and Norway.
April 14, 1937
Lucy Lippard (born April 14, 1937) is an American writer, art critic, activist and curator. Lippard was among the first writers to recognize the "dematerialization" at work in conceptual art and was an early champion of feminist art. She is the author of 21 books on contemporary art and has received numerous awards and accolades from literary critics and art associations.Lucy Lippard was born in New York City and lived in New Orleans and Charlottesville, Virginia, before enrolling at Abbot Academy in 1952. She attended Smith College and earned a B.A. in 1958. In 1962, she earned an M.A. degree in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. Just out of college, Lippard began working in the library at the Museum of Modern Art in 1958 where, in addition to reshelving the library after a fire, she was "farmed out" to do research for curators. She credits these years of working at MoMA paging, filing and researching as preparing her "well for the archival, informational aspect of conceptual art." At MoMA she worked with curators such as Bill Lieberman, Bill Seitz and Peter Selz. By 1966, she had curated two traveling exhibitions for MoMA, one on "soft sculpture" and one on Max Ernst, as well as worked with Kynaston McShine on Primary Structures before he was hired by the Jewish Museum, taking the show with him. It was at MoMA that Lippard met Sol LeWitt who was working the night desk; John Button, Dan Flavin, Al Held, and Robert Ryman all held positions at the museum during this time as well. Since 1966, Lippard has published 20 books—including one novel—on feminism, art, politics and place. A 2012 exhibition on her seminal book, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object at the Brooklyn Museum, titled "Six Years": Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art", cites Lippard's scholarship as its point of entry into a discussion about conceptual art during its era of emergence, demonstrating her crucial role in the contemporary understanding of this period of art production and criticism. Her research on the move toward Dematerialization in art making has formed a cornerstone of contemporary art scholarship and discourse.[citation needed] Lucy Lippard was a member of the populist political artist group known as the Art Workers Coalition, or AWC. Her involvement in the AWC as well as a trip she took to Argentina—such trips bolstered the political motivations of many feminists of the time—influenced a change in the focus of her criticism, from formalist subjects to more feministic ones.
April 14, 1897
Horace McCoy (April 14, 1897 – December 15, 1955) was an American writer whose hardboiled novels took place during the Great Depression. His best-known novel is They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1935), which was made into a movie of the same name in 1969, fourteen years after McCoy's death.
April 14, 1892
Gordon Childe was born in Sydney, Australia, in April 1892. He was a graduate of Sydney and Oxford Universities, and from 1919 to 1920 he held the post of Private Secretary to the Premier of New South Wales. In 1927 he was appointed the first Abercromby Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology in the University of Edinburgh, and directed numerous excavations in Scotland and Northern Ireland, but notably at the wonderfully preserved Stone Age village at Skara Brae in Orkney. He died in October 1957.
April 14, 1934
Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. The author of numerous books, he has over the last three decades developed a richly nuanced vision of Western culture's relation to political economy. He was a recipient of the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize. He is the author of many books, including Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, The Cultural Turn, A Singular Modernity, The Modernist Papers, Archaeologies of the Future, Brecht and Method, Ideologies of Theory, Valences of the Dialectic, The Hegel Variations and Representing Capital.
April 14, 1967
Javier Valdez Cárdenas (April 14, 1967 – May 15, 2017) was a Mexican journalist and founder of Ríodoce, a newspaper based in Sinaloa. He received several international awards for his writings on drug trafficking and organized crime in the Mexican Drug War. Javier Valdez Cárdenas was born on April 14, 1967 in Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico. He graduated from the Autonomous University of Sinaloa with a degree in sociology. In the early 1990s, Valdez Cárdenas worked as a reporter for the national TV station, Canal 3, in Culiacán. He then joined the Sinaloa-based newspaper Noroeste and became a correspondent for the Mexico City-daily newspaper La Jornada in 1998. In 2003, he and other reporters from the daily newspaper Noroeste founded Ríodoce, a weekly dedicated to crime and corruption in Sinaloa, considered one of Mexico's most violent states. Valdez Cárdenas was also the author of several books on drug trafficking, including Miss Narco, which chronicles the lives of the girlfriends and wives of drug lords, and Los morros del narco: Niños y jóvenes en el narcotráfico mexicano ("The Kids of the Drug Trade: Children and teenagers in Mexican drug trafficking"). In September 2009, Ríodoce published a series on drug trafficking entitled "Hitman: Confession of an Assassin in Ciudad Juárez." One morning a few days after the conclusion of the series, a grenade was thrown into Ríodoce's office, damaging the building but causing no injuries. The attackers were never identified. In 2011, Valdez Cárdenas was awarded the International Press Freedom Award of the Committee to Protect Journalists, "an annual recognition of courageous journalism". In his acceptance speech, he called the violence of Mexican drug trafficking "a tragedy that should shame us", blaming the citizenry of Mexico for giving the drug war its deaths and the governments of US and Mexico for giving the drug war its guns. Later in the same year, the trustees of Columbia University awarded Ríodoce the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for journalism that contributes to "inter-American understanding". On May 15, 2017, Valdez Cárdenas was shot and killed by unidentified gunmen around noon, blocks away from the Ríodoce offices in Culiacán, Sinaloa when he was 50 years old. The murder was condemned by the U.S. embassy in Mexico, the United Nations, and the European Union. Everard Meade is Director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego’s Kroc School of Peace Studies and its certificate programs in Applied Peace Education in Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico.
April 15 , 1886
Sir Frank Ezra Adcock, OBE, FBA (15 April 1886 – 22 February 1968) was a British classical historian who was Professor of Ancient History at the University of Cambridge between 1925 and 1951. In addition to his academic work, he also served as a cryptographer in both World War I and World War II. Adcock was born in Desford, Leicester, Leicestershire, on 15 April 1886. He was the son of Thomas Draper Adcock, the head of Desford Industrial School, and Mary Esther Adcock (née Coltman). He was educated at Wyggeston School, a grammar school in Leicester. He went on to study classics at King’s College, University of Cambridge. In 1911, Adcock was elected as a fellow and lecturer of King's College, Cambridge. He held the chair of Ancient History at the University Cambridge from 1925 to 1951 when he retired. With J. B. Bury and S. A. Cook he edited The Cambridge Ancient History, which was published from 1923 to 1939, and also wrote ten chapters of it. Adcock was president of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies from 1929 to 1931. He was president of the Classical Association from 1947 to 1948.
April 15, 1967
A Cajun from New Iberia, Louisiana, Shane K. Bernard (born April 15, 1967) is the author of Swamp Pop: Cajun and Creole Rhythm and Blues (1993), The Cajuns: Americanization of a People (2006), Tabasco: An Illustrated History (2007), and Cajuns and Their Acadian Ancestors: A Young Reader's History (2008). He holds a doctorate in History from Texas A&M University and degrees in English and History from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
April 15, 1908
Howard Browne April 15, 1908, Omaha (Nebraska) – October 28, 1999, Santiago, (California) was a science fiction editor and mystery writer. He also wrote for several television series and films. Some of his work appeared over the pseudonyms John Evans, Alexander Blade, Lawrence Chandler, Ivar Jorgensen, and Lee Francis. Beginning in 1942, Browne worked as managing editor for Ziff-Davis publications on Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures, both under Raymond A. Palmer's editorship. When Palmer left the magazines in 1949, Browne took over in January 1950. Browne ended the publication of Richard Shaver's Shaver Mystery and oversaw the change in Amazing from a pulp magazine to a digest. He left the magazines in 1956 to move to Hollywood. In Hollywood, Browne wrote for television shows including Maverick, Ben Casey, and The Virginian. His last credit was for the film Capone (1975), starring Ben Gazzara. Browne's novel Thin Air was twice adapted for television. In 1975 it was used as the basis for a first season episode of The Rockford Files titled 'Sleight of Hand.' In 1982 it was the basis for a second season episode of Simon & Simon of the same name as the novel.
April 15, 1924
John Harvey Bunzel is an American academic. He served as president of San Jose State University from 1970 to 1978 and has been a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution since 1978. He was formerly a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights.
April 15, 1878
Robert Walser (15 April 1878 – 25 December 1956), was a German-speaking Swiss writer. Walser is understood to be the missing link between Kleist and Kafka. ‘Indeed,’ writes Susan Sontag, ‘At the time [of Walser’s writing], it was more likely to be Kafka [who was understood by posterity] through the prism of Walser. Robert Musil, another admirer among Walser’s contemporaries, when he first read Kafka pronounced [Kafka’s work] as, 'a peculiar case of the Walser type.'‘ Walser was admired early on by artists such as Robert Musil, Hermann Hesse, Stefan Zweig, Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka, and was in fact better known in his lifetime than Franz Kafka or Walter Benjamin, for example. Nevertheless, Walser was never able to support himself based on the meager income he made from his writings and he worked as a copyist, an inventor's assistant, as a butler and in various other low-paying trades. Furthermore, despite marginal early success in his literary career, the popularity of his work gradually diminished over the second and third decades of the 20th century, he remained financially unstable and eventually suffered a nervous breakdown, spending the remainder of his life in sanatoriums, taking frequent long walks. A revival of interest in his works arose when, in the late-twentieth century and the early 2000s his work from the Pencil Zone, also known as Bleistiftgebiet or ‘the Microscripts’—works he had written in a microscopically tiny hand, in a coded alphabet while in the sanatorium—were finally deciphered, translated and published.
April 15, 1832
Wilhelm Busch (15 April 1832 – 9 January 1908), endowed with an equipotent facility with sketch-pad and rhyming dictionary, created some of the most arresting sketches and drollest verses the world has yet seen. In addition to the title piece, this book reprints -Ker and Plunk- (Plisch und Plum), -The Egghead and the Two Cut-ups of Corinth- (Diogenes and die bosen Buben von Korinth), -The Raven-robbin Rascals- (Das Rabennest), -Deceitful Henry- (Der hinterlistige Heinrich), -The Boy and the Popgun- (Das Pusterrohr), -Ice-Peter- (Der Eispeter), -The Boy and the Pipe- (Krischan mit der Piepe), -Firm Faith- (Fester Glauben), -The Two Ducks and the Frog- (Die beiden Enten und der Frosch), and -Cat and Mouse- (Katze und Maus). By turns malevolent, jovial, sardonic, diabolical, and bloodthirsty, these verses tellingly castigate hypocrisy, stodginess, stupidity, egotism, drunkenness, and other human foibles.
April 15, 1956
Michael Jerome Cooper (born April 15, 1956) is an American basketball coach, currently serving as head coach of the Atlanta Dream of the WNBA, and retired professional player. Prior to joining Atlanta, he coached the USC USC Trojans college basketball team. He is a former player in the National Basketball Association (NBA) who spent his entire career with the Los Angeles Lakers, and has coached in the NBA, WNBA, and the NBA DL. Michael Cooper is the only person to win a championship, as either a coach or a player, in the NBA, WNBA, and the NBA Development League.
April 15, 1858
David Émile Durkheim (April 15, 1858 – November 15, 1917) was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology. Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity; an era in which traditional social and religious ties are no longer assumed, and in which new social institutions have come into being. His first major sociological work was The Division of Labor in Society (1893). In 1895, he published his Rules of the Sociological Method and set up the first European department of sociology, becoming France's first professor of sociology. In 1898, he established the journal L'Année Sociologique. Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a study of suicide rates in Catholic and Protestant populations, pioneered modern social research and served to distinguish social science from psychology and political philosophy. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), presented a theory of religion, comparing the social and cultural lives of aboriginal and modern societies. Durkheim was also deeply preoccupied with the acceptance of sociology as a legitimate science. He refined the positivism originally set forth by Auguste Comte, promoting what could be considered as a form of epistemological realism, as well as the use of the hypothetico-deductive model in social science. For him, sociology was the science of institutions if this term is understood in its broader meaning as ‘beliefs and modes of behaviour instituted by the collectivity’ and its aim being to discover structural social facts. Durkheim was a major proponent of structural functionalism, a foundational perspective in both sociology and anthropology. In his view, social science should be purely holistic;] that is, sociology should study phenomena attributed to society at large, rather than being limited to the specific actions of individuals. He remained a dominant force in French intellectual life until his death in 1917, presenting numerous lectures and published works on a variety of topics, including the sociology of knowledge, morality, social stratification, religion, law, education, and deviance. Durkheimian terms such as ‘collective consciousness‘ have since entered the popular lexicon.
April 15, 1843
Henry James (15 April 1843 – 28 February 1916) was an Anglo-American writer who spent most of his writing career in Britain. He is regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism.
April 15, 1908
Howard Browne April 15, 1908, Omaha (Nebraska) – October 28, 1999, Santiago, (California) was a science fiction editor and mystery writer. He also wrote for several television series and films. Some of his work appeared over the pseudonyms John Evans, Alexander Blade, Lawrence Chandler, Ivar Jorgensen, and Lee Francis. Beginning in 1942, Browne worked as managing editor for Ziff-Davis publications on Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures, both under Raymond A. Palmer's editorship. When Palmer left the magazines in 1949, Browne took over in January 1950. Browne ended the publication of Richard Shaver's Shaver Mystery and oversaw the change in Amazing from a pulp magazine to a digest. He left the magazines in 1956 to move to Hollywood. In Hollywood, Browne wrote for television shows including Maverick, Ben Casey, and The Virginian. His last credit was for the film Capone (1975), starring Ben Gazzara. Browne's novel Thin Air was twice adapted for television. In 1975 it was used as the basis for a first season episode of The Rockford Files titled 'Sleight of Hand.' In 1982 it was the basis for a second season episode of Simon & Simon of the same name as the novel.
April 15, 1939
Carlo Ginzburg is the author of numerous books that have been translated into english, including The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller.
April 15, 1946
Marsha Hunt (born April 15, 1946) is an American actress, novelist, singer and former model, who has lived mostly in Britain and Ireland. She achieved national fame when she appeared in London as Dionne in the long-running rock musical Hair. She enjoyed close relationships with Marc Bolan and Mick Jagger, who is the father of her only child Karis. According to Hunt, The Rolling Stones' controversial hit song "Brown Sugar" was based on her. She has written three novels, as well as three volumes of autobiography, which include a frank account of life as a breast cancer sufferer.
April 15, 1958
Anne Michaels (born 15 April 1958) is a Canadian poet and novelist. Anne Michaels was born in Toronto, Ontario, in 1958. Michaels attended Vaughan Road Academy and then later the University of Toronto, where she is an adjunct faculty in the Department of English. Her first book, The Weight of Oranges (1986), a volume of poetry, was awarded the Commonwealth Prize. She received the National Magazine Award, the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry and a nomination for the Governor General's Award for her second collection, Miner's Pond (1991). Michaels has written two novels. She is best known for her novel Fugitive Pieces (1996) (1997 in the UK), it was awarded the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Trillium Book Award, Orange Prize for Fiction and the Guardian Fiction Prize. Michaels, who has also composed musical scores for the theater, has said 'when you put a tremendous amount of love into your work, as in any relationship, you can't know--you can only hope--that what you're offering will in some way be received. You shape your love to artistic demands, to the rigors of your genre. But still, it's a labor of love, and it's the nature of love that you must give it freely.' She took part in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty Six Books where she wrote a piece based upon a book of the King James Bible.
April 15, 1952
Avital Ronell is an American academic who writes about continental philosophy, literary studies, psychoanalysis, feminist philosophy, political philosophy, and ethics.
April 15, 1923
Anthony Francis Clarke Wallace (April 15, 1923 – October 5, 2015) was a Canadian-American anthropologist who specialized in Native American cultures, especially the Iroquois. His research expressed an interest in the intersection of cultural anthropology and psychology. He was famous for the theory of revitalization movements. He was born in Toronto, Ontario, in 1923, the son of the historian Paul Wallace, and did both undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a student of A. Irving Hallowell and Frank Speck. He received his Ph.D. in 1950. He later taught at the University of Pennsylvania, where his students included the anthropologist Raymond D. Fogelson and anthropologist/folklorist Richard Bauman. He was also for a time the Director of Clinical Research at the Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute. He died on October 5, 2015, in Ridley Park, Pennsylvania, where he had been residing.
April 15, 1931
Tomas Gösta Tranströmer (April 15, 1931, Stockholm, Sweden - March 26, 2015, Stockholm, Sweden) was one of the most celebrated and influential poetic figures of his generation. He was born in Stockholm in 1931 and educated at Södra Latin School and the University of Stockholm, where he received a degree in psychology. He began his psychology career in the early 1960s at a juvenile corrections institute in Sweden, and worked for several decades in the field. He is one of the world’s most translated poets, with books appearing in numerous editions in over fifty languages. In addition to his renown as a poet, Tranströmer was also a highly regarded amateur pianist and entomologist.
April 15, 1920
Thomas Stephen Szasz (15 April 1920, Budapest, Hungary – 8 September 2012, Manlius, New York) was a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and academic. He served for most of his career as professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York. A distinguished lifetime fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a life member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, he was best known as a social critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry, of what he saw as the social control aims of medicine in modern society, and scientism. His books The Myth of Mental Illness (1961) and The Manufacture of Madness (1970) set out some of the arguments most associated with him. Szasz argued throughout his career that mental illness is a metaphor for human problems in living, and that mental illnesses are not real in the sense that cancers are real. Except for a few identifiable brain diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, there are neither biological or chemical tests nor biopsy or necropsy findings for verifying or falsifying DSM diagnoses", i.e., there are no objective methods for detecting the presence or absence of mental illness. Szasz maintained throughout his career that he was not anti-psychiatry but was rather anti-coercive psychiatry. He was a staunch opponent of civil commitment and involuntary psychiatric treatment but believed in, and practiced, psychotherapy and psychiatry between consenting adults. His views on special treatment followed from libertarian roots, based on the principles that each person has the right to bodily and mental self-ownership and the right to be free from violence from others, although he criticized the "Free World" as well as the communist states for their use of psychiatry. He believed that suicide, the practice of medicine, the use and sale of drugs and sexual relations should be private, contractual, and legal.
April 15, 1927
Francis Selormey (15 April 1927 – 1983) was a Ghanaian novelist, teacher, scriptwriter and sports administrator. Born in Dzelukofe, in the Volta Region of Ghana, Selormey was brought up in Keta. He attended a Catholic primary school and then St. Augustine's College, Cape Coast. He studied physical education at the University of Ghana and in Germany before becoming a teacher. He was Senior Sports Organizer for the Central Region from 1960 to 1964. In 1965 he became a scriptwriter for the Ghana Film Industry Corporation. At some point he returned to sports administration, as Director of Sports for the Sports Council of Ghana. Married with six children, he spent the last years of his life as a farmer before his death in 1983. The Narrow Path: An African Childhood, was published in Heinemann's African Writers Series in 1966. Semi-autobiographical, it was "the Bildungsroman of a Ghanaian school boy", who is "caught between his love for an overly strict father who insists on Christian, Western ways and his own appreciation for other, traditional influences."
April 16, 1947
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (born Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor, Jr.; April 16, 1947) is a retired American professional basketball player who played 20 seasons in the National Basketball Association (NBA) for the Milwaukee Bucks and Los Angeles Lakers. During his career as a center, Abdul-Jabbar was a record six-time NBA Most Valuable Player (MVP), a record 19-time NBA All-Star, a 15-time All-NBA selection, and an 11-time NBA All-Defensive Team member. A member of six NBA championship teams as a player and two as an assistant coach, Abdul-Jabbar twice was voted NBA Finals MVP. In 1996, he was honored as one of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History. NBA coach Pat Riley and players Isiah Thomas and Julius Erving have called him the greatest basketball player of all time. After winning 71 consecutive basketball games on his high school team in New York City, Lew Alcindor attended college at UCLA, where he played on three consecutive national championship basketball teams and was a record three-time MVP of the NCAA Tournament. Drafted by the one-season-old Bucks franchise in the 1969 NBA Draft with the first overall pick, Alcindor spent six seasons in Milwaukee. After winning his first NBA championship in 1971, he adopted the Muslim name Kareem Abdul-Jabbar at age 24. Using his trademark 'skyhook' shot, he established himself as one of the league's top scorers. In 1975, he was traded to the Lakers, with whom he played the last 14 seasons of his career and won five NBA championships. Abdul-Jabbar's contributions were a key component in the 'Showtime' era of Lakers basketball. Over his 20-year NBA career his team succeeded in making the playoffs 18 times and past the 1st round in 14 of them; his team reached the NBA Finals 10 times. At the time of his retirement in 1989, Abdul-Jabbar was the NBA's all-time leader in points scored (38,387), games played (1,560), minutes played (57,446), field goals made (15,837), field goal attempts (28,307), blocked shots (3,189), defensive rebounds (9,394), and personal fouls (4,657). He remains the all-time leading scorer in the NBA, and is ranked 3rd all-time in both rebounds and blocks. In 2007 ESPN voted him the greatest center of all time, and in 2008 they named him the 'greatest player in college basketball history.' Abdul-Jabbar has also been an actor, a basketball coach, and a best-selling author. In 2012, he was selected by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to be a U.S. global cultural ambassador.
April 16, 1922
Kingsley Amis was born in South London in 1922 and was educated at the City of London School and at St John’s College, Oxford, of which he is an Honorary Fellow. Between 1949 and 1963 he taught at the University College of Swansea, Princeton University and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He started his career as a poet and has continued to write in that medium ever since. His novels include LUCKY JIM (1954). TAKE A GIRL LIKE YOU (1960), THE ANTI-DEATH LEAGUE (1966), ENDING UP (1974), THE ALTERATION (1976), JAKE’S THING (1978) and STANLEY AND THE WOMEN (1984). His novel, THE OLD DEVILS, won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1986. Among his other publications are NEW MAPS OF HELL, a survey of science fiction (1960), RUDYARD KIPLING AND HIS WORLD (1975) and THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION (1981). He published his COLLECTED POEMS in 1979, and has also edited THE NEW OXFORD BOOK OF LIGHT VERSE and THE FABER POPULAR RECITER. Kingsley Amis was awarded the CBE in 1981.
April 16, 1947
Fulvio Testa is an artist working mainly in watercolor and oils. Since 1971 he has illustrated children's books, a number of which have been published by the New York Review of Books. He has had numerous exhibitions in the United States and Europe.
April 16, 1844
Anatole France (born François-Anatole Thibault, 16 April 1844 – 12 October 1924) was a French poet, journalist, and novelist. He was born in Paris, and died in Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire. He was a successful novelist, with several best-sellers. Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters. He was a member of the Académie française, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of his literary achievements. France is also widely believed to be the model for narrator Marcel's literary idol Bergotte in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
April 16, 1896
Tristan Tzara (born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro; April 16, 1896 – December 25, 1963) was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement. Under the influence of Adrian Maniu, the adolescent Tzara became interested in Symbolism and co-founded the magazine Simbolul with Ion Vinea (with whom he also wrote experimental poetry) and painter Marcel Janco. During World War I, after briefly collaborating on Vinea's Chemarea, he joined Janco in Switzerland. There, Tzara's shows at the Cabaret Voltaire and Zunfthaus zur Waag, as well as his poetry and art manifestos, became a main feature of early Dadaism. His work represented Dada's nihilistic side, in contrast with the more moderate approach favored by Hugo Ball. After moving to Paris in 1919, Tzara, by then one of the "presidents of Dada", joined the staff of Littérature magazine, which marked the first step in the movement's evolution toward Surrealism. He was involved in the major polemics which led to Dada's split, defending his principles against André Breton and Francis Picabia, and, in Romania, against the eclectic modernism of Vinea and Janco. This personal vision on art defined his Dadaist plays The Gas Heart (1921) and Handkerchief of Clouds (1924). A forerunner of automatist techniques, Tzara eventually aligned himself with Breton's Surrealism, and under its influence wrote his celebrated utopian poem The Approximate Man. During the final part of his career, Tzara combined his humanist and anti-fascist perspective with a communist vision, joining the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance during World War II, and serving a term in the National Assembly. Having spoken in favor of liberalization in the People's Republic of Hungary just before the Revolution of 1956, he distanced himself from the French Communist Party, of which he was by then a member. In 1960, he was among the intellectuals who protested against French actions in the Algerian War. Tristan Tzara was an influential author and performer, whose contribution is credited with having created a connection from Cubism and Futurism to the Beat Generation, Situationism and various currents in rock music. The friend and collaborator of many modernist figures, he was the lover of dancer Maja Kruscek in his early youth and was later married to Swedish artist and poet Greta Knutson.
April 16, 1948
Marvin W. Meyer (April 16, 1948 – August 16, 2012) was a scholar of religion and a tenured professor at Chapman University, in Orange, California. He was the Griset Professor of Bible and Christian Studies at Chapman University and Director of the Albert Schweitzer Institute. He was also Director of the Coptic Magical Texts Project of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity. Dr. Meyer authored numerous books and articles on Greco-Roman and Christian religions in antiquity and late antiquity, and on Albert Schweitzer's ethic of reverence for life. He had been interviewed on television programs that aired on ABC, BBC, CNN, PBS, A&E, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, and the National Geographic Channel. Professor Meyer was best known for his translations of the texts of documents associated with the ancient mystery religions, early Christian magic, and Gnostic texts, of which the most notable have been the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Judas, the former of which is included among the Nag Hammadi library. Meyer edited a collection of English translations of the Nag Hammadi texts for the HarperOne imprint, the most recently revised edition of which has been released as the Nag Hammadi Scriptures in 2007, including help from James M. Robinson who has edited an earlier publication of the library. He was regarded as an authority on Gnosticism and had worked on many books on the subject.Meyer died of melanoma on August 16, 2012.
April 16, 1871
Edmund John Millington Synge (16 April 1871 – 24 March 1909) was an Irish playwright, poet, prose writer, travel writer and collector of folklore. He was a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival and was one of the co-founders of the Abbey Theatre. He is best known for his play The Playboy of the Western World, which caused riots in Dublin during its opening run at the Abbey Theatre.
April 16, 1972
Tracy K. Smith is the United States Poet Laureate. She is the author of four acclaimed books of poetry, including Wade in the Water and Life on Mars, winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize, a New York Times Notable Book, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and a New Yorker, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. A professor of creative writing at Princeton University, she lives in Princeton with her family.
April 17, 1953
Pierre Assouline (born 17 April 1953) is a writer and journalist. He was born in Casablanca, Morocco. He has published several novels and biographies, and also contributes articles for the print media and broadcasts for radio.
April 17, 1929
Mariama Bâ (April 17, 1929–August 17, 1981) was a Senegalese author and feminist, who wrote in French. Born in Dakar, she was raised a Muslim, but at an early age came to criticise what she perceived as inequalities between the sexes resulting from African traditions. Raised by her traditional grandparents, she had to struggle even to gain an education, because they did not believe that girls should be taught. Bâ later married a Senegalese member of Parliament, Obèye Diop, but divorced him and was left to care for their nine children. Her frustration with the fate of African women—as well as her ultimate acceptance of it—is expressed in her first novel, So Long a Letter. In it she depicts the sorrow and resignation of a woman who must share the mourning for her late husband with his second, younger wife. Abiola Irele called it ‘the most deeply felt presentation of the female condition in African fiction’. This short book was awarded the first Noma Prize for Publishing in Africa in 1980. Bâ died a year later after a protracted illness, before her second novel, Scarlet Song, which describes the hardships a woman faces when her husband abandons her for a younger woman he knew at youth, was published.
April 17, 1885
Karen von Blixen-Finecke (17 April 1885 – 7 September 1962), née Karen Christenze Dinesen, was a Danish author also known by her pen name Isak Dinesen. She also wrote under the pen names Osceola and Pierre Andrézel. Blixen wrote works in Danish, French, and English. Blixen is best known for Out of Africa, her account of living in Kenya, and one of her stories, Babette's Feast, both of which have been adapted into highly acclaimed, Academy Award-winning motion pictures. Prior to the release of the first film, she was noted for her Seven Gothic Tales, for which she is also known in Denmark. Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, described it as ‘a mistake’ that Blixen was not awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature during the 1930s. She never did win, though she finished in third place behind Graham Greene in 1961, the year Ivo Andric was awarded the prize.
April 17, 1957
Journalist and bestselling novelist Nick Hornby is best known for his portraits of dysfunctional Peter Pans -- clueless postmodern males in various stages of arrested development who discover, often to their chagrin, that growing up is a process involving far more than the passage of time.
April 17, 1903
Yvonne Kapp was born and has lived most of her life in London. In the late twenties she was literary editor of Vogue, working in Paris. In the thirties she worked full-time for anti-fascist refugee committees in London. Subsequently she became, and remained throughout the war, chief research officer for the Amalgamated Engineering Union; she was then employed in the field of industrial research by the British Medical Research Council. Her translations include TALES FROM THE CALENDAR by Bertolt Brecht, and THE CORRESPONDENCE OF FREDERICK ENGELS AND PAUL AND LAURA LAFARGUE.
April 17, 1928
Cynthia Ozick (born April 17, 1928) is an American-Jewish short story writer, novelist, and essayist. Cynthia Shoshana Ozick was born in New York City, the second of two children. She moved to the Bronx with her Russian-born parents, Celia (Regelson) and William Ozick, proprietors of the Park View Pharmacy in the Pelham Bay neighborhood. As a girl, Ozick helped to deliver prescriptions. Growing up in the Bronx, she remembers stones thrown at her and being called a Christ-killer as she ran past the two churches in her neighborhood. In school she was publicly shamed for refusing to sing Christmas carols. She attended Hunter College High School in Manhattan. She earned her B.A. from New York University and went on to study English Literature at Ohio State University, where she completed an M.A. in English literature, focusing on the novels of Henry James. Ozick is married to Bernard Hallote, a lawyer. Their daughter, Rachel Hallote, is an associate professor of history at SUNY Purchase and head of its Jewish studies program. Ozick is the niece of the Hebraist Abraham Regelson. She lives in Westchester County, New York. Ozick's fiction and essays are often about Jewish American life, but she also writes on a broad range of topics including politics, history, and literary criticism. In addition, she has written and translated poetry. The Holocaust and its aftermath is also a dominant theme. Much of her work explores the disparaged self, the reconstruction of identity after immigration, trauma and movement from one class to another. In 1971, Ozick received the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for her short story collection, The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories. In 1997, she received the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for Fame and Folly. Three of her stories won first prize in the O. Henry competition. In 1986, she was selected as the first winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story. In 2000, she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Quarrel & Quandary. Her novel Heir to the Glimmering World (2004) (published as The Bear Boy in the United Kingdom) won high literary praise. Ozick was on the shortlist for the 2005 Man Booker International Prize, and in 2008 she was awarded the PEN/Nabokov Award and the PEN/Malamud Award, which was established by Bernard Malamud’s family to honor excellence in the art of the short story. Her novel Foreign Bodies was shortlisted for the Orange Prize (2012) and the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize (2013). David Foster Wallace called Ozick one of the greatest living American writers. She has been described as 'the Athena of America’s literary pantheon,' the 'Emily Dickinson of the Bronx,' and 'one of the most accomplished and graceful literary stylists of her time.'
April 17, 1962
Roberto Quesada was born on April 17, 1962 in Honduras, where he now lives, His collection of stories, El Desertor, was published in Spanish in 1985. It was followed in 1988 by the Spanish-language edition of THE SHIPS (Los barcos). THE SHIPS is his first book to appear in English.
April 17, 1924
Donald Richie (17 April 1924 – 19 February 2013) was an American-born author who wrote about the Japanese people, the culture of Japan, and especially Japanese cinema. Although he considered himself primarily a film historian, Richie also directed a number of experimental films, the first when he was 17.
April 17, 1902
Jaime Mario Torres Bodet (17 April 1902 – 13 May 1974) was a prominent Mexican politician and writer who served in the executive cabinet of three Presidents of Mexico. A native of Mexico City, in the 1920s he was a prominent member of the literary group Los Contemporáneos.
April 17, 1944
Solomon Moiseyevich Volkov (born 17 April 1944) is a Russian journalist and musicologist.
April 17, 1929
Stanley Weintraub (born April 17, 1929) is an American historian and biographer. He is an expert on George Bernard Shaw. Weintraub was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on April 17, 1929. He was the eldest child of Benjamin and Ray Segal Weintraub. He attended South Philadelphia High School, and then he attended West Chester State Teachers College (now West Chester University of Pennsylvania) where he received his B.S. in education in 1949. He continued his education at Temple University where he received his master's degree in English "in absentia," as he was called to duty in the Korean War. He received a commission in the Army as a second lieutenant, and served with the Eighth Army in Korea, receiving a Bronze Star. After the war, he enrolled at Pennsylvania State University in September 1953; his doctoral dissertation "Bernard Shaw, Novelist" was accepted on May 6, 1956. He married Rodelle Horwitz in 1954; they have three children, and now live in Newark, Delaware. Except for visiting appointments, he remained at Penn State for all of his career, finally attaining the rank of Evan Pugh Professor of Arts and Humanities, with emeritus status on retirement in 2000. From 1970 to 1990 he was also Director of Penn State's Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies.
April 17, 1880
Sir Charles Leonard Woolley (17 April 1880 – 20 February 1960) was a British archaeologist best known for his excavations at Ur in Mesopotamia. He is recognized as one of the first "modern" archaeologists, who excavated in a methodical way, keeping careful records, and using them to reconstruct ancient life and history. Woolley was knighted in 1935 for his contributions to the discipline of archaeology.
April 17, 1936
David Kunzle, Los Angeles, California, is distinguished professor (emeritus) of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of "Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Topffer" and "Rodolphe Topffer: The Complete Comic Strips", both published by University Press of Mississippi
April 17, 1919
Born in Buenos Aires, Juan Rodolfo Wilcock (17 April 1919 - 16 March 1978) was was an Argentine writer, poet, critic and translator, and a member of the circle of innovative writers that included Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo. Later self-exiled in Rome, Wilcock became a leading Italian writer, publishing numerous books of poetry, drama, journalism, fiction, and translation. His first known literary work and accomplishment came in 1940 under the title Libro de poemas y canciones (‘Book of Poems and Songs’) which earned the Martín Fierro, a prize given by the Argentine Society of Writers (SADE). In 1945 Wilcock undertook the self-publication of two collections of poetry: Ensayos de poesía lírica and Persecución de las musas menores. The following year he would again obtain the award granted by the Argentine Society of Writers (SADE) for his Paseo Sentimental. Also in 1946, Wilcock published his Los hermosos días. At the time, General Juan Peron’s regime was suffocating intellectual life in Argentina; as World War II was over in Europe, many chose to relocate to the newly liberated capitals of the old world. In 1951 Wilcock left Argentina for the first time in a visit to Italy. He traveled in the company of Ocampo and Bioy Casares. By 1953 he was residing in London earning a living as a translator and a commentator for the BBC. After a short return to Buenos Aires in 1954 he once again set sail for Italy where he would settle for good three years later.
April 17, 1949
Patrizia Cavalli was born in Todi, Umbria, and now lives in Rome. She has published six collections of poetry: Le mie poesie non cambieranno il mondo; Il cielo (The Sky); Poesie 1974–1992 (Poems); L'io singolare proprio mio (The All Mine Singular I); Sempre aperto teatro (The Forever Open Theater); and Pigre divinità e pigra sorte (Lazy Gods, Lazy Fate). She has also published translations of Shakespeare and Molière. Gini Alhadeff published a memoir, The Sun at Midday: Tales of a Mediterranean Family, and a novel, Diary of a Djinn. She was born in Alexandria, Egypt, of Italian parents. She is completing The Magic Horn, about a Swiss-American psychiatrist and her therapeutic sculpture garden at Bellevue Hospital.
April 18, 1947
Kathy Acker (née Karen Lehmann; April 18, 1947 – November 30, 1997) was an American experimental novelist, punk poet, playwright, essayist, postmodernist and sex-positive feminist writer. She was strongly influenced by the Black Mountain School, William S. Burroughs, David Antin, French critical theory, philosophy and pornography.
April 18, 1911
James David Hart (April 18, 1911 – 23 July 1990) was an American literary scholar and professor at University of California, Berkeley for fifty-four years. He is most notable for writing The Oxford Companion to American Literature and A Companion to California.
April 18, 1925
Born in New Orleans of mixed Black and Jewish parentage, Kaufman was one of fourteen children. During twenty years in the Merchant Marine, he cultivated an intense taste for literature on his long sea voyages. Settling in California, in the ‘50s, he became active in the burgeoning West Coast literary scene. Disappointment, drugs, and imprisonment led him to take a ten-year vow of complete silence that lasted until 1973. The present volume includes previously uncollected poems written prior to his p1 edge and newer work composed in the years 1973-1978, before the poet once again lapsed into silence. Kaufman’s earlier books are SOLITUDES CROWDED WITH LONELINESS (New Directions, 1965) and GOLDEN SARDINE (City Lights. 1967). Raymond Foye, who edited and introduced THE ANCIENT RAIN, lives in New York City. His anthology, THE UNKNOWN POE, was published by City lights in 1980.
April 18, 1882
José Bento Monteiro Lobato, (born April 18, 1882, Taubaté, Brazil—died July 4, 1948, São Paulo), writer and publisher, forerunner of the Modernist movement in Brazilian literature. Originally a lawyer and coffee planter in the interior of São Paulo state, Monteiro Lobato wrote an unpretentious letter to a São Paulo newspaper, describing the droughts and brushfires in the interior. The editor asked for more articles and Lobato replied with the sketches and short stories, later collected in his book Urupês (1918; Mushrooms). In these he introduced the character Jeca Tatu (Joe Armadillo), who became the symbol of the Brazilian backlander. Poor Jeca Tatu, Lobato comments. You are so handsome in novels and so ugly in real life! You don’t talk; you don’t sing; you don’t love. A man of action, Monteiro Lobato moved to São Paulo, founded the literary review Revista do Brasil and a publishing house, and gathered around him a circle of new literary talents. Critical and rebellious, he was in and out of prison and exile many times. He also wrote children’s books enjoyed equally well by adults.
April 18, 1907
Stephen Longstreet (April 18, 1907, New York City, NY - February 20, 2002, Century City, CA) was an American author. Born Chauncey Weiner, he was known as Stephen Longstreet from 1939. He wrote as Paul Haggard, David Ormsbee and Thomas Burton, and Longstreet, as well as his birth name. The 1948 Broadway musical High Button Shoes was based on Longstreet's semi-autobiographical 1946 novel, The Sisters Liked Them Handsome. Under contract at Warner Bros. in the 1940s, Longstreet wrote The Jolson Story and Stallion Road, based on his novel of the same name and starring Ronald Reagan. He later wrote The Helen Morgan Story, and as a television writer in the 1950s and 1960s he wrote for Playhouse 90. Longstreet's book, Nell Kimball: Her Life as an American Madam, by herself, is a hoax biography that was partly plagiarized from the works of Herbert Asbury, as was his novel The Wilder Shore from Ashbury's The Barbary Coast. Longstreet's nonfiction works include San Francisco, '49 to '06 and Chicago: 1860 to 1920, as well as A Century on Wheels, The Story of Studebaker and a Jewish cookbook, The Joys of Jewish Cooking, that he wrote with his wife and occasional collaborator, Ethel (Wikidata). The world of jazz was a constant theme throughout Longstreet's life. A number of his books dealt with jazz, Including Jazz From A to Z: A Graphic Dictionary, his 100th book, published in 1989. He died on February 20, 2002.
April 18, 1923
Leif Thormod Panduro (18 April 1923 – 16 January 1977) was a Danish writer, a novelist, short story writer and dramatist. A dentist by profession, he began in his thirties to write stories about people who can't conform to society's rules for one reason or another. Rend mig i traditionerne, (Kick me in the traditions) from 1959 is about an adolescent who finally ends up in an asylum because he thinks society is mad. This novel was made into a film in 1979. Fern fra Danmark (Mr. Fern from Denmark) is about a man who wakes up in a hospital with amnesia but discovers more and more about a not very pleasant self. Panduro's books and plays grew increasingly pessimistic about the orderly middle-class society and its senseless norms. Panduro's books were and are still popular in Denmark. In 1970 he won the Danish booksellers prize De Gyldne Laurbær. Several of his novels were later made into films. His books are used in the Danish public schools. In 1971 he was awarded with the Grand Prize of the Danish Academy and five years later he became a member of the Danish Academy.
April 18, 1772
David Ricardo (18 April 1772 – 11 September 1823) was a British political economist, one of the most influential of the classical economists along with Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith and James Mill.
April 18, 1930
Roberto Sosa (18 April 1930 – 23 May 2011) was an author and poet born in Yoro, Honduras. He spent his early life working hard to help provide for his poor family. When he was almost thirty years old, he published his first book. Sosa published Los Pobres in 1969, which won the Adonais Prize in Spain. Un Mundo Para Todos Dividido, published in 1971, won the Casa de las Americas Prize in Cuba. By 1990, he had published six books of poetry, three of prose, and two anthologies of Honduran literature. In 1990, he published Obra Completa (Complete Works). The Difficult Days, Poems, The Common Grief, and The Return of the River have all been translated into English. At the time of his death, Sosa lived in Tegucigalpa, the capital city of Honduras. He was the editor of a magazine, Presente, and the president of the Honduras Journalists’ Union. He also taught literature at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras.
April 18, 1928
Gilbert Waldbauer is Professor Emeritus of Entomology at University of Illinois. He is the author of eight books, including Fireflies, Honey, and Silk (UC Press), A Walk around the Pond, and What Good Are Bugs?.
April 18, 1952
Gyan Prakash is the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University. He is the author of Bonded Histories and Another Reason (Princeton).
April 18, 1901
László Németh (April 18, 1901, Baia Mare, Romania - March 3, 1975, Budapest, Hungary) was a Hungarian dentist, writer, dramatist and essayist. He was born in Nagybánya the son of József Németh (1873-1946) and Vilma Gaál (1879-1957). Over the Christmas of 1925, he married Ella Démusz (1905-1989), the daughter of János Démusz, a keeper of a public house. Between 1926 and 1944 they had six daughters, but two of them died in infancy. In 1959 he visited the Soviet Union. In the last part of his life he lived and worked in Sajkód. He died from a stroke on 3 March 1975 in Budapest and was buried in Farkasréti Cemetery, Budapest, and now shares a grave with his wife.
April 18, 1969
C. Dale Young practices medicine full-time and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. A recipient of multiple fellowships, his short fiction and poems have appeared widely. He lives in San Francisco.
April 19, 1886
Manuel Carneiro de Sousa Bandeira Filho (Recife, Pernambuco, April 19, 1886 – Rio de Janeiro, October 13, 1968) was a poet, literary critic, and translator. Bandeira wrote over 20 books of poetry and prose. In 1904, he found out that he suffered from tuberculosis, which encouraged him to move from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro, because of Rio's tropical beach weather. In 1922, after an extended stay in Europe where Bandeira met many prominent authors and painters, he contributed poems of political and social criticism to the Modernist Movement in São Paulo. Bandeira began to publish his most important works in 1924. Bandeira became a respected Brazilian author and wrote articles in several newspapers and magazines, as well as teaching Hispanic Literature in Rio de Janeiro. Bandeira began to translate into Portuguese canonical plays of world literature in 1956, which he continued to do until his last days. He died in Rio de Janeiro. Bandeira's poems are of a unique delicacy and beauty. Recurrent themes can be found in his works: the love of women, his childhood in the Northeast city of Recife, friends, health problems. His delicate health affected his poems. Many of Manuel Bandeira's poems depict the limits of the human body. A Literature professor, he was elected to the Brazilian Letters Academy where he was the third occupant of the 24th Chair whose patron was Júlio Ribeiro. His election took place on August 29, 1940, succeeding Luís Guimarães and he was formally introduced by academician Ribeiro Couto on November 30, 1940. He died at the age of 82 on October 18, 1968 in Botafogo (a borough of Rio de Janeiro). His funeral took place at the grand hall of the Brazilian Letters Academy and he was buried at the St. John the Baptist (Port. São João Batista) Cemetery.
April 19, 1955
Neil Devindra Bissoondath (born April 19, 1955 in Arima, Trinidad and Tobago) is a Canadian author who lives in Ste-Foy, Quebec. He is a noted writer of fiction, and also an outspoken critic of Canada's system of multiculturalism. He is the nephew of authors V.S. Naipaul and Shiva Naipaul. Bissoondath attended St. Mary's College in Trinidad and Tobago. Although he was from a Hindu tradition, he was able to adapt to a Catholic high school. Bissoondath describes himself as not very religious and distrustful of dogma. In the early Seventies, political upheaval and economic collapse had created a climate of chaos and violence in the island nation. In 1973, at the age of eighteen, Bissoondath left Trinidad and settled in Ontario, where he studied at York University, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in French in 1977. He then taught English and French at the Inlingua School of Languages and the Toronto Language Workshop. He won the McClelland and Stewart award and the National Magazine award, both in 1986, for the short story ‘Dancing.’ In 2010 he was made a Chevalier of the Ordre national du Québec.
April 19, 1938
Peter Brooks is Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. He is the author of many works of literary criticism, including Reading for the Plot, The Melodramatic Imagination, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling, Troubling Confessions, and Realist Vision. He has also published a novel, World Elsewhere (Simon & Schuster).
April 19, 1900
Richard Arthur Warren Hughes OBE (19 April 1900 – 28 April 1976) was a British writer of poems, short stories, novels and plays. He was born in Weybridge, Surrey. His father was Arthur Hughes, a civil servant, and his mother Louisa Grace Warren who had been brought up in the West Indies in Jamaica. He was educated first at Charterhouse School and graduated from Oriel College, Oxford during 1922. A Charterhouse schoolmaster had sent Hughes's first published work to the magazine The Spectator during 1917. The article, written as a school essay, was an unfavorable criticism of The Loom of Youth, by Alec Waugh, a recently published novel which caused a furore for its account of homosexual passions between British schoolboys in a public school. At Oxford he met Robert Graves, also an Old Carthusian (graduate of Charterhouse), and they co-edited a poetry publication, Oxford Poetry, during 1921. Hughes's short play The Sisters' Tragedy was being staged in the West End of London at the Royal Court Theatre by 1922. He was the author of the world's first radio play, Danger, commissioned from him for the BBC by Nigel Playfair and broadcast on 15 January 1924. Hughes was employed as a journalist and travelled widely before he married, during 1932, the painter Frances Bazley. They settled for a period in Norfolk and then during 1934 at Castle House, Laugharne in south Wales. Dylan Thomas stayed with Hughes and wrote his book Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog whilst living at Castle House. Hughes was instrumental in Thomas relocating permanently to the area. He wrote only four novels, the most famous of which is The Innocent Voyage (1929), or A High Wind in Jamaica, as Hughes renamed it soon after its initial publication. Set in the 19th century, it explores the events which follow the accidental capture of a group of English children by pirates: the children are revealed as considerably more amoral than the pirates (it was in this novel that Hughes first described the cocktail Hangman's Blood). During 1938, he wrote an allegorical novel In Hazard based on the true story of the S.S. Phemius that was caught in the 1932 Cuba hurricane for 4 days during its maximum intensity. He wrote volumes of children's stories, including The Spider's Palace. During World War II, Hughes had a desk job in the Admiralty. He met the architects Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, and Jane's and Max's children stayed with the Hughes family for much of that time. After the end of the war, he spent ten years writing scripts for Ealing Studios, and published no more novels until 1961. Of the trilogy The Human Predicament, only the first two volumes, The Fox in the Attic (1961) and The Wooden Shepherdess (1973), were complete when he died; twelve chapters, less than 50 pages, of the final volume are now published. In these he describes the course of European history from the 1920s through World War II, including real characters and events—such as Hitler's escape after the abortive Munich putsch—as well as fictional. Later in life Hughes relocated to Ynys in Gwynedd. He was churchwarden of Llanfihangel-y-traethau, the village church, where he was buried when he died at home in 1976. Hughes was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and, in the United States, an honorary member of both the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was awarded the OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) during 1946.
April 19, 1931
Etheridge Knight (April 19, 1931 – March 10, 1991) was an African-American poet who made his name in 1968 with his debut volume, Poems from Prison. The book recalls in verse his eight-year-long sentence after his arrest for robbery in 1960. By the time he left prison, Knight had prepared a second volume featuring his own writings and works of his fellow inmates. This second book, first published in Italy under the title Voce negre dal carcere, appeared in English in 1970 as Black Voices from Prison. These works established Knight as one of the major poets of the Black Arts Movement, which flourished from the early 1960s through the mid-1970s. With roots in the Civil Rights Movement, Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, and the Black Power Movement, Etheridge Knight and other American artists within the movement sought to create politically engaged work that explored the African-American cultural and historical experience. Knight is also considered an important poet in the mainstream American tradition. In his 2012 book Understanding Etheridge Knight, Michael S. Collins calls Knight "a mighty American poet....He and Wallace Stevens stand as 'two poles of American poetry,' according to his better-known fellow writer Robert Bly. Or, rather, Knight was, as he often said, a poet of the belly: a poet of the earth and of the body, a poet of the feelings from which cries and blood oaths and arias come, while Stevens was a poet, arguably, of the ache left in the intellect after it tears itself from God. 'Ideas are not the source of poetry,' Knight told one interviewer. 'For me it's passion and feeling....'"
April 19, 1949
Antoni Libera (born April 19, 1949, in Warsaw) is a Polish writer, translator, literary critic, and theater director. He graduated from Warsaw University and received his Ph. D. from the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the Pen Club, the Polish Writers Association (Stowarzyszenie Pisarzy Polskich), and the American Samuel Beckett Society. Libera is best known for his translations and productions of Samuel Beckett's plays. He has translated all Beckett’s dramatic works into Polish, as well as some of his other works. He has also directed many of Beckett’s plays in Poland, Great Britain, Ireland, and the U.S. Many famous Polish actors have appeared in those plays, including Tadeusz Lomnicki, Zbigniew Zapasiewicz, Maja Komorowska, Adam Ferency, Zbigniew Zamachowski, and Andrzej Seweryn, along with British actors like Barry McGovern and David Warrilow. His other translations include Shakespeare ‘Macbeth’, Sophocles ‘Antigon’ and ‘Oedipus the King’, Oscar Wilde ‘Salome’, Friedrich Hölderlin, Constantine Cavafy, and others. He has translated a number of opera librettos as well, such as ‘Death in Venice’ by Benjamin Britten, ‘Black mask’, and ‘Ubu King’ by Krzysztof Penderecki. In 1990 he was commissioned by the London Royal Court Theatre to write the play ‘Eastern Promises,’ which was performed in that theater and published in ‘The May Days Dialogues’ by Methuen in 1990 (Polish title: ‘Czy Europa musi zginac’ published in ‘Dialog’). Libera's first novel, ‘Madame’ (1998), was awarded the Grand Prix from Znak (a major Polish publishing house) and nominated for the 1999 Nike Literary Award. In 2002 it was again nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The novel has been translated into 20 languages. In 2009, Libera published the autobiographical work ‘Godot i jego cie?’ (Godot’s Shadow), which was nominated for an Angelus Award and the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature. From 1988 to 1993, Libera was one of the editors of the magazine ‘Puls’, and from 1996 to 2001 he was a literary director at the Dramatic Theater in Warsaw. In October 2010 he was awarded the Silver Medal ‘Gloria Artis.’
April 19, 1948
Karen Lystra is Professor of American Studies at California State University at Fullerton. She is the author of Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (1989).
April 19, 1943
Ray Raphael (born April 19, 1943) is an American historian and author of twenty books. He is noted for his work on the American Revolution, the Constitution, and the regional history of Northern California.
April 19, 1923
William A. Shack (April 19, 1923 - March 31, 2000), distinguished anthropologist and Africanist, was Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Among his books are The Central Ethiopians: Amhara, Tigrina and Related Peoples (1975) and The Gurage: A People of the Ensete Culture (1966).
May 1, 1900
Ignazio Silone (1 May 1900 – 22 August 1978) was the pseudonym of Secondino Tranquilli, an Italian author and politician. He was born in the town of Pescina in the Abruzzo region and lost many family members, including his mother, in the 1915 Avezzano earthquake. His father had died in 1911. Silone joined the Young Socialists group of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), rising to be their leader. He was a founding member of the breakaway Communist Party of Italy (PCd'I) in 1921, and became one of its covert leaders during the Fascist regime. Ignazio's brother Romolo Tranquilli was arrested in 1928 for being a member of the PCI, and he died in prison in 1931 as a result of the severe beatings he received. Silone left Italy in 1927 on a mission to the Soviet Union, and settled in Switzerland in 1930. While there, he declared his opposition to Joseph Stalin, and the leadership of Comintern; consequently, he was expelled from the PCI. He suffered from tuberculosis and severe clinical depression, and spent nearly a year in Swiss clinics; in Switzerland Aline Valangin helped and played host to him and other migrants. As he recovered, Silone began writing his first novel, Fontamara, published in German translation in 1933. The English edition, first published by Penguin Books in September 1934, went through frequent reprintings during the 1930s, with the events of the Spanish Civil War and the escalation towards the outbreak of World War II increasing attention for its subject material. The United States Army printed unauthorised versions of Fontamara and Bread and Wine and distributed them to the Italians during the liberation of Italy after 1943. These two books together with The Seed Beneath the Snow form the Abruzzo Trilogy. Silone returned to Italy only in 1944, and two years later he was elected as a PSI deputy. In the course of World War II, he had become the leader of a clandestine Socialist organization operating from Switzerland to support resistance groups in Nazi Germany-occupied Northern Italy. He also became an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) agent under the pseudonym of Len. Following his contribution to anti-communist anthology The God That Failed (1949), Silone joined the Congress of Cultural Freedom and edited Tempo Presente. In 1967, with the discovery that the journal received secret funds from the United States Central Intelligence Agency, Silone resigned and devoted all his energies to the writing of novels and autobiographical essays. In 1969, he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, a literary award for writers who deal with the theme of individual freedom and society. In 1971, he was the recipient of the prestigious Prix mondial Cino Del Duca. Italian historians Dario Biocca and Mauro Canali found documents which, they claimed, 'proved' that Silone acted as an informant for the Fascist police from 1919 until 1930. The two historians published the results of their research in a work titled L'informatore. Silone, i comunisti e la polizia. In spite of bitter controversy in the Italian press, Biocca's and Canali's work proved to be substantiated and was reviewed in a positive light by the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, The Nation, New Left Review and others. A 2005 biography by Biocca also includes documents showing Silone's involvement with the American intelligence (the OSS) during and after the World War, ultimately suggesting that Silone's political stands (as well as extensive literary work) should be reconsidered in light of a more complex personality and political engagements. Ignazio Silone was married to Darina Laracy, an Irish student of Italian literature. He died in Geneva, Switzerland in 1978.
April 19, 1923
Lygia Fagundes Telles (born April 19, 1923) is a Brazilian novelist and short-story writer. She was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, but spent her childhood in small towns in the state where her father served as district attorney, police commissioner, and a judge. This childhood experience provided the imaginative background for many of her stories. Today she is a lawyer and president of the Brazilian Cinematheque, founded by her late husband, film critic and author Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes, whose novel P.’S THREE WOMEN is available from Avon Books. Lygia Fagundes Telles has published three novels, a half dozen novellas, and seven short story collections. THE MARBLE DANCE was her first novel. Her first book of short stories, Praia Viva (Living Beach), was published in 1944. In 1949 got the Afonso Arinos award for her short stories book O Cacto Vermelho (Red Cactus). Among her most successful books are Ciranda de Pedra (The Marble Dance) (1954), Verão no Aquário (1963), Antes do Baile Verde (1970), Seminário dos Ratos (1977) and As Horas Nuas, (1989). In 1969 she was awarded the Cannes Prix International des Femmes for her short story ‘Before the Green Masquerade’ (Antes do Baile Verde) chosen from among the works of authors from twenty-one countries. Her most famous novel is As Meninas (The Girl in the Photograph), which tells the story of three young women in the early 1970s, a hard time in the political history of Brazil due to the repression by the military dictatorship. In 2005 she won the Camões Prize, the greatest literary award in the Portuguese language. She is one of the three female members of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.
April 19, 1885
Paul Jordan-Smith (April 19, 1885 – June 17, 1971) was an American Unitarian minister who worked as a writer and editor. Academically, he is regarded as one of the foremost authorities on the 17th-century British author and scholar Robert Burton. However, he is most well-known for his participation in the hoax art movement Disumbrationism. Paul Jordan Smith (his name was not hyphenated until later in life; see below) was born in Virginia and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee. A secret and troubled marriage drove him from Tennessee,and he decided to become a Unitarian-Universalist minister. He moved to Illinois, where he received a bachelor of divinity degree in 1908 from Ryder Divinity School in Galesburg. He served for brief periods in ministerial posts around the Midwest, lectured on religious topics, and ran the Humanist Lyceum Bureau. He ended up in Chicago around 1910, where he got a job as a minister and ran a settlement house. He also enrolled part-time in graduate classes at the University of Chicago and developed a broad acquaintance among both literary and social activist circles, including lawyer Clarence Darrow, activist Emma Goldman, novelist John Cowper Powys, editor and publisher Margaret Anderson, writer Floyd Dell, Chicago Little Theatre founder Maurice Browne, and bookseller George Millard. In the process, he became a passionate book collector and decided on a career in literature. Jordan Smith also developed an interest in art through visits to the Art Institute of Chicago. In late 1913—in the midst of an unhappy divorce from his then-wife Ethel Sloan Park, who was represented by Clarence Darrow, a family friend—Jordan Smith obtained a new job through his University of Chicago connections. He got a position at First Unitarian Church in Berkeley, California, as a substitute minister and enrolled as a doctoral student in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Jordan-Smith then became romantically involved with the writer Sarah Bixby Smith, whose husband Arthur Maxson Smith headed up First UnitarianAr. It was around this time that Paul assumed the hyphenated Jordan-Smith as his last name, in part to disguise his liaison with Sarah, which he feared might damage his academic career. Despite this precaution, the English Department—then headed by Charles Mills Gayley—voted not to renew his fellowship, putting an end to his plans for an academic career.Jordan-Smith married Sarah on March 30, 1916, immediately after her divorce came through. The couple then moved with Sarah's children to her former home in Claremont, California, which had in the meantime been turned into a school for boys. In 1917, the school's lease ended and they began renovating the house back into a private residence, which they named Erewhon on completion. Around this time, they met and subsequently became friends with one of Sarah's cousins, the photographer Edward Weston, who made several photographic portraits of Jordan-Smith. Eventually, the couple moved to a mansion on Los Feliz Boulevard in Los Angeles, where Jordan-Smith had a detached library and writing studio on the property.Though Jordan-Smith did not have to work (thanks to Sarah's inherited wealth), he lectured around southern California, at women's clubs such as the Friday Morning Club (of which Sarah was later president), at the Ebell Club, and elsewhere. He also taught courses on English and American literature at the new University of California Extension program in Los Angeles. Encouraged by some of the philanthropists who attended his talks, he took on leadership of the recently formed People's Council of America for Peace and Democracy, an antiwar organization.The group did well until its leaders came under attack when the U.S. government began to crack down on antiwar opposition through the Espionage Act of 1917. To avoid prosecution, Jordan-Smith was obliged to give up making antiwar speeches and to swear that he did not have any German affiliations or friends. :315–322 Jordan-Smith served for a time as the educational director of the Walt Whitman School, a progressive secondary school founded in East Los Angeles in 1919. Jordan-Smith eventually left Sarah for his cousin Dorothy and the couple divorced. He died on June 17, 1971. Jordan-Smith had three children. His son Wilbur Jordan Smith was head of UCLA Library's Department of Special Collections from 1951 to 1971, and Wilbur's son Paul Jordan-Smith helped D.M. Dooling found Parabola magazine and served as its Epicycle editor. Jordan-Smith was a great admirer of the 17th-century British author and scholar Robert Burton. He co-edited the first all-English translation (having himself translated all of the Latin quotes) of Burton's magnum opus, The Anatomy of Melancholy, following it up with Bibliographica Burtoniana, which included both a study of Burton and a scholarly key to the sources Burton used in The Anatomy of Melancholy. He collected books relating to Burton, and after Sarah died, he gave the core of his collection to the Claremont Colleges Library in her memory. The Robert Burton Collection, as it is called, includes copies of the first six editions of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, a copy of the 1927 edition edited by Smith and Floyd Dell, and editions of various Renaissance Latin authors and others cited by Burton. Jordan-Smith also wrote one of the first books on James Joyce, A Key to the Ulysses of James Joyce. He dedicated this book to Powys, who had persuaded him in 1922 to buy a then-rare and expensive first edition of Ulysses during one of Powys's stays at Erewhon, which they then read together. Inspired by Sarah's ideas, Jordan-Smith collaborated with her on a feminist manifesto entitled The Soul of Woman: An Interpretation of the Philosophy of Feminism. It was published under his name in 1916. He also served for a time in the 1940s and 1950s as the literary critic for the Los Angeles Times. and as such was seen on the cinema screen in 1949 introducing the trailer for the new MGM motion picture The Secret Garden, under the headline 'Great Books Make Great Pictures'. His autobiography, The Road I Came, was published in 1960. His papers are housed in the UCLA Library of Special Collections. Jordan-Smith may be best known today for a hoax that he initiated in 1924, in part out of a dislike of modern art that was evident as far back as 1913, when he saw (and largely rejected) the traveling version of the notorious Armory Show at the Art Institute of Chicago.Giving himself the Russian-sounding pseudonym Pavel Jerdanowitch, Jordan-Smith painted a small group of crudely Postimpressionist canvases that he then entered in art exhibitions around the country as exemplars of a new art movement known as Disumbrationism. His canvases were well received on the whole until he got tired of sustaining the role and outed himself to a Los Angeles Times reporter in 1927.
April 20, 1492
Pietro Aretino (20 April 1492 – 21 October 1556) was an Italian author, playwright, poet, satirist, and blackmailer, who wielded immense influence on contemporary art and politics and invented modern literate pornography.
April 20, 1857
Herman Joachim Bang (20 April 1857 – 29 January 1912) was a Danish author, one of the men of the Modern Breakthrough. Bang was born into a noble family of Asserballe, on the small Danish island of Als, the son of a South Jutlandic vicar (a relative of N. F. S. Grundtvig). His family history was marked by insanity and disease. His paternal grandfather at times functioned as a father figure and impressed his grandson with stories of their family ties to the historical Hvide Clan. When he was twenty he published two volumes of critical essays on the realistic movement. In 1880 he published his novel Haabløse Slægter (Families Without Hope), which aroused immediate attention. The main character was a young man who had a relationship with an older woman. The book was considered obscene at the time and was banned. After some time spent in travel and a successful lecture tour of Norway and Sweden, he settled in Copenhagen and produced a series of novels and collections of short stories which placed him in the front rank of Scandinavian novelists. Among his more famous stories are Fædra (1883) and Tine (Tina, 1889). The latter won for its author the friendship of Henrik Ibsen and the enthusiastic admiration of Jonas Lie. Among his other works are Det hvide Hus (The White House, 1898), Excentriske Noveller (Eccentric Stories, 1885), Stille Eksistenser (Quiet Existences, 1886), Liv og Død (Life and Death, 1899), Englen Michael (The Angel Michael, 1902), a volume of poems (1889), and recollections, Ti Aar (Ten Years, 1891). Bang was homosexual, a fact which contributed to his isolation in the cultural life of Denmark and made him the victim of smear campaigns. He lived most of his life with his sister but found happiness for a few years with the German actor Max Eisfeld (1863–1935), with whom he lived in Prague in 1885–86. Uninterested in politics, he was distant from most of his colleagues in the naturalist movement. Failed as an actor, Bang earned fame as a theatre producer in Paris and in Copenhagen. He was a very productive journalist, writing for Danish, Nordic and German newspapers, developing modern reporting. His article on the fire at Christiansborg Palace is a landmark in Danish journalism. Bang is primarily concerned with the 'quiet existences', the disregarded and ignored people living boring and apparently unimportant lives. He is especially interested in describing lonely or isolated women. Ved Vejen (Katinka, 1886) describes the secret and never fulfilled passion of a young wife of a stationmaster, living in a barren marriage. Tine (1889), which has the war with Prussia in 1864 (the Second War of Schleswig) as background, tells the tragic love story of a young girl on the island of Als. Stuk (Stucco, 1887) tells the story of a young man's love affair that is fading away without any real explanation, against the background of the 'Gründerzeit' of Copenhagen and its superficial modernization and economic speculation. In Ludvigsbakke (1896) a young nurse squanders her love on a spineless childhood friend, who eventually deserts her in order to save his estate by marrying a rich heiress. Some of his books, including Tina and Katinka (English titles), have been translated into many languages and filmed. One film adaptation was Bang's novel Mikaël (1904), which was adapted into a film Michael (1924) by Carl Theodor Dreyer. Bang's works earned him renown as a leading European impressionist writer. Bang's last years were embittered by persecutions and declining health. He traveled widely in Europe, and during a lecture tour of the United States he was taken ill on the train and died in Ogden, Utah.
April 20, 1939
Peter Soyer Beagle (born April 20, 1939) is an American novelist and screenwriter, especially fantasy fiction. His best-known work is The Last Unicorn (1968), a fantasy novel he wrote in his twenties, which Locus subscribers voted the number five "All-Time Best Fantasy Novel" in 1987. During the last twenty-five years he has won several literary awards including a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2011.
April 20, 1898
Emmanuel Bove (20 April 1898 – 19 July 1945) was a French writer, who also published under the pseudonyms of Pierre Dugast and Jean Vallois.
April 20, 1939
Wayson Choy (born April 20, 1939) is a Canadian writer. Choy was born in Vancouver in 1939. A Chinese Canadian, he spent his childhood in the city's Chinatown. Choy graduated from Gladstone Secondary School and went on to attend the University of British Columbia, where he studied creative writing. Choy moved to Toronto in 1962, and taught at Humber College from 1967 to 2004. He continues to teach at the Humber School for Writers. He was president of Cahoots Theatre Company of Toronto from 1999 to 2002. Choy is the author of the novel The Jade Peony (1995) which won the Trillium Book Award and the City of Vancouver Book Award. In 2010, it was selected as one of five books for the CBC's annual Canada Reads competition. His memoir Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood (1999) won the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction and was nominated for a Governor General's Award. All That Matters, was published in 2004 and was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. In 2005, he was named a member of the Order of Canada. Three recently published monographs have featured chapters on Choy's publications up to Not Yet; these are: John Z. Ming Chen's The Influence of Daoism on Asian-Canadian Writers (Mellen, 2008), John Z. Ming Chen and Wei Li's A Study of Canadian Social Realist Literature: Neo-Marxist, Confucian, and Daoist Approaches (Inner Mongolia University Press, 2011), John Z. Ming Chen and Yuhua Ji's Canadian-Daoist Poetics, Ethics, and Aesthetics (Springer, 2015).
April 20, 1895
Henry Marie Joseph Frédéric Expedite Millon de Montherlant (20 April 1895 – 21 September 1972) was a French essayist, novelist, and dramatist. He was elected to the Académie française in 1960. Born in Paris, a descendant of an aristocratic (yet obscure) Picard family, he was educated at the Lycée Janson de Sailly and the Sainte-Croix boarding school at Neuilly-sur-Seine. Henry's father was a hard-line reactionary (to the extent of despising the post-Dreyfus Affair army as too subservient to the Republic, and refusing to have electricity or the telephone installed in his house). In 1912 Henry was expelled from the Catholic Sainte-Croix de Neuilly academy for a relationship with a fellow male student, a relationship that he would depict in his 1969 novel Les Garçons. After the deaths of his father and mother in 1914 and 1915, he went to live with his doting grandmother and eccentric uncles. Mobilised in 1916, he was wounded and decorated. Marked by his experience of war, he wrote Songe ('Dream'), an autobiographic novel, as well as his Chant funèbre pour les morts de Verdun (Funeral Chant for the Dead at Verdun), both exaltations of heroism during the Great War. De Montherlant first achieved critical success with the 1934 novel Les Célibataires, and sold millions of copies of his tetralogy Les Jeunes Filles, written from 1936 through 1939. In these years de Montherlant traveled extensively, mainly to Spain, Italy, and Algeria. During the Second World War after the fall of France in 1940 he remained in Paris and continued to write plays, poems, essays, and worked as a war correspondent. Some time in 1968, according to one source, de Montherlant was attacked and beaten in the streets of Paris, seriously injured and blinded in one eye. The British writer Peter Quennell, who edited a collection of translations of his works, recalled that de Montherlant attributed the eye injury to "a fall" instead; and mentions in confirmation that de Montherlant suffered from vertigo. After becoming almost blind in his last years, de Montherlant died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head after swallowing a cyanide capsule in 1972. His standard biography was written by Pierre Sipriot, and published in two volumes (1982 and 1990), revealing the full extent of de Montherlant's sexual habits. His early successes were works such as Les Célibataires (The Bachelors) in 1934, and the highly anti-feminist tetralogy Les Jeunes Filles (The Young Girls) (1936–1939), which sold millions of copies and was translated into 13 languages. His late novel Chaos and Night was published in 1963. The novels were praised by writers as diverse as Aragon, Bernanos, and Malraux. De Montherlant was well known for his anti-feminist and misogynistic views, as exemplified particularly in The Girls. Simone de Beauvoir considered his attitudes about women in detail in her The Second Sex. He wrote plays such as Pasiphaé (1936), La Reine morte (1942, the first of a series of historical dramas), Le Maître de Santiago (1947), Port-Royal (1954) and Le Cardinal d'Espagne (1960). He is particularly remembered as a playwright. In his plays as well as in his novels he frequently portrayed heroic characters displaying the moral standards he professed, and explored the 'irrationality and unpredictability of human behaviour'. He worked as an essayist also. In the collection L'Equinoxe de septembre (1938) he deplored the mediocrity of contemporary France and in Le solstice de Juin, (1941), he expressed his admiration for Wehrmacht and claimed that France had been justly defeated and conquered in 1940. Like many scions of the old aristocracy, he had hated the Third Republic, especially as it had become in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair. De Montherlant wrote articles for the Paris weekly, La Gerbe, directed by the pro-Nazi novelist and Catholic reactionary Alphonse de Chateaubriant. After the war, he was thus viewed as a collaborationist, and was punished by a one-year restriction on publishing. Although not openly gay, de Montherlant treated homosexual themes in his work, including his play La Ville dont le prince est un enfant (1952) and novel Les Garçons (The Boys), published in 1969 but written four or five decades earlier. He maintained a private correspondence with Roger Peyrefitte—author of Les Amitiés particulières (Special Friendships, 1943), also about relationships between boys at a Roman Catholic boarding school. De Montherlant is remembered for his aphorism "Happiness writes in white ink on a white page", often quoted in the shorter form "Happiness writes white".
April 20, 1950
Stephen Michael "Steve" Erickson (born April 20, 1950) is an American novelist. The recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, he is the only Southern California novelist to win the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award previously bestowed on William Gaddis, William H. Gass and John Barth.
April 20, 1929
Shizuko Go was born in Yokohama in 1929. She graduated from Tsurumi Higher School for Girls and, between recurrences of tuberculosis which continued until her late twenties, attended the Nihon Bungaku Gakko (a left-wing writers’ school) and took part in the Troika literary group led by writer Hiroshi No ma, a pacifist imprisoned during the war. Marriage and raising two sons postponed her writing debut until 1972, when the first part of Requiem appeared in a Yokohama ‘little magazine’ and the completed work was published in the literary review Bungakukai, receiving the prestigious Akutagawa Prize the following year. Go has since published several volumes of essays and short stories.
April 20, 1889
Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was a German politician who was the leader of the Nazi Party (NSDAP), Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and Führer ("leader") of Nazi Germany from 1934 to 1945. As dictator of Nazi Germany, he initiated World War II in Europe with the invasion of Poland in September 1939 and was a central figure of the Holocaust. Born an Austrian citizen and raised near Linz, Hitler moved to Germany in 1913 and was decorated during his service in the German Army in World War I. He joined the precursor of the NSDAP, the German Workers' Party, in 1919 and became leader of the NSDAP in 1921. In 1923, he attempted a coup in Munich to seize power. The failed coup resulted in Hitler's imprisonment, during which time he dictated the first volume of his autobiography and political manifesto Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"). After his release in 1924, Hitler gained popular support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism, anti-Semitism, and anti-communism with charismatic oratory and Nazi propaganda. Hitler frequently denounced international capitalism and communism as being part of a Jewish conspiracy. By 1933, the Nazi Party was the largest elected party in the German Reichstag, which led to Hitler's appointment as Chancellor on 30 January 1933. Following fresh elections won by his coalition, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, which began the process of transforming the Weimar Republic into Nazi Germany, a one-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of National Socialism. Hitler aimed to eliminate Jews from Germany and establish a New Order to counter what he saw as the injustice of the post-World War I international order dominated by Britain and France. His first six years in power resulted in rapid economic recovery from the Great Depression, the effective abandonment of restrictions imposed on Germany after World War I, and the annexation of territories that were home to millions of ethnic Germans—actions which gave him significant popular support. Hitler sought Lebensraum ("living space") for the German people. His aggressive foreign policy is considered to be the primary cause of the outbreak of World War II in Europe. He directed large-scale rearmament and on 1 September 1939 invaded Poland, resulting in British and French declarations of war on Germany. In June 1941, Hitler ordered an invasion of the Soviet Union. By the end of 1941 German forces and the European Axis powers occupied most of Europe and North Africa. Failure to defeat the Soviets and the entry of the United States into the war forced Germany onto the defensive and it suffered a series of escalating defeats. In the final days of the war, during the Battle of Berlin in 1945, Hitler married his long-time lover, Eva Braun. On 30 April 1945, less than two days later, the two killed themselves to avoid capture by the Red Army, and their corpses were burned. Under Hitler's leadership and racially motivated ideology, the Nazi regime was responsible for the genocide of at least 5.5 million Jews and millions of other victims whom he and his followers deemed Untermenschen ("sub-humans") and socially undesirable. Hitler and the Nazi regime were also responsible for the killing of an estimated 19.3 million civilians and prisoners of war. In addition, 29 million soldiers and civilians died as a result of military action in the European Theatre of World War II. The number of civilians killed during the Second World War was unprecedented in warfare, and constitutes the deadliest conflict in human history.
April 20, 1943
Alan Norman Bold (1943–1998) was a Scottish poet, biographer, and journalist. He was born in Edinburgh. He edited Hugh MacDiarmid's Letters and wrote the influential biography MacDiarmid. Bold had acquainted himself with MacDiarmid in 1963 while still an English Literature student at Edinburgh University. His debut work, Society Inebrious, with a lengthy introduction by MacDiarmid, was published in 1965, during Bold's final university year. This early publication kick-started a prolific poetic career with Bold publishing another three books of verse before the end of the decade, including the ambitious book-length poem The State of the Nation. He also edited The Penguin Book of Socialist Verse (1970) and published a 1973 biography of Robert Burns. Alan Bold married an art teacher, Alice. Their daughter Valentina is Robert Burns scholar like her father, who teaches at the University of Glasgow. A lifelong heavy drinker who dealt with the boozy life of the poet in such collections as A Pint of Bitter, Bold died after a short illness in a hospital in Kirkcaldy at the age of 54.
April 21, 1948
Clare Boylan (21 April 1948 – 16 May 2006) was an Irish author, journalist and critic for newspapers, magazines and many international broadcast media. Born in Dublin, Boylan began her career as a journalist at the (now defunct) Irish Press. In 1974 she won the Journalist of the Year award when working in the city for the Evening Press. Later in her career she edited the glossy magazine Image, before largely giving up journalism to focus on a career as an author. Her novels are Holy Pictures (1983), Last Resorts (1984), Black Baby (1988), Home Rule (1992), Beloved Stranger (1999), Room for a Single Lady (1997) (which won the Spirit of Light Award and was optioned for a film) and Emma Brown (2003). The latter work is a continuation of a 20-page fragment written by Charlotte Brontë before her death. Boylan's short stories are collected in A Nail on the Head (1983), Concerning Virgins (1990) and That Bad Woman (1995). The film Making Waves, based on her short story "Some Ladies on a Tour", was nominated for an Oscar in 1988. Her non-fiction includes The Agony and the Ego (1994) and The Literary Companion to Cats (1994). She wrote introductions to the novels of Kate O'Brien and Molly Keane and adapted Molly Keane's novel Good Behaviour as the classic serial for BBC Radio 4 (2004). Boylan's work has been translated as far afield as Russia and Hong Kong. In later life, she lived in County Wicklow with her husband Alan Wilkes. She died after a lengthy struggle with ovarian cancer, aged 58.
April 21, 1816
Charlotte Brontë (21 April 1816 – 31 March 1855) was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood, whose novels are English literature standards. She wrote Jane Eyre under the pen name Currer Bell.
April 21, 1952
Gerald Lyn Early (born April 21, 1952) is an American essayist and American culture critic. He is currently the Merle Kling Professor of Modern letters, of English, African studies, African American studies, American culture studies, and Director, Center for Joint Projects in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He also served as a consultant on Ken Burns' documentary films Baseball, Jazz, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, and The War. He is a regular commentator on National Public Radio's Fresh Air. His essays have appeared in numerous editions of Best American Essays series. He writes on topics as diverse as American literature, the Korean War, African American culture, Afro-American autobiography, non-fiction prose, baseball, jazz, prizefighting, Motown, Miles Davis, Muhammad Ali and Sammy Davis Jr.
April 21, 1939
Ian Gibson is the world’s preeminent expert on Garcia Lorca. Born in Dublin in 1939, he attened Trinity College in Dublin and went on to become a lecturer in Spanish at the Queen’s University, Belfast, and then Reader in Modern Spanish Literature at London University.
April 21, 1926
William Lee Miller (April 21, 1926 – May 27, 2012) was an American journalist, academic, and historian who taught in the University of Virginia's religious studies department for 17 years, and remained affiliated with the University after his 1999 retirement.
April 21, 1948
Emily Prager is an American author and journalist. Prager grew up in Texas, Taiwan, and Greenwich Village, NY. She is a graduate of The Brearley School, Barnard College and has a Masters Degree in Applied Linguistics.
April 21, 1939
Helen Prejean, C.S.J. is a Roman Catholic sister, a member of the Congregation of St. Joseph based in New Orleans, and a leading American advocate for the abolition of the death penalty. Sr. Prejean has founded the groups SURVIVE, to help families of victims of murder and related crimes.
April 21, 1940
Peter Schneider (born 21 April 1940 in Lübeck) is a German novelist. His novel LENZ, published in 1973, had become a cult text for the Left, capturing the feelings of those disappointed by the failure of their utopian revolt. Since then, Peter Schneider has written novels, short stories and film scripts, that often deal with the fate of members of his generation. Other works deal with the situation of Berlin before and after German reunification. Schneider is also a major Essayist; having moved away from the radicalism of 1968, his work now appears predominantly in bourgeois publications. Schneider has frequently held posts as visiting professor or writer in residence at universities in the United States including Stanford, Harvard and Princeton. Since 2001, he has been the Roth Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Georgetown University. He lives in Berlin. Peter Schneider is a member of the German PEN-Club. He is a recipient of a Villa Massimo scholarship (1979) and the Förderpreis für Literatur des Kulturkreises of the Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie (1983).
April 21, 1938
Wallace Houston Terry, II (April 21, 1938 – May 29, 2003) was an African-American journalist and oral historian, best known for his book about black soldiers in Vietnam, Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War (1984), which served as a basis for the 1995 crime thriller Dead Presidents. Terry had a wide-ranging and eclectic career that reflected his many interests. Though primarily a journalist, he was also an ordained minister in the Church of the Disciples of Christ, and worked as a radio and television commentator, public lecturer, and advertising executive. He taught journalism at Howard University and The College of William & Mary, where he sat on the board of trustees.
April 21, 1864
Karl Emil Maximilian 'Max' Weber (21 April 1864 – 14 June 1920) was a German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist whose ideas influenced social theory, social research, and the entire discipline of sociology. Weber was brought up in Berlin, where he was a law student and later a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin. His research in the history of legal institutions led him to emphasize the dependence of law on economic and technological background. Weber became Professor of Economics at Freiburg, then Heidelberg and Munich. He sat on the committee which submitted the first-draft of the Weimar Constitution. He died in 1920.
April 21, 1930
HILDA HILST (April 21, 1930, Jaú, São Paulo, Brazil - February 4, 2004, Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil) was born in Jaú, a small town in the state of São Paulo, in 1930. A graduate of law from the University of São Paulo, she dedicated herself to literary creation from 1954 to her death. She is recognized as one of the most important and controversial names in Brazilian contemporary literature and received some of Brazil's most prestigious literary prizes.
April 21, 1968
Luke Harding is an award-winning foreign correspondent with the Guardian. He has reported from Delhi, Berlin and Moscow and has also covered wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is the author ofMafia State and co-author of WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy (2011) and The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken (1997), nominated for the Orwell Prize. The film rights toWikiLeaks were sold to Dreamworks and the film, The Fifth Estate, came out in 2013. His books have been translated into 13 languages. Luke lives in England with his wife and their two children.
April 22, 1876
Pierre Albert-Birot (22 April 1876 – 25 July 1967) was a French avant-garde poet, dramatist, and theater manager.
April 22, 1922
Jacques Stephen Alexis (Gonaïves, Haiti, 22 April 1922–Mole St-Nicolas, Haiti, c. 22 April 1961) was a Haitian Communist novelist. He is best known for his novels Compère Général Soleil (1955), Les Arbres Musiciens (1957), and L'Espace d'un Cillement (1959), and for his collection of short stories, Romancero aux Etoiles (1960). Alexis was born in Gonaïves, the son of novelist and diplomat Stephen Alexis. After completing medical school in Paris, he traveled throughout Europe and lived for a few years in Cuba. Writer, poet, activist - A descendent of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Alexis was born on 22 April 1922, in Gonaïves. His father was a journalist, historian and diplomat, and Alexis grew up in a family in which literary and political discussions were the norm. At the age of 18, he made what was regarded as remarkable literary debut with an essay about the Haitian poet, Hamilton Garoute. He collaborated on a number of literary reviews, before founding La Ruche, a group dedicated to creating a literary and social spring in Haiti in the early 1940s. In 1955, his novel Compère Général Soleil, was published by Gallimard in Paris. The novel has been translated into English as General Sun, My Brother, and is a must-read for all those with an interest in understanding Haiti. He followed up with ‘Les Arbres Musiciens’ (1957), L'Espace d'un Cillement (1959), and ‘Romanceros aux Etoiles’ (1960). More than just an intellectual, Jacques Stephen Alexis was also an active participant in the social and political debates of his time. In 1959, he formed the People's Consensus Party (Parti pour l'Entente Nationale-PEP), a left-wing political party, but he was forced into exile by the Duvalier dictatorship. In August 1960, he attended a Moscow meeting of representatives of 81 communist parties from all over the world, and signed a common accord document called ‘The Declaration of the 81’ in the name of Haitian communists. In April 1961, he returned to Haiti, but soon after landing at Mole St Nicholas he was captured by Tontons Macoutes. He was taken to the town's main square where he was tortured and then put on a boat to Port-au-Prince he was never seen again. Later his death was confirmed by an obscure notice in the government newspaper buried on page 14.
April 22, 1929
Guillermo Cabrera Infante (April 22, 1929 - February 21, 2005) was a Cuban novelist, essayist, translator, and critic; in the 1950s he used the pseudonym G. Caín. A one-time supporter of the Castro regime, Cabrera Infante went into exile to London in 1965. He is best known for the novel Tres Tristes Tigres (literally ‘three sad tigers’, but published in English as Three Trapped Tigers), which has been compared favorably to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Born in Gibara in Cuba’s former Oriente Province (now part of Holguín Province), in 1941 he moved with his parents, to Havana, which would be the setting of nearly all of his writings other than his critical works. His parents were founding members of the Cuban Communist Party. Originally he intended to become a physician, but abandoned that in favor of writing and his passion for the cinema. Starting in 1950, he studied journalism at the University of Havana. In 1951 he founded the Cinemateca de Cuba, the Cuban Film Library, of which he remained director until its closure was ordered by Fulgencio Batista in 1956. Under the Batista regime he was arrested and fined in 1952 for publishing a short story which included several English-language profanities. His opposition to Batista later cost him a short jail term. He married for the first time in 1953. From 1954 to 1960 he wrote film reviews for the magazine Carteles, using the pseudonym G. Caín; he became its editor in chief, still pseudonymously, in 1957. With the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 he was named director of the Instituto del Cine. He was also head of the literary magazine Lunes de Revolución, a supplement to the Communist newspaper Revolución; however, this supplement was prohibited in 1961 by Fidel Castro. He divorced and remarried in 1961 to his second wife, Miriam, an actress. Having fallen somewhat out of favor with the Castro regime (the government’s ban on a documentary on Havana nightlife made by his brother led to him being forbidden to publish in Cuba), he served from 1962 to 1965 in Brussels, Belgium as a cultural attaché. During this time, his sentiments turned against the Castro regime; after returning to Cuba for his mother’s funeral in 1965, he went into exile, first to Madrid and then to London. In 1966 he published Tres Tristes Tigres, a highly experimental, Joycean novel, playful and rich in literary allusions, which also intended to do for Cuban Spanish what Mark Twain had done for American English, recording the great variety of its colloquial variations. It is little known that he was the Guillermo Caín who co-wrote the script for the 1971 cult film Vanishing Point. Although he is considered a part of the famed Latin American ‘Boom’ generation of writers that includes his contemporary Gabriel García Márquez, he disdained the label. Always the iconoclast, he even rejected the label ‘novel’ for his masterpieces, such as Tres Tristes Tigres and La Habana para un infante difunto. In 1997 he received the Premio Cervantes, presented to him by Spain’s King Juan Carlos. He died February 21, 2005 in London, of septicemia. He had two daughters by his first marriage.
April 22, 1943
Janet Evanovich (born Janet Schneider; April 22, 1943) is an American writer. She began her career writing short contemporary romance novels under the pen name Steffie Hall, but gained fame authoring a series of contemporary mysteries featuring Stephanie Plum, a former lingerie seller from Trenton, New Jersey, who becomes a bounty hunter to make ends meet after losing her job. The novels in this series have been on the New York Times and Amazon bestseller lists.
April 22, 1707
Henry Fielding (22 April 1707 – 8 October 1754) was an English novelist and dramatist known for his rich earthy humour and satirical prowess, and as the author of the novel Tom Jones. Aside from his literary achievements, he has a significant place in the history of law-enforcement, having founded (with his half-brother John) what some have called London's first police force, the Bow Street Runners, using his authority as a magistrate. His younger sister, Sarah, also became a successful writer.
April 22, 1947
Dr. Frederick E. Hoxie is an American historian who specializes in Native American history. He came to Illinois in 1998 from the Newberry Library, a private research library in Chicago. At the Newberry, Hoxie had directed the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History and served as Vice President for Research and Education. In those capacities he developed programs for scholars, students and teachers that promoted the study of the Native American past and administered an internationally-acclaimed research and fellowship program.
April 22, 1899
VLADIMIR NABOKOV (1899-1977) was one of the twentieth century's greatest writers in Russian and English. Poet, novelist, dramatist, memoirist, critic, translator, essayist, and scientist, he was awarded the National Medal for Literature in 1973. He taught creative writing and Russian literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. Among his most celebrated works are LOLITA; PALE FIRE; ADA; SPEAK, MEMORY; and his translation of Pushkin's EUGENE ONEGIN.
April 22, 1724
Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher who is widely considered to be a central figure of modern philosophy. He argued that fundamental concepts structure human experience, and that reason is the source of morality. His thought continues to have a major influence in contemporary thought, especially the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics. Kant's major work, the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781), aimed to explain the relationship between reason and human experience. With this project, he hoped to move beyond what he took to be failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. He attempted to put an end to what he considered an era of futile and speculative theories of human experience, while resisting the skepticism of thinkers such as David Hume. Kant argued that our experiences are structured by necessary features of our minds. In his view, the mind shapes and structures experience so that, on an abstract level, all human experience shares certain essential structural features. Among other things, Kant believed that the concepts of space and time are integral to all human experience, as are our concepts of cause and effect. One important consequence of this view is that one never has direct experience of things, the so-called noumenal world, and that what we do experience is the phenomenal world as conveyed by our senses. These claims summarize Kant's views upon the subject–object problem. Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy, and history. These included the Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 1788), the Metaphysics of Morals (Die Metaphysik der Sitten, 1797), which dealt with ethics, and the Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790), which looks at aesthetics and teleology. Kant aimed to resolve disputes between empirical and rationalist approaches. The former asserted that all knowledge comes through experience; the latter maintained that reason and innate ideas were prior. Kant argued that experience is purely subjective without first being processed by pure reason. He also said that using reason without applying it to experience only leads to theoretical illusions. The free and proper exercise of reason by the individual was a theme both of the Age of Enlightenment, and of Kant's approaches to the various problems of philosophy. His ideas influenced many thinkers in Germany during his lifetime, and he moved philosophy beyond the debate between the rationalists and empiricists. Kant is seen as a major figure in the history and development of philosophy.
April 22, 1946
Adrienne Mayor is the author of ‘Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World’ (Overlook) and ‘The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times’ (Princeton). She is a visiting scholar in classics and history of science at Stanford University.
April 22, 1922
Charles Mingus Jr. (April 22, 1922 – January 5, 1979) was an American jazz double bassist, pianist, composer and bandleader. A major proponent of collective improvisation, he is considered to be one of the greatest jazz musicians and composers in history, with a career spanning three decades and collaborations with other jazz legends such as Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Dannie Richmond, and Herbie Hancock. Mingus' compositions continue to be played by contemporary musicians ranging from the repertory bands Mingus Big Band, Mingus Dynasty, and Mingus Orchestra, to the high school students who play the charts and compete in the Charles Mingus High School Competition.
April 22, 1899
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Nabokovs were known for their high culture and commitment to public service, and the elder Nabokov was an outspoken opponent of antisemitism and one of the leaders of the opposition party, the Kadets. In 1919, following the Bolshevik revolution, he took his family into exile. Four years later he was shot and killed at a political rally in Berlin while trying to shield the speaker from right-wing assassins. The Nabokov household was trilingual, and as a child Nabokov was already reading Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, alongside the popular entertainments of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. As a young man, he studied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his honors degree in 1922. For the next eighteen years he lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations, lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword puzzles in Russian. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom he had one child, a son, Dmitri. Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee once more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for the United States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing fiction in English. In his afterword to Lolita he claimed: 'My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses--the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions--which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.' [p. 317] Yet Nabokov's American period saw the creation of what are arguably his greatest works, Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962), as well as the translation of his earlier Russian novels into English. He also undertook English translations of works by Lermontov and Pushkin and wrote several books of criticism. Vladimir Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.
April 22, 1951
Ana María Shua (born in Buenos Aires, April 22, 1951) is an Argentine writer who has published over eighty books in numerous genres including: novels, short stories, micro fiction, poetry, drama, children's literature, books of humor and Jewish folklore, anthologies, film scripts, journalistic articles, and essays. Her writing has been translated into many languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Korean, Japanese, Bulgarian, and Serbian. Her stories appear in anthologies throughout the world. She has received numerous national and international awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is one of Argentina’s premier living writers. She is particularly known in the Spanish-speaking world on both sides of the Atlantic as the Queen of the Microstory."
April 22, 1947
Frederick J. Simonelli (April 22, 1947 - January 6, 2015) taught at Mount St. Mary's College in Los Angeles. He was born to James and Rose Simonelli in New York City on April 22, 1947. After graduating from John Carroll University (University Heights, OH), he was elected to Euclid City Council (1971-1975) and served as Chair of the Council's Environmental Committee. Fred also served as chief of staff to Ohio Congressman Charles Vanik, and campaign advisor to Ohio Governor John Gilligan. During this time, two of his three children, Laura and James, were born. In 1977, Fred and his family moved to Sacramento, California, and he became Executive Director of the California Cast Metals Association. He earned an M.P.A. in Public Policy from University of San Francisco, and M.A. degree in History from California State University, Sacramento (CSUS). In 1980, the last of his three children, Rachel, was born. In 1996, Fred earned his Ph.D. in History from University of Nevada, Reno. He was an accomplished author, published several books, including American Fuehrer (1999), and taught at Mt. St. Mary's College (Los Angeles) and CSUS. He received the CSUS Outstanding Graduate Award from CSUS (1990), Outstanding Faculty Award from Mt. St. Mary's College (1992), and research fellowships from Yad Vashem in Israel (1999), and the Skirball Institute (2001).
April 23, 1942
Robert Owen "Bob" Callahan (April 23, 1942 - January 28, 2008) was a poet, writer, teacher, publisher, editor and raconteur extraordinaire. Born in Stamford, CT, on April 23, 1942, as a young man he worked as a speech-writer for Bobby Kennedy in a time of great political upheaval; his allegiance to grass-roots democratic ideals and much-desired political change were never shaken. The many books which he initiated, edited, published or wrote include The Smithsonian Book of Comic Book Stories (from Crumb to Clowes); A Day in the Life of Ireland; the multi-volume series of George Herriman’s The Komplete Krazy Kat Komics; the fugitive newspaper strips of George McManus’ Jiggs and Maggie; his own autobiographic Algonquin Woods; and numerous magazine articles and newspaper columns. His collaborations with the alt-comic artist Spain Rodriguez for Salon.com and the LA Weekly helped pioneer the admixture of serious text and noir graphics as the 21st Century's most reliable witness. In spite of a lifetime of hard economic times, he never stopped doing what he loved best.
April 23, 1932
Thomas Pinney is Professor Emeritus of English at Pomona College. He is the author or editor of several books, including the two-volume A History of Wine in America (UC Press).
April 23 1901
George Harmon Coxe (April 23 1901-January 31, 1984) was an American writer of crime fiction. He is perhaps best known for his series Jack 'Flashgun' Casey, which became a popular radio show airing through to the 1940s.
April 23, 1947
Josephine Bernadette McAliskey (née Devlin; born 23 April 1947), usually known as Bernadette Devlin or Bernadette McAliskey, is an Irish civil rights leader and former politician. She served as Member of Parliament for Mid Ulster from 1969 to 1974.
April 23, 1926
James Patrick Donleavy (born 23 April 1926) is an Irish American novelist and playwright. His first novel is The Ginger Man. Another novel, A Fairy Tale of New York, provided the title of the famous song 'Fairytale of New York'.
April 23, 1956
Bettina Drew is a biographer and essayist whose two books both received a special citation in creative nonfiction from PEN. Her essay The Great Amnesia from Southwest Review was a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2015. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
April 23, 1934
Richard M. Elman (April 23, 1934 – December 31, 1997) was a novelist, poet, journalist, and teacher. He was born in Brooklyn, New York. His parents were Yiddish-speaking and came to the United States at the turn of the 20th century from Russo-Poland. His boyhood is captured in his comic novel Fredi & Shirl & The Kids: An Autobiography In Fables. At Syracuse University (B. A., 1955), Elman's teachers, Daniel Curley and Donald Dike, encouraged his writing. At Syracuse, Elman met Emily Schorr, who became a painter. They married in 1955, and in 1964 their daughter Margaret was born. The marriage ended in divorce. In 1979, Elman married Alice (Neufeld) Goode, a teacher, who was his wife until his death. Their daughter Lila was born in 1981. Elman thought of himself as a socialist and his journalism reflected his concerns about social and political injustice.
April 23, 1937
Victoria Glendinning, CBE (née Seebohm; born 23 April 1937) is a British biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist; she is an Honorary Vice-President of English PEN, a winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, was appointed a CBE in 1998 and is Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature.
April 23, 1903
Alrik Gustafson (April 23, 1903, Sioux City, IA - March 24, 1970, Minneapolis, MN) was a Swedish-American literary historian and translator. He received Ph.D. degree at the University of Chicago in 1935 and became professor of Scandinavian languages and Scandinavian literature at the University of Minnesota , Minneapolis in 1939.
April 23, 1942
Howard Barry Hannah (April 23, 1942 – March 1, 2010) was an American novelist and short story writer from Mississippi. The author of eight novels and five short story collections (some sites list it as nine novels and four short story collections), Hannah worked with notable American editors and publishers such as Gordon Lish, Seymour Lawrence, and Morgan Entrekin. His work was published in Esquire, The New Yorker, The Oxford American, Southern Review, and a host of American magazines and quarterlies. His first novel, GERONIMO REX (1972), won the William Faulkner Prize and was nominated for the National Book Award. AIRSHIPS, his 1978 collection of short stories about the Vietnam War, the Civil War, and the modern South, won the Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award. The following year, Hannah received the prestigious Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Hannah won a Guggenheim, the Robert Penn Warren Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the art of the short story. He was awarded the Fiction Prize of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters twice and received Mississippi's prestigious Governor's Award in 1989 for distinguished representation of the state of Mississippi in artistic and cultural matters. For a brief time in 1980, Hannah lived in Los Angeles and worked as a writer for the film director Robert Altman. He was director of the MFA program at the University of Mississippi, in Oxford, where he taught creative writing for 28 years. He died on March 1, 2010, of natural causes.
April 23, 1908
Egon Hostovský (23 April 1908, Hronov – 7 May 1973, Montclair), was a Czech writer. He was related to the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. Hostovský described Zweig as 'a very distant relative'; some sources describe them as cousins. He studied at the gymnasium in Náchod in 1927, then philosophy in Prague and at university in Vienna in 1929, but did not graduate. He returned to Prague in 1930 and worked as an editor in several publishing houses. In 1937 Hostovský joined the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in 1939 he was posted to Brussels, from where, after the occupation of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939, he emigrated to Paris. After Paris was occupied in 1940, he fled to Portugal and then, in 1941, travelled to the United States of America, where he worked in New York at the Czechoslovakian (exile government's) consulate. His father, sisters, and their families died in concentration camps. After World War II he returned to Czechoslovakia and again worked at the Foreign Ministry, but in 1948 he left into his second exile, to Denmark, and then to Norway and finally to the United States, where he worked as a Czech language teacher and later as a journalist and editor at Radio Free Europe. Several of his novels, including The Midnight Patient and Three Nights, were translated in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Philip Hillyer Smith, Jr., a scholar of linguistics and the Czech language. After Hostovský's death, a literary prize—the Egon Hostovský Prize—was founded in his name by his third wife. Their son Paul (b. 1959) is a poet. His work is influenced by his Jewish origin and exile. His literary heroes fight (inner) evil, due to political situation are forced to leave their country and search for lost certainties and roots. Before his first emigration his work was influenced by expressionism.
April 23, 1948
CHARLES JOHNSON is director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Washington, a Guggenheim fellow, an NEA fellowship recipient, a former boards member of the Associated Writing Programs, and Fiction Editor of The Seattle Review. He has received the Writers Guild Award (1986) for his PBS drama ‘Booker,’ the Callaloo Creative Writing Award (1983), the Washington State Governor’s Award for Literature (1983), and Southern Illinois University’s Journalism Alumnus of the Year Award (1981), and has published numerous short stories, critical articles, drawings, book reviews, and written for many television series.
April 23, 1902
Halldor Laxness was born near Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1902. His first novel was published when he wsa seventeen. The undisputed master of contemporary Icelandic fiction, and one of the outstanding novelists of the century, he has written more than sixty books, including novels, short stories, essays, poems, plays, and memoirs. In 1955 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in 1998.
April 23, 1962
Michael Lind is an American writer. He is an ASU Future of War Fellow at New America in Washington, DC, which he co-founded; a contributing editor of Politico and The National Interest; and a columnist for Salon
April 23, 1973
John Lutz (born April 23, 1973) is an American actor, comedian, and screenwriter. He is best known for playing J. D. Lutz on the NBC sitcom 30 Rock, and for his work as a writer on the NBC series Saturday Night Live for seven seasons. In 2014, he joined the writing staff of the NBC late-night talk show Late Night with Seth Meyers.
April 23, 1934
Ismail Marahimin (23 April 1934 – 26 December 2008) was an Indonesian writer. He was born in Medan, North Sumatra. His only novel, Dan Perang Pun Usai (And the War is Over) was published in 1977, and was named best novel of the year in the annual Jakarta Arts Council Novel Competition. Further acclaim came in 1984 when the novel was named recipient of the Pegasus Prize for Literature, a literary award established by the Mobil Corporation (now Exxon Mobil). The prize was presented to him by Subagio Sastrowardoyo, a well-known Indonesian author, in New York.
April 23, 1895
Dame Ngaio Marsh (April 23, 1895 – February 18, 1982), born Edith Ngaio Marsh, was a New Zealand crime writer and theatre director. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1966. Internationally Marsh is known primarily for her creation Inspector Roderick Alleyn, a gentleman detective who works for the Metropolitan Police (London). Thus she is one of the 'Queens of Crime' alongside Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Margery Allingham.
April 23, 1954
Michael Francis Moore (born April 23, 1954) is an American documentary filmmaker and author. He is the director and producer of Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), a critical look at the presidency of George W. Bush and the War on Terror, which is the highest-grossing documentary at the American box office of all time and winner of the Palme d'Or. His film Bowling for Columbine (2002), which examines the causes of the Columbine High School massacre, won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature. Both Fahrenheit 9/11 and Sicko (2007), which examines health care in the United States, are among the top ten highest-grossing documentaries. In September 2008, he released his first free movie on the Internet, Slacker Uprising, which documented his personal quest to encourage more Americans to vote in presidential elections. He has also written and starred in the TV shows TV Nation, a satirical newsmagazine television series, and The Awful Truth, a satirical show. Moore's written and cinematic works criticize topics such as globalization, large corporations, assault weapon ownership, U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, the Iraq War, the American health care system, and capitalism. In 2005, Time magazine named Moore one of the world's 100 most influential people.
April 23, 1929
Professor George Steiner is Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University and Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College at Cambridge University. His non-fiction includes TOLSTOY OR DOSTOEVSKY, a critical analysis of the two great masters of the Russian novel, The DEATH OF TRAGEDY, IN BLUEBEARD'S CASTLE, AFTER BABEL and NO PASSION SPENT: ESSAYS 1978-96. He is also the author of a number of works of fiction including PROOFS AND THREE PARABLES and THE PORTAGE TO SAN CRISTOBAL OF AH, which was adapted for the stage by Christopher Hampton. A volume of autobiography, ERRATA: AN EXAMINED LIFE, was published in 1997. He has been a regular contributor of reviews and articles to journals and newspapers including the New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian. He lives in Cambridge.
April 23, 1951
Ron Robin is Professor of History and Communication Studies and Dean of Students at the University of Haifa. He is the author of The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military Intellectual Complex (2001), The Barbed Wire College: Reeducating German POWs in the United States during World War II (1995), and Enclaves of America: The Rhetoric of American Political Architecture Abroad, 1900—1965 (1992). .
April 23, 1908
Jorge Toriello Garrido (23 April 1908 - 16 June 1998) was one of the three leaders of the first government that ruled Guatemala from 20 October 1944 to 15 March 1945 as part of the October Revolution. Toriello Garrido, a civilian, led the government along with Captain Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán and Major Francisco Javier Arana after overthrowing the military regime of Juan Federico Ponce Vaides, who had temporarily taken over from ousted dictator Jorge Ubico.
April 23, 1957
Patrik Ouredník was born in Prague, but immigrated to France in 1984 where he still lives. He is the author of twelve books, including fiction, essays, and poems. He is also the Czech translator of novels, short stories, and plays from such writers as François Rabelais, Alfred Jarry, Raymond Queneau, Samuel Beckett, and Boris Vian. He has received a number of literary awards for his writing, including the Czech Literary Fund Award. Alex Zucker’s translation of Jachym Topol’s CITY SISTER SILVER (2000) was selected for inclusion in the 2006 guide 1001 BOOKS YOU MUST READ BEFORE YOU DIE. He lives in Brooklyn.
April 23, 1893
Jorge Mateus de Lima (April 23, 1893 – November 15, 1953) was a Brazilian politician, physician, poet, novelist, biographer, essayist, translator and painter. His poetry was initially composed in Alexandrine form, but he later became a modernist. He was born in União dos Palmares, the son of a wealthy merchant. When he was nine, he moved with his mother and siblings to Maceió. In 1909, when only sixteen, he moved to Salvador where he began his medical studies. He completed his studies in Rio de Janeiro in 1914, but he decided that he wanted to make his name as a poet. That same year he published his first book of poems, Alexandrians XIV. He returned to Maceió in 1915 where he devoted himself to medicine, literature and politics. He served as a member of the Legislative Assembly of Alagoas from 1918 to 1922. The Revolution of 1930 inspired him to move to Rio de Janeiro where he set up an office near Cinelândia. In time, this office also served as an art studio and a meeting place for intellectuals. There he made the acquaintance of writers such as Murilo Mendes, Graciliano Ramos and José Lins do Rego. During this period he published ten books, including five collections of poetry. In 1935 Jorge de Lima converted to the Roman Catholicism and many of his poems reflected his religiosity. In 1939 he decided to dedicate more time to the visual arts as well, participating in some exhibitions. In 1952 he published his most important book, the epic Invention of Orpheus. In 1953, only months before he died, he recorded poems for the Archives of the Spoken Word at the Library of Congress. He died in Rio de Janeiro, aged 60. Between 1937 and 1945, his candidacy for the Brazilian Academy of Letters was rejected six times. According to Ivan Junqueira, who served as the Academy's President for the year 2004-2005, the Academy committed an injustice to the author whose literary work was so well received by critics and the public. Referring to Invention of Orpheus, he says, "... even today, more than 50 years after its publication, there is no Brazilian poet who does not remember him." The writings of Jorge de Lima may be read in many ways: The uneasy coexistence between tradition and the new; the vulgar and the sublime; the regional and universal. His work touches on social injustices that have changed little since the beginning of civilization "... of human misery, the attempt to overcome our moorings and our limitations", according to poet and journalist Claufe Rodrigues. Ítalo Moriconi, poet and professor of Brazilian literature at Rio de Janeiro State University, in analyzing the work of Jorge de Lima, does not believe in the hypothesis that religious issues have hampered Lima's career: "As a religious poet Jorge de Lima never produced anything with the quality of a Murilo Mendes in "Freedom Poetry".
April 24, 1954
Mumia Abu-Jamal (born Wesley Cook April 24, 1954) is an American former activist and journalist who was convicted and sentenced to death on July 3, 1982, for the December 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment without parole in December 2011 after District Attorney Seth Williams decided to end the pursuit of the death penalty with the support of the victim's family. Activists, celebrities, and political organizations have criticized the fairness of his trial or opposed his death penalty. The Faulkner family, public authorities, and police organizations maintain that he was properly convicted and appropriately sentenced to death. Once described as 'perhaps the world's best known death-row inmate' by The New York Times, during his imprisonment he has published books and commentaries on social and political issues, including Live from Death Row (1995). Abu-Jamal became involved in black nationalism in his youth and was a member of the Black Panther Party until October 1970. While a self described 'lieutenant of Information' for the party, he quoted Mao Zedong during one of his interviews, saying that 'political power grows out of the barrel of a gun'. He was closely involved with the leftist organization MOVE that protested police brutality and was involved in several incidents that included conflict with the police, violence, and homicide. After leaving the party, he became a radio journalist – eventually becoming president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. On December 9, 1981, Officer Faulkner was shot dead in Philadelphia while he was conducting a traffic stop on Abu-Jamal's brother, William Cook. Faulkner was shot in the back and then again while lying on the pavement. Abu-Jamal was injured by a shot from Faulkner and was taken to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital where two police officers and a black security guard, Priscilla Durham, reportedly heard Abu-Jamal shout out, 'I shot the Mother Fucker, and I hope the Mother Fucker dies.' Abu-Jamal was arrested and charged with first degree murder. Abu-Jamal attempted to represent himself at his 1982 trial but was repeatedly reprimanded for disruptive behavior and given a court-appointed lawyer. Three witnesses testified that they had witnessed Abu-Jamal commit the murder, and he was unanimously convicted by the racially mixed jury (2 blacks and 10 non-blacks) and sentenced to death. He spent the next 30 years on death row. In 2008, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the murder conviction but ordered a new capital sentencing hearing because the jury was improperly instructed. Subsequently, the United States Supreme Court also allowed his conviction to stand, but ordered the appeals court to reconsider its decision as to the sentence. In 2011, the Third Circuit again affirmed the conviction, as well as its decision to vacate the death sentence, and the District Attorney of Philadelphia announced that prosecutors would no longer seek the death penalty. He was removed from death row in January 2012, and in March 2012 the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania ruled that all claims of new evidence put on his behalf did not warrant conducting a retrial.
April 24, 1925
Leslie Alcock (24 April 1925 – 6 June 2006) was Professor of Archaeology at the University of Glasgow, and one of the leading archaeologists of Early Mediaeval Britain. His major excavations included Dinas Powys hill fort in Wales, Cadbury Castle in Somerset and a series of major hillforts in Scotland.
April 24, 1846
Marcus Andrew Hislop Clarke FRSA (24 April 1846 – 2 August 1881), known simply as and published as Marcus Clarke' was an English-born Australian novelist, journalist, poet, editor, librarian., playwright and magazine owner/ editor, he was best known for his 1874 novel For the Term of His Natural Life.
April 24, 1915
Charles William Goyen (April 24, 1915 – August 30, 1983) was an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet, editor, and teacher. Born in a small town in East Texas, these roots would influence his work for his entire life. In World War II he served as an officer aboard an aircraft carrier in the South Pacific, where he began work on one of his most important and critically acclaimed books, The House of Breath. After the war and through the 1950s he published short stories, collections of stories, other novels, and plays. He never achieved commercial success in America, but his translated work was highly regarded in Europe. During his life he could not completely support himself through his writing, so at various times he took work as an editor and teacher at several prominent universities. At one point he did not write fiction for several years, calling it a "relief" to not have to worry about his writing. Major themes in his work include home and family, place, time, sexuality, isolation, and memory. His style of writing is not easily categorized, and he eschewed labels of genre placed on his works.In 1963, he married Doris Roberts, the actress perhaps best known for her work in Everybody Loves Raymond; they remained together until his death in 1983.
April 24, 1950
Michael Patrick Hearn is an American literary scholar and one of America's leading men of letters specializing in children's literature and its illustration. His works include The Annotated Wizard of Oz (1971/2000), The Annotated Christmas Carol (1977/2003), and The Annotated Huckleberry Finn (2001). He considers the three most quintessential American novels to be Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. He is an expert on L. Frank Baum and is currently writing a biography about him, which sets forth to correct the numerous errors in previous biographies, many based on Frank Joslyn Baum's out of print and largely mythological To Please a Child. As an Oz and L. Frank Baum scholar, he also edited The Critical Heritage Edition of the Wizard of Oz for Schocken Books (1986), wrote the introduction to the first published version of the screenplay of The Wizard of Oz (1939 film). He appears in the documentaries Oz: the American Fairyland and Matilda Joslyn Gage (1983), credited as an "Authority on L. Frank Baum". He gave the keynote address at the Centennial convention of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz mounted by The International Wizard of Oz Club, and often makes public appearances in which he lectures on Baum.
April 24, 1943
Thomas King is a Native writer of Cherokee, Greek and German descent. He is a member of the Native Studies department at the University of Lethbridge and is currently teaching in American Studies at the University of Minnesota. His short stories and poems have appeared in journals in Canada and the U.S. He has co-edited a volume of critical essays on the Native in literature and has edited an anthology of short fiction by Native writers in Canada.
April 24, 1940
JOSE LATOUR is the author of eight previous books. Havana World Series is his third novel written in English. The translation of his novel Outcast into Spanish won the 2002 Hammett Prize for Best Crime Novel in that language. Latour is Cuban by birth and was the vice president for Latin America of the International Association of Crime Writers between 1998 and 2002. He moved to Spain in 2002.
April 24, 1946
Adrian C. Louis (April 24, 1946 – September 9, 2018) was an American author. Hailing from Nevada, Louis was a member of Lovelock Paiute tribe who lived on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. He has taught at Oglala Lakota College. His novel Skins (1995) discusses reservation life and issues such as poverty, alcoholism, and social problems and was the basis for the 2002 film, Skins. He also published books of poetry and a collection of short stories, Wild Indians and Other Creatures (1996). His work was noted for its realism. He died on September 9, 2018. Louis has ten published books of poetry and two novels. His poetry and fiction have garnered him much recognition and awards. His work has been praised by some of the other notable modern Native American writers, including Sherman Alexie, N. Scott Momaday, James Welch and Leslie Marmon Silko. In 1999, he was added to the Nevada Writer's Hall of Fame.
April 24, 1918
ALFRED MARNAU (April 24, 1918, Bratislava, Slovakia - June 15, 1999, Greater London) was born in 1918 at Pressburg on the Danube - pre-war Czechoslovakia. His first book of poems was published in 1936, when he was eighteen - and was promptly banned by the police for its too realistic prophecy of the coming war. Shortly thereafter Marnau left Pressburg for more cosmopolitan Prague, which he made his headquarters for several years of traveling through Central Europe. In the summer of 1939, just before the outbreak of hostilities, he escaped to England, where he published two books of poetry, THE WOUNDS OF THE APOSTLES and DEATH OF THE CATHEDRAL, which won praises from such critics as Stephen Spender, Victoria Sackville-West, and Herbert Read. For two years Marnau was editor of New Road, an annual anthology of art and literature. He is also well known as a writer of short stories and essays.
April 24, 1908
George Oppen (April 24, 1908 – July 7, 1984) was an American poet, best known as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism and later moved to Mexico to avoid the attentions of the House Un-American Activities Committee. He returned to poetry — and to the United States — in 1958, and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1969.
April 24, 1930
José Sarney de Araújo Costa (born 24 April 1930) is a Brazilian politician, lawyer, and writer who was President of Brazil from 15 March 1985 to 15 March 1990. Sarney ascended in the politics of his home state of Maranhão as part of the 'Bossa Nova Generation' of UDN politicians in the 1950s, young idealists seeking to reorganize public administration and rid the government of corruption and old deleterious practices. During the Brazilian military dictatorship, which imposed a two-party system, Sarney affiliated himself with the government party, ARENA, becoming the president of the party in 1979. As the regime fell, however, ARENA split over the appointment of Paulo Maluf as Presidential candidate. Sarney joined the dissenters, being instrumental in the creation of the Liberal Front Party. He agreed to run for Vice-President on the ticket of Tancredo Neves, of PMDB, formerly the opposition party to the military government. Neves won the Presidential elections, but fell ill and died before taking office, and Sarney became President. He started out his term with great popularity, but public opinion shifted with the Brazilian debt crisis and the failure of Plano Cruzado to abate chronic inflation. Over time, Sarney and his family acquired enormous clout over Maranhão's public life, and he is today regarded as the foremost of Brazil's oligarchs. Sarney owns the most important newspapers and TV stations in Maranhão, and remains influential there, even though he is now a senator for the smaller state of Amapá. Sarney has also faced multiple allegations of nepotism and corruption in his career. In 2009, the British weekly The Economist called his election as President of the Senate 'a victory for semi-feudalism' and 'a throwback to an era of semi-feudal politics that still prevails in corners of Brazil and holds the rest of it back.' Veja columnist Roberto Pompeu de Toledo deemed him 'the perfect oligarch'. Sarney is currently the longest-standing member of the Brazilian Congress, and has held public office since 1958 almost without interruption. Sarney is also an accomplished writer, and a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.
April 24, 1925
Nathan A. Scott, Jr. (24 April 1925-December 2006) was an American scholar who helped establish the modern field of theology and literature and who helped found the well-known Ph.D. program in that field at the University of Chicago. Scott also published seventeen books, in addition to publishing articles and reviews and editing editions. He has likewise been the subject of numerous articles and books. Scott's innovation in literary criticism was to reject the New Critics' idea that poems should be studied as autonomous objects and to remind scholars that authors' personal beliefs are crucial for understanding their texts; in this way, he also returned criticism to a study of the way literature represents the outside world.
April 24, 1928
Martin Roger Seymour-Smith (24 April 1928 – 1 July 1998) was a British poet, literary critic, biographer and astrologer. Seymour-Smith was born in London and educated at Highgate School and St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he was editor of Isis. He began as one of the most promising of Anglophone post-war poets, but became better known as a critic, writing biographies of Robert Graves (whom he met first at age 14 and maintained close ties with), Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy, and producing numerous critical studies. The poet and critic Robert Nye stated that Seymour-Smith was "one of the finest British poets after 1945." Others to praise his poetry included Robert Graves, C. H. Sisson, Geoffrey Grigson and James Reeves. He came to prominence in 1963, as the editor of the first twentieth-century edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets to use the 'original' spelling. Characteristically, his commentary concerned Shakespeare's sexuality, which upset many. Later, his Fallen Women (1969) and Sex and Society (1975) would become 'standard plundering material for more famous works' as the author good-humouredly claimed. He had known Alex Comfort, who was then writing The Joy of Sex (1972), from their schooldays at Highgate School and the two often swapped notes. Seymour-Smith's Poets Through their Letters Vol 1 (Wyatt to Coleridge) was acclaimed for its scholarship, but sold poorly. Hence, Volume 2 was never published. His two volumes of poetry Tea with Miss Stockport (1963) and Reminiscences of Norma (1971), were praised by many, including Peter Porter. But an apparent creative silence till his last collection, Wilderness (1994), led to a decline in his reputation with the reading public during the 1980s. The Guide to Modern World Literature is an encyclopedic attempt to describe all major 20th-century authors, in all languages. The book is over 1300 pages long. Cyril Connolly said of the first (1973) edition: "I'm very much afraid he will prove indispensable!" His criticism of Lawrence Durrell singled out his poetry as his real achievement; John Fowles, Muriel Spark, C. P. Snow, Malcolm Bradbury and Ted Hughes received the first adverse criticism of their reputations in this book. The stature of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time (1951–76) as the greatest fictional post-war achievement was asserted: a view endorsed by Kingsley Amis and Hilary Spurling. He also predicted that T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets would not survive as a great poem by 2000. The polyglot Seymour-Smith further used the book to champion writers he regarded as underrated, such as James Hanley, Laura Riding, Wyndham Lewis, Roberto Arlt, Pio Baroja, Rayner Heppenstall and Jose Maria Arguedas, while attacking those he felt were overvalued, such as George Bernard Shaw, W. H. Auden and as mentioned above, T. S. Eliot. Seymour-Smith also disparaged Harold Pinter, Margaret Atwood, and Tom Stoppard, whom he thought overrated. Anthony Burgess likened Seymour-Smith to Samuel Johnson due to his many literary surveys from The Guide to Modern World Literature in 1975 onwards.
April 24, 1815
Anthony Trollope (24 April 1815 – 6 December 1882) was one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of his best-loved works, collectively known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, revolve around the imaginary county of Barsetshire. He also wrote perceptive novels on political, social, and gender issues, and on other topical matters. Trollope's literary reputation dipped somewhat during the last years of his life, but he regained the esteem of critics by the mid-twentieth century.
April 24, 1921
Gabriel Okara was born at Bumoundi, Bayelsa State, in the Niger Delta in 1921 and educated at Government College Umuahia in Nigeria and Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He worked as a bookbinder and printer for Federal Government Press at Lagos, served as the director of cultural and information services for the shortlived Republic of Biafra, and was the general manager of the Rivers State newspaper and broadcasting corporations. He is an honorary member of the Pan-African Writers’ Association, a fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters, and is currently writer in residence at the University of Port Harcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria. Brenda Marie Osbey is a poet and essayist. Her most recent volumes are History and Other Poems and All Souls: Essential Poems. A native of New Orleans, she is poet laureate emerita of Louisiana and distinguished visiting professor of Africana Studies at Brown University.
April 25, 1852
Leopoldo Alas was born in the northern Spanish provincial city of Zamora in 1852, but he was brought up in Oviedo, the capital of Asturias, and always regarded himself as an Asturian. He studied Law in the University of Oviedo and completed his doctorate in Madrid in 1878. Under the pseudonym Clarin (Bugle’) he became Spain’s most influential literary critic; at the same time he was a conscientious and much-admired Professor of Law at Oviedo University. His fictional writings brought him little success, and it is only during the last twenty years that his major novel LA REGENTA (1884-5) has been recognized as one of the outstanding works of Spanish literature. Leopoldo Alas suffered from severe ill-health throughout his adult life, and died in 1901. John Rutherford is a Fellow of The Queen’s College, Oxford, where he teaches Spanish and Spanish-American language and literature.
April 25, 1949
James Martin Fenton FRSL FRSA (born 25 April 1949, Lincoln) is an English poet, journalist and literary critic. He is a former Oxford Professor of Poetry.
April 25, 1936
Otto René Castillo (1934 – 1967) was a Guatemalan poet and revolutionary. Castillo was born in Quetzaltenango in 1934 to middle-class parents. Active in progressive politics as a high school student, Castillo went into exile in El Salvador in 1954 after the overthrow of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz by a Central Intelligence Agency-orchestrated coup d'etat. In El Salvador, Castillo met Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton and founded an influential literary circle. He spent the next several years in and out of exile, including a period of time spent in East Germany at the University of Leipzig. Otto Rene Castillo formed no family of his own in Guatemala, but during his stay in the German Democratic Republic, he had two stable partners and fathered two boys. One of his sons, Wolfram, and his mother, Eva, both still live in Berlin and his other partner is still in Leipzig. The well-known GDR documentary filmmaker Karl-Heinz Mund, together with Werner Kohlert made a short commemorative documentary about Castillo (Ganz Berlin ist in deinen Augen.../Todo Berlin esta en tus ojos...) which can be obtained from the DEFA Studio fuer Dokumentarfilme in Berlin. The early to mid-1960s saw the publication of the only two volumes of work put into print during Castillo's lifetime, Poema Tecún Umán and Vámonos patria a caminar. In 1966, he clandestinely returned to Guatemala and joined the guerrilla struggle with the Rebel Armed Forces, where he served as the chief of propaganda and education. After operating in the Sierra de las Minas for several months, he was captured by government forces and taken to Zacapa barracks alongside his comrade, Nora Paíz Cárcamo in March 1967. There they were interrogated, tortured, and immolated.
April 25, 1938
John Nagenda (1938- ), Ugandan poet, fiction writer, scholar and columnist, belongs to a generation of writers who were the first to forge a literature of East Africa. He was born on 25 April 1938 in Gahini, Uganda, the son of William and Sala (Bakaluba) Nagenda. Receiving his early education at local schools, Nagenda was an avid reader by the age of ten and began to develop an interest in writing in his middle teens. He attended Makerere University College (now Makerere University) in Kampala, graduating in 1962, the year that Uganda achieved independence. At the forefront of the movement to establish an African nationalist literature during this period, the university fostered the talents of such prominent East African writers as Peter Nazareth of Uganda, David Rubadiri of Malawi, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o of Kenya. During his undergraduate years Nagenda served as editor of Penpoint, Makerere's literary magazine. His early poems and stories appeared in that publication and in the newly founded Transition. According to Simon Gikandi, editor of The Encyclopedia of African Literature (2003), Nagenda's early writing is indicative of 'the transitional moment in East African literature in English, when writers educated in the British tradition were trying to adopt the forms of prose and poetry learnt in the colonial school and university to represent the African landscape [. . .] and to account for their own coming into being as subjects caught between old and modern ways'. This effort to 'find local substitutes for Wordsworth's Lake District', as Gikandi puts it, is apparent in Nagenda's poem 'Gahini Lake', which appears in Origin East Africa (1965), a groundbreaking Makerere anthology edited by David Cook. Another notable work to come out of this period is Nagenda's short story 'And This, At Last', which appears in Pan African Short Stories (1965), edited by Neville Denny. Nagenda graduated from Makerere in 1962. Nagenda lived in exile in England for several years, during the tyrannical rule in the 1970s of Idi Amin and the political turmoil that ensued after his ousting in 1979. Virtually absent from the literary scene during these years, the author re-emerged in 1986 with the publication of his first novel, The Seasons of Thomas Tebo. An allegorical portrait of the Ugandan people, the narrative focuses on the title character, a precocious and idealistic young man whose innocence is lost as he enters the political power struggle of the post-independence era. The novel established Nagenda as a leading figure in the Ugandan literary revival. Nagenda is also the author of Mukasa (1973), a children's book. His poetry is represented in New Voices of the Commonwealth (1968), edited by Howard Sergeant. The Writer in Modern Africa (1968), edited by Per Waestberg contains the text of a speech that Nagenda delivered at the African-Scandinavian Writers' Conference in 1967. 'Generations in Conflict', his essay about Ghanaian writers Ama Ata Aidoo, J.C. de Graft, and R. Sarif Easmon, appears in Protest and Conflict in African Literature (1969), edited by Cosmo Pieterse and Donald Munro. After Yoweri Museveni took office as president of Uganda in 1986, Nagenda returned from exile and was appointed by Museveni to sit on the newly established Commission of Inquiry into Violations of Human Rights, a body designated to investigate abuses that had occurred in the country since the advent of independence. Nagenda went on to become Museveni's Senior Adviser on Public Relations and Media. In addition to this official role, he writes a weekly column entitled 'One Man's Week', which appears in the Saturday edition of The New Vision newspaper. Although the demands of these positions have kept him fully occupied in recent years, the author has expressed his intention to return to his poetry and other creative writing in the future. In a biographical profile that appears on the website associated with his column, Nagenda describes writing as a strenuous but exhilarating process which he calls 'the perpetual battle against the sentence'. He explains, 'To "defeat the sentence" by putting one word next to another in the best possible way open to you, is a reward in itself. You lose when the sentence, the challenger, refuses to fall in place as you want it. The carpenter must feel the same regarding a table, the singer the song, the painter the picture, the architect the building. Such fights occupy a lifetime, if you are lucky.' Nagenda has also worked as an editor for Oxford University Press and as a radio and television producer in New York, London, and Kampala. For several years he was a member of Uganda's national cricket team. Over the course of his long and multi-faceted career, Nagenda has built a reputation as one of Uganda's leading men of letters. Today he is widely regarded as one of his country's most prominent and respected columnists. However, his creative work has received little attention from critics and scholars. An exception is David F. Dorsey's 'Romance and Revolution in Three African Novels', a comparative study of The Seasons of Thomas Tebo with The Rape of the Pearl (1985), by Magala-Nyago of Uganda, and The Seed of Redemption (1986), by Francis Mading Deng of Sudan, which appears in College Language Association Journal vol. 31, no. 2 (December 1987). Also valuable is an interview with Nagenda, conducted by South African essayist, novelist and scholar Lewis Nkosi, which appears in African Writers Talking: A Collection of Interviews (1972), edited by Cosmo Pieterse and Dennis Duerden.
April 25, 1927
Alvin Schwartz (April 25, 1927 in Brooklyn, New York – March 14, 1992 in Princeton, New Jersey) was the author of more than fifty books dedicated to and dealing with topics such as folklore and word play, many of which were intended for young readers.
April 25, 1939
Ted Kooser (born April 25, 1939) was named U.S. Poet Laureate for 2004-2006. He was born in Ames, Iowa, in 1939. Kooser was educated in the Ames public schools, at Iowa State University, and the University of Nebraska. His awards include two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Stanley Kunitz Prize from Columbia magazine, and the 1981 Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry for Sure Signs.
April 25, 1970
Adriana Lisboa (born April 25, 1970 in Rio de Janeiro) is a Brazilian writer. She is the author of six novels, and has also published poetry, short stories and books for children. Originally written in Brazilian Portuguese, her books have been published in fourteen countries and translated into English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Arabic, Swedish, Serbian and Romanian, with forthcoming translations into Polish and Turkish. Crow Blue is Lisboa's most recent novel translated into English (Bloomsbury, UK, 2013) and an Independent book of the year. Her stories have appeared in Granta, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Brooklyn Rail, Litro Magazine and others. Adriana Lisboa is considered a distinguished figure among Brazilian contemporary writers. Hew work has been the recipient of, among others, the following honors: José Saramago Prize of Literature for Symphony in White (novel), Japan Foundation Fellowship, Brazilian National Library Fellowship, the Newcomer of the Year Award from the Brazilian section of International Board on Books for Young People for Língua de trapos (A Tongue Made of Scraps). In 2007, Hay Festival/Bogota World Book Capital selected her as one of the 39 most important Latin American writers under the age of 39.
April 25, 1873
Poet, short story writer and novelist Walter de la Mare (25 April 1873 – 22 June 1956), is considered one of modern literature's chief exemplars of the romantic imagination. His complete works form a sustained treatment of romantic themes: dreams, death, rare states of mind and emotion, fantasy worlds of childhood, and the pursuit of the transcendent. De la Mare's life was outwardly uneventful. As a youth he attended St. Paul's Cathedral School, and his formal education did not extend beyond this point. Upon graduation he went to work for the Anglo-American (Standard) Oil Company, remaining with the firm for eighteen years. De la Mare began writing short stories and poetry while working as a bookkeeper in the company's London office during the 1890s. His first published short story, ‘Kismet,’ appeared in the journal Sketch in 1895. In 1902 he published his first major work, the poetry collection Songs of Childhood, which was recognized as a significant example of children's literature for its creative imagery and variety of meters. Critics often assert that a childlike richness of imagination influenced everything de la Mare wrote, emphasizing his frequent depiction of childhood as a time of intuition, deep emotion, and closeness to spiritual truth. In 1908, following the publication of his novel Henry Brocken and the poetry collection titled Poems, de la Mare was granted a Civil List pension, enabling him to terminate his corporate employment and focus exclusively on writing. He died in 1956. The appearance of Songs of Childhood introduced de la Mare as a talented author of children's literature, a genre in which he produced collections of fiction and verse, and several highly praised anthologies. Conrad Aiken, writing in his Scepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry in 1919 found that de la Mare's Peacock Pie ‘contains some of the most delightful work he has done.’ The world of childhood, however, is only a facet of de la Mare's work. As a poet de la Mare is often compared with Thomas Hardy and William Blake for their respective themes of mortality and visionary illumination. His greatest concern was the creation of a dreamlike tone implying a tangible but nonspecific transcendent reality. This characteristic of the poems has drawn many admirers, though also eliciting criticism that the poet indulged in an undefined sense of mystery without systematic acceptance of any specific doctrine. Some commentators also criticize the poetry for having an archness of tone more suitable for children's verse, while others value this playful quality. It is generally agreed, however, that de la Mare was a skillful manipulator of poetic structure, a skill which is particularly evident in the earlier collections. With The Burning Glass and Other Poems critics perceived a falling off from the author's past artistic virtuosity, which afterward was only periodically regained. According to Henry Charles Duffin in his Walter de la Mare: A Study of His Poetry (1949), the ‘poetry of Walter de la Mare is not essentially either a criticism of life or (as some think it) an escape from life. It will fulfill both these functions for those who require them, but the primary end of de la Mare's poetry is to heighten life.’ Closely linked with his poetry in theme and mood are de la Mare's short stories. Collections like The Riddle are imbued with the same indefiniteness and aura of fantasy as his poetry. In a review of The Connoisseur, and Other Stories, a critic for the Times Literary Supplement asserted in 1926 that ‘de la Mare has the poet's imagination, and it is a poetic emotion that delights us in his stories.’ Another favorable appraisal of de la Mare's short fiction came from John H. Wills, who wrote in the North Dakota Quarterly that ‘de la Mare is the most underrated short story writer in the English language.’ As a short story writer, de la Mare is frequently compared to Henry James, particularly for his elaborate prose style and his ambiguous, often obscure treatment of supernatural themes. This latter quality is particularly apparent in de la Mare's frequently discussed short story ‘The Riddle,’ in which seven children go to live with their grandmother after the death of their father. The grandmother warns the children that they may play anywhere in the house except in an old oak chest in one of the spare bedrooms. Nevertheless, the children are drawn by ones and twos to play in the trunk, where they mysteriously disappear. While the meaning of their disappearance remains enigmatic, commentators have generally interpreted the events as a symbolic presentation of aging and death. The novels of de la Mare rival his poetry in importance. His early novels, such as Henry Brocken, are works of fantasy written in a genre traditionally reserved for realistic subjects. In his tale of supernatural possession, The Return, de la Mare deals with a primarily naturalistic world while maintaining a fantastic element as the thematic core. Even though it contains no fantasy in a strict sense, Memoirs of a Midget includes a strong ingredient of the unusual and is considered by many critics to be a masterpiece. Storm Jameson in the English Review called the novel ‘the most notable achievement in prose fiction of our generation,’ and J.C. Squire, in his Books Reviewed: Critical Essays on Books and Authors, judged Memoirs of a Midget ‘a poet's book. I can think of no prose book by an English poet which is a more substantial achievement.’ The definitive de la Mare novel, Memoirs is a study of the social and spiritual outsider, a concern central to the author's work. For his extravagance of invention de la Mare is sometimes labelled an escapist who retreats from accepted definitions of reality and the relationships of conventional existence. His approach to reality, however, is not escapist; rather, it profoundly explores the world he considered most significant—that of the imagination. In the London Mercury J. B. Priestley favorably concluded in 1924 that de la Mare is ‘one of that most lovable order of artists who never lose sight of their childhood, but re-live it continually in their work and contrive to find expression for their maturity in it, memories and impressions, its romantic vision of the world.’ Philip Pullman’s many books include the best-selling and award-winning children’s series, His Dark Materials (Knopf). He recently edited and introduced Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm (Viking).
April 25, 1916
Dorothy Margaret Salisbury Davis (April 25, 1916 ? August 3, 2014) was an American crime fiction writer. She was born in Chicago in 1916. Davis was an adopted child, raised in Illinois, by Margaret (Greer) and Alfred J. Salisbury. She worked in Chicago in advertising as a research librarian and as an editor of The Merchandiser, prior to taking up fiction writing. She was married to Harry Davis, the character actor, from 1946 until his death in 1993. She published many novels and short stories. Among them are two sets of series novels, but she mainly wrote stand alone novels. Her novels explore psychological suspense, as was popular for many decades, and has 'an especially strong way of sharing with readers the minds of female characters confronting hazards and crisis'. She was nominated for an Edgar Award eight times, served as President of the Mystery Writers of America in 1956 and was declared a Grand Master by that organization in 1985. She was on the initial steering committee of Sisters in Crime when it was formed in 1986 and her support was influential in dampening attacks on the new organization. Davis died on August 3, 2014, at a senior residence facility in Palisades, New York. She had been in failing health for several months prior to her death at the age of 98.
April 25, 1939
ROBERT SKIDELSKY (born 25 April 1939) is Professor of International Relations at the University of Warwick. He established his reputation as a historian with Politicians and the Slump in 1967 and has been deeply interested in Keynes as a man and an economist ever since.
April 26, 1898
Vicente Pío Marcelino Cirilo Aleixandre y Merlo (April 26, 1898 – December 14, 1984) was a Spanish poet who was born in Seville. Aleixandre was a Nobel Prize laureate for Literature in 1977. He was part of the Generation of '27. He died in Madrid in 1984. Aleixandre's early poetry, which he wrote mostly in free verse, is highly surrealistic. It also praises the beauty of nature by using symbols that represent the earth and the sea. Many of Aleixandre's early poems are filled with sadness. They reflect his feeling that people have lost the passion and free spirit that he saw in nature.
April 26, 1564 baptised
William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) – 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems.
April 26, 121 AD
Marcus Aurelius (April 26, 121 AD – March 17, 180 AD), was Roman Emperor from 161 to 180. He ruled with Lucius Verus as co-emperor from 161 until Verus' death in 169. He was the last of the Five Good Emperors, and is also considered one of the most important Stoic philosophers. During his reign, the Empire defeated a revitalized Parthian Empire in the East; Aurelius' general Avidius Cassius sacked the capital Ctesiphon in 164. In central Europe, Aurelius fought the Marcomanni, Quadi, and Sarmatians with success during the Marcomannic Wars, with the threat of the Germanic tribes beginning to represent a troubling reality for the Empire. A revolt in the East led by Avidius Cassius failed to gain momentum and was suppressed immediately. Marcus Aurelius' Stoic tome Meditations, written in Greek while on campaign between 170 and 180, is still revered as a literary monument to a philosophy of service and duty, describing how to find and preserve equanimity in the midst of conflict by following nature as a source of guidance and inspiration.
April 26, 1945
Paal-Helge Haugen was born on April 26, 1945 in Valle, in the Valley of Setesdal in southern Norway; he now lives in Nodeland, near the south coast. He has published ten volumes of poetry, including three volumes of translations from Chinese, Japanese, and English, and has received the Prize of the Norwegian Cultural Council for his novel, ANNE. He has also written a children’s book, stage plays, and radio and television scripts. William Mishler is Associate Professor in the Department of Scandinavian at the University of Minnesota. His poetry and translations have appeared in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Scandinavian Review, and many other journals. Roger Greenwald is Senior tutor at Innis College in the University of Toronto, where he teaches writing and edits WRIT magazine. His poetry and translations have appeared in numerous journals, and he has translated and edited The Silence Afterwards: Selected Poems of Rolf Jacobsen (Princeton University Press, 1985).
April 26, 1940
Born in 1940, Maria Campbell (née June Stifle) was raised in a close-knit Métis community that existed marginally in shanties on Crown land north of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. Halfbreed – the most acclaimed Aboriginal autobiography of the CP00100-2.jpg1970s – recalls Campbell’s trying, poverty-stricken childhood and early adulthood, which included a stint as a high-end prostitute in Vancouver, battles with drug and alcohol addiction, and involvement in the drug trade. Speaking to the racism and violence that she, her family, and community faced from the surrounding White and Indian populations, Campbell’s story is not merely a personal one, but also gives voice to the Métis as a whole, particularly to Métis women.
April 26, 1914
Bernard Malamud (April 26, 1914 – March 18, 1986) was an author of novels and short stories. Along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, he was one of the great American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, THE NATURAL, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford. His 1966 novel THE FIXER, about antisemitism in Tsarist Russia, won the both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
April 26, 1920
Ronald Hingley (April 26, 1920, Edinburgh, United Kingdom Died: 2010, United Kingdom) was a Fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and University Lecturer in Russian. His works include Chekhov: a Biographical and Critical Study, The Undiscovered Dostoyevsky and Russian Writers. and Society. He also produced a new ten-volume translation and critical edition of Chekov’s works.
April 26, 1922
Sir James Clarke ("Jim") Holt, FBA (26 April 1922 – 9 April 2014) was an English medieval historian, known particularly for his work on Magna Carta. He was the third Master of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, serving between 1981 and 1988.
April 26, 1711
David Hume (26 April 1711 – 25 August 1776) was a Scottish historian, philosopher, economist, diplomat and essayist known today especially for his radical philosophical empiricism and scepticism. Having a central role in the Scottish Enlightenment, and in the history of Western philosophy, Bryan Magee judged him as a philosopher 'widely regarded as the greatest who has ever written in the English language.' While Hume failed in his attempts to start a university career, he took part in various diplomatic and military missions of the time. He wrote The History of England which became a best-seller, and it became the standard history of England in its day. His empirical approach places him with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others at the time as a British Empiricist. Beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume strove to create a total naturalistic 'science of man' that examined the psychological basis of human nature. In opposition to the rationalists who preceded him, most notably René Descartes, he concluded that desire rather than reason governed human behaviour. He also argued against the existence of innate ideas, concluding that humans have knowledge only of things they directly experience. He argued that inductive reasoning and therefore causality cannot be justified rationally. Our assumptions in favour of these result from custom and constant conjunction rather than logic. He concluded that humans have no actual conception of the self, only of a bundle of sensations associated with the self. Hume's compatibilist theory of free will proved extremely influential on subsequent moral philosophy. He was also a sentimentalist who held that ethics are based on feelings rather than abstract moral principles, and expounded the is–ought problem. Hume has proved extremely influential on subsequent western philosophy, especially on utilitarianism, logical positivism, William James, the philosophy of science, early analytic philosophy, cognitive philosophy, theology and other movements and thinkers. In addition, according to philosopher Jerry Fodor, Hume's Treatise is 'the founding document of cognitive science'. Hume engaged with contemporary intellectual luminaries such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith (who acknowledged Hume's influence on his economics and political philosophy), also with James Boswell. Immanuel Kant credited Hume with waking him up from his 'dogmatic slumbers'.
April 26, 1868
Walter Lowrie (Philadelphia, April 26, 1868 – Princeton, August 12, 1959) was a Kierkegaardian theologian and translator. He was born in Philadelphia. Lowrie received his B.A. in 1890, and his M.A. in 1893, both from Princeton University. He studied in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland in 1893-1894. Upon his return home he joined the Episcopal Church. Lowrie was ordained deacon on June 9, 1895, and priest on Dec. 27, 1896. From 1896 until 1898, he was curate at St. James Church, Philadelphia. In 1898-1899, and 1900-1903, he was with the City Mission in Philadelphia. He then served churches in Southwark, Pennsylvania; Boston, Massachusetts; and Newport, Rhode Island. From 1907 until 1930, Lowrie was rector of St Paul's American Church in Rome. When he retired in 1930, he returned to Princeton and began what he called an "itinerant ministry." He published 39 books and numerous articles, including The Short Story of Jesus (1943) and Kierkegaard (1938). A Complete Bibliography of Walter Lowrie was compiled by Donald M. Fox, and published in 1979. From his retirement in 1930 until his death, Lowrie studied and translated the works of Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish nineteenth-century theologian. From 1939 until 1945, he published twelve volumes of Kierkegaard translations and worked very closely with fellow Kierkegaard translator David F. Swenson, who was working from the University of Minnesota. During his retirement, he traveled and lectured throughout the world. Lowrie died in Princeton and his wife, Barbara Armour, left his home, now known as the Walter Lowrie House, to the university.
April 26, 1966
Natasha Trethewey (born April 26, 1966) is an American poet who was appointed United States Poet Laureate in June 2012; she began her official duties in September. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, and she is the Poet Laureate of Mississippi. She is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, where she also directs the Creative Writing Program. Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi on 26 April 1966, Confederate Memorial Day, to Eric Trethewey and Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, who were married illegally at the time of her birth, a year before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws with Loving v. Virginia. Her birth certificate noted the race of her mother as ‘colored’, and the race of her father as ‘Canadian’. Trethewey's mother was part of the inspiration for Native Guard, which is dedicated to her memory. Trethewey's parents divorced when she was young and Turnbough was murdered in 1985 by her second husband, whom she had recently divorced, when Trethewey was 19 years old. Recalling her reaction to her mother's death, she said, ‘that was the moment when I both felt that I would become a poet and then immediately afterward felt that I would not. I turned to poetry to make sense of what had happened’. Natasha Trethewey's father is also a poet; he is a professor of English at Hollins University. Trethewey earned her B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University, and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1995. In May 2010 Trethewey delivered the commencement speech at Hollins University and was awarded an honorary doctorate. She had previously received an honorary degree from Delta State University in her native Mississippi. Structurally, her work combines free verse with more structured, traditional forms like the sonnet and the villanelle. Thematically, her work examines ‘memory and the racial legacy of America’. Bellocq's Ophelia (2002), for example, is a poem in the form of an epistolary novella; it tells the fictional story a mixed-race prostitute who was photographed by E. J. Bellocq in early 20th-century New Orleans. The American Civil War makes frequent appearances in her work. Born on Confederate Memorial Day - exactly 100 years afterwards - Trethewey explains that she could not have ‘escaped learning about the Civil War and what it represented’, and that it had fascinated her since childhood. For example, Native Guard tells the story of the Louisiana Native Guards, an all-black regiment in the Union Army, composed mainly of former slaves who enlisted, that guarded the Confederate prisoners of war. On 7 June 2012 James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, named her the 19th US Poet Laureate. Billington said, after hearing her poetry at the National Book Festival, that he was ‘‘immediately struck by a kind of classic quality with a richness and variety of structures with which she presents her poetry … she intermixes her story with the historical story in a way that takes you deep into the human tragedy of it.’ Newspapers noted that unlike most poet laureates, Trethewey is in the middle of her career. She will also be the first laureate to take up residence in Washington, D.C. when she does so in January 2013.
April 26, 1915
Joseph Zobel (April 26, 1915, in Martinique – June 18, 2006 in Alès, France) is the author of several novels and short-stories in which social issues are at the forefront. Although his most famous novel, ‘La Rue Cases-Nègres‘, was published some twenty years after the great authors of Negritude published their works, Zobel was once asked if he considered himself ‘the novelist of Negritude.’ His most famous novel, La Rue Cases-Nègres (often translated as Black Shack Alley or Sugar Cane Alley), was published in Paris 1950. The novel is an account of a young boy raised by his grandmother in a post-slavery, but still plantation-based, Martinique. The struggles of the impoverished cane sugar plantation workers, and the ambitions of a loving grandmother who works hard to put the main character through school are the core subject of the novel, which also describes life in a colonial society. Zobel stated that the novel was his version of Richard Wright's Black Boy in that they are both semi-autobiographical. The novel was adapted to the screen by Euzhan Palcy in 1983 as Sugar Cane Alley. While La Rue Cases-Nègres is the most renowned work from Joseph Zobel, the author started his writing career in 1942 during World War Two with Diab-la (a tentative English title could be : The Devil's Garden), a socially conscious novel similar to Jacques Roumains' Masters of the Dew (published one year or more later). With Diab-la, Zobel tells the powerful story of a sugar cane plantation worker freeing himself from colonial exploitation by creating a garden in a fishermen's village of Southern Martinique. Leaving Martinique in 1946 to pursue ethnology and drama studies in Paris, Joseph Zobel spent some years in Paris and Fontainebleau, before relocating in Senegal by 1957. Writing a few short stories, he had a notable impact in the cultural life of French-speaking West Africa as a public radio producer. Also a noted poet and a gifted sculptor, Joseph Zobel retired in a small village of Southern France by 1974 and died in 2006. Keith Q. Warner, former chair of the Department of Romance Languages at Howard University, is a native of Trinidad. He is author of KAISO: THE TRINIDAD CALYPSO and editor of Critical PERSPECTIVES ON LEON GONTRAN DAMAS.
April 26, 1968
Jørgen Brekke (born April 26, 1968), was raised in Horten, Norway and studied at the University of Trondheim. Trained as a high school teacher, he has most recently worked as a freelance journalist. He lives in Trondheim with his wife and three children. His first novel, was on the Norwegian bestseller lists for four months and has been sold in twelve countries.
April 27, 1898
Ludwig Bemelmans (April 27, 1898 – October 1, 1962) was an Austria-Hungary-born American writer and illustrator of children's books and an internationally known gourmet. He is known best for the Madeline picture books. Six were published from 1939 to 1961; a seventh was discovered after his death and published posthumously in 1999.
April 27, 1882
Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882-1961) wrote numerous stories, poems, and reviews in addition to four novels. From 1919 to 1926 she was the literary editor of Crisis magazine, where she published and promoted the early work of major voices of the Harlem Renaissance, including Jean Toomer, George Schuyler, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay.
April 27, 1949
Didier Daeninckx (born April 27, 1949, Saint-Denis, Seine-Saint-Denis) is a French author and left-wing politician of Belgian descent, best known for his romans noirs. He frequently uses fictional settings to transport social critique; his writings are characterized by a sobering social realism. An anti-fascist, he has also written on the Alsace Soviet Republic, on eugenicist Alexis Carrel, on Holocaust denial, etc. In his book Le Goût de la vérité (1996), he accuses the Ras l'front cofounder Gilles Perrault of being 'fascist'. In July 2001, the left-wing weekly Politis denounced Daeninckx as 'using Stalin's methods'. He contributes to the website Amnistia.net in which wrote many former members of Red Brigades (such as Enrico Porsia or Corrado Balocco). Daeninckx won the Prix Goncourt de la Nouvelle (2012) for L'Espoir en contrebande.
April 27, 1927
Coretta Scott King (April 27, 1927 – January 30, 2006) was an American author, activist, civil rights leader, and the wife of Martin Luther King, Jr. Coretta Scott King helped lead the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. She was an active advocate for African-American equality. King met her husband while in college. They both became increasingly active in the American Civil Rights Movement. She was also an accomplished singer, and often incorporated music into her civil rights work. King played a prominent role in the years after her husband's assassination in 1968 when she took on the leadership of the struggle for racial equality herself and became active in the Women's Movement. King founded the King Center and sought to make his birthday a national holiday. She finally succeeded when Ronald Reagan signed legislation which established Martin Luther King, Jr. Day on November 2, 1983. She later broadened her scope to include both opposition to apartheid and advocacy for LGBT rights. King became friends with many politicians before and after Martin Luther King's death, most notably John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Robert F. Kennedy. Her telephone conversation with John F. Kennedy during the 1960 presidential election has been credited by historians for mobilizing African-American voters. In August 2005, King suffered a stroke which paralyzed her right side and left her unable to speak; five months later she died of respiratory failure due to complications from ovarian cancer. Her funeral was attended by some 10,000 people, including four of five living US presidents. She was temporarily buried on the grounds of the King Center until being interred next to her husband. She was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame and was the first African American to lie in the Georgia State Capitol. King has been referred to as "First Lady of the Civil Rights Movement".
April 27, 1928
Burton Raffel (born 1928) is a translator, a poet and a teacher. He has translated many poems, including the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, poems by Horace, and Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais.
April 27, 1955
James Reidel is the author of Vanished Act: The Life and Work of Weldon Kees (University of Nebraska Press, 2003) and has edited a selection of Kees’s works for film and television, 3 Entertainments, for Knives Forks Spoons Press. In 2013 he is a resident poet at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut, where he is finalizing his second book of poems for publication, several of which appear in the summer issue of DMQ Review and the inaugural issue of (?m). Reidel’s translations of Franz Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh and Pale Blue Ink in a Lady’s Hand were published by Godine in 2012.
April 27, 1888
Abraham Valdelomar (April 27, 1888, Pisco, Peru - November 3, 1919, Ayacucho, Peru) was born in Iea, Peru, in 1888. An illustrator, poet, short-story writer, novelist, journalist, and political leader, his work reflects the nationalistic though romantic view of Peruvian literature of the early twentieth century.
April 27, 1945
August Wilson was born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a two-room apartment behind a grocery store on Bedford Avenue in the city’s Hill district. He learned to read at age four. At fifteen he quit high school and began his self-education at the Carnegie Library. At twenty he dedicated himself to writing poetry and supported himself with a series of jobs: dishwasher, short-order cook, porter, toy store stock boy, gardener, and mailroom clerk. At thirty-three he left Pittsburgh for St. Paul, Minnesota, where he turned to play writing. In addition to MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM, FENCES, and JOE TURNER’S COME AND GONE, August Wilson is the author of THE PIANO LESSON, which won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for drama, and TWO TRAINS RUNNING.
April 27, 1759
Mary Wollstonecraft (27 April 1759 – 10 September 1797) was an eighteenth-century English writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason. Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft's life, which encompassed several unconventional personal relationships, received more attention than her writing. After two ill-fated affairs, with Henry Fuseli and Gilbert Imlay (by whom she had a daughter, Fanny Imlay), Wollstonecraft married the philosopher William Godwin, one of the forefathers of the anarchist movement. Wollstonecraft died at the age of thirty-eight, ten days after giving birth to her second daughter, leaving behind several unfinished manuscripts. Her daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin would become an accomplished writer herself, as Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. After Wollstonecraft's death, her widower published a Memoir (1798) of her life, revealing her unorthodox lifestyle, which inadvertently destroyed her reputation for almost a century. However, with the emergence of the feminist movement at the turn of the twentieth century, Wollstonecraft's advocacy of women's equality and critiques of conventional femininity became increasingly important. Today Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and work as important influences.
April 28, 1953
Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, Paris, and Spain. A poet and novelist, he has been acclaimed as by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time (The Los Angeles Times), and as the real thing and the rarest (Susan Sontag). Among his many prizes are the prestigious Herralde de Novela Award and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. He is widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. His books include The Savage Detectives, 2666, By Night in Chile, Distant Star, Last Evenings on Earth, and The Romantic Dogs.
April 28, 1962
Gerbrand Bakker (born 28 April 1962) is a Dutch writer. He won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for The Twin, the English translation of his novel Boven is het stil, and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The Detour, the English translation of his novel De omweg.
April 28, 1902
Johan Collett Müller Borgen (28 April 1902 in Kristiania – 16 October 1979) was a Norwegian author, journalist and critic. He was married to Annemarta Borgen. Under the pseudonym of Mumle Gåsegg (Mumble Goose-egg) he wrote shorter articles in the newspaper Dagbladet, particularly during World War II. His articles were ironic and derogatory of the Nazi government, and he kept this up for a long time before being found out. In the end though, he was caught and sent to the prison camp Grini. His best known work is the novel Lillelord (1955). Borgen was editor of the literary magazine Vinduet (‘The Window’) 1954-1959.
April 28, 1903
Dudley Fitts (April 28, 1903 – July 10, 1968) was an American teacher, critic, poet, and translator. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts and attended Harvard University where he edited the Harvard Advocate. He taught at The Choate School 1926–1941 and at Phillips Academy at Andover 1941–1968. He and his former student at Choate, Robert Fitzgerald, published translations of Alcestis of Euripides (1936), Antigone of Sophocles (1939), Oedipus Rex (1949), and The Oedipus Cycle (1949). Their translations were praised for their clarity and poetic quality. He died in Andover, Massachusetts.
April 28, 1950
Carolyn Forché is an American poet, editor, translator, and human rights advocate. Forché was born in Detroit, Michigan, on April 28, 1950, to Michael Joseph and Louise Nada Blackford Sidlosky. Forché earned a B.A. in International Relations at Michigan State University in 1972. After graduate study at Bowling Green State University in 1975, she taught at a number of universities, including the University of Virginia, Skidmore College, Columbia University, and in the Master of Fine Arts program at George Mason University. She is now Director of the Lannan Center for Poetry and Poetics and holds the Lannan Chair in Poetry at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She lives in Maryland with her husband, Harry Mattison, a photographer, and their son, Sean-Christophe Mattison, who is a filmmaker. Forché’s first poetry collection, Gathering the Tribes (1976), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, leading to publication by Yale University Press. In 1977, she traveled to Spain to translate the work of Salvadoran-exiled poet Claribel Alegría. Upon her return, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled her to travel to El Salvador, where she worked as a human rights advocate. Her second book, The Country Between Us (1981), was published with the help of Margaret Atwood. It received the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was also the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Her articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Esquire, Mother Jones, and others. Forché has held three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1992 received a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship. Her anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, was published in 1993, and her third book of poetry, The Angel of History (1994), was chosen for The Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her works include the famed poem The Colonel. She is also a trustee for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Though Forché is sometimes described as a political poet, she considers herself a poet who is politically engaged. After first acquiring both fame and notoriety for her second volume of poems, The Country Between Us, she pointed out that this reputation rested on a limited number of poems describing what she personally had experienced in El Salvador during the Salvadoran Civil War. Her aesthetic is more one of rendered experience and at times of mysticism rather than one of ideology or agitprop. Forché is particularly interested in the effect of political trauma on the poet’s use of language. The anthology Against Forgetting was intended to collect the work of poets who had endured the impress of extremity during the twentieth century, whether through their engagements or force of circumstance. These experiences included warfare, military occupation, imprisonment, torture, forced exile, censorship, and house arrest. The anthology, composed of the work of one hundred and forty-five poets writing in English and translated from over thirty languages, begins with the Armenian Genocide and ends with the uprising of the pro-Democracy movement at Tiananmen Square. Although she was not guided in her selections by the political or ideological persuasions of the poets, Forché believes the sharing of painful experience to be radicalizing, returning the poet to an emphasis on community rather than the individual ego. In this she was strongly influenced by Terrence des Pres. Forché is also influenced by her Slovak family background, particularly the life story of her grandmother, an immigrant whose family included a woman resistance fighter imprisoned during the Nazi occupation of former Czechoslovakia. Forché was raised Roman Catholic and religious themes are frequent in her work. Her fourth book of poems, Blue Hour, was released in 2003. Forthcoming books include a memoir, The Horse on Our Balcony (2010, HarperCollins), a book of essays (2011, HarperCollins) and a fifth collection of poems, In the Lateness of the World (HarperCollins).
April 28, 1935
Dorothy Gallagher is the author of Hannah's Daughters and All the Right Enemies: The Life and Murder of Carlo Tresca, and two volumes of memoirs. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, and Grand Street. She lives in New York City.
April 28, 1874
KARL KRAUS (1874-1936) was a major influence on the intellectual life of Vienna, whose seminal thinkers and artists have profoundly changed twentieth-century thought. On some of them Kraus’s influence was fundamental. Kraus is difficult to classify in any category; he stands unique in world literature. Many critics believe him to be the greatest satirist since Swift; he was also one of the most brilliant aphorists. As a critic of society, in violent opposition to the all-pervading corruption of the spirit in public life, he was without equal.
April 28, 1950
MARITA GOLDEN is the author of MIGRATIONS OF THE HEART, A WOMAN’S PLACE, and LONG DISTANCE LIFE. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and numerous other publications. She teaches in an M.F.A. program at George Mason University and lives with her husband and son in Washington, D.C.
April 28, 1932
Calvin Hernton (April 28, 1932, Chattanooga, TN - September 30, 2001, Oberlin, OH) was a poet, sociologist, essayist and author of several nonfiction works, including the bestselling SEX AND RACISM IN AMERICA. He was Associate Professor of African-American Studies at Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio.
April 28, 1931
Vincent Chukwuemeka Ike comes from Eastern Nigeria. The second of a family of six, he was born in 1931 and grew up in a village where his parents belonged to the Anglican branch of the Church Missionary Society and where his father besides looking after his farm and business was also parish lay treasurer, local counciller and, at one time, a Church teacher. Vincent Chukwuemeka Ike was educated at Government College Umuahia, where he qualified for the University of Ibadan, at that time the only university in Nigeria. He took an active part in the Student's Union, was selected to represent Nigeria at Student Christian Movement Conferences and thanks to a UNESCO Student's Grant was able to attend international conferences in Holland, West Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. After graduating in 1955 he taught for two years in a Girls', Secondary School before returning to Ibadan to join the Administrative staff of the University and look after the students' welfare. When the new University of Nigeria was opened in 1960 at Nsukka in Eastern Nigeria, Mr Ike was asked to fill the post of Deputy Registrar and in 1963 was appointed Registrar, a position he holds at the present time. Recently he spent six months visiting schools and Universities in America and the United Kingdom. Mr Ike started writing as a schoolboy when he edited his House Magazine; as an undergraduate he sat on the editorial board of the University Herald and was an active member of the Magazine Club. Since then his short stories have won prizes in the Nigerian Festival of the Arts, have been broadcast in Nigeria and published in magazines there. Toads For Supper is his first novel. Mr Ike is married and has one son; his wife, Adebimpe, also a graduate of Ibadan University, comes from Western Nigeria, the opposite side of the country to her husband's home. The author's hobbies include photography and carpentry.
April 28, 1934
Diane Johnson (born April 28, 1934) is an American-born novelist and essayist whose satirical novels often feature American heroines living abroad in contemporary France.
April 28, 1932
Sven Lindqvist (born April 28, 1932) is a Swedish author of mostly non-fiction, whose works include Exterminate All the Brutes and A History of Bombing. Sven Lindqvist was born in Stockholm in 1932. He holds a PhD in History of literature from Stockholm University (his thesis, in 1966, was on Vilhelm Ekelund) and a 1979 honorary doctorate from Uppsala University. In 1960–1961, he worked as cultural attaché at the Swedish embassy in Beijing, China. From 1956–86 he was married to Cecilia Lindqvist, with whom he had two children. In 1986 he married the economist Agneta Stark. He lives in the Södermalm area of central Stockholm.
April 28, 1929
John Munonye (April 1929 – 10 May 1999) is an important Igbo writer and one of the most important Nigerian writers of the 20th century. He was born in Akokwa, Nigeria, and was educated at the University of Ibadan and the Institute of Education, London. He retired as the head of the Advanced Teacher Training College, Owerri. John Munonye, unlike some of his contemporaries professed a love for optimism in the face of colonial onslaught on traditional values. To him, the dialectical environment of African and western tradition can be seen in both a positive light and outcome for the common Igbo or Nigerian man or woman. An overriding theme in his novels is the focus on the common man. Munonye sometimes view the common man as being born into a position whereby he is already at a disadvantage, both historically and presently, He sees little difference to the fate of the common man who could be manipulated at the whims of elites and chiefs in both pre- and post-colonial Nigeria and during colonialism.
April 28, 1960
Ian Rankin is an Edgar Award nominee and the recipient of a Gold Dagger Award for Fiction and the Chandler-Fulbright Award. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with his wife and their two sons. Winner of the 2004 Edgar Award for Best Novel.
April 28, 1944
Alice Louise Waters is an American chef, restaurateur, activist and author. She is the owner of Chez Panisse, a Berkeley, California restaurant famous for its organic, locally grown ingredients and for pioneering California cuisine, which she opened in 1971. Waters has been cited as one of the most influential figures in food in the past 50 years, and has been called the mother of American food. She is currently one of the most visible supporters of the organic food movement, and has been a proponent of organics for over 40 years. Waters believes that eating organic foods, free from herbicides and pesticides, is essential for both taste and the health of the environment and local communities. In addition to her restaurant, Waters has written several books on food and cooking, including Chez Panisse Cooking (with Paul Bertolli), The Art of Simple Food I and II, and 40 Years of Chez Panisse. She is one of the most well-known food activists in the United States and around the world. She founded the Chez Panisse Foundation in 1996, and created the Edible Schoolyard program at the Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley, California. Waters serves as a public policy advocate on the national level for school lunch reform and universal access to healthy, organic foods, and the impact of her organic and healthy food revolution is typified by Michelle Obama's White House organic vegetable garden.
April 29, 1966
Svetlana Boym (April 29, 1966, Saint Petersburg, Russia - August 5, 2015, Boston, MA) was the Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literatures at Harvard University, and a media artist, playwright and novelist. She was an associate of the Graduate School of Design and Architecture at Harvard University. Much of her work focused on developing the new theoretical concept of the off-modern. Boym was born in Leningrad, USSR. She studied Spanish at the Herzen Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad. She received an M.A. from Boston University and a Ph.D. from Harvard. Boym's written work explored relationships between utopia and kitsch, memory and modernity, and homesickness and the sickness of home. Her research interests included 20th-century Russian literature, cultural studies, comparative literature and literary studies. In addition to teaching and writing, Boym also sat on the Editorial Collective of the interdisciplinary scholarly journal Public Culture. Boym was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Cabot Award for Research in Humanities, and an award from the American Council of Learned Societies. She won a Gilette Company Fellowship which provided her half a year study at the American Academy in Berlin. In 2006, Boym's media art exhibit opened in Factory Rog Art Space in Ljubljana during the City of Women Festival. She also curated the exhibit "Territories of Terror: Memories and Mythologies of Gulag in Contemporary Russian-American Art" at Boston's University Art Gallery. Boym died on August 5, 2015, aged 56, in Boston, Massachusetts, following a year-long battle with cancer.
April 29, 1946
Humphrey William Bouverie Carpenter (29 April 1946 – 4 January 2005) was an English biographer, writer, and radio broadcaster. Carpenter was born, died, and lived practically all of his life, in the city of Oxford. His father was the Rt. Rev. Harry James Carpenter. His mother was Urith Monica Trevelyan, who had training in the Fröbel teaching method. As a child, he lived in the Warden's Lodgings at Keble College, Oxford, where his father served as Warden until his appointment as Bishop of Oxford. He was educated at the Dragon School Oxford, and Marlborough College, and then read English at Keble. His notable output of biographies included: J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (1977) (also editing of The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien), The Inklings (1978), W. H. Auden (1981), Ezra Pound (1988), Evelyn Waugh (1989), Benjamin Britten (1992), Robert Runcie (1997), and Spike Milligan (2004). His last book, The Seven Lives of John Murray (2008) about John Murray and the famous publishing house of Albemarle Street, was published posthumously. He also wrote histories of BBC Radio 3 (on which he had regular stints as broadcaster), the British satire boom of the 1960s, Angry Young Men: A Literary Comedy of the 1950s (2002), and a centennial history of the Oxford University Dramatic Society in 1985. His Mr Majeika series of children's books enjoyed considerable popularity and were successfully adapted for television. The Joshers: Or London to Birmingham with Albert and Victoria by Humphrey Carpenter (ISBN 0048231428 Hardback, 1977) is a children's adventure book (similar in style to The Railway Children) based on the adventures of taking a working narrowboat up the Grand Union Canal from London to Birmingham. His encyclopaedic work The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature (1984), written jointly with his wife, has become a standard reference source. A distinguished broadcaster, he began his career at BBC Radio Oxford as a presenter and producer where Carpenter met his future wife, Mari Prichard (whose father was Caradog Prichard, the Welsh novelist and poet); they married in 1973. He played a role in launching Radio 3's still running arts discussion programme Night Waves and acted as a regular presenter of other programmes on the network including Radio 3's afternoon drivetime programme In Tune and, until it was discontinued, its Sunday request programme Listeners' Choice. Until the time of his death, he presented the BBC Radio 4 biography series Great Lives recorded in Bristol. The last edition recorded before his death featured an interview with the singer Eddi Reader about the poet Robert Burns, the major focus of her creative work. BBC Radio 4 broadcast this particular programme on New Year's Eve, 2004. Carpenter's other abilities included being a talented amateur jazz musician and an accomplished player of the piano, the saxophone, and the double-bass, playing the last instrument professionally in a dance band in the 1970s. In 1983, he formed a 1930s style jazz band, Vile Bodies, which for many years enjoyed a residency at the Ritz Hotel in London. He also founded the Mushy Pea Theatre Group, a children's drama group based in Oxford, which premiered his Mr Majeika: The Musical in 1991 and Babes, a musical about Hollywood child stars. His death was the result of heart failure, compounded by the Parkinson's disease from which he had suffered for several years. A commemorative stained glass window has been installed in The St. Margaret's Institute, Polstead Road honouring Humphrey's many accomplishments. He is survived by his wife, and daughters Clare and Kate.
April 29, 1863
Constantine Petrou Cavafy, widely recognized as the greatest of modern Greek poets, was born in Alexandria in 1863 into a family originally from Constantinople. After some childhood years spent in England and a stay in Constantinople in the early 1880s, he lived his entire life in Alexandria. It was there that he would write and (for the most part) self-publish the poems for which he became known, working all the while as a clerk in the Irrigation Office of the Egyptian government. His poetry was first brought to the attention of the English-speaking public in 1919 by E. M. Forster, whom he had met during the First World War. Cavafy died in Alexandria on April 29, 1933, his seventieth birthday; the first commercially published collection of his work appeared posthumously, in Alexandria, in 1935.
April 29, 1917
Maya Deren (April 29, 1917 – October 13, 1961), born Eleanora Derenkowskaia, was one of the most important American experimental filmmakers and entrepreneurial promoters of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer and photographer. The function of film, Deren believed, like most art forms, was to create an experience; each one of her films would evoke new conclusions, lending her focus to be dynamic and always-evolving. She combined her interests in dance, voodoo and subjective psychology in a series of surreal, perceptual, black and white short films. Using editing, multiple exposures, jump cutting, superimposition, slow-motion and other camera techniques to her fullest advantage, Deren creates continued motion through discontinued space, while abandoning the established notions of physical space and time, with the ability to turn her vision into a stream of consciousness. Perhaps one of the most influential experimental films in American cinema was her collaboration with Alexander Hammid on Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). She continued to make several more films of her own, including At Land (1944), A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) – writing, producing, directing, editing, and photographing them with help from only one other person, Hella Heyman, as camerawoman. She also appeared in a few of her films but never credited herself as an actress, downplaying her roles as anonymous figures rather than iconic deities.
April 29, 1958
Ramachandra Guha (born 29 April 1958 in Dehra Dun) is an Indian historian and writer whose research interests include environmental, social, political and cricket history. He is also a columnist for The Telegraph and Hindustan Times. A regular contributor to various academic journals, Guha has also written for The Caravan and Outlook magazines. For the year 2011–2012, he held a visiting position at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), the Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs. His newest book is Gandhi before India (2013), the first part of a planned two-volume biography of M. K. Gandhi.
April 29, 1929
Walter Kempowski (April 29, 1929 – October 5, 2007) was a German writer. Kempowski was known for his series of novels called German Chronicle (‘Deutsche Chronik’) and the monumental Echolot (‘Sonar’), a collage of autobiographical reports, letters and other documents by contemporary witnesses of the Second World War. Walter Kempowski was born in Rostock. His father, Karl Georg Kempowski, was a shipping company owner and his mother, Margarethe Kempowski, née Collasius was the daughter of a Hamburg merchant. In 1935 Kempowski began attending St. Georg School; in 1939, he transferred to the local high school (‘Realgymnasium’). As a teenager Kempowski, who was unathletic and had acquired a taste for American jazz and swing music through his older brother, chafed under compulsory service in the Hitler Youth, and was transferred into a penalty unit (Strafeinheit) of the organization. In early 1945 he was drafted into the Flakhelfer, the youth auxiliary of the Luftwaffe, serving in a special unit that performed courier functions. Kempowski's father, who had volunteered for military service at the beginning of the war, only to be turned away because of his membership in the Freemasons, was accepted for service in summer 1940, and died in combat on 26 April 1945. Walter Kempowski's first success as an author was the autobiographic novel Tadellöser und Wolf, in which he described his youth in Nazi Germany from the viewpoint of a well-off middle-class family. In several more books he completed the story of his family from the early 20th century into the late 1950s, when he was released from an East German prison in Bautzen where, accused of spying for the US military forces in West Germany, he had been incarcerated for eight years. In West Germany he became a teacher in a small village near Hamburg. In 2005 he finished his enormous oeuvre Echolot, a collection and collage of documents by people of any kind living in the circumstances of war. Echolot consists of thousands of personal documents, letters, newspaper reports, and unpublished autobiographies that had been collected by the author over a period of more than twenty years. The documents are now deposited in the archive of the Academy of Arts in Berlin. He died of intestinal cancer, aged 78, in Rotenburg in 2007.
April 29, 1947
Yusef Komunyakaa was born in 1947 in the quiet mill town of Bogalusa, Louisiana. Son of a carpenter he was raised in a house of few books at the beginning of the civil rights movement. His grandparents were church people and he has said in interview ‘the Old Testament informed the cadences of their speech. It was my first introduction to poetry.’ During his youth, he read the bible all the way through, twice, and also borrowed James Baldwin's Nobody Knows My Name, from Bogalusa's black library a total of 25 times. In other respects, the town offered him very limited opportunities so in 1969, he joined the army. He was shipped to Vietnam, where he became a combat reporter and managing editor for the Army newspaper Southern Cross; he was awarded a Bronze Star for his work. Komunyakaa began writing poetry in 1973, and received a BA from the University of Colorado Springs in 1975 which he attended on the GI Bill. His first collection Dedications & Other Darkhorses, was published in 1977 was followed two years later by Lost in the Bonewheel Factory. During this time, he gained an M.A. and M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Colorado State University and the University of California, Irvine, respectively. In 1984, Komunyakaa began teaching on the Creative Writing programme at Indianna University and also first received wide recognition following the publication of Copacetic, a collection of poems which typically employs colloquial speech and shows the influence of jazz rhythms. He followed the book with I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986), which won the San Francisco Poetry Center Award; and Dien Cai Dau(1988), which won The Dark Room Poetry Prize and has been cited by poets such as William Matthews and Robert Hass as being among the best writing on the war in Vietnam. Since the late 1980's Komunyakaa has published several more collections, including Thieves of Paradise (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989 (1994), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. The poet Toi Derricotte has written in the Kenyon Review that Komunyakaa ‘takes on the most complex moral issues, the most harrowing ugly subjects of our American life. His voice, whether it embodies the specific experiences of a black man, a soldier in Vietnam, or a child in Bogalusa, Louisiana, is universal. It shows us in ever deeper ways what it is to be human.’
April 29, 1924
David Saul Landes (usually cited as David S. Landes; April 29, 1924 – August 17, 2013) was a professor of economics and of history at Harvard University. He is the author of Bankers and Pashas, Revolution in Time, The Unbound Prometheus, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, and Dynasties. Such works have received both praise for detailed retelling of economic history, as well as scorn on charges of Eurocentrism, a charge he openly embraced, arguing that an explanation for an economic miracle that happened originally only in Europe must of necessity be a Eurocentric analysis. Landes earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1953 and an A.B. from City College of New York in 1942. The historian Niall Ferguson called him one of his "most revered mentors". Landes had a scholarly disagreement with Stephen Marglin over the Industrial Revolution. His son is Richard Landes, the American historian and author, an associate professor in the Department of History at Boston University.
April 29, 1950
Bjarne Reuter (born 29 April 1950) is a Danish writer and screenwriter, best known for children's and young adult books. Many of his works are set in the 1950s and 1960s, the time period of his childhood and adolescence. Many also feature the Copenhagen area, where he was born in Brønshøj. Reuter is the screenwriter of the popular Danish television series and movie Busters verden ("Buster's World"). In 1977 he was awarded with the Danish Ministry of Culture's children book prize. He won the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis for best children's book in 2000, recognising the German-language edition of En som Hodder (1998), and was a finalist for the youth book prize in 2003, for the work published in English as The Ring of the Slave Prince (2004). For his lasting contribution as a children's writer, Reuter was a finalist for the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award in both 2002 and 2004
April 29, 1953
Nicole Rubel is an author/illustrator known for her uniquely colorful illustrations and charming stories. She has over fifty books to her credit and is the co-creator of the popular Rotten Ralph series. Raised in Coral Gables, Florida, Ms. Rubel received a Bachelor of Science in Art Teaching from the Boston Museum School in association with Tufts University. Ms. Rubel's debut book, Rotten Ralph, earned her the Children's Book Showcase Award for Outstanding Graphic Design. She has since received awards from The American Books Association, The American Institute of Graphic Arts, and American Booksellers. She is a finalist for the Oregon Book award for No More Vegetables 20003. Twice as Nice has won a 2005 Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Platinum Book Award and will be featured in the 13th edition of the Oppenheim Toy Portfolio. Her first novel for ages 10 and up, ‘It's Hot and Cold in Miami,’ was received with glowing reviews in 2007. Ms. Rubel's books It Came From The Swamp, Pirate Jupiter and the Moondogs, and Goldie have been adapted for CD-ROM by Vtech and IBM. Her Rotten Ralph books are the basis of a new television series, which began airing on Fox Family channel in 1999. Ms. Rubel's art style was inspired by the paintings of Henri Matisse and the art deco architecture of her hometown of Miami.
April 29, 1875
Rafael Sabatini (29 April 1875 – 13 February 1950) was an Italian/English writer of novels of romance and adventure.
April 29, 1947
David Seals (April 29, 1947 – February 12, 2017) was an American writer. Seals' 1979 novel, The Powwow Highway was made into the film Powwow Highway starring A. Martinez and Gary Farmer. It was produced by George Harrison's Handmade Films, and featured appearances by Wes Studi, Graham Greene and Mr.Seals' son, Sky Seals, and then-wife Irene Handren-Seals. Parts of the film were shot on location on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in Lame Deer, Montana, with a number of tribal members playing small roles in the film. Along with fellow filmmakers William McIntyre and David Ode, Seals was a 1990 winner of the Bush Artists Fellowship, from the Bush Foundation in Minneapolis, for their 6-hour "poetic documentary", With Visible Breath I Am Walking. His other published works include the novel Sweet Medicine, a sequel to The Powwow Highway, which Booklist called "a comic masterpiece". In Sweet Medicine, the story continues where The Powwow Highway ended, but with the added device of the characters also commenting on the success of the previous book and film. In an ironic and self-deprecating incident, the protagonists have the chance to see the movie, but choose to see a Hollywood blockbuster instead. Later they also encounter a commune of yuppie newagers, and are tempted with the promise of fame and money, if they would only choose to sell out their vision. The New York Times said, "The book is full of adventure, humor, love and sex, and occasionally some eloquent rage about the way Indians have been treated in America." Seals' essays have appeared in The Nation, LA Times, Newsday, and 3 scholarly anthologies. His family memoir is entitled The Roswell Trilogy - Abduction at Roswell, Roswell Theogony, and Confessions of the Gods.
April 29, 1905
Peder Sjögren (April 29, 1905, Braås, Sweden - 1966, Stockholm, Sweden), born as Gösta Sjögren, was a Swedish writer who fought in the Spanish Civil War and the Continuation War. Many of his books were based on those experiences. Gösta Tage Filip Sjögren was born in 1905, outside Växjö, in the province of Småland, and at the age of 10 moved to Stockholm. Aged 17, he was sent to Rome, after which he travelled to the Balkans, Spain, North Africa, Poland, and Finland. As an antifascist during the Spanish Civil War, he joined the International Brigades and was wounded in combat. His experiences in the war provided him with themes for several of his novels. After his recovery, he was arrested as a suspected spy, but subsequently escaped from Spain on a British warship. Having worked as a journalist, his best articles were collected into his first book, Bar barbar (1937). In spite of this book and occasional radio plays and short stories, Sjögren did not attract attention until the appearance of Black Palms (Svarta palmkronor, 1944), which became a film by Lars-Magnus Lindgren in 1968. His second novel, Bread of Love (Kärlekens bröd, 1945), was based on his experiences as a volunteer in the Finnish Continuation War of 1941-44. A film of the book directed by Arne Mattsson (1953) was banned in Finland. Sjögren committed suicide in 1966, five days after his second wife died.
April 29, 1972
Allison Varzally is Assistant Professor of History at California State University, Fullerton.
April 29, 1962
Sandra M. Castillo was born in Havana, Cuba, and came to the United States on the Johnson administration’s Freedom Flights. She received her MA from Florida State University. Her poems have appeared in a wealth of publications and anthologies, including The North American Review, The Connecticut Review, The Florida Review, Cimarron Review, Little Havana Blues, and Paper Dance: 52 Latino Poets. In 2002 she received the White Pine Press award for her collection titled My Father Sings to My Embarrassment, selected by poet Cornelius Eady, who described Castillo as a poet who can make Cuban and Cuban-American history link arms and dance."
April 30, 1944
Felix de Azua (born 1944), one of Spain’s foremost contemporary writers, is the author of five novels, three collections of essays, and several volumes of poetry. DIARY OF A HUMILIATED MAN, which was awarded the Premio Herralde, is his first novel to appear in English.
April 30, 1883
Jaroslav Hašek (April 30, 1883 – January 3, 1923) was a Czech humorist, satirist, writer and anarchist best known for his novel The Good Soldier Švejk, an unfinished collection of farcical incidents about a soldier in World War I and a satire on the ineptitude of authority figures, which has been translated into sixty languages. He also wrote some 1,500 short stories. He was a journalist, bohemian, and practical joker. Hašek was born in Prague, Bohemia (then within Austria-Hungary, now part of the Czech Republic), the son of high-school math teacher Josef Hašek and his wife Katerina. Poverty forced the family, with three children - another son Bohuslav, three years Hašek's younger, and an orphan cousin Maria - to move often, more than fifteen times during his infancy. He never knew a real home, and this rootlessness clearly influenced his life of wanderlust. When he was thirteen, Hašek's father died from excessive alcohol intake, and his mother was unable to raise him firmly. The teenage boy dropped out of high school at the age of 15 to become a druggist, but eventually graduated from business school. He worked briefly as a bank clerk in 1903, before embarking a career as a freelance writer and journalist. At the end of 1910/early 1911 he was also a dog salesman (a profession he was to attribute to his hero Švejk and from which some of the improbable anecdotes told by Švejk are drawn). In 1906 he joined the anarchist movement, having taken part in the 1897 anti-German riots in Prague as a schoolboy. He gave regular lectures to groups of proletarian workers and, in 1907, became the editor of the anarchist journal Komuna. As an anarchist in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his movements were closely monitored by the police and he was arrested and imprisoned on a regular basis; his offenses include numerous cases of vandalism and at least one case of assaulting a police officer, for which he spent a month in prison. He satirized the lengths to which the Austro-Hungarian police would go to entrap suspected political subversives in the opening chapters of The Good Soldier Švejk. Hašek met Jarmila Mayerová in 1907, and fell in love with her. However, due to his bohemian lifestyle, her parents found him an unsuitable match for their daughter. In response to this, Hašek attempted to back away from his radical politics and get a settled job as a writer. When he was arrested for desecrating a flag in Prague, Mayerová's parents took her into the country, in hope that this would end their relationship. This move was unsuccessful in that it failed to end the affair, but it did result in Hašek renewing his focus on writing. In 1909 he had sixty-four short stories published, over twice as many as in any previous year, and he was also named as the editor of the journal The Animal World. This job did not last long, however, as he was soon dismissed for publishing articles about imaginary animals which he had dreamed up (though this furnished further material for Švejk). On May 23 1910, he married Jarmila Mayerová. The marriage proved an unhappy one and lasted little more than a year. Mayerová went back to live with her parents in 1911 after he was caught trying to fake his own death. At the outbreak of World War I, Hašek lived periodically with cartoonist Josef Lada, who later illustrated the Good Soldier Švejk. Eventually he was drafted and joined the army; some of the characters in Švejk are based on people he met during the war. He did not spend long fighting in the front line, being captured by the Russians on September 24 1915. At the camp in Totskoye he contracted typhus but later on had a more comfortable existence. In June 1916 he was recruited as a volunteer to join the Czechoslovak Brigade, a unit of mainly Czech volunteers that were fighting the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This unit was later to become known as the Czechoslovak Legions. There he acted respectively as a clerk, journalist, soldier and recruitment agent until February 1918. In March 1918 the Czechoslovak Legions embarked on a journey to join the Western Front via Vladivostok. Hašek disagreed with this move and opted to leave the legion in favour of Czech and Russian revolutionaries. From October 1918 he joined the Red Army, mainly working as a recruiter and propaganda writer. In 1920 he remarried (although still married to Jarmila). He eventually returned to Prague in December 1920. However, in some circles he was not a popular figure, being branded a traitor and a bigamist, and struggled to find a publisher for his works. Before the war, in 1912, he had published the book The Good Soldier Švejk and other strange stories (Dobrý voják Švejk a jiné podivné historky) where the figure of Švejk appeared for the first time; but it was only after the war in his famous novel that Švejk became a sancta simplicitas, a cheerful idiot who joked about the war as if it were a tavern brawl. By this time, Hašek had become gravely ill and dangerously overweight. He no longer wrote, but dictated the chapters of Švejk from his bedroom in the village of Lipnice, where he died in on January 3 1923 of heart failure.
April 30, 1903
Helen Kazantzakis (April 30, 1903, Athens, Greece - February 18, 2004, Athens, Greece0 was a Greek writer and wife of Nikos Kazantzakis.
April 30, 1937
Jean Metellus (30 April 1937 - 4 January 2014) was a Haitian neurologist, poet, novelist and playwright. Jean Metellus was born in Jacmel, Haiti. After completing his education in Haiti, he worked as a teacher. In 1959 he moved to Paris to escape the Duvalier dictatorship, where he studied linguistics and medicine, specializing in neurology. In 1973 the magazine Les Lettres Nouvelles published his poem "Au pipirite chantant," beginning his career as a poet and writer. Some of Metellus's early poems were also published by Jean-Paul Satre in his Les Temps Modernes. Metellus' plays include Anacoana, which was produced in Paris at the Thèâtre National de Chaillot by Antoine Vitez. Metellus published several novels, books of poetry and plays. He dedicated his books to wife Anna-Marie. He died on January 4, 2014
April 30, 1933
Christopher Uchefuna Okeke (30 April 1933 – 5 January 2016), known as Uche Okeke, was a contemporary Nigerian artist. Christopher Uchefuna Okeke was born on 30 April 1933 in Nimo, Njikoka Local Government Area of Anambra State, Nigeria, to Isaac Okonkwo Okeke and Monica Mgboye Okeke (née Okoye). Between 1940 and 1953, he attended St. Peter Claver’s (Primary) School, [Kafanchan], Metropolitan College,[Onitsha], and Bishop Shanahan College, [Orlu, Nigeria|Orl], during which time he had already begun to demonstrate an avid interest in drawing and painting. Before being admitted to read Fine Art at Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, now Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Okeke had already exhibited taxidermy work during the Field Society meeting in Jos Museum, participated in the preparation and presentation of Nigerian Drawings and Paintings with Bernard Fagg as curator and had a solo exhibition of drawings and paintings, in Jos and Kaduna with Sir Ahmadu Bello in attendance. As an undergraduate in 1958, Okeke together with Yusuf Grillo, Bruce Onobrakpeya, Demas Nwoko and others, inaugurated the Zaria Art Society. In that same year he opened a cultural centre at 30 Ibadan Street, Kafanchan, which later became the Asele Institute, Nimo, where among other cultural activities a part of the Smithsonian Institution-sponsored educational film Nigerian Art - Kindred Spirits was shot in 1996. In the early 1970s when he was appointed lecturer and acting head of Fine Arts Department at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, he reviewed the entire course programme introducing new courses and research into Igbo Uli art tradition. In 1973, he also designed the first course programme of the Department of Fine and Applied Arts, Institute of Management and Technology, Enugu, and initiated postgraduate courses in the Department of Fine Arts, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He was the Director of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, a visiting Professor to the Department of Creative Arts, University of Port Harcourt, Honorary Deputy Director-General (Africa) of International Biographical Centre, Cambridge, among numerous other engagements with many educational and cultural institutions in different parts of the world. He inspired many Nigerian artists and Africanist art historians, including some of the world’s avant-garde. That Okeke carried the Uli experiment beyond the walls of Zaria and stood in the forefront of its transformation into a modern idiom in the 1970s, from the studios at Nsukka was original. He is a father figure in the history of Nigerian modernism. Okeke died on 5 January 2016 in his native home at Nimo at the age of 82.
April 30, 1956
Barbara Seranella (April 30, 1956 – January 21, 2007) was an American author. Seranella was born in Santa Monica, California and then grew up in Pacific Palisades. She left what could have been an idyllic childhood to run away at 13 to seek adventure. She hitchhiked to San Francisco and joined a hippie commune. While there she learned auto mechanics on the street (she liked to hang out with guys who had cars). Seranella married Walter Haring in spring of 1982. He was the father of Michera Nicole Colella (DOB March 4, 1982). Seranella raised Michera as her own, often picking up the slack where Michera's biological mother's addiction paired with Walt's psychological instability left Seranella to pick up the pieces. Not wanting to create a wedge between two sisters being raised by a single mother with two different fathers, Seranella made the decision to take in Maryann Colella as well and raise her as her own too, just to avoid the confusion of separating the two girls.
April 30, 1952
Eduardo Sguiglia (born 30 April 1952) is an Argentine economist, writer and essayist. Exiled in Mexico during the last coup d'état in Argentina, he lives in Buenos Aires since the early eighties. He is Master in social sciences and he was a professor and researcher at the University of Buenos Aires. Sguiglia published short stories and novels - Fordlandia (1997), Do not trust me, if your heart fails you (1999) and A handful of glory (2003), Black Eyes (2010) - which were translated into Portuguese, English, Italian and German, and were finalists in the Dublin International Literary Award and Grinzane-Cavour. Fordlandia was selected one of the four best works of fiction by The Washington Post (2000). The New York Times finds his work "reminiscent of the work of Conrad or Kafka, in which, faced with the extremes of an indifferent universe, human beings must come to terms with their own capricious inner landscapes(...)". His latest novel is titled Los cuerpos y las sombras (Edhasa, 2014). Sguiglia was narrative jury in Casa de las Américas (Cuba) and Casa del Teatro (Dominican Republic). On 2016 he was one of the seven latinamerican creators who received the Fundación Jumex and Rockefeller Foundation prize. Moreover, he wrote several articles and essays on the economy and society of Argentina. Among others, "Agustín Tosco" (1984), "The Club of the Powerful" (1991), "Infrastructure and Competitiveness" (1997) and "Ideologies of economic power" (2006). In this field he has been awarded two national awards (Arcor Foundation 1993, Roggio Foundation, 1998), and for his work in foreign affairs he was honoured by the governments of Bolivia, Chile and Brazil. He served in the public sector as president of the regulator of airports, undersecretary of Latin American policy and as first Argentine ambassador to Angola. PATRICIA J. DUNCAN translates Spanish and Italian. Most recently she translated David Toscana’s novel TULA STATION. She lives in San Francisco.
April 30, 1933
Helen Vendler is the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University. Her many books include Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery (Princeton), as well as studies of Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats, Stevens, and Heaney. She is a frequent reviewer for the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and other publications.
April 30, 1947
Jaume Cabré i Fabré (Barcelona, 1947) is a Catalan philologist, novelist and screenwriter. He graduated in Catalan Philology from the University of Barcelona, is a high-school teacher on leave of absence, professor at the University of Lleida, and a member of the Philological Section of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans. During many years he has combined literary writing with teaching. He has also worked in television and cinematographic scriptwriting. He collaborated with Joaquim Maria Puyal as creator and scriptwriter of the first Catalan television series: La Granja (1989–1992), followed by other shows like Estació d'Enllaç (1994–1998), Crims (2000) and the made-for-television movies La dama blanca (1987), Nines russes (2003) and Sara (2003). He also wrote, together with Jaume Fuster, Vicenç Villatoro and Antoni Verdaguer, the script for Antoni Verdaguer's films La teranyina (1990), based on his novel, and Havanera (1993).
May 1, 1923
Joseph Heller (May 1, 1923 – December 12, 1999) was an American satirical novelist, short story writer, and playwright. The title of one of his works, Catch-22, entered the English lexicon to refer to a vicious circle wherein an absurd, no-win choice, particularly in situations in which the desired outcome of the choice is an impossibility, and regardless of choice, a same negative outcome is a certainty. Although he is remembered primarily for Catch-22, his other works center on the lives of various members of the middle class and remain examples of modern satire.
May 1, 1914
Barbara Howes (May 1, 1914 New York City - February 24, 1996 Bennington, Vermont) was an American poet. She was adopted by well-to-do Massachusetts family, and reared chiefly in Chestnut Hill, where she attended Beaver Country Day School. She graduated from Bennington College in 1937. She worked briefly for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in Mississippi, and then edited the literary magazine, Chimera, from 1943 to 1947 and lived in Greenwich Village. In 1947 she married the poet William Jay Smith, and they lived for a time in England and Italy. They had two sons, David Smith, and Gregory. They divorced in the mid-1960s, and she lived in Pownal, Vermont. In 1971, she signed a letter protesting proposed cuts to the School of the Arts, Columbia University. Her work was published in, Atlantic, Chicago Review, New Directions, New Republic, New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Saturday Review, Southern Review, University of Kansas Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Yale Review.
May 1, 1927
Morio Kita was the pen name of Sokichi Sait? (May 1, 1927 – October 24, 2011), a Japanese novelist, essayist, and psychiatrist. Kita attended Azabu High School, Matsumoto Higher School (now part of Shinshu University) and graduated from Tohoku University's School of Medicine. He initially worked as a doctor at Keio University Hospital. Motivated by the collections of his father's poems and the books of German author Thomas Mann, he decided to become a novelist. He was the second son of poet Mokichi Sait?. Shigeta Sait?, his older brother, is also a psychiatrist. The essayist Yuka Sait? is his daughter. He has suffered from manic–depressive disorder since his middle age.
May 1, 1944
Bob Mankoff became The New Yorker's cartoon editor in 1997. He is also the founder and president of Cartoonbank, a division of The New Yorker, which maintains the Internet's only searchable cartoon archive. He has published four collections of his own work and has edited five other New Yorker cartoon collections, most recently The New Yorker's 75th Anniversary Cartoon Collection.
May 1, 1940
Bobbie Ann Mason (born May 1, 1940) is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and literary critic from Kentucky. With four siblings Mason grew up on her family's dairy farm outside of Mayfield, Kentucky. As a child she loved to read, so her parents, Wilburn and Christina Mason, always made sure she had books. These books were mostly popular fiction about the Bobbsey Twins and the Nancy Drew mysteries. She would later write a book about these books that she loved to read as an adolescent titled The Girl Sleuth: A feminist guide to the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and Their Sisters. After high school, Mason went on to major in English at the University of Kentucky. After graduating in 1962, she took several jobs in New York City with various movie magazines, writing articles about various stars who were in the spotlight. She wrote about Annette Funicello, Troy Donahue, Fabian, and other teen stars. She earned her master's degree at the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1966. Next she went to graduate school at the University of Connecticut, where she subsequently received her Ph.D. in literature with a dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov's Ada in 1972. Her dissertation was published in paperback form as Nabokov's Garden two years later. By the time she was in her later thirties, Bobbie Ann started to write short stories. In 1980 The New Yorker published her first story. 'It took me a long time to discover my material', she said. 'It wasn't a matter of developing writing skills, it was a matter of knowing how to see things. And it took me a very long time to grow up. I'd been writing for a long time, but was never able to see what there was to write about. I always aspired to things away from home, so it took me a long time to look back at home and realize that that's where the center of my thought was.' Mason writes about the working-class people of Western Kentucky, and her short stories have contributed to a renaissance of regional fiction in America creating a literary style that critics have labeled 'shopping mall realism.' Mason then went on to write a collection of short stories, Shiloh and Other Stories. In 1985 she wrote her first novel, In Country, which eventually was made into a feature film. She followed In Country with another novel in 1988, Spence and Lila. She has since published several more short story collections.
May 1, 1973
Srikanth Reddy is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago and the author of a previous collection of poetry, Facts for Visitors.
May 1, 1913
Victor Stafford Reid (1 May 1913 – 25 August 1987) was a Jamaican writer born in Kingston, Jamaica, who wrote with an intent of influencing the younger generations. He was awarded the silver and gold Musgrave Medals (1955–1978), the Order of Jamaica (1980) and the Norman Manley Award for Excellence in Literature in 1981. He was the author of several novels, three of which were aimed towards children, one play production, and several short stories. Two of his most notable works are New Day - ‘the first West Indian novel to be written throughout in a dialect form’ - and The Leopard. As a writer, Reid aimed to instil an awareness of legacy and tradition among the Jamaican people. His writings reflected many of the social and cultural hardships that pervade the time periods illustrated in his literary works. As literary critic Edward Baugh has stated, ‘[Reid’s] writing showed a fondness for the rebel with a cause… he wanted people to learn about their heritage through his writing.’ Reid was one of a handful of writers to emerge from the new literary and nationalist movement that seized Jamaican sentiment in the period of the late 1930s. From this ‘new art’ surfaced many of Reid’s literary contemporaries, including Roger Mais, George Campbell, M. G. Smith, and H. D. Carberry. A common objective among this new generation of writers was an inclination to ‘break away from Victorianism and to associate with the Jamaican independence movement.’ Reid’s emphasis on resistance and struggle is reaffirmed in a 1978 lecture he delivered at the Institute of Jamaica on the topic of cultural revolution in Jamaica post-1938. In the address, Reid contended that the collective discontent of the working class majority was the public assertion of a ‘new brand of loyalty’ that situated itself not only beyond, but more importantly, in direct resistance to imperial rule. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Victor Reid was the son of Alexander Reid, a businessman who worked in the shipping industry in the United States and married Margaret Reid. Along with his two brothers and one sister, Victor grew up and attended school in Jamaica, graduating from Kingston Technical High school in 1929. He called himself a ‘city bred’ person because of his urban background. He was initially involved in advertising, journalism, farming and the book trade, before becoming a writer. Because of success in literature, his early life was prosperous. In 1935, he married his wife Monica and they had four children. He held several posts in the Jamaican government, including Chairman of the Jamaica National Trust Commission, and was a Trustee of the Historic Foundation Research Centre in Kingston. Reid was also well traveled, journeying to Great Britain, East Africa and West Africa, Canada and the United States during his lifetime. His first novel, New Day (1949), chronicles the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 and the series of events that led to the establishment of the new Jamaican constitution in 1944. He found it was difficult to get it published, as his manuscript was written in a different type of language, Creole; Reid had decided to introduce patois in order to familiarize young Jamaicans with black history as well as to instil pride in their heritage. Luckily, a piece of his work in the Jamaican Gleaner newspaper caught the attention of some magazine people that were visiting the island. This led to his first publication and gave him exposure to the literary world. He was soon editing and writing for Spotlight News Magazine and The Toronto Star. Just after New Day, Reid published a novel he had written for young people entitled Sixty-Five, which also portrays the Morant Bay Rebellion, but ‘in an easier gentler sort of way.’ In the wake of the later Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya, Reid was inspired to write a novel about the African situation in an attempt to relate that situation to the Jamaican uprising presented in New Day. His representation of this Kenyan rebellion is evidence that he found literary inspiration in these black uprisings. During the time that he was writing The Leopard, he was simultaneously working as an editor of a weekly newspaper called Public Opinion. Once the book was finished, it was ‘snapped up by an American and English publisher and was published.’ Reid’s reviews on his new novel were well received by its first audience. After publishing his first few novels, he decided to shift from literary works on specific events to focus on educating the younger generation in Jamaica. According to Reid, it was more difficult for him to write children’s novels than adult novels, because he ‘had never written down to children.’ Along with his Sixty-Five, Reid also wrote a number of novels for school children including The Young Warriors (1967), which deals with runaway slaves (known as maroons). He also wrote Peter of Mount Ephraim (1971), which dates back to the 1831 Samuel Sharpe slave uprising. His next novel, The Jamaicans, was written in 1976. It commemorates the life of the Juan de Bolas, a pre-Maroon band leader during the English and Spanish quest for supremacy in Jamaica during the mid-17th century. Nanny Town (1983) was Reid’s last published novel and portrays Jamaica’s original Queen Mother who led the Jamaican Maroons to independence from the English. Reid’s final work was a biography of the Jamaican national hero Norman Manley, entitled The Horses of the Morning (1985). Although novels comprised the bulk of Reid’s literary body of work, he was also the author of several stories, collected in Fourteen Jamaican Short Stories (1950), and a play entitled Waterford Bar (1959). Furthermore, edited transcripts of lectures delivered by Reid, such as ‘The Cultural Revolution in Jamaica after 1938’ (1978) and ‘The Writer & His Work: V. S. Reid’ (1986), have been reprinted posthumously in texts such as The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature and the Journal of West Indian Literature, respectively. Reid’s novels focus on the freedom of black culture and describe the struggles of black people. His works tend to focus primarily on the history, hopes, and powers of the Jamaican people. Through his writing, Reid wanted to break apart the ‘distortions of history’ portrayed by the foreign press, which described Jamaican radicals as criminals. He wrote to prove the innocence of people who were rendered to be the opposite. Reid held that ‘[he] must discover, somehow, that these people were not the criminals they were thought to be.’ In a way, he was telling the untold stories of the times. Another important aspect of Reid’s writing included his desire to contribute to the education system. Previously, schools were solely taught from an English perspective and through a colonial lens. Reid, however, wanted people in school to learn about their own heritage through his writing; he wanted people to recognize that blacks, not only Europeans, participated in history. Therefore, Reid wrote novels to be used in Jamaican schools that provided a historical context of their country and heritage. Reid was also constantly reinventing language through his writing. In his first novel, New Day, he created a newly modified language that combines both the elements of Standard English and the native Creole language. Later, in works such as The Leopard, he integrates a singing prose style of writing.
May 1, 1922
Otto Lara Resende (1 May 1922 – 28 December 1992) was a Brazilian journalist and writer. Resende began teaching French at age fourteen and at eighteen years old began working as a journalist in the Belo Horizonte newspaper O Diário. In his career he worked at literary supplement of Diário de Minas. In Rio de Janeiro, Resende worked for the Diário de Notícias, O Globo, Diário Carioca, Correio da Manhã, Última Hora and Jornal do Brasil newspapers, Manchete and Senhor magazines, and TV Globo. He graduated in Law from the Federal University of Minas Gerais. On July 3, 1979 Resende was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters, taking the chair 39, vacant by the death of Elmano Cardim.
May 1, 1909
Yiannis Ritsos (1 May 1909 – 11 November 1990) was a Greek poet and left-wing activist and an active member of the Greek Resistance during World War II. Born to a well-to-do landowning family in Monemvasia, Ritsos suffered great losses as a child. The early deaths of his mother and eldest brother from tuberculosis, his father's struggles with a mental disease, and the economic ruin his family marked Ritsos and affected his poetry. Ritsos himself was confined in a sanatorium for tuberculosis from 1927–1931. In 1931, Ritsos joined the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). He maintained a working-class circle of friends and published Tractorin 1934. In 1935, he published Pyramids; these two works sought to achieve a fragile balance between faith in the future, founded on the Communist ideal, and personal despair. The landmark poem Epitaphios, published in 1936, broke with the shape of Greek traditional popular poetry and expressed in clear and simple language a message of the unity of all people. In August 1936, the right-wing dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas came to power and Epitaphios was burned publicly at the foot of the Acropolis in Athens. Ritsos responded by taking his work in a different direction: he began to explore the conquests of surrealism through thedomain of dreams, surprising associations, explosions of images and symbols, a lyricism illustrative of the anguish of the poet, and both tender and bitter souvenirs. During this period Ritsos published The Song of my Sister (1937) and Symphony of the Spring (1938). During the Axis occupation of Greece (1941–1945) Ritsos became a member of the EAM (National Liberation Front) and authored several poems for the Greek Resistance. These include a booklet of poems dedicated to the resistance leader Aris Velouchiotis, written immediately upon the latter's death on 16 June 1945. Ritsos also supported the Left in the subsequent Civil War (1946-1949); in 1948 he was arrested and spent four years in prison camps. In the 1950s 'Epitaphios', set to music by Mikis Theodorakis, became the anthem of the Greek Left. In 1967 he was arrested by the Papadopoulos dictatorship and sent to a prison camp in Gyaros. Today, Ritsos is considered one of the five great Greek poets of the twentieth century, together with Konstantinos Kavafis, Kostas Kariotakis, Giorgos Seferis, and Odysseus Elytis. The French poet Louis Aragon once said that Ritsos was "the greatest poet of our age." He was unsuccessfully proposed nine times for the Nobel Prize for Literature. When he won the Lenin Peace Prize (also known as theStalin Peace Prize prior to 1956) he declared "this prize is more important for me than the Nobel." His poetry was banned at times in Greece due to his left wing beliefs. Notable works by Ritsos include Tractor (1934), Pyramids (1935), Epitaph (1936), and Vigil (1941–1953). The translator, Edmund Keeley, is the author of several books of criticism and numerous novels, most recently A Wilderness Called Peace. He is internationally renowned for his translattions of C.P. Cavafy and Nobel Prize laureates George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis. Mr. Keeley teaches creative writing and Hellenic studies at Princeton University.
May 1, 1924
Terry Southern (May 1, 1924 – October 29, 1995) was an American novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and university lecturer, noted for his distinctive satirical style. Part of the Paris postwar literary movement in the 1950s and a companion to Beat writers in Greenwich Village, Southern was also at the center of Swinging London in the 1960s and helped to change the style and substance of American films in the 1970s. He briefly wrote for Saturday Night Live in the 1980s. Southern's dark and often absurdist style of satire helped to define the sensibilities of several generations of writers, readers, directors and film goers. He is credited by journalist Tom Wolfe as having invented New Journalism with the publication of "Twirling at Ole Miss" in Esquire in February 1963. Southern's reputation was established with the publication of his comic novels Candy and The Magic Christian and through his gift for writing memorable film dialogue as evident in Dr. Strangelove, The Loved One, The Cincinnati Kid, and The Magic Christian. His work on Easy Rider helped create the independent film movement of the 1970s.
May 1, 1924
Judy Stone (May 1, 1924 – October 6, 2017) was an American journalist and film critic who wrote film reviews for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1961 to 1993. Stone was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Russian Jewish immigrants who owned a dry goods store. She was the youngest of four children, all of whom became journalists, including her brother I. F. Stone. Her interest in journalism came early when she wrote a film review of The General Died at Dawn for the student newspaper at Jay Cooke Junior High School. Stone dropped out of school to make walkie-talkies in a factory during World War II. However, she remained in publishing as managing editor for her labor union's newspaper. Following the war, she settled in San Francisco, working as a reporter for the Marin Independent Journal and, later, at the copy desk at the San Francisco Chronicle. Around 1965, she transferred to the Chronicle's Datebook section. Stone also wrote for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and many other national newspapers and magazines. Her books include The Mystery of B. Traven (1977), Eye on the World: Conversations With International Filmmakers (1997), and Not Quite a Memoir: Of Film, Books, the World (2006). Stone died at her Potrero Hill home in San Francisco on October 6, 2017, at the age of 93.
May 1, 1900
Aleksander Wat is the pen name of Aleksander Chwat (1 May 1900 – 29 July 1967), a Polish poet, writer, art theoretician and memorialist, one of the precursors of the Polish futurism movement in the early 1920s, considered to be one of the more important Polish writers of the 20th century.
May 1, 1927
Akira Yoshimura (born May 1, 1927; died July 31, 2006) was a prize winning Japanese writer. He was the president of the Japanese writers' union and a PEN member. He published over 20 novels, of which On Parole and Shipwrecks are internationally known and have been translated into several languages. In 1984 he received the Yomiuri Prize for his novel Hagoku (Prison Break) based on the true story of Yoshie Shiratori.
May 1, 1829
José Martiniano de Alencar (May 1, 1829 — December 12, 1877) was a Brazilian lawyer, politician, orator, novelist and dramatist. He is considered to be one of the most famous and influential Brazilian Romantic novelists of the 19th century, and a major exponent of the literary tradition known as 'Indianism'. Sometimes he signed his works with the pen name Erasmo. He is patron of the 23rd chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. José Martiniano de Alencar was born in what is today the bairro of Messejana, Fortaleza, Ceará, on May 1, 1829, to former priest (and later politician) José Martiniano Pereira de Alencar and his cousin Ana Josefina de Alencar. Moving to São Paulo in 1844, he graduated in Law at the Faculdade de Direito da Universidade de São Paulo in 1850 and started his career in law in Rio de Janeiro. Invited by his friend Francisco Otaviano, he became a collaborator for the journal Correio Mercantil. He also wrote many chronicles for the Diário do Rio de Janeiro and the Jornal do Commercio. Alencar would compile all the chronicles he wrote for these newspapers in 1874, under the name Ao Correr da Pena. It was in the Diário do Rio de Janeiro, during the year of 1856, that Alencar gained notoriety, writing the Cartas sobre A Confederação dos Tamoios, under the pseudonym Ig. In them, he bitterly criticized the homonymous poem by Gonçalves de Magalhães. Even the Brazilian Emperor Pedro II, who esteemed Magalhães very much, participated in this polemic, albeit under a pseudonym. Also in 1856, he wrote and published under feuilleton form his first romance, Cinco Minutos, that received critical acclaim. In the following year, his breakthrough novel, O Guarani, was released; it would be adapted into a famous opera by Brazilian composer Antônio Carlos Gomes 13 years later. O Guarani would be first novel of what is informally called 'Alencar's Indianist Trilogy' — a series of three novels by Alencar that focused on the foundations of the Brazilian nation, and on its indigenous peoples and culture. The other two novels, Iracema and Ubirajara, would be published on 1865 and 1874, respectively. Although called a trilogy, the three books are unrelated in its plots. Alencar was affiliated with the Conservative Party of Brazil, being elected as a general deputy for Ceará. He was the Brazilian Minister of Justice from 1868 to 1870. He also planned to be a senator, but Pedro II never appointed him, under the pretext of Alencar being too young; with his feelings hurt, he would abandon politics later. He was very close friends with the also famous writer Machado de Assis, who wrote an article in 1866 praising his novel Iracema, that was published the year before, comparing his Indianist works to Gonçalves Dias, saying that 'Alencar was in prose what Dias was in poetry'. When Assis founded the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1897, he chose Alencar as the patron of his chair. In 1864 he married Georgina Augusta Cochrane, daughter of an eccentric British aristocrat. They would have six children — Augusto (who would be the Brazilian Minister of External Relations in 1919, and also the Brazilian ambassador on the United States from 1920 to 1924), Clarisse, Ceci, Elisa, Mário (who would be a journalist and writer, and a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters) and Adélia. (It is implied that Mário de Alencar was actually an illegitimate son of Machado de Assis, a fact that inspired Assis to write his famous novel Dom Casmurro). Alencar died in Rio de Janeiro in 1877, a victim of tuberculosis. A theatre in Fortaleza, the Theatro José de Alencar, was named after him.
May 2, 1905
Charlotte Armstrong Lewi (May 2, 1905 in Vulcan, Michigan – July 7, 1969 in Glendale, California) was an American author. Under the names Charlotte Armstrong and Jo Valentine she wrote 29 novels. She also worked for The New York Times?'? advertising department, as a fashion reporter for Breath of the Avenue (a buyer's guide), and in an accounting firm. Armstrong Lewi graduated from Vulcan High School in Vulcan, Michigan, in June 1921. She attended the junior college program at Ferry Hall in Lake Forest, Illinois for one year (1921–22), during which time she served as Editor-in-Chief of the student publication, Ferry Tales. She attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison and received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Barnard College in 1925. She had a daughter and two sons with her husband, Jack Lewi. In 1957, she received an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for her novel A Dram of Poison. She wrote two other Edgar-nominated novels, both published in 1967: The Gift Shop and Lemon in the Basket. Three of her short stories, all published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, were nominated for Edgars: 'And Already Lost' (1957), 'The Case for Miss Peacock' (1965), and 'The Splintered Monday' (1966).
May 2, 1921
Satyajit Ray (2 May 1921 – 23 April 1992) was an Indian Bengali filmmaker. He is regarded as one of the greatest auteurs of 20th century cinema. Ray was born in the city of Calcutta (now Kolkata) into a Bengali family prominent in the world of arts and literature. Starting his career as a commercial artist, Ray was drawn into independent filmmaking after meeting French filmmaker Jean Renoir and viewing the Italian neorealist film Bicycle Thieves during a visit to London. Ray directed thirty-seven films, including feature films, documentaries and shorts. He was also a fiction writer, publisher, illustrator, graphic designer and film critic. Ray's first film, Pather Panchali (1955), won eleven international prizes, including Best Human Documentary at the Cannes film festival. Alongside Aparajito (1956) and Apur Sansar (1959), the three films form The Apu Trilogy. Ray did the scripting, casting, scoring, cinematography, art direction, editing and designed his own credit titles and publicity material. Ray received many major awards in his career, including 32 Indian National Film Awards, a number of awards at international film festivals and award ceremonies, and an Academy Honorary Award in 1991.
May 2, 1926
Michael Andrew Screech (2 May 1926 - 1 June 2018) was an emeritus fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. In 1992, he was honoured as a Chevalier in the French Legion of Honor. His translation of Montaigne's Essays has been widely recognized.
May 2, 1959
ZOE VALDES was born in Havana in 1959. She currently lives in Paris with her daughter, Attys Luna.
May 3, 1924
Yehuda Amichai (3 May 1924 – 22 September 2000) was an Israeli poet. Amichai is considered by many, both in Israel and internationally, as Israel's greatest modern poet. He was also one of the first to write in colloquial Hebrew. Yehuda Amichai [was] for generations the most prominent poet in Israel, and one of the leading figures in world poetry since the mid-1960s. (The Times, London, Oct. 2000). He was awarded the 1957 Shlonsky Prize, the 1969 Brenner Prize, 1976 Bialik Prize, and 1982 Israel Prize. He also won international poetry prizes: 1994 – Malraux Prize: International Book Fair (France), 1995 – Macedonia`s Golden Wreath Award: International Poetry Festival, and more.
May 3, 1901
John Henry Noyes Collier (3 May 1901 – 6 April 1980) was a British-born author and screenplay writer best known for his short stories, many of which appeared in The New Yorker from the 1930s to the 1950s. Most were collected in The John Collier Reader (Knopf, 1972); earlier collections include a 1951 volume, the famous Fancies and Goodnights, which won the International Fantasy Award and remains in print. Individual stories are frequently anthologized in fantasy collections. John Collier's writing has been praised by authors such as Anthony Burgess, Ray Bradbury, Roald Dahl, Neil Gaiman, Michael Chabon, Wyndham Lewis, and Paul Theroux. He appears to have given few interviews in his life; those include conversations with biographer Betty Richardson, Tom Milne, and Max Wilk.
May 3, 1871
Emmett Dalton (May 3, 1871 – July 13, 1937) was an American outlaw, train robber and member of the Dalton Gang in the American Old West. Part of the ill-fated Dalton raid on two banks in Coffeyville, Kansas, he survived despite receiving 23 gunshot wounds. After serving 14 years in prison for the crime, Dalton capitalized on his notoriety to author books and become an actor in Hollywood.
May 3, 1930
Juan Gelman (born 3 May 1930) is an Argentine poet. He has published more than twenty books of poetry since 1956. He won the Cervantes Prize in 2007, the most important in Spanish literature. His works celebrate life but are also tempered with social and political commentary and reflect his own painful experiences with the politics of his country. Juan Gelman was born in Buenos Aires, in the Villa Crespo neighborhood, in 1930. He was the third son of Ukrainian immigrants. His father, José Gelman, was a social revolutionary who participated in the 1905 revolution in Russia; he immigrated to Argentina, went back shortly after the Bolshevik revolution, and then returned to Argentina for good, disillusioned. Juan Gelman learned to read when he was three years old, and spent much of his childhood reading and playing soccer. He developed an interest in poetry at a very young age, influenced by his brother Boris, who read to him several poems in Russian, a language that Juan did not know. The experience of reading Dostoevsky's ‘The Insulted and Humiliated‘ at age eight made a profound impression on him. As a young man he was a member of several notable literary groups and later became an important journalist. He also worked as a translator at the United Nations. He has always been an ardent political activist. In 1975 he became involved with the Montoneros, though he later distanced himself from the group. After the 1976 Argentine coup, he was forced into exile from Argentina. In 1976, his son Marcelo and his pregnant daughter-in-law, Maria Claudia, aged 20 and 19, were kidnapped from their home. They became two of the 30,000 desaparecidos, the people who ‘vanished’ without a trace during the reign of the military junta. In 1990 Gelman was led to identify his son's remains (he had been executed and buried in a barrel filled with sand and cement), and years later, in 2000, he was able to trace his granddaughter, born in a backdoor hospital before Maria Claudia's murder and given to a pro-government family in Uruguay. The remains of Maria Claudia have not yet been recovered. During his long exile, Gelman lived in Europe until 1988, then in United States and later in México, where he still lives with his wife, Argentinian psychologist Mara La Madrid. In 1997, Juan Gelman received the Argentine National Poetry Prize, in recognition of his life's work, and in 2007 the Cervantes Prize, the most important prize for Spanish writers. He has also had a long and brilliant career as journalist, and continues to write for the Argentinian newspaper Pagina/12. Gelman included Uruguayan police officer Hugo Campos Hermida in a legal suit lodged in Spain for the ‘disappearance‘ of his niece in Uruguay.
May 3, 1853
Edgar Watson Howe (May 3, 1853 – October 3, 1937), sometimes referred to as E. W. Howe, was an American novelist and newspaper and magazine editor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was perhaps best known for his magazine, E.W. Howe's Monthly.
May 3, 1948
Christine Schutt is an American novelist. Schutt received her BA and MA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and her MFA from Columbia University. She has taught graduate and undergraduate writing at Barnard College, Bennington College, Columbia University, Hollins University, Sarah Lawrence College, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Syracuse University and UC Irvine. She has taught at the Sewanee Writers' Conference in the years 2006, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012.
May 3, 1906
Enrique Arturo Laguerre Vélez (May 3, 1906 – June 16, 2005) was a teacher, novelist, playwright, critic, and newspaper columnist (for El Vocero) from Moca, Puerto Rico. Laguerre studied at various universities, obtaining degrees in arts from the University of Puerto Rico and Columbia University. In 1924, he took courses on teaching in rural areas in the town of Aguadilla. The courses where taught by Carmen Gómez Tejera. After this he taught from 1925 to 1988, both at the elementary school and university levels. Laguerre was known to use the pen-names of Tristán Ronda, Luis Urayoán, Motial and Alberto Prado, among others. Married for many years to the well-respected writer Luz V. Romero García, he also worked in many Puerto Rican publications before joining the staff of El Vocero. In 1998, his peers as well as former governors Rafael Hernández Colón and Luis A. Ferré, advocated for Laguerre to be considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Despite their efforts, Laguerre was not awarded the prestigious award. Laguerre was an emeritus member of the Center for Advanced Studies on Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Enrique Laguerre died on June 16, 2005, at the age of 99. His body was buried on the grounds of the Palacete Los Moreau, an old hacienda restored as a museum, in his native town of Moca. Laguerre was one of the most prolific novelists of Puerto Rico. Following in the steps of Manuel Zeno Gandía, Laguerre's most influential work focused on the problems of the colonized society. His novel La Llamarada offers a compressive view of rural Puerto Rico during the Great Depression. Most of his novels are essential readings in Puerto Rican literature courses.
May 3, 1469
Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (3 May 1469 – 21 June 1527) was a Florentian historian, politician, diplomat, philosopher, humanist, and writer during the Renaissance. He was for many years an official in the Florentine Republic, with responsibilities in diplomatic and military affairs. He was a founder of modern political science, and more specifically political ethics. He also wrote comedies, carnival songs, and poetry. His personal correspondence is renowned in the Italian language. He was Secretary to the Second Chancery of the Republic of Florence from 1498 to 1512, when the Medici were out of power. He wrote his masterpiece, The Prince, after the Medici had recovered power and he no longer held a position of responsibility in Florence. His views on the importance of a strong ruler who was not afraid to be harsh with his subjects and enemies were most likely influenced by the Italian city-states, which due to a lack of unification were very vulnerable to other unified nation-states, such as France. 'Machiavellianism' is a widely used negative term to characterize unscrupulous politicians of the sort Machiavelli described in The Prince. The book itself gained enormous notoriety and wide readership because the author seemed to be endorsing behavior often deemed as evil and immoral. Because of this, the term 'Machiavellian' is often associated with deceit, deviousness, ambition, and brutality.
May 3, 1937
Nélida Piñon (born May 3, 1937) is a Brazilian writer. Born in Rio de Janeiro of Galician immigrants. She is a former President of Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Letters).
May 3, 1849
Jacob August Riis (May 3, 1849 – May 26, 1914) was a Danish American social reformer, 'muckraking' journalist and social documentary photographer. He is known for using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the impoverished in New York City; those impoverished New Yorkers were the subject of most of his prolific writings and photography. He endorsed the implementation of 'model tenements' in New York with the help of humanitarian Lawrence Veiller. Additionally, as one of the most famous proponents of the newly practicable casual photography, he is considered one of the fathers of photography due to his very early adoption of flash in photography. While living in New York, Riis experienced poverty and became a police reporter writing about the quality of life in the slums. He attempted to alleviate the bad living conditions of poor people by exposing their living conditions to the middle and upper classes.
May 3, 1951
Tatyana Nikitichna Tolstaya (born 3 May 1951) is a Russian writer, TV host, publicist, novelist, and essayist from the Tolstoy family, known for her fiction and "acerbic essays on contemporary Russian life"
May 3, 1956
CARLO ROVELLI received his PhD in physics at the University of Padua. He has conducted research at Imperial College, Yale University, the University of Rome, and the University of Pittsburgh, and currently directs the quantum gravity group of the Center for Theoretical Physics at Aix-Marseille University. He is author of Quantum Gravity and What Is Time? What Is Space?, as well as many scholarly articles. His most recent book, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, translated into thirty-four languages, is an international bestseller.
May 4, 1946
Rosemary Aubert is the author of sixteen books, among them the acclaimed Ellis Portal mystery series and her latest romantic thriller Terminal Grill. Rosemary is a two-time winner of the Arthur Ellis Award for crime fiction, winning in both the novel and short-story categories. She appears in the recently-published popular short story collection Thirteen. She's a popular teacher and speaker. Rosemary is a member of the Crime Writers of Canada and the Mystery Writers of America. She conducts a much-in-demand writer's retreat at Loyalist College in Belleville, Ontario each summer, as well as mentoring writing students who are studying at the School of Continuing Studies at the University of Toronto. As a hobby, Rosemary studies math and science and has recently completed her second stint attending lectures at the International Summer School at Cambridge University in England. She intends to use some of this math knowledge in future works. Rosemary is an active member of the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto where she promotes Canadian writing and encourages other writers like herself.
May 4, 1830
Alberto Blest Gana (May 4, 1830 – November 9, 1920) was a Chilean novelist and diplomat, considered the father of Chilean novel. Blest Gana was of Irish and Basque descent. He was born in Santiago, the son of an Irishman, William Cunningham Blest, and of María de la Luz Gana Darrigrandi, from an aristocratic landowning family. He studied at the Military Academy and then for one year in France. A liberal, Alberto Blest was named intendant of the province of Colchagua and starting 1866 he was Chilean diplomatic representative at Washington, London and Paris. Among his successes were the inclusion of Chile in the Universal Postal Union and the purchase of armament for Chilean troops during the War of the Pacific. He also participated at border negotiations with Argentina, but with a less important role than his previous activities. Blest Gana passionately read the novels of Honoré de Balzac. Upon his return home, he virtually founded the Chilean novel by adapting European techniques to some ten novels portraying various aspects of national history and life. Of these, the most important is Martín Rivas (1862), which describes the career of a young man during the 1851 political revolt. Abundant local color and social criticism accompany the action of the novel. Although these elements of description are not brought to life and fused with the plot in the manner of Balzac, the novel achieved great success as the first realistic portrayal of Chilean life. After its publication, Blest Gana entered the diplomatic service and was Chilean ambassador to France and Britain for many years. Other novels of this first period are The Arithmetic of Love (Spanish: La aritmética del amor) (1860) and El ideal de un calavera (The Rake's Ideal, 1863). Upon his retirement from diplomacy, Blest Gana returned to writing novels. Strongly influenced by his reading of the new masters of the form, he produced his best work. Four novels from this second period of creative activity are Durante la reconquista (During the Reconquest,1897), Los transplantados (The Exiles, 1904), El loco Estero (Estero the Mad, 1909), and Gladys Fairfield (1912). El loco Estero is about the Chile of Blest Gana's childhood. The lively adventure and love intrigue infused with nostalgia qualify this novel as Blest Gana's greatest work. His literary work - almost exclusively novels - followed the aesthetic ideals and themes of the European Realism, but with a conscious 'americanization' of themes, as a way of making the genre fit (and educational enough) to be read by a national audience. His writings were explicitly influenced by 19th century liberalism, but they are also an attempt to reconcile religious and moral ideals of his time. Notable among his novels are ‘Martín Rivas’ (published 1862, about the social rise of a poor, middle-class young man, which is considered the first Chilean novel), ‘El ideal de un Talavera’ (1863), ‘Durante la Reconquista’ (1879 historical novel of the period 1814-1817); ‘Los Trasplantados’ (1906) and ‘El Loco Estero’ (1909 with pleasant remembrances of childhood). His ability to describe characters and customs has been praised by critics now, as well as at the time of publishing. Despite his non-literary education, which accounts for his careless style and excess of gallicisms, his work is considered fundamental, in terms of their representation of the customs, morals and ideals of 19th century Chileans. ‘Martin Rivas’ was translated into English by Tess O'Dwyer and published by Oxford University Press in 2000. He also wrote a comedy: ‘El jefe de familia’ (1858). He died, aged 90, in Paris.
May 4, 1953
Doug Cushman (born May 4, 1953, Springfield, OH) is an artist who has worked as a cartoonist and a book illustrator. He is also the author of a series of children's books.
May 4, 1925
Ruth First (4 May 1925 – 17 August 1982) was a South African anti-apartheid activist and scholar born in Johannesburg, South Africa. She was killed by a parcel bomb addressed specifically to her in Mozambique, where she worked in exile from South Africa.
May 4, 1972
Steven S. Gubser is professor of physics at Princeton University.
May 4, 1956
David Guterson (born May 4, 1956) is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, journalist, and essayist. He is best known as the author of the book Snow Falling on Cedars.
May 4, 1932
Ronald Hayman (born 4 May 1932) is a British critic, dramatist, and writer best known for his biographies. Ronald Hayman was born on May 4, 1932 in Bournemouth, England to John and Sadie Hayman. He was educated at St Paul's School in London and at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he earned a B.A. in 1954 and an M.A. in 1963. He served in the Royal Air Force for a one-year duty, from 1950-1951. After reading English at Cambridge in 1954, Hayman went to Germany for two years, mainly to write. He became involved in professional theatre after playing the lead in Love's Labour's Lost with English amateurs in Berlin. He then attended drama school and acted for three years in rep and on television. His first play, The End of an Uncle, was staged at Wimbledon in 1959. He made his debut as a director with Jean Genet's Deathwatch at the Arts Theatre in 1960 and in 1961 was awarded an ABC Television traineeship, which took him to Northampton for a year as assistant producer. He also directed Bertolt Brecht's In the Jungle of Cities and Robin Maugham's The Servant. Hayman has directed at Theatre Royal Stratford East, Farnham, the Edinburgh Festival, Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, and Guildford, and for Open Space. His one-man show with Max Adrian as George Bernard Shaw transferred to the West End and went on a world tour. He has been a regular contributor to the Arts page of The Times and to the New Review. He broadcasts on arts programmes and has lectured for the University of London Department of English Literature. In the 1970s he lectured on Shakespeare and the traditions of English acting for the Tufts University of London program. His 1995 play Playing the Wife is based on August Strindberg's second marriage to the Austrian Frida Uhl.
May 4, 1960
Carl Hoffman (born May 4, 1960) is an American journalist and author whose work has most recently focused on western fascination with indigenous cultures, especially in New Guinea and Borneo. Hoffman is a contributing editor at National Geographic Traveler magazine, a former contributing editor at Wired and has published articles in Outside, National Geographic Traveler, Smithsonian, Men’s Journal, National Geographic Adventure and many others.
May 4, 1825
Thomas Henry Huxley (4 May 1825 – 29 June 1895) was an English biologist specialising in comparative anatomy. He is known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Huxley's famous debate in 1860 with Samuel Wilberforce was a key moment in the wider acceptance of evolution and in his own career. Huxley had been planning to leave Oxford on the previous day, but, after an encounter with Robert Chambers, the author of Vestiges, he changed his mind and decided to join the debate. Wilberforce was coached by Richard Owen, against whom Huxley also debated about whether humans were closely related to apes. Huxley was slow to accept some of Darwin's ideas, such as gradualism, and was undecided about natural selection, but despite this he was wholehearted in his public support of Darwin. Instrumental in developing scientific education in Britain, he fought against the more extreme versions of religious tradition.
May 4, 1916
Jane Jacobs (May 4, 1916, Scranton, PA - April 25, 2006, Toronto, Canada) was an urbanist and activist whose writings championed a fresh, community-based approach to city building. She had no formal training as a planner, and yet her 1961 treatise, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, introduced ground-breaking ideas about how cities function, evolve and fail, that now seem like common sense to generations of architects, planners, politicians and activists. Jacobs saw cities as integrated systems that had their own logic and dynamism which would change over time according to how they were used. With an eye for detail, she wrote eloquently about sidewalks, parks, retail design and self-organization. She promoted higher density in cities, short blocks, local economies and mixed uses. Jacobs helped derail the car-centred approach to urban planning in both New York and Toronto, invigorating neighborhood activism by helping stop the expansion of expressways and roads. She lived in Greenwich Village for decades, then moved to Toronto in 1968 where she continued her work and writing on urbanism, economies and social issues until her death in April 2006. A firm believer in the importance of local residents having input on how their neighborhoods develop, Jacobs encouraged people to familiarize themselves with the places where they live, work, and play.
May 4, 1935
José Luandino Vieira (born José Vieira Mateus da Graça on May 4, 1935) is an Angolan writer of short fiction and novels. Vieira was born in Lagoa de Furadouro, Ourém, Portugal and was Portuguese by birth and ethnicity, but his parents immigrated to Angola in 1938 and he grew up immersed in the African quarters (musseques) of Luanda. He wrote in the language unique to the musseque, a fusion of Kimbundu and Portuguese. He left school at the age of fifteen and worked as a mechanic. He was devoted to Angolan independence, resulting in his arrest in 1961 after an interview with the BBC in which he disclosed secret lists of deserters from the Portuguese army fighting in Africa. He would remain in jail for eleven years. Vieira's works often followed the structure of the African oral narrative and dealt with the harsh realities of Portuguese rule in Angola. His best-known work was his early short story collection, Luuanda (1963), which received a Portuguese writers' literary award in 1965, though it was banned by the Portuguese government until 1974 due to its examination of the oppressiveness of the colonial administration in Angola. His novella A vida verdadeira de Domingos Xavier (The Real Life of Domingos Xavier; 1974) portrayed both the cruelty of the Portuguese administration and the courage of ordinary Angolans during the colonial period. Other works include Velhas estórias (‘Old Stories’; 1974), Nós os do Makulusu (‘Our Gang from Makulusu’; 1974), Vidas novas (‘New Lives’; 1975), and João Vêncio: os seus amores (‘João Vêncio: Regarding His Loves’; 1979). Vieira turned down the 100,000 Euros Camões Literary Prize awarded to him in May 2006, citing personal reasons. Vieira also served as secretary-general of the Union of Angolan writers, and in that capacity helped get the works of other Angolan authors and poets published.
May 4, 1938
Carlos Monsiváis Aceves (May 4, 1938 – June 19, 2010) was a Mexican writer, critic, political activist, and journalist. He also wrote political opinion columns in leading newspapers within the country's progressive sectors. His generation of writers includes Elena Poniatowska, José Emilio Pacheco, and Carlos Fuentes. Monsiváis won more than 33 awards, including the 1986 Jorge Cuesta Prize (named after a fellow writer about whom he wrote a book), the 1989 Mazatlán Prize, and the 1996 Xavier Villaurrutia Award. Considered a leading intellectual of his time, Monsiváis documented contemporary Mexican themes, values, class struggles, and societal change in his essays, books and opinion pieces. He was a staunch critic of the long-ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), leaned towards the left-wing, and was ubiquitous in disseminating his views on radio and television. As a founding member of "Gatos Olvidados", Monsiváis wanted his and other "forgotten cats" to be provided for beyond his lifetime.
May 4, 1939
Amos Oz (born May 4, 1939, birth name Amos Klausner) is an Israeli writer, novelist, and journalist. He is also a professor of literature at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba. Since 1967, he has been a prominent advocate and major cultural voice of a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Oz's work has been published in some 41 languages, including Arabic in 35 countries. He has received many honours and awards, among them the Legion of Honour of France, the Goethe Prize, the Prince of Asturias Award in Literature, the Heinrich Heine Prize and the Israel Prize. In 2007, a selection from the Chinese translation of A Tale of Love and Darkness was the first work of modern Hebrew literature to appear in an official Chinese textbook.
May 4, 1912
Ricardo Pozas Arciniega (May 4, 1912, Amealco de Bonfil, Querétaro – January 19, 1994, Mexico City) was a distinguished Mexican anthropologist, scientific investigator and indigenista. He wrote the classic anthropological works Juan Pérez Jolote, biografía de un tzotzil and Los mazatecos y Chamula, un pueblo indio de los altos de Chiapas. Arciniega's parents were Eduardo Pozas, an elementary school teacher, and Isabel Arciniega. Pozas began his studies in the Escuela Normal (Elementary Teacher's formation School) of San Juan del Río, Querétaro. After graduating he began teaching in Vizarrón de Montes, Querétaro, and later in San Sebastián de las Barrancas. Then in 1929 he moved to Mexico City, where he taught in an elementary school for working-class children. Later he worked in Zamora, Michoacán. In 1938 he returned to Mexico City as a secondary school history teacher and a laboratory worker at the Escuela Nacional de Maestros. In 1940 he entered the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (ENAH; National School of Anthropology and History) as a student. It was there that he began his anthropological work. Pozas then went to the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM; National Autonomous University of Mexico) for postgraduate studies in sociology. He worked as an ethnologist in the Museo Nacional de Antropología (National Museum of Anthropology) and as a researcher in the Instituto de Alfabetización para Maestros de Indígenas Monolingües (Literacy Institute for Teachers of Monolingual Indigenous People) of the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (National Indigenous Institute). In UNAM he was one of the professors who founded the School of Political and Social Sciences, where he also founded the Sociological Research Workshops. His work at the university emphasized both teaching and research. He founded the journal Acta Sociológica, which had the objective of publishing the research works of the university students. Near the end of his life, in recognition of his career and his dedication to anthropological and cultural research of the indigenous peoples of Mexico, he was awarded the Manuel Gamio Medal and the University Medal of Merit.
May 4, 1796
William Hickling Prescott (May 4, 1796 – January 28, 1859) was an American historian and Hispanist, who is widely recognized by historiographers to have been the first American scientific historian. Despite suffering from serious visual impairment, which at times prevented him from reading or writing for himself, Prescott became one of the most eminent historians of 19th century America. He is also noted for his eidetic memory. After an extensive period of study, during which he sporadically contributed to academic journals, Prescott specialized in late Renaissance Spain and the early Spanish Empire.
May 4, 1959
Alice Randall (born May 4, 1959) is an American author and songwriter of African-American descent. She is perhaps best known for her novel The Wind Done Gone, a reinterpretation and parody of the popular 1936 novel Gone with the Wind. Born Mari-Alice Randall in Detroit, Michigan, she grew up in Washington, D.C.. She attended Harvard University, where she earned an honors degree in English and American literature, before moving to Nashville in 1983 to become a country songwriter. She currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee, and is married to attorney David Ewing. She is a writer-in-residence at Vanderbilt University and teaches courses including a seminar on the country music lyric in American literature. Randall is the first African-American woman to co-write a number-one country hit. The single "XXX's and OOO's (An American Girl)" was released in 1994 by country music singer Trisha Yearwood. Over 20 of her songs have been recorded, including several top 10 and top 40 records; her songs have been performed by Trisha Yearwood and Mark O'Connor Randall is the author of three novels: The Wind Done Gone (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001), Pushkin and the Queen of Spades (2004), and Rebel Yell (2009). Her first novel The Wind Done Gone, is a reinterpretation and parody of Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel Gone with the Wind. The Wind Done Gone essentially tells the same story as Gone with the Wind but from the viewpoint of Scarlett O'Hara's half-sister Cynara, a mulatto slave on Scarlett's plantation. Randall and her publishing company, Houghton Mifflin, were sued in April 2001 by Mitchell's estate on the grounds that The Wind Done Gone infringed the copyright of Gone with the Wind. The lawsuit was eventually settled, allowing The Wind Done Gone to be published with the addition of a label describing it as "An Unauthorized Parody". In addition, Houghton Mifflin agreed to make a financial contribution to the Morehouse College, a historically black education institution in Atlanta supported by the Mitchell estate. The novel became a New York Times bestseller. Randall's second novel, Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, was named as one of The Washington Post's "Best fiction of 2004." Published by Random House in 2015, the cookbook Soul Food Love was co-written by Randall and her daughter, the author and poet, Caroline Randall Williams. In February, 2016, the book received the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Literature (Instructional). Randall received the Al Neuharth Free Spirit Award in 2001 and the Literature Award of Excellence from the Memphis Black Writers Conference in 2002. She was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in 2002. Randall was also accepted for a prestigious writing residency at the famed Yaddo artist's community from June 23, 2011, to July 24, 2011. Randall and her daughter, Caroline Randall Williams, received the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Literature (Instructional) for their book, Soul Food Love.
May 4, 1949
Graham Colin Swift FRSL (born 4 May 1949) is a English writer. Born in London, England, he was educated at Dulwich College, London, Queens' College, Cambridge, and later the University of York. Some of Swift's books have been filmed, including Last Orders, starring Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins and Waterland, starring Jeremy Irons. Last Orders was joint-winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and a mildly controversial winner of the 1996 Booker Prize, owing to the superficial similarities in plot to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Waterland is set in The Fens; a novel of landscape, history and family, it is often cited as one of the outstanding post-war British novels and has been a set text on the English literature syllabus in British schools. Writer Patrick McGrath asked Swift about the ‘feeling for magic’ in Waterland during an interview. Swift responds that ‘The phrase everybody comes up with is magic realism, which I think has now become a little tired. But on the other hand there’s no doubt that English writers of my generation have been very much influenced by writers from outside who in one way or another have got this magical, surreal quality, such as Borges, Márquez, Grass, and that that has been stimulating. I think in general it’s been a good thing. Because we are, as ever, terribly parochial, self-absorbed and isolated, culturally, in this country. It’s about time we began to absorb things from outside.’ Swift was acquainted with Ted Hughes and has himself published poetry of note, some of which is included in Making an Elephant: Writing from Within (2009).
May 4, 1918
Ana Enriqueta Terán (born 1918 in Valera) is a Venezuelan poet. She is one of the well known Venezuelan poets, especially because of her special use of words. Terán has written in several publications and all her works are compiled in Casa de hablas (1991). She won the National Prize for Literature in 1989.
May 4, 1935
José Luandino Vieira (born José Vieira Mateus da Graça on May 4, 1935) is an Angolan writer of short fiction and novels. Vieira was born in Lagoa de Furadouro, Ourém, Portugal and was Portuguese by birth and ethnicity, but his parents immigrated to Angola in 1938 and he grew up immersed in the African quarters (musseques) of Luanda. He wrote in the language unique to the musseque, a fusion of Kimbundu and Portuguese. He left school at the age of fifteen and worked as a mechanic. He was devoted to Angolan independence, resulting in his arrest in 1961 after an interview with the BBC in which he disclosed secret lists of deserters from the Portuguese army fighting in Africa. He would remain in jail for eleven years. Vieira's works often followed the structure of the African oral narrative and dealt with the harsh realities of Portuguese rule in Angola. His best-known work was his early short story collection, Luuanda (1963), which received a Portuguese writers' literary award in 1965, though it was banned by the Portuguese government until 1974 due to its examination of the oppressiveness of the colonial administration in Angola. His novella A vida verdadeira de Domingos Xavier (The Real Life of Domingos Xavier; 1974) portrayed both the cruelty of the Portuguese administration and the courage of ordinary Angolans during the colonial period. Other works include Velhas estórias (‘Old Stories’; 1974), Nós os do Makulusu (‘Our Gang from Makulusu’; 1974), Vidas novas (‘New Lives’; 1975), and João Vêncio: os seus amores (‘João Vêncio: Regarding His Loves’; 1979). Vieira turned down the 100,000 Euros Camões Literary Prize awarded to him in May 2006, citing personal reasons. Vieira also served as secretary-general of the Union of Angolan writers, and in that capacity helped get the works of other Angolan authors and poets published.
May 4, 1904
Agustín Yáñez Delgadillo (May 4, 1904 in Guadalajara, Jalisco – January 17, 1980 in Mexico City) was a notable Mexican writer and politician who served as Governor of Jalisco and Secretary of Public Education during Gustavo Díaz Ordaz's presidency.
May 5, 1936
William George (Bill) Crampton (5 May 1936 – 4 June 1997) was a British vexillologist. His chief legacy, the Flag Institute, has hundreds of members in the UK and overseas. He was recognised as Britain's foremost authority on flags by government agencies, the flag trade, the media, publishers, librarians and vexillologists of all ages and backgrounds. He served as a president of Fédération internationale des associations vexillologiques, the International Federation of Vexillological Associations.
May 5, 1959
Barney Hoskyns (born 5 May 1959) is a British music critic and editorial director of the online music journalism archive Rock's Backpages. Hoskyns graduated from Oxford with a First Class degree in English. He began writing about music for Melody Maker and New Musical Express, quitting his job as staff writer at NME to research a book about soul music. The result was Say It One Time For The Brokenhearted (1987). He went on to write more than fifteen books on musicians and music history. Hoskyns has written regularly on pop culture and the arts for British Vogue, where for five years he was a Contributing Editor, and for The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Observer and Arena magazine. He has also contributed to Harper's Bazaar, Interview magazine, Spin magazine and Rolling Stone, as well as to Amazon.com and CDNOW. Between 1993 and 1999, Hoskyns worked as Associate Editor and then U.S. Editor of Mojo magazine. Hoyskyns' book Glam! Bowie, Bolan & The Glitter Rock Revolution was published in 1998, tying in with Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine. Haynes provided an introduction. In 2000, Hoskyns became Senior Editor of CDNOW in London. He left the magazine to co-found Rock's Backpages, an online library of classic rock journalism. Hoskyns has been a regular broadcaster and pundit on both radio and television in the UK, appearing on the Top Ten series (CHANNEL 4), the I Love The 80s/90s series (BBC 2), Walk On By (BBC 2), Behind The Music (VH1) and Classic Albums (BBC2). He was the consultant on the acclaimed 2005 series Soul Deep (BBC 2). A BBC documentary based on his 2005 book Hotel California: Singer-Songwriters & Cocaine Cowboys In The L.A. Canyons was broadcast in 2007.
May 5, 1813
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (5 May 1813 – 11 November 1855) was a Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, social critic and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. He wrote critical texts on organized religion, Christendom, morality, ethics, psychology and the philosophy of religion, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and parables. Much of his philosophical work deals with the issues of how one lives as a 'single individual', giving priority to concrete human reality over abstract thinking and highlighting the importance of personal choice and commitment. He was a fierce critic of idealist intellectuals and philosophers of his time, such as Swedenborg, Hegel, Goethe, Fichte, Schelling, Schlegel and Hans Christian Andersen. Kierkegaard's theological work focuses on Christian ethics, the institution of the Church, the differences between purely objective proofs of Christianity, the infinite qualitative distinction between man and God, and the individual's subjective relationship to the God-Man Jesus Christ, which came through faith. Much of his work deals with the art of Christian love. He was extremely critical of the practice of Christianity as a state religion, primarily that of the Church of Denmark. His psychological work explored the emotions and feelings of individuals when faced with life choices. Kierkegaard's early work was written under various pseudonyms which he used to present distinctive viewpoints and interact with each other in complex dialogue. He assigned pseudonyms to explore particular viewpoints in-depth, which required several books in some instances, while Kierkegaard, openly or under another pseudonym, critiqued that position. He wrote many Upbuilding Discourses under his own name and dedicated them to the 'single individual' who might want to discover the meaning of his works. Notably, he wrote: 'Science and scholarship want to teach that becoming objective is the way. Christianity teaches that the way is to become subjective, to become a subject.' While scientists can learn about the world by observation, Kierkegaard emphatically denied that observation could reveal the inner workings of the spiritual world. Some of Kierkegaard's key ideas include the concept of 'Truth as Subjectivity', the knight of faith, the recollection and repetition dichotomy, angst, the infinite qualitative distinction, faith as a passion, and the three stages on life's way. Kierkegaard's writings were written in Danish and were initially limited to Scandinavia, but by the turn of the 20th century, his writings were translated into major European languages, such as French and German. By the mid-20th century, his thought exerted a substantial influence on philosophy, theology, and Western culture.
May 5, 1818
Karl Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, and revolutionary socialist. Marx's work in economics laid the basis for much of the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and subsequent economic thought. He is one of the founders of sociology and social science. He published numerous books during his lifetime, the most notable being The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867–1894). Born into a wealthy middle-class family in Trier in the Prussian Rhineland, Marx studied at the Universities of Bonn and Berlin where he became interested in the philosophical ideas of the Young Hegelians. After his studies he wrote for a radical newspaper in Cologne and began to work out the theory of the materialist conception of history. He moved to Paris in 1843, where he began writing for other radical newspapers and met Friedrich Engels, who would become his lifelong friend and collaborator. In 1849 he was exiled and moved to London together with his wife and children, where he continued writing and formulating his theories about social and economic activity. He also campaigned for socialism and became a significant figure in the International Workingmen's Association. Marx's theories about society, economics and politics – the collective understanding of which is known as Marxism – hold that human societies progress through class struggle: a conflict between an ownership class that controls production and a dispossessed labouring class that provides the labour for production. States, Marx believed, were run on behalf of the ruling class and in their interest while representing it as the common interest of all; and he predicted that, like previous socioeconomic systems, capitalism produced internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system: socialism. He argued that class antagonisms under capitalism between the bourgeoisie and proletariat would eventuate in the working class' conquest of political power and eventually establish a classless society, communism, a society governed by a free association of producers. Marx actively fought for its implementation, arguing that the working class should carry out organised revolutionary action to topple capitalism and bring about socio-economic change. Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history.Many intellectuals, labour unions and political parties worldwide have been influenced by Marx's ideas, with many variations on his groundwork.
May 5, 1929
David Henry Peter Maybury-Lewis (5 May 1929 – 2 December 2007) was a British anthropologist, ethnologist of lowland South America, activist for indigenous peoples' human rights, and professor emeritus of Harvard University. Born in Hyderabad, Sindh (now in Pakistan), Maybury-Lewis attended the University of Oxford, at which he earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree. In 1960, he joined the Harvard faculty, and was Edward C. Henderson Professor of Anthropology there from 1966 until he retired in 2004. His extensive ethnographic fieldwork was conducted primarily among indigenous peoples in central Brazil, which culminated in his ethnography among the Xavante, as well as post-modernist renditions. In 1972, he co-founded with his wife Pia Cultural Survival, the leading US-based advocacy and documentation organization devoted to "promoting the rights, voices and visions of indigenous peoples."
May 5, 1909
Miklós Radnóti, birth name Miklós Glatter (5 May 1909 – 10 November 1944) was a Hungarian poet who died in The Holocaust. Radnóti was born in Budapest into an assimilated Jewish family. His life was considerably shaped by the fact that both his mother and his twin brother died at his birth. He refers to this trauma in the title of his compilation Ikrek hava ('Month of Gemini'/'Month of the Twins'). He identifies himself very strongly as a Hungarian. His poetry mingles avant-garde and expressionist themes with a new classical style, a good example being his eclogues. His romantic love poetry is notable as well. Some of his early poetry was published in the short-lived periodical Haladás ('Progress'). His 1935 marriage to Fanni Gyarmati (1912–2014) was exceptionally happy. Radnóti converted to Catholicism in 1943. Numerous Jewish writers converted to Christianity at that time due to the antisemitism that was pervasive in Hungarian society at the time. Radnóti also admired his former professor of literature, the Piarist priest Sándor Sík. In the early forties Radnóti was conscripted by the Hungarian Army, but being a Jew he was assigned to an unarmed (munkaszolgálat) ('labour battalion'). The battalion assigned to the Ukrainian front, and then in May 1944 the Hungarian Army retreated and his battalion was transferred to the copper mines in Bor, Serbia. In August 1944 as Yugoslav Partisans led by Josip Tito advanced, Radnóti's group of 3,200 Hungarian Jews was force-marched to central Hungary. On the march most of them died, including Radnóti. In these last months of his life Radnóti continued to write poems in a small notebook and scraps of paper he kept with him. His last poem was dedicated to his friend Miklós Lorsi, who was shot to death during their death march. According to witnesses, in early November 1944, Radnóti was severely beaten by a drunken militiaman who had been tormenting him for 'scribbling'. Too weak to continue, he was murdered, together with other young Jews, and buried in a mass grave near the village of Abda, near Gy?r in northwestern Hungary. oday, a statue next to the road commemorates his place of death. Eighteen months after his death, the mass grave was exhumed and in the front pocket of Radnóti's overcoat his small notebook of final poems was found, with instructions in several languages to deliver the notebook to the Budapest University lecturer Gyula Ortutay. The final poems are poignantly lyrical and constitute not only one of the few surviving works of literature written under the Holocaust but masterpieces, such as 'The Seventh Eclogue', and 'Neither Memory Nor Magic,' that rank with the greatest poetry of the century. Possibly his best known poem is the fourth stanza of the Razglednicák (Postcards), where he describes the shooting of another man and then envisions his own death. These poems serve as one of the most chilling pieces of Holocaust literature. From the touching love poems written to a wife he would never see again to the gruesomely accurate descriptions of Nazi barbarism, Radnoti's words help convey the thoughts and emotions of a man facing one of history's greatest evils. Edward Hirsch calls the posthumous collection of Radnoti's internment poems, Clouded Sky (1946), 'one of the pinnacles of Central European poetry this century.' 'Postcard 4' which was written days before his own death, describes the horror of seeing 'his friend, the violinist Miklós Lorsi' executed.
May 5, 1964
TOM REISS is the author of the celebrated international bestseller THE ORIENTALIST. His biographical pieces have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, and other publications. He lives with his wife and daughters in New York City.
May 5, 1947
Linda Fairstein (born May 5, 1947) is an American author, attorney, and former New York City prosecutor focusing on crimes of violence against women and children. She was the head of the sex crimes unit of the Manhattan District Attorney's office from 1976 until 2002. During that time, she oversaw the prosecution of the Central Park Five case, wherein five teenagers, four African-American and one Hispanic, were wrongfully convicted for the 1989 rape and assault in Central Park of a white female jogger. All five convictions were vacated in 2002 after Matias Reyes, a convicted serial rapist and murderer, confessed to having been the sole perpetrator of the crime, and DNA testing showed he was the sole contributor of the DNA of the semen on the victim. After Reyes's confession in 2002, Fairstein still maintained that the wrongfully convicted teenage boys were guilty and she lauded the police investigation as "brilliant". In 2018, she insisted that the teenagers' confessions had not been coerced. After she left the DA's office in 2002, Fairstein began to publish mystery novels featuring Manhattan prosecutor Alexandra Cooper. In June 2019, after the release of the Netflix series When They See Us about the Central Park Five, Fairstein's publisher, Dutton, dropped her.
May 5, 1905
Arthur Floyd Gottfredson (May 5, 1905 – July 22, 1986) was an American cartoonist best known for his defining work on the Mickey Mouse comic strip. He has probably had the same impact on the Mickey Mouse comics as Carl Barks had on the Donald Duck comics. Two decades after his death, his memory was honored with the Disney Legends award in 2003 and induction into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2006.
May 5, 1922
David Karp (May 5, 1922 – September 11, 1999) was an American novelist and television writer. He also used the pseudonyms Wallace Ware and Adam Singer.
May 5, 1974
Mai Neng Moua is a writer and the founder of the Hmong literary arts journal Paj Ntaub Voice.
May 6, 1943
Josephine Dawn Adès (née Tylden-Pattenson; born 6 May 1943), also known as Dawn Ades, is a British art historian and academic. She is professor emeritus of art history and theory at the University of Essex.
May 6, 1937
Rubin "Hurricane" Carter (May 6, 1937 – April 20, 2014) was a middleweight boxer who was wrongfully convicted of murder and later released following a petition of habeas corpus after spending almost 20 years in prison. In 1966, police arrested both Carter and friend John Artis for a triple-homicide committed in the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey. On searching the car, the police found ammunition that fit the weapons used in the murder. Police took no fingerprints at the crime scene and lacked the facilities to conduct a paraffin test for gunshot residue. Carter and Artis were tried and convicted twice (1967 and 1976) for the murders, and both served time in Rahway State Prison. After the second conviction was overturned in 1985, prosecutors chose not to try the case for a third time. Carter's autobiography, titled The Sixteenth Round, which he wrote while he was in prison, was published in 1975 by Warner Books. The story inspired the 1975 Bob Dylan song "Hurricane" and the 1999 film The Hurricane (with Denzel Washington playing Carter). From 1993 to 2005, Carter served as executive director of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted.
May 6, 1950
Jeffery Deaver, former attorney and folksinger, is a New York Times bestselling author of fourteen novels. He¹s been nominated for three Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America and is a two-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Reader¹s Award for Best Short Story of the Year.
May 6, 1812
Martin Robison Delany (May 6, 1812 – January 24, 1885) was an African-American abolitionist, journalist, physician, and writer, arguably the first proponent of American black nationalism. He was one of the first three blacks admitted to Harvard Medical School. He became the first African-American field officer in the United States Army during the American Civil War. Trained as an assistant and a physician, he treated patients during the cholera epidemics of 1833 and 1854 in Pittsburgh, when many doctors and residents fled the city. Floyd J. Miller, who discovered the unknown texts of BLAKE is a member of the Oberlin History Department. His extended introduction to this work not only illuminates the novel but also our understanding of the author.
May 6, 1942
Vladimiro Ariel Dorfman (born May 6, 1942) is an Argentine-Chilean novelist, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist. A citizen of the United States since 2004, he has been a professor of literature and Latin American Studies at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina since 1985.
May 6, 1856
Sigmund Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939), born Sigismund Schlomo Freud, was an Austrian neurologist who became known as the founding father of psychoanalysis. Freud's parents were poor, but they ensured his education. Freud chose medicine as a career and qualified as a doctor at the University of Vienna, subsequently undertaking research into cerebral palsy, aphasia and microscopic neuroanatomy at the Vienna General Hospital. This led in turn to the award of a University lectureship in neuropathology, a post he resigned once he had decided to go into private practice. On the basis of his clinical practice Freud went on to develop theories about the unconscious mind and the mechanism of repression, and created psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient (or ‘analysand’) and a psychoanalyst. Though psychoanalysis has declined as a therapeutic practice, it has helped inspire the development of many other forms of psychotherapy, some diverging from Freud's original ideas and approach. Freud postulated the existence of libido (an energy with which mental process and structures are invested), developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association (in which patients report their thoughts without reservation and in whichever order they spontaneously occur), discovered transference (the process by which patients displace on to their analysts feelings based on their experience of earlier figures in their lives) and established its central role in the analytic process, and proposed that dreams help to preserve sleep by representing sensory stimulii as fulfilled wishes that would otherwise awake the dreamer. He was also a prolific essayist, drawing on psychoanalysis to contribute to the interpretation and critique of culture. Psychoanalysis remains influential within psychiatry and across the humanities. As such it continues to generate extensive debate, notably over its scientific status and as to whether it advances or is detrimental to the feminist cause. Regardless of the scientific content of his theories, Freud's work has suffused intellectual thought and popular culture to the extent that in 1939 W. H. Auden wrote, in a poem dedicated to him: ‘to us he is no more a person / now but a whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our different lives’.
May 6, 1903
Hermann Grab (6 May 1903 – 2 August 1949), a Bohemian German-language writer, was born in Prague in 1903 into a wealthy aristocratic family of Jewish origin in Prague, Bohemian Kingdom (an old name of today's Czech Republic). Although his parents were formally Jewish, Hermann as his brother were educated as Catholics. In 1934, he published the first of his short stories in Prague magazines and in 1935 his first book Der Stadtpark, a Prague novel, for its he was said to be 'Prague Proust.’ After the occupation of his country by Hitler between 1938 and 1939, Grab escaped to Paris. Serious illness prevented him from returning to Prague after World War II. He died fully invalid in 1949 in New York and was buried at Flushing Cemetery in Flushing, Queens, New York City.
May 6, 1668
Alain-René Lesage (6 May 1668 – 17 November 1747; older spelling Le Sage) was a French novelist and playwright. Lesage is best known for his comic novel The Devil upon Two Sticks (1707, Le Diable boiteux), his comedy Turcaret (1709), and his picaresque novel Gil Blas (1715–1735).
May 6, 1907
Yasushi Inoue (May 6, 1907 – January 29, 1991) was a Japanese writer of poetry, essays, short fiction, and novels. He was originally from Asahikawa, Hokkaido. Inoue is famous for his serious historical fiction of ancient Japan and the Asian continent, including Wind and Waves, Tun-huang, and Confucius, but his work also included semi-autobiographical novels and short fiction of great humor, pathos, and wisdom like Shirobamba and Asunaro Monogatari, which depicted the setting of the author's own life — Japan of the early to mid twentieth century — in revealing perspective. 'Inoue, who is one of Japan's most prolific writers today, started relatively late as a novelist. He was forty-two when he published in 1949 his first works, the two novelettes Ryoju and The Bullfight, which the following year won for him the top literary prize in Japan, the Akutagawa Prize. His longer The Roof Tile of Tempyo deals both with art and ancient China; Lou-Lan and The Flood are short historical novels of China. Whether he is writing full novels, novelettes, or short-stories, however, Inoue's penchant for detailed, exhaustive research and historical accuracy give his stories a flavor of authenticity. Even the characters in his stories can often be traced back to historical individuals.
May 6, 1906
Richmond Alexander Lattimore (May 6, 1906 – February 26, 1984) was an American poet and classicist known for his translations of the Greek classics, especially his versions of the Iliad and Odyssey, which are generally considered as among the best English translations available.
May 6, 1868
Gaston Louis Alfred Leroux (6 May 1868 – 15 April 1927) was a French journalist and author of detective fiction. In the English-speaking world, he is best known for writing the novel The Phantom of the Opera (Le Fantôme de l'Opéra, 1911).
May 6, 1904
Harry Martinson (6 May 1904 – 11 February 1978) was a Swedish author, poet and former sailor. In 1949 he was elected into the Swedish Academy. He was awarded a joint Nobel Prize in Literature in 1974 together with fellow Swede Eyvind Johnson 'for writings that catch the dewdrop and reflect the cosmos'. The choice was controversial, as both Martinson and Johnson were members of the academy and had partaken in endorsing themselves as laureates. He has been called 'the great reformer of 20th century Swedish poetry, the most original of the writers called 'proletarian'.
May 6, 1937
Robin Fulton (born 6 May 1937 on the Isle of Arran), is a Scottish poet and translator. He has lived in Stavanger, Norway, since 1973 working as a university lecturer. Fulton gained a PhD in Scottish literature from the University of Edinburgh in 1972. He has published his own collections and several translations of Scandinavian poetry into English, including Olav H. Hauge, Tomas Tranströmer and Henrik Nordbrandt.
May 6, 1823
Elizabeth Drew Stoddard, née Barstow (May 6, 1823 – August 1, 1902), was a United States poet and novelist. Elizabeth Stoddard was born Elizabeth Drew Barstow in the small coastal town of Mattapoisett, Massachusetts. She studied at Wheaton Seminary, Norton, Massachusetts. After her marriage in 1852 to poet Richard Henry Stoddard, the couple settled permanently in New York City, where they belonged to New York's vibrant, close-knit literary and artistic circles. She assisted her husband in his literary work, and contributed stories, poems and essays to the periodicals. Many of her own works were originally published between 1859 and 1890 in such magazines as The Aldine, Harper's Monthly, Harper's Bazaar, and The Atlantic Monthly.
May 6, 1895
Malba Tahan, full name Ali Yezzid Izz-Edin ibn-Salim Hanak Malba Tahan, was a fictitious Persian scholar. He was the creation and frequent pen name of Brazilian author Júlio César de Mello e Souza (May 6, 1895, Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - June 18, 1974, Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil).
May 6, 1955
Holly Sklar (born 1955) is an author and syndicated columnist, policy analyst and strategist whose articles have appeared in hundreds of newspapers and online outlets as well as The Nation, and other publications. She is the co-author of Raise the Floor: Wages and Policies that Work for All of Us (2001).
May 6, 1871
Christian Otto Josef Wolfgang Morgenstern (6 May 1871 – 31 March 1914) was a German author and poet from Munich. Morgenstern married Margareta Gosebruch von Liechtenstern on 7 March 1910. He worked for a while as a journalist in Berlin, but spent much of his life traveling through Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, primarily in a vain attempt to recover his health. His travels, though they failed to restore him to health, allowed him to meet many of the foremost literary and philosophical figures of his time in central Europe. Morgenstern's poetry, much of which was inspired by English literary nonsense, is immensely popular, even though he enjoyed very little success during his lifetime. He made fun of scholasticism, e.g. literary criticism in 'Drei Hasen', grammar in 'Der Werwolf', narrow-mindedness in 'Der Gaul', and symbolism in 'Der Wasseresel'. In Scholastikerprobleme' he discussed how many angels could sit on a needle. Embedded in his humorous poetry is a subtle metaphysical streak. Gerolf Steiner's mock-scientific book about the fictitious animal order Rhinogradentia (1961), inspired by Morgenstern's nonsense poem Das Nasob?m, is testament to his enduring popularity. Morgenstern was a member of the General Anthroposophical Society. Dr. Rudolf Steiner called him 'a true representative of Anthroposophy'. Morgenstern died in 1914 of tuberculosis, which he had contracted from his mother, who died in 1881. Walter Arndt, Sherman Fairchild Professor in the Humanities Emeritus at Dartmouth College, is also a distinguished and prize-winning translator of Pushkin, Rilke, Goethe, Wilhelm Busch, and other poets.
May 6, 1885
Nogami Yaeko (1885–1985) was the author or translator of fifty-seven volumes of published works. Among her best-known novels are Meiro (The Labyrinth, 1956), Hideyoshi to Rikyu (Hideyoshi and Rikyu , 1963), and Mori (The Wood, 1986). Mariko Nishi LaFleur trained and taught at the Urasenke tea school headquarters in Kyoto for many years, and has taught tea ceremony and Japanese culture and language in Japan and the United States for more than thirty-five years. Morgan Beard has an advanced teaching certification ( jun-kyoju ) from the Urasenke tea school and has taught tea culture throughout the Philadelphia area for more than twenty years. She currently serves as the chief of administration for the Philadelphia chapter of the Urasenke Tankokai Association.
May 6, 1919
Carlos Solórzano Fernández (May 6, 1919 – March 30, 2011) was a Guatemalan born Mexican playwright. He is considered one of the most important playwrights in Guatemalan history. His contribution to the theater in Latin America range from his plays to articles in theater journals and encyclopedias, and essays related to the history and anthology of Latin theater. Carlos Solórzano was born in 1919 to a wealthy family in San Marcos, Guatemala. In 1939 Carlos Solórzano moved to Mexico. In 1945 he graduated from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México as an architect, as a master and doctor of letters 1946–1948. His first play, Espejo de Novelas, was penned in 1946. In 1948, a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation permitted him to study drama at Sorbonne, Paris, France. During his studies in France, he became acquainted with many prominent men of letters such as Camus and Ghelderode and their influence and dramatic style would be a major influence in his later works as indeed in increasing his interest in theatrical subjects in general. Solórzano returned to Mexico City. He began writing a number of plays, some of which are important to Mexican theatre today. Doña Beatriz, la sin ventura (1954), El hechicero (1954), Las manos de Dios (1957), El crucificado (1957), Los fantoches de andalucia (1959), Tres actos (1959) are amongst his notable works in the 1950s. His play El crucificado, is a reenactment of Jesus Christ's crucifixion. A number of his works are allegorical ranging from political allegories with hidden agendas to explorations of the reason for man's existence. Solorzano represented Mexico in the first playwriting workshop in Puerto Rico in 1960 and in 1963 was representative of Mexico's Festival of Theater of Nations in Paris with his work Los fantoches de andalucia . He attended the XI Congreso de Literatura Iberoamericana in Austin, Texas. Solórzano is a recipient of the Miguel Ángel Asturias Award (Premio Nacional de Literatura 'Miguel Ángel Asturias') given to those who excel in literature in Guatemala. He was awarded this honor in 1989. Solórzano was an active lecturer and director in the universities. He has served as the director of the Teatro Universitario as well as the director of the Museo Nacional de Teatro. He has lectured in several universities in the United States including Columbia University, the University of Southern California, and the University of Kansas. He was a professor at the Autonomous University of Latin America, and an editor of the theatrical encyclopedia, Enciclopedia Mundial del Teatro Contemporaneo, before he died in 2011. Solórzano died in Mexico City, on March 30, 2011.
May 7, 1929
Richard Jackson Barnet (May 7, 1929 – December 23, 2004) was an American scholar-activist who co-founded the Institute for Policy Studies.
May 7, 1926
Edward Samuel Behr (May 7, 1926, Paris, France - May 27, 2007, Paris, France) was a journalist; he worked primarily as a foreign & war correspondent. He began his career in the early 1950s with the Reuters news agency, then worked for Time-Life, serving as bureau chief in several cities around the world for Time Magazine. He then took a position with Newsweek in 1965 as Asia bureau chief, based in Hong Kong. Later in his career, Mr. Behr also made a number of documentaries for the BBC. He wrote several books during his life on various subjects, including a memoir which was published in 1978.
May 7, 1930
Horst Bienek (May 7, 1930, Gleiwitz – December 7, 1990, Munich) was a German novelist. Born in Gleiwitz, Germany (today Gliwice, Poland), Bienek was forced to leave there in 1945, when Germans were expelled from Silesia. He resettled in the eastern part of Germany. For a time, he was a student of Bertolt Brecht. In 1951, he was arrested by NKVD and sentenced to 25 years of labour in Vorkuta, a gulag. When he was released as the result of an amnesty in 1955, he settled in West Germany. Bienek was the winner of numerous prizes, including the Nelly Sachs Prize in 1981. His best known work is the four-volume series of novels dealing with the prelude to World War II and the war itself, Gleiwitz, Eine oberschlesische Chronik in vier Romanen.
May 7, 1812
Robert Browning (7 May 1812 – 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets. It was an obscure early poem Pauline that brought him to the attention of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, followed by Paracelsus, praised by Wordsworth and Dickens, among others. In 1846, Browning married Elizabeth Barrett, a poet more highly-regarded than him, and they went to live in Italy, a country that he called ‘my university’. At this time, he took exception to the spiritualist Daniel Dunglas Home and denounced his séances as fraudulent, though Elizabeth believed them to be genuine. By the time of her death in 1861, his stock was beginning to rise, with a major collection Men and Women, followed by the long blank-verse poem The Ring and the Book. He is better-known today for his shorter poems, such as The Pied Piper of Hamelin and How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix. His recital of the latter work during a dinner-party, recorded on an Edison wax cylinder, is believed to be the oldest surviving record by a notable person in England.
May 7, 1943
Peter Philip Carey (born 7 May 1943) is an Australian novelist, known primarily for being one of only four writers to have won the Booker Prize twice—the others being J. M. Coetzee, J. G. Farrell and Hilary Mantel. Carey won his first Booker Prize in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda, and won for the second time in 2001 with True History of the Kelly Gang. In May 2008 he was nominated for the Best of the Booker Prize. Carey has won the Miles Franklin Award three times and is frequently named as Australia's next contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In addition to writing fiction, he collaborated on the screenplay of the film Until the End of the World with Wim Wenders and is executive director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York.
May 7, 1940
Angela Carter (7 May 1940 – 16 February 1992) was an English novelist and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, picaresque and science fiction works. In 2008, The Times ranked Carter tenth, in their list of ‘The 50 greatest British writers since 1945’ Born Angela Olive Stalker in Eastbourne, in 1940, Carter was evacuated as a child to live in Yorkshire with her maternal grandmother. As a teenager she battled anorexia. She began work as a journalist on the Croydon Advertiser, following in the footsteps of her father. Carter attended the University of Bristol where she studied English literature. She married twice, first in 1960 to Paul Carter. They divorced after twelve years. In 1969 Angela Carter used the proceeds of her Somerset Maugham Award to leave her husband and relocate for two years to Tokyo, Japan, where she claims in NOTHING SACRED (1982) that she ‘learnt what it is to be a woman and became radicalised.’ She wrote about her experiences there in articles for New Society and a collection of short stories, FIREWORKS: NINE PROFANE PIECES (1974), and evidence of her experiences in Japan can also be seen in THE INFERNAL DESIRE MACHINES OF DOCTOR HOFFMAN (1972). She then explored the United States, Asia and Europe, helped by her fluency in French and German. She spent much of the late 1970s and 1980s as a writer in residence at universities, including the University of Sheffield, Brown University, the University of Adelaide, and the University of East Anglia. In 1977 Carter married Mark Pearce, with whom she had one son. As well as being a prolific writer of fiction, Carter contributed many articles to The Guardian, The Independent and New Statesman, collected in SHAKING A LEG. She adapted a number of her short stories for radio and wrote two original radio dramas on Richard Dadd and Ronald Firbank. Two of her fictions have been adapted for the silver screen: The Company of Wolves (1984) and THE MAGIC TOYSHOP (1987). She was actively involved in both film adaptations, her screenplays are published in the collected dramatic writings, The Curious Room, together with her radio scripts, a libretto for an opera of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, an unproduced screenplay entitled The Christchurch Murders (based on the same true story as Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures) and other works. These neglected works, as well as her controversial television documentary, The Holy Family Album, are discussed in Charlotte Crofts' book, Anagrams of Desire (2003). Her novel NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS won the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature. At the time of her death, Carter was embarking on a sequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre based on the later life of Jane's stepdaughter, Adèle Varens. However, only a synopsis survives. Angela Carter died aged 51 in 1992 at her home in London after developing lung cancer.
May 7, 1882
Williem Elsschot (1882-1960) was the pseudonym of Alfons De Ridder, head of a successful advertising agency who, unbeknownst to his family, was a hugely successful novelist in his spare time. CHEESE, his breakthrough novel, was first published in Dutch in 1933. The translator, Paul Vincent, taught Dutch language and literature for many years at London University before becoming a full-time translator in 1989. He has translated various modern Dutch prose writers including Harry Mulisch, Margriet de Moor, J. Bernlef, and H.M. van den Brink.
May 7, 1927
Herbert J. Gans (born May 7, 1927) is a German-born American sociologist who has taught at Columbia University between 1971 and 2007. One of the most prolific and influential sociologists of his generation, Gans came to America in 1940 as a refugee from Nazism and has sometimes described his scholarly work as an immigrant's attempt to understand America. He trained in sociology at the University of Chicago, where he studied with David Riesman and Everett Hughes, among others, and in social planning at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied primarily with Martin Meyerson. Herbert J. Gans served as the 78th President of the American Sociological Association.
May 7, 1927
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, CBE (born May 7, 1927) is a Booker prize-winning novelist, short story writer, and two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter. She is perhaps best known for her long collaboration with Merchant Ivory Productions, made up of director James Ivory and the late producer Ismail Merchant. Their films won six Academy Awards. She was born Ruth Prawer in Cologne, Germany to Jewish parents Marcus and Eleanora Prawer. Marcus was a lawyer from Poland and Eleanora's father was cantor of Cologne's biggest synagogue. The family fled the Nazis in 1939, emigrating to Britain. Her elder brother, Siegbert Salomon (born 1925), is honorary fellow of The Queen's College and professor emeritus of German at the University of Oxford, an expert on Heine and horror films. During World War II she lived in Hendon in London, experienced the Blitz and began to speak English rather than German. She became a British citizen in 1948. She received her MA in English literature from Queen Mary College, University of London in 1951. She also married Cyrus H. Jhabvala, an Indian Parsi architect, in 1951. The couple moved to Delhi, India, in 1951 and they had three daughters: Ava, Firoza and Renana. Her three daughters are living all around the world: in India, in Los Angeles and in England. In 1975 Jhabvala moved to New York and divided her time between India and the United States. In 1986, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
May 7, 1754
Joseph Joubert (7 May 1754 in Montignac, Périgord – 4 May 1824 in Paris) was a French moralist and essayist, remembered today largely for his Pensées (Thoughts), which were published posthumously. From the age of fourteen Joubert attended a religious college in Toulouse, where he later taught until 1776. In 1778 he went to Paris where he met D'Alembert and Diderot, amongst others, and later became a friend of a young writer and diplomat, Chateaubriand. He alternated between living in Paris with his friends and life in the privacy of the countryside in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. He was appointed inspector-general of universities under Napoleon. Joubert published nothing during his lifetime, but he wrote a copious number of letters and filled sheets of paper and small notebooks with thoughts about the nature of human existence, literature, and other topics, in a poignant, often aphoristic style. After his death his widow entrusted Chateaubriand with these notes, and in 1838, he published a selection titled, Recueil des pensées de M. Joubert (Collected Thoughts of Mr. Joubert). More complete editions were to follow, as were collections of Joubert's correspondence. Somewhat of the Epicurean school of philosophy, Joubert even valued his own frequent suffering of ill health, as he believed sickness gave subtlety to the soul. Joubert's works have been translated into numerous languages. An English translation version was made by Paul Auster. Matthew Arnold in his Critical Essays devotes a section to Joubert.
May 7, 1957
Mary Kinnunen (May 7, 1957 - April 14, 2016) was a poet and editor.
May 7, 1887
Henri Pourrat (1887-1959) collected the multivolume Le tresor des contes (The Treasury of from which FRENCH FOLKTALES is a selection. His many other writings include stories, reminiscences, historical, religious, and ethnographic essays, and novels, of which the best-known is Gaspard des montagnes (Gaspard from the Mountains). Gustaf Bjurström, literary critic and translator, selected the tales in this collection. He was born in 1919 and raised in France. He has translated the work of Claude Simon, Samuel Beckett, Céline, Jean Anouilh, Albert Camus, Michel Foucault, and others into Swedish and that of August Strindberg, Stig Dagerman, Lam Gyllensten, Gunnar Ekelöf, and Ingmar Bergman into French. He currently lives in Paris. Royall Tyler, the translator, was partly educated in France and teaches Japanese at the University of Oslo in Norway. He edited and translated JAPANESE TALES, also part of Pantheon’s folklore series.
May 7, 1868
Stanislaw Feliks Przybyszewski (7 May 1868 – 23 November 1927) was a Polish novelist, dramatist, and poet of the decadent naturalistic school. His drama is associated with the Symbolism movement. He wrote both in German and in Polish. Przybyszewski was born in Lojewo. The son of a local teacher, Józef Przybyszewski, he did not do well in high school and often fought with his classmates. He changed schools, finally matriculating in 1889, and left for Berlin where he first studied architecture and then medicine. It was there that he became fascinated with the philosophy of Nietzsche and Satanism and plunged into the bohemian life of the city. In Berlin he lived with, but did not marry, Martha Foerder. They had had three children together; two before he left her to marry Dagny Juel on 18 August 1893, and one during his marriage to Dagny. From 1893 to 1898 Dagny and he lived at times in Berlin, and at times in Dagny's home-town of Kongsvinger, in Norway. In Berlin they met other artists at Zum schwarzen Ferkel. In 1896 he was arrested in Berlin for the murder of his common-law wife Martha, but released after it was determined that she had died of carbon monoxide poisoning. After Martha's death the children were sent to different foster homes. In the autumn of 1898, he and Dagny moved to Kraków where he set himself up as the leader of a group of revolutionary young artists, and as editor of their mouthpiece Zycie (Life). He remained a fervent apostle of industrialism and self-expression. He travelled to Lemberg (Lviv) and visited the poet and playwright Jan Kasprowicz. Przybyszewski started an affair with Kasprowicz's wife Jadwiga Gasowska. Kasprowicz had married Jadwiga, his second wife, in 1893; his first marriage to Teodozja Szymanska in 1886 had ended in divorce after a few months. In 1899 Przybyszewski abandoned Dagny and set up house with Jadwiga in Warsaw. Around this time he was also involved with Aniela Pajakówna, one of whose two daughters was Przybyszewski's. Dagny returned to Paris and was murdered by a young friend, Wladyslaw Emeryk, in Tbilisi in 1901. In 1905 Przybyszewski and Jadwiga moved to Thorn (Torun) where he attempted rehabilitation from his problems with alcohol. While there, Jadwiga's divorce was finalized, and the couple married on 11 April 1905. Przybyszewski was to struggle with alcoholism for the rest of his life. In 1906 the couple moved to Munich, the trip paid for by the sale of the manuscript of the play Sluby (The Vows). During the war they lived for a short time in Bohemia (Czech Lands), and moved to newly re-established Poland in 1919. In Poznan he applied for the position of director of a literary theatre, but his work with German political brochures during the war prevented this. He got a job working as a German translator for the post office. In 1920 he found similar work in Freistaat Danzig (now Gdansk) with the railways. He lived in Danzig until 1924, and managed a Polish bookshop there. After Danzig he tried to settle in Torun, Zakopane, and Bydgoszcz — all without success. Finally he found work in Warsaw, in the offices of the President. He lived in rooms in the old Royal Castle. In 1927 he returned to the Kujawy region, and died in Jaronty in November of that year, aged 59. He wrote a number of successful novels, of which Homo Sapiens, the most popular, has been translated into English. The Yellow Coat, a feature film about his life and work, written and directed by Kordian Piwowarski, is scheduled to be released in 2014.
May 7, 1861
Rabindranath Tagore (May 7, 1861, Kolkata, India - August 7, 1941, Kolkata, India) was born in Bengal. Gitanjali, a group of over 100 prose poems, translated into English by Tagore himself and published in 1911 with the help of the poet Yeats, earned him the 1913 Nobel laureate for literature.
May 7, 1903
Nikolay Alexeyevich Zabolotsky (May 7, 1903 - October 14, 1958) was a Russian poet, children's writer and translator. He was a Modernist and one of the founders of the Russian avant-garde absurdist group Oberiu.
May 7, 1971
Thomas Piketty is Professor at the Paris School of Economics.
May 8, 1954
Kwame Anthony Appiah (born May 8, 1954) is a British-born Ghanaian-American philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist whose interests include political and moral theory, the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history. Kwame Anthony Appiah grew up in Ghana and earned a Ph.D. at Cambridge University. He is currently the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University.
May 8, 1932
Julieta Campos (May 8, 1932, Havana, Cuba - September 5, 2007, Mexico City, Mexico), born in Cuba in 1932, has lived in Mexico since the mid-1950s. She has published two other novels, Muerteporaqua (1965) and El miedo deperdera Euridice (1979); a collection of short stories, Celina o los gatos (1968); and several works of literary theory and criticism, most notably Functon de la novela (1973). Leland H. Chambers, former editor of the Denver Quarterly, is a professor of English and comparative literature emeritus at the University of Denver, He is the translator of Ezequiel Martinez Estrada’s HOLY SATURDAY AND OTHER STORIES and is preparing translations of other works by Latin American Authors.
May 8, 1908
E H Cookridge (May 8, 1908, Vienna, Austria - January 1, 1979) is the pseudonymn of Edward Spiro. He used several other pseudonymns, including Peter Leighton, Peter Morland, Ronald Reckitt and Edward H Spire along with probably his most famous, E H Cookridge. As Cookridge, he wrote his first book 'Secrets of the British Secret Service' in 1948 and this contained 'some highly coloured versions of true events'. Most of his works under the Cookridge pseudonymn are concerned with spies and spying, including books on George Blake and Kim Philby.
May 8, 1958
Roddy Doyle (born 8 May 1958) is an Irish novelist, dramatist and screenwriter. Doyle is the author of ten novels for adults, seven books for children, seven plays and screenplays, and dozens of short stories. Several of his books have been made into successful films, beginning with The Commitments in 1991. Doyle's work is set primarily in Ireland, especially working-class Dublin, and is notable for its heavy use of dialogue written in slang and Irish English dialect. Doyle was awarded the Booker Prize in 1993 for his novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. After achieving worldwide critical acclaim, Doyle is now recognized as one of Ireland's greatest living writers. His idiosyncratic use of language and dialect has received a substantial amount of critical and scholarly attention in recent years.
May 8, 1924
Petru Dumitriu (8 May 1924 – 6 April 2002) was a Romanian-born novelist who wrote both in Romanian and in French. Dumitriu was born in Bazia?. His father was a Romanian army officer and his mother was Hungarian and spoke to her husband and son mostly in French, so that French was Petru Dumitriu's second language from childhood. After school in Romania, Dumitriu studied philopsophy at Munich University with a Humboldt scholarship, but his studies were interrupted in 1944 when Romania changed sides in the Second World War. After becoming a member of the Romanian Writers' Union committee in 1950, he became editor-in-chief at Via?a Româneasc? in 1953. In 1960, Dumitriu fled from Romania to West Berlin, moved to Frankfurt am Main and later to Bad Godesberg, Germany, finally settling in Metz, France. He did not return to Romania until 1996. He was married twice: with Henriette Yvonne Stahl, a French-born Romanian writer 24 years his senior, in 1956 (they divorced after about one week), and the same year with Irina Medrea (divorced in 1988). He had two daughters: Irene (born 1959) and Helene (born 1961)
May 8, 1737
Edward Gibbon (8 May 1737 – 16 January 1794) was an English historian and Member of Parliament. His most important work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788. The Decline and Fall is known for the quality and irony of its prose, its use of primary sources, and its open criticism of organised religion.
May 8, 1912
George Woodcock (May 8, 1912 – January 28, 1995) was a Canadian writer of political biography and history, an anarchist thinker, an essayist and literary critic. He was also a poet and published several volumes of travel writing. In 1959 he was the founding editor of the journal Canadian Literature which was the first academic journal specifically dedicated to Canadian writing. He is most commonly known outside of Canada for his book Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (1962).
May 8, 1923
Louise Meriwether (born May 8, 1923) is an American novelist, essayist, journalist and activist, as well as a writer of biographies of historically important African Americans for children. She was born in Haverstraw, New York, to Marion Lloyd Jenkins and his wife Julia. After the stock market crash of October 1929, her parents had migrated north in search of work, from South Carolina, where her father was a painter and bricklayer and her mother worked as a domestic. Meriwether grew up in Harlem during the great depression, the only daughter and the third of five children. She graduated from Central Commercial High School in Manhattan and received a B.A. in English from New York University. She received an M.A. in journalism in 1965 from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she had moved with her first husband, Angelo Meriwether, a Los Angeles teacher. Although this marriage, as well as her second marriage to Earle Howe, ended in divorce she continued to use the name Meriwether. She worked as a freelance reporter (1961–64) for the Los Angeles Sentinel and a black story analyst (1965–67) for Universal Studios, the first black woman hired as a story editor in Hollywood. While still living in Los Angeles, working with the Watts Writers Workshop, Meriwether was approached to be editor-in-chief of a new magazine for Black women called Essence but she declined, saying she preferred to write for them, her article 'Black Man, Do You Love Me?' appearing as the cover story for the magazine's first issue in May 1970. In 1970 she published her most successful book, Daddy Was a Number Runner (with a foreword by James Baldwin), a novel that uses autobiographical elements about growing up in Harlem during the Depression and in the era after the Harlem Renaissance, is considered a classic. In the words of Paule Marshall: 'The novel's greatest achievement lies in the sense of black life that it conveys: vitality and force behind the despair. It celebrates the positive values behind the black experience: the tenderness and love that often lie underneath the abrasive surfaces of relationships...the humor that has long been an important part of the black survival kit, and the heroism of ordinary folk...a most important novel.' Meriwether then began writing biographies for children about historically important African Americans, including Robert Smalls, Daniel Hale Williams, and Rosa Parks. As Meriwether explained: 'After publication of my first novel ... I turned my attention to black history for the kindergarten set, recognizing that the deliberate omission of Blacks from American history has been damaging to the children of both races. It reinforces in one a feeling of inferiority and in the other a myth of superiority.' Her short stories have appeared in Antioch Review and Negro Digest, as well as in anthologies including Black-Eyed Susans (ed. Mary Helen Washington, 1975), Confirmation (eds Amina Baraka & Amiri Baraka, 1983), The Other Woman (ed. Toni Cade Bambara, 1984) and Daughters of Africa (ed. Margaret Busby, 1992). Meriwether has also taught creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and at the University of Houston. She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts and the Rabinowitz Foundation. Meriwether has over the years been involved with various organized black causes, including the founding, with John Henrik Clarke, of the anti-Apartheid group Black Concern (originally the Committee of Concerned Blacks), the Harlem Writers Guild, and (with Vantile Whitfield) the Black Anti-Defamation Association (BADA; also known as Association to End Defamation of Black People)[10] that was formed to prevent Twentieth Century Fox's producer David L. Wolper from making a film of William Styron's controversial 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner, which misinterpreted African-American history. She has been active in the peace movement for most of her life.
May 8, 1890
Charles Pearcy Mountford (8 May 1890 – 16 November 1976) was an Australian anthropologist and photographer. He is known for his pioneering work on indigenous Australians and his depictions and descriptions of their art. He also led the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land.
May 8, 1937
Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., THE CRYING OF LOT 49, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, SLOW LEARNER, a collection of short stories, VINELAND and, MASON & DIXON. He received the national book award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.
May 8, 1895
Edmund Wilson (May 8, 1895 – June 12, 1972) was an American writer, literary and social critic, and noted man of letters. Wilson was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. His parents were Helen Mather (née Kimball) and Edmund Wilson, Sr., a lawyer who served as New Jersey Attorney General. Wilson attended The Hill School, a college preparatory boarding school, in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, graduating in 1912. At Hill, Wilson served as the editor-in-chief of the school's literary magazine, The Record. From 1912 to 1916, he was educated at Princeton University. He began his professional writing career as a reporter for the New York Sun, and served in the army during the First World War. His family's summer home at Talcottville, New York, known as Edmund Wilson House, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. Wilson was the managing editor of Vanity Fair in 1920 and 1921, and later served as Associate Editor of The New Republic and as a book reviewer for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. His works influenced novelists Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Floyd Dell, and Theodore Dreiser. He wrote plays, poems, and novels, but his greatest influence was literary criticism. Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (1931) was a sweeping survey of Symbolism. It covered Arthur Rimbaud, Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (author of Axel), W. B. Yeats, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. In his landmark book, To the Finland Station (1940), Wilson studied the course of European socialism, from the 1824 discovery by Jules Michelet of the ideas of Vico culminating in the 1917 arrival of Vladimir Lenin at the Finland Station of Saint Petersburg to lead the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution. In a celebrated essay on the work of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, ‘Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous’ (New Yorker, November 1945; later collected in Classics and Commercials), Wilson condemned Lovecraft's tales as ‘hackwork’. Edmund Wilson is also well known for his heavy criticism of J. R. R. Tolkien's work The Lord of the Rings, which he referred to as ‘juvenile trash’, saying ‘Dr. Tolkien has little skill at narrative and no instinct for literary form.’ Wilson was interested in modern culture as a whole, and many of his writings go beyond the realm of pure literary criticism. His early works are heavily influenced by the ideas of Freud and Marx, reflecting his deep interest in their work. Wilson lobbied for the creation of a series of classic U.S. literature similar to France's Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. In 1982, ten years after his death, The Library of America series was launched. Wilson's writing was included in the Library of America in two volumes published in 2007.
May 8, 1952
Zack Rogow, poet, translator and coordinator of the Lunch Poems Reading Series, provides a general introduction and a brief biography of each poet. The foreword by former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass puts the book in the context of the current poetry scene.
May 8, 1944
Mongane Wally Serote (born 8 May 1944) is a South African poet and writer. Serote was born in Sophiatown, Johannesburg, South Africa, and went to school in Alexandra, Lesotho, and Soweto. He first became involved in the Black Consciousness Movement when he was finishing high school in Soweto. His presence in that town linked him to a group known as the "township" or "Soweto" poets, and his poems often expressed themes of political activism, the development of black identity, and violent images of revolt and resistance. He was arrested by the apartheid government under the Terrorism Act in June 1969 and spent nine months in solitary confinement, before being released without charge. He went to study in New York City, obtaining a Fine Arts degree at Columbia University, before going to work in Gaborone, Botswana, and later London for the African National Congress in their Arts and Culture Department. After contributing poems to various journals, in 1972 he published his first collection, Yakhal'Inkomo. It won the Ingrid Jonker Poetry Prize in 1973. He was a Fulbright Scholar and received a fine arts degree from Columbia University in 1979. He was not able to return to South Africa and he began a life in exile, living in Botswana and London, where he was involved in the Medu Art Ensemble. In 1993, he won the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa. In 2004, he received the Pablo Neruda award from the Chilean government. He has served as chair of the parliamentary select committee for arts and culture, and was also the CEO of Freedom Park, a national heritage site in Pretoria opened in 2007. He has founded a few NGOs, iIKSSA Trust where he is the Chairperson, IARI which he is also the CEO. He sits on a few advisory boards in the country dealing with Arts, Culture, Indigenous Knowneldge and African Renaissance issues.
May 8, 1930
Gary Snyder (born May 8, 1930) is an American poet (often associated with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance), as well as an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist (frequently described as the ‘poet laureate of Deep Ecology‘). Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His work, in his various roles, reflects an immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. Snyder has translated literature into English from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese. For many years, Snyder served as a faculty member at the University of California, Davis, and he also served for a time on the California Arts Council.
May 8, 1928
Rose Zwi (born 8 May 1928) is a Mexican-born South African-Australian writer best known for her work about the immigrants in South Africa. Born in Oaxaca, Mexico, to Jewish refugees from Lithuania, her family moved to South Africa when she was a young girl. In 1967 Zwi graduated from the University of Witwatersrand (Johannesburg) with a BA (Hons) in English Literature. Zwi lived briefly in Israel, but returned to South Africa until 1988 when she relocated to Australia. She became an Australian citizen in 1992 and now lives in Sydney, New South Wales.
May 8, 1956
Brian Massumi (born 1956) is a Canadian philosopher and social theorist. Massumi's research spans the fields of art, architecture, cultural studies, political theory and philosophy. His work explores the intersection between power, perception, and creativity to develop an approach to thought and social action bridging the aesthetic and political domains. He is a retired professor in the Communications Department of the Université de Montréal.
May 8, 1936
Clyde Bellecourt cofounded the American Indian Movement and has worked for Indian rights for decades. He lives in Minneapolis. Jon Lurie, educator and journalist, has worked in the Minneapolis Native American community for many years. He is a staff writer for The Circle and has written for numerous other publications.
May 9, 1920
Richard George Adams (born 9 May 1920) is an English novelist who is best known as the author of Watership Down. He studied modern history at university before serving in the British Army during World War II. Afterward he completed his studies and then joined the British Civil Service. In 1974, two years after Watership Down was published, Adams became a full-time author.
May 9, 1945
Gamal el-Ghitani, (born 9 May 1945) is an Egyptian author of historical and political novels and cultural and political commentaries and was the editor-in-chief of the literary periodical Akhbar Al-Adab ('Cultural News') till 2011. Gamal El-Ghitani was born to a poor family in the town of Guhayna, Sohag Governorate in Upper Egypt and moved with his family to Cairo as a child. He began writing at a young age and had his first short story published when he was only 14. He was originally trained to be a carpet designer and received his diploma in 1962. He continued to write on the side and was imprisoned from October 1966 through March 1967 for his critical commentary on the regime of Gamal Abd el-Nasser. In 1969 he switched careers and became a journalist for the Egyptian newspaper Akhbar El Yom ('The Day's News'). Since becoming a journalist, el-Ghitani has continued to write historical fiction, and many of his stories are set in Cairo. He has also maintained an active pen about many cultural and political topics, notably the level of censorship in modern-day Egypt. In an effort to help promote the Arab literary culture, he helped found the literary magazine 'Gallery 68'. In 1980, he was awarded with the Egyptian National Prize for Literature, and in 1987, the French Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 1985, he became editor-in-chief of Al Akhbar ('The News') and continued to be a contributing editor to Akhbar El-Yom's literary section. From 1993 to 2011, he was the editor-in-chief of Akhbar Al-Adab, one of Egypt's primary literary magazines. In 2005, he won a French Award for translated literature 'Laure Bataillon', one of the highest French awards to be bestowed upon non-French writers. He was entitled for this award due to his giant work 'Kitâb al-Tagalliyyât' or 'Book of Illuminations'. In 2009, he was awarded the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Ren, the award is worth about $200,000 and is one of the world's richest literary awards. Gamal El-Ghitani is married to the Egyptian journalist Magda El-Guindy, editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram's children's magazine 'Alaaeddin'. He has a son, Mohammad, and a daughter, Magda. Farouk Abdel Wahab is based at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago. Edward Said is Parr Professor of English at Columbia University and is the author of many books, including ORIENTALISM. .
May 9, 1860
Sir James Matthew Barrie (9 May 1860 – 19 June 1937) was a Scottish author and dramatist, the child of a family of small-town weavers, and best remembered today as the creator of Peter Pan.
May 9, 1950
Timothy O. Benson is Curator of the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
May 9, 1921
Daniel Joseph Berrigan SJ (May 9, 1921 – April 30, 2016) was an American Jesuit priest, anti-war activist, and poet. Like many others during the 1960s, Berrigan's active protest against the Vietnam War earned him both scorn and admiration, but it was his participation in the Catonsville Nine that made him famous. It also landed him on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's "most wanted list" (the first-ever priest on the list), on the cover of Time magazine, and in prison. His own particular form of militancy and radical spirituality in the service of social and political justice was significant enough, at that time, to "shape the tactics of resistance to the Vietnam War" in the United States. For the rest of his life, Berrigan remained one of the US's leading anti-war activists. In 1980, he founded the Plowshares Movement, an anti-nuclear protest group, that put him back into the national spotlight. He was also an award-winning and prolific author of some 50 books, a teacher, and a university educator.
May 9, 1895
Lucian Blaga (9 May 1895 – 6 May 1961) was a Romanian philosopher, poet, and playwright. Lucian Blaga was a commanding personality of the Romanian culture of the interbellum period. He was a philosopher and writer highly acclaimed for his originality, a university professor and a diplomat. He was born on 9 May 1895 in Lancram, near Alba Iulia, Romania, his father being an Orthodox priest. His elementary education was in Sebes (1902–1906), after which he attended the ‘Andrei Saguna‘ Highschool in Brasov (1906–1914), under the supervision of a relative, Iosif Blaga, who happened to be the author of the first Romanian treatise on the theory of drama. At the outbreak of the First World War, he began theological studies at Sibiu, where he graduated in 1917. He published his first philosophy article on the Bergson theory of subjective time. From 1917 to 1920, he attended courses at the University of Vienna, where he studied philosophy and obtained his PhD. Upon returning to the re-unified Romania, he contributed to the Romanian press in Transylvania, being the editor of the magazines Culture in Cluj and The Banat in Lugoj. In 1926, he became involved in Romanian diplomacy, occupying successive posts at Romania's legations in Warsaw, Prague, Lisbon, Bern and Vienna. His political protector was the famous poet Octavian Goga, who occupied the chair of Prime Minister, Blaga being a relative of his wife. He was chosen a member of the Romanian Academy in 1937. His acceptance speech was entitled Elogiul satului românesc (In Praise of the Romanian Village). In 1939, he became professor of cultural philosophy at the University of Cluj, temporarily located in Sibiu in the years following the Second Vienna Award. During his stay in Sibiu, he edited, beginning in 1943, the magazine Saeculum, which was published annually. He was dismissed from his university professor chair in 1948 because he refused to express his support to the new Communist regime and he worked as librarian for the branch department (Cluj) of the History Institute of the Romanian Academy. He was forbidden to publish new books, and until 1960 he was allowed to publish only translations. He completed the translation of Faust, the masterpiece of Goethe, one of the German writers that influenced him most. He died of cancer on 6 May 1961 and is buried in the countryside village cemetery of Lancram, Romania. He was married to Cornelia (b. Brediceanu). They had a daughter, Dorli, her name being derived from ‘dor’, a noun that can be translated, roughly, as ‘longing’. The University of Sibiu bears his name today.
May 9, 1941
Rüdiger Bubner (9 May 1941, Lüdenscheid – 9 February 2007, Heidelberg) was a German philosopher. Since 1996, he was professor at Heidelberg. He was also member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and honorary member of the Theological Faculty of the University of Fribourg. His main areas of specialisation were aesthetics and practical philosophy with reference to Ancient philosophy, German Idealism, and Phenomenology. Bubner’s works in English include Modern German Philosophy and The Innovation of Idealism (Cambridge University Press 2003), in which he examines German Idealism and its historical heritage.
May 9, 1897
Rudolph Fisher (May 9, 1897 - December 26, 1934) was an African-American writer. His first published work, ‘City of Refuge’, appeared in the Atlantic Monthly Press of February 1925. He went on in 1932 to write The Conjure-Man Dies, the first black detective novel. Fisher was also a physician (with a specialty in radiology), dramatist, musician and orator. Fisher was an active participant in the Harlem Renaissance, primarily as a novelist, but also as a musician. Born in Washington, DC in the late nineteenth century, Fisher grew up in Providence, Rhode Island graduating from Classical High School and attending Brown University. He earned his Bachelor of Arts from Brown in 1919 and received a Master of Arts a year later. He went on to attend Howard University Medical School and graduated in 1924. Fisher married Jane Ryder in 1925, and they had one son, Hugh, who was born in 1926. Fisher died in 1934 at the age of 37. John McCluskey, Jr., is Professor of Afro-American Studies and Adjunct Professor of English at Indiana University. He has contributed articles to a number of journals, including Black World, CLA journal, and American Literature. He is the author of two novels, LOOK WHAT THEY DONE TO MY SONG (Random House, 1974) and MR. AMERICA’S LAST SEASON BLUES (Louisiana State University Press, 1983), and a number of short stories.
May 9, 1936
A internationally renowned, award-winning documentary producer, director, and Bertolt Brecht scholar, John Fuegi, Professor Emeritus Comparative Literature, University of Maryland, grew up in England and Switzerland.
May 9, 1951
Joy Harjo (born Joy Foster on May 9, 1951, Mvskoke) is a poet, musician, and author. Born in Oklahoma, she took her paternal grandmother's surname when she enrolled in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She is an important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, completed her undergraduate degree at University of New Mexico in 1976, and earned an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa in its Creative Writing Program. In addition to writing books and other publications, Harjo has taught in numerous United States universities, has performed at poetry readings and music events, and releases five albums of her original music. Her books include Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015), Crazy Brave (2012), and How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975–2002 (2004).
May 9, 1883
José Ortega y Gasset (9 May 1883 - 18 October 1955) was a Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist working during the first half of the 20th century while Spain oscillated between monarchy, republicanism and dictatorship. He was, along with Friedrich Nietzsche, a proponent of the idea of perspectivism, which was pioneered in European thought by Immanuel Kant.
May 9, 1956
Mark O’Shea, Curator of Reptiles at West Midland Safari Park (U.K.), has participated in more than sixty fieldwork and filming exhibitions, traveling to every continent except Antarctica.
May 9, 1933
Anne Barton (previously Righter, born BarbaraAnn Roesen; 9 May 1933 ? 11 November 2013) was a renowned American-English scholar and Shakespearean critic. Anne Barton died on 11 November 2013, aged 80, in Cambridge, England, United Kingdom. She was survived by her husband of nearly 45 years, theatre director John Barton.
May 9, 1938
Dušan 'Charles' Simi? (born 9 May 1938) is a Serbian-American poet and was co-poetry editor of the Paris Review. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for The World Doesn't End, and was a finalist of the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for Selected Poems, 1963-1983 and in 1987 for Unending Blues. He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007.
May 10, 1876
Ivan Cankar (10 May 1876 – 11 December 1918) was a Slovene writer, playwright, essayist, poet and political activist. Together with Oton Župan?i?, Dragotin Kette, and Josip Murn, he is considered as the beginner of modernism in Slovene literature. He is regarded as the greatest writer in the Slovene language, and has sometimes been compared to Franz Kafka and James Joyce.
May 10, 1939
ROBERT DARNTON is Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of European History at Princeton University. A specialist in early modern French history, he is the author of many acclaimed books, including The GREAT CAT MASSACRE AND OTHER EPISODES IN FRENCH CULTURAL HISTORY and THE KISS OF LAMOURETTE. .
May 10, 1843
Benito Pérez Galdós (May 10, 1843 – January 4, 1920) was a Spanish realist novelist. Some authorities consider him second only to Cervantes in stature as a Spanish novelist. He was the leading literary figure in 19thc. Spain. Galdós was a prolific writer, publishing 31 novels, 46 Episodios Nacionales (National Episodes), 23 plays, and the equivalent of 20 volumes of shorter fiction, journalism and other writings. He remains popular in Spain, and galdosistas (Galdós researchers) considered him Spain's equal to Dickens, Balzac and Tolstoy. As recently as 1950, few of his works were available translated to English, although he has slowly become popular in the Anglophone world. While his plays are generally considered to be less successful than his novels, Realidad (1892) is important in the history of realism in the Spanish theatre. The Galdós museum in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, features a portrait of the writer by Joaquín Sorolla.
May 10, 1945
Benjamin Isaac is Lessing Professor of Ancient History at the University of Tel Aviv. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the author of The Limits of Empire: The Roman Army in the East.
May 10, 1897
Walter Lowenfels (May 10, 1897 – July 7, 1976) was an American poet, journalist, and member of the Communist Party USA. He also edited the Pennsylvania Edition of The Worker, a weekend edition of the Communist-sponsored Daily Worker.
May 10, 1969
Geoffrey G. O’Brien is a Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of The Guns and Flags Project (UC Press).
May 10, 1919
Antônio Olinto Marques da Rocha (May 10, 1919 — September 12, 2009) was a Brazilian writer, essayist and translator. Among his work are included poetry, novels, literary criticism, political analysis, children's literature and dictionaries. He occupied the 8th chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters from 1997 until his death in 2009.
May 10, 1963
Suzan-Lori Parks (born 10 May 1963) is an African-American playwright and screenwriter. She received the MacArthur Foundation 'Genius' Grant in 2001, and the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Topdog/Underdog. Parks was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky into a military family. She spent part of her childhood in West Germany and 'attended German high school instead of the English-speaking school for military children. The experience, in addition to teaching her the fundamentals of language, showed Parks what it feels like to be neither white nor black, but simply foreign.' She eventually returned to the United States and graduated from The John Carroll School in 1981. She later attended and graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1985 with a B.A. in English and German literature (cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) and later spent a year studying acting at Drama Studio London. Parks noted in an interview that her name is spelled with a 'Z' as the result of a misprint early in her career: 'When I was doing one of my first plays in the East Village, we had fliers printed up and they spelled my name wrong. I was devastated. But the director said, 'Just keep it, honey, and it will be fine.' And it was.' Parks would credit the impact of Mount Holyoke on her career later in life. While she was an undergraduate, her Mount Holyoke English professor Mary McHenry introduced Parks to Five Colleges faculty member James Baldwin. Parks began to take classes with Baldwin and, at his behest, began to write plays. Parks also noted that she was inspired by Wendy Wasserstein, a 1971 Mount Holyoke graduate who won the Pulitzer in 1989 for her play The Heidi Chronicles. Parks also credited another Mount Holyoke professor, Leah Blatt Glasser, with her success. Parks' first screenplay was for Spike Lee's 1996 film, Girl 6. She later worked in conjunction with Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions on screenplays for Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005) and the 2007 film, The Great Debaters (with Robert Eisele). Parks' plays include Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, The America Play (the opening scene of which inspired Topdog/Underdog), Venus (about Saartjie Baartman), In The Blood and Fucking A (which are both a retelling of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter). In 2000, Parks received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a playwright in mid-career. Her 2001 play, Topdog/Underdog (a play about family identity, fraternal interdependence, and the struggles of everyday African-American life), won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002. In October 2014, The Public Theater presented the world premiere of Father Comes Home From The Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3), written by Parks and directed by Jo Bonney. The cast featured Sterling K. Brown, Louis Cancelmi, Peter Jay Fernandez, Jeremie Harris, Russell G. Jones, Jenny Jules, Ken Marks, Jacob Ming-Trent, Tonye Patano and Julian Rozzell Jr. She teaches playwriting at Tisch School of the Arts in the Rita & Burton Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing. Parks is married to blues musician Paul Oscher.
May 10, 1967
Jon Ronson is a writer and documentary filmmaker. His books THEM: ADVENTURES WITH EXTREMISTS and THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS were both international bestsellers. THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS was released as a major motion picture in 2009, starring George Clooney. Ronson lives in London.
May 10, 1927
Nayantara Sahgal (Kashmiri: born 10 May 1927) is an Indian writer in English. Her fiction deals with India's elite responding to the crises engendered by political change; she was one of the first female Indo-Anglian writers to receive wide recognition. She is a member of the Nehru-Gandhi family, the second of the three daughters born to Jawaharlal Nehru's sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit. She was awarded the 1986 Sahitya Akademi Award for English, for her novel, RICH LIKE US (1985), by the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters.
May 10, 1873
Richard Wilhelm (10 May 1873 – 2 March 1930) was a German sinologist, theologian, and missionary. He lived in China for 25 years, became fluent in spoken and written Chinese, and grew to love and admire the Chinese people. He is best remembered for his translations of philosophical works from Chinese into German that in turn have been translated into other major languages of the world, including English. His translation of the I Ching is still regarded as one of the finest, as is his translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower; both were provided with introductions by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who was a personal friend. His son Hellmut Wilhelm was also a sinologist, and was professor of Chinese at the University of Washington.
May 10, 1908
Geoffrey Barraclough (May 10, 1908, Bradford, United Kingdom - December 26, 1984, Burford, United Kingdom) was an English historian, known as a medievalist and historian of Germany. He was educated at Bootham School in York and at Bradford Grammar School. He read History at Oriel College, Oxford University in 1926-1929.
May 10, 1957
Annabel Jane Elizabeth Karmel MBE, is the author of books on nutrition and cooking for babies, children and families.
May 10, 1924
Goliarda Sapienza (May 10, 1924, Catania, Italy - August 30, 1996, Gaeta, Italy) was born in the Sicilian city of Catania, into a staunchly anti-fascist family. At sixteen, she moved to Rome to study at the Academy of Dramatic Arts, and during the 1950s and '60s she was an actress in both films and the theater. She worked with, among others, Luchino Visconti (in Senso) and Francesco Maselli. Her novels include Lettera aperta (1967), Il filo di mezzogiorno (1969), and L'università di Rebibbia (1983); Io, Jean Gabin (2010) and her most important work, The Art of Joy, remained unpublished until after her death. Anne Milano Appel, PhD, a former library director and language teacher, has been translating professionally for more than fifteen years and is a member of ALTA, ATA, NCTA, and PEN. Many of her book-length translations have been published, and shorter works that she has authored or translated have appeared in other professional and literary venues.
May 10, 1810
The Reverend Dr. Ebenezer Cobham Brewer (10 May 1810, Norwich – 6 March 1897, Edwinstowe, Nottinghamshire), was the compiler of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, and The Reader's Handbook, Victorian reference works. E. Cobham Brewer was the son of Elisabeth née Kitton and John Sherren Brewer, a Norwich schoolmaster associated with the Baptist congregation of St Mary's Chapel in Norwich. His father kept a school in Calvert Street, Norwich, until 1824, when he opened a new academy in Eaton on the outskirts of Norwich. E. Cobham Brewer attended Trinity Hall, Cambridge, graduating in Law in 1836. He was ordained in 1838. On returning to Norwich to work at his father's school, he compiled his first major work, A Guide to the Scientific Knowledge of Things Familiar, first published around 1838-41. The book became immensely popular and its sales may have funded the extensive travels in Europe he made later. On returning to England in 1856, Brewer started on the work that was to become Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. The dictionary was derived in part from correspondence with readers of his previous book. The first edition was published in 1870, and a revised edition appeared in 1894. Of his methodology, Brewer wrote in the preface to the Historic Note-Book: ‘I have been an author for sixty years, have written many books, and of course have been a very miscellaneous reader. In my long experience I have remarked how little the range of ‘literary’ reading has varied, and how doubt still centres on matters which were cruces in my early years. So that a work of this kind is of as much usefulness in 1891 as it would have been in 1830. I have always read with a slip of paper and a pencil at my side, to jot down whatever I think may be useful to me, and these jottings I keep sorted in different lockers. This has been a life-habit with me...’ The Reader's Handbook has had an extended subsequent history. With detailed revisions by editor Henrietta Gerwig it formed the nucleus of Crowell's Handbook for Readers and Writers which in turn provided the nucleus of Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia, ‘veritably a new book’, as Benét remarked; in revised form, it is still in print. Brewer's Reader's Handbook was re-edited by Marion Harland (1830–1922) and published in the United States, with numerous illustrations as Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama: A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, 4 vols., New York 1892. Other works by Brewer include A Dictionary of Miracles: Imitative, Realistic and Dogmatic (1884?), and The Historic Notebook, With an Appendix of Battles. Several of Brewer's siblings achieved academic and professional success. John Sherren Brewer junior was an eminent historian and editor of British State Papers at the Public Record Office; William Brewer was a surgeon and was elected a Liberal MP for Colchester in 1868; Robert Kitton Brewer was a Doctor of Music and a Baptist Minister, and two of his sisters ran a Girls' School in Lime Tree Road, Norwich. He died on 6 March 1897 at Edwinstowe vicarage, Newark, where he had been residing with his son-in-law, the Rev. H. T. Hayman. In 1856, he married at Paris Ellen Mary, eldest daughter of the Rev. Francis Tebbutt of Hove.
May 10, 1886
William Olaf Stapledon (10 May 1886 – 6 September 1950) – known as Olaf Stapledon – was a British philosopher and author of influential works of science fiction. In 2014, he was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. Stapledon was born in Seacombe, Wallasey, on the Wirral Peninsula in Cheshire, the only son of William Clibbert Stapledon and Emmeline Miller. The first six years of his life were spent with his parents at Port Said, Egypt. He was educated at Abbotsholme School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he acquired a BA degree in Modern History (Second Class) in 1909, promoted to an MA degree in 1913. After a brief stint as a teacher at Manchester Grammar School he worked in shipping offices in Liverpool and Port Said from 1910 to 1912. From 1912 to 1915 Stapledon worked with the Liverpool branch of the Workers' Educational Association. During the First World War he served as a conscientious objector. Stapledon became an ambulance driver with the Friends' Ambulance Unit in France and Belgium from July 1915 to January 1919; he was awarded the Croix de Guerre for bravery. On 16 July 1919 he married Agnes Zena Miller (1894–1984), an Australian cousin. They had first met in 1903, and later maintained a correspondence throughout the war. They had a daughter, Mary Sydney Stapledon (1920–2008), and a son, John David Stapledon (1923–2014). In 1920 they moved to West Kirby. Stapledon was awarded a PhD degree in philosophy from the University of Liverpool in 1925 and used his doctoral thesis as the basis for his first published prose book, A Modern Theory of Ethics (1929). However, he soon turned to fiction in the hope of presenting his ideas to a wider public. The relative success of Last and First Men (1930) prompted him to become a full-time writer. He wrote a sequel, Last Men in London, and followed it up with many more books of both fiction and philosophy. For the duration of the Second World War Stapledon abandoned his pacifism and supported the war effort. In 1940 the Stapledon family built and moved into a new house on Simon's Field, in Caldy, on the Wirral. During the war Stapledon become a public advocate of J.B. Priestley and Richard Acland's left-wing Common Wealth Party, as well as the British internationalist group Federal Union. After 1945 Stapledon travelled widely on lecture tours, visiting the Netherlands, Sweden and France, and in 1948 he spoke at the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Wroc?aw, Poland. He attended the Conference for World Peace held in New York City in 1949, the only Briton to be granted a visa to do so. In 1950 he became involved with the anti-apartheid movement. After a week of lectures in Paris, he cancelled a projected trip to Yugoslavia and returned to his home in Caldy, where he died very suddenly of a heart attack. On Stapledon's religious views, he was an agnostic. Stapledon was cremated at Landican Crematorium. His widow and their children scattered his ashes on the sandy cliffs overlooking the Dee Estuary, a favourite spot of his that features in more than one of his books. Stapledon Wood, on the south-east side of Caldy Hill, is named after him. Stapledon's fiction often presents the strivings of some intelligence that is beaten down by an indifferent universe and its inhabitants who, through no fault of their own, fail to comprehend its lofty yearnings. It is filled with protagonists who are tormented by the conflict between their "higher" and "lower" impulses. Stapledon's writings directly influenced Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, Stanis?aw Lem, Bertrand Russell, John Gloag, Naomi Mitchison, C. S. Lewis, Vernor Vinge, John Maynard Smith and indirectly influenced many others, contributing many ideas to the world of science fiction. The "supermind" composed of many individual consciousnesses forms a recurring theme in his work. Star Maker contains the first known description of what are now called Dyson spheres. Freeman Dyson credits the novel with giving him the idea, even stating in an interview that "Stapledon sphere" would be a more appropriate name. Last and First Men features early descriptions of genetic engineering and terraforming. Sirius describes a dog whose intelligence is increased to the level of a human being's. Some commentators have called Stapledon a Marxist, although Stapledon himself explicitly rejected Marxism. Stapledon's work also refers to then-contemporary intellectual fashions (e.g. the belief in extrasensory perception). Last and First Men, a "future history" of 18 successive species of humanity, and Star Maker, an outline history of the Universe, were highly acclaimed by figures as diverse as Jorge Luis Borges, J. B. Priestley, Bertrand Russell, Algernon Blackwood, Hugh Walpole, Arnold Bennett, Virginia Woolf (Stapledon maintained a correspondence with Woolf) and Winston Churchill. In contrast, Stapledon's philosophy repelled C. S. Lewis, whose Cosmic Trilogy was written partly in response to what Lewis saw as amorality, although Lewis admired Stapledon's inventiveness and described him as "a corking good writer".Together with his philosophy lectureship at the University of Liverpool, which now houses the Olaf Stapledon archive, Stapledon lectured in English literature, industrial history and psychology. He wrote many non-fiction books on political and ethical subjects, in which he advocated the growth of "spiritual values", which he defined as those values expressive of a yearning for greater awareness of the self in a larger context ("personality-in-community"). Stapledon himself named his spiritual values as intelligence, love and creative action.
May 11, 1930
Edward Kamau Brathwaite (born 11 May 1930, Bridgetown, Barbados) is widely considered one of the major voices in the Caribbean literary canon. A professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, Brathwaite is the 2006 International Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, for his volume of poetry Born to Slow Horses. Brathwaite holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex (1968) and was the co-founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM). He received both the Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships in 1983, and is a winner of the 1994 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bussa Award, the Casa de las Américas Prize for poetry, and the 1999 Charity Randall Citation for Performance and Written Poetry from the International Poetry Forum. Brathwaite is noted for his studies of Black cultural life both in Africa and throughout the African diasporas of the world in works such as Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica (1970); The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820 (1971); Contradictory Omens (1974); Afternoon of the Status Crow (1982); and History of the Voice (1984), the publication of which established him as the authority of note on nation language.
May 11, 1916
Spanish writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1989. Camilo José Cela has explored the way novels are written, but also published non-fiction, such as DICCIONARIO SECRETO (1968-72), a thesaurus of forbidden words end expressions. His works are marked by pessimism, brutal realism, sardonic humor, and experiments with narrative time. Cela writes with great detail, describing landscapes and hundreds of individuals, giving an emotional dimension to reporting. Camilo José Cela was born in Iria-Flavia into a large middle-class family. Cela's mother was of British origin and his father was a part-time author. Cela studied medicine, philosophy and law at the University of Madrid, but his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). He served as a corporal with Franco's army, which is noteworthy because literary history knows more writers who were against Franco, starting from Hemingway, Orwell, and García Lorca. (Another Spanish Nobel winner, Jacinto Benavente, sympathized Franco.) Cela witnessed cruelties against civilians and was also wounded by a grenade; later he used his experiences in many of his stories. After resuming his studies, finally graduating at age 27. In 1944 he married María del Rosario Conde Picavea; they had one son, who became an anthropologist. The marriage ended in 1989. Just before the Nobel Prize Cela had met Marina Castaño, a radio journalist, who was 40 years younger. Cela considered her as his muse. They married in 1991 and at the same time Cela lost touch with several old friends. Before devoting himself entirely to writing, Cela worked briefly as a censor during Franco's dictatorship and tried bullfighting, painting and acting.
May 11, 1930
Stanley Lawrence Elkin (May 11, 1930 – May 31, 1995) was an American Jewish novelist, short story writer, and essayist. His extravagant, satirical fiction revolves around American consumerism, popular culture, and male-female relationships.
May 11, 1918
Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988) was Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology. A. Zee is a Permanent Member of the Institute for Theoretical Physics and Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics and Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell (both Princeton).
May 11, 1925
Rubem Fonseca (born May 11, 1925) is a Brazilian writer. He was born in Juiz de Fora, in the state of Minas Gerais, but he has lived most of his life in Rio de Janeiro. In 1952, he started his career as a low-level cop and, later became a police commissioner, one of the highest ranks in the civil police of Brazil. Following the steps of American novelist Thomas Pynchon, a close friend of Fonseca, he refuses to give interviews and feels strongly about maintaining his privacy.
May 11, 1912
Saadat Hassan Manto (11 May 1912 – 18 January 1955) was a British Indian-born Pakistani short story writer of the Urdu language. He is best known for his short stories, 'Bu' (Odour), 'Khol Do' (Open It), 'Thanda Gosht' (Cold Meat), and 'Toba Tek Singh'. Manto was also a film and radio scriptwriter and a journalist. He published twenty-two collections of short stories, one novel, five collections of radio plays, three collections of essays, and two collections of personal sketches. Manto was tried for obscenity six times; thrice before 1947 in British India, and thrice after independence in 1947 in Pakistan, but never convicted. Some of his works have been translated in other languages.
May 11, 1895
William Grant Still (May 11, 1895 – December 3, 1978) was an American composer, who composed more than 150 works, including five symphonies and eight operas. Often referred to as "the Dean" of African-American composers, Still was the first American composer to have an opera produced by the New York City Opera. Still is known most for his first symphony, which was until the 1950s the most widely performed symphony composed by an American. Born in Mississippi, he grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, attended Wilberforce University and Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and was a student of George Whitefield Chadwick and later Edgard Varèse. Of note, Still was the first African American to conduct a major American symphony orchestra, the first to have a symphony (his 1st Symphony) performed by a leading orchestra, the first to have an opera performed by a major opera company, and the first to have an opera performed on national television. Due to his close association and collaboration with prominent Afro-American literary and cultural figures such as Alain Locke and Langston Hughes, William Grant Still is considered to be part of the Harlem Renaissance movement.
May 11, 1940
Margaret Visser (born May 11, 1940) is a writer and broadcaster who lives in Toronto, Paris, and South West France. Her subject matter is the history, anthropology, and mythology of everyday life. Born in South Africa, she attended school in Zambia, Zimbabwe, France (the Sorbonne) and the University of Toronto Canada. She taught Greek and Latin at York University north of Toronto for 18 years. For several years Visser regularly appeared on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's popular radio program Morningside in conversations with Peter Gzowski. Her writing has won many awards, including the Glenfiddich Award for Food Book of the Year in Britain in 1989, the International Association of Culinary Professionals' Literary Food Writing Award, and the Jane Grigson Award. Visser delivered the 2002 CBC Massey Lectures. Her topic was "Beyond Fate." Visser is married to Colin Visser, professor emeritus of the English Department of the University of Toronto.
May 11, 1965
Didier Maleuvre is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of The Religion of Reality: Inquiry into the Self, Art, and Transcendence. b/w photographs.
May 11, 1922
Seymour Krim (May 11, 1922 – August 30, 1989) was an American author, editor and literary critic. He is often categorized with the writers of the Beat Generation. He wrote for the Village Voice, Playboy, New York Element and International Times, among many other publications. He worked for a time at The New Yorker, where Brendan Gill recalled he was often "stripped to the waist."
May 12, 1924
Claribel Alegria was born in Esteli, Nicaragua in 1924, but she considers herself Salvadoran because she went to live in El Salvador when she was a year old. She came to the United States in 1943 and earned her B.A. from George Washington University. She married Darwin J. Flakoll in 1947. They now live in Deya, Mallorca. Her books of poetry include Anillo de Silencio, Suite, Vigilias, Acuario, Huesped de mi Tiempo, Via Unica, Aprendizaje, Pagare a cobrar y otras poemas, Raices, and Sobrevivo. A selected poems, Suma y sigue (antologia), appeared from Visor Madrid in 1981 and her translations of North American poets, Nuevas voces do Norteamerica, appeared from Plaza & Janes, S.A., the same year. In 1978, Claribel Alegria was awarded the Casa de las Americas Prize in Havana, Cuba. . Carolyn Forché was born in 1950 in Detroit. Her first book of poems, GATHERING THE TRIBES, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1975. Between 1978 and 1980 she worked as a journalist and human rights investigator in El Salvador. In 1981 she received the di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America for the working manuscript of her second book of poems. When THE COUNTRY BETWEEN US appeared from the Copper Canyon Press and Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., in 1982, the Academy of American Poets awarded it their Lamont Selection. She has held Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and is currently living in Charlottesville, Virginia.
May 12, 1934
Elechi Amadi (born 12 May 1934) is a Nigerian author of plays and novels that are generally about African village life, customs, beliefs and religious practices, as they were before contact with the Western world. Amadi is best regarded for his 1966 first novel, The Concubine, which has been called ‘an outstanding work of pure fiction’. Born in 1934, in Aluu in the Ikwerre local government area of Rivers State, Nigeria, Elechi Amadi attended Government College, Umuahia (1948-1952), Survey School, Oyo (1953-1954), and the University of Ibadan (1955-1959), where he obtained a degree in Physics and Mathematics. He worked for a time as a land surveyor and later was a teacher at several schools, including the Nigerian Military School, Zaria (1963-1966). Amadi did military service in the Nigerian army and was on the Nigerian side during the Nigeria-Biafra War, retiring in the rank of Captain. After the war Amadi left the army to work for the Rivers State government. Positions he held include Permanent Secretary (1973-1983), Commissioner for Education (1987-1988) and Commissioner for Lands and Housing (1989-1990). He has been writer-in-residence and lecturer at Rivers State College of Education, where he has also been Dean of Arts, head of the Literature Department and Director of General Studies. On 13 May 1989 a symposium was held at the University of Port Harcourt to celebrate Amadi's 55th birthday. In May 2004, a conference was organized by the Association of Nigerian Authors, Rivers State Branch, to mark Elechi Amadi's 70th birthday. On 5 January 2009 Amadi was kidnapped at his home in Aluu town, Port Harcourt, by unknown gunmen. He was released 23 hours later, on the evening of 6 January. Elechi Amadi has said that his first publication was in 1957, a poem entitled ‘Penitence’ in a University of Ibadan campus magazine called The Horn, edited by John Pepper Clark. Amadi's first novel, The Concubine, was published in London in 1966 and was hailed as a ‘most accomplished first performance’. Alastair Niven in his critical study of the novel wrote: ‘Rooted firmly among the hunting and fishing villages of the Niger delta, The Concubine nevertheless possesses the timelessness and universality of a major novel.’ The Concubine was made into a film, written by Elechi Amadi and directed by accomplished Nollywood film director Andy Amenechi, which premiered in Abuja in March 2007. The setting of Amachi's second novel, The Great Ponds, published in 1969, is pre-colonial Eastern Nigeria, and is about the battle between two village communities over possession of a pond. In 1973 Amadi autobiographical non-fiction, Sunset in Biafra, was published. It records his personal experiences in the Nigeria-Biafra war, and according to Niven ‘is written in a compelling narrative form as though it were a novel’.
May 12, 1961
Paul Edward Begala (born May 12, 1961) is an American political consultant and political commentator, best known as an adviser to President Bill Clinton. Begala was a chief strategist for the 1992 Clinton–Gore campaign, which carried 33 states and made Clinton the first Democrat to occupy the White House in twelve years. As counselor to the President in the Clinton White House, he coordinated policy, politics, and communications. Begala gained national prominence as part of the political consulting team Carville and Begala, along with fellow Clinton advisor James Carville. He was a co-host on the political debate program Equal Time on MSNBC from 1999 to 2000, and a co-host on the similar debate program Crossfire on CNN from 2002 to 2005. He now appears regularly on CNN as a Democratic pundit. He is an Affiliated Professor of Public Policy at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy.
May 12, 1920
John Tyler Bonner is Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. He is the author of Lives of a Biologist: Adventures in a Century of Extraordinary Science and Evolution of Culture in Animals (Princeton), and the author or editor of fourteen other books.
May 12, 1916
Albert Murray is the author of several collections of essays, including THE OMNI-AMERICANS: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON BLACK EXPERIENCE AND AMERICAN CULTURE (1970), THE HERO AND THE BLUES (1973), and STOMPING THE BLUES (1978), as well as an autobiographical work, SOUTH TO A VERY OLD PLACE(1971) He lives in New York City.
May 12, 1949
Michael Bronski (born May 12, 1949) is an American academic and writer, best known for his 2011 book A Queer History of the United States. Professor of the Practice in Media and Activism at Harvard University, he currently teaches in the women, gender and sexuality program, A Queer History of the United States won both a Lambda Literary Award and a Stonewall Book Award in 2012. He also previously won two Lambda Literary Awards as an editor of anthologies, in 1997 for Taking Liberties: Gay Men's Essays on Politics, Culture, & Sex and in 2004 for Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps. Bronski was the partner of American poet Walta Borawski, who died in 1994.
May 12, 1939
Rosellen Brown (born May 12, 1939) is an American author, and has been an instructor of English and creative writing at several universities, including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Houston. She has won several grants and awards for her work. The 1996 film Before and After was adapted from her novel of the same name. Brown was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She received a bachelor of arts degree from Barnard College in 1960 and Brandeis University.
May 12, 1907
Leslie Charteris (12 May 1907 – 15 April 1993), born Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin, was a British-American author of adventure fiction, as well as a screenwriter. He was best known for his many books chronicling the adventures of Simon Templar, alias 'The Saint.'
May 12, 1922
Marco Denevi (May 12, 1922 in Sáenz Peña, Buenos Aires – December 12, 1998) was an Argentine award-winning author of novels and short stories, as well as a lawyer and journalist. His work is characterized by its originality and depth, as well as a criticism of human incompetence. His first work, a mystery called Rosaura a las diez (1955), was a Kraft award winner and a bestseller. In 1964, it was translated into English as Rosa at Ten O'Clock. Other famous works of his include Los expedientes (1957), Ceremonia Secreta (1960), El cuarto de la noche (1962), and Falsificaciones (1966). Ceremonia Secreta was filmed as Secret Ceremony in 1968 starring Elizabeth Taylor, Mia Farrow, Robert Mitchum, and Peggy Ashcroft. It was directed by Joseph Losey, from a script by George Tabori. He is less known as an essayist, but he also cultivated this genre with his República de Trapalanda (1989), a late work, in which he takes on Ezequiel Martínez Estrada and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's view of the Argentine republic. He was born in the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and at a young age he began playing the piano and reading. He graduated from college in 1939, and did not receive his law degree until 1956. In 1987 he was inducted into the Argentine Academy of Letters. It is important to note Denevi's desire to be a playwright. He wrote many dramatic pieces but felt he was not talented enough to write for the theater in Spain.
May 12, 1909
Yury Osipovich Dombrovsky (May 12, 1909 - May 29, 1978) was a Russian writer who spent nearly eighteen years in Soviet prison camps and exile. Dombrovsky was the son of Jewish lawyer Joseph Hedal Dombrovsky and Russian mother. Dombrovsky fell foul of the authorities as early as 1932, for his part in the student suicide case described in The Faculty of Useless Knowledge. He was exiled to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan where he established himself as a teacher, and which provided the setting for his novel The Keeper of Antiquities. This work, translated into English by Michael Glenny, gives several ominous hints as to the development of the Stalinist terror and its impact in remote Alma-Ata. Dombrovsky had begun publishing literary articles in Kazakhstanskaya Pravda by 1937, when he was imprisoned again — this time for a mere seven months, having the luck to be detained during the partial hiatus between the downfall of Yezhov and the appointment of Beria. Dombrovsky's first novel Derzhavin was published in 1938 and he was accepted into the Union of Soviet Writers in 1939, the year in which he was arrested yet again. This time he was sent to the notorious Kolyma camps in northeast Siberia, of which we are given brief but chilling glimpses in The Faculty of Useless Knowledge. Dombrovsky, partially paralysed, was released from the camps in 1943 and lived as a teacher in Alma-Ata until 1949. There he wrote The Monkey Comes for his Skull and The Dark Lady. In 1949, he was again arrested, this time in connection with the campaign against foreign influences and cosmopolitanism. This time, he received a ten-year sentence, to be served in the Tayshet and Osetrovo regions in Siberia. In 1955, he was released and fully rehabilitated the following year. Until his death in 1978, he lived in Moscow with Klara Fazulayevna (a character in The Faculty of Useless Knowledge). He was allowed to write, and his works were translated abroad, but none of them were re-issued in the USSR. Nor was he allowed abroad, even to Poland. The Faculty of Useless Knowledge (Harvill), translated by Alan Myers the sombre and chilling sequel to The Keeper of Antiquities took eleven years to write, and was published in Paris in 1978. A widespread opinion is that this publication proved fatal. The KGB did not approve of the work, and it was noted that the book had actually been finished in 1975. Dombrovsky received numerous threats over the phone and through the post; his arm was shattered by a steel pipe in the course of an assault on a bus, and he was finally attacked and severely beaten in the House of Literature. He died about a month and a half later. An account about Dombrovsky written by Armand Maloumian, a fellow inmate of the GULAG, can be found in Kontinent 4: Contemporary Russian Writers (Avon Books, ed. George Bailey), entitled "And Even Our Tears." Jean-Paul Sartre described Yuri Dombrovsky as the last classic.
May 12, 1930
Mazisi (Raymond) Kunene (12 May 1930 – 11 August 2006) was a South African poet best known for his poem Emperor Shaka the Great. While in exile from South Africa's apartheid regime, Kunene was an active supporter and organizer of the anti-apartheid movement in Europe and Africa. He would later teach at UCLA and become Africa's and South Africa's poet laureate. Kunene was born in Durban, in the modern province of KwaZulu-Natal. From very early he began writing poetry and short stories in Zulu, and by age eleven he was being published in local papers. He later undertook a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Natal in Zulu and history and later a Master of Arts in Zulu Poetry. His Master's thesis was titled An Analytical Survey of Zulu Poetry, Both Traditional and Modern. There he criticized the changing nature of Zulu literature, and its emulation of the Western tradition. He won a Bantu Literary Competition in 1956 and left for London to study at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London in 1959. He opposed the apartheid government as the head of the African United Front. Fleeing into exile from the country in 1959, he helped push for the anti-apartheid movement in Britain between 1959-1968. Kunene was closely affiliated with the African National Congress, quickly becoming their main representative in Europe and the United States in 1962. He would later become the director of finance for the ANC in 1972. He became a Professor of African literature at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1975 after lecturing in a number of universities as a cultural advisor for UNESCO. He remained at UCLA for nearly two decades, retiring in 1992. Kunene wrote and published poetry from very early in his life. His works were written originally in Zulu and then translated into English. In 1966, his works were banned by the Apartheid government of South Africa. In 1970, Kunene published Zulu Poems, an anthology of poems ranging from "moral reflection to political commentary." In Emperor Shaka the Great, published in English in 1979, Kunene tells the story of the rise of the Zulu under Shaka. World Literature Today contributor Christopher Larson described it as "a monumental undertaking and achievement by any standards." This extremely nationalistic work charted the growth of the Zulu nation under Shaka, as he reforms the military and the nation and conquers many of the tribes around Zululand. Anthem of the Decades:A Zulu Epic published in English in 1981 tells the Zulu legend of how death came to mankind. In 1982, Kunene published a second collection of poems titled The Ancestors and the Sacred Mountain: Poems containing 100 of his poems. This collection had a particular emphasis on socio-political topics. Unodumehlezi Kamenzi was published in 2017 on the tenth anniversary of his death. This book is the isiZulu edition of Emperor Shaka the Great and embraces Kunene's original dream to have his poem published as intended in the original isiZulu form. Kunene returned to South Africa in 1992 where he taught at the University of Natal until his retirement. UNESCO made him Africa's poet laureate in 1993 and in 2005 he became South Africa's first poet laureate. He died 11 August 2006 in Durban after a lengthy bout of cancer. He was survived by his wife and four children.
May 12, 1812
Edward Lear (12 or 13 May 1812 – 29 January 1888) was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, and is known now mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised. His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to illustrate birds and animals; making coloured drawings during his journeys, which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books; as a (minor) illustrator of Alfred Tennyson's poems. As an author, he is known principally for his popular nonsense collections of poems, songs, short stories, botanical drawings, recipes, and alphabets. He also composed and published twelve musical settings of Tennyson's poetry.
May 12, 1930
Nellie Yvonne McKay (May 12, 1930 – January 22, 2006) was an American academic and author who was the Evjue-Bascom Professor of American and African-American Literature at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she also taught in English and women's studies, and is best known as the co-editor (with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) of the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature. Born in Queens as Nellie Yvonne Reynolds, her parents were Jamaican immigrants. She was private about her age but was probably born between 1931 and 1947, according to colleagues. She graduated with a B.A. in English from Queens College in 1969, a master's in English and American literature from Harvard in 1971, and a Ph.D. in the same field from Harvard in 1977. McKay was Assistant Professor of English and American Literature at Simmons College and Visiting Professor of Afro-American Literature at MIT between 1973 and 1978. McKay joined the faculty of UW–Madison in 1978, receiving tenure in 1984. Her research specialties included 19th- and 20th-Century American and African American Literature, Black Women’s Literature and Multicultural Women’s Writings, all fields that essentially did not exist when she was a student, and whose modern curricula, by many accounts, became heavily indebted to her scholarship. Her colleague at UW–Madison, Craig Werner, said, "When she came here there was not a single university that was paying any attention to black women’s literature. Now, there isn’t a single university that isn’t." A former student recalls that, in 1979, McKay provided the class with photocopied versions of Native Son by Richard Wright and Black Manhattan by James Weldon Johnson, books that were then out of print, from her own rare copies. According to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, in 1991 she was offered the Harvard University post in Afro-American Studies that was later taken by Gates, whom she had recommended in her stead. By the time she collaborated with Gates on the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, in 1996, she was already widely known as a pre-eminent scholar in the field of black American literature, and Gates specifically sought her out. The book became a worldwide standard in the field and remains in print in a second edition. It was selected by former Poet Laureate of the United States Rita Dove in 2000 for the National Millennium Time Capsule created by the White House to be stored by the National Archives until the 22nd century, with Dove calling it "a lucid and eloquent history of one of this country's most significant subcultures". Her edited book Critical Essays on Toni Morrison is "largely credited with establishing the critical acclaim" that led to Morrison's Nobel Prize in Literature. She played a key role in establishing the UW–Madison Lorraine Hansberry Visiting Professorship in the Dramatic Arts. At the time of her death, McKay had been working on a revised edition of the seminal 1982 black feminist anthology All the Women Are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Brave: Black Women’s Studies, originally edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith. She was also advisory editor for the African American Review, president of the Midwest Consortium of Black Studies and a member of the Board of Directors of the Toni Morrison Society. McKay died January 22, 2006, of colon cancer at a hospice in Fitchburg, Wisconsin.
May 12, 1913
Barrington Moore Jr. (12 May 1913 – 16 October 2005) was an American political sociologist, and the son of forester Barrington Moore. He is famous for his Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966), a comparative study of modernization in Britain, France, the United States, China, Japan, Russia, Germany, and India. His many other works include Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery (1972) and an analysis of rebellion, Injustice: the Social Basis of Obedience and Revolt (1978).
May 12, 1933
Stephen Vizinczey, originally István Vizinczey (born 1933, in Káloz, Hungary), is an author and writer. Vizinczey's first published works were poems which appeared in George Lukacs's Budapest magazine Forum in 1949, when the writer was 16. He studied under Lukacs at the University of Budapest and graduated from the city's Academy of Theatre and Film Arts in 1956. He wrote at that time two plays, The Last Word and Mama, which were banned by the Hungarian Communist regime. He took part in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and after a short stay in Italy, ended up in Canada speaking only 50 words of English, and eventually taking Canadian citizenship. He learned English writing scripts for Canada's National Film Board and the CBC. He edited Canada's short-lived literary magazine, Exchange. In 1966 he moved to London. Vizinczey cites his literary ideals as Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Stendhal and Kleist. His best-known works are the novels In Praise of Older Women (1965) and An Innocent Millionaire (1983). In Praise of Older Women: the amorous recollections of András Vajda is a bildungsroman whose young narrator has sexual encounters with women in their thirties and forties in Hungary, Italy, and Canada. 'The book is dedicated to older women and is addressed to young men--and the connection between the two is my proposition' is the book's epigraph. Kildare Dobbs wrote in Saturday Night, 'Here is this Hungarian rebel who in 1957 could scarcely speak a word of our language and who even today speaks it with an impenetrable accent and whose name moreover we can't pronounce, and he has the gall to place himself, with his first book and in his thirty-third year, among the masters of plain English prose...' In 2001 it was translated for the first time into French, and became a best-seller in France. It has twice been made into a movie: a 1978 Canadian production starring Tom Berenger as Andras Vayda, and a subsequent 1997 Spanish production featuring Faye Dunaway as Condesa. In 2010, the book was reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic. First published in 1983, An Innocent Millionaire tells the story of Mark Niven, the son of an American actor who makes an uncertain living in Europe. 'Mankind, we are told, is divided into the haves and the havenots, but there are those who both have the goods and do not and they live the tensest lives.' The boy who spends his childhood in various countries 'has no emotional address' and once financial pressures led to the divorce of his parents, he becomes enchanted with the idea of finding a Spanish treasure ship. He finds both love and the treasure ship, but the fortune turns into a nightmare and his happiness with a married woman ends in tragedy. The novel was praised by critics including Graham Greene and Anthony Burgess. Burgess wrote in Punch that Vizinczey could 'teach the English how to write English', praised the novel's 'prose style and its sly apophthegms, as well as in the solidity of its characters, good and detestable alike.' Burgess ended his review by saying: 'I was entertained but also deeply moved: here is a novel set bang in the middle of our corrupt world that, in some curious way, breathes a kind of desperate hope.' The London Literary Review called the novel 'an authentic social epic, which reunites, after an estrangement of nearly a century, intellectual and moral edification with exuberant entertainment.'
May 12, 1881
Achmed Abdullah (May 12, 1881, Autonomous Republic of Crimea - May 12, 1945) was an American writer. He is most noted for his pulp stories of crime, mystery and adventure. He wrote screenplays for some successful films. He was the author of the progressive Siamese drama Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness, an Academy Award nominated film made in 1927. He earned an Academy Award nomination for collaborating on the screenplay to the 1935 film The Lives of a Bengal Lancer.
May 13, 1947
Charles Baxter (born May 13, 1947) is an American novelist, essayist, and poet. Baxter was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to John and Mary Barber (Eaton) Baxter. He graduated from Macalester College in Saint Paul. In 1974 he received his PhD in English from the University at Buffalo with a thesis on Djuna Barnes, Malcolm Lowry, and Nathanael West. Baxter taught high school in Pinconning, Michigan for a year before beginning his university teaching career at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. He then moved to the University of Michigan, where for many years he directed the Creative Writing MFA program. He currently teaches at the University of Minnesota and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.
May 13, 1937
Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.’ New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,’ and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.’ Since the 1964 release of Charyn’s first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn’s book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.’ Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
May 13, 1940
Charles Bruce Chatwin (13 May 1940 – 18 January 1989) was an English novelist and travel writer. He won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel On the Black Hill (1982). Married and bisexual, he was one of the first prominent men in Britain known to have contracted HIV and died of AIDS, although he hid the facts of his illness.
May 13, 1840
Alphonse Daudet (May 13, 1840, Nîmes, France - December 16, 1897, Paris, France) was born in Nimes, France, in 1840. Novelist, playwright, and journalist, his success came through his novels and stories. He contracted syphilis at the age of seventeen and died at the age of fifty-seven. Julian Barnes is the author of nine novels, a book of stories, and a collection of essays. He is the recipient of the Prix Femina, and in 1988 was made an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives in London. . .
May 13, 1907
Dame Daphne du Maurier, Lady Browning (13 May 1907 – 19 April 1989) was an English author and playwright. Although she is classed as a romantic novelist, her stories have been described as "moody and resonant" with overtones of the paranormal. Her bestselling works were not at first taken seriously by critics, but have since earned an enduring reputation for narrative craft. Many have been successfully adapted into films, including the novels Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, and Jamaica Inn, and the short stories The Birds and Don't Look Now/Not After Midnight. Du Maurier spent much of her life in Cornwall, where most of her works are set. As her fame increased, she became more reclusive. Her parents were the actor/manager Sir Gerald du Maurier and stage actress Muriel Beaumont. Her grandfather was the cartoonist and writer George du Maurier.
May 13, 1945
Maria Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on folklore and literature. She is the author of THE ANNOTATED BROTHERS GRIMM and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
May 13, 1940
Rachel Holmes Ingalls (13 May 1940 – 6 March 2019) was an American-born author who had lived in the United Kingdom from 1965 onwards. She won the 1970 Authors' Club First Novel Award for Theft. Her novella Mrs. Caliban was published in 1982, and her book of short stories Times Like These in 2005.
May 13, 1950
Manning Marable was M. Moran Weston and Black Alumni Council Professor of African American Studies and professor of history and public affairs at Columbia University. He was founding director of African American Studies at Columbia from 1993 to 2003. Since 2002, he has directed Columbia's Center for Contemporary Black History. The author of fifteen books, Marable was also the editor of the quarterly journal Souls. Manning Marable died in April 2011.
May 13, 1881
Afonso Henriques de Lima Barreto (May 13, 1881 — November 1, 1922) was a Brazilian novelist and journalist. A major figure on the Brazilian Pre-Modernism, he is famous for the novel Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma, a bitter satire of the first years of the República Velha in Brazil. Lima Barreto was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1881, to João Henriques de Lima Barreto and Amália Augusta. His father was a typographer and a monarchist who had close connections to Afonso Celso de Assis Figueiredo, the Viscount of Ouro Preto, who would later become Lima Barreto's godfather. Barreto's mother died when he was very young, and he was subsequently sent to study at a private school run by Teresa Pimentel do Amaral. Soon after, he entered at the Liceu Popular Niteroiense, after the Viscount of Ouro Preto decided to pay for his studies. He graduated in 1894, and in the following year, he would enter the famous Colégio Pedro II. Soon after he graduated, he entered the Escola Politécnica do Rio de Janeiro, but was forced to abandon it in 1904 in order to take care of his brothers, since his father's mental health was starting to deteriorate. Barreto used to write for newspapers since 1902, but he achieved fame in 1905, writing for the Correio da Manhã a series of articles regarding the demolition of Castle Hill. In 1911 he founded, alongside some friends, a periodical named Floreal. Although it only lasted for two issues, it received a warm reception by the critics. In 1909 he published his first novel, Recordações do Escrivão Isaías Caminha, a contundent and semi-autobiographical satire of the Brazilian society. However, his masterpiece was Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma, that was published in 1911, under feuilleton form, being re-released under hardcover form in 1915. During his last years of life, Barreto was attacked by heavy crisis of depression, which led him to alcoholism and many internations on different psychiatric hospitals and sanatoriums. He died of a heart attack in 1922.
May 13, 1906
Mauricio Magdaleno (13 May 1906 Zacatecas, Mexico - 30 June 1986 Mexico City, Mexico) was born in a small Mexican town, and as a child lived through the years of revolution and civil war, when guerrilla bands and warring troops swept through the land. He studied at the University of Mexico, leaving Law School to wander through the country as a newspaper reporter. As a creative writer, he became interested first in the theater, and wrote three plays that were produced in Mexico City. He then traveled in Europe, spending two years in Spain, and receiving while there the Teatro Espanol’s Latin American prize for two of his plays. On his return to Mexico, Magdaleno turned to the writing of novels, publishing five; he also tried his hand at biography and produced several volumes of essays and opinions. Throughout all this time, he was a working journalist for several large Mexican and Spanish dailies, and he was also a writer-producer for the movies. He put out the first Mexican picture to star Dolores del Rio. Among his countrymen, SUNBURST is considered his best and most interesting novel.
May 13, 1929
Newton Thornburg (13 May 1929 – 9 May 2011) was an American novelist and screenwriter. Born in Harvey, Illinois, Thornburg graduated from the University of Iowa with a Fine Arts degree. He worked in a variety of jobs before devoting himself to writing full-time (or at least in tandem with his cattle farm in the Ozarks) in 1973. His 1976 novel Cutter and Bone was filmed in 1981 as Cutter's Way. The New York Times called Cutter and Bone "the best novel of its kind for ten years." His other novels include KNOCKOVER, GENTLEMAN BORN, BLACK ANGUS, TO DIE IN CALIFORNIA, VALHALLA, DREAMLAND, A MAN'S GAME, EVE'S MEN, and THE LION AT THE DOOR. Thornburg died on May 9, 2011, a few days shy of his 82nd birthday.
May 13, 1914
Gregor von Rezzori (May 13, 1914 – April 23, 1998), born Gregor Arnulph Hilarius d'Arezzo, was an Austrian-born German-language novelist, memoirist, screenwriter and author of radio plays, as well as an actor, journalist, visual artist, art critic and art collector. He was fluent in German, Romanian, Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, Yiddish, French, and English; during his life, von Rezzori was successively a citizen of Austria-Hungary, Romania, and the Soviet Union, before becoming a stateless person and spending his final years as a citizen of Austria. He married Beatrice Monti della Corte.
May 13, 1941
JEAN DAIVE (1941) is a Belgian poet and translator. He is the author of novels, collections of poetry and has translated work by Paul Celan and Robert Creeley among others. He has edited encyclopedias, worked as a radio journalist and producer with France Culture, and has edited four magazines: fragment (1970–73), fig. (1989–91), FIN (1999–2006) and K.O.S.H.K.O.N.O.N.G. (from 2013 to the present). Publishing since the 1960s, Daive is known as one of the important French avant-garde poets. Also a photographer, Daive chairs the Centre international de poésie de Marseille. NORMA COLE’S books of poetry include Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside, Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988—2008, Spinoza in Her Youth and Natural Light, and most recently Actualities, her collaboration with painter Marina Adams. TO BE AT MUSIC: Essays & Talks made its appearance in 2010 from Omnidawn Press. Her translations from the French include Danielle Collobert’s It Then, Collobert’s Journals, Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (edited and translated by Cole), and Jean Daive’s A Woman with Several Lives. She lives in San Francisco.
May 14, 1935
Roque Dalton García (San Salvador, El Salvador, 14 May 1935 – Quezaltepeque, El Salvador, 10 May 1975) was a Salvadoran poet and journalist. He is considered one of Latin America's most compelling poets. He wrote emotionally strong, sometimes sarcastic, and image-loaded works dealing with life, death, love, and politics.
May 14, 1947
Born in Chicago in 1947, Mary Morris moved East to go to college. Though she never returned to the Middle West, she often writes about the region and its tug. Morris likes the fact that there is more magnetism around the shores of Lake Michigan than the North Pole. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and daughter and teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.
May 14, 1771
Robert Marcus Owen (14 May 1771 – 17 November 1858) was a Welsh social reformer and one of the founders of utopian socialism and the cooperative movement. In 1824, Owen came to America to invest the bulk of his fortune in an experimental 1,000-member colony on the banks of Indiana's Wabash River, called New Harmony. New Harmony was to be a utopian, or ideal/perfect, society.
May 14, 1897
Edward F. Ricketts (May 14, 1897, Chicago, IL - May 11, 1948) co-authored several books, among them Between Pacific Tides (1939), now in its fifth, revised edition and still regarded as the definitive ecological handbook on the California littoral. Katharine A. Rodger is editor of Renaissance Man of Cannery Row: The Life and Letters of Edward F. Ricketts (2002). Susan F. Beegel, editor of The Hemingway Review, coedited Steinbeck and the Environment (1997). .
May 14, 187
José Santos Chocano Gastañodi (May 14, 1875 – December 13, 1934), more commonly known by his pseudonym "El Cantor de América", was a Peruvian poet, writer and diplomat, whose work was widely praised across Europe and Latin America. Considered by many to be one of the most important Spanish-American poets, his poetry of grandiloquent tone was very sonorous and full of color. He produced lyrical poetry of singular intimacy, refined with formalism, within the molds of modernism. His work is inspired by the themes, the landscapes and the people of Peru and of America in general. He became the most popular writer in Peru after Ricardo Palma, although his ascendancy in Peruvian literary circles gradually diminished, to the benefit of another great poet of Peru, César Vallejo. He claimed to have rediscovered Latin America through verse in his 1906 collection Alma América, which carried an introduction by the distinguished philosopher-poet Miguel de Unamuno. Chocano was involved in many violent feuds with other intellectuals, and was jailed for shooting a journalist who had criticized him. In his turn, Chocano was stabbed to death on a tram in Santiago de Chile by an unknown assailant. Chocano is remembered by most Peruvians as a great poet; his compositions "Blazon", "The horses of the conquerors" and "Who knows! ..." are classics of recitations to the present. Born in Lima, Peru, Chocano was admitted to the National University of San Marcos at the early age of 14 years. After a short term in jail for political activism, he relocated to Madrid in the early 20th century. In this city his poems were first recognized by the Spanish literary and artistic circles; many notable artist and writers invited him to recite his poems at their reunions. This allowed Chocano to interact with prominent Spanish and Latin American intellectuals and artist such as Juan Gris, who become known by this pseudonym by signing the illustrations that he created for Chocano's book entitled Alma América and Poemas Indoespañoles (Soul America: Indo-Spanish poems) in 1906; Miguel de Unamuno, who wrote the prologue for Alma América; Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo; and Rubén Darío; and thus his name reached a prominent status not only in Spain, but in France and all over Latin America. His 1906 poetry collection, Alma América, was offered and taken as a "New World" corrective to the purportedly cosmopolitan modernismo of Rubén Darío. Chocano was a sophisticated writer whose metrics and creativity were sought by many statesmen who contracted his services as a writer and adviser for many years. He worked for different regimes and traveled a decade and a half through Latin and Central America, where he befriended a variety of political figures from different points on the ideological spectrum, such as Pancho Villa in Mexico, Manuel Estrada Cabrera in Guatemala, and Woodrow Wilson in the USA, with whom he struck up a correspondence. After the coup which deposed Estrada Cabrera in 1920, Chocano was briefly imprisoned, and subsequently returned to Peru, where he became associated with President Augusto B. Leguía. On November 5, 1922, Chocano was recognized by the government of Peru as a most notable poet of Peru, he was laureated as "The Poet of America" in a ceremony featuring Leguia himself, various ministers, delegates from all the provinces of Peru, and a number of young and established writers. Three years later, Chocano became embroiled in a dispute with Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos; when Peruvian students sided with Vasconcelos, Chocano phoned the journalist Edwin Elmore to complain about his recent article on the polemic; insults and threats quickly followed. Elmore dashed off an article detailing Chocano's attack on him, and hurried to his office at the newspaper "El Comercio" to insert it. Unfortunately, as Elmore left the building, Chocano arrived at it, and after Elmore slapped Chocano, the latter pulled a gun and shot the young journalist in the stomach. Elmore died soon after. Released after two years in jail, Chocano moved to Santiago de Chile, where he lived in dire poverty while preparing a new collection of poetry, Primicias de Oro de Indias. He was stabbed to death on a streetcar in 1934; reports are divided as to whether his assassin was a stranger, a madman, or a rival in a love affair. It is thought that his murder had to do with his political positions. Chocano is considered one of the most important leaders of the Latin-American Modernism, sharing this distinction with Ruben Darío (Nicaragua), Manuel González Prada (Peru), José Martí (Cuba), Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera (México), José Asunción Silva (Colombia) and others. However, Chocano's style is difficult to classify exactly, since it is very diverse and copious: for instance, some experts state that his writing is nearer to romanticism that to modernism; while others, like the American critic, Willis Knapp Jones, have denominated Chocano's work as "novomundista", i.e., a poet writing about the "new World" or America. Chocano was a very prolific poet, who also wrote epic and lyric poems.
May 15, 1856
Lyman Frank Baum (May 15, 1856 – May 6, 1919) was an American author of children's books, best known for writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He wrote thirteen novel sequels, nine other fantasy novels, and a host of other works (55 novels in total, plus four ‘lost’ novels, 83 short stories, over 200 poems, an unknown number of scripts, and many miscellaneous writings), and made numerous attempts to bring his works to the stage and screen.
May 15, 1891
Eldest son of a professor at the Kiev Theological Academy, Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov was born in that city in 1891. After graduating in. medicine at Kiev University, Bulgakov was sent in 1916 (as an alternative to army service) to his first practice in a remote country region of one of the north-western provinces of Russia. There he worked for two years in sole charge of a local govenment clinic serving a large and scattered rural population. Late in 1918, after a spell as a hospital intern, Bulgakov returned to his native Kiev, where he set up in private practice as a specialist in venereology. Driven out, it seems, by the intolerable strains imposed on a doctor in a city racked by civil war, he left Kiev for the Caucasus; it was at this time, in 1919 or 1920, that Bulgakov resolved to give up medicine for a full-time literary career. Moving north to Moscow in the early twenties, Bulgakov endured a period of hardship and struggle to gain recognition as a writer. His first success was his novel The White Guard, originally published in serial form in 1925 and based on his experience of Kiev in the civil war, which he turned into a play for the Moscow Arts Theatre with the altered title of The Days of the Titrbins. From then on Bulgakov’s career was intimately bound up with the stage, in particular with the Moscow Arts Theatre under the joint direction of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, where he worked as an. assistant producer and resident dramatist until his break with Stanislavsky in 1936. After some time spent as an opera librettist with the Bolshoi Theatre, he was reduced to literary impotence by Stalin’s increasingly harsh censorship. Bulgakov fell ill with a painful kidney complaint in 1939, went blind as a result of the disease and died in March 1940. In addition to the stories in the present collection (first published in two magazines in the mid-twenties) Bulgakov wrote altogether fourteen plays, three novels and a rich and varied collection of satirical stories. Although many of his works still remain unpublished in the USSR, enough of his best books and plays have appeared posthumously, between 1955 and 1967, to have secured for Mikhail Bulgakov a place as one of the most original and powerful Russian writers of the twentieth century.
May 15, 1962
Amit Chaudhuri (born 1962 ), is an Indian English author and academic. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, India's highest literary honor, in 2002 for his novel A New World. He is currently Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. In 2012, Chaudhuri won the Infosys Prize for Humanities-Literary Studies for his imaginative and illuminating writings in literary criticism, which reflect a complex literary sensibility, and great theoretical mastery, along with a probing sense of detail.
May 15, 1911
Max Rudolf Frisch (May 15, 1911 – April 4, 1991) was a Swiss playwright and novelist, regarded as highly representative of German-language literature after World War II. In his creative works Frisch paid particular attention to issues relating to problems of human identity, individuality, responsibility, morality and political commitment. His use of irony is a significant feature of his post-war publications. Frisch was a member of the Gruppe Olten. He was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1986.
May 15, 1942
David Hilliard (born May 15, 1942) was a member of the Black Panther Party. He was Chief of Staff in the party. He is currently a visiting instructor at the University of New Mexico. David Hilliard was born on May 15th, 1942 to Lela and Lee Hilliard. David had six brothers and five sisters. Hilliard was convicted on two counts of assault with a deadly weapon for his part in a 1968 encounter with the Oakland Police in retribution for the assassination of Martin Luther King. The April 6, 1968 encounter led to the murder of party member Bobby Hutton, who was shot by police while surrendering with his hands up, and the capture of Eldridge Cleaver, who masterminded the botched operation. In July 1971, Hilliard was sentenced to one to ten years and incarcerated at Vacaville Prison. In January 1973 while serving a sentence of six months to 10 years, he was denied parole. In his autobiography Revolutionary Suicide, Huey P. Newton claimed the district attorney of Alameda County was attempting to send Hilliard to prison on "trumped up charges". With Huey Newton's second wife, Fredrika Newton, Hilliard later formed the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation. Lewis Cole teaches screenwriting at Columbia University and is also the author of A LOOSE GAME, DREAM TEAM, and NEVER TOO YOUNG TO DIE. He lives in New York City.
May 15, 1934
Sir John Desmond Patrick Keegan (15 May 1934 – 2 August 2012) was an English military historian, lecturer, writer and journalist. He was the author of many published works on the nature of combat between the 14th and 21st centuries concerning land, air, maritime, and intelligence warfare, as well as the psychology of battle.
May 15, 1930
Grace Emily Ogot (née Akinyi; 15 May 1930 – 18 March 2015) was a Kenyan author, nurse, journalist, politician and diplomat. Together with Charity Waciuma she was the first Anglophone female Kenyan writer to be published. She was one of the first Kenyan members of parliament and she became an assistant minister. Ogot was born Grace Emily Akinyi to a Christian family on 15 May 1930 in Asembo, in the district of Nyanza, Kenya – a village highly populated by the predominantly Christian Luo ethnic group. Her father, Joseph Nyanduga, was one of the first men in the village of Asembo to obtain a Western education. He converted early on to the Anglican Church, and taught at the Church Missionary Society’s Ng'iya Girls’ School. From her father, she learned the stories of the Old Testament and it was from her grandmother that Ogot learned the traditional folk tales of the area from which she would later draw inspiration. Ogot attended the Ng'iya Girls' School and Butere High School throughout her youth. From 1949 to 1953, she trained as a nurse at the Nursing Training Hospital in Uganda. She later worked in London, England, at St. Thomas Hospital for Mothers and Babies. She returned to the African nursing profession in 1958, working at Maseno Hospital, run by the Church Missionary Society in Kisumu County, Kenya. Following this, Ogot worked at Makerere University College in Student Health Services. In addition to her experience in healthcare, Ogot gained experience in multiple different areas, working for the BBC Overseas Service as a script-writer and announcer on the programme London Calling East and Central Africa, operating a prominent radio programme in the Luo language, working as an officer of community development in Kisumu County and as a public relations officer for the Air India Corporation of East Africa. In 1975, Ogot worked as a Kenyan delegate to the general assembly of the United Nations. Subsequently, in 1976, she became a member of the Kenyan delegation to UNESCO. That year, she chaired and helped found the Writers' Association of Kenya. In 1983 she became one of only a handful of women to serve as a member of parliament and the only woman assistant minister in the cabinet of then President Daniel arap Moi. In 1959, Grace Ogot married the professor and historian Professor Bethwell Allan Ogot, a Luo from Gem Location, and later became the mother of four children. Her proclivity for storytelling and her husband's interest in the oral tradition and history of the Luo peoples would later be combined in her writing career. Ogot died on 18 March 2015. In 1962, Grace Ogot read her short story "A Year of Sacrifice" at a conference on African Literature at Makerere University in Uganda. After discovering that there was no other work presented or displayed from East African writers, Ogot became motivated to publish her works, which she subsequently did both in the Luo language and in English. "A Year of Sacrifice" appeared in print as Ogot's first published work in the African journal Black Orpheus in 1963. In 1964, her short story "The Rain Came" was published as part of the collection Modern African Stories, co-edited by Es'kia Mphahlele, who had organised the earlier mentioned conference on African Literature at Makerere University in Uganda in 1962. "The Rain Came" was a reworked version of "A Year of Sacrifice" but considerably shortened and with a different beginning and ending. Also in 1964, the short story "Ward Nine" was published in the journal Transition. Ogot's first novel The Promised Land, set in the 1930s, was published in 1966 and focused on Luo emigration and the problems that arise through migration. Her main protagonists emigrate from Nyanza to northern Tanzania, in search of fertile land and wealth. The story also focused on themes of tribal hatred, materialism, and traditional notions of femininity and wifely duties. 1968 saw the publishing of Land Without Thunder, a collection of short stories set in ancient Luoland. Ogot's descriptions, literary tools, and storylines in Land Without Thunder offer a valuable insight into Luo culture in pre-colonial East Africa. Her other works include The Strange Bride, The Graduate, The Other Woman and The Island of Tears. Many of her stories are set against the scenic background of Lake Victoria and the traditions of the Luo people. One theme that features prominently within Ogot's work is the importance of traditional Luo folklore, mythologies, and oral traditions. This theme is at the forefront in "The Rain Came", a tale that was related to Ogot in her youth by her grandmother, whereby a chief's daughter must be sacrificed to bring rain. Furthermore, Ogot’s short stories juxtapose traditional and modern themes and notions, demonstrating the conflicts and convergences that exist between the old ways of thought and the new. In The Promised Land, the main character, Ochola, falls under a mysterious illness which cannot be cured through medical intervention. Eventually, he turns to a medicine man to be healed. Ogot explains such thought processes as exemplary of the blending of traditional and modern understandings, "Many of the stories I have told are based on day-to-day life… And in the final analysis, when the Church fails and the hospital fails, these people will always slip into something they trust, something within their own cultural background. It may appear to us mere superstition, but those who do believe in it do get healed. In day-to-day life in some communities in Kenya, both the modern and the traditional cures coexist." Another theme that often appears throughout Ogot’s works is that of womanhood and the female role. Throughout her stories, Ogot demonstrates an interest in family matters, revealing both traditional and modern female gender roles followed by women, especially within the context of marriage and Christian traditions. Such an emphasis can be seen in The Promised Land, in which the notions both of mothers as the ultimate protectors of their children and of dominant patriarchal husband-wife relationships feature heavily. Critics such as Maryse Condé have suggested that Ogot's emphasis on the importance of the female marital role, as well as her portrayal of women in traditional roles, creates an overwhelmingly patriarchal tone in her stories. However, others have suggested that women in Ogot’s works also demonstrate strength and integrity, as in "The Empty Basket", where the bravery of the main female character, Aloo, is contrasted by the failings of the male characters. Though her wits and self-assertion, Aloo overcomes a perilous situation with a snake, while the men are stricken by panic. It is only after she rebukes and shames the men that they are roused to destroy the snake. In Ogot’s short stories, the women portrayed often have a strong sense of duty, as demonstrated in "The Rain Came", and her works regularly emphasise the need for understanding in relationships between men and women. Prior to Kenyan Independence, while Kenya was still under a colonial regime, Ogot experienced difficulties in her initial attempts to have her stories published: "I remember taking some of my short stories to the manager [of the East African Literature Bureau], including the one which was later published in Black Orpheus. They really couldn't understand how a Christian woman could write such stories, involved with sacrifices, traditional medicines and all, instead of writing about Salvation and Christianity. Thus, quite a few writers received no encouragement from colonial publishers who were perhaps afraid of turning out radical writers critical of the colonial regime." She was interviewed in 1974 by Lee Nichols for a Voice of America radio broadcast that was aired between 1975 and 1979 (Voice of America radio series Conversations with African Writers, no. 23). The Library of Congress has a copy of the broadcast tape and the unedited original interview. The broadcast transcript appears in the 1981 book Conversations with African Writers. Three novels by her were posthumously published, launched by her husband in 2018.
May 15, 1890
Katherine Anne Porter (May 15, 1890 – September 18, 1980) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. She is known for her penetrating insight; her work deals with dark themes such as betrayal, death and the origin of human evil.
May 15, 1862
Arthur Schnitzler (15 May 1862 – 21 October 1931) was an Austrian author and dramatist. Arthur Schnitzler, son of a prominent Hungarian laryngologist Johann Schnitzler (1835–1893) and Luise Markbreiter (1838–1911) a daughter of the Viennese doctor Philipp Markbreiter, was born at Praterstrasse 16, Leopoldstadt, Vienna, capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His parents were both from Jewish families. In 1879 Schnitzler began studying medicine at the University of Vienna and in 1885 he received his doctorate of medicine. He began work at Vienna's General Hospital (German: Allgemeines Krankenhaus der Stadt Wien), but ultimately abandoned the practice of medicine in favour of writing. On 26 August 1903, Schnitzler married Olga Gussmann (1882–1970), a 21-year-old aspiring actress and singer who came from a Jewish middle-class family. They had a son, Heinrich (1902–1982), born on 9 August 1902. In 1909 they had a daughter, Lili, who committed suicide in 1928. The Schnitzlers separated in 1921. Schnitzler died on 21 October 1931, in Vienna, of a brain hemorrhage. In 1938, following the Anschluss, Heinrich went to the United States and did not return to Austria until 1959. He became the father of the Austrian musician and ecologist Michael Schnitzler, born in 1944 in Berkeley, California, who moved to Vienna with his parents in 1959. Schnitzler's works were often controversial, both for their frank description of sexuality (in a letter to Schnitzler Sigmund Freud confessed 'I have gained the impression that you have learned through intuition – although actually as a result of sensitive introspection – everything that I have had to unearth by laborious work on other persons') and for their strong stand against anti-Semitism, represented by works such as his play Professor Bernhardi and his novel Der Weg ins Freie. However, although Schnitzler was himself Jewish, Professor Bernhardi and Fräulein Else are among the few clearly identified Jewish protagonists in his work. Schnitzler was branded as a pornographer after the release of his play Reigen, in which ten pairs of characters are shown before and after the sexual act, leading and ending with a prostitute. The furore after this play was couched in the strongest anti-semitic terms. Reigen was made into a French language film in 1950 by the German-born director Max Ophüls as La Ronde. The film achieved considerable success in the English-speaking world, with the result that Schnitzler's play is better known there under its French title. Roger Vadim's film Circle of Love (1964) and Otto Schenk's Der Reigen (1973) are also based on the play. More recently, in Fernando Meirelles' film 360, Schnitzler's play was provided with a new version, as has been the case with many other TV and film productions. In the novella Fräulein Else (1924) Schnitzler may be rebutting a contentious critique of the Jewish character by Otto Weininger (1903) by positioning the sexuality of the young female Jewish protagonist. The story, a first-person stream of consciousness narrative by a young aristocratic woman, reveals a moral dilemma that ends in tragedy. Despite his seriousness of purpose, Schnitzler frequently approaches the bedroom farce in his plays (and had an affair with one of his actresses, Adele Sandrock). Professor Bernhardi, a play about a Jewish doctor who turns away a Catholic priest in order to spare a patient the realization that she is on the point of death, is his only major dramatic work without a sexual theme. A member of the avant-garde group Young Vienna (Jung Wien), Schnitzler toyed with formal as well as social conventions. With his 1900 short story Lieutenant Gustl, he was the first to write German fiction in stream-of-consciousness narration. The story is an unflattering portrait of its protagonist and of the army's obsessive code of formal honour. It caused Schnitzler to be stripped of his commission as a reserve officer in the medical corps – something that should be seen against the rising tide of anti-semitism of the time. He specialized in shorter works like novellas and one-act plays. And in his short stories like 'The Green Tie' ('Die grüne Krawatte') he showed himself to be one of the early masters of microfiction. However he also wrote two full-length novels: Der Weg ins Freie about a talented but not very motivated young composer, a brilliant description of a segment of pre-World War I Viennese society; and the artistically less satisfactory Therese. In addition to his plays and fiction, Schnitzler meticulously kept a diary from the age of 17 until two days before his death. The manuscript, which runs to almost 8,000 pages, is most notable for Schnitzler's casual descriptions of sexual conquests – he was often in relationships with several women at once, and for a period of some years he kept a record of every orgasm. Collections of Schnitzler's letters have also been published. Schnitzler's works were called 'Jewish filth' by Adolf Hitler and were banned by the Nazis in Austria and Germany. In 1933, when Joseph Goebbels organized book burnings in Berlin and other cities, Schnitzler's works were thrown into flames along with those of other Jews, including Einstein, Marx, Kafka, Freud and Stefan Zweig. His novella Fräulein Else, has been adapted a number of times including the German silent Fräulein Else (1929) starring Elisabeth Bergner and a 1946 Argentine film The Naked Angel starring Olga Zubarry.
May 15, 1922
Jakucho Setouchi (born May 15, 1922), formerly Harumi Setouchi, is a Buddhist nun, writer and activist. Setouchi is noted for her biographical novels written as first-person narratives.
May 16, 1944
Achim Bröger (born May 16, 1944 in Erlangen ) is a German children's and young adult book author. He is a member of the PEN Center Germany. Achim Bröger invented stories in bed as a child. After several years working part-time in a textbook publishing house, he decided in 1980 to write. He lives as a freelance writer in Sereetz near Lübeck. Bröger writes books for children and young people as well as radio plays, plays and screenplays for television. His books have been translated into 20 languages. In his books for young people, Bröger writes openly about sexuality, sensitively and realistically addressing this topic. In addition to his work as a book author, he also participated in several television series for children, such as the show with the mouse and dandelion .
May 16, 1944
Jon Wiener is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. Among his books are Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files (UC Press) and Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud and Politics in the Ivory Tower.
May 16, 1925
Henry William Hoffman (May 16, 1925 – September 12, 2009) was an American writer who published thirteen novels and four books of short stories and two plays. He was born he lived in West Virginia but spent his formative years in southwestern Virginia. William Hoffman was the recipient of the 1992 Dos Passos Prize|John Dos Passos Prize For Literature, an O'Henry for the sort story and a Dasheill Hammett award for his mystery writing. In 1996 he was awarded the O. Henry Prize. In 1999 he received The Dashiell Hammett Award for the book Tidewater Blood. He wrote mysteries towards the end of his career. His finest novel, "The Trumpet Unblown" reflected his horrific experiences as a medic in World War II. His short story "Dancer," published in The Sewanee Review, won the 1989 Andrew Lytle Prize.
May 16, 1931
Peter Chad Tigar Levi (16 May 1931, Ruislip – 1 February 2000, Frampton-on-Severn), was a poet, archaeologist, Jesuit priest, travel writer, biographer, academic and prolific reviewer and critic. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford (1984–1989).
May 16, 1931
K. Natwar Singh is an Indian politician and former cabinet minister. He was born on 16 May, 1931, and educated at Mayo College, Ajmer; Scindia School, Gwalior; St. Stephen’s College, Delhi; and Corpus Christie College, Cambridge. He joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1953 and has served in Beijing, New York, Warsaw, London and Lusaka. He received the Padma Bhushan in 1984. He is married to Heminder Kumari of Patiala, and their son, Jagat Singh, following in the footsteps of his father, has also entered politics.
May 16, 1906
Arturo Uslar Pietri (16 May 1906 in Caracas – 26 February 2001), was a Venezuelan intellectual, lawyer, journalist, writer, television producer and politician. Born on 16 May 1906 in Caracas, Venezuela, his parents were general Arturo Uslar Santamaría and Helena Pietri de Uslar. The last name Uslar is of German origin and can be traced back to Johann von Uslar, who fought for the rebel cause during Venezuela’s independence wars. As a young boy and then teenager he lived in various cities in the comparatively urbanised central northern valleys of the country. He moved back to Caracas in 1924 to read political sciences at the Central University of Venezuela, where he graduated Doctor of Political Sciences in 1929. That same year he obtained a law degree. Uslar led a remarkably fruitful life, influential in Venezuelan politics, historical analysis and literature, and as an educator. His period of activity spanned the last years of Venezuelan Caudillismo, the transition to democracy and most of the democratic era of 1958 - 1999. He held posts such as Secretary for the Venezuelan Delegation at the League of Nations, delegate at the International Labour Organization, minister of education, minister of finance, contributor to the Act of Constitution of the New Democratic Government (1958), ambassador to the United States of America, professor of Latin American literature at Columbia University, professor of political economics at the Central University of Venezuela, chief editor of a main newspaper, candidate for the Presidency and member of the Royal Spanish Academy. Uslar Pietri had a lifetime involvement in the Venezuelan media as a cultural figure. He wrote regionally influential essays and novels, of which The Red Lances, an account of life during the Venezuelan War of Independence from various social perspectives is arguably the most famous. In his works he championed mestizaje, or miscegenation, as a valuable feature of Latin American culture. His literary output was recognised in 1990 with a Prince of Asturias Award. He was several times nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Uslar Pietri died on 26 February 2001 in Caracas. He had announced his retirement as an author in 1998 and last figured prominently in political debate in 1993.
May 16, 1917
JUAN RULFO (1918-1986) was one of Mexico's premier authors of the twentieth century and an important precursor of ‘magical realism’ in Latin American writing. His other major work is El llano en llamas (THE BURNING PLAIN). Reared in Laredo, Texas, in the Mexican ranchero culture about which Juan Rulfo writes, Josephine Sacabo is a photographer who now lives and works in New Orleans. Her work, which is often inspired by literature, has been exhibited in one-woman shows in Paris, London, Madrid, Toulouse, Lausanne, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Guatemala City, New Orleans, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other world cities.
May 16, 1912
Louis "Studs" Terkel (May 16, 1912 – October 31, 2008) was an American author, historian, actor, and broadcaster. He received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1985 for "The Good War", and is best remembered for his oral histories of common Americans, and for hosting a long-running radio show in Chicago.
May 16, 1948
Emma Rothschild is the Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History at Harvard University, a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and director of the Joint Center for History and Economics. She is the author of Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment.
May 16, 1956
Marcus Schneck, founder and director of the Backyard Wildlife Association, is a natural history writer and photographer, and the author of several books on hummingbirds and butterflies, including Creating a Butterfly garden. He lives in Pennsylvania.
May 16, 1940
John Margolies (May 16, 1940 New Canaan, Connecticut - May 26, 2016 Manhattan) was an architectural critic, photographer, and author who was noted for celebrating vernacular and novelty architecture in the United States, particularly those designed as roadside attractions. Starting from the mid-1970s, he began to photograph sites during long road trips, since he was concerned these sites would be displaced by the growing modernist trend. He was credited with shaping postmodern architecture and recognizing buildings that would be added to the National Register of Historic Places through his documentary work. Starting in 2007, the Library of Congress began to acquire his photographs, and created the public domain John Margolies Roadside America Photograph Archive in 2016, consisting of 11,710 scans of color slides taken by Margolies.
May 17, 1948
Esmeralda Santiago (born May 17, 1948) is a Puerto Rican author and former actress known for her novels and memoirs.
May 17, 1873
Henri Barbusse (May 17, 1873 – August 30, 1935) was a French novelist and a member of the French Communist Party. Barbusse first came to fame with the publication of his novel Le Feu (translated by William Fitzwater Wray as Under Fire) in 1926, which was based on his experiences during World War I. By this time, Barbusse had become a pacifist, and his writing demonstrated his growing hatred of militarism. Le Feu drew criticism at the time for its harsh naturalism, but won the Prix Goncourt.
May 17, 1925
Michel de Certeau (17 May 1925 – 9 January 1986) was a French Jesuit and scholar whose work combined history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the social sciences. Michel Jean Emmanuel de La Barge de Certeau was born in 1925 in Chambéry, Savoie. Certeau's education was eclectic, following the medieval tradition of peregrinatio academica. After obtaining degrees in classics and philosophy at the universities of Grenoble, Lyon, he studied the works of Pierre Favre (1506–1546) at the École pratique des hautes études (Paris) with Jean Orcibal. He undertook religious training at a seminary in Lyon, where he entered the Jesuit order (Society of Jesus) in 1950 and was ordained in 1956. Certeau entered the Society of Jesus hoping to do missionary work in China. In the year of his ordination, Certeau became one of the founders of the journal Christus, with which he would actively be involved for much of his life. In 1960 he earned his doctorate ("thèse de 3e Cycle") at the Sorbonne with a study of co-founder of the Society of Jesus Pierre Favre (the Sorbonne is a secular state university where theology may not be taught) before embarking on his celebrated study of Jean-Joseph Surin. Certeau was greatly influenced by Sigmund Freud and was, along with Jacques Lacan, one of the founding members of École Freudienne de Paris, an informal group which served as a focal point for French scholars interested in psychoanalysis. He came to public attention after publishing an article dealing with the May 1968 events in France. He also took part in Robert Jaulin's department of ethnology at the University of Paris-VII after May 68. Certeau went on to teach at several universities in locations as diverse as Geneva, San Diego, and Paris. Through the 1970s and 1980s he produced a string of works that demonstrated his interest in mysticism, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis. He died in Paris, aged 60. Certeau's most well-known and influential work in the United States has been The Practice of Everyday Life, cited in fields such as rhetoric, performance studies, and law. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Certeau combined his disparate scholarly interests to develop a theory of the productive and consumptive activity inherent in everyday life. According to Certeau, everyday life is distinctive from other practices of daily existence because it is repetitive and unconscious. Certeau’s study of everyday life is neither the study of popular culture, nor is it necessarily the study of everyday resistances to regimes of power. Instead, he attempts to outline the way individuals unconsciously navigate everything from city streets to literary texts. The Practice of Everyday Life has been a subject of study for its distinction between the concepts of strategy and tactics. Certeau links "strategies" with institutions and structures of power who are the "producers", while individuals are "consumers" or "poachers," acting in accordance with, or against, environments defined by strategies by using "tactics". In the chapter "Walking in the City", Certeau asserts that "the city" is generated by the strategies of governments, corporations, and other institutional bodies who produce things like maps that describe the city as a unified whole. Certeau uses the vantage from the World Trade Center in New York to illustrate the idea of a synoptic, unified view. By contrast, the walker at street level moves in ways that are tactical and never fully determined by the plans of organizing bodies, taking shortcuts in spite of the strategic grid of the streets. Certeau's argument is that everyday life works by a process of poaching on the territory of others, using the rules and products that already exist in culture in a way that is influenced, but never wholly determined, by those rules and products. His work The Writing of History, translated into English after his death, deals with the relationship between history and religion. De Certeau makes a point in linking the history of writing history to the legitimization of political power and that "Western" traditions of history involve using the act of writing as a tool of colonialism; writing their own histories while un-writing the embodied traditions of native peoples.
May 17, 1912
John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 – June 18, 1982) was an American novelist and short story writer. He is sometimes called ‘the Chekhov of the suburbs.’ His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born, and Italy, especially Rome. He is ‘now recognized as one of the most important short fiction writers of the 20th century.’ While Cheever is perhaps best remembered for his short stories (including ‘The Enormous Radio,’ ‘Goodbye, My Brother,’ ‘The Five-Forty-Eight,’ ‘The Country Husband,’ and ‘The Swimmer‘), he also wrote four novels, comprising The Wapshot Chronicle (National Book Award, 1958), The Wapshot Scandal (William Dean Howells Medal, 1965), Bullet Park (1969), Falconer (1977) and a novella Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982). His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody the salient aspects of both – light and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life (as evoked by the mythical St. Botolphs in the Wapshot novels), characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia. A compilation of his short stories, The Stories of John Cheever, won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and its first paperback edition won a 1981 National Book Award. On April 27, 1982, six weeks before his death, Cheever was awarded the National Medal for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been included in the Library of America.
May 17, 1934
Pierre Clastres (17 May 1934 – 29 July 1977) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist. He is best known for his contributions to the field of political anthropology, with his fieldwork among the Guayaki in Paraguay and his theory of stateless societies. Seeking an alternative to the hierarchized Western societies, he mostly researched indigenous people in which the power was not considered coercive and chiefs were powerless. With a background in literature and philosophy, Clastres started studying anthropology with Claude Lévi-Strauss and Alfred Métraux since the 1950s. Between 1963 and 1974 he traveled five times to South America to do fieldwork among the Guaraní, the Chulupi, and the Yanomami. Clastres mostly published essays and, because of his premature death, his work was unfinished and scattered. His signature work is the essay collection Society Against the State (1974) and his bibliography also includes Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians (1972), Le Grand Parler (1974), and Archeology of Violence (1980).
May 17, 1945
Daniel Robert Odier (born in 1945 in Geneva), known by his pseudonym Delacorta, is a Swiss author, screenwriter and poet. With regard to Odier, Anaïs Nin is noted to have written, 'He is an outstanding writer and a dazzling poet.'
May 17, 1929
Eloise Greenfield (born May 17, 1929) is an American children's book and biography author and poet famous for her descriptive, rhythmic style and positive portrayal of the African-American experience. After college, Greenfield began writing poetry and songs in the 1950s while working in a civil service job. Since 1971, she has published more than 40 children's books, including picture books, novels, poetry and biographies. She has focused her work on realistic but positive portrayals of African-American communities, families and friendships. She has also worked to encourage the writing and publishing of African-American literature and has taught creative writing.
May 17, 1959
Rick Harsch hit the literary scene in 1997 with his cult classic The Driftless Zone, which was followed by Billy Verite and Sleep of the Aborigines (all by Steerforth Press) soon after to form The Driftless Trilogy. Harsch migrated to the Slovene coastal city of Izola in 2001, just as the Driftless books were published in French translation by a French publisher that went out of business a few years later. Rick is also the author of Arjun and the Good Snake (2011, Amalietti & Amalietti), Wandering Stone: the Streets of Old Izola (2017, Mandrac Press), Voices After Evelyn (2018, Maintenance Ends Press), Skulls of Istria (2018, corona/samizdat), The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas (2020, corona/samizdat) and Walk Like a Duck: A Season of Little League Baseball in Italy (2020, corona/samizdat). Rick currently lives in Izola still with his wife and two children.
May 17, 1957
Peter Høeg, born in 1957 in Denmark, followed various callings-dancer, actor, sailor, fencer, and mountaineer-before turning seriously to writing. His work has been published in thirty-three countries.
May 17, 1922
Roy Harry Hoopes Jr. (May 17, 1922 - December 1, 2009) was born May 17, 1922, in Salt Lake City and came to Washington with his family when he was 4. He said he lost his Morman faith about the same age. He grew up in Foggy Bottom and was a 1940 graduate of the old Central High School. He graduated from George Washington University in 1943, served in the Navy during World War II, then received a master's degree in history from GWU in 1948. Among his many jobs, Mr. Hoopes was the first managing editor of Washingtonian magazine in 1965, an associate editor at National Geographic and managing editor of High Fidelity magazine. He was a Washington correspondent for Playboy and, from 1987 to 1998, the Washington bureau chief of Modern Maturity magazine. From 1967 to 1973, he was on the public affairs staff of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. He also wrote a satirical column under the name Peter Potomac for Berkshire Eagle newspaper in Massachusetts from 1957 to 1977. The very definition of a professional writer who lived by his typewriter, Mr. Hoopes contributed to hundreds of publications and held many jobs with magazines, newspapers and federal agencies. He wrote books about the Peace Corps, the steel industry, politics, sports and Hollywood, but he was best known for his 1982 biography of Cain, the author of such hard-boiled classics as "The Postman Always Rings Twice," "Mildred Pierce" and "Double Indemnity."
May 17, 1937
Fred Inglis is the author of more than twenty books, including People's Witness: The Journalist in Modern Politics and The Cruel Peace: Everyday Life and the Cold War (Basic). He is professor emeritus of cultural studies at the University of Sheffield.
May 17, 1935
Dennis Christopher George Potter (17 May 1935 – 7 June 1994) was an English television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist. His work in television drama began with contributions to BBC television's The Wednesday Play anthology series from 1965, and continued for the next thirty years. His BBC TV serial The Singing Detective (1986) was particularly well received. This work and many of his television dramas mixed fantasy and reality, the personal and the social and often used themes and images from popular culture. A sufferer from psoriatic arthropathy for most of his adult life, Potter made regular public pronouncements on issues dear to him.
May 17, 1906
Frederic Prokosch (May 17, 1906 – June 2, 1989) was an American writer, known for his novels, poetry, memoirs and criticism. He was also a distinguished translator.
May 17, 1889
Alfonso Reyes (born May 17, 1889 Monterrey, Mexico; died December 27, 1959), prolific literary critic, scholar, poet, and diplomat, one of the leading essayist from Mexico during the first half of the 20th century. Alfonso Reyes deeply influenced an entire generation of writers in his native land and elsewhere in Latin America. The Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges considered him the greatest prose writer in Spanish in any era. Reyes lived many years outside of Mexico. Central theme in Reyes work from his youth was the search for Mexican identity and the influence of the Spanish conquistadors and culture on the history of his country. 'Mexico is at once a world of mystery and clarity: in her landscape, mystery in the souls of he people.' Alfonso Reyes was born in Monterrey. His father, General Bernardo Reyes, was governor of the state of Nuevo León. He was shot in February 1913 in the Zócalo in Mexico City. '... with him fell what was left of Mexico's Belle Epoque,' said later the writer Carlos Fuentes. Reyes was educated in Monterrey and in Mexico City where he attended National Preparatory School. In 1912 he cofounded the School of Higher Studies, National Autonomous University of Mexico, and was its secretary. With the Dominican Republic critic Pedro Henríquez Ureña (1884-1946), Antonio Caso, and José Vasconcelos he founded the Ateneo de la Juventud (Atheneum of Youth) literary society, which had a strong influence in Mexican intellectual life. Reyes was also part of the Centennial Generation lecture society. Reyes started to publish verse in 1906. At the age of 21 Reyes published his first book, Cuestiones estéticas, a collection of essays. It gained an immediate success. Visión de Anáhuac (1917) was a colorful, poetic description of the ancient city of Mexico, Tenochtitlan, which amazed the Spanish invaders. Reyes's vision of the capital offers for the reader insights on the relationship between the ancient and the modern. In 1912 Reyes married Manuela Mota; they had one son. The next year he received a law degree and then taught the history of the Spanish language and literature for a brief period. After the death of his father, he went to France as Undersecretary of the Mexican legation and began his career in the diplomatic service. Following the German invasion of Paris in 1914, he moved to Spain and studied in Madrid under Ramón Menéndez Pidal (1869-1968). Reyes earned his living as a translator and editor of the cultural section of the newspaper El Sol. As a classical scholar, Reyes remained somewhat apart from all literary movements. He upheld aesthetic value as an intangible absolute towards which it is a duty to strive. He also could combine classics with topical issues as in 'Discurso por Virgilio' (1933), which touched government's wine-growing policies. Ifigenia cruel (1924), a poem of exile, is among Reyes's most famous masterpieces. 'I was another, being myself; / I was he who wanted to leave. / To return is to to cry. I do not repent of this wide world. / It is not I who return, / But my shackled feet.' The poem was based on the myth of Iphigenia at Tauris. According to the story, Iphigenia was carried by Artemis (Diana) to Tauris just before she was meant to be sacrificed. There she became the priestess of the goddess. A new twist in the story is that the heroine has lost her memory. She tries to find her true identity and break the cycle of violence that afflicts her family. From 1920 to 1924 Reyes was the first secretary of the Mexican legation in Spain. In the mid-1920s he was a diplomat in Paris and from 1927 Mexican ambassador to Argentina and Brazil. In Rio de Janeiro Reyes published Monterrey literary bulletin. In the 1930s, Reyes established himself as the spokesperson for an antifascist, liberal americanista intelligentsia. When Reyes returned in 1939 to Mexico City, he was named president of the House of Spain – the forerunner of the College of Mexico, a cultural research centre. He housed his sizable library in a new residence (Capilla Alfonsina) he built. During the early years of World War II, he worked as a professor at the College of St. Nicholas, Morelia, Michoacán, and the National Autonomous University. Now the state university library in Mexico, inaugurated in 1980, is known as the Capilla Alfonsina. Reyes's four lessons at College of St. Nicholas were collected in El deslinde (1944). With La experiencia literaria (1942), it is his most developed contribution to the science of literary theory. Reyes made a distinction between pure literature and service literature, which has extrinsic purposes. He placed 'essay' alongside the novel and the sonnet, defining it as the 'centauro de los géneros,' a form in which diverse genres are combined. In 1945 Reyes was awarded the National Prize for Arts and Letters. He cofounded El Colegio Nacional, which offered series of lectures in the arts and the sciences open to the general public. He was the honorary president of Fédération des Alliances Francaises and in 1957 he was elected director of Mexican Academy of the Language. When the Mexican journalist Elena Poniatowska interviewed Reyes in May 1959 in his library, she was surprised how good-natured and helpful he was, ready to answer all questions. He told humorous anecdotes of his life and career and appeared anything but a gloomy intellectual. Reyes died of a heart attack in Mexico City on December 27, 1959. His epitaph was: 'Aquí yace un hijo menor de la Palabra.' (A small child of the Word lies here.) Although he was a serious candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature, the prize eluded him despite lobbying by Borges, Bioy Casares, and Ocampo. Reyes was appreciated for his stylistic versatility and ranked among the finest in 20th-century Spanish America. Octavio Paz has said that Reyes transformed the anecdote in a literary genre. In his essays Reyes sought to reconcile and blend the cultures of pre-Columbian and modern-day Mexico. 'Traveler, you have reached the clearest region of the air,' Reyes wrote in his famous poem describing a Mexico City long vanished. His impressionistic sketches reveal his extensive knowledge of European classical antiquity and the multiple cultural heritage of his own country. The figures of great literature were for him more real than many historical heroes. Reyes saw that the discovery and cultivation of the uniquely Mexican cultural and artistic values are essential to the expressions of a universal national culture. In 'Notas sobre la inteligencia Americana' (1937) and 'Posición de América' (1942) he presented a cultural synthesis that would fuse Old World and native American values. Reyes translated Robert Louis Stevenson, G.K. Chesterton, Anton Chekhov, and Jules Romains. His translation of the Iliad (La Ilíada) appeared in 1951. Reyes also edited a number of scholarly editions of such writers as Francisco de Quevedo, Baltasar Gracián, Lope de Vega, and Amado Nervo. His publications of classical criticism ranges from Socrates to the Hellenistic philosophers, and from Homer and Virgil to the essence of Greek tragedy. Later Carlos Fuentes wrote that Reyes 'translated all of Western culture into Latin American terms.' Fuentes met the author first time in Rio in the 1930s, where his father served as Reyes's secretary.
May 17, 1901
Hugh Joseph Schonfield (London, 17 May 1901 – January 24, 1988, London) was a British Bible scholar specializing in the New Testament and the early development of the Christian religion and church. He was born in London, and educated there at St Paul's School and King's College, doing postgraduate religious studies in the University of Glasgow, Doctor of Sacred Literature. He was one of the founders and president of the pacifist organization Commonwealth of World Citizens "Mondcivitan Republic".
May 17, 1941
Lyn Hejinian is a poet, essayist, teacher, and translator, focusing on modernist, postmodern, and contemporary poetry. She is John F. Hotchkis Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.
May 18, 1925
Robin Blaser (May 18, 1925, Denver, CO - May 7, 2009, Vancouver, Canada) was Professor Emeritus at Simon Fraser University. Among his many books are The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser (UC Press), Pell Mell, and Syntax. Miriam Nichols is College Professor at University College of the Fraser Valley and editor of Even on Sunday: Essays, Readings, and Archival Materials on the Poetry and Poetics of Robin Blaser.
May 18, 1931
Barbara Goldsmith (May 18, 1931 – June 26, 2016) was an American author, journalist, and philanthropist. She received critical and popular acclaim for her best selling books, essays, articles, and her philanthropic work. She was awarded four honoris causa doctorates, and numerous awards; been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, two Presidential Commissions, and the New York State Council on the Arts; and honored by The New York Public Library Literary Lions as well as the Literacy Volunteers, the American Academy in Rome, The Authors Guild, and the Guild Hall Academy of Arts for Lifetime Achievement. In 2009, she received the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit medal from the Republic of Poland. In November 2008, Goldsmith was elected a Living Landmark by the New York Landmarks Conservancy.
May 18, 1889
Gunnar Gunnarson (May 18, 1889 - November 21, 1975) was a prolific Icelandic novelist, dramatist, essayist, and poet, largely self-educated as a writer, whose work celebrate the courage and dignity of the common people of the North. Gunnarsson published his books in Danish to gain a wider audience and to break out the geographical and linguistic isolation. With Kristmann Guðmundsson (1901-1983) and Halldór Killian Laxness (1902-1998), Gunnarsson was among the first internationally known authors of his country. Gunnarsson's fiction was austere in tone and show a deep psychological understanding, individualism, and religious mysticism. Gunnar Gunnarsson was born in Fljótsdalur as the son of a farmer. His mother's was the daughter of a farmer-fisherman. The death of his mother, when he was nine years old, left Gunnarsson with an emotional trauma. Gunnarsson grew up in Vopnafjörður, where the family moved in his childhood. Until the age of 18, Gunnarsson attended country schools and helped on the farm. In 1907 he moved to Denmark, studying at Askov Folk High School for two years. As a writer Gunnarsson started his career before the age of 17. He published two collections of verse, VORLJÓD and MÓDUR-MINNING. From 1910 he devoted himself entirely to writing. Although Gunnarsson wrote his early works in Danish, the stories were set in Iceland. The first volume of Gunnarsson's family saga, AF BORGSL'GTENS HISTORIE (1913-14), became a Scandinavian bestseller in 1912. It was followed with other three parts. The nostalgic novels, recalling a Kain and Abel story, depicted three generations of an Icelandic farm family. One of the farmer's two sons is a dreamer, torn between the call of his art and the call of the soil, while his brother is a demonic evildoer. Gunnarsson's work showed the influence of Selma Lagerlöf, the Swedish Nobel Prize author, who wrote in romantic style. World War I led Gunnarsson to pessimism, which reflected in his fiction, among others in Seven Days' Darkness (1920), which dealt with the eruption of Mount Hekla and the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918. The dualism, tension between two opposite forces, which marked the author's earlier stories, also gave basic structure to LIVETS STRAND (1915). It depicted a clergyman who comes in conflict with his faith and reason. VARG I VEUM (1916) was about a young man in rebellion against bourgeois standards. In 1921 Gunnarsson moved from Copenhagen to Grantofte and in 1929 to Fredsholm. Between 1920 and 1940, Gunnarsson published several essays on culture, social problems, and the unification of the Nordic peoples. He lectured throughout Scandinavian countries, and also in Germany. A selection was published as DET NORDISKE RIGE (1927). In 1939 he returned from Denmark to his home country, and wrote from then on only in his native language. Until 1948 he remained a farmer at the parish of his birth. The last period of his life Gunnarsson lived in Reykjavík. Gunnarsson's works include over 40 novels, short stories, articles and translations. After his five-volume autobiographical suite, KIRKEN PAA BJERGET (1923-1928), Gunnarsson started a long series of novels, planned as a narrative of Iceland's history. He choose sensational or stirring episodes from history, as in JÓN ARASON (1930), the dramatic story of the last Catholic bishop of Iceland, who was executed with his two sons in 1550. Other works include EDBRØDRE (1918, The Sworn Brothers), about the first two settlers in Iceland, HVIDE KRIST (1934), about the arrival of Christianity to Iceland around the year 1000, and GRÅMAND (1936), exploration of the incipient dissolution of the Icelandic Commonwealth during the 13th-century. After returning to Iceland, Gunnarsson planned a five-volume series of novels on life and social developments in his home country during the first half of the 20th-century, but managed to compile only two. SVARTFUGL (1939, The Black Cliffs), was about a double murder that took place under the 'pestilential atmosphere' of an inaccessible farm , and VIKIVAKI (1932) was a fantasy about the responsibility of a writer. Gunnarsson was a honorary professor at the University of Iceland, at Reykjavík, and was granted a honorary Ph.D. from Heidelberg. He was a Commander of the Icelandic Falcon and Knight of Danneborg, a Danish order. Gunnarsson's last novel was BRIMHENDA (1954). He died in Reykjavík on November 21, 1975. Only a few of his works have been translated into English. Gunnar Gunnarsson was considered for the Nobel Prize in literature in 1955. The names of Nobel Prize nominees are usually not revealed, but recent information (2005) indicates that this was the third time Gunnarsson was nominated for the prize.
May 18, 1945
Laurence M. Hauptman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History in the State University of New York, College at New Paltz, and the author of several books on the Iroquois in New York state.
May 18, 1915
ALVIN M. JOSEPHY, JR. (May 18, 1915, Woodmere, NY - October 16, 2005, Greenwich, CT) lived in Greenwich, Connecticut. He traveled as a correspondent to almost every country of the world, wrote for the movies, was an associate editor of Time, contributed to many magazines, wrote and co-authored a number of books, and was since 1960 a managing editor of American Heritage.
May 18, 1908
Often confused with another ubiquitous paperback-writing Kane, the unrelated Frank, Henry had a livelier imagination and more flexibility within the hard-boiled private eye genre in which they both labored. Henry Kane wrote the adventures of two-fisted Manhattan PI. Peter Chambers in the hero’s own voice, which could bob and weave from the conventional style of Raymond chandler to something closer to the pixilated voice of Robert Leslie bellem’s Dan Turner. Here, for example, is the opening sentence of Report for a Corpse (1948): It was crazier than seven Picassos upside down in the greenest light of early morning and you’re drunk on rumba, rum, and remembrance and fresh from your only-beloved—except that five thousand dollars, banked along the edge of the desk in small-heaped hundreds, gave it the unreal aspect of normalcy. In later years, Kane would tweak the series to keep up with supposed market conditions and made the Peter Chambers stories into highly sexualized mysteries somewhat in the vein of Ted Mark’s The Man from O.R.G.Y (or Bellem’s early tales published in Spicy Detective magazine). Kane was a lawyer for some years before he wrote his first novel, A Halo for Nobody (1947), which launched the crime-solving career of Peter Chambers. The first topics in the series were published in hardcover by the prestigious house of Simon & Schuster, but beginning with Laughter Came Screaming in 1954, the rest appeared as soft-cover originals brought out by Avon, Popular Library, and other paperback houses. Kane’s attempts to establish another series character besides Chambers were not successful. In the 1970s, after interest in Peter Chambers had petered out, Kane tried to reinvent himself as a writer of contemporary thrillers and melodramas in the manner of a Robert Ludlum or Sidney Sheldon.
May 18, 1944
W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland, and Manchester. He taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, for thirty years, becoming professor of European literature in 1987, and from 1989 to 1994 was the first director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. His previously translated books - THE RINGS OF SATURN, THE EMIGRANTS, VERTIGO, and AUSTERLITZ - have won a number of international awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Berlin Literature Prize, and the Literatur Nord Prize. He died in December 2001.
May 18, 1941
Phillip Elliott Parotti (born May 18, 1941) is an American fiction writer and educator. Parotti was born in Silver City, New Mexico, the son of Abramo Angelo Parotti, a college professor, and Jerry Ann (née Elliott), a pianist. He married Shirley Brewer in 1964. A former U.S. naval officer, Dr. Parotti was a literature professor at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, from 1972 until his retirement in 2004, and was the fiction editor of Texas Review from 1976-1984. Besides his novels, he has had short fiction published in a number of periodicals. His three mytho-historical novels, The Greek Generals Talk, The Trojan Generals Talk, and Fires in the Sky, all relate to the Trojan War, and have all been critically well received.
May 18, 1920
Anthony Storr (18 May 1920 – 17 March 2001) was an English psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and author. Born in London, Storr was educated at Winchester College, Christ's College, Cambridge, and Westminster Hospital.In 1974, Storr moved from private practice to a teaching appointment at the Warneford Hospital in Oxford, until his retirement in 1984.
May 18, 1909
Phoebe Atwood Taylor (May 18, 1909, Boston, MA - January 9, 1976, Boston, MA) was an American mystery author. Phoebe Atwood Taylor wrote mystery novels under her own name, and as Freeman Dana and Alice Tilton. Her first novel, The Cape Cod Mystery, introduced the 'Codfish Sherlock', Asey Mayo, who became a series character appearing in 24 novels. Taylor's work was light in tone, a bit more serious than screwball comedy, but fun and easy to read. According to critic Dilys Winn, 'Mrs. Taylor is the mystery equivalent to Buster Keaton.' She borrowed heavily on her own background (being born in Boston, and very familiar with Cape Cod) to produce books full of local color. 'As a whole the Asey Mayo books are a treasure trove of humor and local culture of the Cape in the 1930s and '40s.' Taylor adopted the pseudonyms of Freeman Dana and Alice Tilton for her other books because her publisher did not want her known as a writer of potboilers. Like many who lived through the Great Depression, she was in constant need of money.
May 18, 1956
Gisèle Pineau (born 1956) is a French novelist, writer and former psychiatric nurse. Although born in Paris, her origins are Guadeloupean and she has written several books on the difficulties and torments of her childhood as a black person growing up in Parisian society. In particular, she focuses on racism and the effects it can have on a young girl trying to discover her own cultural identity. Her book L'Exil Selon Julia highlights this, as she relies on the memories and experiences of her aged grandmother to help her learn about her society's traditions and her own cultural background. In the book, she also mentions that the discrimination she felt as a youngster did not only apply to French society in Paris, but also to the people of Guadeloupe, who rejected her for being too cosmopolitan upon her return to the land of her ancestors. She for many years lived in Paris and, whilst maintaining her writing career, has also returned to being a psychiatric nurse in order to balance out her life; but she recently has moved back to Guadeloupe.
May 18, 1950
Chris Wickham is Chichele Professor of Medieval History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls College. His book Framing the Middle Ages won the Wolfson Prize, the Deutscher Memorial Prize and the James Henry Breasted Prize of the American Historical Association. He lives in Oxford, England.
May 19, 1908
Manik Bandopadhyay (19 May 1908 – 3 December 1956) was a Bengali novelist and is considered one of the leading lights of modern Bengali fiction. During a short lifespan of 48 years, plagued simultaneously by illness and financial crisis, he produced 36 novels and 177 short stories. His important works include Padma Nadir Majhi (The Boatman on The River Padma, 1936) and Putul Nacher Itikatha (The Puppet's Tale, 1936), Shahartali (Suburbia, 1941) and Chatushkone (The Quadrilateral, 1948).
November 5, 1926
John Peter Berger (born 5 November 1926) is an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a BBC series, is often used as a university text.
May 19, 1909
Thomas Harry Williams (May 19, 1909 – July 6, 1979) was an American historian who taught at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge from 1941 to 1979. He is perhaps best known for American Civil War study, Lincoln and His Generals (1952), a Book of the Month Club selection in 1952, and Huey Long (1969), a study of Louisiana politician Huey Pierce Long, Jr., 1970 winner of both the National Book Award in History and Biography and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
May 19, 1930
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (May 19, 1930 – January 12, 1965) was an American playwright and writer. Hansberry inspired Nina Simone's song 'To Be Young, Gifted and Black'. She was the first black woman to write a play performed on Broadway. Her best known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of Black Americans living under racial segregation in Chicago. Hansberry's family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant and eventually provoking the Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee. The title of the play was taken from the poem 'Harlem' by Langston Hughes: 'What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?' After she moved to New York City, Hansberry worked at the Pan-Africanist newspaper Freedom, where she dealt with intellectuals such as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. Much of her work during this time concerned the African struggle for liberation and their impact on the world. Hansberry has been identified as a lesbian, and sexual freedom is an important topic in several of her works. She died of cancer at the age of 34.
May 19, 1929
Gloria Emerson (May 19, 1929, New York City – August 3, 2004, New York City) was an American author, journalist and New York Times war correspondent. She won the 1978 National Book Award in Contemporary Thought for her book about the Vietnam War, Winners and Losers. During her long career, she wrote four books as well as articles for Esquire, Harper's, Vogue, Playboy, Saturday Review and Rolling Stone.
May 19, 1937
Johannes Fabian (born 19 May 1937) is currently professor of anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. He has taught at Northwestern and Wesleyan Universities and at the National University of Zaire. He is the author of many articles and JAMAA: A CHARISMATIC MOVEMENT IN KATANGA.
May 19, 1933
Tom Feelings (May 19, 1933 – August 25, 2003) was a cartoonist, children's book illustrator, author, teacher, and activist. Through his works, he framed the African-American experience. His most famous book is The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo.
May 19, 1930
EUGENE D. GENOVESE is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Rochester. In 1987-88 he was on leave at the Humanities Research Center in Research Triangle park, North Carolina, and in 1988-89 he was visiting professor at William and Mary. GENOVESE is former president (1979) of the Organization of American Historians and winner of the Bancroft Prize in 1974 for Roll, Jordan, Roll. He has written, in addition to The Political Economy of Slavery and Roll, Jordan, Roll, The World the Slaveholders Made (Wesleyan 1988), In Red and Black, From Rebellion to Revolution, and, with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital. He is a graduate of Brooklyn College (B.A. 1953) and Columbia University (Ph.D. 1959). He has been visiting professor at Columbia, Yale, and Tulane and Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University. His home is in Atlanta, Georgia.
May 19, 1904
Daniel Guérin (19 May 1904 in Paris – 14 April 1988 in Suresnes) was a French anarcho-communist author, best known for his work Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, as well as his collection No Gods No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism in which he collected writings on the idea and movement it inspired, from the first writings of Max Stirner in the mid-19th century through the first half of the 20th century. He is also known for his opposition to Nazism, fascism and colonialism, in addition to his support for the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) during the Spanish Civil War, and his revolutionary defence of free love and homosexuality.
May 19, 1927
Yusuf Idris (also Yusif Idris, May 19, 1927 – August 1, 1991) was an Egyptian writer of plays, short stories, and novels. Idris was born in Faqous. He originally trained to be a doctor, studying at the University of Cairo. He sought to put the foundations of a modern Egyptian theatre based on popular traditions and folklore, his main success in this quest was his most famous work, a play called "Al-Farafeer" depicting two main characters: the Master and the "Farfour" [=poor layman]. For some time he was a regular writer in the famous daily newspaper Al-Ahram. It is known that he was nominated several times to win the Nobel prize for literature. From the English edition of The Cheapest Nights: "While a medical student his work against Farouk’s regime and the British led to his imprisonment and suspension from College. After graduation, he worked at Kasr el Eini, the largest government hospital in Egypt. He supported Nasser’s rise to power but became disillusioned in 1954 at the time when his first collection of stories The Cheapest Nights was published . . Yusuf Idris’ stories are powerful and immediate reflections of the experiences of his own rebellious life. His continuing contact with the struggling poor enables him to portray characters sensitively and imaginatively." Idris won the 1997 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature for his novel City of Love and Ashes. Idris' daughter Basma Idris is also a published writer.
May 19, 1971
Uwem Akpan was born in Ikot Akpan Eda in southern Nigeria. After studying philosophy and English at Creighton and Gonzaga universities, he studied theology for three years at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa. He was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 2003 and received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan in 2006. ‘My Parents' Bedroom,’ a story from his short story collection, SAY YOU'RE ONE OF THEM, was one of five short stories by African writers chosen as finalists for The Caine Prize for African Writing 2007. Say You're One of Them won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book (Africa Region) 2009 and PEN/Beyond Margins Award 2009, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. In 2007, Akpan taught at a Jesuit college in Harare, Zimbabwe. Now he serves at Christ the King Church, Ilasamaja-Lagos, Nigeria.
May 19, 1925
Malcolm X (May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965), born Malcolm Little and also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, was an African-American Muslim minister and a human rights activist. To his admirers he was a courageous advocate for the rights of blacks, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its crimes against black Americans; detractors accused him of preaching racism and violence. He has been called one of the greatest and most influential African Americans in history. Malcolm X was effectively orphaned early in life. His father was killed when he was six and his mother was placed in a mental hospital when he was thirteen, after which he lived in a series of foster homes. In 1946, at age 20, he went to prison for larceny and breaking and entering. While in prison he became a member of the Nation of Islam, and after his parole in 1952 quickly rose to become one of its leaders. For a dozen years he was the public face of the controversial group; in keeping with the Nation's teachings he espoused black supremacy, advocated the separation of black and white Americans and scoffed at the civil rights movement's emphasis on integration. By March 1964, Malcolm X had grown disillusioned with the Nation of Islam and its leader Elijah Muhammad. He ultimately repudiated the Nation and its teachings and embraced Sunni Islam. After a period of travel in Africa and the Middle East, he returned to the United States to found Muslim Mosque, Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. While continuing to emphasize Pan-Africanism, black self-determination, and black self-defense, he disavowed racism, saying, 'I did many things as a [Black] Muslim that I'm sorry for now. I was a zombie then ... pointed in a certain direction and told to march'. In February 1965, shortly after repudiating the Nation of Islam, he was assassinated by three of its members. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published shortly after his death, is considered one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century.
May 19, 1932
Elena Poniatowski (born May 19, 1932) is a French-born Mexican journalist and author, specializing in works on social and political issues focused on those considered to be disenfranchised especially women and the poor. She was born in Paris to upper class parents, including her mother whose family fled Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. She left France for Mexico when she was ten to escape the Second World War. When she was eighteen and without a university education, she began writing for the newspaper Excélsior, doing interviews and society columns. Despite the lack of opportunity for women from the 1950s to the 1970s, she evolved to writing about social and political issues in newspapers, books in both fiction and nonfiction form. Her best known work is La noche de Tlatelolco (The night of Tlatelolco, the English translation was titled 'Massacre in Mexico') about the repression of the 1968 student protests in Mexico City. She is considered to be Mexico's grande dame of letters and is still an active writer.
May 19, 1903
Ernest Samuels (May 19, 1903, Chicago, IL - February 12, 1996, Evanston, IL) was an American biographer and lawyer. Born in Chicago, he received his Ph.B. in 1923 and J.D. in 1926 from the University of Chicago. He moved to the southwest to recover from tuberculosis, ending in stay in that part of the country by practicing law in El Paso, Texas
May 19, 1933
Edward de Bono (May 19, 1933) is a Maltese physician, author, inventor and consultant. He originated the term lateral thinking, wrote the book Six Thinking Hats and is a proponent of the teaching of thinking as a subject in schools.
May 20, 1956
Boris Akunin is the pen name of Grigory Chkhartishvili, who was born in the republic of Georgia in 1956. A philologist, critic, essayist, and translator of Japanese, he published his first detective stories in 1998 and quickly became one of the most widely read authors in Russia.
May 20, 1904
Margery Louise Allingham (20 May 1904 – 30 June 1966) was an English writer of detective fiction, best remembered for her 'golden age' stories featuring gentleman sleuth Albert Campion. Margery Allingham was born in Ealing, London in 1904 to a family immersed in literature. Her father, Herbert, and her mother Emily Jane (née Hughes), were both writers – he was editor of the Christian Globe and The New London Journal (to which Margery later contributed articles and Sexton Blake stories), before becoming a successful pulp fiction writer, while her mother was a contributor of stories to women's magazines. Soon after Margery's birth, the family left London for Essex where they lived in an old house in Layer Breton, a village near Colchester. She went to a local school and then to the Perse School for Girls in Cambridge, all the while writing stories and plays; she earned her first fee at the age of eight, for a story printed in her aunt's magazine. Returning to London in 1920, she attended the Regent Street Polytechnic studying drama and speech-training, curing a stammer she had suffered since childhood; it was at this time that she first met her future husband, Philip Youngman Carter. In 1927, she married Carter, who collaborated with her and designed the jackets for many of her books. They lived on the edge of the Essex Marshes in Tolleshunt D'Arcy, near Maldon. Her first novel, Blackkerchief Dick, was published in 1923 when she was 19. It was allegedly based on a story she heard during a séance, though later in life this was debunked by her husband. Nevertheless, Allingham continued to include occult themes in many novels. Blackkerchief Dick was well received, but was not a financial success. She wrote several plays in this period, and attempted to write a serious novel, but finding her themes clashed with her natural light-heartedness, she decided instead to try the mystery genre. She wrote steadily through her school days. After her return to London in 1920 she enrolled at the Regent Street Polytechnic, where she studied drama and speech training in a successful attempt to overcome a childhood stammer. Her breakthrough occurred in 1929 with the publication of The Crime at Black Dudley. This introduced Albert Campion, albeit originally as a minor character. He returned in Mystery Mile, thanks in part to pressure from her American publishers, much taken with the character. By now, with three novels behind her, Allingham's skills were improving, and with a strong central character and format to work from, she began to produce a series of popular Campion novels. Campion is a mysterious, upper-class character (early novels hint that his family is in the line of succession to the throne), working under an assumed name. He floats between the upper echelons of the nobility and government on one hand and the shady world of the criminal class in the United Kingdom on the other, often accompanied by his scurrilous ex-burglar servant Lugg. During the course of his career he is sometimes detective, sometimes adventurer. As the series progresses he works more closely with the police and MI6 counter-intelligence. He falls in love, gets married and has a child, and as time goes by he grows in wisdom and matures emotionally. As Allingham's powers developed, the style and format of the books moved on: while the early novels are light-hearted whodunnits or 'fantastical' adventures, The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) is more character study than crime novel, focusing on serial killer Jack Havoc. In many of the later books Campion plays a subsidiary role no more prominent than his wife Amanda and his police associates; by the last novel he is a minor character. In 1941, she published a non-fiction work, The Oaken Heart, which described her experiences in Essex when an invasion from Germany was expected and actively being planned for, potentially placing the civilian population of Essex in the front line. Allingham suffered from breast cancer and died at Severalls Hospital, Colchester, England, on 30 June 1966, aged 62. Her final Campion novel, Cargo of Eagles, was completed by her husband as her final request and was published in 1968. Other compilations of her work, both with and without Albert Campion, continued to be released through the 1970s. The Margery Allingham Omnibus, comprising Sweet Danger, The Case of the Late Pig and The Tiger in the Smoke, with a critical introduction by Jane Stevenson, was published in 2006.
May 20, 1799
Honoré de Balzac (20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon. Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multifaceted characters, who are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. His writing influenced many subsequent novelists such as Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Benito Pérez Galdós, Marie Corelli, Henry James, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Italo Calvino, and philosophers such as Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. Many of Balzac's works have been made into or have inspired films, and they are a continuing source of inspiration for writers, filmmakers and critics. An enthusiastic reader and independent thinker as a child, Balzac had trouble adapting to the teaching style of his grammar school. His willful nature caused trouble throughout his life and frustrated his ambitions to succeed in the world of business. When he finished school, Balzac was an apprentice in a law office, but he turned his back on the study of law after wearying of its inhumanity and banal routine. Before and during his career as a writer, he attempted to be a publisher, printer, businessman, critic, and politician; he failed in all of these efforts. La Comédie humaine reflects his real-life difficulties, and includes scenes from his own experience. Balzac suffered from health problems throughout his life, possibly due to his intense writing schedule. His relationship with his family was often strained by financial and personal difficulties, and he ended several friendships over critical reviews. In 1850 he married Ewelina Hanska, his longtime love; he died five months later.
May 20, 1913
John Watson Foster Dulles (Auburn, May 20, 1913 – June 3, 2008, Austin) was a Brazilian history scholar. Born in Auburn, New York 1913, John W.F. Dulles was the son of the former Secretary of State of the United States of America, John Foster Dulles. In 1935 he graduated in philosophy from Princeton University. He received a master's degree in business administration from Harvard University in 1937 and then joined the Bank of New York, where his father was a director. He worked in a New York mining company where he was sent to Arizona where he received a bachelor's degree in metallurgy from the University of Arizona's School of Mines and Metallurgy in 1943. In 1959 he moved to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to fix an unprofitable mine in the State of Minas Gerais. The task proved too difficult due to the political turbulence at the time and so he moved in 1962 to Texas to become a professor of Latin American studies at the University of Texas as well as the University of Arizona. His first book, published in 1962, Yesterday in Mexico: A Chronicle of the Revolution, 1919-1936, was the result of conversations with the Mexican president Adolfo Ruiz Cortines. Later on he dedicated himself to the study of Brazilian history, starting with the study about former president Getúlio Vargas, entitled Vargas of Brazil: a political biography in 1967. His works were criticized for having too much description and too little analytic, as well as for not mentioning his part and of his company in the political articulations during the João Goulart government.
May 20, 1912
Sir Moses I. Finley, CBE, FBA (May 20, 1912–June 23, 1986) was an American professor, whose prosecution by the McCarran Security Committee led to his move to England, where he became English classical scholar and eventually master of Darwin College, Cambridge. His most notable work is The Ancient Economy (1973), where he argued that status and civic ideology governed the economy in antiquity rather than rational economic motivations.
May 20, 1806
John Stuart Mill, (20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873) was a British philosopher, political economist and civil servant. He was an influential contributor to social theory, political theory and political economy. He has been called 'the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century'.
May 20, 1923
Samuel Selvon (1923–16 April 1994) was a Trinidad-born writer. Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners is ground-breaking in its use of creolized English, or ‘nation language’, for narrative as well as dialogue. As he explained: ‘When I wrote the novel that became The Lonely Londoners, I tried to recapture a certain quality in West Indian everyday life. I had in store a number of wonderful anecdotes and could put them into focus, but I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. The people I wanted to describe were entertaining people indeed, but I could not really move. At that stage, I had written the narrative in English and most of the dialogues in dialect. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along.’ Samuel Dickson Selvon was born in San Fernando in the south of Trinidad. His parents were East Indian: his father was a first-generation Christian immigrant from Madras and his mother's father was Scottish. He was educated there at Naparima College, San Fernando, before leaving at the age of fifteen to work. He was a wireless operator with the Royal Naval Reserve from 1940 to 1945. Thereafter he moved north to Port of Spain, and from 1945 to 1950, worked for the Trinidad Guardian as a reporter and for a time on its literary page. In this period, he began writing stories and descriptive pieces, mostly under a variety of pseudonyms such as Michael Wentworth, Esses, Ack-Ack and Big Buffer. Selvon moved to London, England, in the 1950s, and then in the late 1970s to Alberta, Canada, where he lived until his death from a heart attack on 16 April 1994 on a return trip to Trinidad. Selvon married twice: in 1947 to Draupadi Persaud (one daughter) and in 1963 to Althea Daroux (two sons, one daughter). Selvon is known for novels such as The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Moses Ascending (1975). His novel A Brighter Sun (1952), detailing the construction of the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway in Trinidad through the eyes of young Indian worker Tiger, was a popular choice on the CXC English Literature syllabus for many years. Other notable works include Ways of Sunlight (1957), Turn Again Tiger (1958) and Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1972). During the 1970s and early 1980s, Selvon converted several of his novels and stories into radio scripts, broadcast by the BBC, which were collected in Eldorado West One (Peepal Tree Press, 1988) and Highway in the Sun (Peepal Tree Press, 1991). After moving to Canada, Selvon found a job teaching creative writing as a visiting professor at the University of Victoria. When that job ended, he took a job as a janitor at the University of Calgary in Alberta for a few months, before becoming writer-in-residence there. He was largely ignored by the Canadian literary establishment, with his works receiving no reviews during his residency. The Lonely Londoners, as with most of his later work, focuses on the immigration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and the cultural differences that are often subtle and implicit to the dying Empire's fantasy of a ‘white nation’. Selvon also illustrates the panoply of different ‘cities’ that are lived in London, as with any major city, due to class and racial boundaries. In many ways, his books are the precursors to works such as Some Kind of Black by Diran Adebayo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi. Selvon's papers are now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, USA. These consist of holograph manuscripts, typescripts, book proofs, manuscript notebooks, and correspondence. Drafts for six of his eleven novels are present, along with supporting correspondence and items relating to his career.
May 20, 1882
Sigrid Undset (20 May 1882 – 10 June 1949) was a Norwegian novelist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928. Undset was born in Kalundborg, Denmark, but her family moved to Norway when she was two years old. In 1924, she converted to Roman Catholicism. She fled Norway for the United States in 1940 because of her opposition to Nazi Germany and the German occupation, but returned after World War II ended in 1945. Her best-known work is Kristin Lavransdatter, a trilogy about life in Scandinavia in the Middle Ages, portrayed through the experiences of a woman from birth until death. Its three volumes were published between 1920 and 1922. Undset's Nobel Prize was awarded partly for this work, and partly for her four-volume work The Master of Hestviken, published between 1925 and 1927 and dealing with similar themes.
May 20, 1899
Lydia Cabrera (May 20, 1899, Havana, Cuba - September 19, 1991, Miami, FL) was a legendary Cuban ethnographer of Afro-Cuban culture and the author of many books, including El Monte and Vocabulario Congo. Alberto Hernandez-Chiroldes is a professor and chair of the Spanish department at Davidson College. Lauren Yoder is James Sprunt Professor of French at Davidson College. Isabel Castellanos is one of the foremost scholars on Afro-Cuban culture. .
May 20, 1936
John V. Fleming, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, taught humanistic studies at Princeton University for forty years. He is the author of The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
May 20, 1930
James McEachin (born May 20, 1930) is an American actor, award-winning author, and known for his many character roles such as portraying police Lieutenant Brock in several Perry Mason television movies. As the star of the television detective series Tenafly he is (along with Susan Saint James of McMillan & Wife) one of the last surviving actors to have starred as a title character from a series featured on the NBC Mystery Movie.
May 20, 1949
Mary Pope Osborne is the acclaimed author of many books for children. She is best known for her Magic Tree House series as well as her titles in the Dear America and My America series. She lives with her husband in New York City.
May 20, 1954
Gerald Leo Posner (born May 20, 1954) is an American investigative journalist and author of twelve books, including Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (1993), which explores the John F. Kennedy assassination, and Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1998), about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. A plagiarism scandal involving his articles and books arose in 2010. In 2015, the Chicago Tribune called Posner "a merciless pitbull of an investigator."
May 20, 1927
Mont Wesley Swearingen (born May 20, 1927; Steubenville, Ohio) is a former FBI Special Agent from 1951 to 1977, and the author of FBI Secrets, and To Kill a President, an examination of the John F. Kennedy assassination. Swearingen served in the United States Navy from 1945 to 1946. In Kentucky and New York City, he spent years doing serious criminal investigations, which had been his goal in joining the FBI. But Hoover fixated on the threat posed by such groups as the Black Panther Party. and the Weathermen. In Los Angeles, Swearingen burglarized the Tucson Five and their lawyers during the FBI's efforts to prosecute them, but no incriminating evidence was found and the Tucson Five were exonerated. After 25 years with the FBI, Swearingen retired in 1977. Swearingen has been interviewed in the documentary films All Power to the People! and The U.S. vs. John Lennon.
May 20, 1920
Perez Zagorin (May 20, 1920 – April 26, 2009) was an American historian who specialized in 16th- and 17th-century English and British history and political thought, early modern European history, and related areas in literature and philosophy. From 1965 to 1990, he taught at the University of Rochester, New York, retiring as the Joseph C. Wilson Professor of History Emeritus.
May 21, 1926
Robert Creeley (May 21, 1926 – March 30, 2005) was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities at State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1991, he joined colleagues Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Raymond Federman, Robert Bertholf, and Dennis Tedlock in founding the Poetics Program at Buffalo. Creeley lived in Waldoboro, Maine, Buffalo, New York, and Providence, Rhode Island where he taught at Brown University. He was a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.
May 21, 1949
GREG MATTHEWS is an Australian-born writer who has distinguished himself as a unique and compelling voice in contemporary fiction. He is the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Further Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Heart of the Country. He currently makes his home in Indiana.
May 21, 1920
James Plunkett was the pen-name adopted by James Plunkett Kelly (born Dublin 21 May 1920, died Dublin 28 May 2003), an Irish writer. He was educated at Synge Street CBS. Plunkett grew up among the Dublin working class and they, along with the petty bourgeoisie and lower intelligentsia, make up the bulk of the dramatis personae of his oeuvre. His best-known works are the novel STRUMPET CITY, set in Dublin in the years leading up to the lockout of 1913 and during the course of the strike, and the short stories in the collection THE TRUSTING AND THE MAIMED. His other works include a radio play on James Larkin, who figures prominently in his work. During the 1960s, Plunkett worked as a producer at Telefís Éireann. He won two Jacob's Awards, in 1965 and 1969, for his TV productions.
May 21, 1688
Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 – 30 May 1744) was an 18th-century English poet. He is best known for his satirical verse, as well as for his translation of Homer. Famous for his use of the heroic couplet, he is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson.
May 21, 1951
Alan Stuart Franken (born May 21, 1951) is an American comedian, writer, producer, author, and politician who served as a United States Senator from Minnesota from 2009 to 2018.
May 21, 1880
Tudor Arghezi (21 May 1880 – 14 July 1967) was a Romanian writer, best known for his contribution to poetry and children's literature. Born Ion N. Theodorescu in Bucharest (where he also died), he explained that his pen name was related to Argesis, the Latin name for the Arge? River. Born in Bucharest of peasant stock, Tudor Arghezi was awarded Romania’s National Poetry Prize in 1946 and the State Prize for Poetry in 1956. The translators of this volume have endeavored not only to convey the spirit of the original Romanian, but to find an English equivalent for its sound. The English verse, printed facing the Romanian, conveys the distilled, metaphorical nature of a poetry that expresses a strong sense of ancestral continuity and apocalyptic visions of the world. Michael Impey is Assistant Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of Kentucky. Brian Swann teaches at The Cooper Union, New York City, and has published poetry, stories, and criticism in many journals. His books include Roots, The Whale’s Scars, and other volumes.
May 21, 1948
David Bacon is a photojournalist, author, political activist, and union organizer who has focused on labor issues, particularly those related to immigrant labor. He has written several books and numerous articles on the subject. Bacon's parents were strong supporter of unionism and his early interest in labor issues began with union organizing activities. He was involved in organizing efforts for the United Farm Workers, the United Electrical Workers, the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, the Molders' Union and others.
May 21, 1892
John Peale Bishop (May 21, 1892 – April 4, 1944) was an American poet and man of letters. Bishop was born in Charles Town, West Virginia, to a family from New England, and attended school in Hagerstown, Maryland and Mercersburg Academy. At 18, Bishop fell victim to a severe illness and temporarily lost his sight for some time. He entered Princeton University in 1913, at age 21, where he became friends with Edmund Wilson and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He graduated from Princeton in 1917 and served with the army for two years in Europe. He was the model for the character Thomas Parke D'Invilliers in Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise. Upon returning to the United States, he wrote poetry as well as essays and reviews for Vanity Fair in New York City. In 1922 he married Margaret Hutchins, and they soon moved to France, where they lived until 1933, punctuated by one stint for Paramount Pictures in New York (1925–26). While in France they bought the Château de Tressancourt at Orgeval, Seine et Oise, near Paris, where they raised three sons. In 1933 Bishop's family returned to the United States, residing first in Connecticut, then New Orleans, and finally in a house on Cape Cod. His novel Act of Darkness, based on the true story of the rape of a prominent Charles Town social figure by a local Charles Town man, caused a scandal in the town when it was published. He became chief poetry reviewer for The Nation (1940). In 1941-2 he served as publications director in the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, and was then invited to be resident fellow at the Library of Congress. He died within a few months of his appointment, on April 4, 1944, in Hyannis, Massachusetts.
May 21, 1944
Scott Ely (May 21, 1944, Atlanta, GA - October 31, 2013) was raised in Jackson, Mississippi. He served in Vietnam as an infantryman. He received his MFA from the University of Arkansas. For the past twenty-three years, he has been teaching writing in South Carolina at Winthrop University. He has published five novels and three collections of short stories and is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship and a Rockefeller Fellowship to Bellagio, Italy.
May 21, 1909
Felix Greene (21 May 1909 - June 15, 1985) was a British-American journalist who chronicled several Communist countries in the 1960s and 1970s. He was one of the first Western reporters to visit North Vietnam when he traveled there for the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1960s. Some of his material has been reproduced for A-Level history, within the Vietnam War topic. Born in England, Greene first visited China for the BBC in 1957. He later produced documentary films, including One Man's China, Tibet, Cuba va!,, Vietnam! Vietnam! and Inside North Viet Nam. These films have been accused of giving a very rosy and one-sided view of Communist society. Some have argued that Greene purposely hid negative information about the extent of starvation in China. He can be seen as a Fellow traveler. In the 1970s, Felix Greene came to in Dharamsala to visit the 14th Dalai Lama who recalled that after 3 days of discussion, Greene's attitude had changed. Greene was a cousin of the author Graham Greene. He lived in the San Francisco area for twenty years. He died in Mexico of cancer.
May 21, 1881
Johannes Hohlenberg (May 21, 1881 - May 10, 1960, Copenhagen, Denmark) was a Danish publicist. Among his works are Goethes Faust i det 20. Aarhundrede from 1928, a biography of Søren Kierkegaard from 1940, and further treatments of Kierkegaard's works. He published the cultural magazine Øjeblikket between 1947 and 1954, and contributed to the Norwegian magazines Samtiden and Janus.
May 21, 1943
Beverley Naidoo (born May 21, 1943) is a South African author of children's books who lives in the U.K. Her first three novels featured life in South Africa where she lived until her twenties. She has also written a biography of the trade unionist Neil Aggett. The Other Side of Truth, was published by Puffin in 2000, is a story about political corruption and how that affects the lives of the children of an outspoken writer. For that work she won the annual Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject. Naidoo won the Josette Frank Award twice – in 1986 for Journey to Jo'burg and in 1997 for No Turning Back: A Novel of South Africa.
May 21, 1960
John O'Brien (21 May 1960 – 10 April 1994) was an American author. His first novel Leaving Las Vegas was published in 1990 by Watermark Press and made into a film of the same name in 1995. O'Brien was born in Oxford, Ohio, where his parents, Bill and Judy O'Brien, were both students at Miami University.[citation needed] He was the brother of writer Erin O'Brien. John grew up in Brecksville and Lakewood, Ohio, and graduated from Lakewood High School in 1978. He married Lisa Kirkwood in 1979, and the couple moved to Los Angeles, California, in 1982. His first novel, Leaving Las Vegas, is dedicated to her. Through a friend of his ex-wife, O'Brien got a gig writing Episode 37 of the animated series Rugrats, "Toys in the Attic", which premiered in 1992 under his only known pseudonym, Carroll Mine. According to his sister, Erin, he was unhappy with editorial changes made to his script. O'Brien committed suicide by gunshot two weeks after learning that his novel, Leaving Las Vegas, was to be made into a movie. His father says that the novel was his suicide note. Two more of his novels were published posthumously: Stripper Lessons (Grove Press, 1997) and The Assault on Tony's (Grove Press, 1996), both of which had been left unfinished at the time of his death and were completed by his sister, Erin. A third manuscript, Better, was published by Akashic Press in 2009.
May 21, 1848
Encarnacion Pinedo (born May 21, 1848) lived in Santa Clara and profiled the cuisine of the Californios, Spanish-speaking settlers who lived, and ate, very well until Mexico ceded California to the United States in 1848. Dan Strehl, Manager of the Frances Howard Goldwyn Hollywood Regional Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, is the author of The Spanish Cook (1992) and One Hundred Books on California Food and Wine (1990). Victor Valle is Director of the American Communities Program at Cal State Univerisity Los Angeles, Professor of Ethnic Studies at California Polytechnic State University, coauthor of Recipe of Memory (1995), and a member of a Los Angeles Times team that won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the Chicano community in Los Angeles. .
May 21, 1855
Emile Verhaeren (21 May 1855 – 27 November 1916) was a Belgian poet who wrote in the French language, and one of the chief founders of the school of Symbolism.
May 22, 1925
Emilio Carballido Córdoba, Veracruz, 22 May 1925 – Xalapa, Veracruz, 11 February 2008) was a Mexican writer who earned particular renown as a playwright.
May 22, 1954
Gar Anthony Haywood (born May 22, 1954) is the award-winning author of three Aaron Gunner novels: YOU CAN DIE TRYING, FEAR OF THE DARK, and NOT LONG FOR THIS WORLD, as well as the Loudermilk series. He lives in Venice, California, with his two daughters.
May 22, 1927
Peter Matthiessen (May 22, 1927 – April 5, 2014), born in New York City) was a two-time National Book Award-winning American novelist and nonfiction writer as well as an environmental activist.
May 22, 1934
Garry Wills is the best-selling author of many books on religion and American history, including the Pulitzer Prize– winning Lincoln at Gettysburg (Simon & Schuster). His recent books include St. Augustine: A Life (Viking) and a translation of Augustine’s Confessions (Penguin Classics).
May 22, 1859
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859, in Edinburgh. He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and began to write stories while he was a student. Over his life he produced more than 30 books, 150 short stories, poems, plays, and essays across a wide range of genres. His most famous creation is the detective Sherlock Holmes, who he introduced in his first novel, A Study in Scarlet (1887). This was followed in 1889 by an historical novel, Micah Clarke. In 1893 Conan Doyle published The Final Problem in which he killed off his famous detective so that he could turn his attention more toward historical fiction. However, Holmes was so popular that Conan Doyle eventually relented and published The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901. The events of the The Hound of the Baskervilles are set before those of The Final Problem, but in 1903 new Sherlock Holmes stories began to appear that revealed that the detective had not died after all. He was finally retired in 1927. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died on July 7, 1930.
May 22, 1963
Andrej Blatnik, Slovenian writer, university lecturer and editor was born 22 May 1963 in Ljubljana. Andrej Blatnik studied comparative literature, sociology, culture, American literature, and communication. For five years he worked as a freelance artist. Then, for several years he edited a literary magazine and was also employed as an editor at the publishing house.
May 22, 1808
Gérard de Nerval (May 22, 1808 – January 26, 1855) was the nom-de-plume of the French writer, poet, essayist and translator Gérard Labrunie, one of the most essentially Romantic French poets. His life and several of his works were influenced by his infatuation for an actress named Jenny Colon, who died in 1842. His works are notable for the author's charming personality and intelligence, his poetic vision and precision of form. His friend and fellow writer Théophile Gautier wrote a touching reminiscence of him in 1867 (La Vie de Gérard) which was included in Gautier's Portraits et Souvenirs Litéraires, published posthumously in 1875.
May 22, 1956
Peter H. Fogtdal, Danish novelist, was born May 22, 1956 in Copenhagen, Denmark. He has written 12 novels in Danish. Three have been translated into French, two into Portuguese, and one into English. In Denmark he is known for writing novels with a spiritual, mystical or humorous slant. In 2005 he won a French literary prize, Prix Littéraire des Ambassadeurs de la Francophonie for his translated novel Le front chantilly (Floedeskumsfronten). In 2001 this novel was named one of the three best novels of the year by the biggest Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Peter H. Fogtdal shares his time between Portland, Oregon and Copenhagen, Denmark.
May 22, 1969
Lee Grieveson is a Lecturer in the Film Studies Program in the School of Humanities, King’s College, University of London, and a recipient of the prestigious Katherine Singer Kovacs Essay Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
May 22, 1947
Anthony Holden (born 22 May 1947) is an English writer, broadcaster and critic, particularly known as a biographer of artists including Shakespeare, Tchaikovsky, Leigh Hunt, Lorenzo da Ponte and Laurence Olivier, and of members of the British Royal family, notably Charles, Prince of Wales. He has also published translations of opera and Ancient Greek poetry as well as several autobiographical books about poker. In 2009, he was elected the first President of the International Federation of Poker (IFP)
May 22, 1962
Jose Manuel Prieto is a Cuban novelist, translator and scholar. Jose Manuel Prieto was born in Havana, Cuba in 1962. He earned his PhD in History in Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and has taught at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica, Mexico City, from 1994 to 2004. In 2004-2005 he was the Margaret and Herman Sokol Fellow at The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers in The New York Public Library. Prieto has been the recipient of fellowships, grants and awards from Sistema Nacional de Creadores, México, January 2003 – 2005 the Santa Madalena Foundation, April del 2001, Florencia and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2002). Prieto's books have been translated into English, French, German, Norwegian, Italian and Russian and are available through a number of prominent publishing houses, including Grove Press, Suhrkamp, Anagrama, Christian Bourgois, and Faber and Faber. Prieto has translated poems by Anna Akhmatova, and Josef Brodsky, as well as prose by Andrey Platonov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Vladimir Nabokov. Prieto has lived in New York since 2004. He teaches literature at Seton Hall University.
May 22, 1935
Desmond Seward (born 22 May 1935, Paris) is a British popular historian and the author of many books, including biographies of Henry IV of France, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Marie Antoinette, Empress Eugenie and Napoleon's Family. He specialises in Britain and France in the late Middle Ages. He lives in the English countryside on the Berkshire-Wiltshire border.
May 23, 1921
James Benjamin Blish (May 23, 1921 – July 30, 1975) was an American author of fantasy and science fiction. Blish also wrote literary criticism of science fiction using the pen-name William Atheling, Jr.
May 23, 1920
Philip Nicholas Furbank FRSL (23 May 1920 – 27 June 2014) was an English writer, scholar and critic, and a professor (later emeritus) of the Open University. He was known for significant biographies, including E. M. Forster: A Life (1977/8), and Diderot: A Critical Biography (1992), which won a Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. He has also edited the works of Daniel Defoe and made major contributions to the question of attributions to Defoe in A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe, The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe, and A Political Biography of Daniel Defoe all co-written with W. R. Owens, in addition to many others on aspects of Defoe. He was a friend of Alan Turing, becoming his Executor, and general editor of Turing's collected works. He was also known as a reviewer. Furbank's other books include ones on the poet Mallarmé and the painter Poussin, Italo Svevo: The Man and the Writer (1966) and Behalf (1999) on political thought.
May 23, 1946
Ursula Hegi (born May 23, 1946) is a German-born American writer. She is currently an instructor in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton. She was born Ursula Koch in 1946 in Düsseldorf, Germany, a city that was heavily bombed during World War II. Her perception growing up was that the war was avoided as a topic of discussion despite its evidence everywhere, and The Holocaust was a particularly taboo topic. This had a strong effect on her later writing and her feelings about her German identity. She left West Germany in 1964, at the age of 18. She moved to the United States in 1965, where she married (becoming Ursula Hegi) in 1967 and became a naturalized citizen the same year.In 1979, she graduated from the University of New Hampshire with both a bachelor's and master's degree. She was divorced in 1984. The same year, she was hired at Eastern Washington University, in Cheney, Washington, near Spokane, Washington, where she became an Associate Professor and taught creative writing and contemporary literature. Hegi's first books were set in the United States. She set her third, Floating in My Mother's Palm, in the fictional German town of 'Burgdorf,' using her writing to explore her conflicted feelings about her German heritage. She used the setting for three more books, including her best selling novel Stones from the River, which was chosen for Oprah's Book Club in 1997. Hegi appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show on April 8, and her publisher reprinted 1.5 million hardcover copies and 500,000 paperbacks. She subsequently moved from Spokane to New York. Hegi's many awards include an NEA Fellowship and five PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards. She won a book award from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association (PNBA) in 1991 for Floating in My Mother's Palm. She has also had two New York Times Notable Book mentions. She has written many book reviews for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.
May 23, 1935
Joseph Robert Janes (born May 23, 1935) is a Canadian author born in Toronto. A mining engineer by profession, he taught geology, geography and high school mathematics and later geology at Brock University until he dedicated himself to writing full-time in 1970. Janes has published 17 adult novels, five mystery novels for young adults, and textbooks on geology. His series of mysteries set in Occupied France during World War II, and featuring Chief Inspector Jean-Louis St-Cyr of the Sûreté and Hermann Kohler of the Gestapo, are his most popular works and have been critically acclaimed by The Wall Street Journal, amongst others, for their historical accuracy. The U.S.-based Western Society for French History used his writings as a study of the convergence of fiction with history.
May 23, 1891
Pär Fabian Lagerkvist (23 May 1891 – 11 July 1974) was a Swedish author who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1951. Lagerkvist wrote poems, plays, novels, stories, and essays of considerable expressive power and influence[citation needed] from his early 20s to his late 70s. One of his central themes was the fundamental question of good and evil, which he examined through such figures as Barabbas, the man who was freed instead of Jesus, and Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew. As a moralist, he used religious motifs and figures from the Christian tradition without following the doctrines of the church.
May 23, 1902
Manuel Peyrou (May 23, 1902 – January 1, 1974) was an Argentine writer and journalist. His short story, La noche incompleta (The Unfinished Night) was published by La Prensa in 1935, and Peyrou became an editor of the daily's respected literary supplement, eventually becoming the section's chief editor. He contributed to literary critic Victoria Ocampo's Sur, and a close friend from his days at the university, Jorge Luis Borges, later brought him on as chief film critic for Los Anales de Buenos Aires, Borges' literary review. La espada dormida (The Sleeping Sword), Peyrou's 1944 pulp fiction work, was followed by a satire, El estruendo de las rosas, in 1948, which earned him a Municipal Literary Prize; Peyrou's later works departed from the detective genre and were mainly realist narratives. A number, including Las leyes del juego (The Rules of the Game, 1959), El árbol de Judas (The Judas Tree, 1963), Marea de fervor (Tide of Fervor, 1967), and El hijo rechazado (The Rejected Son, 1969), were also acclaimed by critics. His 1949 work, El estruendo de las rosas, was translated into English by Donald A. Yates and published by Herder Publishers in 1972 as Thunder of Roses: A Detective Novel. Peyrou died in Buenos Aires in 1974.
May 23, 1956
Clare Cavanagh (born May 23, 1956, Republic of Irelandi) s a specialist in modern Russian, Polish, and Anglo-American poetry. Her most recent book, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West (Yale UP) received the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. It also received the ASEES/Orbis Book Prize for Polish Studies (2010). Her first book, Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition (Princeton UP, 1995), received the AATSEEL Prize for Oustanding Scholarly Book in Slavic Literature (1997). She is also an acclaimed translator of contemporary Polish poetry, whose awards and honors include the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation, the Katharine Washburne Memorial Lecture in Translation, the PEN/Book-of-the Month Club Prize for Outstanding Literary Translation, and the AATSEEL Award for Outstanding Translation from a Slavic Language. She is an Associate Editor of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (fourth edition, in progress) and is currently working on an authorized biography the Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz, entitled Czeslaw Milosz and His Age: A Critical Life (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). She has received the William Riley Parker Prize of the Modern Language Association, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies for her work in Russian and Polish poetry. Cavanagh's essays and translations have appeared in TLS, The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, Partisan Review, Common Knowledge, Poetry, Literary Imagination and other periodicals.
May 23, 1950
Alice Costandina "Dina" Titus is an American politician who has been the United States Representative for Nevada's 1st congressional district since 2013. She previously served as U.S. Representative for Nevada's 3rd congressional district from 2009 to 2011, when she was defeated by Joe Heck.
May 24, 1940
Joseph Brodsky (1940-96) came to the United States in 1972, an involuntary exile from the Soviet Union. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and serve as Poet Laureate of the United States in 1991 and 1992.
May 24, 1953
Jorge G. Castaneda (born May 24, 1953) was born and raised in Mexico City. He received his B.A. from Princeton University and his Ph.D. from the University of Paris. He has been a professor of political science at the National Autonomous University of Mexico since 1978. He has also been a senior associate of the Carnegie Institute for International Peace in Washington, D.C., and a visiting pro- fessor at Princeton University and the University of California at Berkeley. In 1997 he began a long-term, half-time appointment as Professor of Political Science and Latin American Studies at New York University.
May 24, 1963
Michael Chabon (born May 24, 1963) is an American author and 'one of the most celebrated writers of his generation,' according to The Virginia Quarterly Review. Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was published when he was 25 and catapulted him to literary celebrity. He followed it with a second novel, Wonder Boys (1995), and two short-story collections. In 2000, Chabon published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a critically acclaimed novel that John Leonard, in a 2007 review of a later novel, called Chabon's magnum opus. It received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. His novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union, an alternate history mystery novel, was published in 2007 to enthusiastic reviews and won the Hugo, Sidewise, Nebula and Ignotus awards; his serialized novel Gentlemen of the Road appeared in book form in the fall of that same year. Chabon's most recent novel, Telegraph Avenue, published in 2012 and billed as 'a twenty-first century Middlemarch', concerns the tangled lives of two families in the Bay Area of San Francisco in the year 2004. His work is characterized by complex language, the frequent use of metaphor along with recurring themes, including nostalgia, divorce, abandonment, fatherhood, and most notably issues of Jewish identity. He often includes gay, bisexual, and Jewish characters in his work. Since the late 1990s, Chabon has written in an increasingly diverse series of styles for varied outlets; he is a notable defender of the merits of genre fiction and plot-driven fiction, and, along with novels, he has published screenplays, children's books, comics, and newspaper serials.
May 24, 1925
Millicent Dillon was born Millicent Gerson in New York City on May 24, 1925. Upon receiving a degree in physics from Hunter College in 1944, she held a series of technical-scientific positions. She worked as a junior physicist on a government project at Princeton University from 1944-45. In 1946, she worked as a technical assistant for Standard Oil Company, and she again served as an assistant physicist on a government project at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during the following year. From 1947-48, she served as a staff writer for the Association of Scientists for Atomic Education in New York and then worked as a physicist at Northrup Aircraft. From 1949-52, she worked as a caseworker for a social welfare program in Hawthorne, California. At the age of 40, Dillon enrolled in the creative writing program at San Francisco State University. After receiving a master's degree in 1966, she taught creative writing as a professor of English at Foothill College in Los Altos, California, for five years. From 1974 to 1983 she was an academic writer for the Stanford University News and Publications office. Since 1983 Dillon has been a freelance writer in fiction, biography, and drama. Dillon is best known for her works concerning writers Jane and Paul Bowles. Among these are a biography A LITTLE ORIGINAL SIN: THE LIFE AND WORKS OF JANE BOWLES (1981); a collection of letters, OUT IN THE WORLD: SELECTED LETTERS OF JANE BOWLES 1935-1970 (1985); and a biography YOU ARE NOT I: A PORTRAIT OF PAUL BOWLES (1998). She also edited THE VIKING PORTABLE PAUL AND JANE BOWLES (1994). Her other works include BABY PERPETUA AND OTHER STORIES (short stories, 1971); THE ONE IN THE BACK IS MEDEA, (novel, 1973); AFTER EGYPT: ISADORA DUNCAN AND MARY CASSATT (biography, 1990); THE DANCE OF THE MOTHERS (novel, 1991); HARRY GOLD (novel, 2000); four plays; and additional short stories, essays, and reviews in numerous publications. She is the recipient of a number of honors and awards, including five O. Henry awards in fiction. She also received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Additional information about Millicent Dillon may be found in CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS NEW REVISION SERIES (Gale Research Company, 1984).
May 24, 1899
Henri Michaux (24 May 1899 – 19 October 1984) was a highly idiosyncratic Belgian-born poet, writer, and painter who wrote in French. He later took French citizenship. Michaux is best known for his esoteric books written in a highly accessible style, and his body of work includes poetry, travelogues, and art criticism. Michaux travelled widely, tried his hand at several careers, and took drugs, the latter resulting in two of his most intriguing works, Miserable Miracle and The Major Ordeals of the Mind and the Countless Minor Ones. In 1930–1931, Henri Michaux visited Japan, China and India. The result of this trip is the book A Barbarian in Asia. Oriental culture became one of his biggest influences. The philosophy of Buddhism, and Oriental calligraphy, later became principal subjects of many of his poems and inspired many of his drawings. He also traveled to Africa and to the American continent, where he visited Ecuador and published the book Ecuador. His travels across the Americas finished in Brazil in 1939, and he stayed there for two years. Michaux is best known for his stories about Plume – 'a peaceful man' – perhaps the most unenterprising hero in the history of literature, and his many misfortunes. All his writing is strange and original. As his translator put it in Darkness Moves, the most comprehensive Michaux anthology in English, his poems are 'messages from his inner space.' That space may be transformed by drugs as in Miserable Miracle or by terrifying vision, as in 'Space of the Shadows' (in Darkness Moves) but the 'messages' from it are always as clear and concrete as possible. Henri Michaux was also a highly original artist. His work is not quite figurative, but suggestive. The Museum of Modern Art in Paris and the Guggenheim Museum in New York both had major shows of his work in 1978. In 1955 he became a citizen of France, and he lived the rest of his life there along with his family. In 1965 he won the National Prize of Literature, which he refused to accept.
May 24, 1905
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov (May 24 1905 – February 21, 1984) was a Soviet/Russian novelist and winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is known for writing about life and fate of Don Cossacks during Russian revolution, Civil War and collectivization, primarily the famous And Quiet Flows the Don.
May 24, 1928
William Trevor (24 May 1928 – 20 November 2016) was an Irish novelist, playwright and short story writer. One of the elder statesmen of the Irish literary world, he was widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of short stories in the English language. He won the Whitbread Prize three times and was nominated five times for the Booker Prize, the last for his novel Love and Summer (2009), which was also shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2011. His name was also mentioned in relation to the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2014, Trevor was bestowed Saoi by the Aosdána. Trevor resided in Devon, South West England, from the 1950s until his death at the age of 88.
May 24, 1909
Demetrio Aguilera-Malta (May 24, 1909, Guayaquil, Ecuador - December 28, 1981, Mexico City, Mexico) was a poet, essayist, and foreign correspondent; he wrote and directed films; he taught in several universities in the United States and elsewhere; he painted vigorously; and always he wrote novels of astonishing power, moral and social consciousness, and radical inventiveness.
May 24, 1898
José Maria Ferreira de Castro (May 24, 1898 in Oliveira de Azeméis – June 29, 1974 in Oporto) was a Portuguese writer and journalist At age 12, he emigrated to Brazil, where his work at a rubber plantation for the next four years would be the inspiration for his most famous book, A Selva (1930), which was adapted for a 2002 film of the same title (released in English as The Forest). He returned to Portugal in 1919, and started working as a journalist. He was a noted oppositionist to António de Oliveira Salazar. He was also famous for his travel literature, namely his book A Volta ao Mundo, recounting his travels around the world in the outset of World War II.
May 24, 1941
Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman, May 24, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter, author, and artist who has been an influential figure in popular music and culture for more than five decades.
May 24, 1898
José Maria Ferreira de Castro (Oliveira de Azeméis, May 24, 1898 – Oporto, June 29, 1974) was a Portuguese writer and journalist. At age 12, he immigrated to Brazil, where his work at a rubber plantation for the next four years would be the inspiration for his most famous book, A Selva (1930), which was adapted for a 2002 film of the same title (released in English as The Forest). He returned to Portugal in 1919, and started working as a journalist. He was a noted oppositionist to António de Oliveira Salazar. He was also famous for his travel literature, namely his book A Volta ao Mundo, recounting his travels around the world in the outset of World War II.
May 24, 1852
Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham (24 May 1852 – 20 March 1936) was a Scottish politician, writer, journalist and adventurer. He was a Liberal Party Member of Parliament (MP); the first-ever socialist member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom; a founder, and the first president, of the Scottish Labour Party; a founder of the National Party of Scotland in 1928; and the first president of the Scottish National Party in 1934.
May 24, 1926
Rudolf Kippenhahn (born 24 May 1926, in Pernink, Czechoslovakia) is a German astrophysicist and science author. Rudolf Kippenhahn originally studied mathematics and physics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg before changing to Astronomy. From 1975 to 1991, Kippenhahn was director of the Max Planck Institute For Astrophysics in Garching, Munich, Germany. Since 1991, Kippenhahn has been an active published author in Göttingen, trying to popularise astronomical science research, in the same vein as Stephen Hawking's writing, for which he won the Bruno H. Bürgel prize. His books cover such diverse topics as astronomy, cryptology and atomic physics. In the year 2005, Kippenhahn was honoured by the Royal Astronomical Society with the Eddington medal for his scientific research into the computation of the structure of star and of stellar evolution.
May 24, 1974
Jens Lapidus is a criminal defense lawyer who represents some of Sweden’s most notorious underworld criminals. He lives in Stockholm with his wife.
May 24, 1907
Gwyn Jones (May 24, 1907, New Tredegar, United Kingdom - December 6, 1999, Aberystwyth, United Kingdom) was Professor of English Language & Literature at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, and the Chairman of the Welsh Committee of the Arts Council of Great Britain. He was a Past President of the Viking Society for Northern Research; and the President of Iceland conferred upon him in November 1963 the decoration of Chevalier of the Order of the Falcon. His many works include THE MABINOGION (with Thomas Jones), considered by many as the best translation ever made from medieval Welsh; THE VATNSDALERS’ SAGA translated from Icelandic; many articles medieval and contemporary literature; novels and short stories.
May 24, 1932
Albert Kwadwo Adu Boahen (May 24, 1932 – May 24, 2006) was a Ghanaian academic, historian, and politician. He was an academic at the University of Ghana from 1959 to 1990, since 1971 as a professor. As a politician, he notably was a candidate in the 1992 Ghanaian presidential election, representing the main opposition New Patriotic Party.
May 25, 1943
Penelope Casas (May 25, 1943 – August 11, 2013) was an American food writer, cookbook author and expert on the cuisine of Spain. Casas began authoring a series of English-language cookbooks focusing on the food of Spain during the 1980s, effectively introducing Americans to Spain's culinary heritage for the first time. Casas released her first cookbook, "The Foods and Wines of Spain," in 1982. Her first book is still in print, as of 2013. She would publish five more indepth books and cookbooks on Spanish cuisine. Her follow-up book, "Tapas: The Little Dishes of Spain," released in 1985, introduced a large American audience to the concept of tapas and tapas bars for the first time. Casas' last book was "La Cocina de Mama: The Great Home Cooking of Spain" in 2005. Casas was born Penelope Fexas to Greek immigrant parents, Antonia and Achilles Fexas, on May 25, 1943, in Whitestone, Queens, New York City. Her only brother, Tom Fexas, was a yacht designer. She met her husband, Luis Casas, while studying abroad in Spain as a Vassar College student during the 1960s. She has also studied at the University of Madrid. Casas died from leukemia at her home in Manhasset, New York, on August 11, 2013, at the age of 70
May 25, 1925
Rosario Castellanos (25 May 1925 – 7 August 1974) was a Mexican poet and author. Along with the other members of the Generation of 1950 (the poets who wrote following the Second World War, influenced by César Vallejo and others), she was one of Mexico's most important literary voices in the last century. Throughout her life, she wrote eloquently about issues of cultural and gender oppression, and her work has influenced feminist theory and cultural studies. Though she died young, she opened the door of Mexican literature to women, and left a legacy that still resonates today.
May 25, 1898
Bennett Alfred Cerf (May 25, 1898 – August 27, 1971) was an American publisher, one of the founders of American publishing firm Random House. Cerf was also known for his own compilations of jokes and puns, for regular personal appearances lecturing across the United States, and for his television appearances in the panel game show What's My Line?
May 25, 1932
John Gregory Dunne (May 25, 1932 – December 30, 2003) was an American novelist, screenwriter and literary critic.
May 25, 1949
Jamaica Kincaid (born May 25, 1949) is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua, which is part of the twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda. She lives in North Bennington, Vermont, during the summers and teaches at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, during the academic year. Kincaid is an award-winning writer whose work has been both commended and criticized for its subject matter and tone because her writing draws upon her life and is perceived as angry. In response, Kincaid counters that writers draw upon their lives all the time and that to describe her writing as autobiographical and angry is not a valid criticism.
May 25, 1935
William Patrick Kinsella (born May 25, 1935) is a Canadian novelist and short story writer who is well known for his novel Shoeless Joe (1982), which was adapted into the movie Field of Dreams in 1989. His work has often concerned baseball, First Nations people, and other Canadian issues.
May 25, 1954
Luc Sante (born 25 May 1954, Verviers, Belgium) is a writer and critic. Sante has written a number of books and is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.Born in Verviers, Belgium, Sante immigrated to the United States in the early 1960s. He attended school in New York City, first at Regis High School in Manhattan and later at Columbia University from 1972 to 1976; due to several incompletes and outstanding library fines, he did not take a degree. Since 1984 he has been a full-time writer. Sante is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, where he worked first in the mailroom and then as assistant to editor Barbara Epstein. Sante has written on the subjects of film, art, photography, and miscellaneous cultural phenomena as well as book reviews. His books include Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (1991), Evidence (1992), the autobiographical The Factory of Facts (1998), Walker Evans (1999), Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990-2005 (2007), Folk Photography (2009), and The Other Paris (2015). He co-edited, with the writer, his former wife, Melissa Holbrook Pierson, O. K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors (1998), and translated and edited Félix Fénéon's Novels in Three Lines (2007) for the New York Review Books (NYRB) series. In the early 1980s, he wrote lyrics for the New York City-based band The Del-Byzanteens. Sante wrote the text for Take Me To The Water: Immersion Baptism In Vintage Music And Photography, a collection of historical photos of American baptismal rites, published by Dust-to-Digital in 2009. Having previously taught in the Columbia MFA writing program, Sante currently lives in Ulster County, New York and teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College.
May 25, 1938
Pedro Henrique Saraiva Leão (Fortaleza, May 25 , 1938 ) is a Brazilian doctor and writer. He is a member of Academia Cearense de Letras , Academia Cearense de Medicina and the Brazilian Society of Medical Writers.
May 25, 1938
Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. Carver was a major writer of the late 20th century and a major force in the revitalization of the American short story in literature in the 1980s.
May 25, 1938
Margaret Forster (25 May 1938 – 8 February 2016) was born in Carlisle, England, in 1988. She won an Open Scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, and took a degree in History. Among her seven novels have been GEORGY GIRL and THE TRAVELS OF MAUDIE TIPSTAFF. She was also the chief fiction reviewer for the London Evening Standard.
May 25, 1938
Arturo Islas, Jr. (May 25, 1938 – February 15, 1991) was an English professor and novelist from El Paso, Texas, whose writing focused on the experience of Chicano cultural duality. He received three degrees from Stanford: a B.A. in 1960, a Masters in 1963 and a Ph.D. in 1971, when he joined the Stanford faculty. Islas was one of the first Chicanos in the United States to earn a Ph.D. in English. In 1976, he became the first Chicano faculty member to receive tenure at Stanford. Islas died on February 15, 1991 from complications related to AIDS.
May 25, 1936
David Levering Lewis holds the Martin Luther King, Jr., chair in history at Rutgers University. Educated at Fisk and Columbia universities and the London School of Economics, Dr. Lewis is the author of numerous acclaimed books, including KING: A BIOGRAPHY, WHEN HARLEM WAS IN VOGUE, THE RACE TO FASHODA, and, W. E. B. DU BOIS: BIOGRAPHY OF A RACE, 1868—1919, winner of the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prizes for biography.
May 25, 1944
Tim Page (born 25 May 1944) is an English photographer who made his name during the Vietnam War and is now based in Brisbane, Australia. Page was born on 25 May 1944 in Tunbridge Wells, Kent. He left England in 1962 making his way overland driving through Europe, Pakistan, India, Burma, Thailand and Laos. Without money in Laos, he found work as an agricultural advisor for USAID. He began work as a press photographer in Laos stringing for UPI and AFP, having taught himself photography. His exclusive photographs of an attempted coup d'état in Laos in 1965 for UPI got him a staff position in the Saigon bureau of the news agency. He is celebrated for his work as a freelance accredited press photographer in Vietnam and Cambodia during the 1960s, also finding time to cover the Six-Day War in the Middle East in 1967. Due to a near-death experience in the early 60s, he came to view his life as 'free time'. This led him to take photographs in dangerous situations where other journalists would not venture. Similarly, Page was captivated by the excitement and glamour of warfare, which helped contribute to the style of photographs he is acclaimed for. By late 1965 Page was sharing a house at 47 Bui Thi Xuan, Saigon with Leonardo Caparros and fellow correspondents Simon Dring, Martin Stuart-Fox and Steve Northup, known as "Frankie's House" after the resident Vietnamese houseboy. Frankie's House became a social club for a group correspondents between field assignments and their friends with large quantities of drugs being used there.Page himself does not shy away from the drug culture he was involved in during his time in Vietnam, devoting a large amount of his book Page after Page to it. In Dispatches, Michael Herr wrote of Page as the most 'extravagant' of the 'wigged-out crazies running around Vietnam', due in most respects to the amount of drugs that he enjoyed taking. His unusual personality was part of the inspiration for the character of the journalist played by Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now. Page was injured in action four times. The first, in 1965, was in Chu Lai where he was struck by shrapnel in the legs and stomach; the second was in Da Nang during Buddhist riots (1966), where he received more shrapnel wounds to the head, back, and arms; the third in August 1966 happened in the South China sea, where he was on board the Coast Guard cutter Point Welcome, when it was mistaken for a Viet Cong ship, and U.S. Air Force pilots strafed the vessel, leaving Page adrift at sea with over two hundred wounds. Lastly, in April 1969, Page jumped out of a helicopter to help load wounded soldiers. At the same time, a sergeant stepped on a mine close by, sending a 2-inch piece of shrapnel into Page's head. This list of injuries led his colleagues in the field to joke that he'd never make it to 23 years of age. He spent the next year in the United States undergoing extensive neuro-surgery. During recovery he became closely involved with the Vietnam Veterans peace movement[vague] and worked as a caregiver for amputees, traumatically shocked and stressed young men. One of these was Ron Kovic. On 9 December 1967, Page was arrested in New Haven, Connecticut along with fellow journalists Mike Zwerin and Yvonne Chabrier at the infamous Doors concert where Jim Morrison was arrested onstage. Charges against all four were dropped due to lack of evidence. In the 1970s Page worked as a freelance photographer for music magazines such as Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone. During his recovery in the spring of 1970 he learnt of the capture of his best friend, roommate and fellow photo-journalist Sean Flynn in Cambodia. Throughout the 1970s and 80s he tried to discover Flynn's fate and final resting place and wanted to erect a memorial to all those in the media who either were killed or went missing in the war. This led him to found the Indochina Media Memorial Foundation and was the genesis for the book Requiem, co-edited with fellow Vietnam War photographer Horst Faas. Page's quest to clear up the mystery of Flynn's fate continues; as late as 2009 he was back in Cambodia, still searching for the site of Flynn's remains. Page's book Requiem contains photographs taken by all of the photographers and journalists killed during the Vietnamese wars against the Japanese, French and Americans. Requiem has become since early 2000 a travelling photographic exhibition placed under the custody of the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film. The exhibition has been presented in Vietnam's War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, as well as in New York City, Chicago, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Tokyo, Hanoi, Lausanne, and London. In 2011, it was selected to be the main exhibition of the Month of Photography Asia in Singapore. Page is the subject of many documentaries and two films, and is the author of many books. He lives in Brisbane, Australia and no longer covers wars. He is Adjunct Professor of Photojournalism at Griffith University.
May 25, 1942
Sheila Roberts grew up poor and white in the apartheid of South Africa. In 1977, her first novel, "He's My Brother," was banned by government censors, probably as much for the title as any content, said son Kelly S. Roberts. That same year, she completed her doctorate, leaving South Africa for literary freedom and academic life in the United States. In 1986, she became a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she taught creative writing and literature until her retirement in 2007.
May 25, 1949
Charles M. Robinson III (May 25, 1949, Harlingen, TX - September 18, 2012, Olmito, TX) was an American author, illustrator, and adventurer. He was a history instructor with South Texas College in McAllen, Texas, until early 2012 and was a member of the 2010 Oxford Round Table. He was a graduate of St. Edward's University and the University of Texas–Pan American.
May 25, 1919
Raymond Merrill Smullyan (May 25, 1919 – February 6, 2017) was an American mathematician, magician, concert pianist, logician, Taoist, and philosopher. Born in Far Rockaway, New York, his first career was stage magic. He earned a BSc from the University of Chicago in 1955 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1959. He is one of many logicians to have studied with Alonzo Church.
May 25, 1803
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) was a renowned lecturer and writer whose ideas on philosophy, religion, and literature influenced many writers, including Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. After an undergraduate career at Harvard, he studied at Harvard Divinity School and became an ordained minister, continuing a long line of ministers in his family. He traveled widely and lectured, and became well known for his publications Essays and Nature.
May 26, 1931
Sven Delblanc, born May 26, 1931 in Swan River, Manitoba, Canada, died December 15, 1992 in Sunnersta, Gottsunda Parish, Uppsala, Sweden was a Swedish author and professor of literature. He is buried in Hammarby kyrkogård in Uppsala, Sweden. Delblanc was an associate professor in the history of literature at Uppsala university beginning in 1965. He received the Aftonbladet Literature Prize in 1965. Before his death he was pointed out as the anonymous writer Bo Balderson. In Sweden Delblanc is considered one of the foremost Swedish authors of the later half of the twentieth Century, yet in English-speaking countries he is almost unknown. He was born in Canada but grew up in Trosa, Sweden. His parents divorced and the father, Siegfried Axel Herman Delblanc, remarried. His paternal grandfather, Friedrich Hermann Delblanc, a bookmaker in Stockholm, was from Leipzig, Saxony, Germany. Sven Delblanc's maternal relatives were from Väse in Värmland in the West of Sweden. His maternal grandmother came from Norway. During the fourteenth century the Delblanc family lived in southern France in the vicinity of le Puy, but during the Napoleonic Era a forefather deserted and went to Germany. The maternal grandfather, Axel Nordfält, was the inspiration to the character Samuel in Samuels bok (1981). The Swedish television series Hedebyborna (1978) is based on Delblanc's series of novels Åminne (1970), Stenfågel (1973), Vinteride (1974) and Stadsporten (1976).
May 26, 1955
Doris Dörrie (born 26 May 1955, Hannover) is a German film director, producer and author. Dörrie completed her secondary education (‘Abitur‘) at a humanist Gymnasium. In 1973 she began a two-year attendance in film studies, in the drama department of the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. She then studied at the New School of Social Research in New York. She worked odd jobs in cafés and as film presenter in New York's Goethe House. In 1975, back in Germany, she began to study at the University of Television and Film Munich, and wrote film reviews for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, where she was also assistant editor. Subsequently Dörrie worked as a volunteer for various television stations, and filmed short documentaries. Her numerous works of fiction, unlike her films, were greeted with a mixed reception.
May 26, 1927
Nathan Miller (May 26, 1927, Baltimore, MD - October 22, 2004, Washington, D.C.) was an award-winning journalist and the Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of twelve works of history and biography, including Theodore Roosevelt: A Life and FDR: An Intimate History. He lived in Washington, DC.
May 26, 1921
Hermann Pálsson (26 May 1921 – 11 August 2002) was an Icelandic language scholar and translator, "one of the most distinguished scholars of Icelandic studies of his generation". Often working in collaboration with others such as Magnus Magnusson or Paul Edwards, he translated around 40 works of medieval Icelandic literature.
May 26, 1943
IIan Breakwell (26 May 1943 in Long Eaton, Derbyshire – 14 October 2005 in London) was a world-renowned British fine artist. He was a prolific artist who took a multi-media approach to his observation of society.
May 26, 1937
David Leon Chandler (May 26, 1937 - January 23, 1994) was an American journalist who wrote several historical and biographical books during the 1970s and 1980s. He was associated with early coverage of the Kennedy Assassination and was mentioned in the Warren Commission report. Chandler was born in Covington, Kentucky. Following service in the merchant marine and U.S. Navy, Chandler worked three years from 1959 for The News-Herald in Panama City, Florida. Eventually he led a team whose investigation and coverage of corruption won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, citing the newspaper's "three-year campaign against entrenched power and corruption, with resultant reforms in Panama City and Bay County." He worked for New Orleans' afternoon newspaper The States-Item 1962–1964 and then on contract with LIFE magazine, initially regarding the Kennedy assassination. Chandler ran for Governor of Louisiana in the 1971 Democratic Party primary "hoping to prove that a candidate could win the governorship without taking any campaign contributions" - and finished twelfth with 0.62% of the vote. From 1972 he was a free-lance writer of magazine articles and books. Chandler's books include Brothers in Blood (1975), a history of the Cosa Nostra; The Natural Superiority of Southern Politicians, (1977); 100 Tons of Gold about a mysterious gold horde in New Mexico; Henry Flagler: The Astonishing Life and Times of the Visionary Robber Baron Who Founded Florida (1986); The Binghams of Louisville (1988), a controversial biography of Robert Worth Bingham (who married Flagler's widow a year before her death); and The Jefferson Conspiracies (1994), about the death of Meriwether Lewis (released several months after Chandler's death). He also ghost-wrote the autobiography of his friend, Lafayette Lawyer J. Minos Simon. Chandler lived in New Orleans during the late 1960s and 1970s where he resided in an apartment in a building owned by Clay Shaw. He died in Denver at age 56.
May 26, 1926
Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926 – September 28, 1991) was an American jazz musician, trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. Widely considered one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, Miles Davis was, together with his musical groups, at the forefront of several major developments in jazz music, including bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and jazz fusion. In 2006, Davis was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which recognized him as 'one of the key figures in the history of jazz'. In 2008, his 1959 album Kind of Blue received its fourth platinum certification from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), for shipments of at least four million copies in the United States. On December 15, 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a symbolic resolution recognizing and commemorating the album Kind of Blue on its 50th anniversary, 'honoring the masterpiece and reaffirming jazz as a national treasure'.
May 26, 1970
Alexander Medawar Garland (born 26 May 1970) is an English novelist, screenwriter, film producer and director. He rose to prominence as a novelist in the late 1990s with his novel The Beach, which led some critics to call Garland a key voice of Generation X. He subsequently received praise for the screenplays of the films 28 Days Later (2002), Sunshine (2007), Never Let Me Go (2010) and Dredd (2012). In 2015, Garland made his directorial debut with Ex Machina, a science fiction thriller which explores the relationship between mankind and artificial intelligence; the film earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. His second film, 2018's Annihilation, based on the 2014 novel by Jeff VanderMeer, was a critical success.
May 26, 1924
Peter Godfrey Foote (26 May 1924 – 29 September 2009) was a scholar of Old Norse literature and Scandinavian studies. He inaugurated the Department of Scandinavian Studies at University College London, and headed it for 20 years. Foote was born and raised in Swanage, Dorset, the fourth of five sons of a butcher. His two eldest brothers had to leave school at 14; he and the other younger boys were able to attend grammar school. In 1942 he entered University College of the South West of England (now Exeter University) on a scholarship. His studies were interrupted in 1943 by service in the Royal Navy, mostly in the Far East. Upon demobilisation, Foote resumed his university studies at the start of 1947 and in 1948 earned a University of London external BA with first class honours. In 1948-49 he studied at the University of Oslo on a Norwegian government research studentship, and he then began postgraduate studies in the Department of English at University College, London, receiving an MA in 1951. He had already been appointed a teaching assistant and then assistant lecturer in Old Icelandic within the Department of Scandinavian Studies, which at the time was still part of the Department of English. Over the next 13 years he advanced to reader in Old Scandinavian and then in 1963 to professor of Scandinavian Studies, with the separation of the field from English as a new department. Together with Hugh Smith, director of University College's Department of English and Scandinavian Studies in the 1950s, Foote saw the wisdom of studying Old Norse literature and culture in association with the modern Scandinavian languages and the history of all the Scandinavian countries. In his inaugural lecture in 1964, on Færeyinga saga, Foote looked forward in this spirit to the college teaching modern Icelandic and Faroese, and treating Scandinavian history as a unified field. He said then: "Old Scandinavian . . . confers a welcome freedom, so that I may with perfect propriety offer a lecture on an Icelandic text concerning Atlantic islanders of Norwegian origin whose descendants have now for some centuries technically owed allegiance to the Danish crown". Foote expanded the new department during his tenure, adding first a full-time position in Scandinavian philology (1964), then another in Norse studies (1965), classes in Faroese (1968), then a teaching assistantship in modern Icelandic (1970s), and finally after considerable effort a lectureship in Nordic history (1970). He continued to teach occasionally at University College until 2006, more than twenty years after retiring. He was also very active in the Viking Society for Northern Research, editing Saga-Book, its journal, from 1952 to 1976 and serving twice as president (1974–76 and 1990–92) among other positions. He received honorary doctorates from the University of Iceland and the University of Uppsala and national honours from Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. Foote was greatly respected for the quality of his translations, which included Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu (1957) and together with others, the ancient Icelandic law book Grágás (Laws of Early Iceland, 1980 and 2000). He co-wrote The Viking Achievement (1960) with David M. Wilson. After he retired he produced a three-volume edited translation, the first English edition, of Olaus Magnus's 16th-century Latin Description of the Northern Peoples (1996–98) and edited Jóns saga helga (2003). In 1951 Foote married Eleanor McCaig, from the Stranraer region, whom he had met in the Far East during World War II when she was a nurse. She died in 2006. They had two daughters and a son. He enjoyed walking and bell-ringing, and participated until 2008 in a reading group that took its name, the Orðhenglar ("Pedants"), from his insistence on correct Icelandic.
May 27, 1937
Andrei Georgiyevich Bitov (born Leningrad/St. Petersburg, May 27, 1937) is a prominent Russian writer. Many consider him among the foremost Russian writers of the late 20th century. Among the novels that solidified his reputation are: Flying-Away Monakhov, Life in Windy Weather, Pushkin House, Captive of the Caucasus, and The Monkey Link. Bitov was granted the Bunin Award in 2006 for his selected prose works Palace Without a Tsar. Bitov’s works have been translated into a number of European languages, including English, German, Swedish, French and Italian.
May 27, 1894
Louis-Ferdinand Céline was the pen name of Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 – 1 July 1961). He was a French novelist, pamphleteer and physician. The name Céline was the first name of his grandmother. He is considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, developing a new style of writing that modernized both French and world literature.
May 27, 1949
Alma Guillermoprieto (born May 27, 1949) is a Mexican journalist who has written extensively about Latin America for the British and American press. Her writings have also been widely disseminated within the Spanish-speaking world. Guillermoprieto was born and grew up in Mexico City. In her teens, she moved to New York City with her mother and she studied modern dance for several years. From 1962 to 1973, she was a professional dancer. Her first book, Samba (1990), was an account of a season studying at a samba school in Rio de Janeiro. In the mid-1970s, she started her career as a journalist for The Guardian, moving later to the Washington Post. In January, 1982, Guillermoprieto, then based in Mexico City, was one of two journalists (the other was Raymond Bonner of The New York Times) who broke the story of the El Mozote massacre in which some 900 villagers at El Mozote, El Salvador, were slaughtered by the Salvadoran army in December, 1981. With great hardship and at great personal risk, she was smuggled in by FMLN rebels to visit the site approximately a month after the massacre took place. When the story broke simultaneously in the Post and Times on January 27, 1982, it was dismissed as propaganda by the Reagan administration. Subsequently, however, the details of the massacre as first reported by Guillermoprieto and Bonner were verified, with widespread repercussions. During much of the subsequent decade, Guillermoprieto was a South America bureau chief for Newsweek. Guillermoprieto won an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship in 1985 to research and write about changes in rural life under the policies of the European Economic Community. During the 1990s, she came into her own as a freelance writer, producing long, extensively researched articles on Latin American culture and politics for The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, including outstanding pieces on the Colombian civil war, the Shining Path during the Internal conflict in Peru, the aftermath of the "Dirty War" in Argentina, and post-Sandinista Nicaragua. These were bundled in the book The Heart That Bleeds (1994), now considered a classic portrait of the politics and culture of Latin America during the "lost decade" (it was published in Spanish as Al pie de un volcán te escribo — Crónicas latinoamericanas in 1995). In 1993 she published an article in the New Yorker on Pablo Escobar; this article, "Exit El Patron," was referenced in the Netflix series "Narcos". In April 1995, at the request of Gabriel García Márquez, Guillermoprieto taught the inaugural workshop at the Fundación para un Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano, an institute for promoting journalism that was established by García Márquez in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. She has since held seven workshops for young journalists throughout the continent. That same year, Guillermoprieto also received a MacArthur Fellowship. A second anthology of articles, Looking for History, was published in 2001, which won a George Polk Award. She also published a collection of articles in Spanish on the Mexican crisis, El año en que no fuimos felices. In 2004, Guillermoprieto published a memoir, Dancing with Cuba, which revolved on the year she spent living in Cuba in her early twenties. An excerpt from it was published in 2003 in The New Yorker. In the fall of 2008, she joined the faculty of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Chicago, as a Tinker Visiting Professor. In 2018, she won the Premio Princesa de Asturias in Communication and Humanities, Spain's most prestigious award for authors.
May 27, 1894
Samuel Dashiell Hammett (May 27, 1894 – January 10, 1961) was an American author of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories, a screenplay writer, and political activist. Among the enduring characters he created are Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon), Nick and Nora Charles (The Thin Man), and the Continental Op (Red Harvest and The Dain Curse). In addition to the significant influence his novels and stories had on film, Hammett 'is now widely regarded as one of the finest mystery writers of all time' and was called, in his obituary in The New York Times, 'the dean of the... 'hard-boiled' school of detective fiction.' Time magazine included Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest on a list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.
May 27, 1925
Tony Hillerman (May 27, 1925 – October 26, 2008) was an award-winning American author of detective novels and non-fiction works best known for his Navajo Tribal Police mystery novels. Several of his works have been adapted as big-screen and television movies.
May 27, 1929
Charles Tilly (May 27, 1929, Lombard, IL - April 29, 2008, The Bronx, New York City, NY) was Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University. His work focuses on large-scale social change and its relationship to contentious politics, especially in Europe, since 1500. His books include The Politics of Collective Violence; Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650-2000; Social Movements, 1768-2004; Economic and Political Contention in Comparative Perspective, coedited with Maria Kousis; Identities, Boundaries, and Social Ties; and Trust and Rule; Why? (Princeton) and Democracy.
May 27, 1930
John Simmons Barth (born May 27, 1930) is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictional quality of his work. John Barth, called ‘Jack’, was born in Cambridge, Maryland. Barth has an older brother, Bill, and a twin sister, Jill. He briefly studied ‘Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration’ at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, from which he received a B.A. in 1951 and an M.A. in 1952 (for which he wrote a thesis novel, The Shirt of Nessus). Barth was a professor at The Pennsylvania State University from 1953 to 1965. During the ‘American high Sixties,’ he moved to teach at University at Buffalo, The State University of New York from 1965 to 1973. In that period he came to know ‘the remarkable short fiction’ of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, which inspired his collection Lost in the Funhouse. He then taught at Boston University (visiting professor, 1972–73) and Johns Hopkins University (1973–95) before retiring in 1995. Barth began his career with The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, two short ‘realist’ novels that deal wittily with controversial topics, suicide and abortion respectively. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), was initially intended as the completing novel of a trilogy comprising his first two ‘realist’ novels, but, as a consequence of Barth's maturation as a writer, it developed into a different project. The novel is significant as it marked Barth's discovery of Postmodernism. Barth's next novel, Giles Goat-Boy (about 800 pages), is a speculative fiction based on the conceit of the university as universe. A boy raised as a goat discovers his humanity and becomes a savior in a story presented as a computer tape given to Barth, who denies that it is his work. The short story collection Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and the novella collection Chimera (1972) are even more metafictional than their two predecessors, foregrounding the writing process and presenting achievements such as a seven-deep nested quotation. Chimera shared the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. In the novel LETTERS (1979), Barth interacts with characters from his first six books. His 1994 Once upon a Time: A Floating Opera, reuses stock characters, stock situations and formulas. Barth's work is characterized by a historical awareness of literary tradition and by the practice of rewriting typical of postmodernism. He said: ‘I don't know what my view of history is, but insofar as it involves some allowance for repetition and recurrence, reorchestration, and reprise [...] I would always want it to be more in the form of a thing circling out and out and becoming more inclusive each time.’ In Barth's postmodern sensibility, parody is a central device. Around 1972, in an interview, Barth declared that ‘The process [of making a novel] is the content, more or less.’ While writing these books, Barth was also pondering and discussing the theoretical problems of fiction writing. In 1967 he wrote a highly influential and to some controversial essay considered a manifesto of postmodernism, The Literature of Exhaustion (first printed in The Atlantic, 1967). It depicts literary realism as a ‘used-up’ tradition; Barth's description of his own work, which many thought illustrated a core trait of postmodernism, is ‘novels which imitate the form of a novel, by an author who imitates the role of author’.
May 27, 1867
Enoch Arnold Bennett (27 May 1867 – 27 March 1931) was an English writer. He is best known as a novelist, but he also worked in other fields such as journalism, propaganda and film.
May 27, 1884
Max Brod (May 27, 1884 – December 20, 1968) was a German-speaking Jewish Czech, later Israeli, author, composer, and journalist. Although he was a prolific writer in his own right, he is most famous as the friend and biographer of Franz Kafka. As Kafka's literary executor, Brod refused to follow the writer's instructions to burn his life's work, and had them published instead. Kafka would probably not be famous without Brod's help.
May 27, 1947
Dr. Georg Feuerstein Ph.D (27 May 1947 – 25 August 2012) was a German Indologist specializing in the philosophy and praxis of Yoga. Feuerstein authored over 30 books on mysticism, Yoga, Tantra, and Hinduism. He translated, among other traditional texts, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and the Bhagavad Gita. Feuerstein was born in Würzburg, Germany. He moved to England to do his postgraduate research at Durham University and subsequently lived for 23 years in the United States. In 2004, Georg and his wife and spiritual partner, Brenda L Feuerstein, moved to Saskatchewan, Canada and in 2012 he became a citizen of Canada, where he died 25 August 2012.
May 28,1908
Ian Fleming (1908-1964) worked in Naval Intelligence at the British Admiralty during World War II. His wartime experiences provided him with the inspiration for his sensationally popular James Bond novels.
May 28, 1916
Walker Percy (May 28, 1916 – May 10, 1990) was a Southern author from Covington, Louisiana, whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is known for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans, Louisiana, the first of which, The Moviegoer, won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. He devoted his literary life to the exploration of ‘the dislocation of man in the modern age.’ His work displays a combination of existential questioning, Southern sensibility, and deep Catholic faith.
May 28, 1928
André Schwarz-Bart (May 28, 1928, Metz, Moselle - September 30, 2006, Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe) was a French novelist of Polish-Jewish origins. Schwarz-Bart is best known for his novel The Last of the Just (originally published as Le Dernier des justes). The book, which traces the story of a Jewish family from the time of the Crusades to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, earned Schwarz-Bart the Prix Goncourt in 1959. He won the Jerusalem Prize in 1967. Schwarz-Bart's parents moved to France in 1924, a few years before he was born. In 1941, they were deported to Auschwitz. Soon after, Schwarz-Bart, still a young teen, joined the Resistance, despite the fact that his first language was Yiddish, and he could barely speak French. It was his experiences as a Jew during the war that later prompted him to write his major work, chronicling Jewish history through the eyes of a wounded survivor. He spent his final years in Guadeloupe, with his wife, the novelist Simone Schwarz-Bart, whose parents were natives of the island. The two co-wrote the book Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes (1967) It is also suggested that his wife collaborated with him on A Woman Named Solitude. The two were awarded the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde in 2008 for their lifetime of literary work. Schwarz-Bart died of a complications after heart surgery in 2006. Their son, Jacques Schwarz-Bart, is a noted jazz saxophonist.
May 28, 1946
William Hartley Hume Shawcross, CVO (born 28 May 1946, Sussex) is the Chairman of the Charity Commission for England and Wales, and a British writer and commentator. Shawcross was educated at St Aubyns Preparatory School, Rottingdean, Eton College and University College, Oxford. He attended St Martin's Art School to study sculpture after leaving Oxford. He worked as a journalist for The Sunday Times. He writes and lectures on issues of international policy, geopolitics, Southeast Asia and refugees for a number of publications, including Time, Newsweek, International Herald Tribune, The Spectator, The Washington Post and Rolling Stone. He has also written a number of books, including biographies of Rupert Murdoch and the Shah of Iran. His official biography of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother was released in the UK on 17 September 2009 and in the United States on 20 October 2009. Shawcross was Chairman of ARTICLE 19, the international centre on censorship, from 1986 to 1996. He was a Member of Council of the Disasters Emergency Committee from 1997 to 2002, and a board member of the International Crisis Group from 1995 to 2005. He was a member of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees's Informal Advisory Group from 1995 to 2000. From 1997 to 2003 he was a member of the BBC World ServiceAdvisory Council. In 2008 he became a Patron of the Wiener Library and in 2011 he joined the board of the Anglo-Israel Association and was appointed to the board of the Henry Jackson Society. Shawcross's father was the politician, lawyer, Chief British Prosecutor at Nuremberg and life peer Hartley Shawcross. His mother was Joan Winifred Mather, who died in a riding accident on the Sussex Downs in 1974. In 1970 he married the writer and art critic Marina Warner, and their son, Conrad, is an artist. The marriage ended in divorce. Shawcross later married Michal Levin: their daughter Eleanor, has been a member of the Council of Economic Advisers to George Osborne since 2008. She had previously worked on Boris Johnson's mayoral campaign. Eleanor is married to Simon Wolfson, Baron Wolfson, who is the son of David Wolfson, Baron Wolfson of Sunningdale, both of whom are Conservative life peers and who are the current and former Next chairmen. Shawcross and his third wife, Olga Polizzi, are based in London. Shawcross has lifelong ties to Cornwall where he is a keen campaigner in the preservation and protection of local Conservation Areas. His campaign succeeded in obtaining Grade II listing for St Mawes's historic, and endangered, sea wall. He was appointed Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (CVO) in the 2011 New Year Honours.
May 28, 1943
John Cannizzaro Jr. (born May 28, 1943, Waverly, PA), better known as John Canemaker, is an American independent animator, animation historian, author, teacher and lecturer. In 1980, he began teaching and developing the animation program at New York University, Tisch School of the Arts', Kanbar Institute of Film and Television Department. Since 1988 he has directed the program and is currently a tenured full professor. From 2001-2002 he was Acting Chair of the NYU Undergraduate Film and Television Department. In 2006, his film The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation, a 28-minute animated piece about Canemaker's relationship with his father, won the Academy Award for best animated short. In 2007 the same piece picked up an Emmy award for its graphic and artistic design.
May 28, 1953
Narendra Jadhav was born in Mumbai, India. He is currently the principal adviser and chief economist for the Reserve Bank of India and is the author of seven books and more than seventy research papers.
May 28, 1947
Richard White is Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University. He is the author of numerous prize-winning books, including Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815, and It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West. He is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Mellon Distinguished Scholar Award, among other awards.
May 28, 1743
Johann David Wyss (May 28, 1743 in Bern – January 11, 1818 in Bern) was a Swiss author, best remembered for his book The Swiss Family Robinson (Der schweizerische Robinson) (1812). It is said that he was inspired by Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, but wanted to write a story from which his own children would learn, as the father in the story taught important lessons to his children.
May 29, 1935
André Philippus Brink (born 29 May 1935 in Vrede) is a South African novelist. He writes in Afrikaans and English and is a Professor of English at the University of Cape Town. In the 1960s he and Breyten Breytenbach were key figures in the Afrikaans literary movement known as Die Sestigers (‘The Sixty-ers’). These writers sought to use Afrikaans as a language to speak against the apartheid government, and also to bring into Afrikaans literature the influence of contemporary English and French trends. His novel Kennis van die aand (‘Knowledge of the night’) (1973) was the first Afrikaans book to be banned by the South African government. Brink writes his works simultaneously in English and Afrikaans. While Brink's early novels were especially concerned with apartheid, his more recent work engages the new range issues posed by life in a democratic South Africa.
May 29, 1929
Harry Gordon Frankfurt (born May 29, 1929) is an American philosopher. He is professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University and has previously taught at Yale University and Rockefeller University.
May 29, 1933
Abdel Rahman Munif (May 29, 1933 – January 24, 2004) was a Jordanian-born Saudi novelist. His novels include strong political elements and parodies of the Middle Eastern elite class. His work so offended the rulers of Saudi Arabia that many of his books were banned and his Saudi citizenship revoked. Munif was born a Saudi national and brought up in Amman, Jordan to Saudi parents and an Iraqi grandmother. In 1952 he moved to Baghdad to study law and later moved to Cairo. He received a law degree from the Sorbonne and a PhD in oil economics from the University of Belgrade's Faculty of Economics. He later returned to Iraq to work in the oil ministry and became a member of the Ba'ath Party. He began writing in the 1970s after he left his job with the Iraqi ministry, quit the Ba'ath party, and moved to Damascus, Syria, removing himself from a regime he opposed. He quickly became known for his scathing parodies of Middle Eastern elites, especially those of Saudi Arabia, a country which banned many of his books and stripped him of Saudi citizenship. He used his knowledge of the oil industry to full effect criticizing the businessmen who ran it and the politicians they served. Munif was the author of a total of fifteen novels. The Cities of Salt quintet followed the evolution of the Arabian peninsula as its traditional Bedouin culture is transformed by the oil boom. The novels create a history of a broad region, evoking comparisons to William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. The quintet begins with Mudun al-Milh (Cities of Salt, 1984) in the desert oasis of Wadi al-Uyoun that is disrupted by the arrival of Western oilmen in an image similar to that of the disrupted village of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. As Achebe described the effects on a traditional African village of the arrival of powerful missionaries, so Munif chronicles the economic, social, and psychological effects of the promise of immeasurable wealth drawn from the deserts of nomad and oasis communities. The quintet continues with Al-ukhdud (1985;The Trench), Taqasim al-layl wa-al-nahar (1989; Variations on Night and Day), Al-munbatt (1989; The Uprooted), and Badiyat al zulumat (1989; The Desert of Darkness). Daniel Burt ranked the quintet as the 71st greatest novel of all time. The last two novels in the series have not been translated into English. While his works were never particularly successful in the west, throughout the Middle East they are critically acclaimed and extremely popular. Cities of Salt was described by Edward Said as the 'only serious work of fiction that tries to show the effect of oil, Americans and the local oligarchy on a Gulf country.' While he was one of the fiercest critics of Saddam Hussein and his regime, he was utterly opposed to the American invasion of Iraq and spent the last two years of his life working on non-fiction projects to oppose what he saw as renewed imperialism.
May 29, 1942
Robert Lee Allen (born May 29, 1942) is an activist, writer, and Adjunct Professor of African-American Studies and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Allen received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco, and previously taught at San José State University and Mills College. He is Senior Editor (with Editor-in-Chief and Publisher Robert Chrisman) of The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research, published quarterly or more frequently in Oakland California by the Black World Foundation since 1969.
May 29, 1874
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) better known as G. K. Chesterton, was an English writer, lay theologian, poet, philosopher, dramatist, journalist, orator, literary and art critic, biographer, and Christian apologist. Chesterton is often referred to as the 'prince of paradox.' Time magazine, in a review of a biography of Chesterton, observed of his writing style: 'Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories—first carefully turning them inside out.' Chesterton is well known for his fictional priest-detective Father Brown, and for his reasoned apologetics. Even some of those who disagree with him have recognized the wide appeal of such works as Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. Chesterton, as a political thinker, cast aspersions on both Progressivism and Conservatism, saying, 'The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.' Chesterton routinely referred to himself as an 'orthodox' Christian, and came to identify this position more and more with Catholicism, eventually converting to Roman Catholicism from High Church Anglicanism. George Bernard Shaw, Chesterton's 'friendly enemy' according to Time, said of him, 'He was a man of colossal genius.' Biographers have identified him as a successor to such Victorian authors as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, Cardinal John Henry Newman, and John Ruskin.
May 29, 1944
THADIOUS M. DAVIS is professor of English at Brown University. She is the author of FAULKNER’S NEGRO: ART AND THE SOUTHERN CONTEXT.
May 29, 1950
Melvin Dixon (May 29, 1950, Stamford, Connecticut – October 26, 1992) was an American Professor of Literature, and an author, poet and translator. He wrote about black gay men. He earned a BA from Wesleyan University in 1971 and a PhD from Brown University in 1975. Dixon was a Professor of Literature at Queens College from 1980 to 1992. He was the author of several books. In 1989, Trouble the Water won the Charles H. and N. Mildred Nilon Excellence in Minority Fiction Award. Vanishing Rooms won a Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Literature in 1992. Dixon died of complications from AIDS, which he had been battling since 1969, in his hometown, one year after his partner Richard Horovitz did.
May 29, 1925
Robert Coleman Dowell (May 29, 1925 – August 3, 1985) was an American writer.
May 29, 1930
Elvira Orphée (born 29 May 1930 in San Miguel de Tucumán) is an Argentine writer. She settled in Buenos Aires at the end of the 1940's. Orphée was married to the painter Miguel Ocampo, father of her three daughters, whom he accompanied as a diplomat to Rome where he became friends with Alberto Moravia, Italo Calvino and Elsa Morante. In 1961 she returned to Argentina and then to Paris where she was Counsellor of Latin American literature to the publishing house Gallimard. Her novel, 'Sweet air' (1966), has been recently reprinted under the label Bajo La Luna (August 2009 - Buenos Aires).
May 29, 1880
Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler (29 May 1880 – 8 May 1936) was a German historian and philosopher of history whose interests included mathematics, science, and art. He is best known for his book The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), published in 1918 and 1922, covering all of world history. Spengler's model of history postulates that any culture is a superorganism with a limited and predictable lifespan. Spengler predicted that about the year 2000, Western civilization would enter the period of pre-death emergency whose countering would necessitate Caesarism (extraconstitutional omnipotence of the executive branch of the central government).
May 29, 1892
Alfonsina Storni (May 29, 1892 – October 25, 1938) was one of the most important Argentine and Latin-American poets of the modernist period. Storni was born in Sala Capriasca, Switzerland, to Italian-Swiss parents. Before her birth, her father had started a brewery in the city of San Juan, Argentina, producing beer and soda. In 1891, following the advice of a doctor, he returned with his wife to Switzerland, where Alfonsina was born the following year and lived until she was four years old. In 1896 the family returned to San Juan, and a few years later, in 1901, moved to Rosario. There her father opened a tavern, where Storni worked doing a variety of chores. In 1907, she joined a traveling theatre company which took her around the country. With them she performed in Henrik Ibsen's Spectres, Benito Pérez Galdós's La loca de la casa, and Florencio Sánchez's Los muertos. In 1908, Storni returned to live with her mother, who had remarried and was living in Bustinza. After a year there, Storni went to Coronda, where she undertook studies that would lead to employment as a rural primary schoolteacher. During this period she also started working for the local magazines Mundo Rosarino and Monos y Monadas, as well as the prestigious Mundo Argentino. In 1912 she moved to Buenos Aires, seeking the anonymity afforded by a big city. The following year her son Alejandro was born, the illegitimate child of a journalist in Coronda. Sustaining herself with teaching and newspaper journalism, she lived in Buenos Aires where the social and economical difficulties faced by Argentina's growing middle classes were inspiring an emerging body of women's rights activists. In spite of economic difficulties, she published La inquietud del rosal in 1916, and later started writing for the magazine Caras y Caretas while working as a cashier in a shop. Storni soon became acquainted with other writers, such as José Enrique Rodó and Amado Nervo, and established friendships with José Ingenieros and Manuel Ugarte. Her economic situation improved, which allowed her to travel to Montevideo, Uruguay. There she met the poet Juana de Ibarbourou, as well as Horacio Quiroga, with whom she would become great friends. Her 1920 book Languidez received the first Municipal Poetry Prize and the second National Literature Prize. She taught literature at the Escuela Normal de Lenguas Vivas, and she published Ocre. Her style now showed more realism than before, and a strongly feminist theme. Solitude and marginality began to affect her health, and worsening emotional problems forced her to leave her job as teacher. Trips to Europe changed her writing by helping her to lose her former models, and reach a more dramatic lyricism, loaded with an erotic vehemence unknown in those days, and new feminist thoughts in Mundo de siete pozos (1934) and Mascarilla y trébol (1938). A year and a half after her friend Quiroga committed suicide in 1937, and haunted by solitude and breast cancer, Storni sent her last poem, Voy a dormir ("I'm going to sleep") to La Nación newspaper in October 1938. Around 1:00 AM on Tuesday the 25th, Alfonsina left her room and headed towards the sea at La Perla beach in Mar del Plata, Argentina. Later that morning two workers found her body washed up on the beach. Although her biographers hold that she jumped into the water from a breakwater, popular legend is that she slowly walked out to sea until she drowned. Her death inspired Ariel Ramírez and Félix Luna to compose the song Alfonsina y el Mar ("Alfonsina and the Sea"), which has been performed by Mercedes Sosa, Tania Libertad, Danny Rivera, Nana Mouskouri, Mocedades, Shakira, Andrés Calamaro, Katia Cardenal, Avishai Cohen, Ane Brun, and many others. Also, fifty years after her death, she inspired the Latin American artist Aquino to incorporate her image into many of his paintings. Alfonsina Storni published some of her first works in 1916 in Emin Arslan's literary magazine La Nota, where she was a permanent contributor from March 28 until November 21, 1919. Her poems Convalecer and Golondrinas were published in the magazine. She was the winner of the First Municipal Poetry Prize and the second National Literature Prize for her book Languidez. Storni had several phases of writing over the course of her career: the first from 1916-1920, a second from 1925-1926, and a third from 1934 until her death in 1938. In Storni's time, her work did not align itself with a particular movement or genre. It was not until the modernist and avant-garde movements began to fade that her work seemed to fit in. She was criticized for her atypical style, and she has been labeled most often as a postmodern writer although this label, too, is controversial. Recurring themes in Storni's work include humanism, nature, alienation, death, family, sorrow, women's issues, and violence. One of her most well known poems, Tu Me Quieres Blanca challenged double standards and created a literary indictment against hegemonic male characters. Over time, her work developed strongly feminist themes and explored the collective concerns of women. In 1919 alone Storni authored six short stories, two novels, and a series of essays. The publication of Languidez followed the next year, closing one period of writing and opening another. Five years later she authored Ocre during a period of transition that shifted her tone of irony which would go on to characterize her following works. Storni's early poetry received criticism for being immature and beginner, although these works are amongst the most well known and regarded. The eroticism and feminist themes in her writing have also received harsh criticism, but as time passed critics noted that her work matured and developed. After a nearly eight-year absence from the writing scene, she returned with two books, Mundo De Siete Pozos and Mascarill Y Trebol, that now mark the height of her poetic maturity.
May 30, 1902
Paul Cain was the pen name used by George Caryl Sims (born May 30, 1902 in Des Moines, Iowa, died June 23, 1966 in North Hollywood, California), an American pulp fiction author and screenwriter. George Carol Sims' writing career was spent under two distinct pseudonyms. As Paul Cain he wrote a remarkable series of 17 hard-boiled detective novelettes for the pulp magazine ‘Black Mask’ beginning in early 1932. His character, gambler Gerry Kells, was so popular that the first five stories were combined in book form as ‘Fast One’ in 1933 and remains today as one of the best examples of the genre. His other coinciding writing career was spent as screenwriter Peter Ruric; his most notable script was for The Black Cat (1934), a lesser Boris Karloff classic. The son of a police detective, Sims was born in Des Moines, Iowa. His parents separated in 1908 and he spent the next decade living in a tough neighborhood in Chicago. Sims ended up in southern California in 1918 and became fascinated with the film industry, eventually gaining work as a production assistant and uncredited scenarist. On a trip to New York City in the early 1930s he met hard-drinking actress Gertrude Michael and together they returned to Hollywood in 1932, where she had a brief run at A-movie stardom at Paramount that was derailed by the studio's financial trouble and her alcoholism. Their relationship was really a three-way co-dependent affair with the bottle and Michael, whose once-promising acting career had nosedived by 1935, left him after he wrote a widely-read, thinly-veiled account of her. Sims eventually scripted nine films for major studios, but his increasing problems with alcoholism killed off his pulp career by 1936. His Hollywood career ended at the chaotically run RKO Studios in 1944 and Sims would spend much of the late 1940s and 1950s in Europe. He attempted a Hollywood comeback in 1959 but found that his reputation kept the doors of the crumbling studio system closed to him. He contracted cancer and died in a cheap apartment in Hollywood in the summer of 1966.
May 30, 1941
Roberto Calasso (born 30 May 1941 in Florence) is an Italian writer and publisher. Calasso was born in 1941, into a family of the Tuscan upper class, well connected with some of the great Italian intellectuals of their time. His maternal grandfather Ernesto Codignola was a professor of philosophy at Florence University. Codignola created a new publishing house called La Nuova Italia, in Florence, as his friend Benedetto Croce had done in Bari with Laterza. Calasso's uncle Tristano Codignola, was a partisan during World War II who after the war joined the political life of the new republic, and was for a while Minister of Education. His mother Melisenda – who gave up an academic career to raise her three children – was a scholar of German literature, working on Hölderlin’s translations of the Greek poet Pindar. His father Francesco was a law professor, first at Florence University and then in Rome, where he eventually became dean of his faculty. Calasso has worked for the publishing firm of Adelphi Edizioni since its founding in 1962 and became its Chairman in 1999. His books have been translated into most European languages. He is the author of an unnamed ongoing work reflecting on the culture of modernity which began with The Ruin of Kasch in 1983, a book admired by Italo Calvino. Dedicated to the French statesman Talleyrand, it was followed in 1988 by The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, in which the tale of Cadmus and his wife Harmonia becomes a pretext for re-telling the great tales of Greek mythology and reflecting on the reception of Greek culture for a contemporary readership. Another world civilization is surveyed in Ka (1996, where the subject of the re-telling is Hindu mythology). K restricts the focus to a single author, Franz Kafka; this trend continues with Il rosa Tiepolo, inspired by an adjective used by Proust to describe a shade of pink used by Tiepolo in his paintings. With La folie Baudelaire, Calasso once more broadens his scope to fresco a whole civilisation, that of Paris in the latter half of the 19th century, reconsidering the lives and works of the post-romantic generation of writers and artists from Baudelaire to Valéry. In his most recent work, Ardore (2010), the author returns to India for an exhaustive analysis of the theory and practice of Vedic sacrifice and its significance for post-modern epistemology. His more narrowly focused essays relating to European modernity are collected in I quarantanove gradini (The Forty-nine Steps), addressed to Pierre Klossowski and his wife; Literature and the gods (2002) (based on his Weidenfeld Lectures at Oxford, on the decline and return of pagan imagery in the art of the west), and La follia che viene dalle ninfe (The Madness that Comes from the Nymphs), a collection of related essays ranging from Plato's Phaedrus to Nabokov's Lolita.
May 30, 1953
Can Xue , née Deng Xiaohua, is a Chinese avant-garde fiction writer, literary critic, and tailor. She was born May 30, 1953 in Changsha, Hunan, China. Her family was severely persecuted following her father being labeled an ultra-rightist in the Anti-rightist Movement of 1957. Her writing, which consists mostly of short fiction, breaks with the realism of earlier modern Chinese writers. She has also written novels, novellas, and literary criticisms of the work of Dante, Jorge Luis Borges, and Franz Kafka. Some of her fiction has been translated and published in English.
May 30, 1903
Born in 1903 in New York City, Countee Cullen (Countee LeRoy Porter) was raised in a Methodist parsonage. He attended De Witt Clinton High School in New York and began writing poetry at the age of fourteen. In 1922, Cullen entered New York University. His poems were published in The Crisis, under the leadership of W. E. B. Du Bois, and Opportunity, a magazine of the National Urban League. He was soon after published in Harper’s, the Century Magazine, and Poetry. He won several awards for his poem, ‘Ballad of the Brown Girl,’ and graduated from New York University in 1923. That same year, Harper published his first volume of verse, Color, and he was admitted to Harvard University where he completed a master’s degree. His second volume of poetry, Copper Sun (1927), met with controversy in the black community because Cullen did not give the subject of race the same attention he had given it in Color. He was raised and educated in a primarily white community, and he differed from other poets of the Harlem Renaissance like Langston Hughes in that he lacked the background to comment from personal experience on the lives of other blacks or use popular black themes in his writing. An imaginative lyric poet, he wrote in the tradition of Keats and Shelley and was resistant to the new poetic techniques of the Modernists. He died in 1946.
May 30, 1950
M.G. Vassanji is the author of six acclaimed novels: THE GUNNY SACK, which won the regional Commonwealth Prize; NO NEW LAND; THE BOOK OF SECRETS, which won the very first Giller Prize; AMRIIKA; THE IN-BETWEEN WORLD OF VIKRAM LALL, which also won the Giller Prize, and THE ASSASSIN’S SONG, which was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. He is also the author of two collections of short fiction, UHURU STREET and WHEN SHE WAS QUEEN, and a work of non-fiction, A PLACE WITHIN: REDISCOVERING INDIA. He lives in Toronto with his wife and two sons.
May 30, 1912
Julian Gustave Symons (May 30, 1912, London, United Kingdom - November 23, 1994, Kent, United Kingdom) was a British crime writer and poet. He also wrote social and military history, biography and studies of literature. Julian Symons was born in London. He was a younger brother, and later the biographer, of the writer A. J. A. Symons. He left school at 14. He founded the poetry magazine Twentieth Century Verse in 1937, editing it for two years. ‘He turned to crime writing in a light–hearted way before the war and soon afterwards established himself as a leading exponent of it, though his use of irony to show the violence behind the respectable masks of society place many of his books on the level of the orthodox novel.’ In World War II he applied for recognition as an anti-capitalist conscientious objector, but ended up in the Royal Armoured Corps 1942 to 1944, when he was invalided out with a non-battle-related arm injury. After a period as an advertising copywriter, he became a full-time writer in 1947. During his career he won two Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America and, in 1982, received the MWA's Grand Master Award. Symons served as the president of the Detection Club from 1976 till 1985. Symons's 1972 book Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel (published as Mortal Consequences in the US) is one of the best-known critical works in the field of crime fiction. Revised editions were published in 1985 and 1992. Symons highlighted the distinction between the classic puzzler mystery, associated with such writers as Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, and the more modern ‘crime novel,’ which puts emphasis on psychology and motivation. Symons published over thirty crime novels and story collections between 1945 and 1994. His works combined elements of both the detective story and the crime novel, but leaned clearly toward the latter, with an emphasis on character and psychology which anticipated current crime fiction writers such as Ruth Rendell and P.D. James. His novels tend to focus on ordinary people drawn into a murderous chain of events; the intricate plots are often spiced with black humour. Novels typical of his style include The Colour of Murder (1957), the Edgar-winning The Progress of a Crime (1960), The Man Whose Dreams Came True (1968) The Man Who Lost His Wife (1970) and The Plot Against Roger Ryder (1973). Symons's crime fiction is highly prized by connoisseurs, even if it is less well-known to the general reading public. Symons wrote two modern-day Sherlock Holmes pastiches, as well as a pastiche that was set in the 1920s. In A Three Pipe Problem (1975), the detective was ‘. .a television actor, Sheridan Hayes, who wears the mask of Sherlock Holmes and assumes his character. The book neatly reversed the usual theme of the criminal behind the mask by having a rather commonplace man wearing the mask of the great detective.’ The Kentish Manor Murders was written in 1988. For his 1981 book The Great Detectives, he wrote a Sherlock Holmes pastiche instead of a biographical sketch. Entitled ‘How a Hermit was Disturbed in His Retirement,’ the events of the tale take place in the 1920s as Sherlock Holmes is drawn out of retirement in order to solve an unusual missing persons case. The story was included in the collection The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, in which it was given a more Doylean title of ‘The Adventure of Hillerman Hall.’ He also made occasional forays into historical mystery, such as The Blackheath Poisonings (1978), which was filmed for television in 1992.
May 30, 1955
Colm Toibin was born in Ireland in 1955. He is the author of The South, The Heather Blazing, The Story of the Night, The Blackwater Lightship and most recently The Master, which was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize. His non-fiction includes Bad Blood, Homage to Barcelona and The Sign of the Cross. His work has been translated into seventeen languages. He lives in Dublin.
May 30, 1902
Seton Lloyd was the first Director of the British institute of archaeology at Ankara and subsequently Professor of Western Asiatic archaeology at the University of London.
May 30, 1962
Elizabeth Alexander is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently ANTEBELLUM DREAM BOOK. She has taught and lectured on African American art and culture across the country and abroad for nearly two decades. Alexander currently teaches English and African American Studies at Yale University.
May 30, 1902
Giorgio Diaz de Santillana (30 May 1902 – 1974) was an Italian-American philosopher and historian of science, and Professor of the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Son of the Italian jurist David, expert of Islamic Law, Giorgio was born and mostly educated in Rome, Santillana moved to the United States in 1936 and became a naturalized US citizen in 1945. In 1941 he commenced his academic career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, becoming an Assistant Professor the following year. From 1943 to 1945 he served in the United States Army as a war correspondent. Following the war, in 1945 he returned to MIT and was made an Associate Professor in 1948, the year he was married. He became a full Professor of the History of Science in the School of Humanities in 1954. In 1969, he published a book entitled: Hamlet's Mill, An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time with Dr. Hertha von Dechend. This book focused upon the understanding of the connection between the mythological stories of Pharaonic Egypt, Babylon, Greece, Christianity, etc. and the ancient observations pertaining to the stars, planets and, most notably, the 26,000 year precession of the equinoxes. He died at Beverly, Massachusetts, in 1974.
May 30, 1962
Micheline R. Ishay is Professor and Director of the International Human Rights Program at the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver. She is the author of Internationalism and Its Betrayal (1995), editor of The Human Rights Reader: Major Speeches, Essays, and Documents from the Bible to the Present (1997), and coeditor of The Nationalism Reader (1995).
May 30, 1924
Reg Theriault (1924–2014), who was at various times an itinerant farmworker, a college student, a longshoreman on the San Francisco waterfront for more than thirty years,.and the author of three books about working people. Theriault was born into a family of packinghouse workers who followed the fruit crops. They called themselves "fruit tramps," traveling from the northwest, to the Sacramento Valley, the San Joaquin, down to the Imperial Valley and sometimes to Texas. His most successful book, "How to Tell When You Are Tired: A Brief Examination of Work," was widely praised when it appeared in 1995. Studs Turkel called it "absolutely wonderful." Kirkus Review said it was "an enlightening report about the dignity of hard work." The Chronicle said it was "delightful and absorbing." He is also the author of The Unmaking of the American Working Class (The New Press).
May 30, 1926
Julia Urquidi Illanes (30 May 1926 - 10 March 2010) was a Bolivian writer. Urquidi was born in Cochabamba. She was famous as the first wife of Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa (1955-1964) and also the namesake of one of his most famous novels, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. In 1983 she published her memories titled Lo que Varguitas no dijo (English: What Varguitas did not say). She died in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, aged 83.The English translator Catherine R. Perricone is Professor of Foreign Languages at Auburn University specializing in current Spanish American literature. She edited Alma y Corazon (Heart and Soul) an anthology of Latin American poetesses, and has published articles on Vargas Llosa and other novelists, an extensive bibliography on feminist criticism and Spanish American poetesses, and other subjects in Hispanic literature which have appeared in such journals as Hispania, Foreign Language Annals, Circulo, USF Language Quarterly, and The Americas Review.
May 31, 1968
John Connolly is an Irish writer who is best known for his series of novels starring private detective Charlie Parker.
May 31, 1907
Robert Peter Fleming (31 May 1907 – 18 August 1971) was a British adventurer and travel writer. He was the elder brother of Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond.
May 31, 1974
Born in 1974, TRISTRAM HUNT teaches modern British history at Queen Mary, University of London. He writes political and cultural commentary for the Los Angeles Times and Time magazine, and has authored numerous radio and television series for the BBC and Channel 4.
May 31, 1819
Walter ‘Walt’ Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse.
May 31, 1939
Al Young (May 31, 1939, Ocean Springs, Mississippi) is an American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and professor. On May 15, 2005 he was named Poet Laureate of California by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. In appointing Young as Poet Laureate, the Governor praised him: ‘He is an educator and a man with a passion for the Arts. His remarkable talent and sense of mission to bring poetry into the lives of Californians is an inspiration.’ Muriel Johnson, Director of the California Arts Council declared: ‘Like jazz, Al Young is an original American voice.’ Young’s many books include novels, collections of poetry, essays, and memoirs. His work has appeared in literary journals and magazines including Paris Review, Ploughshares, Essence, The New York Times, Chicago Review, Seattle Review, Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature, Chelsea, Rolling Stone, Gathering of the Tribes, and in anthologies including the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, and the Oxford Anthology of African American Literature. Born May 31, 1939 at Ocean Springs, Mississippi on the Gulf Coast near Biloxi, Al Young grew up in the rural South of villages and small towns, and in urban, industrial Detroit. From 1957-1960 he attended the University of Michigan, where he co-edited Generation, the campus literary magazine. In 1961 he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. Settling at first in Berkeley, he held a variety of colorful jobs (folksinger, lab aide, disk jockey, medical photographer, clerk typist, employment counselor) before graduating with honors from U.C. Berkeley with a degree in Spanish. His marriage in 1963 to technical writer and editor Arline Young produced one child: their son Michael, born in 1971. From 1969-1976 he was Edward B. Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford near Palo Alto, where he lived and worked for three decades. In the year 2000 he returned to Berkeley, where he continues to freelance. Young has taught poetry, fiction writing and American literature at U.C. Berkeley, U.C. Santa Cruz, U.C. Davis, Bowling Green State University, Foothill College, the Colorado College, Rice University, the University of Washington, the University of Michigan, the University of Arkansas, San José State University, where he was appointed the 2002 Lurie Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing, and Charles University in the Czech Republic under the auspices of the Prague Summer Programs. In the spring of 2003 he taught poetry at Davidson College (Davidson, NC), where he was McGee Professor in Writing. In the fall of 2003, as the first Coffey Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC, he taught a poetry workshop. From 2003-2006 he served on the faculty of Cave Canem’s summer workshop retreats for African American poets. His honors include Wallace Stegner, Guggenheim, Fulbright, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the PEN-Library of Congress Award for Short Fiction, the PEN-USA Award for Non-Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, two The New York Times Notable Book of the year citations, an Arts Council Silicon Valley Fellowship, the Stephen Henderson Achievement Award for Poetry, Radio Pacifica’s KPFA Peace Prize, the Glenna Luschei Distinguished Poetry Fellowship, and the Richard Wright Award for Excellence in Literature. He has twice received the American Book Award, for Bodies and Soul: Musical Memoirs (1982) and The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems 1990-2000 (2002). In the 1970s he wrote film scripts for producer Joseph Strick, Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, and Richard Pryor. In the 1980s and 90’s, as a cultural ambassador for the United States Information Agency, he traveled throughout South Asia, Egypt, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian West Bank. In 2001 he traveled to the Persian Gulf to lecture on American and African American literature and culture in Kuwait and in Bahrain for the U.S. Department of State. Subsequent lecture tours took him to Southern Italy in 2004, and to Italy in 2005. His poetry and prose have been translated into Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, German, Urdu, Korean, and other languages. Blending story, recitation and song, Young often performs with musicians.
May 31, 1826
John William De Forest (May 31, 1826 – July 17, 1906) was an American soldier and writer of realistic fiction, best known for his Civil War novel Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty.
May 31, 1926
Lloyd Fernando (31 May 1926 – 28 February 2008) was a Malaysian author and professor at the University of Malaya in the English Department. Lloyd Fernando was born to a Sinhalese family in Sri Lanka in 1926. In 1938, his family migrated to Singapore. Mr. Fernando was educated at St Patrick’s in Singapore, with the Japanese occupation interrupting that education from 1943 to 1945. During the Japanese attack on Singapore, Mr. Fernando’s father was killed. During the Japanese occupation, Fernando worked in a variety of manual labour jobs. Lloyd Fernando thereafter graduated from the University of Malaya in Singapore, and subsequently served as an instructor at the Singapore Polytechnic. Lloyd Fernando became an assistant lecturer at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur in 1960. Mr. Fernando was awarded a scholarship at Leeds University, UK where he received his PhD. In 1967 Fernando was appointed to serve as a professor at the English Department of the University of Malaya, where he served until his retirement in 1978. Subsequently, Mr. Fernando studied law at City University in the United Kingdom and then at Middle Temple, returning to Malaysia with two law degrees, whereupon he was employed by a law firm, and thereafter started a separate law practice business. In 1997, Mr. Fernando had a stroke and ceased his professional activities.
May 31, 1934
Thomas R. Metcalf, Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, is author of Forging the Raj, Ideologies of the Raj, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture, and Britain’s Raj (UC Press), and, with Barbara Daly Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India.
May 31, 1948
Penny Mickelbury (born 1948) is an African-American playwright and mystery novelist who worked as a print and television journalist for ten years before concentrating on fiction writing. After leaving journalism, she taught fiction and script writing in Los Angeles and saw two of her plays (‘’Waiting for Gabriel’’ and ‘’Hush Now’’) produced there. She began writing detective novels with Keeping Secrets, published by Naiad Press in 1994, the first of a series featuring 'Gianna Maglione’, a lesbian chief of a hate-crimes unit based in Washington D.C. and her lover 'Mimi Patterson', a journalist. Her second series features ‘Carol Ann Gibson’, a Washington D.C attorney who is widowed in the first book and subsequently runs an investigation agency with 'Jake Graham', the detective who investigated her husband’s death. Her third features 'Phil Rodriguez', a Puerto Rican private investigator on the Lower Easter Side of New York City.
May 31, 1887
Saint-John Perse (also Saint-Leger Leger, 31 May 1887 – 20 September 1975) was a French poet-diplomat, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry." He was a major French diplomat from 1914 to 1940, after which he lived primarily in the United States until 1967. Alexis Leger was born in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe. His great-grandfather, a solicitor, had settled in Guadeloupe in 1815. His grandfather and father were also solicitors; his father was also a member of the City Council. The Leger family owned two plantations, one of coffee (La Joséphine) and the other of sugar (Bois-Debout). In 1897, Hégésippe Légitimus, the first native Guadeloupan elected president of the Guadeloupe General Council, took office with a vindictive agenda towards colonists. The Leger family returned to metropolitan France in 1899 and settled in Pau. The young Alexis felt like an expatriate and spent much of his time hiking, fencing, riding horses and sailing in the Atlantic. He passed the baccalauréat with honours and began studying law at the University of Bordeaux. When his father died in 1907, the resulting strain on his family's finances led Leger to temporarily interrupt his studies, but he eventually completed his degree in 1910. In 1904, he met the poet Francis Jammes at Orthez, who became a dear friend. He frequented cultural clubs, and met Paul Claudel, Odilon Redon, Valery Larbaud and André Gide. He wrote short poems inspired by the story of Robinson Crusoe (Images à Crusoe) and undertook a translation of Pindar. He published his first book of poetry, Éloges, in 1911. In 1914, he joined the French diplomatic service, and spent some of his first years in Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom. When World War I broke out, he was a press corps attaché for the government. From 1916 to 1921, he was secretary to the French embassy in Peking. In 1921 in Washington, DC, while taking part in a world disarmament conference, he was noticed by Aristide Briand, Prime Minister of France, who recruited him as his assistant. In Paris, he got to know the fellow intellectual poet Valéry, who used his influence to get the poem Anabase published, written during Leger's stay in China. While in China, Leger had written his first extended poem Anabase, publishing it in 1924 under the pseudonym "Saint-John Perse", which he employed for the rest of his life. He then published nothing for two decades, not even a re-edition of his debut book, as he believed it inappropriate for a diplomat to publish fiction. After Briand's death in 1932, Leger served as the General Secretary of the French Foreign Office (Quai d'Orsay) until 1940. Within the Foreign Office he led the optimist faction that believed that Germany was unstable and that if Britain and France stood up to Hitler, he would back down. He accompanied the French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier at the Munich Conference in 1938, where the cession of part of Czechoslovakia to Germany was agreed to. He was dismissed from his post right after the Fall of France in May 1940, as he was a known anti-Nazi. In mid-July 1940, Leger began a long exile in Washington, DC. In 1940, the Vichy government dismissed him from the Légion d'honneur order and revoked his French citizenship (it was reinstated after the war). He was in some financial difficulty as an exile in Washington until Archibald MacLeish, the Director of the Library of Congress and himself a poet, raised enough private donations to enable the Library to employ him until his official retirement from the French civil service, in 1947. He declined a teaching position at Harvard University. During his American exile, he wrote his long poems Exil, Vents, Pluies, Neiges, Amers, and Chroniques. He remained in the US long after the end of the war. He travelled extensively, observing nature and enjoying the friendship of US Attorney General Francis Biddle and his spouse, author Katherine Garrison Chapin. He was on good terms with the UN Secretary General and author Dag Hammarskjöld. In 1957, American friends gave him a villa at Giens, Provence, France. He then split his time between France and the United States. In 1958, he married the American Dorothy Milburn Russell. In 1960, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. After receiving the Nobel Prize, he wrote the long poems Chronique, Oiseaux and Chant pour un équinoxe and the shorter Nocturne and Sécheresse. In 1962, Georges Braque worked with master printmaker Aldo Crommelynck to create a series of etchings and aquatints, L’Ordre des Oiseaux, which was published with the text of Perse's Oiseaux by Au Vent d'Arles. A few months before he died, Leger donated his library, manuscripts and private papers to Fondation Saint-John Perse, a research centre devoted to his life and work (Cité du Livre, Aix-en-Provence), which remains active down to the present day. He died in his villa in Giens and is buried nearby.
May 31, 1887
Saint-John Perse (also Saint-Leger Leger, pseudonyms of Alexis Leger) (31 May 1887 – 20 September 1975) was a French poet-diplomat, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry." He was a major French diplomat from 1914 to 1940, after which he lived primarily in the United States until 1967.
May 31, 1961
Michael Pritchett is an American author best known for his novel THE MELANCHOLY FATE OF CAPT. LEWIS. Pritchett teaches at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. He is a graduate of the University of Missouri and holds a Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing from Warren Wilson College. He won a Dana Award in 2000. His fiction has been antholgized in well-known journals, including Passages North, Natural Bridge and New Letters.
May 31, 1942
Alice Wexler is affiliated with the Center for the Study of Women at University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of "Emma Goldman in America" (1984) and "Emma Goldman in Exile" (1989).
May 31, 1940
Michael Frede (May 31, 1940, Berlin, Germany - August 11, 2007, Agios Minas, Greece), who died in 2007, was Chair of the History of Philosophy at Oxford University. A. A. Long is Professor of Classics, Irving Stone Professor of Literature, and Affiliated Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. David Sedley is Lawrence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge.
June 1, 1899
Harriet de Onis was born in Sheldon, Illinois, on June 1, 1899. She received her B.A. degree from Barnard College, and has (lone postgraduate work at Columbia University and Oxford University. She has been connected with Doubleday, Page & Company and the Houston Publishing Company, and since 1924 has been a free-lance writer and translator. Her translations include the works of Martin Luis Guzman, Ricardo Güiraldes, Ciro Alegria, German Arciniegas, and Fernando Ortiz. She has traveled widely in Latin America, and is married to Federico de Onis, professor at Columbia University.
June 1, 1935
Clayton Eshleman was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, June 1, 1935. He has a B.A. in Philosophy and an M.A.T. in English Literature from Indiana University. He has lived in Mexico, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Peru, France, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. He is presently Professor Emeritus, English Department, Eastern Michigan University. Since 1986 he has lived in Ypsilanti, Michigan with his wife Caryl who over the past forty years has been the primary reader and editor of his poetry and prose. His first collection of poetry, Mexico & North, was published in Kyoto, 1962. From 1968 to 2004, Black Widow Press brought out thirteen collections of his poetry. In 2006, Black Widow Press became his main publisher and with The Price of Experience has now brought out six collections of his poetry, prose, and translations, including in 2008 The Grindstone of Rapport / A Clayton Eshleman Reader. Wesleyan University Press has also published five of his books, including Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld (2003), the first study of Ice Age cave art by a poet. Two book length poems, An Anatomy of the Night and The Jointure, were published by BlazeVOX in 2011 and 2012. Eshleman has published fourteen collections of translations, including Watchfiends & Rack Screams by Antonin Artaud (Exact Change, 1995), The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo with a Foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa (University of California Press, 2007) Solar Throat Slashed by Aimé Césaire, cotranslated with A. James Arnold (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), and another cotranslation with Arnold, also published by Wesleyan in 2013, of Césaire’s original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Eshleman also founded and edited two of the most innovative poetry journals of the later part of the 20th century: Caterpillar (20 issues, 1967-1973) and Sulfur (46 issues, 1981-2000). Wesleyan will publish a 700 page Sulfur Anthology in 2014. Among his recognitions and awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, The National Book Award in Translation, two grants from the NEA, two grants from the NEH, two Landon Translation Prizes from the Academy of American Poets, and a Rockefeller Study Center residency in Bellagio, Italy.
June 1, 1932
Christopher (Kit) Lasch (June 1, 1932 – February 14, 1994) was an American historian, moralist, and social critic. Mentored by William Leuchtenburg at Columbia University, Lasch was a professor at the University of Rochester. Lasch sought to use history as a tool to awaken American society to the pervasiveness with which major institutions, public and private, were eroding the competence and independence of families and communities. He strove to create a historically informed social criticism that could teach Americans how to deal with rampant consumerism, proletarianization, and what he famously labeled the 'culture of narcissism.'
June 1, 1916
Murilo Rubião (June 1, 1916, Carmo de Minas, Minas Gerais, Brazil - September 16, 1991, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil) is a Brazilian writer. He was born in Carmo de Minas city, state of Minas Gerais. After obtaining a law degree, he worked in the Civil Service, served as commercial attache to the Brazilian Embassy in Spain, was a newspaper editor, and later founded, the most widely distributed literary supplement in Brazil. He began writing short fiction in 1947 and continues working in this vein. His work has received great acclaim from the public and critics alike in Europe as well as Latin America and has appeared in Antaeus, Fiction and American Poetry Review. His entire work consists of short stories, all of them dealing with fantastic themes, which is uncommon among Brazilian writers. He was very obsessive about his work, revising it at every new edition, always changing a few details, like character’s names and so on.
June 1, 1956
Mircea C?rt?rescu (born 1 June 1956) is a Romanian poet, novelist and essayist. Born in Bucharest, he graduated from the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Letters, Department of Romanian Language And Literature, in 1980. Between 1980 and 1989 he worked as a Romanian language teacher, and then he worked at the Writers' Union and as an editor at the Caiete Critice magazine. In 1991 he became a lecturer at the Chair of Romanian literary history, part of the University of Bucharest Faculty of Letters. At present (2010), he is an associate professor. Between 1994-1995 he was a visiting lecturer at the University of Amsterdam.
June 1, 1874
Macedonio Fernández (1 June 1874 – 10 February 1952) was an Argentine writer, humorist, and philosopher. His writings included novels, stories, poetry, journalism, and works not easily classified. He was a mentor to Jorge Luis Borges and other avant-garde Argentine writers. Seventeen years of his correspondence with Borges was published in 2000. He also published poetry, including "Creía yo" ("I believed"). Macedonio (like Uruguay's Felisberto Hernández, he is commonly referred to by his first name only) was the son of Macedonio Fernández, farmer and military officer, and Rosa del Mazo Aguilar Ramos. In 1887, he enrolled in the Argentine Colegio Nacional Central. In 1891-1892, as a university student, he published in El Progreso, a series of critical essays on customs and manners later included in Papeles antiguos. Like his intimate friend Jorge Guillermo Borges (father of Jorge Luis Borges), he was interested in psychology and in the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. In 1897 he was granted a degree as a doctor of jurisprudence by the law faculty of the University of Buenos Aires. In this period, he wrote for La Montaña, a socialist daily directed by Leopoldo Lugones and José Ingenieros. He was a personal friend of physician, journalist, politician, and writer Juan B. Justo, with whom he maintained a correspondence. In 1898, he was admitted to the bar, and in 1899 he married Elena de Obieta, with whom he had four children (Macedonio, Adolfo, Maite, plus one) In 1904 he published some poems in a magazine called Martín Fierro (not the more famous magazine of the same name published two decades later). In 1910, he obtained the position of public prosecutor in the Juzgado Letrado de Posadas, which he held for several years. His wife died in 1920, and their children were left in the care of grandparents and aunts. Macedonio abandoned the profession of a lawyer. On the return of the Borges family from Europe in 1921, he renewed his friendship with his old friend, and also began a friendship with Jorge Luis Borges, at this time a young ultraist poet. In 1928 he published No toda es vigilia la de los ojos abiertos, at the request of Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz and Leopoldo Marechal; the next year he published Papeles de Recienvenido. En 1938 he published "Novela de Eterna" y la Niña del dolor, la "Dulce-persona" de un amor que no fue sabido, an anticipation of Museo de la Novela de la Eterna (published posthumously in 1967); in 1941 he published, in Chile Una novela que comienza, and in 1944 a new edition of Papeles de Recienvenido. In 1947, Macedonio moved into the home of his son Adolfo de Obieta, where he lived for the rest of his life. Macedonio was Jorge Luis Borges's most important Argentine mentor and influence. The relationship between the writers, however, was far more complex than Borges or his contemporaries represented it to be. In his later years, Borges made a point of naming Macedonio as an early influence whom, in the exuberance of his youth, Borges imitated "to the point of plagiarism." At the same time, Borges denied that Macedonio possessed any literary talent or importance, reinforcing the long-held perception of the older man as a kind of local Socratic philosopher, specific to Argentina and constitutive of an Argentine mythic dimension. Recent studies by Ana Camblong, Julio Prieto, Daniel Attala and Todd S. Garth, among others, indicate that Macedonio's literary impact on Borges was far more profound and enduring than Borges ever admitted, and that Borges went to great pains to hide this influence. Many of the most fundamental concepts underpinning Borges's fiction come directly from Macedonio. These include the questioning of space and time and their continuity; the confusion of dreaming and wakefulness; the unreliability of memory and the importance of forgetfulness; the slipperiness (or nonexistence) of personal identity; the denial of originality and the emphasis on texts as being recyclings and translations of prior texts; and the questioning and commingling of the roles of author, reader, editor and commentator. These influences extend to thematic material. Such themes include the conceit of an alternative, fictional dimension, elaborated anonymously in collaboration, that invades the known, tangible world (Borges's "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and Macedonio's campaign to transform Buenos Aires by turning it into a novel, a component of his Museo de la Novela de la Eterna); and the hermetic world of immigrant working girls who must negotiate the city on their own, secret terms based purely on instinct and passion (Borges's "Emma Zunz" and Macedonio's Adriana Buenos Aires). While it is evident both men were inspired by ideas they read in the works of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century philosophers (specifically Schopenhauer and Bergson), there is little question that the two Argentines developed some of their most characteristic and enduring ideas together, in conversation, throughout the 1920s. Macedonio appears explicitly in Borges's "Dialogue about a Dialogue," in which the two discuss the immortality of the soul. The relationship between these two men began in earnest in 1921, when Borges returned to Buenos Aires with his family after their extended stay in Switzerland (and travels elsewhere in Europe), where he had completed his education. Borges's father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam, had been a close companion to Macedonio and attended law school with him. Upon graduating law school, Macedonio, the elder Borges, and companion Julio Molina y Vedia hatched a plan to found a utopian colony based on the anarchist principles of Élisée Reclus. This plan apparently never went beyond an exploratory visit the three made around 1897 to a plantation the Molina y Vedia family owned in the Argentine Chaco, near the Bolivian border. During the years prior to 1921, Macedonio married, started a law practice and went about raising a family. This idyll came to an end when Macedonio's wife, Elena de Obieta, died suddenly in 1920. Macedonio then shuttered his law practice, dismantled his household and, about the same time as he renewed his friendship with the now adult Jorge Luis Borges, embarked on a life as an idiosyncratic writer-philosopher. Borges and other members of the generación martinfierrista were drawn to Macedonio as a mentor and figurehead who could serve as an anchor to the nascent Buenos Aires avant-garde and a foil to Leopoldo Lugones, leader of the modernista movement of a generation earlier. Macedonio made noteworthy, if infrequent, contributions to the literary gatherings of the ultraísta movement and the related "Florida" group of writers and artists. Borges was an active participant in Macedonio's intimate tertulias, both in Buenos Aires bars and cafés and in a shack Macedonio sometimes borrowed on a friend's ranch outside the city. He also was one of the collaborators in Macedonio's burlesque campaigns for the presidency of the Argentine Republic (in 1921 and again in 1927), episodes which apparently gave rise to the analogous fictional campaign in Museo. In addition, Borges was responsible for urging Macedonio to publish at least one of the two book-length works printed in Macedonio's lifetime, No toda es vigilia la de los ojos abiertos, in 1926. The relationship between Borges and Macedonio appears to have begun to deteriorate around 1927 or 1928, when correspondence (published and analyzed by Carlos García) indicates a rift between them. This is also about the time that Borges made his famous break with the avant-garde and pronounced the death of Argentine ultraísmo, essentially forcing the closure of its most important publication, the little magazine Martín Fierro, after its sixteenth issue. The two events may not be coincidental. From 1927 onward, Borges not only started to write, publish and promote his characteristic short fiction (beginning with "Hombre de la esquina rosada"), he aggressively renounced his prior aesthetic production and put considerable energy into burying it forever. A number of sources (Donald Shaw in particular) suggest that Borges began to regard most of his early writings, and the ideas behind them, as potentially pernicious, especially in the hands of nationalists. Supporting this notion is the fact that many of Borges's stories in which Macedonio's influence is most evident imply a warning against concepts and principles Macedonio represented: absolute relativism; the priority of thought, emotion and imagination over a nominal existence; and the implicit heroism of a hermetic existence.
June 1, 1952
Donald S. Lopez, Jr., is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan. His many books include THE STORY OF BUDDHISM (HARPERONE) and PRISONERS OF SHANGRI-LA: TIBETAN BUDDHISM AND THE WEST. He has also edited a number of books by the Dalai Lama.
June 1, 1780
Carl Philipp Gottfried (or Gottlieb) von Clausewitz (1 June 1780 – 16 November 1831) was a Prussian general and military theorist who stressed the "moral" (meaning, in modern terms, psychological) and political aspects of war. His most notable work, Vom Kriege (On War), was unfinished at his death. Clausewitz was a realist in many different senses and, while in some respects a romantic, also drew heavily on the rationalist ideas of the European Enlightenment. Clausewitz's thinking is often described as Hegelian because of his dialectical method; but, although he was probably personally acquainted with Hegel, there remains debate as to whether or not Clausewitz was in fact influenced by him. He stressed the dialectical interaction of diverse factors, noting how unexpected developments unfolding under the "fog of war" (i.e., in the face of incomplete, dubious, and often completely erroneous information and high levels of fear, doubt, and excitement) call for rapid decisions by alert commanders. He saw history as a vital check on erudite abstractions that did not accord with experience. In contrast to the early work of Antoine-Henri Jomini, he argued that war could not be quantified or reduced to mapwork, geometry, and graphs. Clausewitz had many aphorisms, of which the most famous is "War is the continuation of politics by other means." Nicholas Murray teaches strategy and policy at the US Naval War College. He is the author of The Rocky Road to the Great War: The Evolution of Trench Warfare to 1914. Christopher Pringle is an academic publisher and a former officer in the British Territorial Army. He is the author of Bloody Big BATTLES! Rules for Wargaming the Late Nineteenth Century and a supporting blog.
June 2, 1740
Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade (2 June 1740 – 2 December 1814) was a French aristocrat, revolutionary politician, philosopher and writer, famous for his libertine sexuality. His works include novels, short stories, plays, dialogues and political tracts; in his lifetime some were published under his own name, while others appeared anonymously and Sade denied being their author. He is best known for his erotic works, which combined philosophical discourse with pornography, depicting sexual fantasies with an emphasis on violence, criminality and blasphemy against the Catholic Church. He was a proponent of extreme freedom, unrestrained by morality, religion or law. The words sadism and sadist are derived from his name. Sade was incarcerated in various prisons and in an insane asylum for about 32 years of his life; 11 years in Paris (10 of which were spent in the Bastille), a month in the Conciergerie, two years in a fortress, a year in Madelonnettes, three years in Bicêtre, a year in Sainte-Pélagie and 13 years in the Charenton asylum. During the French Revolution he was an elected delegate to the National Convention. Many of his works were written in prison.
June 2, 1840
Thomas Hardy (June 2, 1840 - January 11, 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he focused on a declining rural society.
June 2, 1913
Barbara Mary Crampton Pym (2 June 1913 – 11 January 1980) was an English novelist. In the 1950s she wrote a series of social comedies, of which the best known are Excellent Women (1952) and A Glass of Blessings (1958). In 1977 her career was revived when the biographer David Cecil and the poet Philip Larkin both nominated her as the most under-rated writer of the century. Her novel Quartet in Autumn (1977) was nominated for the Booker Prize that year, and she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
June 2, 1953
Cornel Ronald West (born June 2, 1953) is an American philosopher, academic, activist, author, public intellectual, and prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America. The son of a Baptist minister, West received his undergraduate education at Harvard University, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1973, and received a Ph.D at Princeton University in 1980, becoming the first African American to graduate from Princeton with a Ph.D in philosophy. He taught at Harvard in 2001 before leaving the school after a highly publicized dispute with then-president Lawrence Summers. He was The Class of 1943 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton before leaving the school in 2011 to become Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He has also spent time teaching at the University of Paris. The bulk of West's work focuses on the role of race, gender, and class in American society and the means by which people act and react to their "radical conditionedness." West draws intellectual contributions from multiple traditions, including Christianity, the black church, Marxism, neopragmatism, and transcendentalism. Among his most influential books are Race Matters (1994) and Democracy Matters (2004). West is a frequent media commentator on political and social issues. He often appears on networks such as CNN, C-SPAN, MSNBC, Fox News and PBS and programs such as Real Time With Bill Maher, The Colbert Report, and The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson. From 2010 through 2013, he co-hosted a radio program with Tavis Smiley, called Smiley and West. He has also been featured in several documentaries, and made appearances in Hollywood films The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, also providing commentary for the films. He has also made several spoken word and hip hop albums, and has been named MTV's Artist of the Week for his work.
June 2, 1907
DOROTHY WEST (June 2, 1907, Boston, MA - August 16, 1998, Boston, MA) founded the Harlem Renaissance literary magazine CHALLENGE in 1934, and NEW CHALLENGE in 1937, with Richard Wright as her associate editor. She was a welfare investigator and WPA relief worker in Harlem during the Depression. Her first novel, THE LIVING IS EASY, appeared in l948 and is still in print, and her short stories appear in numerous anthologies. Her 1995 novel THE WEDDING was a national bestseller. She lives on Martha’s Vineyard.
June 2, 1943
David William Cohen (born 2 June 1943) is Emeritus Professor of History and Anthropology at the University of Michigan. He specializes in East Africa (Kenya, Uganda) and is a leader in the emerging field of historical anthropology. He is Honorary Research Fellow, Archive and Public Culture Initiative, University of Cape Town. Cohen received his PhD from the University of London. He taught at Johns Hopkins University, and was later professor of anthropology and history and director of the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University. With E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, he wrote on the multiple investigations into the 1990 disappearance and death of Kenya’s Foreign Minister, Robert Ouko.
June 2, 1937
Geir Kjetsaa (2 June 1937, Oslo – 2 June 2008) was a Norwegian professor in Russian literary history at the University of Oslo, translator of Russian literature, and author of several biographies of classical Russian writers. He was born in Oslo, Norway. He was the son of Thorleif Kjetsaa (1907–69) and Marit Elen Hansen (1912–82). He grew up and died in Hornnes. He graduated as cand.philol. in 1963, took the dr.philos. degree in 1969, and was appointed professor in 1971. Kjetsaa was member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and of the Norwegian Academy for Language and Literature. A 1984 monograph by Kjetsaa and others demonstrated through statistical analyses that Mikhail Sholokhov was likely the true author of And Quiet Flows the Don - defending the famous Soviet writer against persistent allegations of plagiarizing. Among his other biographies where works on Jevgenij Baratynskij, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Maksim Gorkij, Leo Tolstoy and Anton Tsjekhov.
June 2, 1907
Rudolf John Frederick Lehmann (2 June 1907 – 7 April 1987) was an English poet and man of letters. He founded the periodicals New Writing and The London Magazine, and the publishing house of John Lehmann Limited. Born in Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, the fourth child of journalist Rudolph Lehmann, and brother of Helen Lehmann, novelist Rosamond Lehmann and actress Beatrix Lehmann, he was educated at Eton and read English at Trinity College, Cambridge. He considered his time at both as "lost years". After a period as a journalist in Vienna, he returned to England to found the popular periodical New Writing (1936–1940) in book format. This literary magazine sought to break down social barriers and published works by working-class authors as well as educated middle-class writers and poets. It proved a great influence on literature of the period and an outlet for writers such as Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden, and miner-author B. L. Coombes. Lehmann included many of these authors in his anthology Poems for Spain which he edited with Stephen Spender. With the onset of the Second World War and paper rationing, New Writing's future was uncertain and so Lehmann wrote New Writing in Europe for Pelican Books, one of the first critical summaries of the writers of the 1930s in which he championed the authors who had been the stars of New Writing—Auden and Spender—and also his close friend Tom Wintringham and Wintringham's ally, the emerging George Orwell. Wintringham reintroduced Lehmann to Allen Lane of Penguin Books, who secured paper for The Penguin New Writing a monthly book-magazine, this time in paperback. The first issue featured Orwell's essay "Shooting an Elephant". Occasional hardback editions combined with the magazine Daylight appeared sporadically, but it was as Penguin New Writing that the magazine survived until 1950. He joined Leonard and Virginia Woolf as managing director of Hogarth Press between 1938 and 1946. He then established his own publishing company, John Lehmann Limited, with his novelist sister Rosamond Lehmann (who had a nine-year affair with one of Lehmann's contributing poets, Cecil Day-Lewis). They published new works by authors such as Sartre and Stendhal, and discovered talents like Thom Gunn and Laurie Lee. He also published the first two books by the cookery writer Elizabeth David, A Book of Mediterranean Food and French Country Cooking. This publishing house ran from 1946–1953. In 1954 he founded The London Magazine, remaining as editor until 1961, following which he was a frequent lecturer and completed his three-volume autobiography, Whispering Gallery (1955), I Am My Brother (1960) and The Ample Proposition (1966). In The Purely Pagan Sense (1976) is an autobiographical record of his homosexual life in England and pre-war Germany, discreetly written in the form of a novel. He also wrote the biographies Edith Sitwell (1952), Virginia Woolf and her World (1975), Thrown to the Woolfs (1978) and Rupert Brooke (1980). In 1965 he published Christ the Hunter, a spiritual/autobiographical prose poem which had been broadcast in 1964 on the BBC Third Programme, In 1974 Lehmann published a book of poems, The Reader at Night, hand-printed on handmade paper and hand-bound in an edition of 250 signed copies (Toronto, Basilike, 1974). An essay by Paul Davies about the creation of this book is included in Professor A.T. Tolley's collection, John Lehmann: a Tribute (Ottawa, Carleton University Press, 1987), which also includes pieces by Roy Fuller, Thom Gunn, Charles Osborne, Christopher Levenson, Jeremy Reed, George Woodcock, and others. Lehmann died in London.
June 2, 1950
John Mulligan is an author and playwright who lives in San Francisco, California. He is the winner of the 1998 PEN-Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence for this novel.
June 2, 1932
Oda Makoto (June 2, 1932, Osaka-July 30, 2007) graduated from the University of Tokyo, where he majored in classical Greek philosophy and literature, then attended Harvard University on a Fulbright Scholarship. In 1961 he published a book describing his travels around the world on a shoe-string budget, which became the bestseller of the year among Japan's postwar generation. Widely known as the leader of Beheiren (League of Citizens' Movements for Peace in Vietnam) and of other major citizens' movements on anti-war and anti-nuclear issues, his numerous essays and full- length novels reflect his activities both in Japan and abroad.
June 3, 1926
Irwin Allen Ginsberg (June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet who vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression. In the 1950s, Ginsberg was a leading figure of the Beat Generation. Ginsberg's epic poem ‘Howl‘, in which he celebrates his fellow ‘angel-headed hipsters’ and excoriates what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States, is one of the classic poems of the Beat Generation. In October 1955, Ginsberg and five other unknown poets gave a free reading at an experimental art gallery in San Francisco. Ginsberg's ‘Howl’ electrified the audience. According to fellow poet Michael McClure, it was clear ‘that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America and its supporting armies and navies and academies and institutions and ownership systems and power support bases.’ In 1957, ‘Howl’ attracted widespread publicity when it became the subject of an obscenity trial in which a San Francisco prosecutor argued it contained ‘filthy, vulgar, obscene, and disgusting language.’ The poem seemed especially outrageous in 1950s America because it depicted both heterosexual and homosexual sex at a time when sodomy laws made homosexual acts a crime in every U.S. state. ‘Howl’ reflected Ginsberg's own homosexuality and his relationships with a number of men, including Peter Orlovsky, his lifelong partner. Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that ‘Howl’ was not obscene, adding, ‘Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?’ In ‘Howl’ and in his other poetry, Ginsberg drew inspiration from the epic, free verse style of the 19th century American poet Walt Whitman. Both wrote passionately about the promise (and betrayal) of American democracy, the central importance of erotic experience, and the spiritual quest for the truth of everyday existence. J. D. McClatchy, editor of the Yale Review called Ginsberg ‘the best-known American poet of his generation, as much a social force as a literary phenomenon.’ McClatchy added that Ginsberg, like Whitman, ‘was a bard in the old manner – outsized, darkly prophetic, part exuberance, part prayer, part rant. His work is finally a history of our era's psyche, with all its contradictory urges.’ Ginsberg was a practicing Buddhist who studied Eastern religious disciplines extensively. One of his most influential teachers was the Tibetan Buddhist, the Venerable Chögyam Trungpa, founder of the Naropa Institute, now Naropa University at Boulder, Colorado. At Trungpa's urging, Ginsberg and poet Anne Waldman started a poetry school there in 1974 which they called the ‘Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics‘. In spite of his attraction to Eastern religions, the journalist Jane Kramer argues that Ginsberg, like Whitman, adhered to an ‘American brand of mysticism’ that was, in her words, ‘rooted in humanism and in a romantic and visionary ideal of harmony among men.’ Ginsberg's political activism was consistent with his religious beliefs. He took part in decades of non-violent political protest against everything from the Vietnam War to the War on Drugs. The literary critic, Helen Vendler, described Ginsberg as ‘tirelessly persistent in protesting censorship, imperial politics, and persecution of the powerless.’ His achievements as a writer as well as his notoriety as an activist gained him honors from established institutions. Ginsberg's book of poems, THE FALL OF AMERICA, won the National Book Award for poetry in 1974. Other honors included the National Arts Club gold medal and his induction into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, both in 1979. In 1995, Ginsberg won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, COSMOPOLITAN GREETINGS: POEMS 1986–1992.
June 3, 1941
Monika Maron (born on June 3, 1941, in Berlin) is a German author, formerly of the German Democratic Republic. She moved in 1951 from West to East Berlin with her stepfather, Karl Maron, the GDR Minister of the Interior. She studied theatre and spent time as a directing assistant and as a journalist. In the late 1970s, she began writing full-time in East Berlin. She left the GDR in 1988 with a three-year visa. After living in Hamburg, Germany, until 1992, she returned to a reunited Berlin, where she currently lives and writes. Her works deal to a large degree with confrontation with the past and explore the threats posed both by memory and isolation. Her prose is sparse, bleak, and lonely, conveying the sensitivity and desperation of her narrators. In 1992, she was distinguished with the renowned Kleist Prize, awarded annually to prominent German authors, and, in 2003, with the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize.
June 3, 1936
Larry Jeff McMurtry (born June 3, 1936) is an American novelist, essayist, bookseller and screenwriter whose work is predominantly set in either the old West or in contemporary Texas. He is known for his 1975 novel Terms of Endearment, his 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove, a historical saga that follows ex-Texas Rangers as they drive their cattle from the Rio Grande to a new home in the frontier of Montana, and for co-writing the adapted screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. Lonesome Dove was adapted into a television miniseries and both the films of Terms of Endearment and Brokeback Mountain won Academy Awards.
June 3, 1930
Marion Zimmer Bradley (June 3, 1930, Albany, NY - September 25, 1999, Berkeley, CA) was born in Albany, NY and lived for many years in Berkeley, CA. Best known as a writer of fantasy, science fiction, and romantic occult fiction, Bradley was also the editor of ‘Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine’ and many anthologies. Her most famous works include the ‘Darkover’ series of science fiction novels and the New York Times bestselling THE MISTS OF AVALON. Marion Zimmer Bradley died in 1999.
June 3, 1947
Richard Burgin (born June 3, 1947, Brookline, MA) is an American fiction writer, editor, composer, critic, and academic. He has published nineteen books, and from 1996 through 2013 was a professor of Communication and English at St. Louis University. He is also the founder and publisher of the internationally distributed award-winning literary magazine Boulevard, now in its 31st year of continuous publication.
June 3, 1913
Robert Knox Jack? Cope (3 June 1913 – 1 May 1991) was a South African novelist, short story writer, poet and editor. Jack Cope was born in Natal, South Africa and home-schooled by tutors. From the age of 12, he boarded at Durban High School in Durban, afterwards becoming a journalist on Natal Mercury and then a political correspondent in London for South African newspapers. At the outbreak of the Second World War, in a state of some disillusionment, he returned to South Africa. He moved to Cape Town, where he worked for the left-wing Guardian newspaper from 1941 to 1955, in various capacities including cultural critic and, at one stage, general editor. He married his second cousin, the artist Lesley De Villiers in 1942. They separated in 1958 and were divorced in the early 1960s. They had two sons, Raymond, (1948–1977) and Michael (born 1952). Jack Cope is also well known for his romantic attachment (ca. 1960-1964) to South African poet Ingrid Jonker. Cope published eight novels, more than a hundred short stories, and three collections of poetry, the last one in association with C.J. Driver. For twenty years, beginning in 1960, he edited Contrast, a literary magazine bilingual in English and Afrikaans. He co-edited The Penguin Book of South African Verse (1968) with Uys Krige and, as general editor throughout much of the 1970s, produced the Mantis editions of Southern African poets. In 1980 he moved to England, where he published The Adversary Within: Dissident Writers in Afrikaans (1982) and his Selected Stories (1986). Cope's first novel, The Fair House (1955), considers the Bambata Rebellion of 1906 in an attempt to account for the later racial and political conditions in South Africa. Later novels, including The Golden Oriole (1958), Albino (1964), and The Rain-Maker (1971), chronicle the white man's destruction of black culture and the ensuing struggle by the blacks to regain their pride and identity. However, it is as a short-story writer that Cope demonstrated his finest talent. His stories evoke, according to Alan Paton, 'with a few words the scents and sounds and colours of our country'. In 'A Crack in the Sky' (The Tame Ox, 1960) and 'Power' (The Man Who Doubted and Other Stories, 1967) his moral vision is clear; his third collection, Alley Cat and Other Stories (1973), contains darker themes such as those of alienation and loneliness. Among Cope's main achievements was his influence on South African literature during the 1960s and 1970s, important years in the struggle against apartheid.
June 3, 1945
John Derbyshire (born June 3, 1945) is a British-American computer programmer, writer, journalist and political commentator. He formerly wrote a column in National Review. He has also written for the New English Review. These columns cover a broad range of political-cultural topics, including immigration, China, history, mathematics, and race. Derbyshire's 1996 novel, Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, was a New York Times "Notable Book of the Year". His 2004 non-fiction book, Prime Obsession, won the Mathematical Association of America's inaugural Euler Book Prize. A political book, We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, was released in September 2009. Derbyshire has been described as a figure within the alt-right movement, and also considers himself to be part of it.
June 3, 1901
Maurice Herbert Evans (3 June 1901 – 12 March 1989) was an English actor noted for his interpretations of Shakespearean characters. In terms of his screen roles, he is probably best known as Dr. Zaius in Planet of the Apes and as Samantha Stephens' father Maurice in Bewitched.
6/3/1943
Peter Kolchin (born June 3, 1943) is an American historian. He has specialized in slavery and labor in the American South before and after the Civil War, and in comparisons with Russian serfdom and other forms of labor.
June 3, 1966
Pierre-François Mourier is currently deputy general director of the Center for Strategic Analysis, a governmental organization under the direction of the prime minister of France. Since his studies at the Ecole normale supérieure de la rue d’Ulm and the Sorbonne, he has worked as a cultural attaché, a professor of Latin, a magazine editor (for Esprit), and on publications for the Ecole nationale supérleure du paysage in the King’s Kitchen Garden at Versailles. In 2002 he was appointed to the Conseil d’Etat (Council of State), the French supreme administrative court, working on issues of higher education and research. He has also served as a speechwriter and senior adviser to President of the Republic Jacques Chirac, and most recently as consul general of France in San Francisco and the Pacific Northwest. He is the author of several essays on the future of higher education and research in France; Cicero; Balzac; the European Union; and the environmental movement. He has published the first two volumes of a comic book trilogy, Le Dernier des Mohégans (The Last of the Mohegans). His first novel, The Spore, was originally published in France.
June 3, 1878
Sinéad de Valera, also known as Sinéad Ní Fhlannagáin and Sinéad Bean de Valera (3 June 1878 – 7 January 1975), was an author and the wife of the Irish republican leader and third President of Ireland, Éamon de Valera. She was born Jane O'Flanagan in Balbriggan. Her father, Laurence, was a carpenter and was a native of Kildare who moved to Balbriggan and married a local girl, Margaret Byrne. The couple emigrated to New York where their daughter, Mary, was born in 1871. The family had returned to Balbriggan by 1873 and Sinéad was born there in 1878. She trained as a teacher and worked first in Edenderry, before taking up a post at a national school in Dorset Street, Dublin in around 1901. The 1901 census records her as 'Jane Flanagan', living with her parents and three siblings at 6 Richmond Cottages in Dublin. In her spare time, she taught Irish at the Leinster College of the Gaelic League in Parnell Square. One of her Irish students was Éamon de Valera, then a teacher of mathematics. On 8 January 1910, they were married. Together they had five sons, Vivion, Éamon, Brian, Ruairi and Terence (Terry), and two daughters, Máirín and Emer. On 9 February 1936, Brian, then aged twenty, was killed in a riding accident in the Phoenix Park. Not long after they married, she changed her name to the Irish spelling, Sinéad. Due to a combination of his imprisonment, political activities, and fundraising tours of the United States, the family saw relatively little of Éamon de Valera in the 1916-23 period. He was also away from home frequently during the early years of his political career. Sinéad de Valera played little or no public role during her husband's fifty years in public life. Sinéad de Valera wrote thirty one books for children in both English and Irish. Among her works were plays such as Cluichidhe na Gaedhilge (1935) and story collections such as The Emerald Ring and Other Irish Fairy Stories (1951), The Stolen Child and Other Stories (1961), The Four-leafed Shamrock (1964) and The Miser's Gold (1970). Sinéad de Valera died on 7 January 1975, at the age of 96, the day before what would have been the de Valeras' sixty-fifth wedding anniversary. Éamon de Valera died nearly eight months later, on 29 August 1975, aged 92. The couple are buried together, along with their son Brian, at Dublin's Glasnevin Cemetery.
June 4, 1940
George C. Chesbro (June 4, 1940 – November 18, 2008) was an American author of detective fiction. His most notable works feature Dr. Robert ‘Mongo the Magnificent‘ Fredrickson. He also wrote the novelisation of The Golden Child, a movie of the same name starring Eddie Murphy. Chesbro was born in Washington, D.C. He worked as a special education teacher at Pearl River and later at Rockland Psychiatric Center, where he worked with troubled teens. Chesbro was married and had one daughter and two stepdaughters.
June 4, 1964
Michael Collins was born in Limerick, Ireland, and now lives in Seattle, Washington. His first book, THE MAN WHO DREAMED OF LOBSTERS, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1993. Michael Collins received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in Chicago.
June 4, 1911
Milovan Dilas (June 4, 1911 – April 20, 1995) was a Yugoslav Communist politician, theorist and author. He was a key figure in the Partisan movement during World War II, as in the post-war government. A self-identified Democratic Socialist, Dilas became one of the best-known and prominent dissidents in Yugoslavia and the whole of the Eastern Bloc.
June 4, 1935
LARS LONNROTH (born June 4, 1935) is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Aalborg in Denmark. He is the author of EUROPEAN SOURCES OF ICELANDIC SAGA-WRITING (Stockholm: Thule-Seelig, 1965) and other works.
June 4, 1952
Dambudzo Marechera (born Charles William Dambudzo Marechera, June 4, 1952, Rusape, Southern Rhodesia – August 18, 1987, Harare) was a Zimbabwean novelist and poet.
June 4, 1955
Val McDermid (born 4 June 1955) is a Scottish crime writer, best known for a series of suspense novels featuring Dr. Tony Hill. Val McDermid grew up in a Scottish mining community and attended Oxford University. She worked as a journalist in Scotland for 14 years, becoming National Bureau Chief of a major national Sunday tabloid. She quit journalism in 1991 and has since become a full-time writer. She is creator of both the Lindsay Gordon and the Kate Brannigan mystery series. Her novel, A PLACE OF EXECUTION was recently named by the New York Times Book Review as one of the notable books of 2000 and won the L.A. Times Book Prize in the new murder/mystery category. It was also shortlisted in 2001 for the Edgar Award and has been nominated for the 2001 Boucheron Anthony Award.
June 4, 1949
Kevin D. Randle is a retired lieutenant colonel who served in Vietnam as a helicopter pilot and in Iraq as a battalion intelligence officer. He began writing for UFO magazines and eventually moved onto books. He is a sought-after expert on UFOs, is the author of several books on alien phenomena, including The UFO Casebook and Crash at Roswell. He lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
June 4, 1907
Jacques Roumain (June 4, 1907 – August 18, 1944) was a Haitian writer, politician, and advocate of Marxism. He is considered one of the most prominent figures in Haitian literature. Although poorly known in the English-speaking world, Roumain has significant following in Europe, and is renowned in the Caribbean and Latin America. The great African-American poet, Langston Hughes, translated some of Roumain's greatest works, including Gouverneurs de la Rosée (Masters of the Dew), a masterpiece of world literature. Although his life was short, Roumain managed to touch many aspects of Haitian life and culture. Roumain was born on June 4, 1907, in Port-au-Prince to wealthy parents. His grandfather, Tancrède Auguste, served as the President of Haiti from 1912 to 1913. He was educated in Catholic schools in Port-au-Prince, and, later, in Belgium, Switzerland, France, Germany and Spain. At twenty years old, he returned to Haiti and formed La Revue Indigene: Les Arts et La Vie (The Indigenous Review: Arts and Life), along with Philippe Thoby-Marcelin, Carl Brouard, and Antonio Vieux. He was active in the struggle against the United States' occupation of Haiti. In 1934 he founded the Haitian Communist Party. Because of some of his political activities, his participation in the resistance movement against the United States' occupation, and most notably, his creation of the Haitian Communist Party, he was often arrested and finally exiled by then President Sténio Vincent. During his years in exile, Roumain worked with and befriended many prominent pan-African writers and poets of the time, including Langston Hughes. During this time he was also affiliated with Columbia University in New York City, where he conducted ethnographical research. With a change in government in Haiti, Roumain was allowed to return to his native country. Upon returning, he founded the Office of Ethnology. In 1943, President Élie Lescot appointed him chargé d'affaires in Mexico, where his newly found creative freedom permitted him to complete two of his most influential books, the poetry collection Bois D'ébène (Ebony Wood) and the novel, Gouverneurs de la Rosée (Masters of the Dew). Much of Roumain's work expresses the frustration and rage of people who have been downtrodden for centuries. He included the mass of the people in his writing and called on the poor union to move against privation. On August 18, 1944, Jacques Roumain, one of Haiti's most respected and complex writers, died of still unknown causes at age 37. Roumain created some of the most colorful, dynamic, and moving poetry of his generation. His writings continue to influence and shape Haitian culture and the pan-African world of today. By the time of his death, Roumain had become an acclaimed writer in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe. His great novel, Gouverneurs de la Rosée, has achieved a permanent place among great Caribbean and Latin American literature. It is a novel that is still studied at universities, read by new generations, and acted out by theatrical groups.
June 4, 1935
JOHN BURROW (4 June 1935 in Southsea – 3 November 2009 in Witney, Oxfordshire) was Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Sussex before becoming Professor of European Thought at Oxford. His earlier books include EVOLUTION AND SOCIETY: A STUDY IN VICTORIAN SOCIAL THEORY; A LIBERAL DESCENT: VICTORIAN HISTORIANS AND THE ENGLISH PAST, which won the Wolfson Prize for History; Gibbon; and THE CRISIS OF REASON: EUROPEAN THOUGHT, 1848-1914. He is a Fellow of the British Academy; an Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford; and in 2008 will be Distinguished Visiting Professor at Williams College in Massachusetts.
June 4, 1898
Harry Crosby (June 4, 1898 – December 10, 1929) was an American heir, bon vivant, poet, and publisher who for some epitomized the Lost Generation in American literature. He was the son of one of the richest banking families in New England, a Boston Brahmin, and the nephew of Jane Norton Grew, the wife of financier J. P. Morgan, Jr.. As such, he was heir to a portion of a substantial family fortune. He was a volunteer in the American Field Service during World War I, and later served in the U.S. Ambulance Corps. He narrowly escaped with his life. Profoundly affected by his experience in World War I, Crosby vowed to live life on his own terms and abandoned all pretense of living the expected life of a privileged Bostonian. He had his father's eye for women, and in 1920 met Mrs. Richard Peabody (née Mary Phelps Jacob), six years his senior. They had sex within two weeks, and their open affair was the source of scandal and gossip among blue-blood Boston. Mary (or Polly as she was called) divorced her alcoholic husband and to her family's dismay married Crosby. Two days later they left for Europe, where they devoted themselves to art and poetry. Both enjoyed a decadent lifestyle, drinking, smoking opium regularly, traveling frequently, and having an open marriage. Crosby maintained a coterie of young ladies that he frequently bedded, and wrote and published poetry that dwelled on the symbolism of the sun and explored themes of death and suicide. Crosby's life in Paris was at the crossroads of early 20th century Paris literary and cultural life. He numbered among his friends some of the most famous individuals of the early 20th century, including Salvador Dalí, Ernest Hemingway, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. In 1927 Polly took the name Caresse, and she and Crosby founded the Black Sun Press. It was the first to publish works by a number of struggling authors who later became famous, including James Joyce, Kay Boyle, Ernest Hemingway, Hart Crane, D. H. Lawrence, René Crevel, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. Crosby died scandalously at age 31 as part of a murder–suicide or suicide pact.
June 4, 1883
Joseph Jefferson Farjeon (4 June 1883 – 6 June 1955) was an English crime and mystery novelist, playwright and screenwriter. Most of Farjeon's works had been forgotten, but the figure of Ben in Number 17 appeared again in a string of novels, including Ben on the Job (1932), reissued in 1955 and 1985. The House Opposite (1931), the first full-length original novel to feature Ben, was reissued under the revived Collins Crime Club imprint in 2015, followed by the seven other "Ben" novels in 2016. A significant revival of interest in the Golden age of detective fiction had followed the 2014 success of The British Library reissue of Mystery in White: A Christmas Crime Story. There followed two further reissues in 2015: Thirteen Guests and The Z Murders.
June 4, 1879
Theodor Haecker (June 4, 1879 in Eberbach, Grand Duchy of Baden - April 9, 1945 in Ustersbach) was a German writer, translator and cultural critic. He was a translator into German of Kierkegaard and Cardinal Newman. He wrote an essay, Kierkegaard and the Philosophy of Inwardness in 1913 at a time when few had heard of Haecker and even fewer had heard of Kierkegaard. After that he translated Newman's famous Grammar of Assent and became a Roman Catholic convert in April 1921. He is known for his consistent opposition to the Nazi regime, which took steps to silence him, and his connections with the German resistance to them, such as the White Rose. It was during this time that he wrote his most important work, the journals known as the "Journal in the Night". The notes in these journals are among the most impressive reflections on fascism. They are the documents of an intellectual's inner resistance against National Socialism. Haecker's achievement can be considered as an important foundation of Christian resistance to National Socialism. Haecker had links with the circle around the Scholl siblings, where he read excerpts from his "Journal in the Night" In early 1944, Haecker's house was completely destroyed during the bombing of Munich. With his sight failing due to worsening diabetes, he left Munich to live the last months of his life in the small village of Ustersbach near Augsburg. His daughter visited him but his son, Reinhard had been sent to the Russian front in early 1945, and was shortly after reported missing. Theodor Haecker died on April 9, 1945 and is buried in Ustersbach. There is a bust by sculptor, Gerold Jäggle atop a fountain dedicated to Haecker in Laupheim near Ulm, paid for by the local citizens. Among his papers was a manuscript possibly written in 1943 and published in English in 1950 as Kierkegaard The Cripple. Haecker questions Rikard Magnussen's claim in his two books, Søren Kierkegaard seen from the Outside and The Special Cross that Kierkegaard was a hunchback. Haecker asks, 'What significance can be attached to an exterior, physical examination of someone whose work and achievements lie solely in the intellectual and spiritual realms of memory and of historical tradition and experience, as in the case of Kierkegaard? (...) Is there any point in trying to explain the connection between Kierkegaard's physical appearance and his inner self, the purely materially visible and spiritually non-sensual and invisible? Would not this make the inner man, the outer, and the outer man, the inner, which is precisely what Kierkegaard so passionately protested?" Yet, Haecker goes on the "to examine the thesis that Kierkegaard's psychological structure was influenced by his deformity." He tried to relate Kierkegaard's inner life to his outer appearance. Alexander Dru says about Haecker's Journal in the Night, "This book, reminiscent in form of Pascal's Pensées, is his last testimony to the truth and a confession of faith that is a spontaneous rejoinder to a particular moment in history. It is written by a man intent, by nature, on the search for truth, and driven, by circumstance, to seek for it in anguish, in solitude, with an urgency that grips the reader." In the opening to Dru's translation, Jacques Maritain (misspelled "Jacques Maratain") is quoted as saying, "Theodor Haecker was a man of deep insight and rare intellectual integrity — a Knight of Faith to use Kierkegaard's expression. The testimony of this great Christian has an outstanding value."
June 4, 1956
John Charles Hockenberry (born June 4, 1956) is an American journalist and author, a four-time Emmy Award winner and three-time Peabody Award winner. Since April 2008, Hockenberry has been host of The Takeaway, a live national news program created by Public Radio International and WNYC New York. Hockenberry has reported from all over the world, reporting on a wide variety of stories in virtually every medium for more than three decades. He has written dozens of magazine and newspaper articles, a play, and two books, including the bestselling memoir Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the novel A River Out Of Eden. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired, The Columbia Journalism Review, Metropolis, and The Washington Post. Hockenberry has appeared as a presenter or moderator at many design and idea conferences around the world including the TED conference, the World Science Festival in New York and in Brisbane, the Mayo Clinic’s Transform Symposium and the Aspen Comedy Festival. He has been a Distinguished Fellow at the MIT Media Lab and serves on the White House Fellows Committee. He is a prominent figure in the disability rights movement; Hockenberry sustained a spinal cord injury in a car crash at the age of 19, which left him with paraplegia from the chest down.
June 4, 1930
James W. Hulse was born in Pioche, NV and is truly a native son of Nevada. He was professor of history at University of Nevada, Reno from 1962-97. Author of many books on Nevada, he was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame in 1997.
June 4, 1942
Terje Johanssen (4 June 1942, Svolvær – 27 May 2005) was a Norwegian poet. He made his literary debut in 1975 with the poetry collection Vegen å gå. He was awarded the Gyldendal's Endowment in 1983, shared with Karin Bang.
June 4, 1960
Kristine Kathryn Rusch is an American writer and editor. She writes under various pseudonyms in multiple genres, including science fiction, fantasy, mystery, romance, and mainstream.
June 4, 1969
Matt Kish (born June 4, 1969) is a self-taught artist and a librarian. He was born in 1969 and lives in Ohio with his wife and their frog.
June 5, 1951
James Campbell (born 5 June 1951), is a Scottish writer. He was born in Glasgow and educated at the University of Edinburgh (1974–78), he is a former editor of the New Edinburgh Review and works for The Times Literary Supplement, where he writes the weekly "NB" column under the pen-name J.C.
June 5, 1939
Margaret Drabble (born 5 June 1939) is an English novelist, biographer and critic. Drabble was born in Sheffield, the second daughter of the advocate and novelist John F. Drabble and the teacher Kathleen Marie (née Bloor). Her older sister is the novelist and critic Dame Antonia Byatt; their younger sister is the art historian Helen Langdon, and their brother, Richard Drabble, is a QC. After attending the Quaker boarding-school Mount School at York, where her mother was employed, Drabble received a major scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge, where she read English and was awarded a starred first. She joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1960, at one point serving as an understudy for Vanessa Redgrave, before leaving to pursue a career in literary studies and writing. Drabble has published 18 novels through 2013. Her first novel, A Summer Bird Cage, was published in 1963. Her early novels were published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1963–87); more recently, her publishers have been Penguin and Viking. Her third novel, The Millstone (1965), brought her the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1966, and Jerusalem the Golden won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1967. A theme of her novels is the correlation between contemporary England's society and its individual members. Her characters' tragic faults reflect the political and economic situation and the restriction of conservative surroundings, making the reader aware of the dark spots of a seemingly wealthy country. Most of her protagonists are women. The realistic descriptions of her figures often owe something to Drabble's personal experiences. Thus, her first novels describe the life of young women during the 1960s and 1970s, for whom the conflict between motherhood and intellectual challenges is being brought into focus, while 1998's The Witch of Exmoor shows the withdrawn existence of an old author. Though inspired by her own life, her works are not mainly autobiographical. She has also written several screenplays, plays and short stories, as well as non-fiction such as A Writer's Britain: Landscape and Literature and biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson. Drabble was married to actor Clive Swift between 1960 and 1975; they have three children, including the gardener and TV personality Joe Swift and the academic Adam Swift. In 1982, she married the writer and biographer Sir Michael Holroyd; they live in London and Somerset. Drabble has famously been engaged in a long-running feud with her novelist sister, A. S. Byatt, over her alleged appropriation of a family tea-set in one of her novels Byatt had planned to write about herself. The pair seldom see each other and neither reads the other's books.
June 5, 1898
Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca, known as Federico García Lorca (5 June 1898 – 19 August 1936) was a Spanish poet, playwright, and theatre director. García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of '27. He was executed by Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War. In 2008, a Spanish judge opened an investigation into Lorca's death. The García Lorca family eventually dropped objections to the excavation of a potential gravesite near Alfacar, but no human remains were found. According to Spanish naming customs, García Lorca is sometimes referred to simply as 'Lorca', his second surname, due to García, his first surname, being extremely common. However, he should never be alphabetized under that name.
June 5, 1947
Redmond O'Hanlon, FRGS, FRSL (born 5 June 1947) is a British writer and scholar. O'Hanlon was born in 1947 in Dorset, England. He was educated at Marlborough College and then Oxford University. After taking his M.Phil. in nineteenth-century English studies in 1971 he was elected senior scholar, and in 1974 Alistair Horne Research Fellow, at St. Anthony's College, Oxford. He completed his doctoral thesis, Changing scientific concepts of nature in the English novel, 1850-1920, in 1977. From 1970-74, O'Hanlon was a member of the literature panel of the Arts Council of Great Britain. He was elected a member of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History in 1982, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1984 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1993. For fifteen years he was the natural history editor of the Times Literary Supplement.
June 5, 1940
Orlando Patterson was born June 5, 1940 in Jamaica and educated there and at the London School of Economics. He is now Professor of Sociology at Harvard University.
June 5, 1939
Laurali "Bunny" Rose Wright (née Appleby) (5 June 1939 – 25 February 2001) was a Canadian writer of mystery novels. Born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Wright worked as an actor (with her husband, John Wright, including a stint doing summer stock in Dawson City) and journalist before publishing her first novel, Neighbours, in 1979. Her earliest novels were literary fiction; after the publication of The Suspect (1985), her first mystery novel and winner of the 1986 Edgar Award for Best Novel, she concentrated exclusively on the genre. One further work of literary fiction, Love in the Temperate Zone, appeared in 1988. L.R. Wright was educated at Carleton, the University of Calgary, UBC, and Simon Fraser University. Early in her life she wrote for the Saskatoon Star Phoenix but her first article was for the Globe and Mail about being a teenager in Germany. She later moved to Calgary, where she was mentored by W.O. Mitchell. She worked for several years as a journalist at the Calgary Herald eventually becoming Assistant City Editor, before turning to full-time writing in 1977. In addition to the Edgar Award, she received the Arthur Ellis Award and wrote several adaptations of her novels for CBC Radio. Her daughter has remarked that her mother's time in Calgary had a great impact on her writing. L. R. Wright's novels have been published and distributed throughout the world in several languages. Wright rarely used her given names for any purpose. She published all her novels as L. R. Wright (except in the USA, where she appeared as Laurali Wright), and was known as Bunny in her personal life. Wright died of breast cancer in Vancouver, British Columbia.
June 5, 1942
Luciano Canfora is Professor of Greek and Latin Philology at the University of Bari. He is the author of many books including the best-selling The Vanished Library: A Wonder of the Ancient World (UC Press).
June 5, 1937
Hélène Cixous (born 5 June 1937) is a professor, French feminist writer, poet, playwright, philosopher, literary critic and rhetorician. She holds honorary degrees from Queen's University and the University of Alberta in Canada; University College Dublin in Ireland; the University of York and University College London in the UK; and Georgetown University, Northwestern University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the USA. In 2008 she was appointed as A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University until June 2014. Catherine A. F. MacGillivray is assistant professor of English and women's studies at the University of Northern Iowa.
June 5, 1912
Adriaan Morriën ( Velsen , 5 June 1912 - Amsterdam , 7 June 2002 ) was a Dutch poet, essayist, translator and critic. Morriën debuted in 1935 with a poem in Forum . His first poetry collection Hartslag was published in 1939. After the Second World War he mainly worked on translations, literary reviews and reviews for Het Parool, among others . He taught French for a number of years and worked at the Institute for Translation Studies at the University of Amsterdam . He was involved in the foundation of the Literature Fund. As editor of a number of literary magazines (including Tirade ), he reviewed manuscripts. He was also a consultant to the publishing houses GA van Oorschot and De Bezige Bij . A number of important writers, including Harry Mulisch , Gerard Reve and WF Hermansand the poet Hans Lodeizen, were 'co-discovered' by him. Adriaan Morriën translated works by Albert Camus , Heinrich Böll , Sigmund Freud , Erich Kästner , Choderlos de Laclos ( Les liaisons dangereuses ), Guy de Maupassant and Pauline Réage ( Histoire d'O ). Morriën was a member of the Republican Society , but in 1999 he was appointed Commander in the Order of the Dutch Lion. Morriën was the father of the two artists Adriënne and Alissa Morrien, who lived together with the couple Marte Röling and Henk Jurriaans since the 1980s .
June 5, 1930
Fatimah Rifaat (June 5, 1930 – January 1996), better known by her pen name Alifa Rifaat , was an Egyptian author whose controversial short stories are renowned for their depictions of the dynamics of female sexuality, relationships, and loss in rural Egyptian culture. While taking on such controversial subjects, Fatimah Rifaat’s protagonists remained religiously faithful with passive feelings towards their fate. Her stories did not attempt to undermine the patriarchal system; rather they were used to depict the problems inherent in a patriarchal society when men do not adhere to their religious teachings that advocate for the kind treatment of women. Fatimah Rifaat used the psydonymn Alifa to prevent embarrassment on the part of her family due to the themes of her stories and her writing career.
June 5, 1919
Richard McClure Scarry (June 5, 1919 – April 30, 1994) was an American children's author and illustrator who published over 300 books with total sales of over 100 million worldwide.
June 5, 1878
Guillermo A Sherwell was born in Paraje Nuevo, Vera Cruz, Mexico, June 5, 1878, the son of a Virginian of old English stock and a distinguished Mexican lady whose ancestors from Spain settled in Mexico soon after the Conquest. He was a brilliant student and in time took his degree of Doctor of Philosophy in that university. He, like many other intellectual and idealistic Mexicans, found life difficult in revolutionary days. He was once arrested by Carranza troops and condemned to be shot. Through the aid of friends he was spirited away from prison the night before what was to be his final daybreak and managed to make his way to the border and into the United States where he taught in various institutions. In 1918 he accepted a call from the Inter-American High Commission of Washington to a post from which he rose to be in a short time the Secretary General. As a writer he distinguished himself as author of a history of Mexico in two volumes (in Spanish), a book of "Poesias," a life of Simón Bolívar and a volume on Antonio José de Sucre (both in English),a and a large number of historical, biographical, and literary articles and monographs.
June 5, 1955
TRACY DAUGHERTY is the author of four novels, four short story collections, and a book of personal essays. His critically acclaimed biography of Donald Barthelme, HIDING MAN was published in 2009. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Currently, he is Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at Oregon State University.
June 5, 1951
Susan Lynn "Suze" Orman is an American author, financial advisor, motivational speaker, and television host. She earned a degree in social work then worked as a financial advisor for Merrill Lynch. In 1983, she became a vice president of retail customer investments at Prudential Bache Securities.
June 5, 1927
Tuomas Anhava (born 5 June 1927, Helsinki - 22 January 2001, Helsinki) was a Finnish writer and recipient of the Eino Leino Prize in 1989. Anhava's works closely follow the mold of modernist tradition of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Anhava was a meticulous poet, always striving for a perfection in his verses. He was obsessed with the method of poetry and had an inclination toward the aesthetics of modern poetry. His Runoja, meaning Poems, came out in 1953. It dealt with alienation and a quest for transcending everyday reality. As if to test himself as well as the technicalities of the modern poem, Anhava wrote the technically difficult poems of 36 runoja 36 Poems in 1958. The poems closely resemble the Japanese and Chinese poetry that Anhava had translated during the same period. Anhava went to apply his acquaintance with the simplification and compression of Oriental epigrams in his later works like Runoja (1961) and Kuudes kirja The Sixth Book (1966). Anhava never attained any significant literary height with his poetry. Nevertheless, he is credited and revered for the great impact he had on Finnish poets (and by extension on Finnish poetry), which was a result of his unwavering devotion to attaining aesthetic perfection.
June 5, 1950
John Yau (born 1950) is an American poet and critic who lives in New York City.
June 5, 1883
John Maynard Keynes (5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946), was an English economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. He built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles, and is widely considered to be one of the most influential economists of the 20th century and the founder of modern macroeconomics.
June 6, 1934
Raymond Andrews (June 6, 1934-November 25, 1991) was an African-American novelist, born in Plainview, Georgia. Andrews' parents, George and Viola Andrews, were sharecroppers and he was the fourth of their ten children. In the early 1970s he began publishing his Muskhogean trilogy which told about the life of an African American in the south from the end of World War I to the beginning of the 1960s. The trilogy consists of Appalachee Red, Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee, and Baby Sweet's. The books written by Raymond Andrews have been applauded by numerous critics and other writers. Novelist Richard Bausch described Andrew's writing as having ‘a smiling generosity of spirit.’ Andrews died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Athens, Georgia on November 25, 1991.
June 6, 1909
Sir Isaiah Berlin (6 June 1909 – 5 November 1997), British of Russian-Jewish origin, was a social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas, ‘thought by many to be the dominant scholar of his generation’. He excelled as an essayist, conversationalist and raconteur; and as a brilliant lecturer who improvised, rapidly and spontaneously, richly allusive and coherently structured material. He translated works by Ivan Turgenev from Russian into English and, during the war, worked for the British Diplomatic Service. In its obituary of the scholar, The Independent stated that ‘Isaiah Berlin was often described, especially in his old age, by means of superlatives: the world's greatest talker, the century's most inspired reader, one of the finest minds of our time ... there is no doubt that he showed in more than one direction the unexpectedly large possibilities open to us at the top end of the range of human potential’. In 1932, at the age of 23, he was elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. From 1957 to 1967, he was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1963 to 1964. In 1966, he played a crucial role in founding Wolfson College, Oxford, and became its first President. He was appointed a CBE in 1946, knighted in 1957, and was awarded the Order of Merit in 1971. He was President of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978. He also received the 1979 Jerusalem Prize for his writings on individual freedom. The annual Isaiah Berlin Lectures are held at the Hampstead Synagogue and both Wolfson College and the British Academy each summer. Berlin's work on liberal theory and on value pluralism has had a lasting influence. HENRY HARDY, editor of the four-volume series of Sir Isaiah’s collected essays, took his B. Phil, and D. Phil, from Wolfson College, and is now an editor and publisher. His edition of selected writings by Arnold Mallinson, Quinquagesimo Anno, was published under his own imprint in 1974. ROGER HAUSHEER is a member of Wolfson College, Oxford, and is studying the philosophy of J.G. Fichte. At present he is also Lecturer in British Studies at the University of Giessen, West Germany.
June 6, 1961
Hernando Calvo Ospina (June 6, 1961, Cali, Colombia) is a Colombian journalist and writer. He lives in France.
June 6, 1941
Alexander Claud Cockburn (6 June 1941 – 21 July 2012) was an Irish American political journalist and writer. Cockburn was brought up by British parents in Ireland but had lived and worked in the United States since 1972. Together with Jeffrey St. Clair, he edited the political newsletter CounterPunch. Cockburn also wrote the 'Beat the Devil' column for The Nation as well as one for The Week in London, syndicated by Creators Syndicate.
June 6, 1965
Erik Fosnes Hansen (born 6 June 1965) is a Norwegian writer. He was born in New York, and made his debut at age twenty with the novel Falketårnet. His most famous work is his second novel, Psalm at Journey's End, which in separate but steadily more interwoven stories follows the individual musicians that end their careers and lives at Titanic. The book has been translated into more than twenty languages. A follow-up of Beretninger om beskyttelse (Tales of Protection) has been announced but is not yet completed. Fosnes Hansen has also published poetry, and is a frequent contributor to contemporary public cultural debate. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy for Language and Literature. Fosnes Hansen was awarded the Riksmål Society Literature Prize in 1990. He gained attention in the Norwegian press after throwing a piece of paper at a representative of the Progress Party during a heated debate on the radio station NRK P2.
June 6, 1875
Thomas Mann (6 June 1875 – 12 August 1955) was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer. Mann was a member of the Hanseatic Mann family, and portrayed his own family in the novel Buddenbrooks. His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann, and three of his six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann, also became important German writers. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland. When World War II broke out in 1939, he emigrated to the United States, whence he returned to Switzerland in 1952. Thomas Mann is one of the best-known exponents of the so-called Exilliteratur.
June 6, 1799
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (6 June 1799 – 10 February 1837) was a Russian author of the Romantic era who is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. Pushkin was born into Russian nobility in Moscow. His matrilineal great grandfather – Abram Gannibal – was brought over as a slave from what is now Eritrea and had risen to become an aristocrat. Pushkin published his first poem at the age of fifteen, and was widely recognized by the literary establishment by the time of his graduation from the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum. While under the strict surveillance of the Tsar's political police and unable to publish, Pushkin wrote his most famous play, the drama Boris Godunov. His novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, was serialized between 1825 and 1832. Notoriously touchy about his honour, Pushkin fought as many as twenty-nine duels, and was fatally wounded in such an encounter with Georges-Charles de Heeckeren d'Anthès. Pushkin had accused D'Anthès, a French officer serving with the Chevalier Guard Regiment of attempting to seduce the poet's wife, Natalya Pushkina.
June 6, 1910
Edouard Roditi (1910-1992) was born in Paris 1910 of American parents. In 1929 he abandoned his studies of the Latin and Greek classics at Oxford and, until 1937, was associated with the Surrealist movement in Paris, as contributor to transition and as partner in Editions du Sagittaire, which published Andre Breton’s Surrealist manifestos and a number of books by Crevel, desnos and Tzara. His books of poetry and prose include: THRICE CHOSEN (1981), THE CONFESSIONS OF A SAINT (1977), THE DELIGHTS OF TURKEY (1977), MEETING WITH CONRAD (1977), EMPEROR OF MIDNIGHT (1974), NEW HIEROGLYPHIC TALES: PROSE POEMS (1968), DIALOGUES ON ART (1960, 1980), POEMS 1928-1948 (1949), OSCAR WILDE (1947), PRISON WITHIN PRISON: THREE HEBREW ELEGIES (1941), POEMS FOR F. (1934).
June 6, 1911
Verna Norberg Aardema Vugteveen (June 6, 1911 - May 11, 2000), best known by the name Verna Aardema, was an American writer of children's books
June 6, 1928
Julian Hudson Mayfield (June 6, 1928 – October 20, 1984) was an American actor, director, writer, lecturer and civil rights activist. Julian Hudson Mayfield was born on June 6, 1928, in Greer, South Carolina, and was raised from the age of five in Washington, D.C. He attended Paul Laurence Dunbar High School and while there he decided on being a writer as a career. After high school, he joined the US Army in 1946 and was stationed in Hawaii before being honorably discharged. He studied briefly at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Mayfield moved to New York in 1948, originally to study at New York University, but instead began a career in theatre. He developed the role of Absalom Kumalo for the Kurt Weil musical Lost in the Stars during 1949–50, before producing his own play Fire in 1951 and directing Ossie Davis's Alice in Wonder in 1952. Along with Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Alice Childress, Rosa Guy, Audre Lorde, John O. Killens, William Branch, Sidney Poitier, and Loften Mitchell, Mayfield became an important figure in what historians have termed the New York Black Cultural Left. This group was associated with the African-American singer and political activist Paul Robeson and was composed of actors, writers and artists who believed that art was a key component of the struggle for Civil Rights. During this period, Mayfield spent summers at Camp Unity, a left-wing interracial summer camp for adults in Wingdale, New York. There, he wrote and produced his one-act play 417, which he later adapted into his first novel, The Hit. Mayfield drove a taxi cab a night while writing during the day. He also attended the Jefferson School of Social Science on Sixth Avenue. In 1954, Mayfield met and married Puerto Rican doctor and activist, Ana Livia Cordero. Later that year, the couple relocated to San Juan, Puerto Rico. There, Mayfield wrote for the Puerto Rican World Journal, an English newspaper on the island. He also worked at the island's only English radio station. Additionally, he began adapting his one-act play, 417 to novel form. Renamed The Hit, the novel was published in 1957 and was followed by The Long Night in 1958 and The Grand Parade in 1961. In 1955, Mayfield became a target of FBI surveillance due to his association with members of the Communist Party in New York, including Paul Robeson and Louis Burnham, and his role in the communist front the Committee for the Negro in the Arts (CNA). His FBI file, available on the website of William J. Maxwell, reported that: "Mayfield, a free-lance writer, has been described as being a communist party (CP) synthesizer and to have been a CP member possibly as late as 1955. He has been connected in the past with other organizations which have been designated pursuant to Executive Order 10450" (FBI, p. 1) The FBI later tracked him to Puerto Rico and spied on him and his family. Surveillance on Mayfield continued until the late 1970s. Returning to the United States in 1959, Mayfield was inspired by the success of the Cuban Revolution. Visiting Cuba at the invitation of Fidel Castro in July 1960, he accompanied LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka), John O. Killens, Ana Livia Cordero, and Robert F. Williams to Oriente where they celebrated the anniversary of the attack on the Moncada Barracks and the birth of the Movimiento 26 de Julio. After returning from Cuba, Mayfield began raising money for food and weapons for Williams and ferrying them to Monroe, NC. In August 1961, after a series of attacks by white terrorists, a tense standoff developed between Williams' self-defense group and white citizens of Monroe. On August 27, a white couple, Mr. And Mrs. Bruce Stegall from nearby Marshall, NC, accidentally drove down the street to the house where Williams and others were guarding. The couple was held at gunpoint and brought to Williams's house. They were held and released them a few hours later. The FBI, which had previously refused to take action against the violence perpetuated by white citizens of Monroe, charged Williams with kidnapping and named Mayfield and fellow activist Mae Mallory as material witnesses. Late that night, Williams, his wife Mabel, Mayfield, and Mallory left Monroe in Mayfield's car and made their way to Canada. Then Robert and Mabel Williams fled to Cuba while Mayfield traveled to London to meet his wife and from there to Ghana where she had a taken a job with the government of then President Kwame Nkrumah. During Mayfield's time in Ghana, he was employed by the Ministry of Information and wrote for the Evening News and The Spark, Ghanaian newspapers. He founded the African Review, a bimonthly journal that featured articles by African-descended intellectuals including Bessie Head, Preston King, and Neville Dawes, analyzing the economic and social issues facing decolonizing Africa. Mayfield established the international branch of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, and edited a collection called The World Without the Bomb in 1963. Mayfield lived in worked in Ghana until January 1966 before relocating to Ibiza, Spain, just prior to the 1966 Ghanaian coup d'état. Mayfield returned to the United States in May 1967 and took a job teaching at Cornell University. At the invitation of film director Jules Dassin, he began rewriting the script for The Betrayal, which would later be made into the film Uptight (1968). The movie, which was shot on location in Cleveland, was a financial failure, but it presaged the explosion of Black films in the late 1960s and early 1970s known as Blaxploitation. In November 1971, Mayfield relocated to Guyana at the invitation of Tom Feelings, an artist and friend from Ghana, who had recently relocated as a planning officer in the Guyanese Ministry of Education. There, he worked for the government of Forbes Burnham in that leader's attempt to modernize his recently independent nation. Burnham, who had previously been a staunch ally of the United States in the 1960s, proclaimed his support for other Caribbean revolutionary movements in the early 1970s. His first marriage having ended in divorce, Mayfield married Joan Cambridge, a Guyanese writer and colleague in the Ministry of Information and Culture, in 1973. As internal politics became more heated, the nation's economic fortunes suffered and Mayfield left the country in 1975. He won a Fulbright Fellowship and taught in West Germany and Turkey in 1976. From 1975 to 1978, he worked as a visiting professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, and for his last six years the writer-in-residence at Howard University. Julian Mayfield died cardiac arrest at Washington Adventist Hospital in Takoma Park, Maryland, on October 20, 1984, aged 56.
June 6, 1963
Federico Andahazi (born June 6, 1963) is an Argentine writer. Federico Andahazi was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, at Congreso, a central neighborhood of the city. He is the son of Bela Andahazi, Hungarian poet and psychoanalyst, and Juana Merlín. He obtained a bachelor's degree in Psychology (University of Buenos Aires); he practiced psychoanalysis a few years, while he was working on his short stories. His books have been translated to many languages. In the United States, he has been published by Doubleday, in England by Transworld, in France by Laffont, in Italy by Frassinelli, in China by China Times, in Japan by Kadokawa, in Germany by Krüger, and by publishing houses in other countries. He gave lectures in the Faculty of Journalism and Communication Sciences of the University of Moscow, Russia, and the University of Santos Ossa of Antofagasta, Chile. He also gave talks in Stockholm, London, Paris, Istanbul and other cities of Europe, Latin America, and The United States. He had participated in literary congresses in France, Finland, and several cities in Spain among others. He was invited to book fairs in Guadalajara, Moscow, Pula, Istanbul, Madrid, Barcelona, and Buenos Aires and most cities of Argentina. He has written articles published by Clarín, La Nación, Perfil, Noticias, Veintitrés, Lamujerdemivida, Brando, V de Vian, and others in Argentina, USA, Portugal, Colombia. In 1996 he won the First Prize of the Segunda Bienal de Arte Joven de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires with his short story "Almas misericordiosas". The same year he received the First Prize of the Concurso Anual desde la Gente with his short story "El sueño de los justos". Towards the end of 1996, he was awarded the CAMED Prize for the short story Por Encargo. In 1996, while Andahazi was the finalist of the Planeta Awards, his novel The Anatomist won the First Prize of the Fundación Fortabat. However, the mentor and financial supporter of the contest, María Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat, announced her "disagreement" with the decision of the jury, through a request published in most newspapers of Buenos Aires, in which she stated that the novel "does not contribute to [the] exalt[ation of] the most high values of the human spirit". The Fundación respected and implemented the decision of the jury, which included María Angélica Bosco, Raúl Castagnino, José María Castiñeira de Dios, María Granata and Eduardo Gudiño Kieffer, but the jury was subsequently dismissed by Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat and the literary competitions organized by the Fundación Fortabat have not been held again. The Anatomist was published by Editorial Planeta in 1997, translated into over thirty languages, and has sold millions of copies worldwide. His second novel, The Merciful Women, was published in 1998. In 1998 the publishing house Temas published a small volume with some of the short stories awarded titled El árbol de las tentaciones. There are three short stories that begin in the same way and they are located in similar settings (nineteenth-century Argentina). In 2000 he published El príncipe and in 2002 El secreto de los flamencos. Errante en la sombra was published in 2004; Andahazi wrote more than forty tangos for this story, in which singer Carlos Gardel takes part. During the summer of 2005, Andahazi and his readers collectively wrote a newspaper serial called Mapas del fin del mundo published by the newspaper Diario Clarín. The author wrote the beginning of a text, giving the place to the readers to continue the story, creating characters, proposing plots, solving riddles, to be sent by e-mail. Therefore, in an unprecedented work, reading and answering thousands of e-mails per week, Andahazi built the story with the various inputs and points of view. Every Saturday a new chapter was added to the novel, increasing the participation and the expectation of readers converted into co-authors. The novel La ciudad de los herejes was also published in 2005. In 2006, Federico Andahazi won the Planeta Prize with his novel El conquistador. He participated in numerous anthologies, among which are: Las palabras pueden: Los escritores y la infancia (2007, to UNICEF and World Food Program) with authors like José Saramago, Carlos Fuentes, Ernesto Sábato, Juan Gelman, Mario Benedetti and Mario Vargas Llosa. Líneas aéreas (1999, published by Lengua de trapo, Spain) with writers such as Jorge Volpi, Santiago Gamboa and Edmundo Paz Soldán. A Whistler in the nightworld, short fiction from the Latin Americas (2002, published by Plume, USA) Laura Restrepo and Ángeles Mastretta among others. La Selección Argentina (2000, published by Tusquets). El libro de los nuevos pecados capitales (2001, Norma Publishing Group). He also participated in the book Homage to Diego Maradona (2001, SAF) in the company of Roberto Fontanarrosa and Pacho O'Donnell.
June 6, 1606
Pierre Corneille (6 June 1606 – 1 October 1684) was a French tragedian, and one of the three great seventeenth-century French dramatists, along with Molière and Racine. As a young man, he earned the valuable patronage of Cardinal Richelieu, who was trying to promote classical tragedy along formal lines, but later quarrelled with him, especially over his best-known play Le Cid about a medieval Spanish warrior, which was denounced by the newly formed Académie française for breaching the unities. He continued to write well-received tragedies for nearly forty years.
June 6, 1952
Deborah Crombie (née Darden) (born June 6, 1952) is an American author of the Duncan Kincaid / Gemma James mystery series set in the United Kingdom. Crombie was raised in Richardson, Texas, and has lived in the United Kingdom. She now lives in McKinney, Texas. Crombie studied biology at Austin College and was a writing student of Warren Norwood at Tarrant County College.
June 6, 1939
Marian Wright Edelman (born June 6, 1939) is an American activist for the rights of children. She is president and founder of the Children's Defense Fund.
June 6, 1918
Martin Julius Esslin (6 June 1918 – 24 February 2002) was a Hungarian-born English producer, dramatist, journalist, adaptor and translator, critic, academic scholar and professor of drama, best known for coining the term "Theatre of the Absurd" in his work of the same name (Theatre of the Absurd; 1961). This work has been called "the most influential theatrical text of the 1960s" by some reviewers.
June 6, 1935
Joy Nozomi Kogawa (born June 6, 1935) is a Canadian poet and novelist of Japanese descent. Born Joy Nozomi Nakayama in Vancouver, British Columbia, she was sent with her family to the internment camp for Japanese Canadians at Slocan during World War II. After the war she resettled with her family in Coaldale, Alberta. She has worked to educate Canadians about the history of the internment camps, and was active in the fight for government redress. Although the majority of her writing is poetry, Kogawa's best-known work is Obasan (1981), a semi-autobiographical novel. A sequel, Itsuka (1992), was rewritten and retitled Emily Kato (2005). Obasan has been named as one of the most important books in Canadian history by the Literary Review of Canada and was also listed by The Toronto Star in a ‘Best of Canada’ feature. Obasan was later adapted into a children's book, Naomi's Road (1986), which, in turn, Vancouver Opera adapted into a 45-minute opera that toured elementary schools throughout British Columbia. The opera was also performed before the general public in the greater Vancouver area, Red Deer and Lethbridge, Alberta, Seattle, Washington, and Ottawa, Ontario at the National War Museum. Although the novel Obasan describes Asian Canadian experiences, it is routinely taught in Asian American literature courses in the USA, due to its successful ‘integration of politically understanding and literary artistry’ and ‘its authentication of a pan-Asian sensibility.’ Kogawa currently divides her time between Vancouver and Toronto, Ontario, and is the 2012–13 Writer-in-Residence at the University of Toronto. In 1986, Kogawa was made a Member of the Order of Canada; in 2006, she was made a Member of the Order of British Columbia. In 2010, the Japanese government honored Kogawa with the Order of the Rising Sun ‘for her contribution to the understanding and preservation of Japanese Canadian history.’
June 6, 1925
Maxine Kumin (June 6, 1925 – February 6, 2014) was an American poet and author. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1981–1982. Kumin's many awards include the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize for Poetry (1972), the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1973) for Up Country, in 1995 the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the 1994 Poets' Prize (for Looking for Luck), an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for excellence in literature (1980), an Academy of American Poets fellowship (1986), the 1999 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and six honorary degrees.
June 6, 1951
Geraldine McCaughrean is a British children's novelist. She has written more than 160 books, including Peter Pan in Scarlet, the official sequel to Peter Pan commissioned by Great Ormond Street Hospital, the holder of Peter Pan's copyright. Her work has been translated into 45 languages worldwide.
June 6, 1943
Werner Sollors is the Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and of Afro American Studies, and Director of the History of American Civilization Program, at Harvard University. Previous works include Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a 'Populist Modernism' and Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture.
June 6, 1964
Yvonne Tasker is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema (1998) and Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (1983).
June 7, 1955
Hargurchet Singh Bhabra (June 7, 1955 - June 1, 2000) was a British Asian writer and broadcaster who settled in Canada. Bhabra was born in Mumbai, India and moved to England with his family in 1957. The family eventually settled in Beare Green, Surrey. From 1966 to 1973, Bhabra attended Reigate Grammar School. He was the only boy of Asian origin in the school, was highly regarded by his teachers, and an accomplished actor in school productions such as Much Ado about Nothing. Regarded by his teachers as the most exceptional member of an exceptional year, he won a scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford where he studied English Literature. Bhabra worked for six years in international banking in the City of London. In 1984, he resigned to complete Gestures, a novel on which he had been working for years. He travelled and worked as a correspondent for a few years, which provided material for his career as a writer of fiction, under his own name and also as A M Kabal and John Ford. Gestures won a Betty Trask Award in 1987. It has been described thus: ‘With extraordinary force and subtlety, Gestures conducts the 'funeral rite over an entire way of life. . . a liberal, human, European culture which has finally disappeared'. The lines could stand as an epitaph for Bhabra himself. Infused with his own erudition, elegance and empathy, it was also - and to a great degree - an expression of his own sense of displacement.’ Indeed, although he published in quick succession three thrillers — The Adversary (1986) and Bad Money (1987), and Zero Yield — the next few years were spent largely on travels to Egypt, Mexico and Latin America. In 1989, Bhabra was awarded the first Fulbright Chandler Fellowship in Spy and Detective Fiction Writing. This prize included a post as writer-in-residence at the University of California, Los Angeles for one year. Bhabra stayed on in Los Angeles from 1991 to 1993, hoping to earn money as a scriptwriter. That did not work out, however, though his fund of esoteric knowledge did help him win a handsome sum as a contestant on a television quiz show, Jeopardy, an accomplishment of which he remained proud. While there, he also developed an obsession with climbing bridges, which led to his arrest while making an assault on the Golden Gate, San Francisco. Bhabra also taught at Amherst College in Massachusetts. In 1994 Bhabra moved to Toronto, where his parents now lived. In Canada, Bhabra was perceived as an Asian-Canadian writer and broadcaster. He taught at the Humber School for Writers at Humber College and then joined TVOntario as co-host, with Marni Jackson, of the book show Imprint from 1995 to 1997. Knowledgeable and intelligent, Bhabra had interests ranging from food and fashion to films and books. His contract with Imprint was not renewed after the 1997 season. After leaving Imprint, Bhabra struggled to make ends meet with occasional freelance magazine and television work. Television projects included the show Starting Up!, about the challenges and rewards of opening a business, which he created and produced for TVO. Bhabra also embarked on an ambitious fiction quartet: South, West, North, and East. By the spring of 1999, Bhabra had completed a draft of the first chapter of the first novel, South, a draft which failed to lead to the publishing contract he hoped for and much needed, in order to support himself financially. When opportunities at TVO dried up, Bhabra joined TFO, the French-language channel, where he worked, for a short time, on a new arts show, Ôzone. Bhabra left TFO in late 1999 as a result of artistic differences. He was sustained, during these years, by the support of his partner, Vee Ledson, daughter of educator Sidney Ledson. Bhabra had encouraged Ledson to pursue her dream of running her own school, Laurel Academy, which she established in Toronto in 1995. On 1 June 2000, a week before his 45th birthday, he killed himself by jumping off the Prince Edward Viaduct on Toronto's Bloor Street. Alas, none around him knew of his debilitating writer's block; in the months and weeks leading up to his death, Bhabra had led some of those closest to him to believe he had, at last, completed the first novel and secured a book contract for it, and that he had begun work on the second book. His death contributed to the argument for the Luminous Veil, a suicide barrier fence over the viaduct. In 2001, Bhabra, was posthumously nominated for a Gémeaux Award (Prix Gémaux), for his work on Ôzone. In 2003, the Luminous Veil was finally completed and in the same year Gestures was reprinted.
June 7, 1935
Harry Crews is the author of 23 books, including The Gospel Singer, Naked in Garden Hills, This Thing Don't Lead to Heaven, Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit, Car, The Hawk Is Dying, The Gypsy's Curse, A Feast of Snakes, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, Blood and Grits, The Enthusiast, All We Need of Hell, The Knockout Artist, Body, Scar Lover, The Mulching of America, Celebration, and Florida Frenzy (UPF, 1982). Erik Bledsoe is an instructor of English and American studies at the University of Tennessee. He has published articles on southern writers and edited a special issue of the Southern Quarterly devoted to Crews. His 1997 interview with Harry Crews from that magazine is included in this collection.
June 7, 1899
Elizabeth Bowen (7 June 1899, Dublin – 22 February 1973, Moldoveni, Teleorman) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer.
June 7, 1958
Bradley Clayton Denton (born 1958) is an American science fiction author. He has also written other types of fiction, such as the black comedy of his novel Blackburn, about a sympathetic serial killer. He was born in Towanda, Kansas, and attended the University of Kansas at Lawrence and graduated with degrees in astronomy (B.A.) and English (M.A.). His first published work was the short story "The Music of the Spheres", published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in March 1984. His collection The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians and A Conflagration Artist won the 1995 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection. He and his wife Barbara moved from Kansas to Austin, Texas in 1988.
June 7, 1954
Karen Louise Erdrich, known as Louise Erdrich, (Little Falls, Minnesota June 7, 1954) is an American author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a band of the Anishinaabe (also known as Ojibwa and Chippewa). Erdrich is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant writers of the second wave of the Native American Renaissance. In 2009, her novel The Plague of Doves was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In November 2012, she received the National Book Award for Fiction for her novel The Round House. She is also the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis that focuses on Native American literature and the Native community in the Twin Cities.
June 7, 1898
Maurits Cornelis Escher (7 June 1898 – 27 March 1972), usually referred to as M. C. Escher, was a Dutch graphic artist. He is known for his often mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints. These feature impossible constructions, explorations of infinity, architecture, and tessellations.
June 7, 1943
Nikki Giovanni (born June 7, 1943), one of America’s most widely read living poets, has earned a reputation for being outspoken and controversial - mostly because she always speaks her mind. She entered the literary world at the height of the Black Arts Movement and quickly achieved not simple fame but stardom. A recording of her poems was one of the best-selling albums in the country; all but one of her nearly twenty books are still in print with several having sold more than a hundred thousand copies. Named woman of the year by three different magazines, including Ebony, and recipient of a host of honorary doctorates and awards, Nikki Giovanni has read from her work and lectured at colleges around the country. Her books include BLACK FEELING, BLACK TALK/BLACK JUDGEMENT; MY HOUSE; THE WOMEN AND THE MEN; COTTON CANDY ON A RAINY DAY; THOSE WHO RIDE THE NIGHT WINDS; and SACRED COWS. . . AND OTHER EDIBLES. Nikki Giovanni is a professor of English at Virginia Polytechnic.
June 7, 1937
Jack David Zipes is an American retired Professor of German at the University of Minnesota, who has published and lectured on the subject of fairy tales, their evolution, and their social and political role in civilizing processes. According to Zipes, fairy tales ‘serve a meaningful social function, not just for compensation but for revelation: the worlds projected by the best of our fairy tales reveal the gaps between truth and falsehood in our immediate society.’ His arguments are avowedly based on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and more recently theories of cultural evolution. Jack Zipes completed a B.A. in Political Science (1959), and a M.A. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, (1960). From there, Zipes studied at the University of Munich in 1962 and the University of Tübingen in 1963. He completed a PhD in comparative literature at Columbia University in 1965. Zipes taught at various institutions before heading the Department of German, Scandinavian, and Dutch at the University of Minnesota. He has translated the complete fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.
June 7, 1952
ORHAN PAMUK won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. His novel MY NAME IS RED won the 2003 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His work has been translated into more than sixty languages. Orhan Pamuk’s other books include THE BLACK BOOK, ISTANBUL, THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE, MY NAME IS RED, THE NAIVE AND THE SENTIMENTAL NOVELIST, OTHER COLORS, SNOW, and THE WHITE CASTLE.
June 7, 1931
Okot p'Bitek (7 June 1931 – 20 July 1982) was a Ugandan poet, who achieved wide international recognition for Song of Lawino, a long poem dealing with the tribulations of a rural African wife whose husband has taken up urban life and wishes everything to be westernised. Song of Lawino was originally written in Acholi language, and self-translated to English, and published in 1966. It was a breakthrough work, creating an audience amongst anglophone Africans for direct, topical poetry in English; and incorporating traditional attitudes and thinking in an accessible yet faithful literary vehicle. It was followed by the pendant Song of Ocol (1970), the husband's reply. The East African Song School or Okot School poetry is now an academic identification of the work following his direction, also popularly called 'comic singing': a forceful type of dramatic verse monologue rooted in traditional song and phraseology. Okot p'Bitek was born in Gulu, in the North Uganda grasslands. His father Jebedayo Opi was a schoolteacher, his mother Lacwaa Cerina was a traditional singer. His background was Acholi, and he wrote first in Lwo, one of the Western Nilotic languages. He was educated at Gulu High School, then King's College, Budo, and later at universities in the United Kingdom. At school he was noted as a singer, dancer, drummer and athlete; he composed and directed an opera while at college. He travelled abroad first as a player with the Ugandan national football team, in 1958. At this point he gave up on football as a possible career, staying on in Britain; he studied education at the University of Bristol, and then law at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He then took a B. Litt. degree in social anthropology at the University of Oxford, with a 1963 dissertation on Acholi and Lango traditional cultures. According to George Heron he lost his commitment to Christian belief during these years. This had major consequences for his attitude as a scholar of African tradition, which was by no means accepting of the general run of earlier work, or what he called 'dirty gossip' in relation to tribal life. His character Lawino also speaks for him, in some places, on these matters. He wrote an early novel, Lak Tar Miyo Kinyero Wi Lobo (1953), in Lwo, later translated into English as White Teeth. It concerns the experiences of a young Acholi man moving away from home, to find work and so a wife. He organised an arts festival at Gulu, and then at Kisumu. Subsequently he taught at Makerere University and then was Director of Uganda's National Theatre. He became unpopular with the Ugandan government, and took teaching posts outside the country. He took part in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 1969. He was at the Institute of African Studies of University College, Nairobi from 1971 as a senior research fellow and lecturer, with visiting positions at University of Texas at Austin and University of Ife in Nigeria in 1978/9. He remained in exile during the regime of Idi Amin, returning in 1982 to Makerere University, to teach creative writing. Apart from his poetry and novels, he also took part in an ongoing debate about the integrity of scholarship on traditional African religion, with the assertion in African Religions in Western Scholarship (1971) that scholars centred on European concerns were 'intellectual smugglers'. His point, aimed partly at Africans who had had a training in Christian traditions, was that it led to a concentration on matters distant from the actual concerns of Africans; this has been contested by others. He was an atheist. He died in Kampala of a stroke in 1982. He is survived by daughters Agnes Oyella, Jane Okot p'Bitek, who wrote a Song of Farewell (1994), Olga Okot Bitek Ojelel and Cecilia Okot Bitek who work as nurses, Juliane Okot Bitek who writes poetry, and a son George Okot p'Bitek, who is a Teacher in Kampala. Olga, Cecilia, and Juliane all live in Vancouver, Canada. In 2004 Juliane was the recipient of an award in the Commonwealth Short Story Contest for her story 'Going Home'. These are the daughters of his wife Caroline. The Song of Lawino has been described as one of the most important works of African literature of the 1960s. The Luo original was written in rhymed couplets, and was metrically regular. The English translation, published a decade later in 1966, is in a staccato form of free verse, running to 13 sections and some 5000 lines. It develops from many angles Lawino, the almost-discarded wife of an upwardly-mobile husband, as a persona or type, but also as an individual of great verbal resource who probably reflects the author's mother. Kwame Anthony Appiah remarks in In My Father's House that the specific cultural points made are carried off without the need for much exposition. Given that the form mixes harangue with self-reflection, it is always clear where the argument tends and the context is brought along with the main thrust, whether the issue is cooking, Lawino's relatives being told they cannot drop in unannounced, or the pretensions and fashions of the urban second wife. Scholars have identified numerous allusions in and sources of Song of Lawino, in Acholi traditional songs. These can be found at the level of particular phrases. They also come from across the range of genres, making the Song of Lawino a cross-section of an entire culture. The shorter sequel Song of Ocol was less well received. The self-justification of the ambitious husband had no doubt a satirical and political aim. It has also dated much more quickly, while the many-faceted Lawino, who starts with the comment 'My husband's tongue is bitter', is more likely to become a timeless creation. In Two Songs, he addressed other issues, in the same style. Song of a Prisoner drew on his reactions to Kenyan politics, and Song of Malaya deals with the life of a prostitute.
June 7, 1920
Carlos Gorostiza Rodríguez (June 7, 1920 – July 19, 2016) was an Argentine playwright, theatre director, and novelist. His seminal work El puente debuted in 1949 and he garnered numerous awards for his proceeding works. He later was Secretary of Culture between 1983 and 1986.
June 7, 1917
Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, and was educated at the Englewood High School and Wilson Junior College in Chicago. Living in Chicago since early childhood she has watched the life of her people there and has reflected it in her poems which have appeared an magazines like The Negro Quarterly, Poetry, Common Ground, Harper’s and the New York Herald Tribune.
June 7, 1952
A’Lelia Bundles (born June 7, 1952) is the former Washington deputy bureau chief for ABC News and was an award-winning network news producer with ABC and NBC for more than twenty years. She is the author of numerous essays, articles and encyclopedia entries about Madam C. J. Walker and a young adult book, MADAM C. J. WALKER, which won an American Book Award. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia.
June 7, 1944
Kjartan Fløgstad (born 7 June 1944 in the industrial city of Sauda in Ryfylke, Rogaland) is a Norwegian author. Fløgstad studied literature and linguistics at the University of Bergen. Subsequently he worked for a period as an industrial worker and as a sailor before he debuted as a poet with his collection of poems titled Valfart (Pilgrimage) in 1968. He received the Nordic Council's Literature Prize for his 1977 novel Dalen Portland (Dollar Road). Other major works include Fyr og flamme (Fire and Flame), Kron og mynt, Grand Manila and Grense Jakobselv.
June 7, 1883
Sylvanus Griswold Morley (June 7, 1883 – September 2, 1948) was an American archaeologist, epigrapher, and Mayanist scholar who made significant contributions toward the study of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization in the early 20th century. Morley made extensive excavations of the Maya site of Chichen Itza that he directed on behalf of the Carnegie Institution. He also published several large compilations and treatises on Maya hieroglyphic writing, and wrote popular accounts on the Maya for a general audience. To his contemporaries, "Vay" Morley was one of the leading Mesoamerican archaeologists of his day. Although more recent developments in the field have resulted in a re-evaluation of his theories and works, his publications, particularly on calendric inscriptions, are still cited. In his role as director of various projects sponsored by the Carnegie Institution, he oversaw and encouraged many others who later established notable careers in their own right. His commitment and enthusiasm for Maya studies helped inspire the necessary sponsorship for projects that would ultimately reveal much about ancient Maya civilization. Morley also conducted espionage in Mexico on behalf of the United States during World War I, but the scope of those activities only came to light well after his death. His archaeological field work in Mexico and Central America provided suitable cover for investigating German activities and anti-American activity at the behest of the United States' Office of Naval Intelligence.
June 7, 1925
Jack Olsen (June 7, 1925 – July 16, 2002) was an American journalist and author known for his crime reporting. Olsen was Senior Editor-in-Chief for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1954. He was Midwest bureau chief for Time magazine and a senior editor for Sports Illustrated in 1961. He was also a regular contributor to other publications, including Fortune and Vanity Fair.
June 7, 1945
Deborah Frances Tannen (born June 7, 1945) is an American academic and professor of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She has been a McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences following a term in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Tannen is the author of twelve books, including That's Not What I Meant! and You Just Don't Understand, the latter of which spent four years on the New York Times Best Sellers List, including eight consecutive months at number one. She is also a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and TIME magazine, among other publications.
June 8, 1910
María Luisa Bombal Anthes (Viña del Mar, 8 June 1910 – 6 May 1980) was a Chilean author. Daughter of Martín Bombal Videla and Blanca Anthes Precht. Her work is now highly regarded, incorporating themes of eroticism, surrealism and feminism, and she ranks among a small number of Latin American female authors whose works received worldwide acclaim. Following the death of her father, Martín Bombal Videla, in 1922, the twelve-year-old María Luisa was sent to Paris, where she studied at the college Sainte Geneviève. At the institute for literature at the University of Paris she studied literature and philosophy until her return to South America. She had also attended the Lycée La Bruyère and the Sorbonne at the University of Paris. After her return, she married Elogio Sánchez, who did not share her interest in literature. During their marriage, Bombal began to suffer from depression, and shot her husband after a failed suicide attempt, although he survived. With the help of friends, María Bombal fled the country to Argentina, where in 1933 she met Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda in Buenos Aires. In 1940, she and her third husband emigrated to the USA, where she lived until 1971, when she returned to South America; living first in Argentina and then in Viña del Mar, Chile. There, the 18th September 1976, Bombal again met Jorge Luis Borges. She remained in Chile until her death in 1980.
June 8, 1927
George Lamming (born 1927), is a novelist and poet. He was born in Barbados and teaches at Brown University. George Lamming was born on June 8, 1927 in Carrington Village, Barbados, of mixed African and English parentage. After his mother married his stepfather, Lamming split his time between this birthplace and his stepfather's home in St David's Village. Lamming attended Roebuck Boys' School and Combermere School on a scholarship. Encouraged by his teacher, Frank Collymore, Lamming found the world of books and started to write. Before moving to England, he worked from 1946 to 1950 as a teacher at El Colegio de Venezuela, a boarding school for boys in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He then emigrated to England where, for a short time, he worked in a factory. In 1951 he became a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial Service. His writings were published in the Barbadian magazine Bim, edited by his teacher Frank Collymore, and the BBC's Caribbean Voices series broadcast his poems and short prose. Lamming himself read poems on Caribbean Voices, including some by the young Derek Walcott. He entered academia in 1967 as a writer-in-residence and lecturer in the Creative Arts Centre and Department of Education at the University of the West Indies. Since then, he has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Pennsylvania and a lecturer in Denmark, Tanzania, and Australia.
June 8, 1945
Alfred W. McCoy is professor of Southeast Asian history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Educated at Columbia, the University of California at Berkeley, and Yale, he has spent the past twenty years writing about the politics and history of Southeast Asia. He is the author of several books on the Philippines, one of which won the country’s National Book Award, and the editor of Southeast Asia Under Japanese Occupation. An internationally recognized expert on drug trafficking and organized crime, he is also the author of DRUG TRAFFIC: NARCOTICS AND ORGANIZED CRIME IN AUSTRALIA.
June 8, 1937
A. G. MOJTABAI (born June 8, 1937 Brooklyn, New York City, NY) has taught at Harvard, New York University, and the University of Tulsa. She is the author of ten previous books, which have been translated into several languages.
June 8, 1947
Sara Paretsky (born June 8, 1947) is an American author of detective fiction, best known for her novels focused on the protagonist V. I. Warshawski.
June 8, 1934
Dorinda 'Dori' Sanders is an African-American novelist, food writer and farmer. Her first novel, Clover, was a bestseller, and won a 1990, Lilian Smith Book Award.
June 8, 1903
Marguerite Yourcenar (8 June 1903 – 17 December 1987) was a French novelist and essayist born in Brussels, Belgium, who became a US citizen in 1947. Winner of the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize, she was the first woman elected to the Académie française, in 1980, and the seventeenth person to occupy seat 3. Yourcenar was born Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour in Brussels, Belgium, to Michel Cleenewerck de Crayencour, of French bourgeois descent, originating from French Flanders, a very wealthy landowner, and a Belgian mother, Fernande de Cartier de Marchienne, of Belgian nobility, who died ten days after her birth. She grew up in the home of her paternal grandmother. She adopted the surname Yourcenar – an almost anagram of Crayencour, having one fewer c – as a pen name; in 1947 she also took it as her legal surname. Yourcenar's first novel, Alexis, was published in 1929. She translated Virginia Woolf's The Waves over a 10-month period in 1937. In 1939, her partner at the time, the literary scholar and Kansas City native Grace Frick, invited Yourcenar to the United States to escape the outbreak of World War II in Europe. She lectured in comparative literature in New York City and Sarah Lawrence College. Yourcenar was bisexual; she and Frick became lovers in 1937 and remained together until Frick's death in 1979 and a tormented relationship with Jerry Wilson. After ten years spent in Hartford, Connecticut, they bought a house in Northeast Harbor, Maine, on Mount Desert Island, where they lived for decades. They are buried alongside each other at Brookside Cemetery, Mount Desert, Maine. In 1951, she published, in France, the novel Memoirs of Hadrian, which she had been writing on-and-off for a decade. The novel was an immediate success and met with great critical acclaim. In this novel, Yourcenar recreated the life and death of one of the great rulers of the ancient world, the Roman emperor Hadrian, who writes a long letter to Marcus Aurelius, the son and heir of Antoninus Pius, his successor and adoptive son. The Emperor meditates on his past, describing both his triumphs and his failures, his love for Antinous, and his philosophy. The novel has become a modern classic. Her books include MEMOIRS OF HADRIAN, COUP DE GRACE, THE ABYSS, FIRES, A COIN IN NINE HANDS, ALEXIS, and THE DARK BRAIN OF PIRANESI.
June 8, 1965
Karin Alvtegen was born in 1966 in a small town in Sweden. Her first novel, GUILT (Skuld), was published in Sweden in 1998, to rave reviews. Two years later MISSING (Saknad) won Scandinavia's distinguished Glass Key award, for Best Crime Novel of the Year. BETRAYAL (Svek) (2005) was shortlisted for another Glass Key, and SHAME (Skam) was a finalist for one of England's prestigious CWA ‘Dagger’ awards, for Best International Crime Novel of 2006. She has been called ‘a modern-day Strindberg’ and ‘Sweden's Queen of Crime.’
June 8, 1939
Bernard Terry Casey (June 8, 1939 – September 19, 2017) was an American actor, poet, and professional football player. Casey was born in Wyco, West Virginia, the son of Flossie (Coleman) and Frank Leslie Casey. He graduated from East High School in Columbus, Ohio. Casey was a record-breaking track and field athlete for Bowling Green State University. He earned All-America recognition and a trip to the finals at the 1960 United States Olympic Trials. In addition to national honors, Casey won three consecutive Mid-American Conference titles in the high-hurdles, 1958–60. Casey was drafted by the San Francisco 49ers in 1961 as the 9th pick in the first round. He played for eight NFL seasons: six with the 49ers and two with the Los Angeles Rams. Casey began his acting career in the film Guns of the Magnificent Seven, a sequel to The Magnificent Seven. Then he played opposite fellow former NFL star Jim Brown in the crime dramas ...tick...tick...tick... and Black Gunn. He played the title role in the 1972 science fiction TV film Gargoyles. He also played Tamara Dobson's love interest in 1973's Cleopatra Jones. From there he moved between performances on television and the big screen such as playing team captain for the Chicago Bears in the TV film Brian's Song. In 1979, he starred as widower Mike Harris in the NBC television series Harris and Company, the first weekly American TV drama series centered on a black family. In 1980, he played Major Jeff Spender in the television mini-series The Martian Chronicles, based on the novel by Ray Bradbury. In 1981, Casey played a detective opposite Burt Reynolds in the feature film Sharky's Machine, directed by Reynolds. He reunited with Reynolds a few years later for the crime story Rent-a-Cop. In 1983, he played the role of CIA agent Felix Leiter in the non-Eon Productions James Bond film Never Say Never Again. He co-starred in Revenge of the Nerds and had a comedic role as Colonel Rhombus in the John Landis film Spies Like Us. Casey also appeared in the movie Hit Man. Also during his career, he worked with such well-known directors as Martin Scorsese in his 1972 film Boxcar Bertha and appeared on such television series as The Streets of San Francisco and as U. N. Jefferson, the national head of the Lambda Lambda Lambda fraternity in Revenge of the Nerds. He played a version of himself, and other football players turned actors, in Keenen Ivory Wayans's 1988 comedic film I'm Gonna Git You Sucka. He played a high school teacher in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, released in 1989. Casey appeared as a very influential prisoner with outside connections in Walter Hill's Another 48 Hrs.. In 1992, he appeared as a Naval officer in the battleship USS Missouri in Under Siege. In 1994, Casey guest-starred in a two-episode story arc in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (along with series star Avery Brooks) as the Maquis leader Lieutenant Commander Cal Hudson, and in 1995 as a guest-star on both SeaQuest 2032 as Admiral VanAlden and Babylon 5 as Derek Cranston. He has continued working as an actor. In 2006, he co-starred in the film When I Find the Ocean alongside such actors as Lee Majors.
June 8, 1933
Roger Davis Masters studied at Harvard, served in the U.S. Army and completed his M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. After teaching at Yale, he has been on the faculty at Dartmouth College as well as Cultural Attaché at the American Embassy in Paris.
June 8, 1945
Judy Sierra holds a PhD in folklore from the University of California. Her poetry collection Antarctic Antics was a best-seller in the USA. She enjoys storytelling and reading books to children in schools. She lives in California.
June 8, 1927
Jerry Stiller was born in New York City in 1927 and began his award-winning career as part of the famed improvisational group The Compass. He and his wife, Anne Meara, played every major nightclub in the country and appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show more than thirty-five times. His many stage credits include the Broadway productions of Hurlyburly and The Ritz; he has appeared in many films, notable among them is Hairspray, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and Seize the Day. He currently appears on the hit television series, The King of Queens.
June 9, 1927
Robert Wright Campbell (June 9, 1927 in Newark, New Jersey – September 21, 2000 in Monterey), often credited as R. Wright Campbell or Robert Campbell, was an American screenwriter, author and occasional actor. He was the brother of actor William Campbell and brother in law of Judith Campbell Exner.
June 9, 1956
Patricia Cornwell (born Patricia Carroll Daniels; June 9, 1956) is a contemporary American crime writer. She is widely known for writing a popular series of novels featuring the heroine Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a medical examiner. Her books have sold more than 100 million copies.
June 9, 1898
Curzio Malaparte (9 June 1898 – 19 July 1957), born Kurt Erich Suckert, was an Italian journalist, dramatist, short-story writer, novelist and diplomat. His chosen surname, which he used from 1925, means ‘evil/wrong side’ and is a play on Napoleon's family name ‘Bonaparte‘ which means, in Italian, ‘good side’. Born in Prato, Tuscany, to a Lombard mother and a German father, he was educated at Collegio Cicognini and at the La Sapienza University of Rome. In 1918 he started his career as a journalist. Malaparte fought in World War I, earning a captaincy in the Fifth Alpine Regiment and several decorations for valor, and in 1922 took part in Benito Mussolini's March on Rome. In 1924, he founded the Roman periodical La Conquista dello Stato (‘The Conquest of the State’, a title that would inspire Ramiro Ledesma Ramos' La Conquista del Estado). As a member of the Partito Nazionale Fascista, he founded several periodicals and contributed essays and articles to others, as well as writing numerous books, starting from the early 1920s, and directing two metropolitan newspapers. In 1926 he founded with Massimo Bontempelli (1878–1960) the literary quarterly ‘900’. Later he became a co-editor of Fiera Letteraria (1928–31), and an editor of La Stampa in Turin. His polemical war novel-essay, Viva Caporetto! (1921), criticized corrupt Rome and the Italian upper classes as the real enemy (the book was forbidden because it offended the Regio Esercito). In Tecnica del Colpo di Stato (1931) Malaparte attacked both Adolf Hitler and Mussolini. This led to Malaparte being stripped of his National Fascist Party membership and sent to internal exile from 1933 to 1938 on the island of Lipari. He was freed on the personal intervention of Mussolini's son-in-law and heir apparent Galeazzo Ciano. Mussolini's regime arrested Malaparte again in 1938, 1939, 1941, and 1943 and imprisoned him in Rome's infamous jail Regina Coeli. During that time (1938–41) he built a house, known as the Casa Malaparte, on Capo Massullo, on the Isle of Capri. Shortly after his time in jail he published books of magical realist autobiographical short stories, which culminated in the stylistic prose of Donna Come Me (WOMAN LIKE ME) (1940). His remarkable knowledge of Europe and its leaders is based upon his experience as a correspondent and in the Italian diplomatic service. In 1941 he was sent to cover the Eastern Front as a correspondent for Corriere della Sera. The articles he sent back from the Ukrainian Fronts, many of which were suppressed, were collected in 1943 and brought out under the title Il Volga nasce in Europa (‘The Volga Rises in Europe’). Also, this experience provided the basis for his two most famous books, KAPUTT (1944) and THE SKIN (1949). KAPUTT, his novelistic account of the war, surreptitiously written, presents the conflict from the point of view of those doomed to lose it. From November 1943 to March 1946 he was attached to the American High Command in Italy as an Italian Liaison Officer. Articles by Curzio Malaparte have appeared in many literary periodicals of note in France, the United Kingdom, Italy and the United States. After the war, Malaparte's political sympathies veered to the left, and he became member of the Italian Communist Party. In 1947 Malaparte settled in Paris and wrote dramas without much success. After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Malaparte became interested in the Maoist version of Communism, but his journey to China was cut short by illness, and he was flown back to Rome. Io in Russia e in Cina, his journal of the events, was published posthumously in 1958. Malaparte's final book, Maledetti Toscani, his attack on bourgeois culture, appeared in 1956. Shortly after the publication of this book, he became a Catholic. He died from lung cancer on 19 July 1957.
June 9, 1917
Eric Hobsbawm (June 9, 1917, Alexandria, Egypt - October 1, 2012) was educated in Austria, Germany, and England. Emeritus Professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London, and Emeritus University Professor of politics and society at the New School for Social Research, Hobsbawm is the author of more than fourteen books.
June 9, 1958
Anthony Lander Horwitz (June 9, 1958 – May 27, 2019) was an American journalist and author who won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. His books include One for the Road: a Hitchhiker's Outback (1987), Baghdad Without a Map (1991), Confederates in the Attic (1998), Blue Latitudes (AKA Into the Blue) (2002), A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World (2008), Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War (2011), and Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide (2019)
June 9, 1946
James Kelman (born 9 June 1946) is a Scottish novelist, short story writer, playwright and essayist. His novel A Disaffection was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 1989. Kelman won the 1994 Booker Prize with How Late It Was, How Late. In 1998 Kelman was awarded the Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award. His 2008 novel Kieron Smith, Boy won both of Scotland's principal literary awards: the Saltire Society's Book of the Year and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year.
June 9, 1950
Alexs D. Pate is the author of five novels including the New York Times Bestseller Amistad, commissioned by Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks/SKG and based on the screenplay by David Franzoni. Other novels include Losing Absalom, Finding Makeba, The Multicultiboho Sideshow and West of Rehoboth. Alexs’s first book of nonfiction, In The Heart of the Beat: The Poetry of Rap, which investigates the literary history and the quality of rap as a poetic expression, was published by Scarecrow Press January 2010. His memoir, The Past is Perfect: Memoir of a Father/Son Reunion will also be published next year by Coffee House Press. An excerpt of the memoir appears in the Fall 2007 edition of Black Renaissance Noire. Alexs’s poetry collection, Innocent, was published in 1998. In addition, Alexs wrote the foreword to the recently re-published Gordon Parks’ memoir To Smile in Autumn by the University of Minnesota Press. Alexs also wrote the introduction to Mahmoud El-Kati’s new book, Hiptionary. Alexs’s most recent novel, West of Rehoboth was selected as Honor Fiction Book for 2002 by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. In February of 2002, noted National Book Award novelist Charles Johnson chose Alexs as an Achiever Who Will Lead The Next Generation in the area of literature. The list of eight achievers was published in the USA TODAY/WEEKEND along with a dialog between Johnson and Pate. Alexs is an Assistant Professor in African American and African Studies at the University of Minnesota , where he teaches courses in writing and black literature, including a course on The Poetry of Rap. He also teaches fiction writing at the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast M.F.A. program in Portland, Maine. He is currently at work on two novels, The Slide and a story about a black pirate captain, Adventures of the Black Arrow: Search for Libertalia. As host and curator of the Givens Foundation’s NOMMO author’s series Alexs has engaged in conversation with such writers as Ishmael Reed, Amiri Baraka, John Edgar Wideman, Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sanchez, and Ntozake Shange.
June 9, 1948
AHMED RASHID is a journalist based in Lahore. He is the Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Daily Telegraph. He also writes for the Wall Street Journal.
June 9, 1922
George Axelrod (June 9, 1922 – June 21, 2003) was an American screenwriter, producer, playwright and film director, best known for his play, The Seven Year Itch (1952), which was adapted into a movie of the same name starring Marilyn Monroe. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his 1961 adaptation of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's and also adapted Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate (1962).
June 9, 1962
Born and raised in West Los Angeles. Paul Beatty (born June 9, 1962) received an M.A. in psychology from Boston University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Brooklyn College, where he studied with Allen Ginsberg. His first volume of poetry, BIG BANK TAKE LITTLE BANK, was greeted enthusiastically by critics and was chosen by the Village Voice as one of the best books of 1991. His second, JOKER, JOKER, DEUCE, received similar acclaim. His work has been published in a variety of anthologies and journals, including the Norton anthology NEXT: YOUNG AMERICAN WRITERS ON THE NEW GENERATION. Beatty received a New York State Fellow of the Arts Award for Poetry in 1993 and has just been awarded a S25,000 grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Performing Arts. He has made several appearances on MTV, has been profiled in magazines ranging from Newsweek to Vibe to Harpers Bazaar, was the winner of the 1990 New York Poetry Slam, and has read from his work around the United States and in Europe.
June 9, 1930
Roberto Fernández Retamar (born June 9, 1930, Havana) is a Cuban poet, essayist, literary critic and President of the Casa de las Américas. In his role as President of the organization, Fernández also serves on the Council of State of Cuba. An early close confidant of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, he has remained a central figure in Cuba since the 1959 Revolution. Retamar has also written over a dozen major collections of verse and founded the Casa de las Americas cultural magazine. Professor De Castro Rocha, at the University of Manchester has described Retamar as ‘one of the most distinguished Latin American intellectuals of the twentieth century.’ In 1989, he was award the National Prize for Literature, Cuba's national literary award and most important award of its type.
June 9, 1910
Patrícia Rehder Galvão , known by the pseudonym Pagu (São João da Boa Vista, June 9, 1910 - Santos , December 12, 1962) was a writer, poet, theater director, translator, and journalist. A member of Brazil's avant-garde in its heyday. Patrícia Galvão (or to use her nickname, Pagu) was extraordinary. Not only was her work among the most exciting and innovative published in the 1930s, it was unique in portraying an avant-garde woman's view of women in Sao Paulo during that audacious period. Like many of her contemporaries Galvão was a member of the Brazilian Communist Party. She attracted Party criticism for her unorthodox behavior and outspokenness. A visit to Moscow in 1934 disenchanted her with the communist state, but she continued to militate for change upon returning to Brazil. She was imprisoned and tortured under the Vargas dictatorship between 1935 and 1940. In the 1940s she returned to the public through her journalism and literary activities. She died in 1962.
June 9, 1921
Jean Lacouture (9 June 1921 – 16 July 2015) was a journalist, historian and author. He was particularly famous for his biographies. Jean Lacouture was born in Bordeaux, France. He began his career in journalism in 1950 in Combat as diplomatic redactor. He joined Le Monde in 1951. In 1953, he worked in Cairo for France Soir, before returning to Le Monde as director for the overseas services, and grand reporter (one of the highest titles in French journalism) until 1975. Politically engaged on the Left, Lacouture supported decolonisation, and Mitterrand from 1981. He worked for the Nouvel Observateur, and L'Histoire. He is interviewed in the 1968 documentary film about the Vietnam War entitled In the Year of the Pig. Lacouture was also director for publication at Seuil, one of the main French publishers, from 1961 to 1982, and professor at the IEP of Paris between 1969 and 1972. He was mainly known to the public because of his biographies, including the lives of Ho Chi Minh, Nasser, Léon Blum, De Gaulle, François Mauriac, Pierre Mendès France, Mitterrand, Montesquieu, Montaigne, Malraux, Germaine Tillion, Champollion, Jacques Rivière, Stendhal and Kennedy. A dedicated music lover, Lacouture was also president of a society of devotees of Georges Bizet. In 2015 he died in Roussillon, France.
June 9, 1945
Michael H. Tonry, an American criminologist, is the McKnight Presidential Professor of Criminal Law and Policy at the University of Minnesota Law School. He is also the director of the University of Minnesota's Institute on Crime and Public Policy.
June 9, 1943
Margaret Jacob was born on June 9, 1943, and raised in New York City. Her mother, of Irish ancestry, was a domestic worker; her father, of German ancestry, was a mechanic. Among her early influences Jacob counts her Irish ancestry, the political interests of her parents, her participation in church, her school experience studying science, and her aunt, who was a teacher. Jacob was motivated to become a historian because of an interest in Irish-English conflict and a fascination with the past as it shaped the present.
June 9, 1897
Stefán Einarsson (9 June 1897 – 9 April 1972) was an Icelandic linguist and literary historian, who was a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in the United States. Stefán was born and raised on the farm of Höskuldsstaðir in Breiðdalur. His parents were Einar Gunnlaugsson and his wife Margrét Jónsdóttir. After attending school in Akureyri and graduating in 1917 from the Menntaskólinn in Reykjavík, he attended the University of Iceland and completed a master's degree in Icelandic in 1923–24; while a student, he assisted Sigfús Blöndal and Jón Ófeigsson on the Icelandic dictionary for four years. He then studied phonetics at the University of Helsinki in 1924–25 and at the University of Cambridge and completed his PhD at the University of Oslo with a dissertation on the phonetics of Icelandic. He became a faculty member at Johns Hopkins the same year, 1927, at the invitation of Kemp Malone, for whom he had recorded a study text in Icelandic, and worked there until his retirement in 1962. He taught primarily in the English department, in the fields of Old Norse and Old English, and beginning in 1945, Scandinavian literature. He became Professor of Scandinavian Philology in 1945. He remained loyal to Iceland, accepting all invitations to contribute articles about Iceland to reference works and becoming one of the founding officers of the Icelandic Patriotic Society, for whose journal he wrote at least one article a year. He edited Heimskringla, the Icelandic newspaper published in Winnipeg. In 1942 he was appointed Icelandic vice-consul in Baltimore; from 1952 to 1962, when he retired from Johns Hopkins, he served as consul. After retirement he moved back to Iceland and lived in Reykjavík until his death (in Hrafnista nursing home); he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for 1962–63. He played violin and piano and drew and painted well; several of his works include illustrations by him. He was married twice. His first wife, Margarethe Schwarzenberg (26 May 1892 – 7 January 1953), was an Estonian historian. They had no children. Her ashes are buried with his at the family farm. His second wife, whom he married in December 1954, was Ingibjörg Árnadóttir (1896–1980), from Njarðvík, a relative of Halldór Hermannsson, the librarian of the Fiske Icelandic collection at Cornell University. She had four children from a previous marriage. Stefán Einarsson published prolifically, over 500 books and articles in all. In addition to books and articles on linguistic and literary topics, in English he published a grammar of the Icelandic language (which grew out of a wartime Armed Forces course and contains a valuable glossary of Modern Icelandic words) and two histories of Icelandic literature, one of the first treatments of modern Icelandic literature and the other the first survey spanning the entire national literature from the settlement to the contemporary period, including émigré literature. He was the first Icelander to take a structuralist approach to Icelandic phonetics, and an early explorer of the idea of a link between skaldic and Latin meter. In Icelandic, in addition to two further books on Icelandic literature, one of them an expansion of his general survey published in English, he also co-edited and wrote a large part of a book on the history of his native Breiðdalur and was responsible for two of the annuals of the Ferðafélag Íslands, covering Eastern Region. His publications show three areas of emphasis: Icelandic language and culture as revealed in literature; the East Fjords; and great living Icelanders, particularly Sigurður Nordal, with whom he studied, Þórbergur Þórðarson, and Halldór Laxness. Early in his career, at Sigurður's urging, he wrote a biography of Eiríkr Magnússon, who was his maternal great uncle. However, he ranged extremely widely in his reviews, "from Medieval Latin to Strindberg and Icelandic telephone directories." He was also on the editorial boards of the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Modern Language Notes, and Scandinavian Studies (and Notes). Stefán was an honorary member of numerous learned societies, including the American Philosophical Society, to which he was only the second Icelander to be elected. He was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Order of the Falcon, Iceland's highest honour, in 1939, and in 1962 received an honorary doctorate from the University of Iceland. There is a room dedicated to his work at the Breiðdalur Institute in Breiðdalsvík.
June 10, 1915
Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 – April 5, 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990. In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited ‘the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age.’ His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift and Ravelstein. Widely regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest authors, Bellow has had a ‘huge literary influence.’ Bellow said that of all his characters Eugene Henderson, of ‘Henderson the Rain King,’ was the one most like himself. Bellow grew up as an insolent slum kid, a ‘thick-necked’ rowdy, and an immigrant from Quebec. As Christopher Hitchens describes it, Bellow's fiction and principal characters reflect his own yearning for transcendence, a battle ‘to overcome not just ghetto conditions but also ghetto psychoses.’ Bellow's protagonists, in one shape or another, all wrestle with what Corde (Albert Corde, the dean in ‘The Dean's December’) called ‘the big-scale insanities of the 20th century.’ This transcendence of the ‘unutterably dismal’ (a phrase from Dangling Man) is achieved, if it can be achieved at all, through a ‘ferocious assimilation of learning’ (Hitchens) and an emphasis on nobility. In 1989, Bellow received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
June 10, 1941
Philip Caputo (born June 10, 1941) is an American author and journalist. He is best known for A Rumor of War, a best-selling memoir of his experiences during the Vietnam War. Caputo has written 15 books, including two memoirs, five books of general nonfiction, and eight novels. His latest, the nonfiction travel/adventure book The Longest Road: Overland In Search of America from Key West to the Arctic Ocean, was published in July 2013 by Henry Holt.
June 10, 1863
Louis Marie-Anne Couperus (The Hague, 10 June 1863 – De Steeg, 16 July 1923) was a Dutch novelist and poet. His oeuvre contains a wide variety of genres: lyric poetry, psychological and historical novels, novellas, short stories, fairy tales, feuilletons and sketches. Couperus is considered to be one of the foremost figures in Dutch literature.
June 10, 1906
Jorge Icaza Coronel (June 10, 1906 – May 26, 1978) was a writer from Ecuador, best known for his novel Huasipungo, which brought attention to the exploitation of Ecuador's indigenous people by Ecuadorian whites. He was born in Quito in 1906 and died of cancer in the same city in 1978. Jorge Icaza’s literary career began as a playwright. His plays include El Intruso in 1928, La Comedia sin Nombre in 1929, Cuál es in 1931, Sin Sentido in 1932, and Flagelo, which was published in 1936. After his 1933 playscript, El Dictador, was censured, Icaza turned his attention to writing novels about the social conditions in Ecuador, particularly the oppression suffered by its indigenous people. With the publication of Huasipungo in 1934, Jorge Icaza Coronel achieved international fame. The book became a well-known 'Indigenist' novel, a movement in Latin American literature that preceded Magical Realism and emphasized brutal realism. Fragments of the book first appeared in English translation in Russia, where it was welcomed enthusiastically by Russia's peasant socialist class. Jorge Icaza was later appointed Ecuador's ambassador to Russia. The first complete edition of Huasipungo was first translated into the English language in 1962 by Mervyn Savill and published in England by Dennis Dobson Ltd. An 'authorized' translation appeared in 1964 by Bernard H. Dulsey, and was published in 1964 by Southern Illinois University Press in Carbondale, IL as 'The Villagers'. His other books include Sierra in 1933, En las calles in 1936, Cholos in 1938, Media vida deslumbrados in 1942, Huayrapamushcas in 1948, Seis relatos 1952, El chulla Romero y Flores in 1958, and Atrapados, which was published in 1973. Although the latter two books are recognized as Jorge Icaza’s greatest literary achievements by experts (such as Theodore Alan Sackett), Huasipungo continues to be Icaza’s most popular book and has been translated to over 40 languages. Jorge Icaza and Huasipungo are often compared to John Steinbeck and his Grapes of Wrath from 1939, as both are works of social protest. Besides the first edition of 1934, Huasipungo went through two more editions or complete rewritings in Spanish, 1934, 1953, 1960, the first of which was difficult for even natives of other Hispanic countries to read and the last the definitive version. This makes it difficult for the readers to ascertain which version they are reading. Besides being an 'indigenista' novel, Huasipungo has also been considered a proletarian novel, and that is because Latin America had to substitute the Indians for the European working class as a model or character of proletarian literature. Icaza became internationally popular based upon his publications, and was invited to many colleges in the United States to give lectures on the problems of the indigenous people of Ecuador.
June 10, 1944
LESLIE MUNDWILER (June 10, 1944 - November 17, 2013 was born in Galesburg, Illinois. Les renounced his American citizenship in protest to the Vietnam War, becoming a Canadian citizen in 1972. He helped found housing Co-ops in Toronto and conducted related research for the Province of Manitoba. At the University of Winnipeg he taught English composition 1985 - 1986, and from 1984 to present was sole proprietor of Highbrow Books, a local book store and publisher. Les studied classical music and was active in the Manitoba chess scene, playing at Expert level, teaching students and competing in tournaments. Les published essays, criticism, fiction and poetry, recognized by notable Canadian writers such as David McFadden. His literary work, including a 1984 book on Michael Ondaatje, was rooted in theoretical interests and a humane, classical sensibility, shaped by preoccupations with imagination and Roman satire, tempered by shades of lyricism.
June 10, 1963
Pernille Rygg was born on June 10, 1963 in Oslo, Norway. She studied history and ethnology, for several years worked as a set painter for film companies and for the Norwegian Broadcasting Company.
June 10, 1928
Maurice Bernard Sendak (June 10, 1928 – May 8, 2012) was an American illustrator and writer of children's books. He became widely known for his book Where the Wild Things Are, first published in 1963. Born to Jewish-Polish parents, his childhood was affected by the death of many of his family members during the Holocaust. Sendak also wrote works such as In the Night Kitchen, Outside Over There, and illustrated many works by other authors including the Little Bear books by Else Holmelund Minarik.
June 10, 1929
Edward Osborne Wilson (born June 10, 1929), usually cited as E. O. Wilson, is an American biologist, researcher, theorist, naturalist and author. His biological specialty is myrmecology, the study of ants, on which he is the world's leading expert. Wilson has been called "the father of sociobiology" and "the father of biodiversity", his environmental advocacy, and his secular-humanist and deist ideas pertaining to religious and ethical matters. Among his greatest contributions to ecological theory is the theory of island biogeography, which he developed in collaboration with the mathematical ecologist Robert MacArthur, which was the foundation of the development of conservation area design, as well as the unified neutral theory of biodiversity of Stephen Hubbell. Wilson is (2014) the Pellegrino University Research Professor, Emeritus in Entomology for the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, a lecturer at Duke University, and a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He is a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction (for On Human Nature in 1979, and The Ants in 1991) and a New York Times bestseller for The Social Conquest of Earth, Letters to a Young Scientist, and The Meaning of Human Existence.
June 10, 1926
Christopher Middleton (10 June 1926 – 29 November 2015) was a British poet and translator, especially of German literature. He was born John Christopher Middleton in Truro, Cornwall, in 1926. Following four years' service in the Royal Air Force, he studied at Merton College, Oxford, matriculating in 1948. He then held academic positions at the University of Zürich and King's College London. In 1966 he took up a position as Professor of Germanic Languages & Literature at the University of Texas, Austin, retiring in 1998. Middleton has published translations of Robert Walser, Nietzsche, Hölderlin, Goethe, Gert Hofmann and many others. He has received various awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for translation. Middleton married Mary Freer in 1953; they had two daughters and a son. They divorced in 1969. Middleton died on 29 November 2015.
June 11, 1932
Athol Fugard (born 11 June 1932) is a South African playwright, novelist, actor, and director who writes in English. He is best known for his political plays opposing the South African system of apartheid and for the 2005 Academy Award-winning film of his novel Tsotsi, directed by Gavin Hood. Fugard is an adjunct professor of playwriting, acting and directing in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego. For the academic year 2000–2001, he was the IU Class of 1963 Wells Scholar Professor at Indiana University, in Bloomington, Indiana. The recipient of many awards, honours, and honorary degrees, including the 2005 Order of Ikhamanga in Silver ‘for his excellent contribution and achievements in the theatre’ from the government of South Africa, he is also an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
June 11, 1922
Erving Goffman (11 June 1922 – 19 November 1982), a Canadian-born sociologist and writer, was considered 'the most influential American sociologist of the twentieth century'. In 2007 he was listed by The Times Higher Education Guide as the sixth most-cited author in the humanities and social sciences, behind Anthony Giddens and ahead of Jürgen Habermas. Goffman was the 73rd president of the American Sociological Association. His best-known contribution to social theory is his study of symbolic interaction. This took the form of dramaturgical analysis, beginning with his 1959 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Goffman's other major works include Asylums (1961), Stigma (1963), Interaction Ritual (1967), Frame Analysis (1974), and Forms of Talk (1981). His major areas of study included the sociology of everyday life, social interaction, the social construction of self, social organization (framing) of experience, and particular elements of social life such as total institutions and stigmas.
June 11, 1959
James Hugh Calum Laurie (born 11 June 1959) is an English actor, director, musician, comedian, and author. Laurie first gained recognition for his work as one half of the comedy double act Fry and Laurie with friend and comedy partner Stephen Fry, whom he met through mutual friend Emma Thompson whilst attending Cambridge University, where Laurie was president of the Cambridge Footlights. The duo acted together in a number of projects during the 1980s and 1990s, including the sketch comedy series A Bit of Fry & Laurie and the P. G. Wodehouse adaptation Jeeves and Wooster. Laurie's other roles during the period include the period comedy series Blackadder (in which Fry also appeared) and the films Sense and Sensibility, 101 Dalmatians, The Borrowers and Stuart Little. Laurie portrayed the title character in the U.S. medical drama series House (2004–12) on Fox, for which he won a Golden Globe Award.He also played the lead role of forensic psychiatrist Dr. Eldon Chance in the Hulu series Chance (2016–17). Outside acting, Laurie has released two blues albums, Let Them Talk (2011) and Didn't It Rain (2013), both to favourable reviews, and has authored a novel, The Gun Seller, published in 1996. Among his honours, Laurie has won three Golden Globe Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards and has been nominated for ten Primetime Emmy Awards. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2016. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2007 New Year Honours and Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2018 New Year Honours, both for services to drama.
June 11, 1948
David Lehman (born June 11, 1948 in New York City) is a poet and the series editor for The Best American Poetry series. He teaches at The New School in New York City. David Lehman grew up the son of European Holocaust refugees in Manhattan's northernmost neighborhood of Inwood. He attended Stuyvesant High School and Columbia University, and Cambridge University in England on a Kellett Fellowship. He later received a Ph.D. in English from Columbia, where he was Lionel Trilling's research assistant. Lehman's poem ‘The Presidential Years’ appeared in The Paris Review No. 43 (Summer, 1968) while he was a Columbia undergraduate. His books of poetry include Yeshiva Boys (November 2009), When a Woman Loves a Man (2005), The Evening Sun (2002), The Daily Mirror (2000), and Valentine Place (1996), all published by Scribner. Princeton University Press published Operation Memory (1990), and An Alternative to Speech (1986). He collaborated with James Cummins on a book of sestinas, Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and with Judith Hall on a book of poems and collages, Poetry Forum (Bayeux Arts, 2007). Lehman has edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006), The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present (Scribner, 2008), and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner, 2003), among other anthologies. He has written six nonfiction books, including, most recently, A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (Nextbook, 2009, for which he received an ASCAP Deems Taylor award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. In an interview published in Smithsonian Magazine, Lehman discusses the artistry of the great lyricists: ‘The best song lyrics seem to me so artful, so brilliant, so warm and humorous, with both passion and wit, that my admiration is matched only by my envy ... these lyricists needed to work within boundaries, to get complicated emotions across and fit the lyrics to the music, and to the mood thereof. That takes genius.’ Lehman’s other books of criticism include The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Doubleday, 1998), which was named a ‘Book to Remember 1999’ by the New York Public Library; The Big Question (1995); The Line Forms Here (1992) and Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (1991). His study of detective novels, The Perfect Murder (1989), was nominated for an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. A new edition of The Perfect Murder appeared in 2000. In 1994 he succeeded Donald Hall as the general editor of the University of Michigan Press’s Poets on Poetry series, a position he held for twelve years. With Star Black, Lehman originated and was co-director of the famed KGB Bar Monday night poetry series and co-editor of The KGB Bar Book of Poems (HarperCollins, 2000). Lehman’s work has been translated into sixteen languages, including Spanish, Russian, French, Polish, Chinese, and Mongolian. Lehman is series editor of The Best American Poetry (Scribner), which he initiated in 1988. Books Lehman edited in the 1980s include Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms: 65 Leading Contemporary Poets Select and Comment on Their Poems (1987; expanded, 1996), James Merrill, Essays in Criticism (with Charles Berger, 1983), and Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery (1980). He has written on a variety of subjects for journals ranging from the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and The Wall Street Journal to The American Scholar, The Atlantic, Smithsonian and Art in America. He has taught in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York City since the program's inception in 1996 and has served as poetry coordinator since 2003. In an interview with Tom Disch in the Cortland Review, Lehman addresses his great variety of poetic styles: ‘I write in a lot of different styles and forms on the theory that the poems all sound like me in the end, so why not make them as different from one another as possible, at least in outward appearance? If you write a new poem every day, you will probably have by the end of the year, if you’re me, an acrostic, an abecedarium, a sonnet or two, a couple of prose poems, poems that have arbitrary restrictions, such as the one I did that has only two words per line.’ Lehman has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and received an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award. Lehman divides his time between Ithaca, New York, and New York City.
June 11, 1943
Iain Sinclair (born 11 June 1943) is a Welsh writer and filmmaker. Much of his work is rooted in London, most recently within the influences of psychogeography.
June 11, 1925
William Clark Styron, Jr. (June 11, 1925 – November 1, 2006) was an American novelist and essayist who won major literary awards for his work. For much of his career, Styron was best known for his novels, including: Lie Down in Darkness (1951), his acclaimed first novel, published at age 26; The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), narrated by Nat Turner, the leader of an 1831 Virginia slave revolt; Sophie's Choice (1979), a story 'told through the eyes of a young aspiring writer from the South, about a Polish Catholic survivor of Auschwitz and her brilliant but troubled Jewish lover in postwar Brooklyn'. In 1985, he suffered his most serious bout with depression. Out of this grave and menacing experience, he was later able to write the memoir Darkness Visible (1990), the work Styron became best known for during the last two decades of his life.
June 11, 1923
George Baxt (June 11, 1923 – June 28, 2003) was an American screenwriter and author of crime fiction, best remembered for creating the gay black detective, Pharaoh Love. George Leonard Baxt was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian/Jewish immigrants. After working for several years as an agent he moved to Britain in the late 1950s and began a new career as a writer for television and the cinema. His most notable screenplays include The City of the Dead (1960) starring Christopher Lee and three collaborations with director Sidney Hayers noted for their taut suspense and black humour: Circus of Horrors (1960), the thriller Payroll (1961) from the novel by Derek Bickerton and Night of the Eagle (1962) which he re-wrote following a draft by Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, though his credit was omitted from the US version which was released as Burn, Witch, Burn. In 1966 he published A Queer Kind of Death, his first novel, which was met with considerable acclaim, not least for his creation of gay black detective Pharaoh Love. The influential New York Times critic Anthony Boucher said in his review that, "This is a detective story, and unlike any other that you have read. No brief review can attempt to convey its quality. I merely note that it deals with a Manhattan subculture wholly devoid of ethics or morality, that staid readers may well find it 'shocking', that it is beautifully plotted and written with elegance and wit ... and that you must under no circumstances miss it." A critical analysis of the book can be found in The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered. Love would be the central figure in two immediate sequels Swing Low Sweet Harriet (1967) and Topsy and Evil (1968) and also two later novels, A Queer Kind of Love (1994) and A Queer Kind of Umbrella (1995). Baxt also wrote a long series of period mysteries, combining his love of detective stories and Hollywood movies by featuring real celebrities solving fictional murder cases in the style of Stuart M. Kaminsky's 'Toby Peters' books, starting with The Dorothy Parker Murder Case (1984) and concluding twelve volumes later with The Clark Gable and Carole Lombard Murder Case in 1998, often featuring detective Jacob Singer. Baxt himself appears as a character in The Tallulah Bankhead Murder Case (1987), which is set in 1952 during the HUAC hearings.
June 11, 1934
Stanley Corngold (June 11, 1934) is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. His books include The Fate of the Self, Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form, and Complex Pleasure as well as two translations of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Selected Stories.
June 11, 1910
Jacques-Yves Cousteau (11 June 1910 – 25 June 1997) was a French naval officer, explorer, conservationist, filmmaker, innovator, scientist, photographer, author and researcher who studied the sea and all forms of life in water. He co-developed the Aqua-lung, pioneered marine conservation and was a member of the Académie française. Cousteau described his underwater world research in a series of books, perhaps the most successful being his first book, The Silent World: A Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventure, published in 1953. Cousteau also directed films, most notably the documentary adaptation of the book, The Silent World, which won a Palme d'or at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival. He remained the only person to win a Palme d'Or for a documentary film, until Michael Moore won the award in 2004 for Fahrenheit 9/11.
June 11, 1944
Marjorie Long (born June 11, 1944) is an American professor at Harvard University and the author of a wide variety of books, most notably ones about William Shakespeare and aspects of popular culture including sexuality. She wrote Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, a ground breaking theoretical work on transvestitism's contribution to culture. Other works include Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses, Academic Instincts, Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life, Shakespeare After All, and Dog Love.
June 11, 1905
Harry Steinhauer (1905–2006) was Professor emeritus and Chair of the department of Germanic and Semitic Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. He edited and translated numerous volumes of German literature, including TWELVE GERMAN NOVELLAS (UC Press).
June 11, 1572
Ben Jonson (originally Benjamin Jonson c. 11 June 1572 – 6 August 1637) was an English playwright, poet, and literary critic of the seventeenth century, whose artistry exerted a lasting impact upon English poetry and stage comedy.
June 11, 1941
David E. Stannard (born June 11, 1941) is Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii. His previous books include DEATH IN AMERICA, SHRINKING HISTORY: ON FREUD AND THE FAILURE OF PSYCHOHISTORY, THE PURITAN WAY OF DEATH: A STUDY IN RELIGION, CULTURE, AND SOCIAL CHANGE, and BEFORE THE HORROR: THE POPULATION OF HAWAII ON THE EVE OF WESTERN CONTACT.
June 11, 1659
Yamamoto Tsunetomo (June 11, 1659 – November 30, 1719), was a samurai of the Saga Domain in Hizen Province under his lord Nabeshima Mitsushige. For thirty years Yamamoto devoted his life to the service of his lord and clan. When Nabeshima died in 1700, Yamamoto did not choose to follow his master in death in junshi because the master had expressed a dislike of the practice in his life. After some disagreements with Nabeshima's successor, Yamamoto renounced the world and retired to a hermitage in the mountains. Later in life (between 1709 and 1716), he narrated many of his thoughts to a fellow samurai, Tashiro Tsuramoto (ja). Many of these aphorisms concerned his lord's father and grandfather Naoshige and the failing ways of the samurai caste. These commentaries were compiled and published in 1716 under the title of Hagakure, a word that can be translated as either In the Shadow of Leaves or Hidden Leaves. The Hagakure was not widely known during the years following Tsunetomo's death, but by the 1930s it had become one of the most famous representatives of bushido taught in Japan. In 2011 a manga/comic book version was published Hagakure: The Manga Edition, translated by William Scott Wilson, adapted by Sean Michael Wilson and Chie Kutsuwada (Kodansha International Ltd., 2011). Tsunetomo believed that becoming one with death in one's thoughts, even in life, was the highest attainment of purity and focus. He felt that a resolution to die gives rise to a higher state of life, infused with beauty and grace beyond the reach of those concerned with self-preservation. Some viewed him as a man of immediate action due to some of his quotes, and in the Hagakure he criticized the carefully planned Ak? vendetta of the Forty-seven r?nin (a major event in his lifetime) for its delayed response. Yamamoto Tsunetomo is also known as Yamamoto J?ch?, the name he took after retiring and becoming a monk.
June 11, 1934
Jerry Uelsmann is an internationally-recognized artist and the author of multiple books. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, with his wife, the artist Maggie Taylor.
June 11, 1911
Born in Chicago, Josephine Miles (June 11, 1911, Chicago, IL - May 12, 1985, Berkeley, CA) was educated at UCLA and the University of California, Berkeley. At the latter she was a member of the English Department since 1940, professor since 1952. Her poems have appeared in many magazines and in six earlier books, from Lines at Intersection (1939) to Poems 1930-1960. Her half-dozen prose works concern mainly poetry and its modes of expression. Among her many honors are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; also, with special reference to her poetic achievement, awards from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1956 and from the United States Foundation for the Arts in 1967.
June 12, 1892
Djuna Barnes (June 12, 1892 – June 18, 1982) was an American writer who played an important part in the development of 20th-century English-language modernist writing and was one of the key figures in 1920s and '30s bohemian Paris after filling a similar role in the Greenwich Village of the teens. Her novel Nightwood became a cult work of modern fiction, helped by an introduction by T. S. Eliot. It stands out today for its portrayal of lesbian themes and its distinctive writing style. As a roman à clef, the novel features a thinly veiled portrait of Barnes in the character of Nora Flood, whereas Nora’s lover Robin Vote is a composite of Thelma Wood and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Since Barnes' death, interest in her work has grown and many of her books are back in print.
June 12, 1929
Brigid Antonia Brophy, Lady Levey (12 June 1929, in London, England – 7 August 1995, in Louth, Lincolnshire, England) was an English novelist, essayist, critic, biographer, and dramatist. In the Dictionary of Literary Biography: British Novelists since 1960, S. J. Newman described her as ‘one of the oddest, most brilliant, and most enduring of [the] 1960s symptoms.’ She was a feminist and pacifist who expressed controversial opinions on marriage, the Vietnam War, religious education in schools, sex (she was openly bisexual), and pornography. She was a vocal campaigner for animal rights and vegetarianism. A 1965 Sunday Times article by Brophy is credited by psychologist Richard D. Ryder with having triggered the formation of the animal rights movement in England. Because of her outspokenness, she was labeled many things, including ‘one of our leading literary shrews’ by a Times Literary Supplement reviewer. ‘A lonely, ubiquitous toiler in the weekend graveyards, she has scored some direct hits on massive targets: Kingsley Amis, Henry Miller, Professor Wilson Knight.’ Brophy was married to art historian Sir Michael Levey. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1984, which took her life 11 years later at the age of 66.
June 12, 1931
Robert William Arthur Cook (12 June 1931 – 30 July 1994), better known since the 1980s by his pen name Derek Raymond, was an English crime writer, credited with being a founder of British noir. The eldest son of a textile magnate, Cook spent his early years at the family’s London house, off Baker Street, tormenting a series of nannies. In 1937, in anticipation of the Second World War, the family retreated to the countryside, to a house near their Kentish castle. In 1944 Cook went to Eton, which he later characterized as a hotbed of buggery and an excellent preparation for vice of any kind. He dropped out at the age of 17. During his National Service, Cook attained the rank of corporal (latrines). After a brief stint working for the family business, selling lingerie in a department store in Neath, Wales, he spent most of the 1950s abroad. He lived in the Beat Hotel in Paris, rubbing shoulders with his neighbours William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, and danced at fashionable left bank boîtes with the likes of Juliette Greco. In New York he resided on the Lower East Side and was married to an heiress from New England for all of sixty-five days. He claimed that he was sick of the dead-on-its-feet upper crust he was born into, that he didn’t believe in and didn’t want, whose values were meaningless. He was seeking to carve his way out — Crime was the only chisel I could find. Cook smuggled oil paintings to Amsterdam, drove fast cars into Spain from Gibraltar, and consummated his downward mobility by spending time in a Spanish jail for sounding off about Francisco Franco in his local bar. Cook returned to London in 1960. He soon fronted a property company for Charlie Da Silva, an associate of the Krays. After undergoing interrogation by the Dutch police force in connection with an insurance scam related to the apparent theft of a Rembrandt painting, Cook claimed to have given up a life of actual crime for good in favor of a life of writing about it. Published under the name of Robin Cook, his study of one man’s deliberate descent into the milieu of London lowlifes, The Crust on its Uppers (1962) was an immediate succès de scandale upon publication. Lexicographers mined it for authentic usage of Cockney rhyming slang and thieves’ cant. But glowing reviews failed to produce great riches. Cook was unfazed by this disparity, commenting later: I’ve watched people like Kingsley Amis, struggling to get on the up escalator, while I had the down escalator all to myself. He supported his second wife, Eugene, and first child, Sebastian, by combining further novel-writing with stints as a Soho pornographer in St Anne's Court or running gambling parties. In conducting these affairs, Cook soon found himself inspired to depart from England. He spent much of the 1960s in Italy. The Tuscan village in which he settled declared itself an independent anarchist state, and appointed Cook in a dual capacity of its foreign minister and minister of finance. By the end of 1970, Cook had a third wife, Rose, a stepson, Nicholas, an infant daughter, Zoe, a house in Holland Park, and a job as a taxi-driver. His books earned no royalties, his third marriage was in shambles, and he lost his London house. Cook relocated to France and bought a derelict 15th-century fortified tower in Aveyron, to the north of Montpellier. He abandoned writing through all of the 1970s, working as a vineyard laborer with occasional sidelines in roofing, driving, and livestock slaughter. His family rejoined him for a while, but by 1979 the marriage had broken up for good. Nearing 50, Cook eased himself back into literature with a potboiler that was published only in a French translation. He returned to London, got married to his fourth wife, Fiona, then divorced again. He worked as a minicab-driver on the night shift. He was collecting the material for the first of his black novels. Cook published He Died With His Eyes Open (1984) under the pen name of Derek Raymond. He adopted his new pseudonym because he did not want to be confused with the other Robin Cook, best-selling author of Coma, nor with the bloody shadow minister for health, come to that. In France, his books kept being published under his real name, generating some confusion with the American novelist. The book inaugurated the Factory series, nominal police procedurals narrated by the unnamed protagonist, a sergeant at London Metropolitan Police’s Department of Unexplained Deaths, also known as A14. A14 handles the crummy lowlife murders, in contrast with attention-grabbing homicides handled by the prestigious Serious Crimes Division, better known as Scotland Yard. It is by far the most unpopular and shunned branch of the service (He Died With His Eyes Open, p. 6). As befits his lowly professional standing and departmental affiliation, the detective is surly, sarcastic, and insubordinate. His first case in the series is an inquiry into the murder of one Charles Locksley Alwin Staniland, an unemployed writer aged fifty-one, of upper class breeding but apparently down on his luck. He appears to be making little headway in an investigation that his departmental betters would be expected to treat as trivial.
June 12, 1954
Donald Revell is professor of English and Graduate Studies Director at UNLV. Tantivy is his twelfth poetry collection. Donald Revell’s translations include The Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud, and A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud, both of which were published by Omnidawn. A Season in Hell won the PSA translation award. His books of essays include Invisible Green: Selected Prose, published by Omnidawn. He serves as poetry editor of Colorado Review. Revell lives in the desert south of Las Vegas with his wife, poet Claudia Keelan, and their children Benjamin Brecht and Lucie Ming.
June 12, 1939
Rosalyn Fraad "Ros" Baxandall, (June 12, 1939 – October 13, 2015), was an American historian of women's activism and an active New York City feminist.
June 12, 1959
Catherine Besteman is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Colby College and author of Unraveling Somalia: Race, Violence, and the Legacy of Slavery (1999), among other books. Hugh Gusterson, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Science at MIT, is author of Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (California, 1996) and People of the Bomb (2004).
June 12, 1918
Amaury de Riencourt (born 12 June 1918 in Orleans, France died 13 January 2005 at Bellevue, Switzerland) was a historian, an expert on Southeast Asia, Indian scholar, sinologist, tibetologist, Americanist French writer.
June 12, 1973
Julie Orringer, is an American writer and lecturer born in Miami, Florida. Her first book, How to Breathe Underwater, was published in September 2003 by Knopf Publishing Group. She is married to fellow writer Ryan Harty.
June 13, 1927
Friedrich Katz (13 June 1927 – 16 October 2010) was an Austrian-born anthropologist and historian specialized in 19th and 20th century history of Latin America; particularly, in the Mexican Revolution. "He was arguably Mexico's most widely regarded historian... The whole of the Mexican press, left, right and center, noted and lamented his passing." He served as co-director of the Mexican Studies Program at the University of Chicago, co-received the 1999 Bolton Prize (nowadays Bolton-Johnson Prize) for the best English-language book on Latin American History by The Conference on Latin American History and was honored with the Order of the Aztec Eagle by the Government of Mexico. He also won the 2000 Bryce Wood Book Award presented by the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) for outstanding English-language book in the humanities and social sciences for his book The Life and Times of Pancho Villa. The American Historical Association has created a book prize in honor of Friedrich Katz.
June 13, 1922
Etienne Leroux (1922–1989) was an influential Afrikaans author and a key member of the South African Sestigers literary movement. He was born on 13 June 1922 as Stephanus Petrus Daniël le Roux, son of S.P. Le Roux, a South African Minister of Agriculture. His works gained critical acclaim and were translated into many languages. His 1968 book, translated into English as One for the devil is titled Een vir Azazel (One for Azazel) in Afrikaans, and makes use of the Azazel myth. He studied Law at Stellenbosch University (BA, LLB) and worked for a short time at a solicitor's office in Bloemfontein. From 1946 he farmed and lived as a writer on his farm, Ja-Nee, in the Koffiefontein district. Etienne Leroux is known as one of the most important (and at the time controversial) writers of the avant garde group of the sixties. He died on 30 December 1989, and was buried at the family church yard of Wamakersdrift, of which his farm formed part. His audience will be the audience that only a good writer can merit, an audience which assembles slowly in ones and twos ... the rumour spreads that here an addition will be found to the literature of our time. -- Graham Greene.
June 13, 1947
Carlos Montemayor (Parral, Chihuahua, June 13, 1947 – Mexico City, February 28, 2010) was a Mexican novelist, poet, essayist, literary critic, tenor, political analyst, and promoter of contemporary literature written in indigenous languages. He was a Member of the Mexican Academy of the Language. Montemayor died of stomach cancer on February 28, 2010.
June 13, 1888
Fernando Pessoa, born Fernando António Nogueira Pessôa (June 13, 1888 – November 30, 1935), was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher, described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language. He also wrote in and translated from English and French. Pessoa was a prolific writer, and not only under his own name, for he dreamed up approximately seventy-five others. He did not call them pseudonyms because he felt that did not capture their true independent intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms. These imaginary figures sometimes held unpopular or extreme views.
June 13, 1917
Augusto Roa Bastos, (born Asunción, June 13, 1917 – died Asunción, April 26, 2005) is undoubtedly one of the greatest Paraguayan novelists of all time, and indeed among the most important Latin American writers. As a teenager he fought in the Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia and worked as journalist and a film scriptwriter. He is best known for Yo el Supremo (1974, I, the Supreme). This is one of the foremost Latin American novels to tackle the question of dictators and dictatorships, in the person of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who ruled Paraguay with an iron fist and no little eccentricity for 26 years in the early 19th century. His other major work was Hijo de Hombre (1960, ‘Son of Man’). He also wrote numerous other novels and stories. Roa Bastos spent his childhood in Iturbe, a small town some 200 km to the south of the capital Asunción, where his father managed a sugar refinery. In 1932, with the outbreak of the Chaco War, he dropped out of school and joined the troops as a medical auxiliary; the horrors he experienced during this time set him firmly against violence for the rest of his life. After the war, his first jobs were as a bank clerk and reporter on the Asunción daily El País; around the same time, he began writing for the theater. During World War II he was invited to London by the British Council; he also served as El País’s war correspondent in London and covered the Nuremberg Trials for the paper. In 1947, because of his activities in opposition to President Higinio Morínigo during the Paraguayan Civil War, he was forced to flee the country. He settled in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he published most of his work. With the arrival of the military dictatorship in 1976, however, he left Argentina for France, where he taught Guaraní and Spanish literature at the University of Toulouse. Roa Bastos did not return to his native Paraguay until 1989, following the downfall of Alfredo Stroessner for whom he professed detestation. That same year, he was awarded the Premio Cervantes (Cervantes Prize), awarded by the Spanish Royal Academy and its correspondent academies in the various American nations, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the Spanish-language novel; he spent the prize money on educational and literary projects in Paraguay. Originally published in Spanish as Hijo de Hombre, 1961 - Editorial Losada, S.A., Buenos Aires.
June 13, 1865
William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and, along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and others, founded the Abbey Theatre, where he served as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Irishman so honoured for what the Nobel Committee described as ‘inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.’ Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929). Yeats was a very good friend of American expatriate poet and Bollingen Prize laureate Ezra Pound. Yeats was born and educated in Dublin, but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the 20th century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889 and those slow-paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.
June 13, 1752
Frances Burney (13 June 1752 – 6 January 1840), also known as Fanny Burney and after her marriage as Madame d'Arblay, was an English novelist, diarist and playwright. She was born in Lynn Regis, now King's Lynn, England, on 13 June 1752, to musical historian Dr. Charles Burney (1726–1814) and Esther Sleepe Burney (1725–1762). The third of six children, she was self-educated and began writing what she called her "scribblings" at the age of ten. In 1793, aged 42, she married a French exile, General Alexandre D'Arblay. Their only son, Alexander, was born in 1794. After a lengthy writing career, and travels that took her to France for more than ten years, she settled in Bath, England, where she died on 6 January 1840.
June 13, 1874
Leopoldo Lugones Argüello (13 June 1874 – 18 February 1938) was an Argentine writer and journalist. Born in Villa de María del Río Seco, a city in Córdoba Province, in Argentina's Catholic heartland, Lugones belonged to a family of landed gentry. He was the firstborn son of Santiago M. Lugones and Custodia Argüello. His father, son of Pedro Nolasco Lugones, was returning from the city of Buenos Aires to Santiago del Estero when he met Custodia Argüello while stopping in Villa de María, a locality that was at that time disputed territory between the provinces of Santiago del Estero and Córdoba. It was his mother who gave young Leopoldo his first lessons and was responsible for his strict Catholic upbringing. When Lugones was six years old and following the birth of a second child, the family moved to the city of Santiago del Estero and later to Ojo de Agua, a small town situated in the south of the province of Santiago del Estero close to the border with Córdoba, where the poet's two younger brothers were born: Ramón Miguel Lugones (1880, Santiago del Estero), and the youngest of the four children, Carlos Florencio Lugones (1885, Ojo de Agua). Later his parents sent him to study at the Colegio Nacional de Monserrat, in Córdoba, where his maternal grandmother lived. In 1892 the family would move to that city, at the time when Lugones was beginning his forays into the fields of journalism and literature. He first worked for La Montaña, a newspaper, and was in favour with the aristocratic Manuel Quintana, a candidate to become a president of Argentina. This brought him first to Buenos Aires in 1896, where his literary talent developed quickly. That year, he married Juana Agudelo, from whom he had a son, Leopoldo Polo Lugones, who would become the notorious chief of the Federal Police during the dictatorship of José Félix Uriburu. In 1899, he became an active Freemason. Lugones was the leading Argentine exponent of the Latin American literary current known as Modernismo. This was a form of Parnassianism influenced by Symbolism. He was also the author of the incredibly dense and rich historical novel La Guerra Gaucha (1905). He was an impassioned journalist, polemicist and public speaker who at first was a Socialist, later a conservative/traditionalist and finally a supporter of Fascism and as such an inspiration for a group of rightist intellectuals such as Juan Carulla and Rodolfo Irazusta. Leopoldo Lugones went to Europe in 1906, 1911, 1913 and in 1930, in which latter year he supported the coup d'état against the aging Radical party president, Hipólito Yrigoyen. On February 18, 1938, the despairing and disillusioned Lugones committed suicide by taking a mixture of whisky and cyanide while staying at the river resort of El Tigre in Buenos Aires. Political frustration has been the most widely cited cause of his suicide. Nevertheless, recent publications in Argentina have shed light on another possible motivation: Lugones was very enamored of a girl he met at one of his lectures in the university. He maintained a passionate and emotional relationship with her until, discovered and pressured by his son, he was forced to leave her, causing in him a depressive decline that would end his life. His descendants have had similarly tragic fates. It is believed that his son Polo, the chief of police during Uriburu's dictatorship, was the creator of the picana and the one who introduced it as a method of torture. Polo Lugones committed suicide in 1971. Polo's younger daughter, Susana Pirí Lugones, was detained and disappeared in December 1978 as a victim of the Dirty War. His older daughter, Carmen, whom he called Babú, is still alive. One of Pirí's sons, Alejandro, committed suicide, like his great-grandfather, in Tigre. This comprises Lugones' tragic familial fate, curiously similar to that of Horacio Quiroga's, himself a friend and admirer of Leopoldo Lugones. Editor and translator Gwen Kirkpatrick is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Literature at Georgetown University. Sergio Waisman is Associate Professor of Spanish at The George Washington University.
June 13, 1880
Harry Søiberg (June 13, 1880 - January 2, 1954) was a Danish writer.
June 13, 1930
Paul Veyne (born 13 June 1930 in Aix-en-Provence) is a French archaeologist and historian, and a specialist on Ancient Rome. A former student of the École Normale Supérieure and member of the École française de Rome, he is now honorary professor at the Collège de France.
June 13, 1961
Born and raised in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, poet Denise Duhamel earned a BFA at Emerson College and an MFA at Sarah Lawrence College. She lived in New York City from 1985 until 1999. Citing Dylan Thomas and Kathleen Spivack as early influences, Duhamel writes both free verse and fixed-form poems that fearlessly combine the political, sexual, and ephemeral. A professor at Florida International University, she lives in Florida.
June 13, 1925
Burton DeWitt Watson (June 13, 1925 – April 1, 2017) was an American scholar best known for his numerous translations of both Chinese and Japanese literature into English. Watson's translations received many awards, including the Gold Medal Award of the Translation Center at Columbia University in 1979, the PEN Translation Prize in 1982 for his translation with Hiroaki Sato of From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry, and again in 1995 for Selected Poems of Su Tung-p'o. In 2015, at age 88, Watson was awarded the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation for his long and prolific translation career. Burton Watson, was also the translator of Records of the Grand Historian of China, translated from the Shih chi of Ssu-ma Ch'ien, 2 vols. (1961), Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings (1964), and Su Tung-p'o: Selections from a Sung Dynasty Poet (1965). He is the author of Ssu-ma Ch'ien: Grand Historian of China (1958) and Early Chinese Literature (1962).
June 14, 1907
René Char (June 14, 1907 – February 19, 1988) was a 20th-century French poet. Char was born in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in the Vaucluse department of France, the youngest of four children of Emile Char and Marie-Thérèse Rouget, where his father was mayor and managing director of the Vaucluse plasterworks. He spent his childhood in Névons, the substantial family home completed at his birth, then studied as a boarder at the school of Avignon and subsequently, in 1925, a student at L'École de Commerce de Marseille, where he read Plutarch, François Villon, Racine, the German Romantics, Alfred de Vigny, Gérard de Nerval and Charles Baudelaire. He was tall (1.92 m) and was an active rugby player. After briefly working at Cavaillon, in 1927 he performed his military service in the artillery in Nîmes. Char's first book, Cloches sur le cœur was published in 1928 as a compilation of poems written between 1922–1926. In early 1929, he founded the journal Méridiens with André Cayatte and published three issues. In August, he sent twenty-six copies of his book Arsenal, published in Nîmes, to Paul Éluard, who in the autumn came to visit him at L'Isle sur la Sorgue. In late November, Char moved to Paris, where he met Louis Aragon, André Breton, and René Crevel, and joined the surrealists. His 'Profession de foi du sujet' was published in December in the twelfth issue of La Révolution surréaliste. He remained active in the surrealist movement through the early 1930s but distanced himself gradually from the mid-1930s onward. Throughout his career, Char's work appeared in various editions, often with artwork by notable figures, including Kandinsky, Picasso, Braque, Miró, Matisse and Vieira da Silva. Char joined the French Resistance in 1940, serving under the name of Captain Alexandre, where he commanded the Durance parachute drop zone. He refused to publish anything during the Occupation, but wrote the 'Feuillets d'Hypnos' during it (1943–4), prose poems dealing with resistance. These were published in 1946, and were a grand success. During the 1950s and 1960s, despite brief and unhappy experiences in the theater and film, Char reached full maturity as a poet. In the 1960s, he joined the battle against the stationing of atomic weapons in Provence. He died of a heart attack in 1988 in Paris. The Hotel Campredon (also known as the Maison René Char) in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue is a public collection of his manuscripts, drawings, paintings and objets d'art. Char was a friend and close associate of Albert Camus, Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot among writers, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Victor Brauner among painters. He was to have been in the car involved in the accident that killed both Camus and Michel Gallimard, but there was not enough room, and returned instead that day by train to Paris. The composer Pierre Boulez wrote three settings of Char's poetry, Le Soleil des eaux, Le visage nuptial, and Le marteau sans maître. A late friendship developed also between Char and Martin Heidegger, who described Char's poetry as 'a tour de force into the ineffable' and was repeatedly his guest at La Thor in the Vaucluse.
June 14, 1944
Laurie Colwin (June 14, 1944 – October 24, 1992) was an American author. Her published works include Passion and Affect (1974), Shine on, Bright and Dangerous Object (1975), Happy All the Time (1978), The Lone Pilgrim (1981), Family Happiness (1982), Another Marvelous Thing (1988), Home Cooking (1988), Goodbye without Leaving (1990), More Home Cooking (1993), and A Big Storm Knocked It Over (1993). The PBS series American Playhouse adapted Colwin's short story An Old-Fashioned Story as a 90-minute film retitled Ask Me Again, which aired February 8, 1989. Colwin was born in Manhattan, New York City, and grew up in Lake Ronkonkoma, on Long Island, Philadelphia and Chicago, the second child of Estelle Colwin (née Woolfson) and Peter Colwin. In Philadelphia, she attended the Cheltenham High School, which inducted her posthumously into their Hall of Fame in 1999. From a young age, Colwin was a prolific writer. Her work first appeared in The New Yorker, and in 1974 her first collection of short stories was published. She was a regular contributor to Gourmet magazine and had articles in Mademoiselle, Allure, and Playboy. Her non-fiction books (Home Cooking and More Home Cooking) are collections of essays, and are as much memoirs as cookbooks. In the foreword to Home Cooking, Colwin wrote: 'Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers. In my kitchen I rely on Edna Lewis, Marcella Hazan, Jane Grigson, Elizabeth David, the numerous contributors to The Charleston Receipts, and Margaret Costa (author of an English book entitled The Four Seasons Cookery Book),' Colwin died unexpectedly in 1992, in Manhattan, from a heart attack at the age of 48. Her last two books, More Home Cooking and A Big Storm Knocked It Over, were published posthumously. She also appears in Nancy Crampton's 2005 book of photography, Writers, which features Crampton's portraits of various literary figures. Colwin's husband, Juris Jurjevics, was the editor-in-chief of Soho Press for 20 years and wrote a novel, The Trudeau Vector, published in 2003; her daughter, Rosa Jurjevics, works for a New York publishing house, and is a contributing writer for the San Diego Reader.
June 14, 1918
T. M. ALUKO was born in 1918 at Ilesha and educated at Government College, Ibadan. He studied civil engineering and town planning in Lagos and London, and in 1960 was appointed Director of Public Works for Western Nigeria. He has now joined the staff of the University of Lagos. He first attracted notice through short stories which won prizes in contests organized by the British Council in Nigeria. A number of his stories and articles were then published In West Africa Review and broadcast by the BBC African Service. One Man One Wife was first published in 1959 by the Nigerian Printing and Publishing Company in Lagos. Since then he has published two other novels, ONE MAN ONE MATCHET (1964) and KINSMAN AND FOREMAN (1966).
June 14, 1897
Jan Fridegård, born Johan Fridolf 'Fride' Johansson, (14 June 1897 – 8 September 1968) was a Swedish writer of the proletarian school.
June 14, 1899
Yasunari Kawabata (11 June 1899 – 16 April 1972) was a Japanese novelist and short story writer whose sparse, lyrical, subtly-shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, the first Japanese author to receive the award. His works have enjoyed broad international appeal and are still widely read.
June 14, 1933
Jerzy Kosi?ski (June 14, 1933 – May 3, 1991), born Józef Lewinkopf, was a Polish-American novelist and two-time President of the American Chapter of P.E.N., who wrote primarily in English. Born in Poland, he survived World War II and, as a young man, immigrated to the U.S., where he became a citizen. He was known for various novels, among them The Painted Bird (1965) and Being There (1970), which was adapted as a film (1979).
June 14, 1933
Richard Marek is an American writer, editor, and publisher who is most famous for his novel WORKS OF GENIUS that explores the odd relationships between authors and publishers in the publishing industry. Marek was born June 14, 1933 in New York City to George and Muriel Marek. He earned his B.A. at Haverford College in 1955 and his M.A. at Columbia University in 1956. In college, Marek was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. Marek married Margot Lynn Ravage in 1954. The couple had two children before Marek's wife passed on in 1987. Marek served in the U.S. Army from 1956 to 1957. During that time he was stationed in Japan. Marek's career in the publishing business began with his positions as an editor at McCall's magazine and his work at Macmillan publishing starting in 1962. In 1968, he signed the ‘Writers and Editors War Tax Protest’ pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. Over the course of his career, Marek was also employed at companies like World Publishing, and Dial Press. Marek ran his own publishing company, Richard Marek Books, from 1977 to 1981. In 1985, Marek began serving as the president of E. P. Dutton, a publishing company in New York, New York. As Marek remarked in an online profile, he has been responsible for editing ‘well over 300 books’. Marek's first major piece of writing, WORKS OF GENIUS (1987), was a novel that dealt with the inner workings of the publishing industry. The novel received praise from several major publications such as The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times Book Review. Marek's second writing, HERE IS MY HOPE: A BOOK OF HEALING AND PRAYER: INSPIRATIONAL STORIES OF THE JOHN HOPKINS HOSPITAL, was co-written with Randi Henderson and was published in 2001.
June 14, 1894
José Carlos Mariátegui La Chira (14 June 1894 – 16 April 1930) was a Peruvian journalist, political philosopher, and activist. A prolific writer before his early death at age 35, he is considered one of the most influential Latin American socialists of the 20th century. Mariátegui's most famous work, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (1928), is still widely read in South America. An avowed, self-taught Marxist, he insisted that a socialist revolution should evolve organically in Latin America on the basis of local conditions and practices, not the result of mechanically applying a European formula.
June 14, 1939
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán was born in Barcelona in 1939. He was a journalist, novelist and creator of Pepe Carvalho, a fast-living, gourmet private detective. Montalbán won both the Raymond Chandler Prize and the French Grand Prix of Detective Fiction for his thrillers, which are translated into all major languages. He died in October 2003.
June 14, 1914
Anna Maria Ortese (June 14, 1914 in Rome – March 10, 1998 in Rapallo, Genoa, Italy) was an Italian short story writer and a poet. She was best known for her 1953 short story 'Il Mare Non Bagna Napoli,' which depicted the abject conditions of Naples following World War II. She once said, We write because we look for companionship, then we publish because we get paid a little bit of money.' Born in Rome, she was the fifth of six children born to Vaccá Beatrice and Oreste Ortese. Her father worked for the Italian government, and the family moved frequently. In January 1933, her brother, Emmanuel, with whom she was very close, died in Martinique, where his ship had docked. His death drove her to write. Her first poems were published in the magazine La Sierra Lettering. Her work was well-received, and she was encouraged to write further. The following year, the same magazine published her first short story, 'La Pellerossa.' In 1937, Massimo Bontepelli, writer for La Bonpiani and Ortese's mentor, published another of her short stories, 'Angelici Dolori'. Although this story received favorable reviews, it drew criticism from prominent literary critics Falqui and Vigorelli. Despite her promising start, her inspiration and motivation waned. In 1939, she traveled from Firenze to Venice, where she found employment as a proofreader with the local newspaper Il Gazzetino. With World War II approaching, Ortese returned to Naples, where she had once lived with her family. It was there that she was once again inspired to write. At the end of the war, Anna worked as a writer for the magazine Sud. Her parents died in 1950 and 1953. During this time, she published her second and third books: L’infanta Se Polta and Il Mare Non Bagna Napoli. Il Mare Non Bogna Napoli consisted of five chapters which depicted the abject conditions of Naples following the war. It became highly acclaimed and was awarded the Viareggio Prize. It is from the novel's first chapter that the movie Un Paio de Occhialli was made and presented at the Venice Biennale in 2001. From the mid-1950s to the late '60s, Anna traveled and wrote extensively. She returned to Milan in 1967 and wrote a book, Povertie Semplicchi, for which she was awarded the Strega Prize. In her later years, Ortese became more isolated until the age of seventy-five, when she moved Rapallo to live with her sister. At the age of 80, she began corresponding with Beppe Costa, who encouraged her to publish Il Treno Russo. Soon after, Anna accepted the proposal to republish many of her old novels. One, L’Iguana, was translated into French by Galli Mard in 1988. Another, Il Cordillo Adolorato, topped the Italian fiction list. In 1987, a collection of her short stories, A Music Behind the Wall: Selected Stories, was published. She died peacefully at the age of 84 in her home in Rapallo in March 1998. Only after her death did her work receive international recognition and praise.
June 14, 1942
Jonathan Raban (born 14 June 1942, Hempton, Norfolk, UK) is a British travel writer and novelist. He has received several awards, such as the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Award, the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, and a 1997 Washington State Governor's Writer's Award. Since 1990 he has lived with his daughter in Seattle. Though he is primarily regarded as a travel writer, Raban’s accounts often blend the story of a journey with rich discussion of the history of the water through which he travels and the land around it. Even as he maintains a dispassionate and often unforgiving stance towards the people he meets on his travels, he does not shirk from sharing his own perceived foibles and failings with the reader. Frequently, Raban’s autobiographical accounts of journeys taken mirror transformations in his own life or the world at large: Old Glory takes place during the buildup to Ronald Reagan’s victory in the 1980 presidential election, Coasting as the Falklands War begins, and Passage to Juneau as the failure of the author’s marriage becomes apparent. Similarly melancholic and personal themes of turmoil and loss can be detected in his novels.
June 14, 1811
Harriet Elisabeth Beecher Stowe (June 14, 1811 – July 1, 1896) was an American abolitionist and author. Her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) was a depiction of life for African Americans under slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United States and United Kingdom. It energized anti-slavery forces in the American North, while provoking widespread anger in the South. She wrote more than 20 books, including novels, three travel memoirs, and collections of articles and letters. She was influential for both her writings and her public stands on social issues of the day.
June 14, 1925
Dalton Jérson Trevisan (born 14 June 1925) is a Brazilian author of short stories. He has been described as an ‘acclaimed short-story chronicler of lower-class mores and popular dramas.’
June 14, 1941
John Edgar Wideman (born June 14, 1941, in Washington, D.C.) is an American writer, professor at Brown University, and contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions. Wideman was born on June 14, 1941. He grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA and much of his writing is set there, especially in the Homewood neighborhood of the East End. He graduated from Pittsburgh's Peabody High School, then attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he became an All-Ivy League forward on the basketball team. He was the second African-American to win a Rhodes Scholarship (New College, Oxford University, England), graduating in 1966. He also graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. A widely-celebrated writer and the winner of many literary awards, he is the first to win the International PEN/Faulkner Award twice: in 1984 for SENT FOR YOU YESTERDAY and in 1990 for PHILADELPHIA FIRE. In 2000, he won the O. Henry Award for his short story ‘Weight’, published in The Callaloo Journal. His nonfiction book BROTHERS AND KEEPERS received a National Book Critics Circle nomination, and his memoir FATHERALONG was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant. Wideman was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story in 1998, for outstanding achievement in that genre. In 1997, his novel THE CATTLE KILLING won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction. He has taught at the University of Wyoming, University of Pennsylvania, where he founded and chaired the African American Studies Department, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst's MFA Program for Poets & Writers.
June 14, 1820
John Bartlett (June 14, 1820 – December 3, 1905), who ran the University Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was frequently asked for information on quotations and he began a commonplace book of them for reference. In 1855, he privately printed his compilation as A Collection of Familiar Quotations. This first edition contained 258 pages of quotations by 169 authors, chiefly the Bible, William Shakespeare, and the great English poets. Bartlett wrote in the fourth edition that "it is not easy to determine in all cases the degree of familiarity that may belong to phrases and sentences which present themselves for admission; for what is familiar to one class of readers may be quite new to another." The book was a great success, and Bartlett issued three more editions before joining the Boston publishing firm of Little, Brown, and Company. Bartlett rose to be the senior partner of the firm and supervised nine editions of the work before his death in 1905, the work selling over 300,000 copies. The seventh edition had appeared in 1875, the eighth edition in 1882, and the ninth in 1891. The tenth edition, however, would not appear for more than twenty years.
June 14, 1934
PETER O. CHOTJEWITZ (June 14, 1934, Heinzenberg, Germany - December 15, 2010, Stuttgart, Germany) was born in 1934 in Berlin, and wrote primarily for the theater, for radio, and in short story form. He lived in Kruspis, in Hesse, where he also practiced law.
June 14, 1950
Philip F. Gura (born June 14, 1950) is an intellectual and cultural historian. He currently serves as William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he holds appointments in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature, Religious Studies, and American Studies. Gura was born in Ware, Massachusetts. A graduate of Phillips Academy (1968), he received his AB, magna cum laude, in History and Literature in 1972 from Harvard College, and his PhD, in the History of American Civilization in 1977, from Harvard University, where he lived in Lowell House. He is the author or editor of 13 books, including The Wisdom of Words: Language, Theology, and Literature in the New England Renaissance (1981), A Glimpse of Sion's Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660 (1984), the prize-winning America's Instrument: The Banjo in the 19th Century (1999), Buried from the World: Inside the Massachusetts State Prison, 1829–1831 (2001), C. F. Martin and His Guitars, 1796–1873 (2003), Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical (2005), American Transcendentalism: A History (2007), which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in non-fiction, The American Antiquarian Society, 1812–2012: A Bicentennial History (2012), Truth's Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel (2013), Jonathan Edwards: Writings from the Great Awakening (2013), and The Life of William Apess (Pequot). Some of his essays, which number over fifty, have been collected in The Crossroads of American History and Literature (1996). He also serves as an editor for The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Harvard University Press will publish his fourteenth book, Man’s Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War, in 2017. Gura is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, and the Society of American Historians. In 2008, the Division on American Literature to 1800 of the Modern Language Association honored him with its Distinguished Scholar award. He plays the clawhammer banjo in a traditional Appalachian style, known as "old-time.
June 14, 1935
André Schiffrin (June 14, 1935 – December 1, 2013) was a French-born American author, publisher and socialist. Schiffrin was born in Paris, the son of Jacques Schiffrin, a Russian Jew who emigrated to France and briefly enjoyed success there as publisher of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, which he founded, and which was bought by Gallimard, until he was dismissed because of the anti-Jewish laws enforced by the Vichy regime. Jacques Schiffrin and his family had to flee and eventually found refuge in the United States. As the younger Schiffrin recalls in his autobiography, A Political Education: Coming of Age in Paris and New York (2007), he thus experienced life in two countries as a child of a European Jewish intellectual family. As an anti-Communist socialist, Schiffrin opposed both the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the U.S. war in Vietnam. He was one of the founders of the organization that became Students for a Democratic Society. In 1968, he signed the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. Schiffrin was the managing director of publishing at Pantheon Books, where he was partially responsible for introducing the works of Pasternak, Foucault and others to American readers. Schiffrin's 28-year period at Pantheon, a division of Random House, came to an end in 1990 when CEO Alberto Vitale sacked him because of a conflict over the division's losses and the downsizing which Vitale wished to make. In 1992 Schiffrin, with former Pantheon colleague Diane Wachtell, established the non-profit The New Press, explaining that he did so because of economic trends that prevented him from publishing the serious books he thought should be made available. Schiffrin discussed what he regards as the crisis in western publishing in his book The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (2000). In 2011, Schiffrin was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur by the French government. Schiffrin's daughter, journalist Anya Schiffrin, is married to the economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz. His daughter Natalia is married to international lawyer Philippe Sands. Schiffrin died on December 1, 2013 in Paris from pancreatic cancer.
June 14, 1952
Jill Nelson is an associate professor of journalism at the City College of New York and has written for the New York Times Book Review, among other publications.
June 14, 1924
Vladimir Alexeyevich Soloukhin (June 14, 1924 – April 4, 1997) was a Russian poet and writer. Born in Alepino, a village in what is now in Sobinsky District, Vladimir Oblast, he was raised in a peasant family. He attended Vladimir Aviation College (ru), where he studied to be a mechanic. At that time, he published his first poems in a local newspaper; Prizyv (The Call). After his military service, from 1942-1945 in the Kremlin guard, he began his serious literary career, and in 1951 graduated from the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute. From 1958-1981, he worked in the editorial offices of the prominent newspaper Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guard) and in the literary journal Nash Sovremennik (Our Contemporary).
June 14, 1949
John Robert Stilgoe (born 1949) is a historian and photographer who is the Robert and Lois Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape at the Visual and Environmental Studies Department of Harvard University, where he has been teaching since 1977. He is also a fellow of the Society of American Historians. He was featured on a 60 Minutes episode in 2004 entitled "The Eyes Have It". Stilgoe was born in Norwell, Massachusetts in 1949. His father was a boatbuilder. He graduated from Boston University with a B.A. in 1971, and from Purdue University with an M.A. in 1973. He entered Harvard's Ph.D. program in American Civilizations in 1973, where he studied under J. B. Jackson, a landscape architect known for his studies of vernacular American landscapes.
June 14, 1950
Robert J. C. Young FBA (born June 14, 1950) is a British postcolonial theorist, cultural critic, and historian. He was educated at Repton School and Exeter College, Oxford, where he read for a B.A. and D.Phil., taught at the University of Southampton, and then returned to Oxford University where he was Professor of English and Critical Theory and a fellow of Wadham College. In 2005, he moved to New York University where he is now Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature. As a graduate student at Oxford, he was one of the founding editors of the Oxford Literary Review, the first British journal devoted to literary and philosophical theory. Young is Editor of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies which appears bimonthly. His work has been translated into over twenty languages. In 2013 he was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. Young's work has been described as being 'at least partially instrumental in the radicalisation of postcolonialism'. His first book, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (1990) argues that Marxist philosophies of history had claimed to be world histories but had really only ever been histories of the West, seen from a Eurocentric—even if anti-capitalist—perspective. Offering a detailed critique of different versions of European Marxist historicism from Lukács to Jameson, Young suggests that a major intervention of postcolonial theory has been to enable different forms of history and historicisation that operate outside the paradigm of Western universal history. While postcolonial theory uses certain concepts from post-structuralism to achieve this, Young argues that post-structuralism itself involved an anti-colonial critique of Western philosophy, pointing to the role played by the experience of the Algerian War of Independence in the lives of many French philosophers of that generation, including Derrida, Cixous, Lyotard, Althusser, and Bourdieu. White Mythologies was the first book to characterise postcolonial theory as a field in itself, and to identify the work of Edward W. Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi K. Bhabha and the Subaltern Studies historians as its intellectual core. In Colonial Desire (1995) Young examined the history of the concept of 'hybridity', showing its genealogy through nineteenth-century racial theory and twentieth-century linguistics, prior to its counter-appropriation and transformation into an innovative cultural-political concept by postcolonial theorists in the 1990s. Young demonstrates the extent to which racial theory was always developed in historical, scientific and cultural terms, and argues that this complex formation accounts for the ability of racialised thinking to survive into the modern era despite all the attempts made since 1945 to refute it. The most significant mistake that has been made, he suggests, involves the assumption that race was developed in the nineteenth-century purely as a 'science' which can be challenged on purely scientific grounds. Having deconstructed 'white Marxism' through the lens of postcolonial theory in White Mythologies, in Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001), Young charted the genealogy of postcolonial theory in the very different trajectory of Marxism as the major ideological component of twentieth-century anti-colonial struggles. The book provides the first genealogy of the anticolonial thought and practice which form the roots of postcolonialism, tracing the relation of the history of the national liberation movements to the development of postcolonial theory. Stressing the significance of the work of the Third International, as well as Mao Zedong's reorientation of the landless peasant as the revolutionary subject, Young points to the importance of the Havana Tricontinental of 1966 as the first independent coming together of the three continents of the South—Africa, Asia and Latin America—in political solidarity, and argues that this was the moment in which what is now called 'postcolonial theory' was first formally constituted as a specific knowledge-base of non-Western political and cultural production. In Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (2003) Young links this genealogy of postcolonialism to the contemporary activism of the New Social Movements in non-Western countries. Intended as an introduction to postcolonialism for the general reader, the book is written in a highly accessible style and unorthodox format, mixing history with fiction, cultural analysis with moments of poetic intensity that stage and evoke postcolonial experience rather than merely describe it. Instead of approaching postcolonialism through its often abstract and esoteric theories, the book works entirely out of particular examples. These examples emphasise issues of gender, language, indigenous rights, 'development' and ecology as well as addressing the more usual postcolonial ideas of ambivalence, hybridity, and orientalism and subalternity. In The Idea of English Ethnicity (2008) Young returned to the question of race to address an apparent contradiction—the idea of an English ethnicity. Why does ethnicity not seem to be a category applicable to English people? To answer this question, Young reconsiders the way that English identity was classified in historical and racial terms in the nineteenth century. He argues that what most affected this was the relation of England to Ireland after the Act of Union of 1800–1. Initial attempts at excluding the Irish were followed by a more inclusive idea of Englishness which removed the specificities of race and even place. Englishness, Young suggests, was never really about England at all, but was developed as a broader identity, intended to include not only the Irish (and thus deter Irish nationalism) but also the English diaspora around the world—North Americans, South Africans, Australians and New Zealanders, and even, for some writers, Indians and those from the Caribbean. By the end of the nineteenth century, this had become appropriated as an ideology of empire. The delocalisation of the country England from ideas of Englishness (Kipling's "What do they know of England who only England know?") could account for why recent commentators have found Englishness so hard to define—while at the same time providing an explanation of why some of the most English of Englishmen have been Americans. On the other hand, Young argues, its broad principle of inclusiveness also helps to explain why Britain has been able to transform itself into one of the most successful of modern multicultural nations.
June 14, 1904
George Wylie Henderson (June 14, 1904 – 1965) was an American writer of the Harlem Renaissance. Henderson was born in 1904 in Warriorstand, Alabama, an unincorporated area of Macon County. He attended the limited and segregated rural school. He went to Tuskegee Institute, where he learned printing as a trade. As a young man, Henderson moved to New York, joining the Great Migration of hundreds of thousands of blacks from the South to Northern and Midwestern industrial cities in the early part of the 20th century. He supported himself as a printer for the New York Daily News. He also worked as a writer, becoming associated with writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Henderson lived in New York City until his death. From 1932-33, he published nine stories in The New York Daily News, in its "Daily Story from Real Life" series. In addition, he became a regular contributor of short stories in Redbook Magazine, which had national distribution. Henderson also published two novels, Ollie Miss (1935) and Jule (1946), which dealt with pressures on African Americans in the modernizing South. These novels were reprinted in 1989 and 1990, respectively, by the University of Alabama Press, with an introduction by Blyden Jackson. David Nicholls suggests that these expressed some of the "individualist ethos" of Booker T. Washington, president of the Tuskegee Institute which Henderson had attended. They also express contrasts, as Ollie Miss is about an African-American woman near Tuskegee who wants a farm where she can raise her child. Jule, by contrast, deals with a young man who leaves the South to go to the city in the North, similar to Henderson's own journey of advancement, to an urban center that held the promise of autonomy.
June 15, 1955
Marjorie Agosín (born June 15, 1955) is an award-winning poet, essayist, fiction writer, activist, and professor. She is a prolific author: her published books, including those she has written as well as those she has edited, number over eighty. Two of her recent books are both poetry collections, The Light of Desire / La Luz del Deseo, translated by Lori Marie Carlson (Swan Isle Press, 2009), and Secrets in the Sand: The Young Women of Juárez, translated by Celeste Kostopulos-Cooperman (White Pine Press, 2006), about the female homicides in Ciudad Juárez. She teaches Spanish language and Latin American literature at Wellesley College. She has won notability for her outspokenness for women's rights in Chile. The United Nations has honored her for her work on human rights. She also won many important literary awards. The Chilean government awarded her with the Gabriela Mistral Medal of Honor for Life Achievement in 2002. Agosín was born in 1955 to Moises and Frida Agosín in Chile, where she lived her childhood in a German community.
June 15, 1953
Ana Castillo (born 15 June 1953) is a Mexican-American Chicana novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist, editor, playwright, translator and independent scolar. Considered as one of the leading voices in Chicana experience, known for her daring and experimental style as a Latino novelist. Her works offer pungent and passionate socio-political comment that is based on established oral and literary traditions. Castillo's interest in race and gender issues can be traced throughout her writing career. Her novel, Sapogonia was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is the editor of ‘La Tolteca’, an arts and literary magazine. Castillo held the first Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Endowed Chair at DePaul University. She has attained a number of awards including an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for her first novel, ‘The Mixquiahuala Letters’, a Carl Sandburg Award, a Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in fiction and poetry and in 1998 Sor Juana Achievement Award by the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago.
June 15, 1888
Maria Dermout (June 15, 1888, Pekalongan — June 27, 1962, The Hague) was an Indo novelist, born on Java, Dutch East Indies, educated in the Netherlands, who wrote in Dutch. After completing her education she returned to Java, where she married and travelled extensively across Java and the Moluccas with her husband. In 1933 her husband was pensioned, and the couple returned to the Netherlands. Maria Dermout was widowed in 1952. She wrote two novels, both of which were not published until she was in her sixties: The Ten Thousand Things (De tienduizend dingen 1955) and Days Before Yesterday — also published as Just Yesterday (Nog pas gisteren 1951). There are English translations of her novels by Hans Koning. Some of her short stories were published in translation in magazines such as Vogue during the 1960s. In Dutch, five short-story collections by her were also published. Dermoût is arguably one of the great ‘what-ifs’ of twentieth-century literature: she turned to writing early in life, but remained largely unpublished until she was 63. As things stand, she is viewed as one of the giants among Dutch-Indies literary writers, and THE TEN THOUSAND THINGS in particular is widely regarded as an idiosyncratic masterpiece. Although not conventionally autobiographical, both of her novels draw from Dermoût's own life. In particular, like the central character in THE TEN THOUSAND THINGS, Dermout lost her son in violent circumstances (he died in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp). The Javanese childhood experiences and reminiscences described in Days Before Yesterday are based on, but do not mirror, her own childhood in the tropics.
June 15, 1888
Ramón López Velarde (June 15, 1888 – June 19, 1921) was a Mexican poet. His work is generally considered to be postmodern, but is unique for its subject matter. He achieved great fame in his native land, to the point of being considered Mexico's national poet. López Velarde was born in Jerez, Zacatecas. He was the first of nine children of José Guadalupe López Velarde, a lawyer from Jalisco, and Trinidad Berumen Llamas, who came from a local landowning family. José, after an unsuccessful law career, had founded a Catholic school in Jerez. In 1900, Ramón was sent to a seminary in Zacatecas, where he remained for two years; later, when his family moved, he transferred to a seminary in Aguascalientes. In 1905 he abandoned the seminary in favor of a career in the law. During his years in the seminary, Velarde had spent his holidays in Jerez. During one of these trips, he met Josefa de los Ríos, a distant relative eight years his senior, who made a deep impression on him. The earliest poem ascribed to Velarde, ‘Fuensanta’ (1905) is believed to have been inspired by her. In 1906 he collaborated on the literary review Bohemio, published in Aguascalientes by some of his friends, under the pseudonym of ‘Ricardo Wencer Olivares’. The Bohemio group sided with Manuel Caballero, a Catholic Integralist opposed to literary modernism, during the controversy surrounding the 1907 reappearance of the polemical Revista Azul. However, their intervention had no appreciable effect on Mexican literary culture. In January 1908 Velarde began his law studies at the University of San Luis Potosí. Soon after, his father died, leaving the family, which had returned to Jerez, in a desperate financial situation. Thanks to the support of his maternal uncles, Velarde was able to continue his studies. He continued to collaborate on various publications in Aguascalientes (El Observador, El Debate, Nosotros) and later in Guadalajara (El Regional, Pluma y Lápiz). Bohemia had ceased to exist by 1907. In San Luis Potosí Velarde read modernist poetry, especially that of Amado Nervo and Andrés González Blanco. This radically changed his aesthetic sensibilities, transforming him into a fervent defender of modernism. In 1910 he began to write what would later become La sangre devota. During the years of the Mexican Revolution, López Velarde openly supported the political reforms of Francisco Madero, whom he met personally in 1910. In 1911 he received his law degree and became a judge in the small town of Venado. However, he left his position at the end of the year and traveled to Mexico City, hoping that Madero, the new president of the republic, might offer him a position in his government. Madero made no such offer, perhaps because of Velarde's militant Catholicism. Eduardo J. Correa, his old mentor, hired him in 1912 to collaborate on La Nación, a monthly Catholic journal in Mexico City. Velarde wrote poems, reviews, and political commentary about Mexico's new state of affairs. He attacked, among others, Emiliano Zapata. He left the journal soon after the revolt of February 9, 1913, which brought Victoriano Huerta to power. Trying to escape the political turmoil of Mexico City, he returned to San Luis Potosí. He began his courtship of María de Nevares, which he would continue for the rest of his life, unsuccessfully. At the beginning of 1914 he settled permanently in Mexico City. In the middle of 1915 the rise to power of Venustiano Carranza began a period of relative tranquility. Mexican poetry was currently dominated by the postmodernism of Enrique González Martínez, for whom Velarde had little admiration. He preferred the work of José Juan Tablada, who was also his good friend. During this period he was also interested in the work of the Argentine modernist Leopoldo Lugones, who left a decisive influence on Velarde's later work. In 1915 López Velarde began to write more personal poems, marked by their nostalgia for his native Jerez (to which he would never return), and for his first love, ‘Fuensanta’. In 1916 he published his first book, La sangre devota (The Pious Blood), which he dedicated to ‘the spirits’ of the Mexican poets Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera and Manuel José Othón, and was well-received by the Mexican literary community. The book - and even its title - concerned the Catholic liturgy, which was associated with the idealized world of the author's childhood in Jerez, and identified as the only refuge from his turbulent city life. The poem ‘Viaje al terruño’ is fundamentally an attempt to evoke a return to childhood. Nevertheless, this nostalgia for the past is not free of a certain ironic distance, as in the poem ‘Tenías un rebozo de seda. .’ he remembers himself as a ‘seminarian, without Baudelaire, without rhyme, and without a sense of smell’. In 1917, Josefa de los Ríos, the inspiration for ‘Fuensanta’, died. Velarde began to work on his next book, Zozobra (Sinking), which would not be published for another two years. Between March and July of that year he collaborated with González Martínez on the review Pegaso. Despite receiving increasing criticism for his Catholicism and provincialism, Velarde's literary prestige also began to rise. In 1919 Velarde published Zozobra, considered by the majority of critics to be his major work. It was heavily ironic, and drew both from his provincial upbringing and his recent experiences in the city. The influence of Lugones was evident in the book's tendency to avoid common settings, the use of vocabulary then considered unpoetical, the unusual adjective use, unexpected metaphors, the use of word games, the frequency of proparoxytones, and the humorous use of rhyme. In this sense, the work also resembled that of the Uruguayan poet Julio Herrera y Reissig. Zozobra consists of forty poems arranged cyclically, begun by the line ‘Hoy como nunca’ (‘Today as never’), saying goodbye to Fuensanta and Jerez, and ending with the poem ‘Humildemente’ (‘Humbly’), which marks a symbolic return to his origins. Zozobra was strongly criticized by González Martínez. In 1920 the revolt of Alvaro Obregón brought an end to the government of Carranza, which for Velarde had been a period of stability and great productivity. But after a brief period of unrest in Velarde's life, José Vasconcelos was named minister of education, and promised a cultural renovation of the country. Velarde wrote for two journals promoted by Vasconcelos, México Moderno and El Maestro. In the latter, Velarde published one of his best-known essays, ‘Novedad de la Patria’, where he expounded on the ideas of his earlier poems. Also appearing in El Maestro was ‘La suave patria’, which would cement Velarde's reputation as Mexico's national poet. Velarde died on June 19, 1921, soon after turning thirty-three. His death was officially attributed to pneumonia, although it was speculated that syphilis might have been to blame. He left behind an unfinished book, El son del corazón (‘The sound of the heart’), which would not be published until 1932. After his death, at Vasconcelos' quiet urging, López Velarde was given great honors, and held up as the national poet. His work, especially ‘La suave patria’, was presented as the ultimate expression of post-revolutionary Mexican culture. This official appropriation did not preclude others from championing his work. The poets known as the Contemporáneos saw Velarde, together with Tablada, as the beginning of modern Mexican poetry. Xavier Villaurrutia, in particular, insisted on the centrality of Velarde in the history of Mexican poetry, and compared him to Charles Baudelaire. The first complete study of Velarde was made by American author Allen W. Phillips in 1961. This formed the basis for a subsequent study by Octavio Paz, included in his book Cuadrivio (1963), in which he argued the modernity of López Velarde, comparing him to Jules Laforgue, Leopoldo Lugones and Julio Herrera. Other critics, such as Gabriel Zaid, centered their analysis on Velarde's formative years and his strong Catholicism. On 1989, on Velarde's one hundredth birthday, Mexican author Guillermo Sheridan published a new biography of the poet, titled Un corazón adicto: la vida de Ramón López Velarde, which remains the most complete biography of Velarde to date. Velarde's oeuvre, like that of José Juan Tablada, marks a moment of transition between modernism and the avant-garde. His work was marked by the appearance of isms in the ambition of Hispanic authors to take a novel approach to poetic language. At the same time, his work was framed by duality, whether it be the Mexican struggle between rural traditions and the new culture of the cities, or his own struggle between asceticism and pagan sensuality. Despite his importance, he remains a virtual unknown outside his own country. Corecipient of the first Gregory Kolovakos Award in 1992, Margaret Sayers Peden is a distinguished critic and translator of Latin American literature.
June 15, 1937
Lev Loseff (June 15, 1937 – May 6, 2009) was professor of Russian and chair of the Russian language and literature department at Dartmouth. He published eight collections of verse and fiction in Russian, as well as numerous works of criticism. A major compilation of his poetry, translated by Gerald Smith, will be published by Arc Publications in late 2010. His English works include ON THE BENEFICENCE OF CENSORSHIP: AESOPIAN LANGUAGE IN MODERN RUSSIAN LITERATURE and two coedited volumes, JOSEPH BRODSKY: THE ART OF A POEM and BRODSKY’S POETICS AND AESTHETICS. Jane Ann Miller is a Russian-English interpreter and translator. Her previous translations include works by Joseph Brodsky, Yuz Aleshkovsky, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, and Yegor Gaidar.
June 15, 1949
Simon Phillip Hugh Callow (born 15 June 1949) is an English actor, musician, writer, and theatre director.
June 15, 1920
Amy Clampitt (June 15, 1920 – September 10, 1994) was an American poet and author. She was also awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US and Canada, in 1982, under the poetry category.
June 15, 1921
James A. Emanuel (June 15, 1921, Alliance, NE - September 28, 2013, 14th arrondissement of Paris, Paris, France) was born in Alliance, Nebraska. After a series of jobs in his late teens, he served during World War II, partly as secretary to the Army’s first black general, General Benjamin O. Davis Sr. After the war, Emanuel earned his BA from Howard University, his MA from Northwestern, and his PhD in English and comparative literature from Columbia. Emanuel began teaching at City College, CUNY while completing his doctorate; he taught at the institution from 1957 until his retirement in 1983. Though often described as neglected, Emanuel was one of the driving forces behind opening the English college curricula to African American literature. His groundbreaking study Langston Hughes (1967) was one of the first scholarly books on Hughes. With Theodore L. Gross, Emanuel also edited one of the first anthologies of black writers, Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America (1968). That same year, he published his first book of poetry, The Treehouse and Other Poems (1968). In his poetry, Emanuel frequently utilizes traditional forms and evokes the harsh realities of black experience. His many collections include Black Man Abroad (1978), Whole Grain: Collected Poems 1958–1989 (1991), and The Force and the Reckoning (2001). In the 1990s, Emanuel developed a new form of writing, frequently described as jazz haiku. His collection JAZZ from the Haiku King (1999) contains examples of the 17-syllable stanza form. He read his work in this genre to live jazz accompaniment. In 1996, he received the Sidney Bechet Award. Other honors and awards include a John Hay Whitney Award, a Saxton Memorial Fellowship, a Special Distinction Award from the Black American Literature Forum, and the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Achievement from Columbia University in 2007. A selection of Emanuel’s writings was placed in the Library of Congress, including his correspondence with figures such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and many others. Emanuel’s only son died in 1983, prompting the poem Deadly James (For All the Victims of Police Brutality). Emanuel rarely spoke of his son’s death, except to say that he committed suicide after being beaten by three cowardly cops. Emanuel moved to Paris in 1984, where he lived until his death in 2013. He taught English at the University of Toulouse and the University of Grenoble.
June 15, 1818
Juana Manuela Gorriti (June 15, 1818–November 6, 1892) was an Argentine writer with extensive political and literary links to Bolivia and Peru. Juana Manuela Gorriti was born in Salta near the Bolivian border. She came from a wealthy upper-class family, and attended a convent school when she was eight. Her father, José Ignacio de Gorriti, was a politician and soldier, and signed the Argentine Declaration of Independence on July 9. She was also the niece of the infamous guerrilla Jose Francisco 'Pachi' Gorriti. Her family was liberal, and supported the Unitarians during a time when Juan Manuel de Rosas ran the country. Juan Manuel was a conservative who was in office from 1829 and 1852, and used genocide to steal land from the indigenous people. In 1831, when Gorriti was thirteen, the federal caudillo Facundo Quiroga forced Gorriti and much of her family into exile, so they emigrated to Tarija, Bolivia. This is where she met future husband Manuel Isidro Belzu. Manuel Isidro Belzu was a captain in the Bolivian Army at the time. They married when she was fifteen, and she bore three daughters. As his career advanced, their marriage suffered, and he abandoned her in 1842 after nine years together. He later went on to become president in 1848, and was assassinated in office to be replaced by Mariano Melgarejo. It was rumored, though unconfirmed, that Mariano himself shot Belzu during a fake embrace in order take over as President, even though he acted as a dictator. Gorriti did not receive the divorce papers until fourteen years later, during the shelling on Lima's port by the Spanish Navy in 1866. Separated, but not divorced, she left Bolivia for Peru, where her literary life would take off. She started teaching, and eventually founded a school. In Lima, a coastal city where she lived, Gorriti arose as an influential journalist, and started to regularly host tertulias. Fashionable men and women of mostly a well educated background would attend these salons, such as Ricardo Palma and Manuel González Prada, Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera, Clorinda Matto de Turner and Teresa González de Fanning. They would meet to discuss literature and progress, a theme Gorriti felt passionate about, and would include in much of her literature. Gorriti was a feminist, and it showed in many of her journals. Through her writings, she instructed and inspired women to take on the modern gender roles which were so common in Europe and North America. She wanted women to stand up and be heard, to educate themselves, and not be afraid to go against the norm. In 1866, the Spanish Navy shelled ports on Peru's and Chile's coastlines, including the port of Lima. Gorriti served as a battlefield nurse. She also risked her life evacuating the wounded when the Spanish surrendered at Callao. For her heroism, and Florence Nightingale-like actions, Gorriti was seen as a Peruvian freedom fighter, and was awarded the Second Star of May by the Peruvian government. She wrote about these events in numerous articles and short stories, later collected and published in the Album of Lima founded by herself and her friend and fellow writer Carolina Freyre de Jaimes. Gorriti also founded the newspaper The Dawn of Lima with fellow poet Numa Pompilio Yona. In 1878, Gorriti returned to Argentina, and even after having faced numerous scandals in her life such as divorce, exile, and Belzu having a child out of wedlock, she was still seen as an exceptional woman who brought great pride to her country. Her daughter Mercedes became sick in Peru in 1879, but Gorriti could not go to her because of the war between Chile and Peru over the provinces of Tanca and Arica. Mercedes died later that year. Gorriti also founded the newspaper The Argentina Dawn, where she published many articles on the rights and education of women, and how Progress was limiting their freedom. When she died, Argentines hailed her as a famous, instructive, influential journalist in her day. Gorriti wrote a number of novels and short stories, including 'La hija del mazorquero' and 'El lucero de manantial.' Both of these stories are melodramatic tales with a strong anti-Rosista political message. She also wrote a number of other novels and short stories. Among these is another melodramatic novel, 'La oasis de la vida' written in the 1880s as an advertisement for the insurance company 'La Buenos Aires': the plot is the standard 'poor orphan boy can't marry his true love', but all is resolved when he finally discovers his parents had a life insurance policy with company, and so he isn't quite so poor after all. This novel was indicative of the new, more expansive literary climate in Argentina at the time. Of interest, but not often noted, was her on-again, off-again, three-year stay in Lima where she served as a mentor for a whole generation of women writers. This resulted in her publication of a short but influential novel 'La Quena' in the prestigious newspaper El Comercio. Later as Peruvian politics began to stabilize she contributed to the institutionalization of Peruvian literature by collaborating in the Revista de Lima with stories like 'El Angel Caido', 'Si haces mal no esperes bien' and others. By organizing and hosting her tertulias, she provided a great opportunity for many female writers like Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera, Clorinda Matto de Turner and Teresa González de Fanning to come together and discuss literature, progress, and the progress of women. Many of the attendees would later go on to write more about these subjects, including Teresa González de Fanning, who founded an enlightened women's movement. Although perhaps not as well known as she should be, Juana Manuela Gorriti is an author not to be overlooked. Her stories are finely crafted, and not only bear witness to trends in South American literature of the 19th century, but are enjoyable reading in their own right. ABOUT THE EDITOR AND TRANSLATOR: Francine Masiello is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Sergio Waisman is Assistant Professor of Spanish at George Washington University.
June 15, 1934
Hettie Jones was born in Brooklyn and grew up in New York. A graduate of Mary Washington College of the University of Virginia, she helped found a small publishing house and was the managing editor of the Partisan Review. She has taught in day care centers and headed a program for children with the Mobilization for Youth; she was also a member of the board of The Church of All Nations Nursery School. The author of THE TREE STANDS SHINING, an ALA Notable Book, and LONGHOUSE WINTER: IROQUOIS TRANSFORMATION TALES, Ms. Jones lives in New York City with her two daughters and a host of animals. She travels by bicycle.
June 15, 1951
W. Nikola-Lisa is the author of numerous children's picture books, including Storm, illustrated by Michael Hays, No Babies Asleep, illustrated by Peter Palagonia, and Till Year's Good End, illustrated by Christopher Manson. The idea for Hallelujah! came to Mr. Nikola-Lisa while he was doing research for Till Year's Good End, a book explaining the medieval labors of the months. As he perused several medieval images of the infant Jesus, the majority of which depicted a fair-skinned child, Mr. Nikola-Lisa began to wonder how people of other racial and ethnic backgrounds both portrayed and celebrated this icon of the Christian faith. Mr. Nikola-Lisa and his family live in Chicago, Illinois.
June 15, 1939
ROSA NISSAN lives in Mexico City and is a photographer and filmmaker.
June 15, 1895
Irina Vladimirovna Odoyevtseva (real name Iraida Heinike; born in Riga, Russian Empire, on 15 June 1895, according to some sources in 1901; died in Leningrad, Soviet Union, on 14 October 1990) was a Russian poet, novelist and memoirist, and the wife of the poet Georgy Ivanov. Iraida Heinike was born in Riga, now the capital of the Republic of Latvia but then in the Russian Empire. Her father Gustav Heinike was a Baltic German lawyer. In 1918 she moved to St. Petersburg (then in the throes of revolution and recently rebaptized "Petrograd"), and adopted the pen name "Irina Odoyevtseva". She joined the Second Guild of Poets, was tutored by Nikolai Gumilyov, whom she "worshipped", and become his favorite student. According to Yevgeny Yevtushenko, she "enchanted everybody, her teacher included, with her brilliant, masterful poetry" and had tremendous success with her debut book Dvor Tchudes (The Yard of Wonders, 1922), "half-starved bohemia learning her 'Cabman' and 'Pressed-down Glass' poems by heart." Formally an acmeist, Odoevtseva developed her own distinctive style and was in many ways ahead of her times, anticipating the latter experiments of oberiuts and even 1960s Soviet conceptualists. Her trademark was a distinctive speech impediment (she couldn't pronounce her "r"'s), which she mentioned a number of times in her later autobiographies "On the Banks of Neva" and "On the Banks of Seine". In 1921 she married the poet Georgy Ivanov, a prominent acmeist. In 1922 the couple emigrated to Paris. There she wrote several novels which enjoyed good sales and were translated into other languages (Angel of Death, 1927; Isolde, 1931; Abandon All Hope, 1948); but she was more successful in later life with her memoirs, On the Banks of Neva (1967) and On the Banks of Seine (1983), with their many personal anecdotes about the famous artists she had known: Nikolai Gumilyov, Georgy Ivanov, Osip Mandelstam, Zinaida Gippius, Dmitri Merezhkovsky, Andrey Bely and Ivan Bunin among others. These two books caused much controversy among the Russians in France but still "might be regarded as a priceless document of the time, even if full of aberrations and frivolous twists of fantasy," according to poet and Russian poetry historian Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Her marriage to Georgy Ivanov, though it lasted 37 years, "had little to do with the usual concepts of conjugal life," according to her biographer Ella Bobrova. An example of their wild life can be found in the papers of the French writer Georges Bataille: "In December 1937 [...] Laure and myself prepared a dinner: we were expecting Ivanov and Odoyevtseva. Just as we had planned, the dinner proved no less wild than the wind blowing that day. Odoevtseva, naked, began to vomit." During the Second World War, the couple joined the exodus from Paris and lived in a villa in the coastal resort town of Biarritz, which they had bought in 1932 when Odoyevtseva received an inheritance upon her father's death. The town was occupied by German troops in the summer of 1940. In 1943 their house was requisitioned by the German army, but they remained in Biarritz until 1946. Their house had been looted and later destroyed by American bombing. But the Ivanovs' social position during the war years would later lead to Georgy being charged with nazi sympathies, particularly by his former friend Georgy Adamovich. After the War, Ivanov and Odoyevtseva moved back to Paris, but their flat had been looted. They were both excluded from the literary world, which was now dominated by Communists and where their alleged nazi sympathies earned them ostracism. They lived in more or less desperate poverty, and Ivanov sank into alcoholism. In the early 1950s Ivanov had to move into an assisted living environment. He managed to get into the "Russian House" in Juan-les-Pins in the south of France, a subsidized home for destitute immigrants; then in the winter of 1953 he moved into a government shelter for the elderly in Hyères, also on the southern coast. He died in Hyères in 1958. Twenty years after Ivanov's death Odoevtseva married another émigré writer, Jacques Gorbof (born Yakov Gorbov), whose work she had translated in the 1950s. She lived with him until his death in 1981. In 1987, taking advantage of the relaxation of border restrictions, Odoyevtseva returned to Leningrad. She enjoyed a warm public welcome there, and for a couple of years, as Yevtushenko puts it, "was transported from one concert stage to another as a kind of a talking relic and was, indeed, talking a lot — in the most gracious manner, at that." A popular figure on Russian TV during the Perestroika period, Odoyevtseva enjoyed some commercial success too, having 200,000 copies of her memoirs sold — a figure far surpassing whatever she might have sold through her 65 years abroad. She died in Leningrad three years later.
June 15, 1937
During the last four decades of the twentieth century, photographer Michael P. Smith became one of the best-known photographers of his hometown, New Orleans. The author of five photo collections, Smith photographed each New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival from 1970 until 2004. While his photos of individual musicians brought him fame, Smith’s work also provides a valuable visual record of New Orleans’s brass bands, social aid and pleasure club parades, jazz funerals, neighborhood Mardi Gras celebrations, and spiritual churches. Born June 15, 1937, in New Orleans, Michael Proctor Smith grew up in the suburb of Metairie, the son of Charles Horton Smith II and Margaret Hatchett. After graduating from Metairie Park Country Day School, Smith attended Tulane University. Smith’s photographic career began in 1966 when he became fascinated with the African American culture in his native New Orleans. As a graduate student at Tulane University, he made photographs for its jazz archive, discovering a subject and a documentary style of working that engaged him for the rest of his life. Smith’s first collection of photographs, A Joyful Noise: A Celebration of New Orleans Music, was published in 1991. Within seven years, he also published New Orleans Jazz Fest, A Pictorial History;Spirit World: Pattern in the Expressive Folk Culture of African-American New Orleans; Mardi Gras Indians; and Jazz Fest Memories. In A Joyful Noise, Smith explained that his work was motivated by a simple fascination with the unique cultural diversity in the Mississippi Delta region and the fertility of its traditional cultures in producing such a world-recognized wealth and variety of quality music, folk arts and crafts, cuisine, and related public celebrations and festivals. Professionally, Smith worked as a freelance photographer for the prestigious Black Star photographic agency for more than twenty years. He co-founded the New Orleans music club Tipitina’s in 1977. During the 1980s, Smith traveled to Cuba, where he photographed many of the same subjects he explored in New Orleans: neighborhood life, street music, and religious practices. Smith’s photographs have been exhibited in art galleries and museums and collected by museums and other institutions throughout the world. The Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities presented Smith its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002. In 2004, the Arts Council of New Orleans gave Smith a Mayor’s Art Award, and the New Orleans/Gulf South chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers honored him with its Clarence John Laughlin Lifetime Achievement Award. Shortly before his death, on September 26, 2008, the Historic New Orleans Collection purchased much of his work for its permanent collection. Recently, the New Orleans Photo Alliance created the Michael P. Smith Fund for Documentary Photography in honor of Smith’s work, and the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities established the Michael P. Smith Documentary Award.
June 15, 1953
Eric D. Weitz is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of A CENTURY OF GENOCIDE and CREATING GERMAN COMMUNISM, 1890-1990.
June 16, 1938
Gustav Torgny Lindgren (born 16 June 1938) is a Swedish writer. Lindgren is the son of Andreas Lindgren and Helga Björk. He studied in Umeå to become a teacher and worked as a teacher until the middle of the 1970s. He was for several years active as a local politician for the Swedish Social Democratic Party. In the 1980s he converted to the Catholic faith. Lindgren began as a poet in 1965 but had to wait until 1982 for his breakthrough, with The Way of a Serpent (Swedish: Ormens väg på hälleberget). Lindgren has been translated into more than thirty languages and is one of Sweden's most internationally successful contemporary writers. He became a member of the Swedish Academy in 1991. The Way of a Serpent tells the story of a farmer family in a poverty-stricken region in the northern parts of Sweden in the nineteenth century. The family formerly owned its land, but had to sell it cheap during a succession of years of famine. The new owner collects his rent as long as there is money in the household, and exploits the women when there is no money. The way of the serpent is a surprisingly thin novel, considering the width of its content and specifically that it spans over three generations. The language is stark and spartan, and is heavily influenced by the local dialect. The main theme is the family's struggle for survival, where both the mother and the daughters have to contribute to indulge their creditor. The novel is considered to be one of Lindgren's greatest works, and was made into a film by Bo Widerberg in 1986.
June 16, 1920
José Guillermo Abel López Portillo y Pacheco (June 16, 1920 – February 17, 2004) was a Mexican lawyer and, politician affiliated with Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) who served as the 51st President of Mexico from 1976 to 1982.
June 16, 1949
JAIME MANRIQUE was born in Barranquilla, Colombia, and moved to New York when he was seventeen. His first book of poems received his country’s National Poetry Award. In Spanish, he has published a novella and a collection of short stories, a volume of film criticism, and the novel Colombian Gold, which was translated into many languages. Forthcoming is Christopher Columbus on His Deathbed, an epic poem (Vehicle Editions). Manrique teaches creative writing and Latin American literature and cinema at the Eugene Lang College of The New School for Social Research. He lives in Manhattan.
June 16, 1938
Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938 in Lockport, New York) grew up on a farm where she developed a love for literature and writing. Oates went on to become an acclaimed, prolific bestselling writer. She published her first book in 1963 and has since published over forty novels, as well as a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Oates earned a scholarship to attend Syracuse University and graduated valedictorian in 1960. She then received her master's from the University of Wisconsin in 1961, the same year in which she wed English student Raymond Smith. Oates took on teaching work at the University of Detroit, and by the end of the decade, had moved on to work at the University of Windsor in Canada. She and her husband went on to work as co-editors on the literary quarterly publication The Ontario Review, and Oates would take on a teaching position at Princeton University by the late 1970s. In 2008, Smith died unexpectedly of pneumonia-related complications. Oates suffered tremendously emotionally, and detailed the depths of her grief in the memoir A Widow's Story. She remarried in 2009 to Professor Charles Gross. In early 2013, she published the novels Daddy Love, which recounts the horrifying experience of a boy who's kidnapped, and The Accursed, a Gothic, surreal tale that looks at Woodrow Wilson's time as the president of Princeton and the violent prejudice faced by the African-American community.
June 16, 1723
Adam Smith (16 June 1723 NS (5 June 1723 OS) – 17 July 1790) was a Scottish moral philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is best known for two classic works: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). The latter, usually abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is considered his magnum opus and the first modern work of economics. Smith is cited as the 'father of modern economics' and is still among the most influential thinkers in the field of economics today. Smith studied social philosophy at the University of Glasgow and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was one of the first students to benefit from scholarships set up by fellow Scot, John Snell. After graduating, he delivered a successful series of public lectures at the University of Edinburgh, leading him to collaborate with David Hume during the Scottish Enlightenment. Smith obtained a professorship at Glasgow teaching moral philosophy, and during this time he wrote and published The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In his later life, he took a tutoring position that allowed him to travel throughout Europe, where he met other intellectual leaders of his day. Smith laid the foundations of classical free market economic theory. The Wealth of Nations was a precursor to the modern academic discipline of economics. In this and other works, he expounded upon how rational self-interest and competition can lead to economic prosperity. Smith was controversial in his own day and his general approach and writing style were often satirised by Tory writers in the moralising tradition of William Hogarth and Jonathan Swift. In 2005, The Wealth of Nations was named among the 100 Best Scottish Books of all time.
June 16, 1927
Ariano Suassuna (June 16, 1927 – July 23, 2014) was a Brazilian playwright and author. He is in the 'Movimento Armorial'. He founded the Student Theater at Federal University of Pernambuco. Four of his plays have been filmed, and he was considered one of Brazil's greatest living playwrights of his time. He was also an important regional writer, doing various novels set in the Northeast of Brazil. He received an honorary doctorate at a ceremony performed at a circus. He was the author of, among other works, the 'Auto da Compadecida' and 'A Pedra do Reino'. He was a staunch defender of the culture of the Northeast, and his works dealt with the popular culture of the Northeast.
June 16, 1932
Florence Ladd, author, social critic, and psychologist, is a fiction writer. Her novel Sarah's Psalm (Scribner, 1996) received the 1997 Literary Award for Fiction from the American Library Association's Black Caucus. Ladd's short stories have appeared in The Golden Horn and Ragtime. She also has written several nonfiction and research works. She co-authored the book Different Strokes (Westview Press, 1979). Her recent nonfiction works are included in A Stranger in the Village (Griffin and Fish, eds.), Grandmothers: Granddaughters Remember (Marguerite Bouvard, ed.), and Dutiful Daughters (Jean Gould, ed.). She was a consultant for the School for International Training's Zimbabwe projects. From 1989 to 1997, she was director of the Bunting Institute at Harvard University, a multidisciplinary center for women in higher education. In 1998, she taught a fiction writing workshop at the Women's Institute for Continuing Education in Paris. She has held fellowships at the Bunting Institute and the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University; has been a resident fellow at the MacDowell Colony; and has been awarded several honorary degrees. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Flavigny-sur-Ozerain in Burgundy.
June 16, 1911
Victor Canning (16 June 1911 – 21 February 1986) was a prolific British writer of novels and thrillers who flourished in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. He was personally reticent, writing no memoirs and giving relatively few newspaper interviews. His masterpiece was The Rainbird Pattern (1972), which was awarded the CWA Silver Dagger and nominated for the Edgar awards. His later novels were all far darker and more realistic than any of his earlier thrillers. They do not have conventional happy endings. The settings are mostly in the south of England, and the villains are often sinister government officials who crush the innocent bystanders who might expose them.
June 16, 1895
Hugh I'Anson Fausset (16 June 1895 – 1965), was an English writer, a literary critic and biographer, and a poet and religious writer. His mother was Ethel I'Anson, of Darlington, Durham, descended from Joshua I'Anson who established the Darlington I'Anson line in 1749. His father was the Rev. R. T. E. Fausset, of Killington, then in Westmorland, who was the son of Andrew Robert Fausset. Hugh Fausset was educated at Sedbergh School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and then at as a choral scholar at King's College, Cambridge. Fausset worked at the Foreign Office, during the summer of 1918. In 1919 he became a reviewer and writer. He was a correspondent of John Freeman. Fausset wrote for The Times Literary Supplement and The Manchester Guardian, as well as for other periodicals. He married Marjory Rolfe, daughter of the Rev. G. W. Rolfe.
June 16, 1946
Babafemi Adeyemi Osofisan (born June 16, 1946 in Erunwon, Ogun State) is a Nigerian writer known for his critique of societal problems and his use of African traditional performances and surrealism in some of his novels. A frequent theme his novels explore is the conflict between good and evil. He is in fact a didactic writer whose works seek to correct his decadent society. Osofisan attended primary school at Ife and secondary school at Government College, Ibadan. After secondary school, he attended the University of Ibadan. He did his post-graduate studies at the Sorbonne, Paris before holding faculty positions at the University of Ibadan, where he retired as full professor in 2011.
June 16, 1961
Éric Sanvoisin was born in Valence, France in 1961. Father of seven children, he works in a library. Thierry Martin was a French illustrator, known under his pen name Martin Matje. Born in Paris, Matje was originally educated as an engineer. Matje was the author of several children’s books published by Nathan, Gallimard and Nathan. Also a press illustrator, his work appeared in Libération, Marie-Claire, Lire, Le Monde de l’Education, Les Échos, and The New Yorker.
June 16, 1931
John Shelby "Jack" Spong (born June 16, 1931) is a retired American bishop of the Episcopal Church. From 1979 to 2000 he was Bishop of Newark (based in Newark, New Jersey). He is a liberal Christian theologian, religion commentator and author. He calls for a fundamental rethinking of Christian belief away from theism and traditional doctrines.
June 16, 1899
Marita Bonner (June 16, 1899 – December 7, 1971), also known as Marieta Bonner, was an American writer, essayist, and playwright who is commonly associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Other names she went by were Marita Occomy, Marita Odette Bonner, Marita Odette Bonner Occomy, Marita Bonner Occomy, and Joseph Maree Andrew. On December 29, 1921, along with 15 other women, she chartered the Iota chapter of Delta Sigma Theta sorority. Marita Bonner was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Joseph and Anne Noel Bonner. Marita was one of four children and was brought up in a middle-class community in Massachusetts. She attended Brookline High School, where she contributed to the school magazine, The Sagamore. She excelled in German and Music, and was a very talented pianist. In 1917, she graduated from Brookline High School and in 1918 enrolled in Radcliffe College, commuting to campus because many African-American students were denied dormitory accommodation. In college, she majored in English and Comparative Literature, while continuing to study German and musical composition. At Radcliffe, African-American students were not permitted to board, and many either lived in houses off-campus set aside for black students, or commuted, as Bonner did. Bonner was an accomplished student at Radcliffe, founding the Radcliffe chapter of Delta Sigma Theta, a black sorority, and participating in many musical clubs (she twice won the Radcliffe song competition). She was also accepted to a competitive writing class that was open to 16 students, where her professor, Charles Townsend Copeland, encouraged her not to be "bitter" when writing, a descriptor often used for authors of color. In addition to her studies, she taught at a high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After finishing her schooling in 1922, she continued to teach at Bluefield Colored Institute in West Virginia. Two years later, she took on a position at Armstrong High School in Washington, D.C., until 1930, during which time her mother and father both died suddenly. While in Washington, Bonner became closely associated with poet, playwright and composer Georgia Douglas Johnson. Johnson's "S Street salon" was an important meeting place for many of the writers and artists involved in the New Negro Renaissance. While living in Washington D.C., Bonner met William Almy Occomy. They married and moved to Chicago, where Bonner's writing career took off. After marrying Occomy, she began to write under her married name. After 1941, Bonner gave up publishing her works and devoted her time to her family, including three children. She began teaching again in the 1940s and finally retired in 1963. Bonner died on December 7, 1971, from smoke-inhalation complications at a hospital after her apartment caught fire. She was 73.
June 17, 1871
James Weldon Johnson (June 17, 1871 – June 26, 1938) was a writer, poet and distinguished statesman, born in Jacksonville, Florida, where he and his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, grew up. Their father was head waiter at a resort hotel there and their mother, who had been born in the Bahamas and educated in New York City, was the first black woman to teach in a public school in Florida. Their parents were both talented musically and the family often made music together. James attended Atlanta University and, on graduation, became principal of Stanton Grammar School in Jacksonville. Over the years, he became a figure in the struggle of African Americans for equal rights. He was the executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People from 1920 through 1931. In 1900 he and his brother J. Rosamond Johnson wrote a song in celebration to be sung by school children. That song, ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,’ much to their surprise, became the ‘Negro National Anthem’ and is still being sung throughout the country. Johnson contributed articles regularly to ‘The Crisis’. In 1927, he published the Book of American Negro Poetry. Dr. James Weldon Johnson was appointed consul to Venezuela. His autobiography is called ALONG THIS WAY: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, published in 1933. BLACK MANHATTAN, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLORED MAN, and GOD’S TROMBONES are three of his most famous works. Even while traveling, lecturing, and lobbying, Johnson made time to pursue his literary interests. In 1922 he produced the first edition of THE BOOK OF AMERICAN NEGRO POETRY, an anthology of contemporary African-American verse that included such writers as Paul Laurence Dunbar, Claude McKay, and W. E. B. Dubois. (The second edition of the collection, published in 1931, added nine more poets, including Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes.) In the preface, Johnson stated one of his best-known beliefs: ‘the final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced.’ By presenting the literary achievements of African Americans, Johnson hoped to change the perceptions of white America about the inferiority of his race.
June 17, 1874
Rufino Blanco Fombona (Caracas, Venezuela, June 17, 1874 - Buenos Aires, Argentina, October 16, 1944) was a Venezuelan writer, editor, diplomat, and prominent figure of the literary modernism of the time. He was born into a an illustrious family (descended from Spanish conquerors, heroes of Independence, jurists, diplomats and writers), the son of Rufino Blanco Toro and Isabel Fombona Palacio. He did his elementary education in Caracas and obtained a bachelor's degree in 1889. He started Law and Philosophy at the Central University of Venezuela, but decided to enter the Military Academy at age 18. He intervened in the Legalist Revolution (1892) and was then appointed consul in Philadelphia. There he began to cultivate poetry and on his return to Caracas in 1895 he participated in the magazines El Cojo Ilustrado and Cosmopola. He was assigned to the Venezuelan Embassy in Holland, where he remained during 1896 and 1897. In 1898 he went to jail briefly for dueling with an assistant to the President of the Republic contrary to his ideas; once in freedom he went to New York to teach Spanish and from there he moved to the Dominican Republic, where he worked as a journalist and was appointed consul in Boston of that country (1898-1899). In 1899 Trovadores y trovas appeared in Caracas , a mixture of verses and prose that was his first book. Tales of the Poet (1900), American Tales (1904) and Little Lyrical Opera followed.(1904), a mature book of verses whose prologue is signed by Rubén Darío, because, in effect, it is part of the aesthetics of modernism , although later it will be oriented more towards postmodernism . He reprinted part of his verses in a bilingual edition ( Au-delà des horizons. Petits poèmes lyriques (Paris, 1908) and simultaneously published a collection of articles Letters and Letters from Latin America. He went to jail in Ciudad Bolívar for having killed the colonel who was trying to arrest him for fighting against the rubber monopoly in his position as governor of the federal territory of Amazonas, in the middle of the Amazon region; This served as inspiration for his first novel, The Iron Man (1907), that are already visible the influences that marked his narrative: the French realism ( Honoré de Balzac ) and pessimism naturalist of Guy de Maupassant . He also wrote the full-length pamphlet against his enemy ; the black Benjamín Ruiz (1900) and also attacked the government with another pamphlet of the same year, A page of history; Ignacio Andradeand his government , where he blamed the politician of that name for having rigged the elections that made him president and caused a civil war in Venezuela. At that time he fought against the coup d'état of Juan Vicente Gómez as secretary of the Chamber of Deputies and that earned him an exile that kept him away from the country for twenty-six years. He lived in Paris (1910-1914) and then in Madrid (1914-1936) in a period of his life especially fertile in literary aspects. It started with the anti-gomecist libel Judas capitolino (1912); the poetry books Songs of Prison and Exile (1911) and Song Book of Unhappy Love (1918), written on the occasion of the tragic suicide of his young wife, who had learned of his infidelity; the books of short stories, Minimal Dramas (1920) and Grotesque Tragedies (1928), and the novels The Golden Man (1915), The Miter in the Hand (1927), Beauty and the Beast (1931) andThe secret of the happiness (1933). He also directed Editorial America for almost twenty years . His projects from this period include his edition of part of the work of Simón Bolívar : the Letters (1913, 1921, 1922) and the Discourses and Proclamations (1913). In his essays, on the other hand, he proposes a "panhispanistam² project" to American "Pan-Americanism" and praises the work of the Spanish conquerors, founders of a community from which the new republics emerged. On the other hand, he collected and printed a series of studies on Bolívar by Juan Montalvo , José Martí and José Enrique Rodó, among others (1914). His friends from Spain and Latin America proposed him with no luck in 1925 to the Nobel Prize for Literature and, opposed to the dictatorship in Spain of Miguel Primo de Rivera , with the support of the Republicans of the Radical Party , he was appointed to his fall civil governor of the provinces of Almería (1933) and Navarra (1933-34). Upon returning to his country he entered the National Academy of History (1939) and was appointed president of the state of Miranda (1936-1937) and plenipotentiary minister of Venezuela in Uruguay (1939-1941). He no longer attempted to meddle with politics again: he devoted himself to historical research, to poetry, and to writing his Diary (about a thousand pages long and published in three parts: Diary of My Life. The Two-Year Novel (1904-1905). ) 1929; Camino de imperfection , 1933, and Two and a Half Years of Concern , 1942; the third part was not published as it was apparently stolen by Gómez's agents in Madrid). His heart condition worsened, his last book was poetry: Golden Cobs, a compilation of old poems with some new ones, and died of a heart attack during a trip to Buenos Aires.
June 17, 1878
Agustín Edwards (June 17, 1878 - 1941) was a Chilean politician, financier, and writer. At age twenty-two, Edwards became one of the youngest members in Chile's House of Representatives. At the same time he became active in the Edwards Bank of Valparaíso. Elected vice president of the House and president of the Ministry of Finance in 1902, he negotiated a peace treaty with Bolivia and initiated the construction of a railroad from Arica to La Paz. In 1906 he began his diplomatic career, serving successively in Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. Upon his return to Chile, he served as finance minister under President Pedro Montt. During World War I he was named envoy to Great Britain in charge of diplomatic and financial affairs and, in 1920, became special envoy to the Court of St. James. In 1921 he was named representative to the League of Nations. He received many honors in Chile and Europe. While living abroad Edwards studied newspaper and magazine production, then utilized this knowledge in Chile, where he founded the newspaper El Mercurio and several magazines, including Zig-Zag. In the financial domain, he reorganized the Edwards Bank, founded several companies, and was involved in nitrate mining. In 1925 he resolved a conflict with Bolivia and reestablished peace. Among his writings are his Memoria sobre el plebiscito tacneño (1926), in which he opposes a plan to allow Tacna and Arica to determine their nationality; My Native Land (1928), a cultural history of Chile; Peoples of Old (1929), on the Araucanian Indians; The Dawn (1931), on Chilean history from Independence (1810) to the first elected president (1841); and Cuatro presidentes de Chile (1932), on the period from 1841 to 1932.
June 17, 1940
Dan T. Carter (born June 17, 1940, Florence County, South Carolina) is an American historian. He graduated from University of South Carolina, University of Wisconsin, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with a Ph.D. in 1967. He taught at the University of Maryland, and the University of Wisconsin. He was Kenan University Professor at Emory University, and Educational Foundation Professor at University of South Carolina, retiring in 2007. In 2009, he was the Dow Research Professor at the Roosevelt Center in Middelburg the Netherlands. He was president of the Southern Historical Association.
June 17, 1948
Jacqueline Jones (born 17 June 1948), is an American social historian. She held the Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas from 2008 to 2017 and is Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History at the University of Texas at Austin.
June 17, 1945
Educated at the universities of Newcastle, Oxford, and Bonn, PAUL KENNEDY is now Dilworth Professor of History at Yale University, where he teaches modern international and strategic history.
June 17, 1909
égine Pernoud (17 June 1909, Château-Chinon, Nièvre – 22 April 1998, Paris) was a French historian and archivist. In 1929 she obtained an undergraduate degree in literature at the University of Aix-en-Provence. She then achieved a Doctorate in Literature from the École Nationale des Chartes and the École du Louvre. Having grown up in an impoverished family, she worked in various professions (teacher, coach, archiver) while completing her university studies and while waiting for a post in a museum. She later became curator at the Museum of Reims in 1947, at the Museum of the History of France in 1949, at the National Archives, and at the Centre of Joan of Arc (which she had founded in 1974 at the request of André Malraux). She is known for writing extensively about Joan of Arc and the social standing of women in the Middle Ages (500 - 1500), e.g., on Robert of Arbrissel who in 1099 founded the double monastery - one with nuns, and one with monks - of Fontevraud, where he put a nun, Petronilla Chemillé, who was 22 years of age, in charge of leading it. She primarily did the work of a medieval historian, however she also published several popular works. She was a founding member of the Academy of the Morvan in 1967. She received the Grand Prize of the City of Paris in 1978 and in 1997 the French Academy awarded her for her lifetime's work.
June 17, 1926
DAVID SHAHAR (June 17, 1926, Jerusalem, Israel - April 2, 1997, Paris, France) won the Prime Minister’s Award for Literature in 1969, and in 1973 he was awarded the Agnon Prize. News from Jerusalem, a collection of tales, was published in 1974. Mr. Shahar represents the fifth generation of his family to reside in Jerusalem.
June 17, 1867
John Robert Gregg (b. 17 June 1867, Shantonagh, Monaghan, Ireland – d. 23 February 1948, New York City, New York) was an educator, publisher, humanitarian, and the inventor of the eponymous shorthand system Gregg Shorthand.
June 18, 1812
Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov (18 June [O.S. 6 June] 1812 – 27 September [O.S. 15 September] 1891) was a Russian novelist best known for his novels A Common Story (1847), Oblomov (1859), and The Precipice (1869). He also served in many official capacities, including the position of censor. Goncharov was born in Simbirsk into the family of a wealthy merchant; as a reward for his grandfather's military service, they were elevated to gentry status. He was educated at a boarding school, then the Moscow College of Commerce, and finally at Moscow State University. After graduating, he served for a short time in the office of the Governor of Simbirsk, before moving to Saint Petersburg where he worked as government translator and private tutor, while publishing poetry and fiction in private almanacs. Goncharov's first novel, A Common Story, was published in Sovremennik in 1847. Goncharov's second and best-known novel Oblomov was published in 1859 in Otechestvennye zapiski. His third and final novel The Precipice was published in Vestnik Evropy in 1869. He also worked as a literary and theatre critic. Towards the end of his life Goncharov wrote a memoir called An Uncommon Story, in which he accused his literary rivals, first and foremost Ivan Turgenev, of having plagiarized his works and prevented him from achieving European fame. The memoir was published in 1924. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, among others, considered Goncharov an author of high stature. Anton Chekhov is quoted as stating that Goncharov was '...ten heads above me in talent.'
June 18, 1946
Lídia Jorge (born June 18, 1946) is a prominent Portuguese novelist and author whose work is representative of a recent style of Portuguese writing, the so-called ‘Post Revolution Generation’. Her books have won international recognition and have been published in many countries.
June 18, 1922
Donald Lawrence Keene (born June 18, 1922) is an American-born Japanese scholar, historian, teacher, writer and translator of Japanese literature. Keene is University Professor Emeritus and Shincho Professor Emeritus of Japanese Literature at Columbia University, where he taught for over fifty years. Soon after the 2011 T?hoku earthquake and tsunami, he retired from Columbia, moved to Japan permanently, and acquired citizenship under the name K?n Donarudo.
June 18, 1903
Raymond Radiguet (18 June 1903 – 12 December 1923) was a French novelist and poet whose two novels were noted for their explicit themes, and unique style and tone. In his brief career he wrote two penetrating novels-The Devil in the Flesh (1923, tr. 1932), a study of adolescence; and Le Bal du comte d'Orgel (1924, tr., Count's Ball, 1929, Count d'Orgel, 1953), a sophisticated novel of manners reflecting the disillusionment of the post-World War I period. Radiguet was born in Saint-Maur, Val-de-Marne close to Paris, the son of a caricaturist. In 1917 he moved to the city. Soon he would drop out of the Lycée Charlemagne, where he studied, in order to pursue his interests in journalism and literature. He associated himself with the Modernist set, befriending Picasso, Max Jacob, Jean Hugo, Juan Gris and especially Jean Cocteau, who became his mentor. Radiguet also had several well-documented relationships with women. An anecdote told by Ernest Hemingway has an enraged Cocteau charging Radiguet (known in the Parisian literary circles as ‘Monsieur Bébé’ – Mister Baby) with decadence for his tryst with a model: ‘Bébé est vicieuse. Il aime les femmes.’ (‘Baby is depraved. He likes women.’ [Note the use of the feminine adjective.]) Radiguet, Hemingway implies, employed his sexuality to advance his career, being a writer ‘who knew how to make his career not only with his pen but with his pencil.’ In early 1923 Radiguet published his first and most famous novel, Le Diable au corps (The Devil in the Flesh). The story of a young married woman who has an affair with a sixteen-year-old boy while her husband is away fighting at the front provoked scandal in a country that had just been through World War I. His second novel, Le bal du Comte d'Orgel, also dealing with adultery, was only published posthumously in 1924. Radiguet died in Paris in 1923 at age 20 of typhoid fever, which he contracted after a trip he took with Cocteau. Cocteau, in an interview with The Paris Review stated that Radiguet had told him three days prior to his death that, ‘In three days, I am going to be shot by the soldiers of God.’ In reaction to this death Francis Poulenc wrote, ‘For two days I was unable to do anything, I was so stunned’. In addition to two novels, Radiguet's works include a few poetry volumes and a play.
June 18, 1949
Chris Van Allsburg (born June 18, 1949) is an American illustrator and writer of children's books. He has won two Caldecott Medals for U.S. picture book illustration, for Jumanji (1981) and The Polar Express (1985), both of which he also wrote; both were later adapted as successful motion pictures. He was also a Caldecott runner-up in 1980 for The Garden of Abdul Gasazi. For his contribution as a children's illustrator he was 1986 U.S. nominee for the biennial International Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest international recognition for creators of children's books. He received the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Michigan in April 2012.
June 18, 1889
Elisabeth Sanxay Holding (1889–1955) was an American novelist and short story writer. She primarily authored fiction in the hardboiled subgenre of detective novels. Born June 18, 1889 in Brooklyn, New York, Sanxay attended Miss Whitcombe's and other schools for young ladies before marrying British diplomat George E. Holding in 1913. The couple had two daughters and traveled widely in South America and the Caribbean before living in Bermuda for a number of years, where Mr. Holding was a government official. After Mr. Holding's retirement, the couple lived in the Bronx section of New York City, where Elisabeth Sanxay Holding died on February 7, 1955. Elisabeth Sanxay Holding wrote romantic novels during the 1920s, but, after the stock market crash in 1929, she turned to the more lucrative genre of the detective novel. From 1929 through 1954, she wrote eighteen detective novels, which sold well and earned her praise for her style and character development. Her series character for these novels was Lieutenant Levy. Holding also authored many short stories. Her novel The Blank Wall (1947) was popular enough to inspired the film adaptation The Reckless Moment in 1949. It was adapted again into the 2001 The Deep End starring Tilda Swinton. It was republished by Persephone Books in 2003 and again in 2009. A number of Holding's crime novels have been more recently reprinted by Stark House Press and other publishers and made available to new readers. It appeared in 2015 as part of the Library of America's omnibus Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s. Holding was much admired during her day.
June 18, 1914
Efraín Huerta (June 18, 1914 in Silao, Guanajuato – February 3, 1982 in Mexico City) was a Mexican poet and journalist. Born and raised in the state of Guanajuato, he moved to Mexico City initially to start a career in art. Unable to enter the Academy of San Carlos, he attended the Escuela Preparatoria Nacional, where he met writers such as Rafael Solana, Carmen Toscano and Octavio Paz. He had been writing poetry since he was young, but initially opted to attend law school; however, when he published his first book of poems, the left to pursue writing full-time. As a poet, he published regularly from the 1930s to the 1980s, and as a journalist collaborated with over twenty newspapers and journals, under his own name and using pseudonyms. He was also active politically, a communist and Stalin supporter through his life with his social and political ideas finding their way into his writing. Poetically, he is part of the Taller generation of Mexican poets, although his development was a bit different from others in this group. Near the end of his career, his work had developed a colloquial style, including work focusing on Mexico City and creating a new form called a poemínimo."
June 18, 1961
Angela Johnson is an award winning American children's book and poetry author with over 40 books to her credit. She began her writing career in 1989 with the publication of a picture book called "Tell Me a Story, Mama" which won the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award in 1991. She has won three Coretta Scott King Awards, one each for her novels "The First Part Last (2004)," "Heaven(1999)," and "Toning the Sweep" (1994)."The First Part Last" was also the recipient of the Michael L Printz Award. "When I Am Old With You" was an Honor Book in 1990 and named an American Library Association Notable Book. "The Other Side, The Shorter Poems" was also selected as a Coretta Scott King Honor book in 1998. In recognition of her outstanding talent, Angela was named a 2003 MacArthur Fellow. Born in Tuskegee, Alabama in 1961, she grew up in Alabama and Ohio. She lives in Kent, Ohio.
June 18, 1954
Frané Lessac is a U.S born author, illustrator and painter who currently lives and works in Western Australia. Frané Lessac has published over 40 books for children and won numerous awards for her illustrations. Frané Lessac currently resides in Fremantle, Western Australia.
June 18, 1944
Lois Palken Rudnick is professor emerita of American studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Rudnick lives in Santa Fe.
June 18, 1924
François Caradec (June 18, 1924, Quimper, France - November 13, 2008, Paris, France) was a French writer and a member of both the Collége de 'Pataphysique and the Oulipo. His voluminous oeuvre includes biographies of Raymond Roussel and Alfred Jarry, as well as an encyclopedia of practical jokes and a dictionary of French slang. Caradec was a devoted specialist in Alphonse Allais, compiling and editing his collected works, and was one of the first historians of the bande dessinée in France.
June 19, 1905
Edward Ewell (Eddie) Anderson, novelist, the son of Edward Houston and Ellen Sara (Sexton) Anderson, was born on June 19, 1905, at Weatherford. His father, a country printer, worked in a number of small towns before settling in Ardmore, Oklahoma, where Eddie went through high school before he ran off with the mayor's son to a wheat harvest, fought one professional boxing match, played trombone a season in a carnival band, and, eventually, learned the reporter's trade at the Daily Ardmorite. Anderson worked on newspapers in Oklahoma, Arkansas, El Paso, Fort Worth, and Tyler, before settling for a time in Abilene in the late 1920s. While working for Max Bentley on the newly established Abilene Morning News, he covered the trial of Marshall Ratliff, ringleader in the Santa Claus Bank Robbery. In 1930 Anderson worked his passage on a freighter to Europe and back. He returned to Abilene, where his parents and three sisters had settled, to try seriously to write fiction. A year later he began collecting material for hobo fiction by riding freight cars across the nation. He returned to write a picaresque novel about an out-of-work musician hoboing aimlessly around the United States. He also wrote short stories about hoboes, and Story magazine accepted two of them. Anderson married Polly Anne Bates in Abilene in 1934. They went to New Orleans, where he sold pieces to detective magazines and worked on a New Orleans newspaper. His hobo novel, Hungry Men, was published by Doubleday, Doran, and Company in 1935. It won the Doubleday-Story Prize that year and was a Literary Guild selection. Anderson returned to Texas and lived in Kerrville, where he began work on a second novel about two desperadoes who resembled Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. By the time this second novel, Thieves Like Us (1937), was published, Anderson was working for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, where he also wrote a successful radio series. After good reviews of Thieves Like Us Anderson went to Hollywood, where he worked for B. P. Schulberg at Paramount and for Warner Brothers. When his screenwriting faltered, he worked for the Los Angeles Examiner and the Sacramento Bee. By then the Andersons had three children. Anderson returned to Texas after World War II and worked for the Associated Press and the Fort Worth Star Telegram, among other papers. His marriage ended in divorce in 1950. For a time he took to the road again and drifted almost as much as he had during the early 1930s. He wrote for an underground newspaper in New York at one time. He then drifted back to Texas and lived principally at Brownsville, where he eventually married a Mexican national named Lupe. They had a son and a daughter. Anderson's later fiction projects did not reach print. After two years of retirement from newspaper work, he died of heart disease on September 5, 1969, in Brownsville. Thieves Like Us has been made into motion pictures twice, as They Live by Night in 1948 and as Thieves Like Us in 1974. In 1985 Hungry Men was reissued.
June 19, 1944
Francisco Buarque de Hollanda (born June 19, 1944 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), popularly known as Chico Buarque is a singer, guitarist, composer, dramatist, writer and poet. He is best known for his music, which often includes social, economic and cultural commentary on Brazil and Rio de Janeiro in particular.
June 19, 1891
Adolfo Costa du Rels (or Adolfo Costa du Reís) (1891–1980) was a Bolivian writer and diplomat who became the last President of the Council of the League of Nations. He was the author of many plays, novels and other writings, mostly in French, and received several literary awards.
June 19, 1909
Osamu Dazai (June 19, 1909 – June 13, 1948) was a Japanese author who is considered one of the foremost fiction writers of 20th-century Japan. A number of his most popular works, such as The Setting Sun (Shay?) and No Longer Human (Ningen Shikkaku), are considered modern-day classics in Japan. With a semi-autobiographical style and transparency into his personal life, Dazai’s stories have intrigued the minds of many readers. His books also bring about awareness to a number of important topics such as human nature, mental illness, social relationships, and postwar Japan. One such literary work, No Longer Human, has received quite a few adaptations: a film directed by Genjiro Arato, the first four episodes of the anime series Aoi Bungaku, and a manga serialized in Shinchosha's Comic Bunch magazine. While Dazai continues to be widely celebrated in Japan, he remains relatively unknown elsewhere with only a handful of his novels available in English.
June 19, 1957
María Amparo Escandón (Mexico City, Mexico, June 19, 1957) is a Mexican born, US citizen. She is a professional communicator in various media: best-selling bilingual novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, advertising creative director, and film producer. Her award-winning literary work is known for addressing bicultural themes that deal with the immigration experience of Mexicans crossing over to the United States. Her stories concentrate on family relationships, loss, forgiveness, faith, and self-discovery. A linguist with a sharp ear for dialogue, she explores the dynamics of language in border sub-cultures and the evolution of Spanglish. Her innovative style of multiple voice narrations and her cleverly humorous, quirky, and compassionate stories with a feminine angle capture the magical reality of everyday life and place her among the top Latin American female writers. Her work has been translated into over 21 languages and is currently read in more than 85 countries
June 19, 1945
Greil Marcus (born June 19, 1945) is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a much broader framework of culture and politics than is customary in pop music journalism.
June 19, 1623
Blaise Pascal (19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Christian philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalizing the work of Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote in defense of the scientific method. In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines. After three years of effort and fifty prototypes, he built 20 finished machines (called Pascal's calculators and later Pascalines) over the following ten years, establishing him as one of the first two inventors of the mechanical calculator. Pascal was an important mathematician, helping create two major new areas of research: he wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of 16, and later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. Following Galileo and Torricelli, in 1646, he refuted Aristotle's followers who insisted that nature abhors a vacuum. Pascal's results caused many disputes before being accepted. In 1646, he and his sister Jacqueline identified with the religious movement within Catholicism known by its detractors as Jansenism. His father died in 1651. Following a religious experience in late 1654, he began writing influential works on philosophy and theology. His two most famous works date from this period: the Lettres provinciales and the Pensées, the former set in the conflict between Jansenists and Jesuits. In that year, he also wrote an important treatise on the arithmetical triangle. Between 1658 and 1659 he wrote on the cycloid and its use in calculating the volume of solids. Pascal had poor health, especially after his 18th year, and his death came just two months after his 39th birthday.
June 19, 1861
José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda (1861–1896), was a Filipino nationalist, writer and reformist. He is widely considered the greatest national hero of the Philippines. He was the author of Noli Me Tangere, El Filibusterismo and a number of poems and essays. He was executed on December 30, 1896 by the then colonial government as a revolutionary.
June 19, 1947
Salman Rushdie is the author of eleven novels - GRIMUS, MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), SHAME, THE SATANIC VERSES, HAROUN AND THE SEA OF STORIES, THE MOOR’S LAST SIGH, THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET, FURY, SHALIMAR THE CLOWN, THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE, and LUKA AND THE FIRE OF LIFE - and one collection of short stories: EAST, WEST. He has also published three works of nonfiction: THE JAGUAR SMILE, IMAGINARY HOMELANDS: ESSAYS AND CRITICISM 1981–1991, and STEP ACROSS THIS LINE, and coedited two anthologies, MIRRORWORK and BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2008. He is a former president of American PEN. Born in Mumbai, India, and educated in the U.K., multi-award-winning novelist Salman Rushdie is considered one of the most important and influential writers of contemporary English-language fiction. Rushdie freelanced for two London advertising firms before turning to a full-time writing career. He made his literary debut in 1975 with GRIMUS, a sci-fi fantasy that made a very small splash in publishing circles. Still, the book was deemed outstanding enough to be selected by a panel of distinguished writers (including Brian Aldiss, Kingsley Amis, and Arthur C. Clarke) as the best science fiction novel of 1975. However, at the last minute, his publishers withdrew the book from consideration, fearing that, if he won, Rushdie would never be able to shake the label of ‘genre writer.’ Salman Rushdie hit the jackpot with his second novel, MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN, an ambitious allegory that parallels the turbulent history of India before and after partition. Widely considered Rushdie's magnum opus, MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN was awarded the Booker Prize in 1981. (Twelve years later, a panel of judges named it the best overall novel to have won the Booker Prize since the award's inception in 1975; and in 2005, Time included it on a list of the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923.) Undoubtedly, though, the book that put Rushdie squarely on the cultural radar screen was THE SATANIC VERSES. Published in 1988 and partially inspired by the life of the prophet Muhammad, this erudite study of good and evil won the Whitbread Book Award, but achieved far more notoriety when Muslim fundamentalists condemned it for its blasphemous portrayal of Islam. The book was banned in many Muslim countries, a fatwa was issued by the Iranian Ayatollah, and a multimillion dollar bounty was placed on Rushdie's head. The novelist spent much of the 1990s in hiding, under the protection of the British government. (In 1998, Iran officially lifted the fatwa, but threats against Rushdie's life still reverberate throughout the Muslim world.) Even without the controversy inspired by THE SATANIC VERSES, Rushdie's literary fame would be assured. His novels comprise a unique body of work that draws from fantasy, mythology, religion, and magic realism, blending them all with staggering imagination and comic brilliance. He has created his own idiom, pushing the boundaries of language with dazzling wordplay and a widely admired ‘chutnification’ of history. His books have won most major awards in Europe and the U.K. and have garnered praise from critics around the world. Britain's Financial Times called him ‘Our most exhilaratingly inventive prose stylist.’ Time magazine raved, ‘No novelist currently writing in English does so with more energy, intelligence and allusiveness than Rushdie.’ And the writer Christopher Hitchens lamented in the Progressive that were it not for the death threats against him, Rushdie would surely be a Nobel laureate by now. In addition to his bestselling novels, Rushdie has also produced essays, criticism, and a book of children's fiction. In 2007, Rushdie was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. The citation reads: ‘Ahmed Salman Rushdie -- author, for services to literature.’
June 19, 1947
JOHN RALSTON SAUL is an internationally renowned novelist and essayist. Named one of Utne Reader’s 100 visionaries, he gave the prestigious 1995 Massey Lectures at the University of Toronto, on which THE UNCONSCIOUS CIVILIZATION is based.
June 19, 1945
Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff (born June 19, 1945) is an American author. He is known for his memoirs, particularly This Boy's Life (1989), and his short stories. He has also written two novels.
June 19, 1792
Gustav Benjamin Schwab (19 June 1792 – 4 November 1850) was a German writer, pastor and publisher. Gustav Schwab was born in Stuttgart, the son of the philosopher Johann Christoph Schwab: he was introduced to the humanities early in life. After attending Gymnasium Illustre, he studied as a scholar of Tübinger Stift at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, his first two years studying Philology and Philosophy, and thereafter Theology. While at university he established a literary club and became a close friend of Ludwig Uhland, Karl Varnhagen and Justinus Kerner, with whom he published a collection of poems under the title Deutscher Dichterwald. In the spring of 1813, he made a journey to northern Germany, where he met Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Rückert, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Adelbert von Chamisso and others. In 1818 he became a high school teacher in Stuttgart, and in 1837 he started work as a pastor in Gomaringen, near Tübingen. In 1841, he moved back to Stuttgart, where he was first pastor and then from 1845 educational counselor for Stuttgart's high school system. In 1847 he received an honorary Doctorate from his old university. Schwab's collection of myths and legends of antiquity, Sagen des klassischen Altertums, published from 1838 to 1840, was widely used at German schools and became very influential for the reception of classical antiquity in German classrooms. In his later years, he traveled regularly to Überlingen am Bodensee to enjoy the waters at the city's spa; he died in Stuttgart in 1850.
June 19, 1949
Philippe Descola (born 19 June 1949) is a French anthropologist noted for studies of the Achuar, one of several Jivaroan peoples, and for his contributions to anthropological theory. Descola started with an interest in philosophy and later became a student of Claude Lévi-Strauss. His ethnographic studies in the Amazon region of Ecuador began in 1976 and was funded by CNRS. He lived with the Achuar from 1976 to 1978. His reputation largely arises from these studies.
June 19, 1930
EDUARDO MANET was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1930, and studied philosophy, literature, drama and cinema at the University of Havana. In 1950 he came to Europe, where he studied drama in Paris with Etienne Decroux, Pierre Valde, Tania Balachova and Jacques Lecoq, and attended courses m Italian literature and Etruscology at Perugia, Florence and Rome. After writing a number of scripts for French television, he returned to Cuba in 1960. There he became Director General of the Cuban National Theatre Company, and a script-writer and director at the Cinema Institute, where he assisted Chris Marker in the filming of ‘Cuba, si’. He directed four full-length films and six shorts, one of which, ‘El Negro’, was chosen in London as one of the ten best films of its year. He also wrote two novels in French, ‘Les Etrangers dane la yule’ and ‘Un Cri sur le Rivage’. He is at present living in Paris and working on a new play, provisionally entitled ‘Them’. . ROBERT BALDICK was born in Huddersfield of a French mother and an English father, and educated at Oxford. He is a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, joint editor of the Penguin Classics, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His published works include several biographies, a history of duelling, and a study of the siege of Paris; and he has translated the books of a wide range of authors from Flaubert to Simenon, and Chateaubriand to Sartre. Among notable plays he has translated are Montherlant’s Queen in Death, Schehade’s Vasco, and Barrault’s Rabelais. He is married to the American translator Jacqueline Baldick. . First published in France in 1969.
June 19, 1957
Subcomandante Marcos was the nom de guerre used by Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente (born 19 June 1957), Mexican insurgent and former leader and spokesman of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) during the Chiapas conflict. Marcos has used several other pseudonyms; he referred to himself as Delegate Zero during the 2006 Mexican Presidential Campaign, and in May 2014 announced that Subcommandante Marcos "no longer exists," adopting the name Subcomandante Galeano instead. Born in Tampico, Tamaulipas, Marcos earned a degree in sociology and a master's degree in philosophy from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and taught at the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM) for several years during the early 1980s. During this time he became increasingly involved with a guerrilla group known as the National Liberation Forces (FLN), before leaving the university and moving to Chiapas in 1984. The Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) was founded in the Lacandon Jungle in 1983, initially functioning as a self-defense unit dedicated to protecting Chiapas' Mayan people from evictions and encroachment on their land. While not Mayan himself, Marcos emerged as the group's leader, and when the EZLN – often referred to as Zapatistas – began their rebellion on January 1, 1994, Marcos served as their spokesman. Known for his trademark ski mask and pipe, and for his charismatic personality, Marcos led the EZLN during the 1994 revolt and the subsequent peace negotiations, during a counter-offensive by the Mexican Army in 1995, and throughout the decades that followed. In 2001, he led a group of Zapatista leaders into Mexico City to meet with President Vicente Fox, attracting widespread public and media attention. In 2006, Marcos made another public tour of Mexico, which was known as The Other Campaign. In May 2014, Marcos announced that the persona of Subcomandante Marcos had been "a hologram" and no longer existed. Many media outlets interpreted the message as an announcement that Marcos had retired as the Zapatistas' leader and spokesman. Marcos is also a prolific writer, and hundreds of essays and multiple books are attributed to him. Most of his writings focus on his anti-capitalist ideology and the advocacy for indigenous people's rights, but has also written poetry and novels.
June 19, 1939
Dennis Tedlock is university professor of anthropology and religion at Boston University He has also taught at Iowa State University, the University of California at Berkeley, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, Wesleyan University, the New School for Social Research, and Yale University. He is the author of Finding the Center: Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indians, The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation, and the editor, with Barbara Tedlock, of Teachings from the American Earth: Indian Religion and Philosophy.
June 19, 1929
Born in Paris on June 19, 1929, Olivier Todd studied at the Sorbonne and at Cambridge University. He taught for a few years before turning to journalism. He has been a reporter, a columnist, and an editor at Le Nouvel Observateur and L'Express. He has also contributed to the Times Literary Supplement and Newsweek International, and worked for the first French television channel and the BBC. Todd is the author of numerous books, including novels, essay collections, and biographies. Jean-Paul Sartre endorsed Todd's first published novel and later called him--in jest--his "rebel son." Albert Camus has enjoyed both critical and popular success in France, and has been translated into more than ten languages. A recognized observer of the French political and literary scene, Todd is currently at work on a new biography of André Malraux. He lives in Paris.
June 19, 1858
Sam Walter Foss (June 19, 1858 – February 26, 1911) was an American librarian and poet whose works included The House by the Side of the Road and The Coming American. Birthplace of Sam Foss in Candia, New Hampshire: the original "House by the Side of the Road"
June 20, 1858
Charles Waddell Chesnutt (June 20, 1858 – November 17, 1932) was an American author, essayist, political activist and lawyer, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War South. The legacy of slavery and interracial relations had resulted in many free people of color who had attained education before the war, as well as slaves and freedmen of mixed race. Two of his books were adapted as silent films in 1926 and 1927 by the director and producer Oscar Micheaux. Chesnutt also established what became a highly successful legal stenography business, which provided his main income.
June 20, 1923
Peter Gay (born Peter Joachim Fröhlich; June 20, 1923 – May 12, 2015) was a German-American historian, educator and author.
June 20, 1951
PAUL MULDOON is the author of eight previous books of poetry, recently collected in Poems 1968-1998 (FSG, 2001). He teaches at Princeton University and is Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.
June 20, 1920
Amos Tutuola (June 20, 1920 - June 8, 1997) was a Nigerian writer famous for his books based in part on Yoruba folk-tales. Tutuola was born in Abeokuta, Nigeria, in 1920, where his parents Charles and Esther were Yoruba Christian cocoa farmers. When about 7 years old, he became a servant for F.O. Monu, an Igbo man, who sent Tutuola to the Salvation Army primary school in lieu of wages. At age 12 he attended the Anglican Central School in Abeokuta. His brief education was limited to six years (from 1934 to 1939). When his father died in 1939, Tutuola left school to train as a blacksmith, which trade he practiced from 1942 to 1945 for the Royal Air Force in Nigeria. He subsequently tried a number of other vocations, including selling bread and acting as messenger for the Nigerian Department of Labor. In 1946, Tutuola completed his first full-length book, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, within a few days. In 1947 he married Victoria Alake, with whom he had four sons and four daughters. After he had written his first three books and become internationally famous, he joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation in 1956 as a storekeeper in Ibadan, Western Nigeria. Tutuola became also one of the founders of Mbari Club, the writers' and publishers' organization. In 1979, he held a visiting research fellowship at the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) at Ile-Ife, Nigeria, and in 1983 he was an associate of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. In retirement he divided his time between residences at Ibadan and Ago-Odo. Tutuola died at age 77 on June 8, 1997 from hypertension and diabetes. Despite his short formal education, Tutuola wrote his novels in English. His most famous novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and his Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town, was written in 1946, published in 1952 in London by Faber and Faber, and translated and published in Paris as L'Ivrogne dans la brousse by Raymond Queneau in 1953. The noted poet Dylan Thomas brought it to wide attention, calling it ‘brief, thronged, grisly and bewitching’. Although the book was praised in England and the United States, it faced severe criticism in Tutuola's native Nigeria. Part of this criticism was due to his use of ‘broken English’ and primitive style, which supposedly promote the Western stereotype of ‘African backwardness’. The Palm-Wine Drinkard was followed up by My Life in the Bush of Ghosts in 1954 and then several other books in which Tutuola continued to explore Yoruba traditions and folklore. Strangely the narrative of the Palm-Wine Drinkard refers back to The Bush of Ghosts several times even though the latter was written and published later. However, none of the subsequent works managed to match the success of The Palm Wine Drinkard. Many of Tutuola's papers, letters, and holographic manuscripts have been collected at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin.
June 20, 1887
Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters (20 June 1887 – 8 January 1948) was a German artist who was born in Hanover, Germany. Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography, and what came to be known as installation art. He is most famous for his collages, called Merz Pictures.Jack Zipes is a leading authority on fairy tales. His translations include THE COMPLETE FAIRY TALES OF THE BROTHERS GRIMM and THE FAIRY TALES OF HERMANN HESSE (both Bantam). He is the editor of THE GREAT FAIRY TALE TRADITION (Norton), and the author of WHY FAIRY TALES STICK and HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN, among many other books. He is professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota.
June 20, 1883
Lily Bess Campbell was born on June 20, 1883 in Ada, Ohio. She received her B. Litt. in 1905 and her MA in 1906 from the University of Texas. After a long period of ill health, she began her professional career as Instructor in English at the University of Wisconsin (1911-1918) and received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1921. Though her first published work treated Victorian poetry (The grotesque in the poetry of Robert Browning. 1907), her major contributions to the academic field were made as scholar of Renaissance drama and an eminent Shakespearean authority. Campbell taught at UCLA from 1922 until she retired in 1950 (among the many students she influenced was dancer-choreographer Agnes De Mille). In 1923, she published Scenes and machines on the English stage during the Renaissance, a Classical revival, a work based on her 1921 dissertation. Her next important book was Shakespeare's tragic heroes : slaves of passion (1930). She went on to produce the first modern edition of The mirror for magistrates, based on originals in the Huntington Library in 1938. In his "Dedicatory Preface" to Essays critical and historical, dedicated to Lily B. Campbell (1950), Louis B. Wright (Folger Shakespeare Library scholar) wrote, "Miss Campbell's edition of the Mirror and its later augmentations perhaps will stand as her most enduring contribution to the advancement of Renaissance learning" (vii). Campbell later published Shakespeare's "Histories" : mirrors of Elizabethan policy (1947). In addition to her scholarly work, she published a satirical novel in 1929 entitled, These are my jewels. Lily Bess Campbell is remembered as a strong and early leader in the development of the Department of English and in UCLA's transition from an undergraduate college to a research university. While at UCLA, she served on the Faculty Senate. When the University of Chicago celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1941, Campbell was chosen as one of the 50 most distinguished American scholars and was granted an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters. She also received a Litt.D from Ohio Northern University in 1940 and an LL.D from UC Berkeley in 1951. Campbell won the achievement award from the American Association of University Women in 1960, and was named Woman of the Year by the Los Angeles Times in 1962. Lily Bess Campbell died on February 18, 1967, leaving a sizable bequest to the university to provide assistance for doctoral students working on their dissertations. UCLA's Campbell Hall is named after her.
June 20, 1909
Errol Leslie Flynn (20 June 1909 – 14 October 1959) was an Australian-born actor who achieved fame in Hollywood after 1935. He was known for his romantic swashbuckler roles in Hollywood films, as well as frequent partnerships with Olivia de Havilland. He became a U.S. citizen in 1942.
June 20, 1934
Morris Keith Hopkins (20 June 1934 – 8 March 2004) was a British historian and sociologist. He was professor of ancient history at the University of Cambridge from 1985 to 2000. Hopkins had a relatively unconventional route to the Cambridge professorship. After Brentwood School, he graduated in classics at King's College, Cambridge in 1958.
June 20, 1952
Vikram Seth (born 20 June 1952) is an Indian novelist and poet. He has written several novels and poetry books. He has received several awards such as Padma Shri, Sahitya Academy Award, Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, WH Smith Literary Award and Crossword Book Award. Seth's collections of poetry such as Mappings and Beastly Tales are notable contributions to the Indian English language poetry canon.
June 20, 1933
Dorothy Preece Simpson (born 20 June 1933, Blaenavon, Monmouthshire, Wales) is an English-language writer of mystery novels, and a winner of a Silver Dagger Award from the Crime Writers' Association of Great Britain.
June 20, 1950
Poet, painter and psychologist, Daisy Zamora (born June 20, 1950) was a combatant of the national Sandinista Liberation front and served as Vice Minister of Culture after the 1979 revolution. She currently lives in Nicaragua where she has been active with groups concerned with women’s issues.
June 20, 1920
Eduardo Mondlane was born in the Gaza district of Southern Mozambique in 1920. The first of his family to receive formal education, he went to a mission primary school but, as an African, entry to secondary school was barred to him. However he taught himself English and obtained a scholarship to a high school in the Northern Transvaal from where he went on to study social science at Witwatersrand University. Because of his political activities as an organizer of a Mozambican students' association he was deported back to Mozambique and then arrested and questioned by the police. He was eventually sent to continue his studies at Lisbon University but on an American scholarship. The police continued to harass him, however, and study became impossible. He managed to transfer his scholarship to the U.S.A. where he finished his B.A. in 1953 and went on to take M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in sociology at Northwestern University, Illinois. Research at Harvard followed and then a job in the United Nations Department of Trusteeship as a research officer. During these years he continued to study the political problems of his own country and in 1961 he revisited Mozambique to find that nothing had changed. He then left the U.N. and made open contact with existing political movements in exile. Convinced that unity was essential from the beginning, he was among those who helped bring the various embryo parties together and in 1962, in newly independent Tanganyika, a joint Congress was held. The Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) was formed and Dr Mondlane was elected President. Two years later the armed struggle was launched and since then areas of Northern Mozambique have been freed from Portuguese control. He made frequent visits to the liberated areas and in 1968, at the party's second Congress held in Northern Mozambique, he was re-elected President. Eduardo Mondlane was assassinated in Dar es Salaam on 3 February 1969. He left a wife and three children.
June 21, 1868
José Pereira da Graça Aranha (June 21, 1868 – January 26, 1931) was a Brazilian writer and diplomat, considered to be a forerunner of the Modernism in Brazil. He was also one of the organizers of the Brazilian Modern Art Week of 1922. He founded and occupied the 38th chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters from 1897 until his death in 1931. However, he would break all his relations with the Academy in 1924, accusing it of being "old-fashioned". Graça Aranha was born in São Luís, to a rich and cultured family, son of journalist Temístocles da Silva Maciel Aranha and Maria da Glória da Graça. He was a prodigy, having completed his secondary studies when 13 years old, and went to study Law in Recife. He graduated with honours in 1886 and travelled to the South to work. He became a judge in Porto do Cachoeiro, a village in the backlands of the state of Espírito Santo. This experience was used by him in one of his best known novels, Canaã, a great editorial success in 1902. The novel explored the conflicts of the Brazilian immigrants. According to author Raymond Leslie Williams: 'Along with Os Sertões (by Euclides da Cunha), Canaã was one of the most widely read and discussed books in Brazil in the early part of the century. Canaã is a work of ideas rather than actions, and one of the central ideas that Graça Aranha promotes is that culture in the broadest sense (cultura) is the ultimate answer to society's ills.' Without having published any books, Graça Aranha was invited to be one of the 40 founding members of the Brazilian Academy of Letter in 1897, by Machado de Assis, Joaquim Nabuco and Lúcio de Mendonça. In 1900, he was admitted to the Foreign Service as a career diplomat. He worked as such for the next 20 years. While he was stationed in Paris, France, he wrote another success in 1911, the theater drama Malazarte. He retired as a diplomat in 1919 and returned to Brazil in 1921. Graça Aranha sponsored modernism in the letters and arts and had several personality clashes with the traditionalists at the Academy, headed by writer Coelho Neto. He allied himself to other budding modernists of São Paulo and organized the revolutionary Week of Modern Art in February 1922. He opened the week under booing of an hostile audience, with a conference titled "The aesthetic emotion in modern art". Shortly before the "Week", Graça Aranha published in 1921 an influential theoretical essay, "Estética da Vida" (An Aesthetics of Life), where he analysed the relationship of Brazilian soul with nature, a recurrent theme at the time. He argued that the three main races had formed the "soul" or essence of the Brazilian people by adding three basic emotions to culture: the Portuguese's melancholy, African childishness and "cosmic terror", and the Indians' "metaphysics of terror", or the use of ghosts. He proposed that Brazilian culture should strive to achieve a new relationship to nature, based on the incorporation of such feelings into art and by overcoming the ethnic differences by means of an integration between the I and the cosmos. Due to his participation, Graça Aranha was ostracised in the Academy, but he persisted, to the point even that on June 19, 1924 he stated in a conference, titled "The modern spirit" at the Academy, that its creation had been an error. A few months later, on October 18, he resigned from the Academy. In the same year, he founded with Renato Almeida a modernist literature review and magazine, Movimento Brasileiro, which lasted until just after his death. His last novel, published in 1929 was A Viagem Maravilhosa (The Marvelous Journey), which was not so well received by the critics. He also wrote an incomplete autobiography, which was published posthumously in 1931. After his death, a group of intellectuals and friends established the Graça Aranha Foundation, a project which was devised by him. One of the Foundation's aims was to award prized in the arts and literature to distinguished Brazilians who excelled in these fields. Among the most famous awardees were writers Jorge Amado, Rachel de Queiroz, José Lins do Rego, Érico Verissimo, Clarice Lispector, Lêdo Ivo and Alphonsus de Guimaraens Filho. The Foundation, which was maintained by Nazareth Prado, closed down only a year later, when funds for awarding prizes were exhausted.
June 21, 1839
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, often known as Machado de Assis, Machado, or Bruxo do Cosme Velho, (June 21, 1839, Rio de Janeiro-September 29, 1908, Rio de Janeiro) was a Brazilian novelist, poet and short-story writer. He is widely regarded as the most important writer of Brazilian literature. However, he did not gain widespread popularity outside Brazil in his own lifetime. Machado’s works had a great influence on Brazilian literary schools of the late 19th century and 20th century. José Saramago, Carlos Fuentes, Susan Sontag and Harold Bloom are among his admirers and Bloom calls him ‘the supreme black literary artist to date.’ Son of Francisco José de Assis (a mulatto housepainter, descendent of freed slaves) and Maria Leopoldina Machado de Assis (a Portuguese washerwoman), Machado de Assis lost both his mother and his only sister at an early age. Machado is said to have learned to write by himself, and he used to take classes for free will. He learned to speak French first and English later, both fluently. He started to work for newspapers in Rio de Janeiro, where he published his first works and met established writers such as Joaquim Manuel de Macedo. Machado de Assis married Carolina Xavier de Novais, a Portuguese descendant of a noble family. Soon the writer got a public job and this stability permitted him to write his best works. Machado de Assis began by writing popular novels which sold well, much in the late style of José de Alencar. His style changed in the 1880s, and it is for the sceptical, ironic, comedic but ultimately pessimistic works he wrote after this that he is remembered: the first novel in his ‘new style’ was Epitaph for a Small Winner, known in the new Gregory Rabassa translation as The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (a literal translation of the original title, Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas). In their brilliant comedy and ironic playfulness, these resemble in some ways the contemporary works of George Meredith in the United Kingdom, and Eça de Queirós in Portugal, but Machado de Assis’ work has a far bleaker emotional undertone. Machado’s work has also been compared with Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Machado de Assis could speak English fluently and translated many works of William Shakespeare and other English writers into Portuguese. His work contains numerous allusions to Shakespearean plays, John Milton and influences from Sterne and Meredith. He is also known as a master of the short story, having written classics of the genre in the Portuguese language, such as O Alienista, Missa do Galo, ‘A Cartomante’ and ‘A Igreja do Diabo.’ Along with other writers and intellectuals, Machado de Assis founded the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1896 and was its president from 1897 to 1908, when he died. Dain Borges is a Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego and is author of The Family in Bahia. Carlos Felipe Moisés is a Brazilian poet and literary critic. Elizabeth Lowe is the author of The City in Brazilian Literature.
June 21, 1944
Raymond Douglas ‘Ray’ Davies CBE (born 21 June 1944) is an English rock musician. He is best known as lead singer and songwriter for The Kinks, which he led with his younger brother, Dave. He has also acted, directed and produced shows for theatre and television. Since the dissolution of the Kinks in 1996, Ray Davies has embarked on a solo career as a singer-songwriter.
June 21, 1969
A graduate of Stanford University, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and Yale Law School, HEIDI W. DURROW (born June 21, 1969) has received grants From the New York Foundation For the Arts, the American Scandinavian Foundation, and the Lois Roth Endowment and a Fellowship for Emerging Writers from the Jerome Foundation.
June 21, 1912
Mary Therese McCarthy (June 21, 1912 – October 25, 1989) was an American novelist, critic and political activist, best known for her novel The Group, her marriage to critic Edmund Wilson, and her storied feud with playwright Lillian Hellman.
June 21, 1948
Ian McEwan was born on 21 June 1948 in Aldershot, England. He studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970. He received his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia. McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). He was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday, and his novel On Chesil Beach was named Galaxy Book of the Year at the 2008 British Book Awards. McEwan has been named the Reader's Digest Author of the Year for 2008, the 2010 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, and in 2011 was awarded the Jerusalem Prize. McEwan lives in London.
June 21, 1935
Françoise Sagan (June 21, 1935 – September 24, 2004), real name Françoise Quoirez, was a French playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. Hailed as ‘a charming little monster’ by François Mauriac on the front page of Le Figaro, Sagan was best known for works with strong romantic themes involving wealthy and disillusioned bourgeois characters.
June 21, 1905
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, existentialism, and Marxism, and his work continues to influence fields such as Marxist philosophy, sociology, critical theory and literary studies. Sartre was also noted for his long polyamorous relationship with the feminist author and social theorist Simone de Beauvoir. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature but refused the honour.
June 21, 1970
Olen Steinhauer (born June 21, 1970) is an American writer of spy fiction novels, known for books such as the New York Times Best Seller The Tourist, the Milo Weaver Trilogy and the Yalta Boulevard Sequence.
June 21, 1924
CAN THEMBA (June 21, 1924, Marabastad, Pretoria, City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality, South Africa - 1968, Manzini, Swaziland), born at Marabastad in the northern Transvaal in 1924, won the first Mendi Memorial Scholarship to Fort Hare. He graduated with a first class degree in English in 1947 and after studying education, took up teaching. In 1953 a prize in a short story competition in the new magazine South African Drum, started him on a life of journalism in Johannesburg. This was mainly on Drum and The Golden City Post, of each of which in turn he was Associate Editor. In 1963 Can Themba, with his wife and children, went into voluntary exile in Swaziland, where he took up teaching again. He died in Manzini in 1968.
June 21, 1945
ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI was born in 1945. His previous books all published by FSG, include TREMOR (1985), CANVAS (1992), and MYSTICISM FOR BEGINNERS (1998), collections of poetry; and TWO CITIES (1995), a collection of essays. He lives in Paris and Houston.
June 21, 1931
Barbara Levick is a Fellow of St. Hilda's College and Lecturer in Ancient History in the University of Oxford.
June 21, 1946
Ellen Meloy (June 21, 1946, Pasadena, California – November 4, 2004, Bluff, Utah) was an American nature writer. She was born Ellen Louise Ditzler in Pasadena, California. She graduated from Goucher College with a degree in art, and from the University of Montana with a master's degree in environmental studies. She married her husband Mark Meloy, a river ranger, in 1985. Her nephew is the musician and writer Colin Meloy and her niece is the writer Maile Meloy. An award has been named for her, and the fourth recipient is Amy Irvine.
June 21, 1944
Paul Rabinow is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Director of the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory, and former Director of Human Practices for the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center.
June 21, 1952
GREGORY DAVID ROBERTS was born in Melbourne, Australia. A gifted writer and student, he became addicted to heroin when his marriage collapsed and he lost the custody of his daughter. When he committed a series of robberies with an imitation pistol, he was described as the Gentleman Bandit. Sentenced to nineteen years in prison, he escaped and journeyed to New Zealand, Asia, Africa, and Europe. For ten of those fugitive years he lived in Bombay-where he established a free medical clinic for slum-dwellers, and worked as a counterfeiter, smuggler, gunrunner, and street soldier for a branch of the Bombay mafia. Recaptured in Germany, he served out his sentence there and in Australian prisons. Upon his release, he established a successful multimedia company, and since the international publication of SHANTARAM, he is a full-time writer, at home in several countries.
June 21, 1873
Henry Major Tomlinson (21 June 1873 – 5 February 1958) was a British writer and journalist. He was known for anti-war and travel writing, novels and short stories, especially of life at sea.
June 21, 1987
Oliver Bendorf (June 21, 1987) was born in Iowa City. He received an MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin and currently lives in Madison. His poems have appeared in Blackbird, Indiana Review, jubilat, Ninth Letter, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere, and anthologized in Best New Poets and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. He has received fellowships from Vermont Studio Center and the Lambda Literary Foundation.
June 21, 1949
Poet, performer, anthologist, John Agard was born in Guyana and came to Britain in 1977. His many books include seven from Bloodaxe, From the Devil’s Pulpit (1997), Weblines (2000), We Brits (2006), Alternative Anthem: Selected Poems (2009), Clever Backbone (2009), Travel Light Travel Dark (2013) and Playing the Ghost of Maimonides (2016). He is the winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry for 2012, presented to him by The Queen on 12 March 2013. He won the Casa de las Américas Prize in 1982, a Paul Hamlyn Award in 1997, and a Cholmondeley Award in 2004. We Brits was shortlisted for the 2007 Decibel Writer of the Year Award, and he has won the Guyana Prize twice, for his From the Devil's Pulpit and Weblines. As a touring speaker with the Commonwealth Institute, he visited nearly 2000 schools promoting Caribbean culture and poetry, and has performed on television and around the world. In 1989 he became the first Writer in Residence at London’s South Bank Centre, who published A Stone’s Throw from Embankment, a collection written during that residency. In 1998 he was writer-in-residence for the BBC with the Windrush project, and Bard at the Beeb, a selection of poems written during that residency, was published by BBC Learning Support. He was writer in residence at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich in 2007. He is popular writer for children and younger readers, with titles including Get Back Pimple (Viking), Laughter is an Egg (Puffin), Grandfather’s Old Bruk-a-down Car (Red Fox), I Din Do Nuttin (Red Fox), Points of View with Professor Peekaboo (Bodley Head) and We Animals Would Like a Word with You (Bodley Head), which won a Smarties Award. Einstein, The Girl Who Hated Maths, a collection inspired by mathematics, and Hello H2O, a collection inspired by science, were published by Hodder Children’s Books and illustrated by Satoshi Kitamura. Frances Lincoln Children’s Books published his recent titles The Young Inferno (2008), his retelling of Dante, also illustrated by Satoshi Kitamura, which won the CLPE Poetry Award 2009, and Goldilocks on CCTV (2011). His first non-fiction work, Book (Walker Books, 2016), tells the history of books in the voice of the Book itself, and was longlisted for the 2016 Carnegie Medal. He lives with the poet Grace Nichols and family in Sussex; they received the CLPE Poetry Award 2003 for their children’s anthology Under the Moon and Over the Sea (Walker Books).
June 21, 1923
Maria Luisa Spaziani (21 June 1923 – 30 June 2014) was an Italian poet. Spaziani was born in Turin. At nineteen, she founded the review Il dado, working with collaborators such as Vasco Pratolini, Sandro Penna and Vincenzo Ciaffi. Virginia Woolf sent her a chapter of her novel The Waves, autographed to Alla piccola direttrice (To the young editor). Spaziani did not contribute her own poems, however, feeling that they were not of sufficient quality. In the 1950s Spaziani became involved with the poet Eugenio Montale (1896–1981). Montale encouraged Spaziani to write poetry, and was a significant influence in her early style. Maria Luisa Spaziani's first book of poetry, Le acque del sabato, appeared in 1954. Montale drew upon his affair with her in creating the character of la Volpe ("the Fox") in his work La bufera e altro (1956). Montale's poem "Da un lago svizzero" is an acrostic forming her name, Maria Luisa Spaziani. (Spaziani eventually published her correspondence with Montale, some eight hundred letters, in 1995.) After travelling extensively in the late 50's and early 60's, in countries including England, Belgium, Greece, France, and the Soviet Union, Spaziani chose to settle in Rome. Starting from 1964 she has taught French language and literature at the University of Messina. She published extensively, as a poet, translator, and scholar. Spaziani was nominated thrice for the Nobel Prize for Literature; 1990, 1992 and 1997. Her poetry combines a vivid and immediate sense of the natural world with a rich appreciation of literary culture and tradition. Though echoes of past poets appear in her work, Spaziani's voice is clearly her own, sensitive and controlled. Spaziani was the president of the Centro internazionale Eugenio Montale, which confers the Premio Montale, a literary prize for translations and publications of Italian verse. Spaziani died on 30 June 2014 at the age of 91.
June 22, 1947
Octavia Estelle Butler (June 22, 1947 – February 24, 2006) was an American science fiction writer. A recipient of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, Butler was one of the best-known African-American women in the field. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Fellowship nicknamed the Genius Grant. Butler was born and raised in Pasadena, California. Since her father Laurice, a shoeshiner, died when she was a baby, Butler was raised by her grandmother and her mother (Octavia M. Butler), who worked as a maid in order to support the family. Butler grew up in a struggling, racially mixed neighborhood. According to the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Butler was ‘an introspective, only child in a strict Baptist household’ and ‘was drawn early to [science fiction] magazines such as Amazing, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Galaxy and soon began reading all the science fiction classics.’ Octavia Jr., nicknamed Junie, was paralytically shy and a daydreamer, and was later diagnosed as being dyslexic. She began writing at the age of 10 ‘to escape loneliness and boredom’; she was 12 when she began a lifelong interest in science fiction. ‘I was writing my own little stories and when I was 12, I was watching a bad science fiction movie called Devil Girl from Mars,’ she told the journal Black Scholar, ‘and decided that I could write a better story than that. And I turned off the TV and proceeded to try, and I've been writing science fiction ever since.’
June 22, 1926
Tadeusz Konwicki (22 June 1926 – 7 January 2015) was a Polish writer and film director, a member of the Polish Language Council. Konwicki was born in 1926 in Nowa Wilejka, where he spent his early childhood. He spent his adolescence in Wilno (Vilnius), attending a local gymnasium. Immediately following the outbreak of World War II, Wilno was occupied by the Soviet Union and subsequently by Nazi Germany, and all education for Poles was discontinued. Konwicki continued his studies underground. In 1944, he joined the ranks of a local Home Army partisan unit, taking part in Operation Tempest and Operation Ostra Brama. After the war Wilno (retrieving its name as Vilnius in the process) was annexed by the Soviet Union and Konwicki was expatriated. In the spring of 1945 Konwicki moved to Kraków, where he enrolled at Jagiellonian University. He also started to work as a journalist at Odrodzenie weekly, moving to Warsaw in 1947 to continue his work for the magazine. In the capital, he was one of the leading advocates for Socialist Realism in literature. In 1948 he finished his memoirs of his partisan years (Rojsty), but the book was not published until 1956. His literary debut was the production novel Construction Site (1950, Przy Budowie), which was followed by the novel Power (1954, W?adza). His 1956 novel From a Besieged City (1956, Z obl??onego miasta) also became quite popular. In the years 1952–1966 he was a member of Polish United Workers' Party By the mid-1950s, Konwicki had become disillusioned by the communist regime in Poland and fell out of grace with the party. His later works (beginning with A Hole in the Sky (1959, Dziura w niebie), are mostly concerned with the author's childhood and the semi-mythical, romantic land of his youth. At this time Konwicki became the head of the Kadr Film Studio and has since been recognized as one of the most notable members of the Polish Film School. However, his work veered away from the style pursued by his contemporaries, due to its uniquely bitter quality. As a filmmaker he is known for his Venice'58 Grand Prix winner The Last Day of Summer (Ostatni dzie? lata, 1958), All Souls' Day (Zaduszki, 1961), as well as for his masterpieces Salto (1962) and How Far Away, How Near (Jak daleko st?d, jak blisko (1973)), as well as film adaptations: of Nobel Prize Winner Czeslaw Milosz book Dolina Issy (1982), and of Adam Mickiewicz's epic poem Dziady – Lawa (1990) . He is widely known for two novels, published by the Polish underground press: The Polish Complex (1977) and A Minor Apocalypse (1979). The latter work, a bitter satire about a washed-up writer who is asked to burn himself in front of the Soviet-built Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw, was subsequently adapted as the basis of a French film bearing the same title. A Minor Apocalypse is a post-Orwellian parody that refers to specific historical events, such as self-immolation protests against the communist regime by Ryszard Swiec in Poland and Jan Palach in Czechoslovakia. His 1989 film A Tale of Adam Mickiewicz's 'Forefathers' Eve' was entered into the 16th Moscow International Film Festival.
June 22, 1856
Sir Henry Rider Haggard, (22 June 1856 – 14 May 1925) — known as H. Rider Haggard — was an English writer of adventure novels set in exotic locations, predominantly Africa, and a pioneer of the Lost World literary genre.
June 22, 1882
Jan Hendrik Frederik Grönloh (June 22, 1882, Amsterdam, Netherlands - July 25, 1961, Hilversum, Netherlands) was born in Amsterdam, the oldest of four children. After an idealistic youth, he joined the Holland–Bombay Trading Company in 1904, becoming director in 1926, suffering a nervous breakdown leading to a short hospitalization in 1927, and retiring at age fifty-five, on December 31, 1937; he married Aagje Tiket (b. 1883) in 1906 and had four daughters with her, born in 1907, 1908, 1909, and 1912. Meanwhile, as Nescio (Latin for ‘I don’t know’; he adopted a pseudonym so as not to jeopardize his business career, acknowledging his authorship publicly only in 1929), he wrote what is now considered perhaps the best prose in the Dutch language. Damion Searls is a writer and a translator of many classic twentieth-century authors, including Proust, Rilke, Robert Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Thomas Bernhard. His translation of Hans Keilson’s COMEDY IN A MINOR KEY was a New York Times Notable Book of 2010 and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He also edited Henry David Thoreau’s THE JOURNAL: 1837–1861, available as an NYRB Classic. Joseph O’NeilL is the author of three novels, most recently NETHERLAND (2008), and of BLOOD-DARK TRACK: A FAMILY HISTORY (2001). Born in Ireland, he spent most of his childhood in the Netherlands.
June 22, 1923
Nelson Peery (June 22, 1923 – September 6, 2015) was an American political activist and author. Peery spent over 60 years in the revolutionary movement, and was active in the Communist Party USA (CP-USA), the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Marxist–Leninist Party (POC), the Communist League (CL), the Communist Labor Party (CLP), and the League of Revolutionaries for a New America (LRNA). He grew up in rural Minnesota, the son of a postal service worker in the only black family in the town.[citation needed] He hoboed across the western United States and joined the U.S. Army in World War II. These experiences, which became the subject of his memoir Black Fire: The Making of an American Revolutionary, shaped his ideas about racism and the American economy.In his sequel Black Radical: The Education of an American Revolutionary, Peery wrote about his re-entry into civilian life following the war. The book offers a perspective on the historically significant period from 1946–68, including the postwar, grassroots movement for equality and democracy led by black veterans, the battles of the black Left and revolutionaries during the McCarthy era and their role in the Freedom Movement, and the 1965 Watts Riots in Los Angeles, where Peery and his family were living at the time. Peery compares these political goals to those of the United States in World War II. He died on September 6, 2015 at the age of 92.
June 22, 1973
Luis Manuel Ruiz was born in Seville in 1973. A freelance journalist, he writes frequently for El Pals and other publications. His first book, El criterio de las moscas (Alfaguara, 1998), won the Novela Corta Universidad de Sevilla Prize.
June 22, 1861
Félix Fénéon (22 June 1861, Turin, Italy – 29 February 1944, Châtenay-Malabry) was a Parisian anarchist and art critic during the late 19th century. He coined the term 'Neo-impressionism' in 1886 to identify a group of artists led by Georges Seurat, and ardently promoted them. The Fénéon Prize was established in 1949 by his wife based on proceeds from the sale of his art collection.
June 22, 1936
Ber van Perlo has been traveling and living in Africa since 1981. He is the award-winning author and illustrator of Birds of Eastern Africa, Birds of Southern Africa, Birds of Western and Central Africa, and Birds of Mexico and Central America (all Princeton). Princeton Illustrated Checklists.
June 22, 1949
John-Henri Bertilson Holmberg (Born: June 22, 1949, Essingen, Germany) is a Swedish author, critic, publisher and translator, and a well-known science fiction fan.
June 22, 1945
Pere Gimferrer (born 22 June 1945) is an award-winning Spanish poet, translator and novelist. He is twice winner of Spain's Premio Nacional de Poesía (National Poetry Prize) He was born in Barcelona in 1945. He writes both in Castilian and Catalan. In Castilian, he has written the poetry collections Arde el mar (1966, National Prize for Poetry), Amor en vilo (2006), Interludio azul (2006) and Tornado (2008). In Catalan, he has written the novel Fortuny (1983, Ramon Llull Prize and Critica Prize), and the poetry collection El vendaval (1988, National Poetry Prize). For lifetime achievement, he won the Premio Nacional de las Letras Españolas (National Prize for Spanish Literature) in 1998 and the International Octavio Paz Prize for Poetry and Criticism in 2006.
June 22, 1913
Sándor Weöres (22 June 1913 – 22 January 1989) was a Hungarian poet and author. Born in Szombathely, Weöres was brought up in the nearby village of Csönge. His first poems appeared when he was nineteen, being published in the influential journal Nyugat (‘West’) through the acceptance of its editor, the poet Mihály Babits. Weöres attended the University of Pécs, studying law first before moving on to geography and history. He ultimately received a doctorate in philosophy and aesthetics. His doctoral dissertation The Birth of the Poem was published in 1939. It was in 1937 that he made the first of his travels abroad, going first to Manila for a Eucharistic Congress and then visiting Vietnam and India. During World War II Weöres was drafted for compulsory labor, but was not sent to the front. After the end of the war, he returned to Csönge and briefly lived as a farmer. In 1948 Weöres again travelled abroad, residing in Italy until 1949. In 1951 he settled in Budapest where he would reside for the rest of his life. The imposition of Stalinism in Hungary after 1948 silenced Weöres and until 1964 little could be published. Weöres' translations into Hungarian were wide and varied, including the works of Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko, the Georgian poet Rustaveli, the Slovenian poets Oton Župan?i? and Josip Murn Aleksandrov. He also translated Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and Henry VIII, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, the nonsense poems by Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, the complete poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé. His translation of the Tao Te Ching continues to be the most widely read in Hungary. Many of Weöres' poems have been set to music. The Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály composed a choir on the poem Öregek (Old People) of the 14 years old poet,György Ligeti, a friend of the poet, set several poems from Rongysz?nyeg and other books in the composition Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedüvel. Composer Peter Eötvöshas composed two pieces, Atlantis and Ima, with texts from Weöres' poem Néma zene (‘Silent Music’). In 1980 the Hungarian filmmaker Gábor Bódy adapted the poem Psyché to make the epic feature Nárcisz és Psyché. THE EDITOR Miklös Vajda, born in 1931, is literary editor of The New Hungarian Quarterly. He is a well-known critic and translator from English and German, and editor of the anthology Modern Hungarian Poetry (Columbia University Press/Corvina, 1977).
June 23, 1889
Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966), one of twentieth-century Russia’s greatest poets, was viewed as a dangerous element by post-Revolution authorities. One of the few unrepentant poets to survive the Bolshevik revolution and subsequent Stalinist purges, she set for herself the artistic task of preserving the memory of pre-Revolutionary cultural heritage and of those who had been silenced.
June 23, 1903
Hans Christian Branner (23 June 1903 in Ordrup - April 23, 1966 in Copenhagen) was a Danish author and member of the Danish Academy. Branner has written novels, short stories (TWO MINUTES OF SILENCE, 1944), essays (HIKING ALONG THE RIVER, 1956) and plays (THERMOPYLAE, 1958). He made his literary debut with the novel TOYS in 1936, and quickly became a popular author in Denmark. H. C. Branner received many awards and honors during his time as a writer. He was inspired by Freud and his theories and believed that man could be free by knowing his past and then dealing with it. Branner was considered a humanist writer. He is buried in Hørsholm Cemetery.
June 23, 1906
Wolfgang Arthur Reinhold Koeppen (23 June 1906 – 15 March 1996) was a German novelist and one of the best known German authors of the postwar period. Koeppen was born out of wedlock in Greifswald, Pomerania to Marie Köppen, a seamstress who also worked as a prompter at the Greifswald theater. He did not have contact with his father, ophthalmologist Reinhold Halben, who never formally accepted the fatherhood. Wolfgang lived first in his grandmother's house on Bahnhofstrasse, but after her death in 1908 moved with his mother to her sister's in Ortelsburg (Szczytno), East Prussia, where Koeppen began attending the public school. He and his mother moved back to Greifswald in 1912, but only two years later returned to East Prussia. Koeppen returned to Greifswald after World War I, working as a delivery boy for a book dealer. During that time he volunteered at the theater and attended lectures at the University of Greifswald. Finally in 1920, Koeppen left Greifswald permanently, and after 20 years of moving about, settled in Munich, living there the remainder of his life. Throughout the 1950s, Koeppen travelled extensively, to the U.S., the Soviet Union, London and Warsaw. Koeppen's wife died in 1984, and he died in a nursing home in Munich in 1996. In remembrance of the author and to archive his literary achievements and personal belongings, the Wolfgang Koeppen Foundation (German: Stiftung) was founded upon the initiative of fellow authors Günter Grass and Peter Rühmkorf in Greifswald in 2000. Koeppen started as a journalist. In 1934 his first novel appeared while he was in the Netherlands. In 1939 he returned to Germany, and from 1943 until his death he lived in Munich. In 1947, Koeppen was asked to write the memoirs of the philatelist and Holocaust survivor Jakob Littner (born 1883 in Budapest, died 1950 in New York City). The resulting book was published in 1948 without mention of Koeppen's name. In 1992, a new edition was published, acknowledging Koeppen's authorship. In 2000, Littner's original manuscript was published in English and in 2002, in German. In 1951, Koeppen published his novel Tauben im Gras (Pigeons on the Grass), which used a stream of consciousness technique. It is considered a significant work of German-language literature by the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki. Das Treibhaus (1953) was translated into English as The Hothouse (2001) and was named a Notable Book by the New York Times and one of the Best Books of the Year by the Los Angeles Times. Koeppen's last major novel Der Tod in Rom (Death in Rome) was published in 1954. Gottlieb Judejahn, a character in Der Tod in Rom, is a former SS general condemned to death at the Nuremberg trials. He escaped to an Arab country whose military he is trying to build up. He is in Rome to buy weapons and to meet members of his family, including his wife Eva. Eva's sister is married to Friedrich Pfaffrath, who is now mayor of the same town where he was a senior administrator in Nazi Germany. Judejahn's son, Adolf, is also in Rome to be ordained into the priesthood. Pfaffrath's son, Siegfried, is a young composer, in Rome to hear the first performance of his symphony. Conductor Kürenberg is married to Ilse, who is Jewish and who survived the Holocaust as she and her Gentile husband could afford to live outside Germany during the war. Der Tod in Rom is an exploration of themes associated with the Holocaust, German guilt, conflict between generations and the silencing of the past.
June 23, 1924
C. Eric Lincoln (June 23, 1924–May 14, 2000) was an African-American scholar. C. Eric Lincoln was born in Athens, Alabama on June 23, 1924. He was abandoned by his father, then by his mother, and raised by his grandmother. At age 13, he picked cotton to support his family. He graduated a valedictorian from high school. After studying and working in Chicago, then served in the U.S. Navy from 1943 to 1945. He received a B.A. in Sociology and Philosophy from LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis, Tennessee in 1947. In 1954, he received an M.A. from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1956, he received a Bachelor of Divinity from the University of Chicago, and in 1957 he was ordained as a Methodist minister. He went on to earn a master's degree in Education, and in 1960 he received a PhD in Social Ethics from Boston University. He started his career as a sales representative for Pepsi Cola, then was a manager for a Memphis nightclub, and a road manager for the Birmingham Black Barons baseball team. As an academic, he taught at Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia, for eleven years, from 1962 to 1972, he served as Adjunct or Visiting Professor at Portland State University in Oregon, Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, Fordham University, Brown University, and at the University of Ghana. In 1970, he became the founding president of the Black Academy of Letters. From 1973 to 1976, he served as Professor of Religion and of Sociology and chairman of the Department of Religion and Philosophical Studies at Fisk University. From 1976 to 1993, he taught Religion and Culture at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. In 1990 he was elected to the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His novel, The Avenue, Clayton City, won the Lillian Smith Book Award for Best Southern Fiction in 1988 and the International Black Writers' Alice Browning Award in 1989. He was an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He was friends with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Alex Haley. In 1990, he was cited by Pope John Paul II for 'scholarly service to the church'. He was diagnosed with diabetes in 1980 and died on May 14, 2000, at the age of 75 in Durham, North Carolina.
June 23, 1668
Giovan Battista (Giambattista) Vico (23 June 1668 – 23 January 1744) was an Italian political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist. He criticized the expansion and development of modern rationalism and was an apologist of classical antiquity. Vico is best known for his magnum opus, the Scienza Nuova of 1725, often published in English as New Science. Vico is a precursor of systemic and complexity thinking, as opposed to Cartesian analysis and other kinds of reductionism. He is also well known for noting that verum esse ipsum factum ('true itself is fact' or 'the true itself is made'), a proposition that has been read as an early instance of constructivist epistemology. Vico is often claimed to have inaugurated modern philosophy of history, although the term is not found in his text (Vico speaks of a 'history of philosophy narrated philosophically'). While Vico was not, strictly speaking, a historicist, interest in him has often been driven by historicists (such as Isaiah Berlin and Hayden White).
June 23, 1937
Martti Ahtisaari is a Finnish politician, the tenth President of Finland, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and a United Nations diplomat and mediator noted for his international peace work.
June 23, 1952
Robert David Kaplan (born June 23, 1952) is an American author. His books are on politics, primarily foreign affairs, and travel. His work over three decades has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Republic, The National Interest, Foreign Affairs and The Wall Street Journal, among other newspapers and publications.
June 23, 1901
Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar has been noted as the most prominent Turkish novelist of the twentieth century. Born in Istanbul, he traveled widely in Anatolia before returning to Istanbul in 1919, after the First World War, to study literature with the poet laureate Yahya Kemal. Deeply influenced by Paul Valéry and Bergson, Tanpinar created a cultural universe in his work, bringing together Western forms of writing and the sensibilities of a decadent Ottoman culture. He taught aesthetics, mythology, and literature at the University of Istanbul. Erdag Göknar is assistant professor of Turkish Studies at Duke University. He holds an MFA in creative writing and a Ph.D. in Near and Middle East Studies. He received, with Orhan Pamuk, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his English translation of Pamuk’s MY NAME IS RED in 2003. He is also the recipient a Fulbright fellowship and an NEA translation grant for A MIND AT PEACE.
June 23, 1941
Dr John Sudgen (born June 23, 1941) has pursued a busy trans-Atlantic career as a lecturer, senior research fellow and writer. He is the author of a series of acclaimed articles and books, including Sir Francis Drake, Tecumseh: A Life, which won the Distinguished Book Award of the American Society for Military History, and Blue Jacket, which won the Ohioana Award. This first volume of his definitive biography, Nelson: A Dream of Glory, was published to great critical acclaim in 2004 and was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize.
June 23, 1933
Robert Sward (born 1933) is an American and Canadian poet and novelist. Jack Foley, in his Introduction to Sward's Collected Poems, 1957–2004 (Black Moss Press, 2004) calls him, "in truth, a citizen, at heart, of both countries. At once a Canadian and American poet, one with a foot in both worlds, Sward also inhabits an enormous in-between." Or, as Rainer Maria Rilke puts it, "Every artist is born in an alien country; he has a homeland nowhere but within his own borders."
June 23, 1891
Novelist, playwright, film director, screenwriter, Vladislav Van?ura was born on June 23, 1891 in Háj (Silesia) into a family with roots in the nobility. In 1896, his family moved to a country house along the Vltava River a few miles south of Prague, and from 1905 he studied in Prague, first at a primary school and then at the Royal Gymnasium in Lesser Town. He matriculated to Charles University to study law in 1915, but soon changed to the study of medicine (working a few months in a hospital in 1918), finishing his degree in 1921. In the eleven year period between 1923, when his first book appeared (a collection of short prose titled Amazon Stream), and 1934, when his novel The End of Old Times was published, Van?ura produced his most acclaimed novels: Jan Marhoul, Baker; Arable Fields and Battlefields; Summer of Caprice; and Marketa Lazarová. These works brought Van?ura renown as a stylistic innovator of the first order. He was the first chairman of the Dev?tsil artists group, helping to formulate its program for avant-garde literature (Poetism). In 1921, he joined the Communist Party, but was expelled in 1929 after he came out against Klement Gottwald's leadership. In 1928, he moved to Zbraslav (now an outer suburb of Prague), into a functionalist villa designed for him by the architect Jaromír Krejcar, a fellow member of Dev?tsil. Nazi Germany occupied Bohemia and Moravia on March 15, 1939, and on May 22 Van?ura's cousin, Ji?í Mahen (born Antonín Van?ura), to whom Marketa Lazarová is dedicated, committed suicide. Van?ura was active in the Czech underground resistance, and on May 12, 1942, he was arrested by the Gestapo, tortured at their Prague headquarters, and imprisoned. After the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich on May 27, a wave of Nazi reprisals ensued in which thousands of Czechs were murdered, including Van?ura, who was executed by the SS on June 1, 1942.
June 24, 1842
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (born June 24, 1842; assumed to have died sometime after December 26, 1913) was an American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist. Today, he is probably best known for his short story ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge‘ and his satirical lexicon The Devil's Dictionary. His vehemence as a critic, his motto ‘Nothing matters’ and the sardonic view of human nature that informed his work all earned him the nickname ‘Bitter Bierce’. Despite his reputation as a searing critic, Bierce was known to encourage younger writers, including poet George Sterling and fiction writer W. C. Morrow. Bierce employed a distinctive style of writing, especially in his stories. His style often embraces an abrupt beginning, dark imagery, vague references to time, limited descriptions, impossible events and the theme of war. In 1913, Bierce traveled to Mexico to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution. While traveling with rebel troops, he disappeared without a trace.
June 24, 1923
Yves Bonnefoy (born 24 June 1923) is a French poet and essayist. Bonnefoy was born in Tours, Indre-et-Loire, the son of a railroad worker and a teacher. His works have been of great importance in post-war French literature, at the same time poetic and theoretical, examining the meaning of the spoken and written word. He has also published a number of translations, most notably Shakespeare as well as several works on art and art history, including Miró and Giacometti.
June 24, 1916
John Anthony Ciardi (June 24, 1916 – March 30, 1986) was an American poet, translator, and etymologist. While primarily known as a poet, he also translated Dante's Divine Comedy, wrote several volumes of children's poetry, pursued etymology, contributed to the Saturday Review as a columnist and long-time poetry editor, and directed the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont. In 1959, Ciardi published a book on how to read, write, and teach poetry, How Does a Poem Mean?, which has proven to be among the most-used books of its kind. At the peak of his popularity in the early 1960s, Ciardi also had a network television program on CBS, Accent. Ciardi's impact on poetry is perhaps best measured through the younger poets whom he influenced as a teacher and as editor of the Saturday Review.
June 24, 1937
Anita Mazumdar Desai (born 24 June 1937) is an Indian novelist and the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times; she received a Sahitya Academy Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Academy, India's National Academy of Letters; she won the British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea.
June 24, 1961
Rebecca Solnit is the best-selling author of ten books – among them Wanderlust, Savage Dreams, and Hollow City – and countless articles, for which she has received numerous awards and accolades. In 2003 she won the prestigious Lannan Literary Award. Also in 2003 she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for River of Shadows.
June 24, 1938
Lawrence Block (born June 24, 1938) is an American crime writer best known for two long-running New York–set series about the recovering alcoholic P.I. Matthew Scudder and the gentleman burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr. Block was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 1994.
June 24, 1880
Marguerite Chapin , better known as Marguerite Caetani (Waterford , 24 June 1880 - Ninfa , 17 December 1963), was a literary figure, journalist, art collector and patron, US naturalized Italian, of Bassett Princess, Duchess of Sermoneta, founder and director of Commerce magazines (in France) and of Dark Shops (in Italy).
June 24, 1942
Jean Marzollo (June 24, 1942 – April 10, 2018) was an American children's author and illustrator. She wrote more than 100 books, including the best-selling and award-winning I Spy series for children, written completely in rhythm and rhyme.
June 24, 1949
Robert Parry (June 24, 1949 – January 27, 2018) was an American investigative journalist. He was best known for his role in covering the Iran-Contra affair, including breaking the Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, and the CIA involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking in the U.S. scandal in 1985. He was awarded the George Polk Award for National Reporting in 1984 and the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence by Harvard's Nieman Foundation in 2015.
June 24, 1912
Mary Wesley (24 June 1912 – 30 December 2002) was an English novelist. During her career, she was one of Britain's most successful novelists, selling three million copies of her books, including 10 bestsellers in the last 20 years of her life.
June 25, 1870
Robert Erskine Childers DSC (25 June 1870 – 24 November 1922), universally known as Erskine Childers, was the author of the influential novel The Riddle of the Sands and an Irish nationalist who smuggled guns to Ireland in his sailing yacht Asgard. He was executed by the authorities of the nascent Irish Free State during the Irish Civil War. He was the son of British Orientalist scholar Robert Caesar Childers; the cousin of Hugh Childers and Robert Barton; and the father of the fourth President of Ireland, Erskine Hamilton Childers.
June 25, 1887
Frigyes Karinthy (1887-1938) was born in Budapest to a poor but cultivated family. He published his first story, an imitation of Jules Verne, at the age of fifteen, and after briefly studying science and medicine at the University of Budapest, began work as a journalist while frequenting Budapest’s burgeoning café society, eventually becoming an influential member of the circle associated with the pro-Western literary magazine Nyugat. That’s How You Write, a collection of parodies of well-known writers that was one of five books that Karinthy published in 1912, established him as a popular comic writer. Karinthy wrote numerous novels, short stories, poems, and theatrical pieces and translated Gulliver’s Travels and Winnie-the-Pooh. He also hoped to assemble a modern encyclopedia modeled on that of Diderot. His triumphant recovery from the illness described in A Journey Round My Skull was followed the next year by his death, while vacationing at a popular resort, of a stroke.
June 25, 1952
Tololwa Mollel is a children’s author, dramatist and storyteller, who has written seventeen internationally published books, and several plays as well as stories that he created or adapted for performance. His books, which include award winning titles such as Rhinos for Lunch and Elephants for Supper, Big Boy, and My Rows and Piles of Coins have been published in Canada, the U.S., Australia, England and Tanzania where he was born. His work has been translated into various South African languages, into Korean, Spanish, Serbian, Norwegian and Finnish, and of course his native Kiswahili, Tanzania’s national language. In Tanzania, Mollel was a University lecturer and an actor and performer in a touring company that performed as far as Germany and Sweden. He continued performing in Canada but came to devote himself to writing and to the literary scene in Edmonton, serving as President of the Writers Guild of Alberta in the late 1990s. He does extensive work with schools and libraries, with literacy, arts and educational bodies, and with community organizations. In all this work, Mollel has presented, performed and conducted writing, storytelling and dramatic workshops and writer-in-residence programs in schools, libraries and communities across Canada and the U.S., as well as in England, Australia and Tanzania. Of his presentations and his work with schools, libraries and communities, Mollel says, I aim to provide a feast of words – written and spoken – for the eye, the ear and the mind; as well as for the creative imagination, and for performance. Through writing, storytelling and drama, Mollel hopes to empower the young, and others, with the gift of story — to write, tell, share and enjoy stories; to mentor them as he was mentored. Mollel has increasingly come to combine the arts of storytelling, story making and theater into story performance with music with collaborating musicians and artists. Click here to learn about Mollel’s childhood sources of inspiration for his love of story and story making.
June 25, 1903
Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, biting social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democratic socialism. He is best known for the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics and literature, language and culture.
June 25, 1926
Ingeborg Bachmann (June 25, 1926, Klagenfurt, Austria - October 17, 1973) studied law and philosophy at the universities of Insbruck, Graz, and Vienna. She received her degree, writing a dissertation on Heidegger, from the University of Vienna in 1950. After graduating she became a scriptwriter at Radio Rot-Weill-Rot in Vienna, and in 1953 won the Gruppe 47 Prize for her first collection of poems DIE GESTUNDETE ZEIT (THE MORTGAGE ON BORROWED TIME). Over the next many years, she produced numerous collections of poetry, fiction, and radio plays, including ANRUFUNG DES GROGEN BAREN (INVOCATION OF THE GREAT BEAR) [poetry], the collections of stories DES DREISSIGSE JAHR (THE THIRTIETH YEAR) and SIMULTAN, and the novel MALINA. Green Integer has previously published her early work LETTERS TO FELICIAN.
June 25, 1823
James Dunwoody Bulloch (June 25, 1823, Savannah, Georgia – January 7, 1901) was the Confederacy's chief foreign agent in Great Britain during the American Civil War. Based in Liverpool, he operated blockade runners and commerce raiders that provided the Confederacy with its only source of hard currency. Bulloch arranged for the unofficial purchase of Confederate cotton, and the dispatch of armaments and other war supplies to the South. His secret service funds are alleged to have been used for the planning of Lincoln’s assassination. Bulloch’s half-sister Martha was the mother of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt and grandmother of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Philip Van Doren Stern (1900-1984) was one of the most influential Civil War historians of the twentieth century.
June 25, 1935
Fran Ross (June 25, 1935 – September 17, 1985) was an African American author best known for her novel Oreo. She briefly wrote comedy for Richard Pryor. Born on June 25, 1935, in Philadelphia, she was the eldest daughter of Gerald Ross, a welder, and Bernetta Bass Ross, a store clerk. Recognized for her scholastic, artistic and athletic talents, she earned a scholarship to Temple University after graduating from Overbrook High School at the age of 15. Ross graduated from Temple University in 1956 with a B. S. degree in Communications, Journalism and Theatre. She worked for a short time at the Saturday Evening Post. Ross moved to New York in 1960, where she applied to work for McGraw-Hill and later Simon & Schuster as a proofreader, working on Ed Koch's first book, among others. Ross began her novel Oreo hoping for a career in writing, and it was published in 1974 at the height of the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Ross's title comes from a white and black biscuit, used as an ethnic slur in slang, mastery of whose American varieties is a feature of the novel, and employs the myth of Theseus to narrate the story of a black-Jewish girl searching for, and eventually exacting vengeance on, her father. Ross wrote articles for magazines such as Essence, Titters and Playboy, and then got work on The Richard Pryor Show. She was unable to complete a second novel, due to difficulties supporting herself on this work. She worked in media and publishing until she died of cancer on September 17, 1985 in New York City. Oreo was rediscovered and republished in 2000 by Northeastern University Press, with a new introduction by Harryette Mullen. Mat Johnson has hailed Ross's work as a masterpiece that was ahead of its time.
June 25, 1923
Nicholas Mosley, 3rd Baron Ravensdale, 7th Baronet, MC, FRSL (25 June 1923 – 28 February 2017), was an English novelist. He was born in London in 1923. He was the eldest son of Sir Oswald Mosley, 6th Baronet, a British politician, and his first wife, Lady Cynthia Mosley, a daughter of The 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston (Viceroy of India and Foreign Secretary). In 1932 his father, Sir Oswald Mosley, founded the British Union of Fascists and became an open supporter of Benito Mussolini. In 1933, when he was only 10, Nicholas's mother, Lady Cynthia, died and in 1936 Diana Mitford, one of the Mitford sisters, who was already his father's mistress, became his stepmother. As a young boy, he began to stammer and attended weekly sessions with the speech therapist Lionel Logue to help him to overcome his disorder. He later said that his father claimed never really to have noticed this stammer, but still, he may, as a result of it, have been less aggressive when speaking to him than towards other people. Mosley was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. In 1940, his father was interned because of his campaigning against the war with Germany. The younger Mosley was still soon commissioned into the Rifle Brigade and saw active service in Italy, winning the Military Cross in 1945. In 1966, Mosley succeeded his aunt Irene Curzon, 2nd Baroness Ravensdale, his mother's elder sister, as Baron Ravensdale, thus gaining a seat in the House of Lords. On the death of his father, on 3 December 1980, he also succeeded to his father's baronetcy. In 1983, after his father's death, Lord Ravensdale published Beyond the Pale: Sir Oswald Mosley and Family 1933–1980, in which he proved to be a harsh critic of his father. He called into question his father's motives and even Oswald's understanding of politics. The book contributed to the Channel 4 television programme Mosley (1998), based on Oswald Mosley's life. At the end of the serial, Nicholas is portrayed meeting his father in prison to ask him about his national allegiance.
June 25, 1955
Patricia Smith has been called a testament to the power of words to change lives. She is the author of seven books of poetry, including Incendiary Art (2017); Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2012), which won the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler (2008), a chronicle of the human and environmental cost of Hurricane Katrina which was nominated for a National Book Award; and Teahouse of the Almighty, a 2005 National Poetry Series selection published by Coffee House Press. Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Paris Review, the New York Times, TriQuarterly, Tin House, The Washington Post, and in both Best American Poetry and Best American Essays. Her contribution to the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir, which she edited, won the Robert L. Fish Award from the Mystery Writers of America for the best debut story of the year and was chosen for Best American Mystery Stories 2013. Smith also penned the critically acclaimed history Africans in America (1999) and the award-winning children’s book Janna and the Kings (2003). She is a 2014 Guggenheim fellow, a 2012 fellow at both MacDowell and Yaddo, a two-time Pushcart Prize winner, recipient of a Lannan fellowship and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history. She is currently working on a biography of Harriet Tubman, a poetry volume combining text and 19th century African-American photos, and a collaborative novel with her husband Bruce DeSilva, the Edgar-Award winning author of the Liam Mulligan crime novels.
June 26, 1908
Salvador Guillermo Allende Gossens (26 June 1908 – 11 September 1973) was a Chilean physician and politician, known as the first Marxist to become president of a Latin American country through open elections. Allende's involvement in Chilean political life spanned a period of nearly forty years. As a member of the Socialist Party, he was a senator, deputy and cabinet minister. He unsuccessfully ran for the presidency in the 1952, 1958, and 1964 elections. In 1970, he won the presidency in a close three-way race. He was elected in a run-off by Congress as no candidate had gained a majority. As president, Allende adopted a policy of nationalization of industries and collectivisation; due to these and other factors, increasingly strained relations between him and the legislative and judicial branches of the Chilean government culminated in a declaration by Congress of a "constitutional breakdown". On 11 September 1973, the military moved to oust Allende in a coup d'état supported by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). As troops surrounded La Moneda Palace, he gave his last speech vowing not to resign. Later that day, Allende committed suicide with an assault rifle, according to an investigation conducted by a Chilean court with the assistance of international experts in 2011. Following Allende's death, General Augusto Pinochet refused to return authority to a civilian government, and Chile was later ruled by a military junta that was in power up until 1990, ending almost four decades of uninterrupted democratic rule. The military junta that took over dissolved the Congress of Chile, suspended the Constitution, and began a persecution of alleged dissidents, in which thousands of Allende's supporters were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered.
June 26, 1939
The critically acclaimed and best-selling author Barbara Chase-Riboud was established as one of our most passionate and distinguished historical novelists with her first book, SALLY HEMINGS, which won the 1979 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize as the best novel written by an American woman. She was awarded the 1988 Carl Sandburg Prize as best American poet for her second collection of poems a melologue, PORTRAIT OF A NUDE WOMAN AS CLEOPATRA. Chase-Riboud is also the author of VALIDE, a novel of white slavery. A graduate of Yale University who holds an honorary degree from Temple University.
June 26, 1936
Erica Elisabeth Arendt Harvor is a Canadian novelist and poet who lives in Ottawa, Ontario. She was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, she grew up in Saint John and on the Kingston Peninsula. Harvor enrolled at Concordia University in 1983, receiving an MA in Creative Writing in 1986.
June 26, 1932
Eugene H. Kaplan is the Donald E. Axinn Endowed Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Conservation (emeritus) at Hofstra University. His many books include Sensuous Seas: Tales of a Marine Biologist (Princeton) and A Field Guide to Southeastern and Caribbean Seashores (Peterson Field Guides).
June 26, 1922
Richard "Dick" McGee Morse, Ph.D. (June 26, 1922 – April 17, 2001) was a Latin Americanist scholar and professor at Columbia University, University of Puerto Rico, Yale University and Stanford University before finishing his career at the Wilson Center in Washington DC. Morse was born in Summit, New Jersey, United States, but moved with his family at a young age to Greenwich, Connecticut. After graduating from the Hotchkiss School, Morse enrolled at Princeton University in 1939, where he studied literature with Allen Tate and R. P. Blackmur. As a student, Morse studied in Cuba, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, and graduated magna cum laude with a major in the School of Public and International Affairs. Following World War II, Morse continued his academic and literary career, becoming an expert in Latin American studies. Morse was chairman of Latin American Studies at Yale University before moving to Stanford University in the late 1970s. In 1984 he moved to Washington DC with his wife Emerante, when he became Secretary of Latin American Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a "think tank" associated with the Smithsonian Institution. Morse was one of the first academics in the United States to offer a nontraditional analysis of Latin America by suggesting, often to the dismay of contemporaries in other fields, that English-speaking North America had much to learn from the cultures of Spanish-, Portuguese- and French-speaking countries of the South. His most influential work was perhaps Prospero's Mirror, published in Spanish in 1982 and in Portuguese in 1988, but never entirely in English. In that book, Morse passionately defends that cultural and social originality of Latin America, particularly that of Brazil and Mexico, could be the source of new ideas, thoughts and solutions for the world. In 1993, Morse was awarded the Order of the Southern Cross (Ordem do Cruzeiro do Sul) for contributions to Brazilian culture, the nation's highest honor for non-Brazilians. He married Emerante de Pradine, a Haitian singer, in 1954. Morse died due to Alzheimer's disease on April 17, 2001, at his home in Pétion-Ville, Haiti.
June 26, 1869
Martin Andersen Nexø (26 June 1869 – 1 June 1954) was a Danish writer. He was the first significant Danish author to depict the working class in his writings, and the first Danish socialist, later communist, writer. Martin Andersen Nexø was born to a large family (the fourth of eleven children) in Christianshavn, at the time an impoverished district of Copenhagen. In 1877, his family moved to Nexø, and he adopted the name of this town as his last name. Having been an industrial worker before, in Nexø he attended a folk high school, and later worked as a journalist. He spent the mid-1890s travelling in Southern Europe, and his book Soldage (1903) (English: Days in the Sun) is largely based on those travels. Like many of his literary contemporaries, including Johannes Vilhelm Jensen, Nexø was at first heavily influenced by fin-de-siécle pessimism, but gradually turned to a more extroverted view, joining the Social Democratic movement and later the Communist Party of Denmark; his later books reflect his political support of the Soviet Union. Pelle Erobreren (English: Pelle the Conqueror), published in four volumes 1906–1910, is his best-known work and the one most translated. Its first section was made the subject of the DDR-FS movie Pelle der Eroberer in 1986 and the movie Pelle Erobreren in 1987. Ditte Menneskebarn (English: Ditte, Child of Man), written from 1917 to 1921, praises the working woman for her self-sacrifice, and a Danish film version of the first part of the book was released in 1946 as Ditte, Child of Man. The much debated Midt i en Jærntid (i.e. 'In an Iron Age', English: In God's Land), written in 1929, satirises the Danish farmers of World War I. During his latter years, 1944 to 1956, Nexø wrote but did not complete a trilogy consisting of the books Morten hin Røde (English: Morten the Red), Den fortabte generation (English: The Lost Generation), and Jeanette. This was ostensibly a continuation of Pelle the Conqueror, but also a masked autobiography. Danish police arrested Nexø in 1941 during Denmark's occupation by the Nazis, for his communist affiliation. Upon his release, he traveled to neutral Sweden and then to the Soviet Union, where he made broadcasts to Nazi-occupied Denmark and Norway. After World War II, Nexø moved to Dresden in East Germany, where he was made an honorary citizen. The Martin-Andersen-Nexø-Gymnasium high school in Dresden was named after him. Nexø died in Dresden in 1954 and was interred in the Assistens Kirkegård in the Nørrebro neighbourhood of Copenhagen. A minor planet, 3535 Ditte, discovered by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh in 1979, is named after the main character in his novel Ditte, Child of Man. In 1949, Nexø received an honorary doctorate from the University of Greifswald's Faculty of Arts.
June 26, 1952
Greg Palast’s undercover reports and his ‘Inside Corporate America’ column in the Observer have won him Britain’s top prizes for investigative and business journalism as well as the Financial Times David Thomas Prize. Salon.com chose his scandal-busting report on the presidential race in Florida ‘Political Story of the Year’ and his writings have appeared in the Washington Post, Harper’s and The Nation. Greg Palast divides his time between New York and London.
June 26, 1931
Colin Henry Wilson (26 June 1931 – 5 December 2013) was an English writer, philosopher and novelist. He also wrote widely on true crime, mysticism and the paranormal, eventually writing more than a hundred books. Wilson called his philosophy "new existentialism" or "phenomenological existentialism", and maintained his life work was "that of a philosopher, and (his) purpose to create a new and optimistic existentialism".
June 26, 1945
Joseph Graf von Westphalen (born June 26, 1945 in Schwandorf ) is a German writer, known primarily as a satirist. Joseph Graf von Westphalen's parents are both from noble families. He grew up in Munich and studied literature and art history at the University of Munich. In 1978 he received his doctorate of philosophy. From 1979 to 1981 he worked for the collecting society Wort. Subsequently, he was an editor at the cultural magazine" Westermann's Monatshefte." Since 1987 he has lived as a freelance writer in Munich. Joseph von Westphalen began his writing career as a journalist with the writing of polemical pieces, which he described as "indignations". He quickly became known as a sharp-tongued opponent of Zeitgeisterscheinungen of all kinds. His critical sweep continued from Westphalen in his novels , in which the character of Harry von Duckwitz, however, also embodies the other, hedonistic side of the author. In the second half of the nineties Westphalen was one of the first authors to explore the possibilities of multimedia ( CD-ROM "My Cosmos", 1996) andInternet used to provide readers with an insight into the literary workshop. Joseph von Westphalen, who has been a member of the PEN Center Germany since 1992 , was awarded the Ernst Hoferichter Prize in 1992.
June 26, 1905
Lynd Kendall Ward (June 26, 1905 – June 28, 1985) was an American artist and storyteller, known for his series of wordless novels using wood engraving, and his illustrations for juvenile and adult books. His wordless novels have influenced the development of the graphic novel. Strongly associated with his wood engravings, he also worked in watercolor, oil, brush and ink, lithography and mezzotint. Ward was a son of Methodist minister and political organizer Harry F. Ward.
June 26, 1936
Nancy Willard (June 26, 1936 – February 19, 2017) was an American writer: novelist, poet, author and occasional illustrator of children's books. She won the 1982 Newbery Medal for A Visit to William Blake's Inn. Willard was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she later received the B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and won five Hopwood Awards for creative writing. She also studied at Stanford University, where she received her M.A. Her first novel,[clarification needed] Things Invisible to See (1985), is set in her home town of Ann Arbor in the 1940s. Two brothers become involved with a paralyzed young woman, and it "ends with a baseball game that anticipates the film Field of Dreams in its player lineup of baseball luminaries. Susan Fromberg Schaeffer said the novel 'has the quality of a fairy tale ... a paradigm of life as a Manichean conflict between good and evil'." Willard moved to Poughkeepsie, New York in 1964 and married Eric Lindbloom. In 1965 she became first a professor at Vassar College and later a lecturer, giving up her tenure to focus on writing. She retired from Vassar in 2013. All three volumes of Anatole stories were published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich with illustrations by David McPhail. A collected reissue will be published by New York Review Books’ YA imprint NYRB Kids in November 2018. A Visit to William Blake's Inn, illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen, was published by Harcourt Brace in 1981. The text is a collection of poems with prose introduction and epilogue, all by Willard.[a] It features a child's overnight stay at "William Blake's Inn", inhabited by Blake and several wonderful creatures. Willard won the Newbery Medal for the work and the Provensens were one runner-up for the Caldecott Medal. The two annual awards by professional children's librarians recognize the year's "most distinguished contribution to American children's literature" and "most distinguished American picture book for children". The first two books of the Anatole trilogy were named to the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award list in 1977 and 1979. The University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Education from 1958 to 1979 annually named several "all time" books that belong on the same shelf as Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.
June 26, 1958
Andrew Jonathan Bate (born 26 June 1958) is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, novelist and scholar. He specialises in Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism. He is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Provost of Worcester College, Oxford.
June 26, 1913
Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) was best known as the co-creator (with Léopold Senghor) of the concept of négritude. Clayton Eshleman is emeritus professor of English at Eastern Michigan University and the foremost American translator of César Vallejo and Aimé Césaire. A. James Arnold is emeritus professor of French at the University of Virginia. He edited A History of Literature in the Caribbean and authored Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire.
June 27, 1914
Robert Fordyce Aickman (27 June 1914 – 26 February 1981) was an English conservationist and writer of fiction and nonfiction. As a conservationist, he is notable for co-founding the Inland Waterways Association, a group which has preserved from destruction and restored England's inland canal system. As a writer, he is best known for his supernatural fiction, which he described as ‘strange stories’.
June 27, 1920
Edward Ricardo Braithwaite (born June 27, 1920; some sources state 1912 or 1922) is a Guyanese novelist, writer, teacher, and diplomat, best known for his stories of social conditions and racial discrimination against black people. He was born in Georgetown, Guyana. Braithwaite had a privileged beginning in life: both of his parents went to Oxford University and he describes growing up with education, achievement, and parental pride surrounding him. He attended Queen's College, Guyana and then the City College of New York (1940). During World War II, he joined the Royal Air Force as a pilot – he would later describe this experience as one where he had felt no discrimination based on his skin colour or ethnicity. He went on to attend the University of Cambridge (1949), from which he earned a bachelor's degree and a doctorate in physics. After the war, like many other ethnic minorities, despite his extensive training, Braithwaite could not find work in his field and, disillusioned, reluctantly took up a job as a schoolteacher in the East End of London. The book To Sir, With Love (1959) was based on his experiences there. While writing his book about the school, Braithwaite turned to social work and it became his job to find foster homes for non-white children for the London County Council. His experiences resulted in his second novel Paid Servant (1962). Braithwaite's numerous writings have primarily dealt with the difficulties of being an educated black man, a black social worker, a black teacher, and simply a human being in inhumane circumstances. His best known book, To Sir, With Love, was made into a 1967 film of the same name starring Sidney Poitier, and adapted for Radio 4 in 2007 starring Kwame Kwei-Armah. Paid Servant was dramatised on Radio 4 the following year, again with Kwei-Armah in the lead role. His 1965 novel Choice of Straws was dramatised in Radio 4's Saturday Play slot in September 2009. In 1973, the South African ban on Braithwaite's books was lifted and he reluctantly applied to visit the country. He was granted a visa and the status 'Honorary White' which gave him significantly more freedom and privileges than the indigenous black population, but less than the whites. He recorded the experiences and horror he witnessed during the six weeks he spent in South Africa in Honorary White (London: The Bodley Head, 1975). Braithwaite continued to write novels and short stories throughout his long international career as an educational consultant and lecturer for UNESCO, permanent representative to the United Nations for Guyana, Guyana's ambassador to Venezuela, and academic. He taught English studies at New York University; in 2002, was writer-in-residence at Howard University, Washington, D.C.; associated himself with Manchester Community College, Connecticut, during the 2005-06 academic year as visiting professor, also serving as commencement speaker and receiving an honorary degree.
June 27, 1949
Rafael Chirbes (27 June 1949 – 15 August 2015) was a Spanish novelist. He was born in Tavernes de la Valldigna in Valencia. He is the author of several novels, two of which have won the Premio de la Crítica de narrativa castellana - Crematorio (2007) and En la orilla (2013). The latter also won the Premio Nacional de Narrativa. Chirbes is further known for his trilogy of novels dealing with postwar Spain (La larga marcha, La caída de Madrid and Los viejos amigos). He has also written several collections of essays.
June 27, 1936
Lucille Clifton (June 27, 1936, Depew, New York – February 13, 2010, Baltimore, Maryland) was an American writer and educator from Buffalo, New York. From 1979 to 1985 she was Poet Laureate of Maryland. Common topics in her poetry include the celebration of her African-American heritage, and feminist themes, with particular emphasis on the female body.
June 27, 1939
Ivan Doig (born on June 27, 1939) is an American novelist and the author of Sweet Thunder, forthcoming in August 2013 from Riverhead Books. He was born in White Sulphur Springs, Montana to a family of homesteaders and ranch hands. After the death of his mother Berneta, on his sixth birthday, he was raised by his father Charles ‘Charlie’ Doig and his grandmother Elizabeth ‘Bessie’ Ringer. After several stints on ranches, they moved to Dupuyer, Pondera County, Montana in the north to herd sheep close to the Rocky Mountain Front. After his graduation from Valier high school, Doig attended Northwestern University, where he received a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in journalism. He later earned a Ph.D. in American history at the University of Washington, writing his dissertation about John J. McGilvra (1827-1903). He now lives with his wife Carol Doig, née Muller, a university professor of English, in Seattle, Washington. Before Doig became a novelist, he wrote for newspapers and magazines as a free-lancer and worked for the United States Forest Service.
June 27, 1869
Emma Goldman (June 27, 1869 – May 14, 1940) was an anarchist political activist and writer. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the 20th century.
June 27, 1850
Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (27 June 1850 – 26 September 1904) was an international writer, known best for his books about Japan, especially his collections of Japanese legends and ghost stories, such as Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things. In the United States, Hearn is also known for his writings about the city of New Orleans based on his ten-year stay in that city.
June 27, 1880
Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968) was an American author, political activist, and lecturer. She was the first deaf-blind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree.
June 27, 1908
João Guimarães Rosa (27 June 1908 – 19 November 1967) was a Brazilian novelist, considered by many to be one of the greatest Brazilian novelists born in the 20th century. His best-known work is the novel Grande Sertão: Veredas (translated as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands). Some people consider this to be the Brazilian equivalent of Ulysses. Guimarães Rosa was born in Cordisburgo in the state of Minas Gerais, the first of six children of Florduardo Pinto Rosa (nicknamed 'seu Fulô') and Francisca Guimarães Rosa ('Chiquitinha'). He was self-taught in many areas and from childhood studied many languages, starting with French before he was seven years old, as can be seen in an interview he gave a cousin of his later in life: 'I speak: Portuguese, German, French, English, Spanish, Italian, Esperanto, some Russian; I read: Swedish, Dutch, Latin and Greek (but with the dictionary right next to me); I understand some German dialects; I studied the grammar of: Hungarian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Lithuanian, Polish, Tupi, Hebrew, Japanese, Czech, Finnish, Danish; I dabbled in others. But all at a very basic level. And I think that studying the spirit and the mechanism of other languages helps a great deal in the deeper understanding of the national language [of Brazil]. In general, however, I studied for pleasure, desire, distraction.' Still a child, he moved to his grandparents' house in Belo Horizonte, where he finished primary school. He began his secondary schooling at the Santo Antônio School in São João del Rei, but soon returned to Belo Horizonte, where he graduated. In 1925, at only 16, he applied for what was then called the College of Medicine of Minas Gerais University. On June 27, 1930, he married Lígia Cabral Penna, a girl of only 16, with whom he had two daughters, Vilma and Agnes. Vilma had a son, João Emílio, who had a daughter, Alice (the only granddaughter of the author). In that same year he graduated and began his medical practice in Itaguara, then in the municipality of Itaúna, in Minas Gerais, where he stayed about two years. It is in this town that he had his first contact with elements from the sertão (semi-arid Brazilian outback), which would serve as reference and inspiration in many of his works. Back in Itaguara, Guimarães Rosa served as a volunteer doctor of the Public Force (Força Pública) in the Constitutionalist Revolution of 1932, heading to the so-called Tunel sector in Passa-Quatro, Minas Gerais, where he came into contact with the future president Juscelino Kubitschek, at that time the chief doctor of the Blood Hospital. Later he became a civil servant through examination. In 1933, he went to Barbacena in the position of Doctor of the 9th Infantry Battalion (Oficial Médico do 9º Batalhão de Infantaria). Most of his life was spent as a Brazilian diplomat in Europe and Latin America. In 1938 he served as assistant-Consul in Hamburg, Germany, where he met his future second wife, the Righteous Among the Nations Aracy de Carvalho Guimarães Rosa. In 1963, he was chosen by unanimous vote to enter the Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Letters) in his second candidacy. After postponing for 4 years, he finally assumed his position only in 1967: just three days before passing away in the city of Rio de Janeiro, victim of a heart attack. His masterpiece is The Devil to Pay in the Backlands. In this novel, Riobaldo, a jagunço is torn between two loves: Diadorim, another jagunço, and Otacília, an ordinary beauty from the backlands. Following his own existential quest, he contemplates making a deal with Lucifer in order to eliminate Hermógenes, his nemesis. One could say that Sertão (the backlands) represents the whole Universe and the mission of Riobaldo is to pursue its travessia, or crossing, seeking answers for the metaphysical questions faced by mankind. In this sense he is an incarnation of the classical hero in the Brazilian backlands. Guimarães Rosa died at the summit of his diplomatic and literary career, aged 59.
June 27, 1937
Kirkpatrick Sale is an independent scholar and author who has written prolifically about political decentralism, environmentalism, luddism and technology.
June 27, 1889
Julio Torri Maynes (June 27, 1889 in Saltillo, Coahuila – May 11, 1970 in Mexico City) was a Mexican writer and teacher who formed part of the Ateneo de la Juventud (1909–1914). He wrote principally in the essay form, although his limited production included short stories and scholarly works as well. Considered one of the best prose stylists of Latin America, he was admitted to the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua in 1952. His parents were Julio S. Torri and Sofía Maynes de Torri. He began his schooling in Colegio Torreón and later in the Escuela Juan Antonio de la Fuente, both in Saltillo. In 1908 he travelled to Mexico City and in 1913 obtained a law degree from the National Law School; in 1933 he was awarded a doctorate in letters from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He formed part of the Ateneo de la Juventud, a literary generation that also included Rafael Cabrera, Jesus T. Acevedo, Alfonso Cravioto, Antonio Caso, Ricardo Gómez Robledo, Enrique González Martínez, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Salvador Novo, Alfonso Reyes, Diego Rivera, José Vasconcelos, and Luis G. Urbina. He engaged from 1914-22 in voluminous correspondence with Alfonso Reyes, who during that time was residing in Europe. From 1916-23 he co-edited with Agustín Loera the editorial Cultura. He was founder and director of the SEP's Departamento de Bibliotecas (Department of Libraries) and served as its literary classics editor. In 1921 he founded, along with Xavier Guerrero, José Clemente Orozco, and Vicente Lombardo Toledano, the syndicalist Grupo Solidario del Movimiento Obrero. He taught literature for nearly half a century at several institutions, including the National Preparatory School, the UNAM, and for various summers at the University of Texas, holding from 1953 onward the title of UNAM Emeritus Professor. He undertook poetic and pedagogical ambassadorships to countries like Argentina, Brazil, and the United States, while a trip to Europe in 1952 inspired some of his writing. In 2001 CONACULTA and the Coahuilan Institute of Culture (Icocult) established the Premio Nacional de Cuento Joven Julio Torri, a prize for young writers that honors Julio Torri. His nephew, Julio Torri Cervi, (1932–2003) was a famous eccentric who lived for a time in Tulancingo. Torri's oeuvre was distinctly influenced by his readings of Charles Lamb, Marcel Schwob, Jules Renard, Jules Laforgue, Stéphane Mallarmé, and above all Oscar Wilde. He produced notable essays on Aeschylus, Maeterlinck, Proust, Tolstoy, Aldous Huxley, José Juan Tablada, Reyes, and Luis Gonzaga Urbina. He was a translator of works by Pascal and Heinrich Heine. As an author his preferred forms were the essay (which put on display his impressive learning and culture) and the short story. He is credited with being one of the earliest practitioners of prose poetry and writers of estampas (literary sketches) in Mexico; he is also noted for his mastery of the epigraph. He was a fastidious writer who endlessly polished and refined his words, clarity and purity were the hallmarks of his style. His most important works are Ensayos y Poemas (Essays and Poems) (1917), De fusilamientos (On Executions [Fusillations]) (1940), Tres libros (Three Books) (1964), Diálogo de los libros (Dialogue of the Books) (1980, posthumous).
June 27, 1934
Alberto Bevilacqua (27 June 1934—9 September 2013) was an Italian writer and filmmaker. Leonardo Sciascia, an Italian writer and politician, read Bevilacqua's first collection of stories, The Dust on the Grass (1955), was impressed and published it. Mario Colombi Guidotti, responsible for the literary supplement of the Journal of Parma, began to publish his stories in the early 1950s. Friendship Lost, his first book of poems, was published in 1961. Caliph, published in 1964, was his break-through novel. The protagonist, Irene Corsini, imbued with his own sweet and energetic temperament, is one of the strongest female characters in Italian literature. His novel This Kind of Love won the Campiello Prize in 1966. In both This Kind of Love and Caliph, Bevilacqua oversaw the adaptations and productions of the film versions. This Kind of Love won Best Film at Cannes. Bevilacqua was also a poet. His writings have been translated throughout Europe, the United States, Brazil, China and Japan. In 2010, his seven "stories" as he likes to call them, are included in the Novels volume of the prestigious series "I Meridiani. Bevilacqua directed seven films between 1970 and 1999. His 1970 film La califfa was entered into the 1971 Cannes Film Festival. Bevilacqua, aged 79, died in Rome on 9 September 2013 from cardiac arrest. He had been hospitalized since 11 October 2012 for heart failure.
June 27, 1928
James Lincoln Collier (born June 27, 1928, New York City, NY) has published over fifty books, including Decision at Philadelphia, a highly regarded study of the Constitutional Convention which he co-wrote with his brother Christopher Collier. A leading jazz historian, he has also received a Newbery Honors Medal, a Christopher Medal, and has twice been monimated for the National Book Award. He has been a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Senior Research Fellow for the Institute for Studies in American Music.
June 27, 1928
Peter Davison (June 27, 1928, New York, New York – December 29, 2004, Boston, Massachusetts) was an American poet, essayist, teacher, lecturer, editor, and publisher. Peter Davison was born in New York City to Edward Davison, a Scottish poet, and Nathalie (née Weiner) Davison. He grew up in Boulder, Colorado, where his father taught at the University of Colorado. Davison attended Harvard University, graduating in 1949. Among his classmates at Harvard were John Ashbery, Robert Bly, and Robert Creeley. After graduating from Harvard, Davison spent a year at Cambridge University on a Fulbright Fellowship. He worked at publishers Harcourt Brace and at Harvard University Press, serving as an assistant to that press's director. In 1966 he joined the Atlantic Monthly Press, remaining there for 29 years, the final 15 as its director. For 30 years he was also poetry editor for Atlantic Monthly. (Later it merged with Grove Press to become Grove/Atlantic.) In the 1980s he joined Houghton Mifflin, where he edited books for his own imprint from 1985 to 1998. From the 1950s forward he was part of a Boston and New England literary milieu that included Robert Lowell, Robert Frost, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Richard Wilbur, and Donald Hall. In 1963, his first collection of poetry, Breaking of the Day, was selected by Dudley Fitts, for the Yale Younger Poets Prize. He would go on to publish 11 volumes of poetry. His final poetry collection, Breathing Room (2000), received the Massachusetts Book Award.
June 27, 1925
Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett (27 June 1925 – 27 December 2011) was a British philosopher, described as "among the most significant British philosophers of the last century and a leading campaigner for racial tolerance and equality." He was, until 1992, Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford. He wrote on the history of analytic philosophy, most notably as an interpreter of Frege, and has made original contributions to the subject, particularly in the philosophies of mathematics, logic, language and metaphysics. He was known for his work on truth and meaning and their implications for the debates between realism and anti-realism, a term he helped popularize. He devised the Quota Borda system of proportional voting, based on the Borda count. In mathematical logic, he developed an intermediate logic, already studied by Kurt Gödel: the so-called Gödel–Dummett logic.
June 27, 1953
Alice McDermott (born June 27, 1953) is an American writer and university professor. For her 1998 novel Charming Billy she won an American Book Award and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. McDermott is Johns Hopkins University's Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities.
June 27, 1888
Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier (27 June 1888 – 19 August 1960) was a British historian of Polish-Jewish background. His best-known works were The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929), England in the Age of the American Revolution (1930) and the History of Parliament series (begun 1940) he edited later in his life with John Brooke.
June 27, 1942
Daniel Isaac "Danny" Schechter (June 27, 1942 – March 19, 2015) was an American television producer, independent filmmaker, blogger, and media critic. He wrote and spoke about many issues including apartheid, civil rights, economics, foreign policy, journalistic control and ethics, and medicine.
June 27, 1961
Meera Syal (born June 27, 1961), a British-born Indian, is a writer and actress. Her first novel, Anita and Me, won a Betty Trask award and was short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Prize. She lives in London.
June 27, 1915
Grace Lee Boggs, the recipient of many human rights and lifetime achievement awards, is an activist, writer, and speaker. She is celebrated in the national Women’s Hall of Fame. Boggs is the coauthor, with James Boggs, of Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century and the author of Living for Change: An Autobiography. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, she is 95 years old. Scott Kurashige is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan and author of The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles.
June 27, 1872
Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872—1906) overcame racism and poverty to become one of the best-known authors in America, and the first African American to earn a living from his poetry, fiction, drama, journalism, and lectures. This original collection includes the short novel The Sport of the Gods, Dunbar’s essential essays and short stories, and his finest poems, such as Sympathy, all which explore crucial social, political, and humanistic issues at the dawn of the twentieth century.
June 27, 1884
Gaston Bachelard (27 June 1884 – 16 October 1962) was a French philosopher. He made contributions in the fields of poetics and the philosophy of science. To the latter he introduced the concepts of epistemological obstacle and epistemological break (obstacle épistémologique and rupture épistémologique). He influenced many subsequent French philosophers, among them Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Dominique Lecourt and Jacques Derrida, as well as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. For Bachelard the scientific object should be constructed and therefore, different from the positivist sciences, information is in continuous construction. Empiricism and rationalism are not regarded as dualism or opposition but complementary, therefore studies of a priori and a posteriori or in other words reason and are dialectic and are part of scientific research.
June 28, 1905
Henry Hare Carter (28 June 1905 - 2001) was an American linguistics professor, commander in the US Naval Reserve, translator, and a Spanish or Portuguese writer of textbooks and research. Henry Hare Carter was born on June 28, 1905, in Staten Island, New York, to John Hanford and Elizabeth Carter (née Ensminger). He married Gloria Maria Castello Branco de Gouveia (deceased May 16, 2015) in Recife, Brazil in 1946. Professor Carter received his B.S., A.M. & Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania in years 1928, 1931 and 1937. Dr. Carter was a professor of romance languages for almost 40 years at several colleges and universities, including the University of Pennsylvania; Northwestern University, Evanston; the Naval Academy; DePaul University; Colorado College; and for the last 24 years of teaching (from 1956) at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, where he retired as Professor Emeritus of Romance Languages and Literatures. Among his teaching specialities were Spanish literature; the history of the Spanish language; and Spanish poetry, drama, and prose. He spoke seven languages. During his student days, he would often travel and study abroad during the summers in Europe with foreign studies, including Madrid in 1931, the Sorbonne (Paris) in 1933, Corsi Roma (Rome) 1937, and Coimbra, Portugal in 1939. For most of his professional life he was interested in the translation of 12th- and 13th-century manuscripts, written by monks, about the stories of Joseph of Arimathea and the Holy Grail, and the legend of El Cid. He also was a scout on his travels in South America and Spain for new Spanish words to be included in the Williams' Spanish-English Dictionary. His endorsement of the book was included on the front cover of the paperback edition. Henry Carter was elected to numerous academies, both in the United States and abroad, including: the Brazilian Academy of Philology (1971), the Academy of Sciences, Lisbon (1975), and Académico de Mérito, in the Portuguese Academy of History (1989). During World War II, he was assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence; serving in Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and Brazil, where he was the liaison officer between the American and Brazilian navies. He retired from the US Naval Reserve with the rank of commander. During his Navy years, he wrote Paleographical Edition and Study of the Language of a Portion of Codex Alcobacensis 200 and Cancioneiro da Ajuda: A Diplomatic Edition (1941). In retirement, Professor Carter resided with the Congregation of Holy Cross at Moreau Seminary, where he regularly shared stories of the obscure origins of words and delighted generations of seminarians. He died in 2001.
June 28, 1945
Syl Cheney-Coker (b. 1945) is a poet, novelist, and journalist from Sierra Leone. Educated in the United States, he has a global sense of literary history, and has introduced styles and techniques from French and Latin American literatures to Sierra Leone. He has spent much of his life in exile from his native country, and has written extensively (in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction) about the condition of exile and the view of Africa from an African abroad. Cheney-Coker was born in Freetown with the name Syl Cheney Coker, and changed his name to its current spelling in 1970. He went to the United States in 1966, where he attended the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Oregon, and the University of Wisconsin. After his schooling he returned briefly to Sierra Leone, but accepted a position at the University of the Philippines in 1975; he later married a Filipino woman. He moved to Nigeria in 1977 to teach at the University of Maiduguri, and returned to the United States in 1988 to be Writer-in-Residence at the University of Iowa. Cheney-Coker’s poetry is tinged with the anxiety of his perennially uncertain status, dealing both with exile (he has spent the majority of his adult life outside of his country) and with the precariousness of living as an intellectual in Sierra Leone. At the same time, he is concerned always with how he will be read; his poems are radical and ardent, but also erudite and allusive, which can distract a reader from Cheney-Coker’s ideological project. He has been called one of the more western-influenced African poets. In the early 1990s, Cheney-Coker returned to Freetown to become editor of a progressive newspaper, the Vanguard. After the military coup of 1997, Cheney-Coker was targeted as a dissident, and barely escaped with his life. In part through the efforts of Wole Soyinka, an exiled Nigerian poet teaching at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Cheney-Coker was invited to be the first writer in the City of Asylum program in Las Vegas, Nevada. He decided to return to a somewhat more stable Sierra Leone in 2003, saying, ‘After a while, exile is neither justifiable nor tolerable.’
June 28, 1924
Danilo Dolci (June 28, 1924 – December 30, 1997) was an Italian social activist, sociologist, popular educator and poet. He is best known for his opposition to poverty, social exclusion and the Mafia on Sicily, and is considered to be one of the protagonists of the non-violence movement in Italy. He became known as the ‘Gandhi of Sicily’. In the 1950s and 1960s, Dolci published a series of books (notably, in their English translations, To Feed the Hungry, 1955, and Waste, 1960) that stunned the outside world with their emotional force and the detail with which he depicted the desperate conditions of the Sicilian countryside and the power of the Mafia. Dolci became almost a cult hero-figure in Northern Europe and the United States. Young people idolised him and committees were formed to raise funds for his work. In 1958 he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, despite being an explicit non-Communist. He was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), which in 1947 received the Nobel Peace Prize along with the British Friends Service Council, now called Quaker Peace and Social Witness, on behalf of all Quakers worldwide. Among those who publicly voiced support for his efforts were Carlo Levi, Erich Fromm, Bertrand Russell, Jean Piaget, Aldous Huxley, Jean-Paul Sartre and Ernst Bloch. In Sicily, Leonardo Sciascia advocated many of his ideas. In the United States his proto-Christian idealism was absurdly confused with Communism.
June 28, 1867
LUIGI PIRANDELLO was born on June 28, 1867, in Agrigento, Sicily. After attending secondary school in Palermo, he went, at the age of eighteen, to the University of Rome. The following year he transferred to the University of Bonn. In Germany he studied romance philology and philosophy, started to write poetry, and completed a translation of Goethe’s ROMAN ELEGIES. On his return to Rome, Pirandello was urged by his fellow Sicilian, the novelist Capuana, to try his hand at prose writing. In the short-story form, Pirandello’s genius began to emerge. In the twenty years from 1894 to the outbreak of World War I he published innumerable short stories and four novels. In an experimental mood, Pirandello then turned to the stage, attempting at first to convey as vividly as possible the attitudes and speech of his native island. A couple of regional plays preceded his first stage success, RIGHT YOU ARE IF YOU THINK YOU ARE, which had its premiere in 1917. From then on Pirandello wrote forty-odd plays in relatively quick succession. He was fifty-four when his drama SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR brought him international acclaim. In 1934 Pirandello was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died a year and a half later.
June 28, 1966
ASA LARSSON was born in Kiruna, Sweden, in 1966. She studied in Uppsala and lived for some years in Stockholm but now prefers the rural life with her husband, two children, and several chickens. A former tax lawyer, she now writes full-time and is the author of SUN STORM, winner of Sweden's Best First Crime Novel Award, and THE BLACK PATH, which Delacorte will publish in 2007.
June 28, 1908
Norman Lewis (28 June 1908–22 July 2003) was a prolific British writer best known for his travel writing. Though not widely known, ‘Norman Lewis is one of the best writers, not of any particular decade, but of our century’, according to Graham Greene.
June 28, 1712
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (28 June 1712 – 2 July 1778) was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of the 18th century. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological, and educational thought. Rousseau's novel Émile, or On Education is a treatise on the education of the whole person for citizenship. His sentimental novel Julie, or the New Heloise was of importance to the development of pre-romanticism and romanticism in fiction. Rousseau's autobiographical writings — his Confessions, which initiated the modern autobiography, and his Reveries of a Solitary Walker — exemplified the late 18th-century movement known as the Age of Sensibility, and featured an increased focus on subjectivity and introspection that later characterized modern writing. His Discourse on Inequality and The Social Contract are cornerstones in modern political and social thought. Rousseau was a successful composer of music, who wrote seven operas as well as music in other forms, and made contributions to music as a theorist. As a composer, his music was a blend of the late Baroque style and the emergent Classical fashion, and he belongs to the same generation of transitional composers as Christoph Willibald Gluck and C.P.E. Bach. One of his more well-known works is the one-act opera Le devin du village, containing the duet 'Non, Colette n'est point trompeuse' which was later rearranged as a standalone song by Beethoven. During the period of the French Revolution, Rousseau was the most popular of the philosophes among members of the Jacobin Club. Rousseau was interred as a national hero in the Panthéon in Paris, in 1794, 16 years after his death.
June 28, 1937
Juan José Saer (June 28, 1937 – June 11, 2005) was one of the most important Argentine novelists of the last fifty years. Born to Syrian immigrants in Serodino, a small town in the Santa Fe Province, he studied law and philosophy at the National University of the Litoral, where he taught History of Cinematography. Thanks to a scholarship, he moved to Paris in 1968. He had recently retired from his position as a lecturer at the University of Rennes, and had almost finished his final novel, La Grande (2005), which has since been published posthumously, along with a series of critical articles on Latin American and European writers, Trabajos (2006). In year 2012, a first installment of his previously unpublished working notebooks has been edited and published as 'Papeles de trabajo' by Seix Barral in Argentina. A second volume followed, the result of five years of editing work by a team coordinated by Julio Premat, who writes the introduction of the first volume. These notebooks allow the reader a privileged insight into the creative processes of Saer. As critics point out, the books of Juan José Saer may be taken as a single 'oeuvre', set in his 'La Zona', a fluvial region around the Argentinian city of Santa Fé, populated by characters who are developed and become referential from novel to novel. Saer's novels frequently thematize the situation of the self-exiled writer through the figures of two twin brothers, one of whom remained in Argentina during the dictatorship, while the other, like Saer himself, moved to Paris; several of his novels trace their separate and intertwining fates, along with those of a host of other characters who alternate between foreground and background from work to work. Like several of his contemporaries (Ricardo Piglia, César Aira, Roberto Bolaño), Saer's work often builds on particular and highly codified genres, such as detective fiction (The Investigation), colonial encounters (The Witness), travelogues (El río sin orillas), or canonical modern writers (e.g. Proust, in La mayor and Joyce, in 'Sombras sobre vidrio esmerilado'). His novel La ocasión won the Nadal Prize in 1987. He developed lung cancer, and died in Paris in 2005, at age 67. Several of his stories were turned into movies by his students, including Palo y hueso (Stick and Bone, 1968) directed by Nicolás Sarquís, Cicatrices (Scars) directed by Patricio Coll and Nadie Nada Nunca (No, No, Never, 1998) directed by Raúl Beceyro.
June 28, 1892
E. H. Carr (June 28, 1892, London, United Kingdom - November 3, 1982, London, United Kingdom) was born in London in 1892 and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was attached to the British delegation at the Peace Conference in 1919. He resigned from the Foreign Office in 1936 to become Professor of International Politics at the University College of Wales. From 1941 to 1946 he was an editor of The Times of London and from 1953 to 1955 a Tutor in Politics, Balliol College, Oxford. Since 1955 he has been a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He is the author of six books in addition to WHAT IS HISTORY? and his multi-volume A HISTORY OF SOVIET RUSSIA.
June 28, 1947
Fred L. Block is an American sociologist, and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. Block is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading economic and political sociologists.
June 28, 1931
Jürg Federspiel (28 June 1931 – 12 January 2007) was a Swiss writer, born in Kemptthal, Canton Zurich. Federspiel authored more than 20 novels and short story collections. Federspiel grew up in Davos and attended secondary school in Basel. From 1951 he worked as a journalist and film critic for several Swiss newspapers, and spent time in Germany, France, Great Britain, Ireland and the USA. His first notable work was a collection of short stories, Orangen und Tode ("Oranges and death") in 1961. In the English-speaking world his best-known work was The Ballad of Typhoid Mary. A historical novel about the life of Mary Mallon, it was published in German in 1982, and published in English translation in 1983 by Random House. Towards the end of his life, he lived alternately in Basel and New York City. His last published book was Mond ohne Zeiger ("Moon without hands"), a collection of poetry in 2001. He suffered for years with severe diabetes and Parkinson's disease. Federspiel died on 25 February 2007 in Basel, having been missing since 12 January 2007. The cause of death was assumed to be suicide.
June 28, 1935
Stratis Haviaras (born June 28, 1935, Nea Kios, Greece) is the author of four books of poetry in Greek, and two collections of poems and two novels in English. He received his M.F.A. from Goddard College, and is the Founding Editor of the Harvard Review. Haviaras worked for thirty years as the curator of the Poetry and Farnsworth Rooms in the Harvard College Library. He is the author of When the Tree Sings, The heroic age, Millennial afterlives, Crossing the river twice, Alphav?ta, Achna: mythistor?ma.
June 28, 1894
John Ramsay Allardyce Nicoll (28 June 1894 – 17 April 1976) was a British literary scholar and teacher. Allardyce Nicoll was born and educated in Glasgow. He became a lecturer at King's College London in 1920 and took the chair of English at East London College (later Queen Mary's College) in 1923. In 1933 he went to Yale University as professor of the history of drama and dramatic criticism and chair of the drama department. He established a strong graduate programme in theatre history. Around 1943-45 he performed war work at the British embassy in Washington. From 1945 to 1961 he headed the English Department at the University of Birmingham; from 1951 to 1961 he was also founding director of the Shakespeare Institute at Birmingham. His major work was his six-volume History of English Drama, 1660-1900, published as separate volumes starting in 1923, and reissued as a set in 1952-59. He also wrote many other books on English drama. He was married twice and had no children.
June 28, 1903
George Padmore (28 June 1903 – 23 September 1959), born Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse in Trinidad, was a leading Pan-Africanist, journalist, and author who left Trinidad in 1924 to study in the United States and from there moved to the Soviet Union, Germany, and France, before settling in London and, toward the end of his life, Accra, Ghana.
June 28, 1948
Harold Schechter is an American true crime writer who specializes in serial killers. He is a professor of American literature and popular culture at Queens College, City University of New York.
June 28, 1950
Alfredo Véa is a criminal defense lawyer in San Francisco and author of three other novels, La Maravilla, The Silver Cloud Café, and Gods Go Begging.
June 28, 196
ANNIE JACOBSEN is a journalist, bestselling author, and 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Her books AREA 51, OPERATION PAPERCLIP, and THE PENTAGON'S BRAIN were New York Times bestsellers and have been collectively published in many languages. Her book, "PHENOMENA: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations Into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis," published March 28, 2017. OPERATION PAPERCLIP was chosen as one of the best non-fiction books of 2014 by The Boston Globe, Apple iBooks, and Publishers Weekly. THE PENTAGON'S BRAIN was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in History and was chosen as one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and Amazon. Each of her books is in television development (Valhalla/AMC, Plan B/RatPac, Warner Brothers/J.J. Abrams/Bad Robot, Amblin/Blumhouse). Jacobsen graduated from St. Paul's School and Princeton University where she wrote with Joyce Carol Oates and Paul Auster, studied Greek, and served as Captain of the Princeton Women's Ice Hockey Team. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband Kevin and their two sons.
June 29, 1924
Cid (Sidney) Corman (June 29, 1924 – March 12, 2004) was an American poet, translator and editor, most notably of Origin, who was a key figure in the history of American poetry in the second half of the 20th century.
June 29, 1929
Oriana Fallaci (29 June 1929 – 15 September 2006) was an Italian journalist, author, and political interviewer. A former partisan during World War II, she had a long and successful journalistic career. Fallaci became famous worldwide for her coverage of war and revolution, and her interviews with many world leaders during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Her book Interview with History, contains candid, lengthy, penetrating interviews with Indira Gandhi, Willy Brandt, Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Muammar Gaddafi, Yasser Arafat, Golda Meir, Deng Xiaoping, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and both Henry Kissinger, and North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap, during the Vietnam War. The interview with Kissinger was published in Playboy Magazine, with Kissinger describing himself as ‘the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse.’ Kissinger later wrote that it was ‘the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press.’ After retirement, she returned to the spotlight after writing a series of articles and books critical of Islam that aroused support as well as controversy.
June 29, 1908
Bruno Fischer (1908-1992) was an American pulp writer and journalist who also wrote short stories (and one novel) under the name of Russell Gray. He was born in Germany but emigrated the US with his family in 1913. He was educated at the Rand School of Social Sciences, and married Ruth Miller in 1934. The first short story he ever sold was of the horror genre... 'The Cat Woman' (1936). He produced detective short stories from 1940 to 1962, then switched to a continuing series of novels.
June 29, 1798
Giacomo Leopardi (June 29, 1798 - June 14, 1837) was born in Ricanti, Italy, in 1798. He was a poet, essayist, philosopher, and philologist. He died in 1837. FROM THE POETRY FOUNDATION - Prolific writer, translator, and thinker Giacomo Leopardi was born in the small provincial town of Recanati, Italy, during a time of political upheaval and unrest in Europe created by the French Revolution. Although his aristocratic family was affected by the instability of the region, Leopardi was tutored extensively under private priests from an early age, showing a remarkable talent and thirst for knowledge. As a sickly adolescent who was often confined to the household, Leopardi spent most of his time in his father’s extraordinary library, immersing himself in classical and philological knowledge. Within years of independent study, Leopardi became fluent in reading and writing Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, while he began translating various classical texts including Horace and Homer. For years Leopardi secluded himself in his father’s library, studying and writing constantly. At the age of fourteen he wrote Pompeo in Egitto (Pompey in Egypt) an anti-Caesarean manifesto, and went onto writing various philological works until 1816, which marked a turning point in Leopardi’s life which he called ‘the passage from erudition to the beautiful.’ Leopardi wrote L'appressamento della morte (The Approach of Death), a poem in terza rima which was heavily influenced by Petrarch and Dante, as well as Inno a Nettuno (Hymn to Neptune), and Le rimembranze (Memories). After this, Leopardi abandoned other types of work and concentrated on lyric poetry, including his book Canti (Songs) and Canzoniere (Songbook), as well as many more. Leopardi frequently focuses on the patriotic, idyllic scenes, unrequited love, childhood, and classical themes and references. Regarded by many as the ‘first modern Italian classic’ poet, Leopardi was additionally praised for his prose work, with his varied use of dialogue, myth, allegory, and satire. For over five years years he stopped writing lyric poetry so he could concentrate on composing his innovative prose magnum opus called Operette morali (Small Moral Works). Frederick John Snell, author of The Primer of Italian Literature, commented on Leopardi’s style and mastery of language: ‘He opens every little scratch, and probes, if he does not poison, the wounds of suffering humanity. Yet in all this he is the reverse of a fanatic. He argues dexterously, in the finest of literary styles.’ Unfortunately, Leopardi spent most of his life with ill health and growing blindness. As a result of his medical conditions, he was confined to Recanati for a long period of time but over his lifetime was able to travel to Rome, Florence, Milan, Bologna, and Pisa. In 1837, he died of cholera in Naples.
June 29, 1879
Zsigmond Móricz (June 29, 1879, Tiszacsécse — September 4, 1942) was a major Hungarian novelist and Social Realist.
June 29, 1930
Slawomir Mrozek (born 29 June 1930) is a Polish dramatist and writer. Mrozek joined the Polish United Workers' Party during the reign of Stalinism in the People's Republic of Poland, and made a living as a political journalist. In the late 1950s Mrozek begun writing plays. His first play, Policja (THE POLICE), was published in 1958. Mrozek emigrated to France in 1963 and then further to Mexico. He traveled in France, England, Italy, Yugoslavia and other European countries. In 1996 he returned to Poland and settled in Kraków. His first full-length play ‘Tango’ (1964) - a family saga - is still along with ‘The Emigrants’ (a bitter and ironic portrait of two Polish emigrants in Paris) his best-known work, and continue to be performed throughout the world. Director Andrzej Wajda made a theatre production of ‘The Emigrants’ in 1975 at the Teatr Stary in Kraków. In 2006 Mrozek released his autobiography called ‘Baltazar’. Mrozek's works belong to the genre of Theatre of the Absurd, intended to shock the audience with non-realistic elements, political and historic references, distortion and parody. In 1953, during the reign of Stalinism in Poland, Mrozek was one of several signatories of an open letter to Polish authorities participating in defamation of Catholic priests from Kraków, three of whom were condemned to death (but never executed) by the communist government after being groundlessly accused of treason.
June 29, 1922
Vasko Popa (June 29, 1922 - January 5, 1991) was a Serbian poet of Romanian descent. Popa was born in the village of Grebenac, Vojvodina, Yugoslavia (present-day Serbia). After finishing high school, he enrolled as a student of the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy. He continued his studies at the University of Bucharest and in Vienna. During World War II, he fought as a partisan and was imprisoned in a German concentration camp in Beckerek (today Zrenjanin, Serbia). After the war, in 1949, Popa graduated from the Romanic group of the Faculty of Philosophy at Belgrade University. He published his first poems in the magazines Književne novine (Literary Magazine) and the daily Borba (Struggle). From 1954 until 1979 he was the editor of the publishing house Nolit. In 1953 he published his first major verse collection, Kora (Bark). His other important work included Nepocin-polje (No-Rest Field, 1956), Sporedno nebo (Secondary Heaven, 1968), Uspravna zemlja (Earth Erect, 1972), Vucja so (Wolf Salt, 1975), and Od zlata jabuka (Apple of Gold, 1978), an anthology of Serbian folk literature. His Collected Poems, 1943–1976, a compilation in English translation, appeared in 1978, with an introduction by the British poet Ted Hughes. On May 29, 1972 Vasko Popa founded The Literary Municipality Vršac and originated a library of postcards, called Slobodno lišce (Free Leaves). In the same year, he was elected to become a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Vasko Popa is one of the founders of Vojvodina Academy of Sciences and Arts, established on December 14, 1979 in Novi Sad. He is the first laureate of the Branko’s award (Brankova nagrada) for poetry, established in honour of the poet Branko Radicevic. In the year 1957 Popa received another award for poetry, Zmaj’s Award (Zmajeva nagrada), which honours the poet Jovan Jovanovic Zmaj. In 1965 Popa received the Austrian state award for European literature. In 1976 he received the Branko Miljkovic poetry award, in 1978 the Yugoslav state AVNOJ Award, and in 1983 the literary award Skender Kulenovic. In 1995, the town of Vršac established a poetry award named after Vasko Popa. It is awarded annually for the best book of poetry published in Serbian language. The award ceremony is held on the day of Popa’s birthday, 29 June. Vasko Popa died on January 5, 1991 in Belgrade and is buried in the Aisle of the Deserving Citizens in Belgrade’s New Cemetery. Vasko Popa wrote in a succinct modernist style that owed much to surrealism and Serbian folk traditions (via the influence of Serbian poet Momcilo Nastasijevic) and absolutely nothing to the Socialist Realism that dominated Eastern European literature after World War II; in fact, he was the first in post-World War II Yugoslavia to break with the Socialist Realism. He created a unique poetic language, mostly elliptical, that combines a modern form, often expressed through colloquial speech and common idioms and phrases, with old, oral folk traditions of Serbia – epic and lyric poems, stories, myths, riddles, etc. In his work, earthly and legendary motifs mix, myths come to surface from the collective subconscious, the inheritance and everyday are in constant interplay, and the abstract is reflected in the specific and concrete, forming a unique and extraordinary poetic dialectics.In The New York Times obituary, the author mentions that the English poet Ted Hughes lauded Popa as an ‘epic poet’ with a ‘vast vision’. The author also mentions that in his introduction to ‘Vasko Popa: Collected Poems 1943-1976,’ translated by Anne Pennington Hughes says: ‘As Popa penetrates deeper into his life, with book after book, it begins to look like a universe passing through a universe. It is one of the most exciting things in modern poetry, to watch this journey being made.’ Since his first book of verse, Kora (Bark), Vasko Popa has gained steadily in stature and popularity. His poetic achievement - eight volumes of verse written over a period of thirty eight years - has received extensive critical acclaim both in his native land and beyond. He is one of the most translated Serbian poets and at the time he had become one of the most influential World poets.
June 29, 1937
Michael Rogin (Born: June 29, 1937, Mount Kisco, NY - Died: November 25, 2001, Paris, France) was Robson Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include ‘Ronald Reagan,’ the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (California, 1987). Rogin was born on June 29, 1937, in Mt. Kisco, New York, and received his bachelor's degree summa cum laude in government from Harvard University in 1958. He did graduate work at the University of Chicago, where he gained his master's degree in 1959 and his doctorate in political science, in 1962. Rogin began teaching in the UC Berkeley Political Science Department in 1963 and remained there throughout an uncommonly distinguished career. His eight books and numerous articles and essays earned him a preeminent place in the United States and Europe among scholars of politics who valued the breadth and originality of his work and its interdisciplinary character. ‘He invented ways of thinking about things,’ said UC Berkeley law professor Robert Post, who co-authored the 1998 book ‘Race and Representations’ with Rogin. ‘He was just so perceptive and so much his own vision. No one can duplicate that.’ Rogin's books include ‘The Intellectuals and McCarthy’ (1967), which he described as ‘a Gothic horror story disguised as Social Science;’ ‘Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian’ (1975); ‘Subversive Genealogy: the Politics and Art of Herman Melville’ (1983); ‘'Ronald Reagan,' the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology’ (1987); ‘Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot’ (1996); and ‘Independence Day, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Enola Gay’ (1998). Rogin's work appealed to and offended the preconceptions of a wide variety of academics. It inspired numerous conferences, colloquia and controversies and drew countless invitations for him to speak at universities across the United States and Europe. His book on Ronald Reagan attracted the attention of the media (Rogin was interviewed on CBS TV's ‘60 Minutes’) and the general public. He served on the editorial committee of UC Press for several decades and wrote numerous articles and reviews for journals, including the London Review of Books, for which he became a frequent contributor. Colleagues and students remember Rogin as a prolific, wide-ranging author and a master teacher and mentor of graduate students and undergraduates alike. In the classroom, Rogin was known for speaking in staccato sentences, firing away questions that prodded students and exposed them to new ways of thinking. When Rogin first came to UC Berkeley he taught American Politics, then branched out to teach broader, more interdisciplinary courses in the humanities and social sciences. This included courses on film, Marxism, race and racism, and feminism.
June 29, 1900
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (officially Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint Exupéry 29 June 1900 – 31 July 1944) was a French aristocrat, writer, poet, and pioneering aviator.
June 29, 1932
Circe Maia is a Uruguayan poet, essayist, translator, and teacher of philosophy. She is the author of eleven poetry collections including Superficies, Breve Sol and Dualidades. She has received the Medalla Delmira Agustini, 2013; the Premio Bartolomé Hidalgo, 2010; and the Premio Nacional de Poesía de Uruguay, 2007. Jesse Lee Kercheval is a poet, novelist, and translator. She is the author of 13 books including the poetry collections Extranjera and Dog Angel and editor of América invertida: an anthology of younger Uruguayan poets. She is the Zona Gale Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
June 29, 1939
Marcel Bénabou (born June 29, 1939) is a scholar of Roman history, a novelist, and, since 1970, the Definitively Provisional Secretary of the Oulipo. His first and latest books are Résistance africaine à la romanisation (1976) and Ecrire sur Tamara (2002). Three of his novels have been published in English by the University of Nebraska Press: Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books (1996), Dump This Book While You Still Can! (2001), and, winner of the National Jewish Book Award, Jacob, Menahem, and Mimoun: A Family Epic (1998).
June 29, 1941
Kwame Ture (born Stokely Carmichael, June 29, 1941, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago – November 15, 1998, Conakry, Guinea) was a Trinidadian-American who became a prominent figure in the Civil Rights Movement and the global Pan-African movement. He grew up in the United States from the age of 11 and became an activist while he attended Howard University. He would eventually become active in the Black Power movement, first as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), later as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party (BPP), and lastly as a leader of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party (A-APRP).
June 29, 1948
Gayle Pemberton was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. She holds a B.A. degree in English from the University of Michigan and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University. She is the author of The Hottest Water in Chicago: Notes of a Native Daughter and numerous essays on American literature and culture. A former Guggenheim Foundation, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute and Ford Foundation fellow, Pemberton is Professor of English Emerita at Wesleyan University. She lives in Massachusetts with her Welsh Terrier, Ella.
June 29, 1936
David Rudkin is a dramatist and screenwriter of forty years’ standing. His recent screenplays include Testimony (1987), for which he was awarded the New York Film Festival Gold Medal.
June 29, 1839
Iginio Ugo Tarchetti (29 June 1839 – 25 March 1869) was an Italian author, poet, and journalist. Born in San Salvatore Monferrato, his military career was cut short by ill health, and in 1865 he settled in Milan. Here he entered literary study, becoming part of the Scapigliatura, a literary movement animated by a spirit of rebellion against traditional culture. He worked on several newspapers and published a torrent of short stories, novels, and poems. He contracted tuberculosis and died in poverty at the age of 29. Tarchetti published his plagiarized translation of "The Mortal Immortal" (1833) by Mary Shelley as "The Elixir of Immortality", with small but significant changes but without attribution. He also appropriated foreign texts in the Gothic tradition, such as works by E. T. A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe and Theophile Gautier. Lawrence Venuti, who discovered the antecedents of "Mortal Immortal" while translating Tarchetti's Fantastic Tales, considers his appropriation as serving the social agenda of Scapigliatura. Fantastic Tales was the first ever translation of Tarchetti into English.
June 29, 1938
Peter Wollen (born 29 June 1938 in London) is a film theorist and filmmaker. He studied English at Christ Church, Oxford. Both political journalist and film theorist, Wollen's Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969) helped to transform the discipline of film studies by incorporating the methodology of structuralism and semiotics. He has taught film at a number of universities and is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles.
June 30, 1932
Alexandre Biyidi Awala (30 June 1932 - 8 October 2001), known as Mongo Beti, was a Cameroonian writer. Though he lived in exile for many decades, Beti's life reveals an unflagging commitment to improvement of his home country. As one critic wrote after his death, ‘The militant path of this essayist, chronicler and novelist has been governed by one obsession: the quest for the dignity of African people.’The son of Oscar Awala and Régine Alomo, Alexandre was born in 1932 at Akométan, a small village 10 km from Mbalmayo, itself 45 km away from Yaoundé, capital of Cameroon. (The village's name comes from Akom ‘rock’ and Etam ‘source’: in old maps of the region, the name is written in two parts). From an early age, Beti was influenced by the currents of rebellion sweeping Africa in the wake of World War II. His father drowned when Beti was seven, and he was raised by his mother and extended family. Beti recalls arguing with his mother about religion and colonialism; he also recalls early exposure to the opinions and analysis of independence leader Ruben Um Nyobe, both in the villages and at Nyobe's private residence. He carried these views into the classroom, and was eventually expelled from the missionary school in Mbalmayo for his outspokenness. In 1945 he entered the lycée Leclerc in Yaoundé. Graduating in 1951, he came to France to continue his higher education in literature, first at Aix-en-Provence, then at the Sorbonne in Paris. By the early 1950s, Beti had turned to writing as a vehicle of protest. He wrote regularly for the journal Présence Africaine; among his pieces was a review of Camara Laye's Black Child that criticized Laye for what Beti saw as pandering to European tastes. He began his career in fiction with the short story Sans haine et sans amour (‘Without hatred or love’), published in the periodical Présence Africaine, edited by Alioune Diop, in 1953. Beti's first novel Ville cruelle (‘Cruel City’), under the pseudonym Eza Boto, followed in 1954, published in several editions of Présence Africaine. It was, however, in 1956 that he gained a widespread reputation; the publication of the novel Le pauvre Christ de Bomba (‘The poor Christ of Bomba’) created a scandal because of its satirical and biting description of the missionary and colonial world. Under pressure from the religious hierarchy, the colonial administrator in Cameroon banned the novel in the colony. This was followed by Mission terminée, 1957 (winner of the Prix Sainte Beuve 1958), and Le Roi miraculé, 1958. He also worked during this time for the review Preuves, for which he reported from Africa. He worked also as a substitute teacher at the lycée of Rambouillet. In 1959, he was named certified professor at the lycée Henri Avril in Lamballe. He took the Agrégation de Lettres classiques in 1966 and taught at the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen. from this date until 1994. Following Nyobe's assassination by French forces in 1958, however, Beti fell silent as a writer for more than a decade, remaining in exile from his homeland. After his death,Odile Tobner noted that exile was not easy on Beti; he remained tortured by his concern for his embattled country.In 1972 he re-entered the world of literature with a bang. His book Main basse sur le Cameroun, autopsie d'une décolonisation ('Cruel hand on Cameroon, autopsy of a decolonization') was censored upon its publication by the French Ministry of the Interior Raymond Marcellin on the request, brought forward by Jacques Foccart, of the Cameroon government, represented in Paris by the ambassador Ferdinand Oyono. The essay, a critical history of recent Cameroon, asserted that Cameroon and other colonies remained under French control in all but name, and that the post-independence political elites had actively fostered this continued dependence. Beti was inspired to write in part by the execution of Ernest Ouandie by the government of Cameroon. In 1974 he published Perpétue and Remember Ruben; the latter was the first in a trilogy exploring the life and impact of Nyobe. After a long judicial action, Mongo Beti and his editor François Maspéro finally obtained, in 1976, the cancellation of the ban on the publication of Main basse. Beti returned to critical and political writing at the same time that he returned to fiction. In 1978 he and his wife Odile Tobner launched the bimonthly review Peuples Noirs. Peuples africains ('Black People. African People'), which was published until 1991. This review chronicled and denounced tirelessly the evils brought to Africa by neo-colonial regimes. During this period were published the novels La ruine presque cocasse d'un polichinelle (1979), Les deux mères de Guillaume Ismaël Dzewatama futur camionneur (1983), La revanche de Guillaume Ismaël Dzewatama (1984), also Lettre ouverte aux Camerounais ou la deuxième mort de Ruben Um Nyobé (1984) and Dictionnaire de la négritude (1989, with Odile Tobner). Frustrated by what he saw as the failure of post-independence governments to bring genuine freedom to Africa, Beti adopted a more radical perspective in these works. In exile, Beti remained vitally connected to the struggle in Cameroon. Throughout the seventies and eighties, acquaintance with Beti or his work could spell trouble for a citizen of Cameroon; on numerous occasions, Beti used his connections in France to rescue one of his young readers, many of whom knew him from his periodical and his polemical essays. Ambroise Kom, arrested merely for subscribing to Peuples noirs, was saved from incarceration by Beti's actions in France on his behalf. In 1991 Mongo Beti returned to Cameroon, after 32 years of self-imposed exile. In 1993 he published La France contre l'Afrique, retour au Cameroun; this book chronicles his visits to his homeland. After retiring from teaching in 1994, he returned to Cameroon permanently. Various business endeavors in Betiland failed; eventually, he opened in Yaoundé the Librairie des Peuples noirs (Bookstore of the Black Peoples) and organized agricultural activities in his village of Akometam. The goal of the bookshop was to encourage engaged literacy in the capital, and also to provide an outlet for critical texts and authors. During this period, Beti also supported John Fru Ndi, an anglophone opposition leader. He created associations for the defence of citizens and gave to the press numerous articles of protest. The government attempted to hinder his activities. On his first return to Cameroon, police prevented him from speaking at a scheduled conference; Beti instead addressed a crowd outside the locked conference room. He was subjected in January 1996, in the streets of Yaoundé, to police aggression. He was challenged at a demonstration in October 1997. In response he published several novels: L'histoire du fou in 1994 then the two initial volumes Trop de soleil tue l'amour (1999) et Branle-bas en noir et blanc (2000), of a trilogy which would remain unfinished. He was hospitalized in Yaoundé on October 1, 2001 for acute hepatic and kidney failure which remained untreated for lack of dialysis. Transported to the hospital at Douala on October 6, he died there on October 8, 2001. Some critics noted the similarity of his death to that of his heroine Perpetua, who also died while awaiting treatment in one of the country's overburdened hospitals. From beginning to end, Beti's work was informed by two principles. In terms of style, he was a realist. In a critical statement published in 1955, he asserted that ‘Given the modern conceptions of the beautiful in literature, given at the very least these essential conceptions, if a work is realistic it has many chances of being good; if not, supposing even that it has formal qualities, it risks lacking resonance, profundity, that of which all literature has the greatest need -- the human; from which it follows that it has much less chance of being good -- if only it had some -- than a realistic work.’ Beti's fiction remains true to this credo. Thematically, Beti's work is unified by an unwavering commitment to combatting colonialism, both overt and covert. Beti's aim always, even in his harsh criticism of Cameroon's independence government, was to strengthen African autonomy and prosperity. ‘Sans haine et sans amour’, 1953, is a short story and Beti's first significant work.
June 30, 1936
Assia Djebar is the pen-name of Fatima-Zohra Imalayen (born 30 June 1936), an Algerian novelist, translator and filmmaker. Most of her works deal with obstacles faced by women, and she is noted for her feminist stance. She is ‘frequently associated with women's writing movements, her novels are clearly focused on the creation of a genealogy of Algerian women, and her political stance is virulently anti-patriarchal as much as it is anti-colonial.’ Djebar is considered to be one of North Africa's pre-eminent and most influential writers. She was elected to the Académie française on 16 June 2005, the first writer from the Maghreb to achieve such recognition. For the entire body of her work she was awarded the 1996 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
June 30, 1911
Czes?aw Mi?osz (30 June 1911 – 14 August 2004) was a Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. Regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century, he won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature.
June 30, 1939
José Emilio Pacheco Berny (June 30, 1939 – January 26, 2014) was a Mexican poet, essayist, novelist and short story writer. He is regarded as one of the major Mexican poets of the second half of the 20th century. The Berlin International Literature Festival has praised him as 'one of the most significant contemporary Latin American poets'. In 2009 he was awarded the Cervantes Prize for his literary oeuvre. He taught at UNAM, as well as the University of Maryland, College Park, the University of Essex, and many others in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. He died aged 74 in 2014 after suffering a cardiac arrest. He was awarded the following prizes: Premio Cervantes 2009, Reina Sofía Award (2009), Federico García Lorca Award (2005), Octavio Paz Award (2003), Pablo Neruda Award (2004), Ramón López Velarde Award (2003), Alfonso Reyes International Prize (2004), José Fuentes Mares National Prize for Literature (2000), National José Asunción Silva Poetry Award (1996), and Xavier Villaurrutia Prize. In 2013 he was awarded the Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings festival in Struga, Macedonia. He was elected by unanimous acclaim to the Mexican Academy (Academia Mexicana de la Lengua) on March 28, 2006. He was a member of The National College (El Colegio Nacional) since 1986.
June 30, 1938
Arturo Azuela Arriaga (June 30, 1938, Mexico City - June 7, 2012) was a Mexican writer, historian and academic. His works have been translated into six languages. SHADOWS OF SILENCE is the first of his novels to appear in English. . Elena C. Murray is a freelance translator in Mexico City.
June 30, 1909
Juan Emilio Bosch Gaviño (30 June 1909, La Vega – 1 November 2001, Santo Domingo) was a politician, historian, short story writer, essayist, educator, and the first democratically elected president of the Dominican Republic for a brief time in 1963. Previously, he had been the leader of the Dominican opposition in exile to the dictatorial regime of Rafael Trujillo for over 25 years. To this day he is remembered as an honest politician and regarded as one of the most prominent writers in Dominican literature. He founded both the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) in 1939 and the Dominican Liberation Party (PLD) in 1973.
June 30, 1956
Craige B. Champion is Associate Professor of Ancient History and Classics in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.
June 30, 1908
E. Breton De Nijs (pseudonym of Robert Nieuwenhuys (Semarang, Dutch East Indies, 30 June 1908 – Amsterdam, 8 November 1999) was a Dutch writer of Indo descent. The son of a 'Totok' Dutchman and an Indo-European mother, he and his younger brother Roelof, grew up in Batavia, where his father was the managing director of the renowned Hotel des Indes. His Indies childhood profoundly influenced his life and work. His Javanese nanny 'nènèk' (English: grandma) Tidjah and particularly his Eurasian mother created the benchmarks of his childhood environment. In his award winning book Oost-Indische spiegel, he states: "If I write about my childhood, I write about her world." and "My Indies youth was critical to my receptiveness to particular cultural patterns. It ingrained a relationship with Indonesia that is irreplaceable." Nieuwenhuys is the Nestor of Dutch Indies literature. In 1927 he (and his brother) moved to the Netherlands and enrolled in the University of Leiden, but abhorred academic life and never completed his study at the Faculty of Arts. He did however become acquainted with Indonesian nationalists studying in the Netherlands and adopted anti-colonial convictions. In 1935 he returned to the Dutch East Indies and befriended his mentor, the iconic Indo writer E. du Perron. Perron influenced him to study the literary work of P.A. Daum and upcoming writer Beb Vuyk. He joined anti-colonial magazines as a writer, researcher and critic. In 1941 he was a conscript medic in the KNIL and from 1942 to 1945 a Japanese POW. In the Japanese concentration camp Tjimahi he was part of a small group of intellectuals, including Leo Vroman and the iconic Tjalie Robinson, that for a while was able to print a camp periodical named 'Kampkroniek' (Camp Chronicles) and a pamphlet named 'Onschendbaar Domein' (Inviolable Domain). From 1945–1947 he stayed in the Netherlands to recuperate from the war and evaded the violence of the Bersiap period. In 1947 he returned to his land of birth during the continuing Indonesian revolution and set up a cultural and literary magazine in an attempt to mitigate the Dutch-Indonesian alienation via art and literature. Although Indonesian intellectuals and artists were receptive to this unique forum political developments and strong anti-Dutch sentiments surpassed all good intentions. In 1952, 4 years into Indonesian independence, Nieuwenhuys repatriated to the Netherlands. In the Netherlands Nieuwenhuys became a teacher and pursued a literary career. He became a highly influential literary scholar and author and won numerous awards throughout his career, among them the 1983 Constantijn Huygens Prize. Nieuwenhuys' magnum opus is the authoritative literary classic Mirror of the Indies: A History of Dutch Colonial Literature (Original Dutch: Oost-Indische spiegel), the main reference book regarding Dutch Indies literature.
June 30, 1685
John Gay (30 June 1685 – 4 December 1732) was an English poet and dramatist and member of the Scriblerus Club. He is best remembered for The Beggar's Opera (1728), a ballad opera. The characters, including Captain Macheath and Polly Peachum, became household names.
June 30, 1959
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (born June 30, 1959) is an American author, and former associate professor of government and social studies at Harvard University. Goldhagen reached international attention and broad criticism as the author of two controversial books about the Holocaust: Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), and A Moral Reckoning (2002). He is also the author of Worse Than War (2009), which examines the phenomenon of genocide, and The Devil That Never Dies, in which he traces a worldwide rise in virulent anti-Semitism (2013).
June 30, 1908
Robert Nieuwenhuys (Semarang, Dutch East Indies, 30 June 1908 – Amsterdam, 8 November 1999) was a Dutch writer of Indo descent. The son of a 'Totok' Dutchman and an Indo-European mother, he and his younger brother Roelof, grew up in Batavia, where his father was the managing director of the renowned Hotel des Indes. His Indies childhood profoundly influenced his life and work. His Javanese nanny 'nènèk' (English: grandma) Tidjah and particularly his Eurasian mother created the benchmarks of his childhood environment. In his award winning book Oost-Indische spiegel, he states: "If I write about my childhood, I write about her world." and "My Indies youth was critical to my receptiveness to particular cultural patterns. It ingrained a relationship with Indonesia that is irreplaceable." In 1927 he (and his brother) moved to the Netherlands and enrolled in the University of Leiden, but abhorred academic life and never completed his study at the Faculty of Arts. He did however become acquainted with Indonesian nationalists studying in the Netherlands and adopted anti-colonial convictions. In 1935 he returned to the Dutch East Indies and befriended his mentor, the iconic Indo writer E. du Perron. Perron influenced him to study the literary work of P.A. Daum and upcoming writer Beb Vuyk. He joined anti-colonial magazines as a writer, researcher and critic. In 1941 he was a conscript medic in the KNIL and from 1942 to 1945 a Japanese POW. In the Japanese concentration camp Tjimahi he was part of a small group of intellectuals, including Leo Vroman and the iconic Tjalie Robinson, that for a while was able to print a camp periodical named 'Kampkroniek' (Camp Chronicles) and a pamphlet named 'Onschendbaar Domein' (Inviolable Domain). From 1945–1947 he stayed in the Netherlands to recuperate from the war and evaded the violence of the Bersiap period. In 1947 he returned to his land of birth during the continuing Indonesian revolution and set up a cultural and literary magazine in an attempt to mitigate the Dutch-Indonesian alienation via art and literature. Although Indonesian intellectuals and artists were receptive to this unique forum political developments and strong anti-Dutch sentiments surpassed all good intentions. In 1952, 4 years into Indonesian independence, Nieuwenhuys repatriated to the Netherlands. In the Netherlands Nieuwenhuys became a teacher and pursued a literary career. He became a highly influential literary scholar and author and won numerous awards throughout his career, among them the 1983 Constantijn Huygens Prize. Nieuwenhuys' magnum opus is the authoritative literary classic Mirror of the Indies: A History of Dutch Colonial Literature (Original Dutch: Oost-Indische spiegel), the main reference book regarding Dutch Indies literature.
June 30, 1978
Dinaw Mengestu (born 30 June 1978) is an Ethiopian-American novelist and writer. In addition to three novels, he has written for Rolling Stone on the war in Darfur, and for Jane Magazine on the conflict in northern Uganda. His writing has also appeared in Harper's, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. He is the Program Director of Written Arts at Bard College. In 2007 the National Book Foundation named him a "5 under 35" honoree. Since his first book was published in 2007, he has received numerous literary awards, and was selected as a MacArthur Fellow in 2012. Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. His family left Ethiopia during the war when he was two years old and immigrated to the United States. He was raised in Peoria, Illinois, and graduated from Fenwick High School in Oak Park, Illinois. Mengestu received his B.A. in English from Georgetown University, and his MFA in fiction from Columbia University.Mengestu's début novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, was published in the United States in March 2007 by Penguin Riverhead. It tells the story of Sepha Stephanos, who fled the warfare of the Ethiopian Revolution 17 years before and immigrated to the United States. He owns and runs a failing grocery store in Logan Circle, then a poor African-American section of Washington, D.C. that is becoming gentrified. He and two fellow African immigrants, all of them single, deal with feelings of isolation and nostalgia for home. Stephanos becomes involved with a white woman and her daughter, who move into a renovated house in the neighborhood. The novel was published in the United Kingdom as Children of the Revolution in May 2007 by Jonathan Cape. It has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Mengestu's second novel, How to Read the Air, was published in October 2010. Part of the novel was excerpted in the July 12, 2010, issue of The New Yorker, after Mengestu was selected as one of their "20 under 40" writers of 2010. This novel was also the winner of the 2011 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. This literary award was established in 2007 by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation. In 2014, he was selected for the Hay Festival's Africa39 project as one of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with the potential and the talent to define the trends of the region.
June 30, 1928
Nathaniel Tarn (born June 30, 1928) is an American poet, essayist, anthropologist, and translator. He was born in Paris to a French mother and a British father. He lived in Paris until age 7, then in Belgium until age 11; when World War II began, the family moved to England. He emigrated to the United States in 1970 and taught at several American universities, primarily Rutgers, where he was a professor from 1972 until 1985. He has lived outside Santa Fe, New Mexico since his retirement from Rutgers. Tarn was educated at Lycée d'Anvers and Clifton College and graduated with degrees in history and English from King's College, Cambridge. He returned to Paris and, after some journalism and radio work, discovered anthropology at the Musée de l'Homme, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the Collège de France. A Smith-Mundt-Fulbright grant took him to the University of Chicago; he did fieldwork for his doctorate in anthropology with the Highlands Maya of Guatemala. In 1958, a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation administered by the Royal Institute of International Affairs sent him to Burma for 18 months, after which he became an instructor at London School of Economics and then lecturer in Southeast Asian Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London. Even after moving primarily to literature, he continued to write and publish anthropological work on the Highland Maya and on the sociology of Buddhist institutions, as E. Michael Mendelson. Tarn published his first volume of poetry Old Savage/Young City with Jonathan Cape in 1964 and a translation of Pablo Neruda's The Heights of Macchu Picchu in 1966 (broadcast by the BBC Third Programme 1966), and began building a new poetry program at Cape. He left anthropology in 1967. From 1967-9, he joined Cape as General Editor of the international series Cape Editions and as a Founding Director of the Cape-Goliard Press, specializing in contemporary American Poetry with emphasis on Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Louis Zukofsky and their peers and successors. He brought a great many French, other European and Latin American titles to Cape and made many visits to the U.S. as a Cape Editor. He taught English at SUNY Buffalo in the summer of 1969. In 1970, with a principal interest in the American literary scene, he immigrated to the U.S. as Visiting Professor of Romance Languages, Princeton University, and eventually became a citizen. Later he moved to Rutgers. Since then he has taught English and American Literature, Epic Poetry, Folklore and other subjects at the Universities of Pennsylvania, Colorado, and New Mexico, as well as reading and lecturing elsewhere. As poet, literary & cultural critic (Views from the Weaving Mountain, University of New Mexico Press, 1991, and "The Embattled Lyric, Stanford University Press, 2007), translator (he was the first to render Victor Segalen's "Stèles" into English, continued work on Neruda, Latin American and French poets) and editor (with many magazines), Tarn has published some thirty books and booklets in his various disciplines. He has been translated into ten foreign languages. In 1985, he took early retirement as Professor Emeritus of Poetry, Comparative Literature & Anthropology from Rutgers University and has since lived near Santa Fe, New Mexico. His interests range from bird watching, gardening, classical music, opera & ballet, and much varied collecting, to aviation and world history.
June 30, 1963
Vidar Sundstøl is the acclaimed Norwegian author of six novels, including the Minnesota Trilogy, written after he and his wife lived for two years on the north shore of Lake Superior. The Land of Dreams was nominated for the Glass Key for best Scandinavian crime novel of the year, and the series has been translated into eight languages.
June 30, 1933
Mauricio Rosencof (born June 30, 1933) is a well-known Uruguayan playwright, poet, and journalist. Since 2005 he has been Director of Culture of the Municipality of Montevideo. Louise Popkin is a translator of Latin American poetry, theater, and fiction. She lives in the Boston area.
July 1, 1892
James Mallahan Cain (1892 - 1977) was a first-rate writer of American hard-boiled crime fiction. Born in Baltimore, the son of the president of Washington College, Cain began his career as a reporter, serving in the American Expeditionary Force in World War I and writing for THE CROSS OF LORRAINE, the newspaper of the 79th Division. He returned from the war to embark on a literary career that included a professorship at St. John’s College in Annapolis and a stint at The New Yorker as managing editor before he went to Hollywood as a script writer. Cain’s famous first novel, The POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, was published in 1934 when he was forty-two, and became an instant sensation. It was tried for obscenity in Boston and was said by Albert Camus to have inspired his own book, THE STRANGER. The infamous novel was staged in 1936, and filmed in 1946 and 1981. The story of a young hobo who has an affair with a married woman and plots with her to murder her husband and collect his insurance, THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE is a benchmark of classic crime fiction and film noir. Two of Cain’s other novels, MILDRED PIERCE (1941) and DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1943), were also made into film noir classics. In 1974, James M. Cain was awarded the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America. Cain published eighteen books in all and was working on his autobiography at the time of his death.
July 1, 1949
Denis Hale Johnson (July 1, 1949, Munich, Germany - May 24, 2017, Gualala, CA) was an American writer best known for his short story collection Jesus' Son (1992) and his novel Tree of Smoke (2007), which won the National Book Award for Fiction. He also wrote plays, poetry and non-fiction.
July 1, 1946
B. Kojo Laing or Bernard Kojo Laing (born 1 July 1946) is a Ghanaian novelist and poet, whose writing is characterised by its hybridity, whereby he uses Ghanaian Pidgin English and vernacular languages alongside standard English. His first two novels in particular - Search Sweet Country(1986) and Woman of the Aeroplanes (1988) - were praised for their linguistic originality, both books including glossaries that feature the author's neologisms as well as Ghanaian words. Laing was born in Kumasi, capital of Ghana's Ashanti region, the eldest son and fourth of the six children of George Ekyem Ferguson Laing (an Anglican priest who became the first African rector of the Anglican Theological College in Ashanti) and Darling Egan. Baptized as Bernard Ebenezer, he later stopped using his English Christian name, favouring his African identity instead. After some early education in Accra, Laing in 1957 went to continue his primary and secondary schooling in Scotland, attending Bonhill Primary School and the Vale of Leven Academy in Alexandria, Dunbartonshire. He graduated from Glasgow University in 1968 with a master's degree, before returning to Ghana and joining the civil service, remaining there until 1979. He subsequently worked for five years as an administrative secretary of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana-Legon and in 1984 became head of Saint Anthony’s School in Accra. Laing emerged as a poet in the 1970s, with work ‘occasionally drawing on the techniques of surrealism’, but received significant attention only with the appearance his first novel, Search Sweet Country, which was published in 1986 to critical acclaim, and won prizes including the Valco Award and the Ghana Book Award. Search Sweet Country was reissued by McSweeney's in 2012, with an Introduction by Binyavanga Wainaina. Reviewing it in The Slate Book Review, Uzodinma Iweala writes: ‘Reading Search Sweet Country is like reading a dream, and indeed at times it feels like the magical landscapes of writers like the Nigerian Ben Okri or the Mozambican Mia Couto. Each page delivers an intense blast of vivid imagery, a world in which landscapes come to life when inanimate objects receive human characterization.... Laing ... is a master stylist, and Search Sweet Country delivers an absorbing, if demanding, world for both its characters and the reader.’ Publishers Weekly called it an ‘intricate, beautifully rambling novel ... a compelling and rewarding read’, while the reviewer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette observed: ‘'Search Sweet Country' can be read over and over, continually surprising with a fresh turn of phrase or nuance in character, always engaging, always beautiful. The search is worthwhile.’ Laing's second novel, Woman of the Aeroplanes, was published in 1988, and has drawn comparison with the work of Ayi Kwei Armah. Laing has since published two further novels: Major Gentl and Achimota Wars (1992), which also won a Valco Award in 1993, and Big Bishop Roko and the Altar Gangsters (2006). His poetry collection, Godhorse was published in 1989. Laing has also written short stories, one of which – ‘Vacancy for the Post of Jesus Christ’ – was included in The Heinemann Book of Contemporary African Stories (1992), edited by Chinua Achebe and C. L. Innes. Laing lives in Accra and since 2005 has devoted himself full-time to writing.
July 1, 1742
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1 July 1742 – 24 February 1799) was a German scientist, satirist, and Anglophile. As a scientist, he was the first to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics in Germany. Today, he is remembered for his posthumously published notebooks, which he himself called Sudelbücher, a description modeled on the English bookkeeping term 'scrapbooks', and for his discovery of the strange tree-like patterns now called Lichtenberg figures.
July 1, 1964
Kim McLarin is an American novelist. She is a former staff writer for The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Greensboro News & Record and the Associated Press. She is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston.
July 1, 1953
Harryette Mullen (born July 1, 1953), Professor of English at University of California, Los Angeles is an American poet, short story writer, and literary scholar. Mullen was born in Florence, Alabama, grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and attended graduate school at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As of 2008, she lives in Los Angeles, California. Mullen's most recent work is Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary. Mullen began to write poetry as a college student in a multicultural community of writers, artists, musicians, and dancers in Austin, Texas. As an emerging poet, Mullen received a literature award from the Black Arts Academy, a Dobie-Paisano writer’s fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters and University of Texas, and an artist residency from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. In Texas, she worked in the Artists in Schools program before enrolling in graduate school in California, where she continued her study of American literature and encountered even more diverse communities of writers and artists. Mullen was influenced by the social, political, and cultural movements of African Americans, Mexican Americans, and women in the 1960s-70s, including Civil Rights, Black Power, the Black Arts Movement, Movimiento Chicano, and feminism. Her first book, Tree Tall Woman, which showed traces of all of these influences, was published in 1981. Especially in her later books, Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, Muse & Drudge, and Sleeping with the Dictionary, Mullen frequently combines cultural critique with humor and wordplay as her poetry grapples with topics such as globalization, mass culture, consumerism, and the politics of identity. Critics, including Elisabeth Frost and Juliana Spahr, have suggested that Mullen’s poetry audience is an eclectic community of collaborative readers who share individual and collective interpretations of poems that may provoke multiple, divergent, or contradictory meanings, according to each reader’s cultural background. Mullen has taught at Cornell University, and currently teaches courses in American poetry, African American literature, and creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles. While living in Ithaca and Rochester, New York, she was a faculty fellow of the Cornell University Society for the Humanities and a Rockefeller fellow at the Susan B. Anthony Institute at University of Rochester. She has received a Gertrude Stein Award for innovative poetry, a Katherine Newman Award for best essay on U.S. ethnic literature, a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Her poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), was a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received a PEN Beyond Margins Award for her Recyclopedia (2006). She is also credited for rediscovering the novel Oreo, published in 1974 by Fran Ross. Mullen won the fourth annual Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers in 2010. She appears in the documentary film, The Black Candle, directed by M.K. Asante, Jr. and narrated by Maya Angelou.
July 1, 1909
Juan Carlos Onetti (July 1, 1909, Montevideo – May 30, 1994, Madrid) was an Uruguayan novelist and author of short stories. A high school drop-out, Onetti's first novel, El pozo, published in 1939, met with his close friends' immediate acclaim, as well as from some writers and journalists of his time. 500 copies of the book were printed, most of them left to rot at the only bookstore that sold it, Barreiro (the book was not reprinted until the 60's, with an introduction and preliminary study by Ángel Rama). Aged 30, Onetti was already working as editing secretary of the famous weekly Uruguayan newspaper Marcha. He had lived for some years in Buenos Aires, where he published short stories and wrote cinema critiques for the local media, and met and befriended the notorious novelist and journalist Roberto Arlt, author of the novels El juguete rabioso, Los siete locos, Los lanzallamas. He went on to become one of Latin America's most distinguished writers, earning Uruguay National Literature Prize in 1962. He was considered a senior member of the 'Generation of 45', a Uruguayan intellectual and literary movement: Carlos Maggi, Manuel Flores Mora, Ángel Rama, Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Idea Vilariño, Carlos Real de Azúa, Carlos Martínez Moreno, Mario Arregui, Mauricio Muller, José Pedro Díaz, Amanda Berenguer, Tola Invernizzi, Mario Benedetti, Ida Vitale, Líber Falco, Juan Cunha, among others. In 1974, he and some of his colleagues were imprisoned by the military dictatorship. Their crime: as members of the jury, they had chosen Nelson Marra's short story El guardaespaldas (i.e. ‘The bodyguard’) as the winner of Marcha's annual literary contest. Due to a series of misunderstandings (and the need to fill some space in the following day's edition), El guardaespaldas was published in Marcha, although it had been widely agreed among them that they shouldn't and wouldn't do so, knowing this would be the perfect excuse for the military to intervene, considering the subject of the story (the interior monologue of a top-rank military officer who recounts his murders and atrocious behavior, much as it was happening with the functioning regime). Onetti left his native country (and his much-loved city of Montevideo) after being imprisoned for 6 months in Colonia Etchepare, a mental institution. As soon as he was released, Onetti fled to Spain with his wife, violin player Dorotea Mühr. There he continued his career as a writer, being awarded the most prestigious literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world, the Premio Cervantes. He remained in Madrid until his death in 1994. He is interred in the Cementerio de la Almudena in Madrid.
July 1, 1934
René Victor Pilhes (born July 1, 1934) is a French writer and former publicist, born in 1934. Pilhes began working as an advertising executive at Air France then at Publicis as Creative Director and Executive Board Member, before devoting himself entirely to literature where he views society as a moralist. It is also a director of TF1. He was married December 19, 1959 to Nicole Ingrand, with whom he has three children: Nathalie, Laurent, Maria. His best known work is The Curse
July 1, 1804
Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin (1 July 1804 – 8 June 1876), best known by her pseudonym George Sand, was a French novelist and memoirist. She is equally well known for her much publicized romantic affairs with a number of artists, including the composer and pianist Frédéric Chopin and the writer Alfred de Musset.
July 1, 1921
Walter Kaufmann (July 1, 1921, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany - September 4, 1980, Princeton, NJ) was a professor of philosophy at Princeton University. He is the author, editor, or translator of many books on philosophy, religion, and poetry. His poetry has appeared in books and magazines, and he has contributed articles and essays to encyclopedias, books, and scholarly periodicals, including Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, Commentary, The New Leader, Harper’s, and The American Scholar.
July 1, 1945
Susham Bedi (born 1 July 1945) is an Indian author of novels, short stories and poetry, currently living in the United States. She was a professor of Hindi language and literature at the department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) at Columbia University, New York. She writes predominantly about the experiences of Indians in the South Asian diaspora, focusing on psychological and 'interior' cultural conflicts. Unlike other prominent Indian American novelists she writes mainly in Hindi rather than in English. She has been widely translated into English, French, Dutch and other languages by artists, academics, and students. She was an actress in India in the 1960s and early 1970s. More recently in the United States she has appeared on such shows as True Crime: New York City, Third Watch, and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and in movies such as The Guru (2002) and ABCD (1999). She is the mother of the actress Purva Bedi. In 2007 she was awarded 100,000 rupees by Uttar Pradesh Hindi Sansthan for her contributions to Hindi language and literature. In January 2006 she was honored by Sahitya Academy in Delhi for her contributions to Hindi literature.
July 1, 1952
William Louis DeAndrea (July 1, 1952 - October 9, 1996) was an American mystery writer and columnist. DeAndrea was born in Port Chester, New York in 1952 and was educated at Syracuse University. During the 1980s his job took him to Europe, first to Paris and then London; on his return to the United States he settled in Litchfield County, Connecticut. He won three Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, the first for his first novel, Killed in the Ratings. The majority of his novels made up several series. The Matt Cobb mysteries drew on DeAndrea's experience working for a major American television network. The Niccolo Benedetti mysteries paid homage to great detectives such as Nero Wolfe. (DeAndrea was an active member of The Wolfe Pack when he lived in New York.) The Clifford Driscoll series ventured into the realm of the spy thriller, while the Lobo Blacke/Quinn Booker series of historical mysteries were set in the old West. DeAndrea was also the author of the J’Accuse! column in the Armchair Detective, a fanzine published by Mysterious Press. He won his third Edgar in 1994 for his reference work, Encyclopedia Mysteriosa. In 1982, he participated in the intercontinental quiz show Top of the World, which pitted contestants via satellite from Australia, the US and the UK. DeAndrea emerged as the American champion (thanks to his knowledge of Ellery Queen) and was invited to the final in London, but lost out to British insurance broker James Eccleson. He was married to mystery writer Jane Haddam, and died on October 9, 1996.
July 1, 1952
Barry Eichengreen is George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
July 1, 1920
Oakley Maxwell Hall (July 1, 1920 – May 12, 2008) was an American novelist. He was born in San Diego, California, graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and served in the Marines during World War II. Some of his mysteries were published under the pen names "O.M. Hall" and "Jason Manor." Hall received his Master of Fine Arts in English from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.
July 2, 1877
HERMANN HESSE was born in Württemberg, Germany in 1877. His parents first met at a mission in India, and the repressive piety of his upbringing contributed towards his attempted suicide in 1892. He was determined to be ‘a writer and nothing else’. A major breakthrough came with the novel Peter Camenzind (1904), and in the same year he married his first wife, who bore him three sons. In 1912, the family moved to Switzerland, but his wife’s schizophrenia, the death of his father, and the illness of his youngest son caused Hesse to suffer a breakdown. His subsequent interest in psychiatry–he got to know Carl Jung personally–and his lifelong fascination with Indian religions had a profound influence on his novels, which he called ‘biographies of the soul’ (e.g. Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, The Glass Bead Game). He married twice more. In 1946 Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, though later he devoted much of his time to painting water-colours. He died in 1962 in Montagnola, Switzerland, where he is buried.
July 2, 1956
Cynthia Kadohata is the author of the novel The Floating World. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and Grand Street. She is the recipient of a 1991 Whiting Writers Fellowship and lives in Los Angeles.
July 2, 1963
Mark James Patrick Kermode (2 July 1963) is an English film critic, presenter, writer, and musician. He is the chief film critic for The Observer, contributes to the magazine Sight & Sound, and co-presents the BBC Radio 5 Live show Kermode and Mayo's Film Review and the BBC Two arts programme The Culture Show. Kermode writes and presents a film-related video blog for the BBC, and is a member of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. Kermode is a founding member of the skiffle band the Dodge Brothers, for which he plays double bass.
July 2, 1923
Wislawa Szymborska-Wlodek (2 July 1923 – 1 February 2012) was a Polish poet, essayist, translator and recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Prowent, which has since become part of Kórnik, she later resided in Kraków until the end of her life. She was described as a ‘Mozart of Poetry’. In Poland, Szymborska's books have reached sales rivaling prominent prose authors: although she once remarked in a poem, ‘Some Like Poetry’ (‘Niektórzy lubia poezje’), that no more than two out of a thousand people care for the art. Szymborska was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality’. She became better known internationally as a result of this. Her work has been translated into English and many European languages, as well as into Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and Chinese.
July 2, 1930
Ootupulackal Velukkuty Vijayan (2 July 1930 – 30 March 2005), commonly known as O. V. Vijayan, was an Indian author and cartoonist, who was an important figure in modern Malayalam language literature. Best known for his first novel Khasakkinte Itihasam (1969), Vijayan has six novels, nine short-story collections, and nine collections of essays, memoirs and reflections. Born in Palakkad in 1930, Vijayan graduated from Victoria College in Palakkad and obtained a masters degree in English literature from Presidency College, Madras. He wrote his first short story, 'Tell Father Gonsalves', in 1953. Khasakkinte Itihasam (The Legends of Khasak), Vijayan's first novel, appeared in 1969. It set off a great literary revolution and cleaved the history of Malayalam fiction into pre-Khasak and post-Khasak. While Khasakkinte Itihasam continues to be his best-known work as an angry young man, his later works, Gurusagaram (The Infinity of Grace), Pravachakante Vazhi (The Path of the Prophet) and Thalamurakal (Generations) bespeak a mature transcendentalist. Vijayan has authored many volumes of short stories, which range from the comic to the philosophical and show an astonishing diversity of situations, tones and styles. An incisive writer in English as well, Vijayan translated most of his own works from Malayalam to English. He was also an editorial cartoonist and political observer and worked for news publications including The Statesman and The Hindu.
July 2, 1869
Hjalmar Emil Fredrik Söderberg (July 2, 1869 – October 14, 1941) was a Swedish novelist, playwright, poet and journalist. His works often deal with melancholy and lovelorn characters, and offer a rich portrayal of contemporary Stockholm through the eyes of the flaneur. Söderberg is greatly appreciated in his native country, and is sometimes considered to be the equal of August Strindberg, Sweden's national author. Born in Stockholm, Söderberg began his literary course at the Swedish news daily Svenska Dagbladet, age 20. Six years later his first novel was released, Förvillelser (Delusions, 1895), written from the viewpoint of a young dandy aimlessly idling in the capital, recklessly squandering money and love. The somber yet reflective and insightful story would prove typical of much of Söderberg's output. Subsequent to the release of Historietter (Anecdotes, 1898), a collection of twenty short stories, his next major work - Martin Bircks Ungdom (Martin Birck's Youth, 1901) - was released. Much like Förvillelser in terms of its vivid environmental depiction and acute perception, it follows the development of a young amateur poet. Söderberg's next novel, by some considered his masterpiece, was Doktor Glas (Doctor Glas, 1905). In a frightful tale of vengeance and passion, Söderberg stays true to his detached yet emotionally poignant writing style. In his later years, Söderberg turned to journalism and theological studies. He was a fierce critic of Nazism, and wrote often on the subject in the revered Resistance paper Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning . He died in Denmark and is buried on Vestre Kirkegård in Copenhagen. Söderberg was married to Märta Abenius (b. 1871, d. 1932) between the years 1899-1917. They had three children: actress Dora Söderberg-Carlsten (b. 1899), Tom Söderberg (b. 1900) and Mikael Söderberg (b. 1903). From 1917 he was married in Denmark to Emelie Voss (b. 1876, d. 1957), with whom he had one child: actress Betty Søderberg (b. 1910). Söderberg had for a number of years a stormy on / off relationship with Maria von Platen (b. 1871, d.1959), a relationship which is said to have influenced him in his writing, especially his 1906 play Gertrud, and for the character of Lydia in The Serious Game. A recent reissue of Paul Britten Austin's translation of Doktor Glas into English, as Doctor Glas, and with a perceptive introduction by Margaret Atwood, has meant a rise in his popularity in the Anglo-Saxon literary world.
July 2, 1906
Josef Bor (July 2, 1906 - January 31, 1979, Prague, Czech Republic), Czech-Jewish author, was deported with all his family in 1942. He lost all his family, but was saved in the last moment.
July 2, 1908
Kurt R. Eissler (2 July 1908 – 17 February 1999) was an Austrian psychoanalyst and a close associate and follower of Sigmund Freud. K. R. Eissler took a PHD in psychology at Vienna University in 1934, and underwent a training analysis with August Aichhorn. His first psychoanalytic contribution, an article on early female development, was published in 1939, to be followed by others on anorexia nervosa and shock treatment. With the Anchluss, Eissler moved to the States, where he developed into a combative supporter of the Freudian theory. Of his twelve, often heated and extensive books, some half dealt with issues in Freud's life and work, the other half with figures from high culture such as Shakespeare and Goethe. Eissler provided a spirited defence of the death drive, and introduced the term 'parameter' to codify deviations from pure interpretation in the Freudian tradition. He saw creative art as emanating from an asocial element in the artist's mind, and as offering a form of conflict-resolution that need not be shared by the artist themselves. He also considered that some forms of regression were of benefit to the artist in enabling them to break out of the traditional pattern that he has been forced to integrate through the identifications necessitated and enforced by the oedipal constellation. Eissler is also known for his work in establishing and filling the Sigmund Freud Archives, a wide-ranging collection of primary material relating to the life of Freud. The collection has not, however, proved uncontroversial. The historian Peter Gay commended Eissler on the one hand for his industry in preserving so much otherwise scattered and ephemeral material, but on the other hand challenged (on several occasions) his policy of restricting scholarly access to the said material. Controversy also surrounded his choice of successor for the Sigmund Freud Archives. Janet Malcolm described Eissler as a singular mixture of brilliance, profundity, originality, and moral beauty on the one hand, and wilfulness, stubbornness, impetuosity, and maddening guilessness on the other. He was also an atheist.
July 2, 1951
Jack Gantos (born July 2, 1951) is an American author of children's books. He is best known for the fictional characters Rotten Ralph and Joey Pigza. Rotten Ralph is a cat who stars in ten picture books written by Gantos and illustrated by Nicole Rubel from 1976 to 2011. Joey Pigza is a boy with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), featured in four novels from 1998 to 2007. Gantos won the 2012 Newbery Medal from the American Library Association (ALA), recognizing Dead End in Norvelt as the previous year's ‘most distinguished contribution to American literature for children’. Dead End also won the 2012 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction and made the Guardian Prize longlist in Britain. His 2002 memoir Hole in My Life was a runner up for the ALA Printz Award and Sibert Medal. Previously Gantos was a finalist for the U.S. National Book Award and a finalist for the Newbery Medal for two Joey Pigza books.
July 2, 1905
Tatsuz? Ishikawa (July 2, 1905—January 31, 1985) was a Japanese author. He was the winner of the first Akutagawa Prize. Born in Yokote, Akita Prefecture, Japan, Ishikawa was raised in several places, including Kyoto and Okayama Prefecture. He entered Waseda University's literature department but left before graduating. In 1930 he left Japan for Brazil and worked on a farm. Ishikawa won the first Akutagawa Prize in 1935 for S?b?, a novel based on his experiences in Brazil. In December 1937, Ishikawa was dispatched to Nanjing as a special reporter by the Ch?? K?ron publishing company. After landing in Shanghai, he arrived in Nanjing in January 1938, weeks after the fall of the city to the Imperial Japanese Army. Embedded in a squadron later connected to the Nanking Massacre, Ishikawa wrote a fictional account of the atrocities suffered by Chinese civilians as well as the widespread pessimism of the Japanese soldiers. Due to its controversial subject matter, nearly one-fourth of its contents was censored even before it was scheduled to be serialized in Ch?? K?ron.
July 2, 1843
Antonio Labriola (July 2, 1843 – February 12, 1904) was an Italian Marxist theoretician. Although an academic philosopher and never an active member of any Marxist political party, his thought exerted influence on many political theorists in Italy during the early 20th century, including the founder of the Italian Liberal Party, Benedetto Croce and the leaders of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci and Amadeo Bordiga. Labriola was born in Cassino (then in the Papal States), the son a schoolteacher. In 1861, he entered the University of Naples. Upon graduating, he remained in Naples and became a schoolteacher. During this period, he pursued an interest in philosophy, history and ethnography. The early 1870s saw Labriola take up journalism and his writings from this time express liberal and anticlerical views. In 1874, Labriola was appointed as a professor in Rome, where he was to spend the rest of his life teaching, writing and debating. Although he had been critical of liberalism since 1873, his move towards Marxism was gradual, and he did not explicitly express a socialist viewpoint until 1889. He died in Rome on 2 February 1904. Heavily influenced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Johann Friedrich Herbart, Labriola's approach to Marxist theory was more open-ended than the orthodoxy of theorists such as Karl Kautsky. He saw Marxism not as a final, self-sufficient schematisation of history, but rather as a collection of pointers to the understanding of human affairs. These pointers needed to be somewhat imprecise if Marxism was to take into account the complicated social processes and variety of forces at work in history. Marxism was to be understood as a 'critical theory', in the sense that it sees no truths as everlasting, and was ready to drop its own ideas if experience should so dictate. His description of Marxism as a 'philosophy of praxis' would appear again in Gramsci's Prison Notebooks.
July 2, 1910
H. G. ADLER (July 2, 1910, Prague, Czech Republic - August 21, 1988, London, United Kingdom) was the author of twenty-six books of fiction, poetry, philosophy, and history. A survivor of the Holocaust, Adler later settled in England and began writing novels about his experience. Working as a freelance writer and teacher throughout his life, Adler died in London in 1988.
July 2, 1930
Ota Pavel (born Otto Popper) (2 July 1930 in Prague – 31 March 1973 in Prague) was a Czech writer, journalist and sport reporter. He is primarily an author of autobiographical and biographical novels. He was born in Prague as the third and youngest son of Jewish travelling salesman Leo Popper. During World War II his father and both his older brothers were imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps (his brother Ji?í was imprisoned in Mauthausen). Otto remained with their mother, who was of non-Jewish origin,[citation needed] in Bušt?hrad. Young Otto briefly worked as a miner in the Kladno Region. His father and both brothers survived Nazi imprisonment and returned home after the end of the World War. In 1960 Otto graduated at the St?ední škola pro pracující (High School for Workers). He was an enthusiastic hockey player and played on the junior team of HC Sparta Praha, but his hopes for a professional ice-hockey career were dashed by a serious illness and tonsillectomy. He stayed on with Sparta for a short time to train its junior team. In 1949 his close friend Arnošt Lustig recommended him to concentrate on writing, and as a result, Popper was engaged as a sports reporter by Czechoslovak Radio.In 1955 he changed his name to Ota Pavel. From 1956 to 1957 he was a sports reporter for the journal Stadion (Stadium), then contributed for a few years to the army journal ?eskoslovenský voják (Czechoslovak Soldier). His first literary attempts (mainly short sport-related feuilletons) were published in Stadion. His work as a journalist took him to the Soviet Union. He was also allowed to travel to Western countries, including France and Switzerland. In 1962 he visited the USA with the Czech football team Dukla Prague. During the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck he showed signs of the mental illness that would later end his official journalistic career. He later described the episode in his book 'Jak jsem potkal ryby': 'I went mad at the winter Olympics in Innsbruck. My brain got cloudy, as if a fog from the Alps had enveloped it. In that condition I came face to face with one gentleman - the Devil. He looked the part! He had hooves, fur, horns, and rotten teeth that looked hundreds of years old. With this figure in my mind I climbed the hills above Innsbruck and torched a farm building. I was convinced that only a brilliant bonfire could burn off that fog. As I was leading the cows and horses from the barn, the Austrian police arrived...' Following this he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. In 1966 the effects of this disease led to his retirement and thereafter several admissions to mental hospitals for treatment. This difficult period in his life was also his most creative, in which he produced his strongest and most lyrical collections, including 'How I Came to Know Fish'. He died of a heart attack in 1973 in Prague and is buried at the New Jewish cemetery in Prague-Žižkov, next to his father. Ota Pavel's work was focused on sports, especially fishing. Some of his works were adapted for the film: Zlatí úho?i (Golden Eels) (starring Vladimír Menšík) and Smrt krásných srnc?. Two of his books, Golden Eels and How I Came to Know Fish were translated into English.
July 2, 1922
Gregorio Selser (July 2, 1922 — August 27, 1991) was an Argentine journalist and historian. He published an extensive bibliography critical of globalization, imperialism, and covert operations implemented by the CIA in Latin America, in particular. Selser was born in Buenos Aires. He earned a degree in Journalism at the University of Buenos Aires, and in 1955, was hired by the Uruguayan weekly journal, Marcha, as its chief Argentine correspondent. That year, he published his first book, a biography on Nicaraguan nationalist Augusto Sandino. He returned to Buenos Aires in 1956, and joined the editorial board of La Prensa. Selser joined the IPS news agency in 1964. He and his family left Argentina following the March 1976 coup, and was hired as researcher by the Latin American Institute of Latin American Studies (ILET). His three daughters, Irene, Gabriela and Claudia Selser, each became journalists in their own right. Selser was recognized by critics as "a Latin Americanist committed to freedom and justice." His books covered a wide array of contentious Latin American issues and events, including the 1903 Separation of Panama from Colombia, the installation of the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua, the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, the Alliance for Progress, the 1964 overthrow of Dominican Republic President Juan Bosch and the subsequent U.S. occupation, the 1973 coup in Chile, psy-ops carried out in Latin America, the 1980 Cocaine Coup in Bolivia, the Salvadoran Civil War, the 1989 Operation Just Cause, and other topics. Selser would be afflicted with a terminal illness, and he committed suicide in Mexico City in 1991.
July 2, 1924
Francis Guy Percy Wyndham (born 2 July 1924) is an English author, literary editor and journalist. Francis Wyndham was born in London in 1924 to Violet Lutetia Leverson and Guy Percy Wyndham. His mother was the daughter and biographer of the writer Ada Leverson (a friend of Oscar Wilde, whom Wilde called "Sphynx"). His father was a retired soldier and diplomat, had been a member of "The Souls", and was significantly older than his mother ("more like a grandfather really"). Francis also has a brother and, from his father's earlier marriage, a half-brother and half-sister, the photographer Olivia Wyndham (another son from this earlier marriage had died in the First World War). He graduated from Eton in 1940, spent a year at Oxford University and then was drafted into the army in 1942 until it was discovered he was suffering from TB. He was discharged and returned to London, where he began writing reviews for The Times Literary Supplement and short stories (collected in Out of the War). From 1953 he worked in publishing, first for Derek Verschoyle and then for André Deutsch as a reader (where he became involved with the writing careers of, and friends with, Bruce Chatwin, V. S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys and Edward St Aubyn). He left to become an editor at Queen magazine and in 1964 was hired by The Sunday Times (moving with his friend Mark Boxer), where he stayed until 1980. He became Jean Rhys' literary executor after her death in 1979.
July 2, 1929
SAMUEL F. YETTE was a Washington correspondent for Newsweek. Before that, he was special assistant to the director of the Office of Economic Opportunity and executive secretary of the Peace Corps. Other journalistic jobs he has held include being a reporter for the Afro-American in Baltimore and Washington and for the Dayton (Ohio) Journal Herald and an associate editor of Ebony. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he covered the black resurgence for civil rights, including the Montgomery Bus boycott, the Clinton (Tennessee) school riots, the Freedom Rides and the formative meetings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
July 2, 1923
Cyril M. Kornbluth (July 2, 1923 – March 21, 1958) was a member of the Futurians (a group of SF writers and fans in the late 1930s, who greatly influenced the course of the Science Fiction field). Known for his insightful, cynical and humorous stories, he began writing professionally at the age of 15. As an infantryman in WW Il, he fought in the Battle of the Bulge, for which he was decorated. He attended the University of Chicago before becoming a news wire-service reporter. Rising to become bureau editor, Kornbluth quit in 1951 to write full-time, but died of a heart attack at the age of 35. A prolific writer both in the SF field and other genres, he wrote over a hundred stories and twenty-eight books, by himself and with others. Kombluth is best known for his collaborations, such as the Gunner Cade stories with Judith Merril. His more extensive collaborative work with Frederik Pohl resulted in such books as Critical Mass, Gladiator-At-Law, The Space Merchants and short stories like "Best Friend," "The Castle on Outerplanet," "The Engineer," "A Gentle Dying," "Gravy Planet," "Mars-Tube," and "Mute Inglorious Tam." In 1973 Kornbluth and Pohl's short story "The Meeting" won the Hugo award. Kornbluth used a variety of pen-names, including Cecil Corwin, S. D. Gottesman, Edward J. Bellin, Kenneth Falconer, Walter C. Davies, Simon Eisner, Jordan Park, Arthur Cooke, Paul Dennis Lavond and Scott Mariner. The ‘M’ in Kornbluth's name may have been in tribute to his wife, Mary Byers; Kornbluth's colleague and collaborator Frederik Pohl confirmed Kornbluth's lack of any actual middle name in at least one interview.
July 3, 1943
CECIL BROWN was born in North Carolina in 1943. He attended Columbia University and the University of Chicago. Mr. Brown has taught film and writing, most recently at the University of California at Berkeley. He has written numerous plays, short stories, and films scripts - including Which Way Is Up?, which he co-authored. His first novel, THE LIFE AND LOVES OF MR. JIVEASS NIGGER, was published in 1969. Mr. Brown Lives in Berkeley, California.
July 3, 1886
Francis Carco (July 3, 1886, Nouméa, New Caledonia - May 26, 1958, Paris, France) was a French author, born at Nouméa, New Caledonia. He was a poet, belonging to the Fantaisiste school, a novelist, a dramatist, and art critic for L'Homme libre and Gil Blas. During the War he became aviation pilot at Étampes, after studying at the aviation school there. His works are picturesque, painting as they do the street life of Montmartre, and being written often in the argot of Paris. He has been called the ‘romancier des apaches.’ His memoir, The Last Bohemia: From Montmartre to the Latin Quarter, contains reminiscences of Bohemian life in Paris during the early years of the twentieth century. He had an affair with Katherine Mansfield in 1915. Carco held the ninth seat at Académie Goncourt from 1937–1958. He is buried in Cimetière de Bagneux.
July 3, 1832
María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (July 3, 1832 – August 12, 1895) was the first female Mexican-American author to write in English. In her career she published two books: Who Would Have Thought It? (1872), The Squatter and the Don (1885), and one play: Don Quixote de la Mancha: A Comedy in Five Acts: Taken From Cervantes' Novel of That Name (1876). Ruiz de Burton's work is considered to be a precursor to Chicano literature, giving the perspective of the conquered Mexican population that, despite being granted full rights of citizenship by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, was a subordinated and marginalized national minority. Her background provided her a critical distance from the New England Protestant culture into which she was brought by her marriage to her husband, a powerful and influential Protestant Union Army General. Her life took her from coast to coast in the United States, which provided her with opportunity for first-hand observation of the U.S., its westward expansion, the American Civil War, and its aftermath. This vantage point and her status as a woman provided her with both an insider's and outsider's perspective on issues of ethnicity, power, gender, class, and race.
July 3, 1883
The son of a well-to-do merchant, FRANZ KAFKA was born in Prague in 1883 and died of tuberculosis in a sanitorium near Vienna in 1924. After earning a law degree in 1906, he worked most of his adult life at the Workers Accident Insurance Company for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague. Only a small portion of his writings were published during his lifetime; most of them, including the three unfinished novels, AMERIKA, THE TRIAL, and THE CASTLE, were published posthumously.
July 3, 1901
José Lins do Rego Cavalcanti (July 3, 1901 in Pilar Paraíba - September 12, 1957 in Rio de Janeiro) was a Brazilian novelist most known for his semi-autobiographical 'sugarcane cycle.' These novels were the basis of films that had distribution in the English speaking world. Along with Graciliano Ramos and Jorge Amado he stands as one of the greatest regionalist writers of Brazil. According to Otto Maria Carpeaux, José Lins was 'the last of the story tellers'. His first novel, Menino de Engenho ('Boy from the plantation'), was published with difficulty, but soon it got praised by the critics.
July 3, 1952
Rohinton Mistry (born 3 July 1952) is an Indian-born Canadian writer in English. Residing in Brampton, Ontario, Canada, Mistry is of Indian origin, and belongs to the Parsi community. Born in Mumbai, India, Rohinton Mistry immigrated to Canada in 1975. While attending the University of Toronto he won two Hart House literary prizes (the first to win two), for stories which were published in the Hart House Review, and Canadian Fiction Magazine's annual Contributor's Prize for 1985.
July 3, 1906
Francis Steegmuller (July 3, 1906 – October 20, 1994) was an American biographer, translator and fiction writer, who was known chiefly as a Flaubert scholar.
July 3, 1937
Sir Tom Stoppard (born Tomáš Straussler; 3 July 1937) is a Czech-born British playwright, knighted in 1997. He has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, finding prominence with plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. He co-wrote the screenplays for Brazil, The Russia House, and Shakespeare in Love, and has received one Academy Award and four Tony Awards. Themes of human rights, censorship and political freedom pervade his work along with exploration of linguistics and philosophy. Stoppard has been a key playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation.
July 3, 1948
Evelyn Coleman is the award-winning author of a dozen books for young readers as well as numerous short stories, essays and a novel for adults published over a long writing career. A resident of Atlanta, she is the author most recently of "Freedom Train," a 2008 book for young readers, which was chosen in 2010 for inclusion on the Georgia Center for the Book's first list of "25 Books All Young Georgians Should Read." Her novel is a "touching, humorous portrait" of life in the segregated South of the 1940s that focuses on a young white boy's awakening to the realities of race around him. Evelyn Coleman was born in Burlington, NC in 1948 in her grandmother's home. Her parents built their home right next door, and that is where she grew up. Her mother was a school teacher and helped inspire young Evelyn with the importance and fun of reading. In a writing career than spans more than three decades, she has written a series of young adult and juvenile books and received a number of honors for them including an Edgar Award nomination for "Shadows on Society Hill," the Georgia Author of the Year Award and the Atlanta Mayor's Literary Fellowship. Her books have received the Parents Choice Honor Book Award, the Carter G. Woodson Award, been named a Smithsonian Notable Book and been listed as a "pick" by the American bookseller's Association. Her novels for young readers, which have throughtfully explored issues of race in ways that allow children to see realities without sugar-coating or bitterness, include "The Footwarmer and the Crow" (1994), "The Glass Bottle Tree" (1995), "Cymbals" (1995), "White Socks Only" (1996), "To Be a Drum" (1998), "The Rise of Osceola McCarthy" (nonfiction biography, 1998), "Mystery of the Dark Tower" (2000), "Born in Sin" (2003), "Shadows on Society Hill" (2007) and "Circle of Fire" (2009). A film of "White Socks Only" was produced by Phoenix Films and won the Bronze Award at the WorldFest Houston Film Festival. Her adult novel, a thriller about race and eugenics set in Atlanta titled "What's a Woman Gotta Do," was published in 1999. Her adult short stories and essays have been included in several anthologies, among them "Proverbs for the People," Shades of Black: Crimes & Mysteries by African American Writers" and "Black Women Writers on motherhood." Her stories and articles also have appeared in Essence magazine, the Utne Reader, Jive and Southern Exposure. She is a past president of the Mystery Writers of America, SE, and a member of International Thriller Writers. Coleman has written of herself: "Ever since I was a small child I cared about the world at large. I wanted everything to be fair and equal. Growing up in the segregated South gave me a lot to work toward. Over the years I continue to marvel at the changes both positive and not so positive, but it always gives me hope that every day people are striving to do the right thing. I have come to understand that 'the right thing' is often shaped by a person's view of the world. And in that sense I would like my books to force people to have to look through the eyes of others, to feel empathy, to try understanding their opponents, to fight for justice for everyone." In 2012, she joined the advisory council of the Georgia Center for the Book.
July 3, 1933
Ed Cray is a longtime freelance writer who has been published in many of the country's leading newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Cray is the author of 20 published books, including General of the Army, a biography of George C. Marshall; Chief Justice, a biography of Earl Warren; and most recently Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie. He has organized an international Consortium for the Study of Biography. Cray joined the School of Journalism faculty as an adjunct instructor in 1976. He is now a tenured professor. He earned a B.S. degree in anthropology from UCLA in 1957, then spent 18 months as a graduate student studying anthropology, folklore and ethnomusicology. He lives in Santa Monica. He has three adult children.
July 3, 1888
Ramón Gómez de la Serna Puig (July 3, 1888 in Madrid – January 13, 1963 in Buenos Aires) was a Spanish writer, dramatist and avant-garde agitator. He strongly influenced surrealist film maker Luis Buñuel. Ramón Gómez de la Serna was especially known for "Greguerías" – a short form of poetry that roughly corresponds to the one-liner in comedy. The Gregueria is especially able to grant a new and often humorous perspective. Serna published over 90 works in all literary genres. In 1933, he was invited to Buenos Aires. He stayed there during the Spanish Civil War and the following Franco regime and died there.
July 4, 1918
Ernst Ingmar Bergman (4 July 1918 – 30 July 2007) was a Swedish director, writer and producer for film, stage and television. Described by Woody Allen as ‘probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera,’ he is recognized as one of the most accomplished and influential film directors of all time. He directed over sixty films and documentaries for cinematic release and for television, most of which he also wrote. He also directed over one hundred and seventy plays. Among his company of actors were Harriet Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Gunnar Björnstrand, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson, Ingrid Thulin and Max von Sydow. Most of his films were set in the landscape of Sweden. His work often dealt with death, illness, faith, betrayal, bleakness and insanity.
July 4, 1958
Cristina García (born July 4, 1958) is a Cuban-born American journalist and novelist. After working for Time Magazine as a researcher, reporter, and Miami bureau chief, she turned to writing fiction. Her first novel, Dreaming in Cuban (1992), received critical acclaim and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has since published her novels The Agüero Sisters (1997) and Monkey Hunting (2003), and has edited books of Cuban and other Latin American literature. Her fourth novel, A Handbook to Luck, was released in hardcover in 2007 and came out in paperback in April 2008.
July 4, 1931
Sébastien Japrisot (4 July 1931 – 4 March 2003) was a French author, screenwriter and film director, born in Marseille. His pseudonym was an anagram of Jean-Baptiste Rossi, his real name. Japrisot has been nicknamed 'the Graham Greene of France'. Famous in the Francophony, he is little known in the English-speaking world, though a number of his novels have been translated into English and have been made into films.
July 4, 1804
Nathaniel Hawthorne (born Nathaniel Hathorne; July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer. He was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, the only judge involved in the Salem witch trials who never repented of his actions. Nathaniel later added a ‘w’ to make his name ‘Hawthorne’ in order to hide this relation. He entered Bowdoin College in 1821, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1824, and graduated in 1825. Hawthorne published his first work, a novel titled Fanshawe, in 1828; he later tried to suppress it, feeling it was not equal to the standard of his later work. He published several short stories in various periodicals which he collected in 1837 as Twice-Told Tales. The next year, he became engaged to Sophia Peabody. He worked at a Custom House and joined Brook Farm, a transcendentalist community, before marrying Peabody in 1842. The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, later moving to Salem, the Berkshires, then to The Wayside in Concord. The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, followed by a succession of other novels. A political appointment took Hawthorne and family to Europe before their return to The Wayside in 1860. Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864, and was survived by his wife and their three children. Much of Hawthorne's writing centers on New England, many works featuring moral allegories with a Puritan inspiration. His fiction works are considered part of the Romantic movement and, more specifically, Dark romanticism. His themes often center on the inherent evil and sin of humanity, and his works often have moral messages and deep psychological complexity. His published works include novels, short stories, and a biography of his friend Franklin Pierce.
July 4, 1900
Born on July 4, 1900, in Paris, Robert Desnos was the son of a café owner. He attended commercial college, and then worked as a clerk before becoming a literary columnist for the newspaper Paris-Soir. He first published poems in the Dadaist magazine Littérature in 1919, and in 1922 he published his first book, Rrose Selavy, a collection of surrealistic aphorisms. While on leave in Morocco from his mandatory two years in the French Army, Desnos befriended poet Andre Breton. Together with writers Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard, Breton and Desnos would form the vanguard of literary surrealism. They practiced a technique known as ‘automatic writing,’ and many hailed Desnos as the most accomplished practitioner. Breton, in the Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924, singled out Desnos for particular praise. The technique involved drifting into a trance and then recording the associations and leaps of the subconscious mind. Desnos' poems from this time are playful (often using puns and homonyms), sensual, and serious. The 1920s were an extremely creative period for Desnos; between 1920 and 1930, he published more than eight books of poetry, including Language cuit (1923), Deuil pour deuil (1924), Journal d'une apparition (1927), and The Night of Loveless Nights (1930). In the 1930s, Desnos diverged slightly from his Surrealist peers. Breton, in his Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1930, would criticize Desnos for straying from the movement and for his journalistic work. In part, Desnos had simply grown tired of his own excesses—both in his creative and personal life. It was at this time that he married Youki Foujita and took on more commercial writing assignments for French radio and television. His poems became more direct and musical, though still maintaining some of their earlier adventurous style. Desnos continued to write throughout the decade; in 1936 he wrote a poem per day for the entire year. His published works from this time include Corps et biens (1930), and Le sans cou (1934). In 1939 at the onset of World War II, Desnos again served in the French Army. During the German occupation, he returned to Paris and under pseudonyms such as Lucien Gallois and Pierre Andier, Desnos published a series of essays that subtly mocked the Nazis. These articles combined with his work for the French Resistance led to his arrest. Desnos was sent to first to Auschwitz, and then transferred to a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. Although the Allies liberated this camp in 1945, Desnos had contracted typhoid. He died on June 8, 1945. His Selected Poems were first translated and published in English in 1972, (by William Kulik with Carole Frankel), and again in 1991 (translated by Carolyn Forché and William Kulik).
July 4, 1941
Tomaž Šalamun (July 4, 1941 – December 27, 2014) was born in 1941 in Zagreb, Croatia and raised in Koper, Slovenia. He published more than fifty books of poetry in Slovenian during his lifetime, and he is not only recognized as a leading figure of the Slovenian poetic avant-garde but is also considered one of the leading contemporary poets of Central Europe. In 1996 he became the Slovenian Cultural Attaché in New York and lived in the US intermittently until his death in 2014. His honors include the Preseren Fund Prize, the Jenko Prize, Laurel Wreath, Poetry and People Prize, Njegoš Prize, Europäsche Prize, Pushcart Prize, a visiting Fulbright to Columbia University, and a fellowship to the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Besides teaching at several distinguished universities and having his work appear in over seventy journals and magazines internationally, he has had fifteen collections of poems published in English so far. All together, his poetry has been translated into over twenty languages around the world, numbering over eighty volumes. He leaves an expanding legacy with readers and especially with the many young poets who were influenced by his work.
July 4, 1905
Lionel Mordecai Trilling (July 4, 1905 – November 5, 1975) was an American literary critic, author, and teacher. With wife Diana Trilling, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review. Although he did not establish a school of literary criticism, he is one of the leading U.S. critics of the twentieth century who traced the contemporary cultural, social, and political implications of literature. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he has been a subject of continued interest.
July 4, 1899
Benjamin Péret (4 July 1899 – 18 September 1959) was a French poet, Parisian Dadaist and a founder and central member of the French Surrealist movement with his avid use of Surrealist automatism. Benjamin Péret was born in Rezé, France on 4 July 1899. He, as a child, acquired little education due to his dislike of school and he instead attended the Local Art School from 1912. He too, however, resigned soon after in 1913 due to his sheer lack of study and willingness to do so. Afterwards he spent a short period of time in a School of Industrial Design before enlisting in the French army's Cuirassiers during the First World War to avoid being jailed for defacing a local statue with paint. He saw action in the Balkans before being deployed to Salonica, Greece. During a routine movement of his unit via train, he discovered a copy of the magazine Sic, sitting upon a bench on the station platform, which contained poetry by Apollinaire – sparking his love for poetry. Towards the end of the war, still in Greece, he suffered from an attack of Dysentery which led to his repatriation and deployment in Lorraine for the remainder of the war. After the end of the war he joined the Dada movement and soon after, in 1921, he published Le Passager du transtlantique – his first book of poetry before he abandoned the Dada movement to follow André Breton and the emerging Surrealist movement, working alongside and influencing the Mexican writer Octavio Paz. In the fall of 1924 he was the co-editor of the journal La Révolution surréaliste, becoming chief editor in 1925. And in 1928, before immigrating to Brazil in 1929 with his wife Elsie Houston, he published Le Grand Jeu. Two years later in 1931, a mere few months after the birth of his first son, Geyser, whilst living in Rio De Janeiro, he was arrested and expelled from Brazil on grounds of being a 'Communist Agitator' – having formed, with his brother-in-law Mario Pedrosa, the Brazilian Communist League which was based upon the ideas of Trotsky. Having returned to France and buffeted by the winds of politics, he fought for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. In 1940 he was imprisoned for his political activities. Upon his release he sailed for Mexico with the aid of the American-based Emergency Rescue Committee to study pre-Columbian myths and American Folklore. He had originally wished to emigrate to the United States but was unable to do so due to his Communist affiliations. Peret went to Mexico with his lover, the Spanish painter Remedios Varo. In Mexico City he became involved with the European intellectual community around the Austrian painter and surrealist Wolfgang Paalen living there in exile. He was particulaly inspired by Paalen´s huge collection and knowledge about the 'Totem Art' of the Northwestcoast of British Columbia; 1943 he finished a long essay on the necessity of poetical myths, exemplified with the mythology and art of the Northwestcoast, which was then published in New York by André Breton in VVV. Whilst living in Mexico City Peret met Nathalia Sedova, Trotsky's widow. He remained in Mexico until the end of 1947. He returned to Paris and died there on 18 September 1959.
July 4, 1901
Samuel Guy Endore (July 4, 1901 – February 12, 1970), born Samuel Goldstein and also known as Harry Relis, was an American novelist and screenwriter. During his career he produced a wide array of novels, screenplays, and pamphlets, both published and unpublished. A cult favorite of fans of horror, he is best known for his novel The Werewolf of Paris, which occupies a significant position in werewolf literature, much in the same way that Dracula does for fans of vampires. Endore is also known for his left-wing novel of the Haitian Revolution, Babouk: The Story of A Slave. He was nominated for a screenwriting Oscar for The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), and his novel Methinks the Lady . . . (1946) was the basis for Ben Hecht's screenplay for Whirlpool (1949).
July 4, 1948
Professor Njabulo Simakahle Ndebele (born 4 July 1948 in Johannesburg), an academic, a literary and a writer of fiction, is the former Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Cape Town (UCT). On November 16, 2012 he was inaugurated as the Chancellor of the University of Johannesburg. Ndebele's father was Nimrod Njabulo Ndebele and his mother was Makhosazana Regina Tshabangu. He married Mpho Kathleen Malebo on 30 July 1971. They have one son and two daughters. Ndebele was awarded a Bachelor of Arts in English and Philosophy by the University of Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland in 1973; a Master of Arts in English Literature by the University of Cambridge in 1975; and a Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing by the University of Denver in 1983. He also studied at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, where he was the first recipient of the South African Bursary. Njabulo Ndebele was Vice-Chancellor and Principal at the University of Cape Town from July 2000 to June 2008, following tenure as a scholar in residence at the Ford Foundation’s headquarters in New York. He joined the Foundation in September 1998, immediately after a five-year term of office as Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Limpopo in Sovenga, in the then Northern Province. Previously he served as Vice-Rector of the University of the Western Cape. Earlier positions include Chair of the Department of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand; and Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Dean, and Head of the English Department at the National University of Lesotho. An established novelist, Ndebele published The Cry of Winnie Mandela in 2004 to critical acclaim. An earlier publication Fools and Other Stories won the Noma Award, Africa’s highest literary award for the best book published in Africa in 1984. His highly influential essays on South African literature and culture were published in a collection Rediscovery of the Ordinary. Ndebele served as President of the Congress of South African Writers for many years. As a public figure he is known for his incisive insights in commentaries on a range of public issues in South Africa. Ndebele is also a key figure in South African higher education. He has served as Chair of the South African Universities Vice-Chancellor’s Association from 2002 to 2005, and served on the Executive Board of the Association of African Universities since 2001. He has done public service in South Africa in the areas of broadcasting policy, school curriculum in history, and more recently as chair of a government commission on the development and use of African languages as media of instruction in South African higher education. He recently became President of the AAU and Chair of the Southern African Regional Universities Association. He is also a Fellow of UCT. He holds honorary doctorates from universities in the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Japan, South Africa and the United States. The University of Cambridge awarded him an Honorary Doctorate in Law in 2006, and he was made an honorary fellow of Churchill College in 2007. In 2008 the University of Michigan awarded him another Honorary Doctorate in Law.
July 4, 1937
Richard Lee Rhodes is an American historian, journalist and author of both fiction and non-fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and most recently, Energy: A Human History.
July 4, 1095
Majd ad-D?n Us?ma ibn Murshid ibn ?Al? ibn Munqidh al-Kin?ni al-Kalbi (July 4, 1095 – November 17, 1188) was a medieval Muslim poet, author, faris (knight), and diplomat from the Banu Munqidh dynasty of Shaizar in northern Syria. His life coincided with the rise of several medieval Muslim dynasties, the arrival of the First Crusade, and the establishment of the crusader states. He was the nephew and potential successor of the emir of Shaizar, but was exiled in 1131 and spent the rest of his life serving other leaders. He was a courtier to the Burids, Zengids, and Ayyubids in Damascus, serving the Zengi, Nur ad-Din, and Saladin over a period of almost fifty years. He also served the Fatimid court in Cairo, as well as the Artuqids in Hisn Kayfa. He travelled extensively in Arab lands, visiting Egypt, Syria, Palestine and along the Tigris river, and went on pilgrimage to Mecca. He often meddled in the politics of the courts in which he served, and he was exiled from both Damascus and Cairo. During and immediately after his life he was most famous as a poet and adib (a 'man of letters'). He wrote many poetry anthologies, such as the Kitab al-'Asa ('Book of the Staff'), Lubab al-Adab ('Kernels of Refinement'), and al-Manazil wa'l-Diyar ('Dwellings and Abodes'), and collections of his own original poetry. In modern times he is remembered more for his Kitab al-I'tibar ('Book of Learning by Example' or 'Book of Contemplation'), which contains lengthy descriptions of the crusaders, whom he interacted with on many occasions, and some of whom he considered friends, although he generally saw them as ignorant foreigners. Most of his family was killed in an earthquake at Shaizar in 1157. He died in Damascus in 1188, at the age of 93.
July 4, 1899
Austin Warren (July 4, 1899 – August 20, 1986) was an American literary critic, author, and professor of English.
July 4, 1951
George Bilgere is the author of five previous poetry collections, most recently The White Museum, which was chosen by Alicia Suskin Ostriker for the Autumn House Poetry Series. His third book, The Good Kiss, was selected by Billy Collins to win the University of Akron Poetry Award. He has won numerous other awards, including the Midland Authors Award, the May Swenson Poetry Award, and a Pushcart Prize. Bilgere is the recipient of grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Commission, and the Ohio Arts Council. His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, Fulcrum, and the Best American Poetry series.
July 5, 1955
Sebastian Barry (born 5 July 1955) is an Irish playwright, novelist and poet. He is noted for his dense literary writing style and is considered one of Ireland's finest writers. Barry's literary career began in poetry before he began writing plays and novels. In recent years his fiction writing has surpassed his work in the theatre in terms of success, having once been considered a playwright who wrote occasional novels. He has twice been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for his novels A Long Long Way (2005) and The Secret Scripture (2008), the latter of which won the 2008 Costa Book of the Year and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His 2011 novel On Canaan's Side was longlisted for the Booker. Barry was born in Dublin. He is the son of the late Irish actress Joan O'Hara. He attended Catholic University School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus. His academic posts have included Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa (1984), Villanova University (2006) and Writer Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin (1995–1996). Barry started his literary career with the novel Macker's Garden in 1982. This was followed by several books of poetry and a further novel The Engine of Owl-Light in 1987 before his career as a playwright began with his first play produced in the Abbey theater, Boss Grady's Boys in 1988. Barry's maternal great-grandfather, James Dunne, provided the inspiration for the main character in his most internationally known play, The Steward of Christendom. The main character, named Thomas Dunne in the play, was the chief superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police from 1913-1922. He oversaw the area surrounding Dublin Castle until the Irish Free State takeover on 16 January 1922. One of his grandfathers belonged to the British Army Corps of Royal Engineers. Both The Steward of Christendom and the novel The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, are about the dislocations (physical and otherwise) of loyalist Irish people during the political upheavals of the early 20th century. The title character of the latter (McNulty), for instance, is a young man forced to leave Ireland by his former friends for his political beliefs during the Anglo-Irish War. He also wrote Hinterland, a satirical play based loosely on former Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, the performance of which caused a minor controversy in Dublin. The Sunday Times, which did not review the play, criticized it as ‘feeble, puerile, trite, dissociated, shallow, exploitative and gratuitously offensive’. Barry's work in fiction came to the fore during the 1990s. His novel A Long Long Way was shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize, and was selected for Dublin's 2007 One City One Book event. The novel tells the story of Willie Dunne, a young recruit to the Royal Dublin Fusiliers during the First World War. It brings to life the divided loyalties that many Irish soldiers felt at the time following the Easter Rising in 1916. (Willie Dunne, son of the fictional Thomas Dunne, first appears as a minor but important character in The Steward of Christendom.) Barry's 2008 novel, The Secret Scripture won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction (announced in August 2009), the oldest such award in the UK, the 2008 Costa Book of the Year (announced January 27, 2009) and in French translation Le testament caché it won the 2010 Cezam Prix Littéraire Inter CE. It was also a favourite to win the 2008 Man Booker Prize, narrowly losing out to Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger. Sebastian Barry's most recent play is Andersen's English, and is inspired by children's writer Hans Christian Andersen coming to stay with Charles Dickens and his family in the Kent marshes. Directed by Max Stafford-Clark and produced by Out of Joint and Hampstead Theatre, it toured in the UK from 11 February to 8 May 2010. On Canaan's Side, Barry's fifth novel, concerns Lily Bere, the sister of the character Willy Dunne from A Long Long Way and the daughter of the character Thomas Dunne from The Steward of Christendom, as she emigrates to the US. The novel was longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize and won the 2012 Walter Scott Prize. Barry lives in County Wicklow with his family.
July 5, 1889
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (5 July 1889 – 11 October 1963) was a French writer, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. Cocteau is best known for his novel Les Enfants Terribles (1929), and the films Blood of a Poet (1930), Les Parents Terribles (1948), Beauty and the Beast (1946) and Orpheus (1949). His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Yul Brynner, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, Igor Stravinsky, María Félix, Édith Piaf, Panama Al Brown, Colette and Raymond Radiguet.
July 5, 1955
António Emílio Leite Couto (born July 5, 1955), better known as Mia Couto, is a world-renowned Mozambican writer. Couto was born in the city of Beira, Mozambique’s second largest city, where he was also raised and schooled. He is the son of Portuguese emigrants who moved to the former Portuguese colony in the 1950s. At the age of fourteen, some of his poetry was published in a local newspaper, Notícias da Beira. Three years later, in 1971, he moved to the capital Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) and began to study medicine at the University of Lourenço Marques. During this time, the anti-colonial guerrilla and political movement FRELIMO was struggling to overthrow the Portuguese colonial rule in Mozambique. In April 1974, after the Carnation Revolution in Lisbon and the overthrow of the Estado Novo regime, Mozambique was about to become an independent republic. In 1974, FRELIMO asked Couto to suspend his studies for a year to work as a journalist for Tribuna until September 1975 and then as the director of the newly-created Mozambique Information Agency (AIM). Later, he ran the Tempo magazine until 1981. His first book of poems, Raiz de Orvalho, was published in 1983; it included texts aimed against the dominance of Marxist militant propaganda. Couto continued working for the newspaper Notícias until 1985 when he resigned to finish his course of study in biology. Not only is Mia Couto considered one of the most important writers in Mozambique, but many of his works have been published in more than 20 countries and in various languages, including Portuguese, English, French, German, Italian, Serbian and Catalan. In many of his texts, he undertakes to recreate the Portuguese language by infusing it with regional vocabulary and structures from Mozambique, thus producing a new model for the African narrative. Stylistically, his writing is influenced by magical realism, a style popular in modern Latin American literatures, and his use of language is reminiscent of the Brazilian writer Guimarães Rosa, but also deeply influenced by the baiano writer Jorge Amado. He has been noted for creating proverbs, sometimes known as ‘improverbs’, in his fiction, as well as riddles, legends, metaphors, giving his work a poetical dimension. An international jury at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair named his first novel, Terra Sonâmbula (Sleepwalking Land), one of the best 12 African books of the 20th century. In 2007, he became the first African author to win the prestigious Latin Union literary prize, which has been awarded annually in Italy since 1990. Mia Couto became only the fourth writer in the Portuguese language to take home this prestigious award, having competed against authors from Portugal, France, Colombia, Spain, Italy, and Senegal. Currently, he is a biologist employed by the Limpopo Transfrontier Park while continuing his work on other writing projects.
July 5, 1938
Bram Dijkstra (born 5 July 1938) is a retired professor of English literature and the author of seven books on literary and artistic subjects. He also curates art exhibitions and writes catalog essays for San Diego art museums. He joined the faculty of the University of California, San Diego in 1966 and taught there until he retired and became an emeritus professor in 2000. He is married to the literary agent Sandra Dijkstra.
July 5, 1938
Óscar Arturo Hahn Garcés (born 1938 in Iquique, Chile) is a Chilean writer and poet. Known in Chile as one of the writers of the Generation of the 70s (also known as the ‘Dispersed’ or ‘Decimated Generation’ - ‘Generacion Trilce’). Born in Iquique, Chile, Hahn studied at the Pedagogical Institute of Santiago during his youth. His first steps in poetry can be traced back to his adolescence in Rancagua. In 1959 he won the Student Federation of Chile's Prize in Poetry. In 1961 he won the Society of Chilean Writers' Alerce Prize for the work This Black Rose (Esta Rosa Negra). In 1967 he won the Unique Prize of the First Contest in Northern Poetry of the University of Chile for the (then) regional seat of Antofagasta. He studied and set himself to the University of Chile's Curriculum in the Teaching of Literature while in residence at Arica. In 1972 he was awarded the degree of Master of Arts by the University of Iowa, USA and was named a member of the International Writers' Program there. In 1988 his second daughter, Constanza Daniella Hahn was born, and in 1990 his first son, Diego Ignacio Hahn was born. In 1972, when he returned to Chile, he took a job as Adjunct Professor at the University of Chile, Arica. In the next year, 1973, his life would change dramatically, due to political developments in his home country; on 11 September of that year, during the Chilean coup of 1973 he was detained by the newly-installed military government of Augusto Pinochet, which had displaced the progressive government of the democratically-elected leader Salvador Allende. Later interviewed about his experiences, Hahn remarked: ‘September 11 is a difficult date for me to forget, not only on account of the things that happened in the country at large but also because they took me prisoner, and they took me as a prisoner the very same night of September 11, which was deadly serious, since in that very moment they were just killing people without even asking them their names, just totally at random. It was a lottery, and I believe that I'm alive thanks to sheer chance, because there were people who were detained with me and they shot them dead; this could just as well happened to me, I don't know what reason took them away, instead of me, or instead of any of the others that survived.’ Hahn left Chile in 1974 to set down new roots in the USA. He was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by the University of Maryland College Park, and between 1978 and 1988 he collaborated in the composition of the Handbook of Latin American Studies issued by the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. He is a member of the Chilean Academy of Language,[11] and sat on theorganizing committee for the Comités del V Congreso Internacional de la Lengua Española (CILE). Hahn won the Society of Chilean Writers' Alerce Prize, the Municipal Prize of Santiago, the Altazor Prize (2003) and the Pablo Neruda Prize (2011). He has taught Latin American literature at the University of Iowa. Hahn was awarded the Premio Nacional de Literatura on September 3, 2012.
July 5, 1924
Osman Lins (July 5, 1924, Vitória de Santo Antão, Pernambuco, Brazil – July 8, 1978, São Paulo, Brazil) was a Brazilian novelist and short story writer. He is considered to be one of the leading innovators of Brazilian literature in the mid 20th century. He graduated from the University of Recife in 1946 with a degree in economics and finance, and held a position as bank clerk from 1943 until 1970. From 1970 to 1976 he taught literature. His first novel, 0 Visitante ('The Visitor'), was published in 1955. His later publications would bring him international recognition and establish his reputation—Nove, Novena (1966; 'Nine, Ninth'), a collection of short stories, Avalovara (1973), a novel, and A Rainha dos Cárceres da Grécia (1976; 'The Queen of the Grecian Jails'), a novel/essay. Lins was the recipient of three major Brazilian literary awards, which included the Coelho Neto Prize of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.
July 5, 1916
Robert Deane Pharr was an acclaimed author of five novels, the first of which, THE BOOK OF NUMBERS (1969), was published while he was a fifty-three-year-old waiter in New York. Setting out to be ‘a black Sinclair Lewis,’ Pharr focused on the harsh yet vibrant living conditions faced by countless African Americans in urban America from the 1930s to the 1970s. Critics such as Susan Lardner of the New Yorker celebrated Pharr for his ‘tough, emotion-laden dialogue’ and the profound sense of pain and loss that permeates his work. Pharr was born on July 5, 1916, in Richmond, Virginia, the son of Lucie Deane Pharr, a teacher, and John Benjamin Pharr, a minister. Pharr grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, but returned to Virginia in 1933 to attend Saint Paul's Normal and Industrial School in Lawrenceville. He also went to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and Virginia Union University in Richmond, graduating in 1939. While doing postbaccalaureate work at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, Pharr attempted creative writing for the first time and won a national playwriting contest. Pharr spent three years in a sanitarium for tuberculosis and alcoholism, and for the two decades following his release waited tables in hotels and resorts up and down the East Coast. While employed at the Columbia University Faculty Club in New York, he developed the publishing contacts necessary to see his first novel, THE BOOK OF NUMBERS, into print. Much of the critical attention that Pharr subsequently received resulted at least in part from the fact that he was an unknown, fifty-three-year-old African American waiter. When asked about this in a 1974 interview, Pharr said, ‘It's things like that that tend to drive a black writer up the wall.’ Pharr's intent as a writer was to become ‘a black Sinclair Lewis’ whose novel, BABBITT, as Pharr states, ‘set me on fire . . . Mr. Lewis let me look through windows and peek around corners at the white man as he really lived. I began to understand. And by the time I was 17 I had already made up my mind to do as Mr. Lewis had done. Only I would let white people look at the black man as he lives when the white man is not looking or listening.’ This desire to present a true view of African Americans made Pharr's works appear as fictionalized autobiographies. As in Lewis's work, social commentary was inlaid into every description. THE BOOK OF NUMBERS is set in a 1930s black ward of a southern city inspired in large part by Richmond's Jackson Ward. The main character, David Greene, goes from traveling waiter to millionaire by creating an illegal lottery. Pharr stated that ‘in order for there to be black wealth in that novel, there had to be law breaking. As long as black people could not break out of the economic ghetto into a world of free enterprise, they had to commit crime.’ Thus, THE BOOK OF NUMBERS became Pharr's analysis of an American Dream distorted by the denial of opportunities to African Americans. The novel eventually sold more than 300,000 copies and in 1973 was adapted for a film directed by Raymond St. Jacques. Pharr's second and much longer novel, S. R. O. (1971), revolves around a varied cast of social pariahs all living in a single-room-occupancy hotel in Harlem. It is much closer to an autobiography than any of Pharr's other works - the protagonist is a middle-aged, college-educated, African American man who waits tables and becomes a writer. Although praised for its powerful depiction of the protagonist's psychological traumas, the novel drew sharp criticism for its length and its overly large cast of complex characters. Booklist succinctly commented that the novel was ‘profane, penetrating, but not wholly successful.’ Similar appraisals confronted Pharr's last three works, THE WELFARE BITCH (1973), THE SOUL MURDER CASE (1975), and GIVEADAMN BROWN (1978). Although marred by Pharr's didacticism, THE SOUL MURDER CASE, a harrowing depiction of addiction and an explicit treatment of sexuality, featured a tight narrative and was considered the most successful of his later works. GIVEADAMN BROWN, a portrait of Harlem's drug underworld, was criticized for its contrived, cinematic plot but retained Pharr's gift for strong dialogue and his moving depictions of drug addiction. The subject matter of his latter works and, in the case of GIVEADAMN BROWN, his reliance on action plot devices earned comparisons to black exploitation films of the 1970s. Ultimately, Pharr's reputation rests on THE BOOK OF NUMBERS and its perhaps unparalleled evocation of the vibrancy and despair experienced by urban African Americans. As a result, Pharr accomplished much of the goal he laid out for himself at the age of seventeen - to present an honest portrait of how the African Americans he knew lived their lives. Pharr died of an aneurysm on April 1, 1992, in Syracuse, New York.
July 5, 1947
Sony Lab'ou Tansi (5 July 1947 - 14 June 1995), born Marcel Ntsoni, was a Congolese novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and poet. Though he was only 47 when he died, Tansi remains one of the most prolific African writers and the most internationally renowned practitioner of the "New African Writing." His novel The Antipeople won the Grand Prix Littéraire d'Afrique Noire. In his later years, he ran a theatrical company in Brazzaville in the Republic of the Congo. The oldest of seven children, Tansi was born in the former Belgian Congo, in the village of Kimwaanza, just south of the city now known as Kinshasa in the modern day Democratic Republic of the Congo. He was initially educated in the local language, Kikongo, and only began speaking French at the age of twelve, when his family moved to Congo-Brazzaville, today known as the Republic of the Congo. He attended the École Normale Supérieure d'Afrique Centrale in Brazzaville where he studied literature, and upon completing his education in 1971, he became a French and English teacher in Kindauba. When the young teacher began writing for the theatre later that year, he adopted the pen name "Sony La'bou Tansi" as a tribute to Tchicaya U Tam'si, a fellow Congolese writer who wrote politically charged poetry about oppressive nature of the state. In the early part of his career, Tansi continued to support himself through teaching and he worked as an English instructor at the Collège Tchicaya-Pierre in Pointe Noire while working on his first two novels and several plays. In 1979 he founded the Rocado Zulu Theatre, which would go on performed his plays in Africa, Europe, and the United States in addition to appearing regularly at the Festival International des Francophonies in Limoges. After teaching for many years, Tansi moved on to government work, serving as an administrator in several ministries in Brazzaville. In the late 1980s he allied with opposition leader Bernard Kolélas to found the Congolese Movement for Democracy and Integral Development (MCDDI), a political party acting against the communist regime of President Denis Sassou Nguesso and his Congolese Labour Party. Left-wing forces succeeded in pushing President Sassou toward democracy, and former Prime Minister Pascal Lissouba returned from an extended exile and was elected President in the August 1992 elections. In that same year, Tansi was elected to parliament as a deputy for the Makélékélé arrondissement of Brazzaville, but his participation in opposition politics angered President Lissouba, and his passport was withdrawn in 1994. Tansi soon discovered that he had contracted the AIDS virus, but Lissouba's travel restrictions prevented him from going abroad to seek treatment for himself and his wife. Tansi's partner, Pierrette, died from the disease on 31 May 1995 and Tansi followed 14 days later.
July 5, 1810
Phineas Taylor Barnum (July 5, 1810 – April 7, 1891) was an American showman and businessman remembered for promoting celebrated hoaxes and for founding the Barnum & Bailey Circus. Although Barnum was also an author, publisher, philanthropist, and for some time a politician, he said of himself, 'I am a showman by profession...and all the gilding shall make nothing else of me', and his personal aim was 'to put money in his own coffers'. Barnum is widely, but erroneously, credited with coining the phrase 'There's a sucker born every minute'. Born in Bethel, Connecticut, Barnum became a small-business owner in his early twenties, and founded a weekly newspaper, before moving to New York City in 1834. He embarked on an entertainment career, first with a variety troupe called 'Barnum's Grand Scientific and Musical Theater', and soon after by purchasing Scudder's American Museum, which he renamed after himself. Barnum used the museum as a platform to promote hoaxes and human curiosities such as the Feejee mermaid and General Tom Thumb. In 1850 he promoted the American tour of singer Jenny Lind, paying her an unprecedented $1,000 a night for 150 nights. After economic reversals due to bad investments in the 1850s, and years of litigation and public humiliation, he used a lecture tour, mostly as a temperance speaker, to emerge from debt. His museum added America's first aquarium and expanded the wax-figure department. Barnum served two terms in the Connecticut legislature in 1865 as a Republican for Fairfield. With the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution over slavery and African-American suffrage, Barnum spoke before the legislature and said, 'A human soul, ‘that God has created and Christ died for,’ is not to be trifled with. It may tenant the body of a Chinaman, a Turk, an Arab or a Hottentot – it is still an immortal spirit'. Elected in 1875 as Mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut, he worked to improve the water supply, bring gas lighting to streets, and enforce liquor and prostitution laws. Barnum was instrumental in starting Bridgeport Hospital, founded in 1878, and was its first president. The circus business was the source of much of his enduring fame. He established 'P. T. Barnum's Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome', a traveling circus, menagerie and museum of 'freaks', which adopted many names over the years. Barnum died in his sleep at home in 1891, and was buried in Mountain Grove Cemetery, Bridgeport, which he designed himself.
July 5, 1939
A graduate of Buffalo's Canisius College and the University of Notre Dame, JOHN F. MARSZALEK, Ph.D. taught for five years at Gannon University in Erie, PA. before coming to Mississippi State University in 1973 where he became a W. L. Giles Distinguished Professor of History in 1994, retiring as Giles Distinguished Professor Emeritus in 2002. A specialist in the U. S. Civil War, the Jacksonian Period, and race relations, he is the author or editor of thirteen books and over 300 articles and book reviews.
July 5, 1935
Fergus Millar is Emeritus Professor of Ancient History at the University of Oxford. He is the author of The Roman Republic in Political Thought (2002), The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic (1998), and The Roman Near East 31BC - AD 337 (1993).
July 5, 1958
Meredith Ann Pierce (born July 5, 1958 in Seattle, Washington) is a fantasy writer and librarian. Her books deal in fantasy worlds with mythic settings and frequently feature young women who first wish only to love and be loved, yet who must face hazard and danger to save their way of life, their world, and so on, usually without being respected for their efforts until the end of the story.
July 6, 1899
Mignon Good Eberhart (July 6, 1899, Lincoln, Nebraska - October 8, 1996, Greenwich, Connecticut) was an American author of mystery novels. She had one of the longest careers (from the 1920s to the 1980s) among major American mystery writers.
July 6, 1937
Bessie Emery Head (6 July 1937 – 17 April 1986) is usually considered Botswana's most influential writer. Bessie Emery Head was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, the child of a wealthy white South African woman and a black servant when interracial relationships were illegal in South Africa. It was claimed that her mother was mentally ill so that she could be sent to a quiet location to then give birth to Bessie without the neighbors knowing. However, the exact circumstances are disputed, and some of Bessie Head's comments, though often quoted as straight autobiography, are in fact from fictionalized settings. In the 1950s and '60s she was a teacher, then a journalist for the South African magazine Drum. In 1964 she moved to Botswana (then still the Bechuanaland Protectorate) as a refugee, having been peripherally involved with Pan-African politics. It would take 15 years for Head to obtain Botswana citizenship. Head settled in Serowe, the largest of Botswana's ‘villages’ (i.e. traditional settlements as opposed to settler towns). Serowe was famous both for its historical importance, as capital of the Bamangwato people, and for the experimental Swaneng school of Patrick van Rensburg. The deposed chief of the Bamangwato, Seretse Khama, was soon to become the first President of independent Botswana. Her early death in 1986 (aged 48) from hepatitis came just at the point where she was starting to achieve recognition as a writer and was no longer so desperately poor. Most of Bessie Head's important works are set in Serowe, in particular the three novels When Rain Clouds Gather, Maru, and A Question of Power. One of her best works is When Rain Clouds Gather, in which she writes about a troubled young man called Makhaya who runs away from his birthplace, South Africa, to become a refugee in a little village called Golema Mmidi, in the heart of Botswana. Here he is faced with many challenges, one of which is the fact that Chief Matenge does not allow his presence in the village. He meets a white man named Gilbert and starts a whole new journey into the unknown. Head also published a number of short stories, including the collection The Collector of Treasures. She published a book on the history of Serowe, the village she settled in, called Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind. Her last novel, A Bewitched Crossroad, is historical, set in nineteenth-century Botswana. She had also written a story of two prophets, one wealthy and one who lived poorly called ‘Jacob: The Faith-Healing Priest’. Head's work, which emphasised the value of ordinary life and humble people, was more in touch with an earlier trend in African writing than many recent writers, who have made overtly political comments. Her writing has endured nonetheless. Religious ideas feature prominently at times, as in the work A Question of Power. It is interesting to note that Head was initially brought up as a Christian; however, she was later influenced by Hinduism (to which she was exposed through South Africa's Indian community). Most of her writing took place while she was in exile in Botswana. An exception is the early novel The Cardinals (published posthumously), written before she left South Africa. In some ways Bessie Head remained an outsider in her adopted country, and some discern she had something of a love-hate relationship with it. At times she suffered mental health problems and on one occasion put up a public notice making bizarre and shocking allegations about then President Sir Seretse Khama, which led to a period in Lobatse Mental Hospital. A Question of Power is based partly on those experiences. In 2007 the Bessie Head Heritage Trust was established, along with the Bessie Head Literature Awards. In July 2007 the library in Pietermaritzburg was renamed the Bessie Head library in her honor. In 2003 she was awarded the South African ‘Order of Ikhamanga in Gold’ for her ‘exceptional contribution to literature and the struggle for social change, freedom and peace.’
July 6, 1925
Norman Sherry FRSL (6 July 1925 – 19 October 2016) was an English born American novelist, biographer, and educator who was most well known for his three-volume biography of the British novelist Graham Greene. He was professor of English literature at Lancaster University. During World War Two, he served in Burma. Sherry was born in Newcastle Upon Tyne, England. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He also wrote on Joseph Conrad, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, and Jane Austen. Volume 1 of his Life of Graham Greene, and volume 2 "one of the Best Eleven Books of 1995" by the editors of The New York Review of Books.From 1983, Sherry held the post of Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. He was formerly married to the children's novelist Sylvia Sherry. Sherry died on 19 October 2016 at the age of 91.
July 6, 1886
Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch (6 July 1886 – 16 June 1944) was a French historian who cofounded the highly influential Annales School of French social history. Bloch was a quintessential modernist. An assimilated Alsatian Jew from an academic family in Paris, he was deeply affected in his youth by the Dreyfus Affair. He studied at the elite École Normale Supérieure; in 1908–9 he studied at Berlin and Leipzig. He fought in the trenches of the Western Front for four years. In 1919 he became Lecturer in Medieval history at Strasbourg University, after the German professors were all expelled; he was called to the University of Paris in 1936 as professor of economic history. He is best known for his pioneering studies French Rural History and Feudal Society and his posthumously-published unfinished meditation on the writing of history, The Historian's Craft. A French soldier in both World Wars, he was captured and shot by the Gestapo during the German occupation of France for his work in the French Resistance. English historian Denys Hays says he and Frederic William Maitland were "the two greatest historians of recent times." French historian Fernand Braudel says Bloch and Lucien Febvre were, "the greatest historians of this century."
July 6, 1887
Marc Zakharovich Chagall (6 July 1887 – 28 March 1985) was a Russian-French artist. Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as 'the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century' (though Chagall saw his work as 'not the dream of one people but of all humanity'). An early modernist, he was associated with several major artistic styles and created works in virtually every artistic medium, including painting, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramic, tapestries and fine art prints. According to art historian Michael J. Lewis, Chagall was considered to be 'the last survivor of the first generation of European modernists'. For decades, he 'had also been respected as the world's preeminent Jewish artist'. Using the medium of stained glass, he produced windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz, windows for the UN, and the Jerusalem Windows in Israel. He also did large-scale paintings, including part of the ceiling of the Paris Opéra. Before World War I, he traveled between St. Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin. During this period he created his own mixture and style of modern art based on his idea of Eastern European Jewish folk culture. He spent the wartime years in Soviet Belarus, becoming one of the country's most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avant-garde, founding the Vitebsk Arts College before leaving again for Paris in 1922. He had two basic reputations, writes Lewis: as a pioneer of modernism and as a major Jewish artist. He experienced modernism's 'golden age' in Paris, where 'he synthesized the art forms of Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism, and the influence of Fauvism gave rise to Surrealism'. Yet throughout these phases of his style 'he remained most emphatically a Jewish artist, whose work was one long dreamy reverie of life in his native village of Vitebsk.' 'When Matisse dies,' Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, 'Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is'.
July 6, 1923
David Hawkes (6 July 1923 – 31 July 2009) was a British sinologist and translator. After being introduced to Japanese through codebreaking during the Second World War, Hawkes studied Chinese and Japanese at Oxford University between 1945 and 1947 before studying at Peking University from 1948 to 1951. He then returned to Oxford, where he completed his D.Phil. and later became Shaw Professor of Chinese. In 1971, Hawkes resigned his position to focus entirely on his translation of the famous Chinese novel The Story of the Stone (also known as Dream of the Red Chamber), which was published in three volumes between 1973 and 1980. He retired in 1984 to rural Wales before returning to Oxford in his final years. Hawkes was known for his translations that preserved the "realism and poetry" of the original Chinese, and was the foremost non-Chinese Redology expert.
July 6, 1858
John Atkinson Hobson (commonly known as John A. Hobson or J. A. Hobson; 6 July 1858 – 1 April 1940), was an English economist, social scientist and critic of imperialism, widely popular as a lecturer and writer. Hobson was born in Derby, the son of William Hobson, "a rather prosperous newspaper proprietor", and Josephine Atkinson. He was the brother of the mathematician Ernest William Hobson. He studied at Derby School and Lincoln College, Oxford, afterwards teaching classics and English literature at schools in Faversham and Exeter. When Hobson relocated to London in 1887, England was in the midst of a major economic depression. While classical economics was at a loss to explain the vicious business cycles, London had many societies that proposed alternatives. While living in London, Hobson was exposed to the Social Democrats and Henry Mayers Hyndman, Christian Socialists, and Henry George's Single-tax system. He befriended several of the prominent Fabians who would found the London School of Economics, some of whom he had known at Oxford. However, none of these groups proved persuasive enough for Hobson; rather it was his collaboration with a friend, the famous businessman and mountain climber Albert F. Mummery, that would produce Hobson's contribution to economics: the theory of underconsumption. First described by Mummery and Hobson in the 1889 book Physiology of Industry, underconsumption was a scathing criticism of Say's law and classical economics' emphasis on thrift. The forwardness of the book's conclusions discredited Hobson among the professional economics community. Ultimately he was excluded from the academic community. During the very late 19th century his notable works included Problems of Poverty (1891), Evolution of Modern Capitalism (1894), Problem of the Unemployed (1896) and John Ruskin: Social Reformer (1898). They developed Hobson's famous critique of the classical theory of rent and his proposed generalization anticipated the Neoclassical "marginal productivity" theory of distribution. Soon after this period Hobson was recruited by the editor of the newspaper The Manchester Guardian to be their South African correspondent. During his coverage of the Second Boer War, Hobson began to form the idea that imperialism was the direct result of the expanding forces of modern capitalism. He believed the mine owners, with Cecil Rhodes, who wanted control of the Transvaal, in the vanguard, were manipulating the British into fighting the Boers so that they could maximize their profits from mining. His return to England was marked by his strong condemnation of the conflict. His publications during the next few years demonstrated an exploration of the associations between imperialism and international conflict. These works included War in South Africa (1900) and Psychology of Jingoism (1901). In what is arguably his magnum opus, Imperialism (1902), he espoused the opinion that imperial expansion is driven by a search for new markets and investment opportunities overseas. Imperialism gained Hobson an international reputation, and influenced such notable thinkers as Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, and Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Hobson wrote for several other journals before writing his next major work, The Industrial System (1909). In this tract he argued that maldistribution of income resulted, through oversaving and underconsumption, in unemployment and that the remedy was in eradicating the "surplus" by the redistribution of income by taxation and the nationalization of monopolies. Hobson's opposition to the First World War caused him to join the Union of Democratic Control. His advocacy for the formation of a world political body to prevent wars can be found clearly in his piece Towards International Government (1914). However, he was staunchly opposed to the League of Nations. In 1919 Hobson joined the Independent Labour Party. This was soon followed by writings for socialist publications such as the New Leader, the Socialist Review and the New Statesman. During this period it became clear that Hobson favoured capitalist reformation over communist revolution. He was a notable critic of the Labour Government of 1929. During the later years of his life, Hobson published his autobiography, Confessions of an Economic Heretic (1938). Later historians would attack Hobson, and the Marxist theories of imperialism he influenced. Notably, John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson in their 1953 article The Imperialism of Free Trade would argue that Hobson placed too much emphasis on the role of formal empire and directly ruled colonial possessions, not taking into account the significance of trading power, political influence and informal imperialism. They also argued that the difference in British foreign policy that Hobson observed between the mid-19th-century indifference to empire that accompanied free market economics, and the later intense imperialism after 1870, was not a reality.
July 6, 1941
Randall Robinson (born 6 July 1941) is an African-American lawyer, author and activist, noted as the founder of TransAfrica. He is known particularly for his impassioned opposition to apartheid, and for his advocacy on behalf of Haitian immigrants and Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
July 6, 1945
ANA TERESA TORRES (born July 6, 1945) has won many national awards for her fiction, which includes three previous novels: Exile in Time, Vague Disappearances, and Malena of Five Worlds. She spent more than twenty years teaching and practicing clinical psychology and now writes full time, a frequent book reviewer and contributor to literary journals. She lives in her native Caracas with her son and daughter.
July 6, 1923
Walter Raleigh Trevelyan (6 July 1923 – 23 October 2014) was a British author, editor, and publisher and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He resided in both Shepherd Market, London and Cornwall. His Spanish partner Raúl Balín died in 2004 Raleigh Trevelyan was born in the Andaman Islands. India to Colonel Walter Raleigh Fetherstonhaugh Trevelyan, commander of the British Indian Army garrison at the penal settlement of Port Blair, and Olive Beatrice Frost Trevelyan. The family moved to Punjab, and then when he was six, the family trekked on horseback for three weeks to his father's new assignment in Gilgit, where Colonel Trevelyan was posted as military adviser to the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir. At the age of eight, like many children of the British Raj, Raleigh was packed off to a boarding prep school in England and rarely saw his parents after that. After leaving Winchester College in 1942, Trevelyan served in the Second World War in the Rifle Brigade and was sent first to Algiers and then to Italy. On 23 May 1944, during the breakout from Anzio, the Green Howards battalion to which he was attached lost 230 men, some of whose deaths he blamed on himself. Towards the end of 1944, back with the Rifle Brigade, Trevelyan got a job in the British military mission in Rome, where he remained for two years, falling in love with central Italy. His participation in the bloody Battle of Anzio, in which he was wounded twice, was the subject of two memoirs. The Fortress: A Diary of Anzio and After (1957), was recognized for his painfully honest account of how a soldier responds to the terror of being under fire. Later, with the help of German and Italian friends, Trevelyan wrote Rome ’44: The Battle for the Eternal City (1981), which provided a vivid account of what it had been like for soldiers and civilians on the other side of the conflict. After the war Trevelyan worked briefly in merchant banking, then became an editor at William Collins, Sons and later at Jonathan Cape and Michael Joseph, editing both fiction and nonfiction while writing his own books. Among Trevelyan's early popular books were several about Italy, including Princes Under the Volcano (1973), an account of the British role in Sicily in the 19th and 20th centuries; and The Shadow of Vesuvius (1976), about the discovery of the remains of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 18th century. A 1978 book, A Pre-Raphaelite Circle, viewed the major painters of the early Victorian avant-garde movement of the title through the prism of correspondence he found in the papers of Pauline Trevelyan, a distant relation by marriage who was a confidante and patron of the art critic and artist John Ruskin. The Golden Oriole (1987) combined a journal of Trevelyan's five journeys to the subcontinent with historical chronicle, genealogy, family photographs, memoirs and interviews, to trace his family's involvement across 200 years of British involvement in India. Notable were Sir William Macnaghten, the British Resident in Kabul whose beheading during the First Anglo-Afghan War prompted the 1842 retreat from Kabul and the Massacre of Elphinstone's Army and the ten Trevelyans who were among the hundreds of Britons massacred during the Siege of Cawnpore in the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Others ancestors discussed in the chronicle include Thomas Babington Macaulay who introduced English-medium education in India; Charles Trevelyan, reformer of the British Civil Service and later Governor of Madras and Indian Finance Minister; George Otto Trevelyan, the author of the classic, The Competition Wallah (1865); Humphrey Trevelyan, a British diplomat who became one of Jawaharlal Nehru's closest and most valued associates during the final preparations for Indian Independence; and, of course, his own parents. Trevelyan spent ten years retracing Walter Raleigh's footsteps for his best-known work, the acclaimed biography Sir Walter Raleigh (2002). The volume argued for the elevation of his distant ancestor and namesake to the upper reaches of the pantheon of British greats, based on Raleigh's achievements as an explorer, courtier, poet, American colonizer and early purveyor of tobacco to England and potatoes to Ireland. The book waded deep into the nuances of British, French and Spanish foreign policy to explain Raleigh's various acts of naval heroism and piracy; verified Raleigh's claims about silver and gold deposits in The Guianas (thought at the time to be wild fabrications); and brought Elizabethan court intrigues into focus to trace the events that led to Raleigh's years in the Tower of London and his beheading for treason in 1618.
July 6, 1955
William Wall (born July 6, 1955) is the author of four novels, three collections of poetry, and two volumes of short fiction. His work has won many prizes including The Virginia Faulkner Award, The Patrick Kavanagh Award, The Sean O’Faolain Prize and many more. He has been short- or longlisted for, among many others, The Man Booker Prize, The National Book Awards, the Raymond Carver Prize and The Manchester Fiction Prize. His work has been translated into many languages and he translates from Italian.
July 7, 1860
Abraham 'Abe' Cahan (July 7, 1860 – August 31, 1951) was a Belarusian-born Jewish-American socialist newspaper editor, novelist, and politician.
July 7, 1907
Robert Anson Heinlein (July 7, 1907 – May 8, 1988) was an American science fiction writer. Often called the ‘dean of science fiction writers’, he was one of the most influential and controversial authors of the genre in his time. He set a standard for scientific and engineering plausibility, and helped to raise the genre's standards of literary quality. He was one of the first science fiction writers to break into mainstream magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post in the late 1940s. He was one of the best-selling science fiction novelists for many decades, and he, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke are often considered to be the ‘Big Three’ of science fiction authors. A notable writer of science fiction short stories, Heinlein was one of a group of writers who came to prominence under the editorship of John W. Campbell, Jr. in his Astounding Science Fiction magazine—though Heinlein denied that Campbell influenced his writing to any great degree. Within the framework of his science fiction stories, Heinlein repeatedly addressed certain social themes: the importance of individual liberty and self-reliance, the obligation individuals owe to their societies, the influence of organized religion on culture and government, and the tendency of society to repress nonconformist thought. He also speculated on the influence of space travel on human cultural practices. Heinlein was named the first Science Fiction Writers Grand Master in 1974. He won Hugo Awards for four of his novels; in addition, fifty years after publication, three of his works were awarded ‘Retro Hugos‘—awards given retrospectively for works that were published before the Hugo Awards came into existence. In his fiction, Heinlein coined words that have become part of the English language, including ‘grok‘ and ‘waldo‘, and popularized the terms ‘TANSTAAFL‘ and space marine. He also described a modern version of a waterbed in his novel The Door Into Summer, though he never patented or built one. Several of Heinlein's works have been adapted for film and television.
July 7, 1945
Natsuki Ikezawa, born in 1945 and regarded as one of the best serious writers in Japan, is known for his love of islands, and lives on one in the far south of the Japanese archipelago. Since his debut as a novelist at the age of thirty-nine, Pacific islands have provided the setting for seven of his major works.
July 7, 1948
Kathleen Joan Toelle 'Kathy' Reichs (born July 7, 1948) is an American crime writer, forensic anthropologist and academic. She is a professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte; as of 2013 she is on indefinite leave. She divides her work time between the Laboratoire des Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale for the province of Quebec and her professorship at UNC Charlotte. She is one of the eighty-two forensic anthropologists certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology and is on the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. Her schedule also involves a number of speaking engagements around the world. Reichs has been a producer for the TV series Bones, which is loosely based on her novels, which in turn, are inspired by her life. She has two daughters, Kerry and Courtney, and one son, Brendan.
July 7, 1951
Norman Solomon's books include ‘False Hope: The Politics of Illusion in the Clinton Era,’ ‘Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in the News Media’ and ‘The Power of Babble.’ He writes a nationally syndicated column called ‘Media Beat.’
July 7, 1915
Margaret Walker (July 7, 1915, Birmingham, AL - November 30, 1998, Chicago, IL) received her A.B. from Northwestern University where she majored in English under Professor Edward Hungerford and began planning this novel. She married, raised a family, taught, and in 1963 was awarded a fellowship at the University of Iowa where she received a Ph.D. and completed this novel in the Creative Writers’ Workshop. She then lived with her family in Jackson, Mississippi, where she was engaged in teaching. By an interesting coincidence Miss Walker finished her book on April 9, 1965, one hundred years after Appomattox, and her final oral for her degree on the following May 20, exactly one hundred years to the day that her great-grandmother was set free from slavery.
July 7, 1954
Leonora Brito (7 July 1954 – 14 June 2007) was a writer from Cardiff, Wales. Brito was born in Cardiff on 7 July 1954. She studied Law and History at Cardiff University. In 1991 she won the Rhys Davies Short Story Prize. Her first short story collection, Dat's Love (1995), was published by Seren Books and was described by Publisher's Weekly as combining 'an unexpected setting (the Caribbean community in Wales) with some truly fresh writing'. In an article for the Guardian, Gary Younge states that 'with the exception of Leonora Brito's Dat's Love, the literary voices of blacks and Asians in Wales are rarely heard.' Brito's Chequered Histories (2006), another short story collection, was also published by Seren. In addition to prose she wrote successfully for radio and television. She died in 2007.
July 7, 1955
Stephen Dorril (born 7 July 1955; Worcestershire) is a British academic, author, and journalist. He is a senior lecturer in the journalism department of Huddersfield University and is director of the university's Oral History Unit. He has written a number of books, mostly about the UK's intelligence services. With Robin Ramsay, Dorril co-founded the magazine Lobster. He has appeared on radio and television as a specialist on the security and intelligence services. He is a consultant to BBC's Panorama programme. His first book Honeytrap, written with Anthony Summers about the Profumo Affair, was one of the sources for the 1989 film Scandal.
July 7, 1912
Richard Erdoes was born in Frankfurt, Germany, and educated in Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. He now divides his time between New York City and Santa Fe, New Mexico. His many books on the American West include LAME DEER, SEEKER OF VISIONS; SALOONS OF THE WEST; THE RAIN DANCE PEOPLE; THE SUN DANCE PEOPLE; and THE SOUND OF FLUTES. His photographs have been published in National Geographic, Life, and many other magazines, and he created the illustrations which appear in this volume. Alfonso Ortiz was born at San Juan, a Tewa pueblo in New Mexico. He received his B.A. from the University of New Mexico and holds a MA and Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago. He is the author of THE TEWA WORLD and was the contributing editor of the two Southwest volumes of the Smithsonian's Handbook of the North American Indian. A 1982 MacArthur Fellow, Alfonso Ortiz lives in Santa Fe and teaches at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
July 7, 1963
Thomas Gerald Franklin (born July 7, 1963) is an American writer originally from Dickinson, Alabama, United States, "a town of around 500 people in south central Alabama, near Monroeville, home of "To Kill a Mockingbird" author Harper Lee".
July 7, 1885
Carlos Gonzalez Pens (born in. Lagos de Moreno , Jalisco, July 7, 1885 -. died in Mexico City August 1, 1955) was one of the most important writers in Mexico. He was an editor of El Universal, a leading newspaper of Mexico City, and professor of Mexican literature at the University of Mexico. Gonzalez Pena won distinction as a dramatist and novelist. In 1928 he published the first edition and in 1940 the second (revised and enlarged) edition of Historia de la Literatura Mexicana of which this is an authorized translation. The translators: Gusta Barfield Nance is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Southern Methodist University. Florene Johnson Dunstan is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Agnes Scott College.
July 7, 1919
William Moses Kunstler (July 7, 1919 – September 4, 1995) was an American self-described "radical lawyer" and civil rights activist, known for his politically unpopular clients. Kunstler was an active member of the National Lawyers Guild, a board member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the co-founder of the Law Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the "leading gathering place for radical lawyers in the country". Kunstler's defense of the "Chicago Seven" from 1969–1970 led The New York Times to label him "the country's most controversial and, perhaps, its best-known lawyer". Kunstler is also well known for defending members of the Catonsville Nine, Black Panther Party, Weather Underground Organization, the Attica Prison rioters, and the American Indian Movement. He also won a de facto segregation case regarding the District of Columbia's public schools and "disinterred, singlehandedly" the concept of federal removal jurisdiction in the 1960s. Kunstler refused to defend right-wing groups such as the Minutemen, on the grounds that: "I only defend those whose goals I share. I'm not a lawyer for hire. I only defend those I love."
July 7, 1948
Stephen Ratcliffe (born July 7, 1948 in Boston, Massachusetts) is a contemporary U.S. poet and critic who has published a number of books of poetry and three books of criticism. He lives in Bolinas, CA and is the publisher of Avenue B Press. He was the director of the Creative Writing program at Mills College in Oakland, CA where he has been an instructor for more than 25 years, and continues to teach Creative Writing (poetry) and Literature (poetry, Shakespeare) courses there. The focus of much of Ratcliffe’s recent work from the past decade is on the "long poem / book" written in consecutive days, ‘rooted’/ ‘grounded’ in the place where he lives and does his work: Bolinas. As of 2010, Ratcliffe has published at least 19 books of poetry (21 including the e-editions on Ubuweb ) and as the editor and publisher of Avenue B,
July 8, 1942
Harold Jaffe (born July 8, 1942) is an American writer of novels, short fiction, drama and essays. He is the author of 26 books, including 14 collections of fiction, four novels and two volumes of essays. He is also the editor of the literary-cultural journal Fiction International. His works have been translated into 15 languages, including German, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, French, Turkish, Dutch, Czech, and Serbo-Croatian. Jaffe is also a Professor of Creative Writing, English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University. Jaffe’s fiction has appeared in such journals as Mississippi Review; City Lights Review; Paris Review; New Directions in Prose and Poetry; Chicago Review; Chelsea; Fiction;Central Park; Witness; Black Ice; Minnesota Review;Boundary 2; ACM; Black Warrior Review; Cream City Review; Two Girls’Review; and New Novel Review. His fictions have also been anthologized in Pushcart Prize; Best American Stories; Best of American Humor; Storming the Reality Studio; American Made; Avant Pop: Fiction for a Daydreaming Nation; After Yesterday’s Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology; Bateria and Am Lit (Germany);Borderlands (Mexico); Praz (Italy); Positive (Japan); and elsewhere. The 2004 issue of The Journal of Experimental Fiction called The Literary Terrorism of Harold Jaffe was devoted to his writings.
July 8, 1621
Jean de La Fontaine (8 July 1621 – 13 April 1695) was the most famous French fabulist and one of the most widely read French poets of the 17th century. He is known above all for his Fables, which provided a model for subsequent fabulists across Europe and numerous alternative versions in France, and in French regional languages. According to Flaubert, he was the only French poet to understand and master the texture of the French language before Victor Hugo. A set of postage stamps celebrating La Fontaine and the Fables was issued by France in 1995.
July 8, 1898
Alexander Raban "Alec" Waugh (8 July 1898 – 3 September 1981), was a British novelist, the elder brother of the better-known Evelyn Waugh and son of Arthur Waugh, author, literary critic, and publisher. His first wife was Barbara Jacobs (daughter of the writer William Wymark Jacobs), his second wife was Joan Chirnside and his third wife was Virginia Sorenson, author of the Newbery Medal–winning Miracles on Maple Hill.
July 8, 1912
Enrique Gil Gilbert (July 8, 1912 – February 21, 1973) was an Ecuadorian novelist, journalist, poet, and a high-ranking member of the Communist Party of Ecuador. Gil Gilbert was born and died in the coastal city of Guayaquil, and was the youngest member of the Guayaquil Group, which was one of the most renowned literary and intellectual groups in Ecuador in 1930–40. Gil Gilbert’s most famous novel is Nuestro Pan (Our Daily Bread) (1942), which was translated into English (1943), German, Japanese, and Czech. The novel won Honourable Mention in the Latin-American Prize Novel Competition. Critics and historians agree that the Guayaquil Group emerged with the publication of Los que se van, cuentos del cholo y del motuvio (The Vanishing Ones. Stories about the Cholo and the Montuvio) (1930), a social realist book of 34 short stories by Demetrio Aguilera Malta, Joaquín Gallegos Lara, and Enrique Gil Gilbert, that dealt with the lives of the coastal peasant of Ecuador. It marked a whole new type of literature in Ecuador, which until then had been characterized by Romanticism and Modernism. The group's other members include: Demetrio Aguilera Malta, Alfredo Pareja Diezcanseco, Joaquín Gallegos Lara, and José de la Cuadra. Their writing featured: a socialist-inspired expose of social-economic abuses; a literature rooted in popular culture; Freudianism; a grotesque vision of the world; and a concern with anthropology and indigenous culture. The Guayaquil Group is considered a forerunner of magical realism. Gil Gilberto was a registered member of the Communist Party of Ecuador. In 1944 he traveled to Moscow in his capacity as Secretary General of the Regional Committee of the Communist Party of Ecuador. He was persecuted for his socialist and militant ideas, and in 1935, under the dictatorship of Federico Paez, he lost his teaching job at the Rocafuerte School in Guayaquil. Gil Gilberto spent fifteen months in prison under the government of the military junta of 1963. While in prison, law enforcement ransacked his home, and his wife had to flee into exile in Chile, while his children went into hiding. They burned many of his papers and books, including a completed but unpublished book, manuscripts of unfinished works, thus many of his writings were lost forever. When he was released from prison he was without a home, family, or any money. Gil Gilbert was married to Alba Calderón, a painter, feminist, and revolutionary, who founded the movement for the recognition of women in Ecuador. Gil Gilbert and Calderon had two sons: Enrique Gil Calderón, a choral director, and Antonio Gil Calderon, a doctor and businessman.
July 8, 1909
G. V. Desani was born on July 8, 1909 in Nairobi, Kenya, the son of an Indian merchant, and was reared in India. In the late 1930s, and throughout the war, he was a BBC broadcaster and lectured on India throughout England. All About H. Hatterr was written and published in 1948, causing an immediate sensation and eventually achieving permanent fame as one of the greatest Anglo-Indian novels of the century. From the early 1950s to the mid-1960s, Mr. Desani studied Buddhism and Hindu culture in seclusion in India and Burma. He came to the United States in 1970 to teach at Boston University and subsequently the University of Texas at Austin, where he was Professor Emeritus of religion and philosophy. Dr. Desani died in November, 2000.
July 8, 1899
Gerald Basil Edwards (G.B. Edwards) (July 8, 1899, Vale, Guernsey - December 29, 1976, Weymouth, Dorset), was a British author. Edwards is known for The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, which was published posthumously in 1981. Edwards had worked on his great novel for many years but only completed it towards the end of his life, presenting the typescript to his friend Edward Chaney in August 1974, rather in the manner that the fictional Ebenezer bequeaths his 'Book' to Neville Falla in the novel. The typescript was rejected by all the publishers it was shown to and only after Edwards' death was it taken up by Hamish Hamilton who arranged for John Fowles to write an introduction. It was widely and very favorably reviewed, among others by William Golding and Guy Davenport. Harold Bloom included it in his Western Canon. Penguin produced a paperback and it was published in American and in French translation. It has now been published in Italian also by Elliot Edizioni. It is currently in print in Britain and America with New York Review of Books in their Classics series. In the late 1920s and '30s Edwards had been regarded as a writer and intellectual of great promise, one who might indeed fill the shoes of D.H. Lawrence, whose biography Cape commissioned him to write. He occasionally contributed to Middleton Murry's Adelphi magazine but never completed his larger projects. Eventually his friends Murry, J.S. Collis and Stephen Potter gave up their hopes in him. By 1933 he had abandoned his wife and children and he did not re-establish contact with his daughter until decades later. He became an itinerant teacher of drama and, latterly, a minor civil servant and something of a recluse. Towards the end of his life, he became a lodger in a house near Weymouth where he was 'discovered' by art student Edward Chaney. The latter encouraged him to complete his novel and eventually got it published. In September 2008 Chaney and Jane Mosse unveiled Guernsey's first Blue Plaque on Edwards's father's house on the island.
July 8, 1943
Faye Wattleton (born Alyce Faye Wattleton; 8 July 1943) is the first African American, the youngest president ever elected to Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and the first woman since Margaret Sanger to hold the position. She is best known for her contributions to the family planning and reproductive health, as well as the pro-choice movement.
July 8, 1952
Marianne Deborah Williamson (born July 8, 1952) is an American author, spiritual leader, politician, and activist. She has written 13 books, including four New York Times number one bestsellers in the "Advice, How To, and Miscellaneous" category. She is the founder of Project Angel Food, a volunteer food delivery program that serves home-bound people with HIV/AIDS and other life-threatening illnesses. She is also the co-founder of the Peace Alliance, a nonprofit education and advocacy organization supporting peace-building projects. She has received national attention as a result of her frequent appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show and was known as Oprah's "spiritual adviser." In 2014, Williamson unsuccessfully ran as an independent to represent California's 33rd congressional district in the United States House of Representatives. On January 9, 2019, she announced her campaign for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 United States presidential election. She suspended her campaign on January 10, 2020, a few days after laying off her campaign staff. She later endorsed Bernie Sanders at a rally in Austin, Texas on February 23, 2020. She was hired as a columnist for Newsweek shortly after the conclusion of the campaign.
July 9, 1904
Helen Florence Caldwell (July 9, 1904- April 12, 1987) was born in Omaha, Nebraska, attended Classical High School in Providence. Her family moved to Los Angeles in 1917 where she graduated from Los Angeles High School, She attended UC Berkeley for a while but graduated from the fledgling UCLA in 1925. For the next decade she worked for RKO Pictures and the Los Angeles Board of Education, while also studying Japanese dance with the celebrated dancer and choreographer Michio Ito and performing with Ito's company in the Hollywood Bowl. In the meantime UCLA had evolved into a full-fledged university, where Caldwell's graduate study was capped with a master's degree in classics in 1939. From 1942 onward she served as Lecturer in classics at her alma mater, was advanced to Senior Lecturer in 1965, and retired in 1970. During those twenty-eight years, while UCLA grew into an academic megalopolis, and even the classics faculty more than tripled in size. Caldwell was a hard-working mainstay of instruction, offering a great variety of courses in both Greek and Latin, admired by students and colleagues for scholarly competence, forthright friendliness, and exemplary humanitas. In a single year (e.g. 1965-66) she would be called on to teach Catullus and Horace, Roman elegy, Vergil's Aeneid, Plautus and Terence, and Latin composition, on top of her specialty of ancient drama with its 100 + enrollments, or again elementary Greek, elementary Latin, Tacitus, and Ovid in addition to much else. Fondness for nature, her alma mater, and the literature of antiquity brought forth a felicitous booklet, Ancient Poets' Guide to UCLA Gardens (1968). She also found her research vocation in Luso-Brazilian literature, focused on the major nineteenth-century novelist Machado de Assis, whose fame was secure in Romance-speaking areas, but whom Caldwell nearly single-handedly opened up for the English-speaking world. Her introduced and commented translations of four of Machado's major novels (Dom Casmurro [1953], Esau and Jacob [1965], Counselor Ayres' Memorial [1972], Helena [1983]) and numerous short stories (1963) were accompanied by Caldwell’s own book-length studies (The Brazilian Othello of Machado de Assis. A Study of Dom Casmurro [1960]. Machado de Assis.The Brazilian Master and His Novels [1970]) and earned her a wide reputation, marked by her being made a Grande Oficial of the Ordem Nacional do Cruzeiro do Sol by the Brazilian government in 1959, and by the award of the Machado de Assis Medal by the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1963. In 1982 she moved to Santa Barbara, seeking relief from increasing severe bronchial asthma in the more salubrious atmosphere up the coast. She died there five years later.
July 9, 1936
A political activist and award-winning African-American poet and essayist - including the 1995 Lila Wallace—Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award - JUNE JORDAN was the author of numerous books, including TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES and CIVIL WARS.
July 9, 1945
Dean Ray Koontz is an American author. His novels are broadly described as suspense thrillers, but also frequently incorporate elements of horror, fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and satire.
July 9, 1966
Amélie Nothomb (born Fabienne-Claire ; 9 July 1966 in Etterbeek, Belgium) is a Belgian writer who writes in French. Amélie Nothomb, née Fabienne Claire Nothomb, was born in Etterbeek, Belgium on 9 July 1966, to Belgian diplomats. Although Nothomb claims to be born in Japan, she discovers Japan in actuality at the age of two, living there until she was five years old, and then subsequently lived in China, New York, Bangladesh, Burma, Coventry and Laos. She is from a distinguished Belgian political family; she is the grandniece of Charles-Ferdinand Nothomb, a Belgian foreign minister (1980–1981), and great granddaughter of writer and politician Pierre Nothomb. She has one brother and one sister, Juliette Nothomb. Nothomb's first novel, Hygiène de l'assassin, was published in 1992. Since then, she has published approximately one novel per year, including Les Catilinaires (1995), Fear and Trembling (1999) and Métaphysique des tubes (2000, published in English as The Character of Rain). She has been awarded numerous prizes, including the 1999 Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française, the Prix René-Fallet, and the 1993 Prix Alain-Fournier. While in Japan, Nothomb attended a local school and learned Japanese. When she was five, the family moved to China. 'Quitter le Japon fut pour moi un arrachement' ('Leaving Japan was a wrenching separation for me'), she wrote in Fear and Trembling. She studied philology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. After some family tensions and having finished her studies, Nothomb returned to Japan to work in a Japanese company in Tokyo. Her experience of this time, although its authenticity has been critically called to question, is told in Fear and Trembling. She wrote a romanticized biography (The Book of Proper Names) for the French female singer Robert in 2002 and during the period 2000–2002 she wrote the lyrics for nine tracks of the same artist. A documentary was directed by Laureline Amanieux about Amélie's return to Japan where she finds the beauty of the landscapes, the peace of the rites of the country, the sadness of Fukushima, but especially, the arms of her Japanese nursemaid, Nishio San.
July 9, 1933
Oliver Sacks is a physician and the author of nine previous books, including THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT and AWAKENINGS (which inspired the Oscar-nominated film). He lives in New York City, where he is Professor of Clinical Neurology at Columbia University.
July 9, 1927
Negritude poet David Mandessi Diop (July 9, 1927 – August 29, 1960) was born in Bordeaux to a Senegalese father and a Cameroonian mother. He lived much of his life in France but also spent significant time in West Africa, where he was a strong supporter of the movement for independence from French colonial rule. He died at the age of 33 in an airplane crash on his way home to France from Dakar. Diop was educated at the Lycée Marcelin Berthelot in Paris. Influenced by the work of Martinique poet Aimé Césaire, Diop composed poems of political resistance, recalling the power of a free Africa and vividly portraying the oppression of French colonialist rule. Rejecting assimilation into European culture and rhythms, Diop frequently used colloquial and spoken phrasings patterned with rhythmic repetition. At age 15, Diop began publishing his poems regularly in the literary journal Présence Africaine, and five of his poems were featured in Léopold Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie négre et malgache (1948). He published only one short book of poems during his lifetime, Coups de pilon (Pounding) (1956). Hammer Blows and Other Writings (1973, translated and edited by Simon Mpondo and Frank Jones), a posthumous translation, was expanded to include a selection of the poet’s previously uncollected prose.
July 9, 1951
Ingar Sletten Kolloen (born 9 July 1951) is a Norwegian journalist, biographer, novelist and playwright. He has written biographies of Tor Jonsson, Knut Hamsun and Joralf Gjerstad. He wrote the play Jeg kunne gråte blod in 2004, and the novel Den fjerde engelen in 2007.
July 9, 1934
Marianne Macdonald (born July 9, 1934 in Kenora, Ontario) is a Canadian children's books author and novelist best known for her mystery series featuring London antiques bookstore owner and amateur investigator Dido Hoare. Main themes of the Dido Hoare novels are responsibility and trust, the struggles of a single working mother and a complex and troubled father-daughter relationship.
July 9, 1887
Samuel Eliot Morison, Rear Admiral, United States Naval Reserve (July 9, 1887 – May 15, 1976) was an American historian noted for his works of maritime history that were both authoritative and highly readable. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1912, and taught history at the university for 40 years. He won Pulitzer Prizes for Admiral of the Ocean Sea (1942), a biography of Christopher Columbus, and John Paul Jones: A Sailor's Biography (1959). In 1942, he was commissioned by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to write a history of United States naval operations in World War II, which was published in 15 volumes between 1947 and 1962. He retired from the navy in 1951 as a rear admiral. Morison wrote the popular Oxford History of the American People (1965), and co-authored the classic textbook The Growth of the American Republic (1930) with Henry Steele Commager. Over the course of his distinguished career, Morison received eleven honorary doctoral degrees, including degrees from Harvard University (1936), Columbia University (1942), Yale University (1949), and the University of Oxford (1951). Morison also garnered numerous literary prizes, military honors, and national awards from both foreign countries and the United States, including two Pulitzer Prizes, two Bancroft Prizes, the Balzan Prize, the Legion of Merit, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
July 9, 1953
Thomas Ligotti (born July 9, 1953) is a contemporary American horror author and reclusive literary cult figure. His writings have been noted as rooted in several literary genres – most prominently Lovecraftian horror – and have overall been described by critics such as S.T. Joshi as works of "philosophical horror," often written as short stories and novellas and with similarities to gothic fiction. The worldview espoused by Ligotti in both his fiction and non-fiction has been described as profoundly pessimistic and nihilistic. The Washington Post called him "the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction."
July 10, 1913
Salvador Espriu i Castelló (July 10, 1913 – February 22, 1985) was a Spanish poet who wrote most of his works in Catalan. Espriu was born in Santa Coloma de Farners, Catalonia. He was the son of an attorney. He spent his childhood between his home town, Barcelona, and Arenys de Mar, a village on the Maresme coast. At the age of sixteen, he published his first book, Israel, written in Spanish. In 1930 he entered the University of Barcelona, where he studied law and ancient history. While traveling (1933) to Egypt, Greece and Palestine, he became acquainted with the countries that originated the great classical myths, and which would be so influential in his work. During the Spanish civil war he was mobilised and served in military accounting. Translated into several languages, Espriu's work has obtained international recognition, most notably the Montaigne prize (1971). He was also given the Award of Honour of Catalan Letters (1972), the Ignasi Iglesias prize (1980), the City of Barcelona Prize (1982) and the Gold Medal of the Generalitat de Catalunya (1982). He was awarded honorary doctor's degrees by the universities of Toulouse and Barcelona. He died in Barcelona in 1985, and was buried in the Arenys de Mar cemetery, which gives name to his poem Cementiri de Sinera.
July 10, 1792
Captain Frederick Marryat (10 July 1792 – 9 August 1848) was a British Royal Navy officer, a novelist, and an acquaintance of Charles Dickens. He is noted today as an early pioneer of the sea story, particularly for his semi-autobiographical novel Mr Midshipman Easy (1836), for his children's novel The Children of the New Forest (1847), and for a widely used system of maritime flag signalling, known as Marryat's Code.
July 10, 1931
Alice Ann Munro (née Laidlaw; born 10 July 1931) is a Canadian short-story writer, winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work, three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction, and a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize.
July 10, 1871
MARCEL PROUST was born in Auteuil in 1871. In his twenties, following a year in the army, he became a conspicuous society figure, frequenting the most fashionable Paris salons of the day. After 1899, however, his chronic asthma, the death of his parents, and his growing disillusionment with humanity caused him to lead an increasingly retired life. From 1907 on, he rarely emerged from a cork-lined room in his apartment on boulevard Haussmann. There he insulated himself against the distractions of city life and the effects of trees and flowers-though he loved them, they brought on his attacks of asthma. He slept by day and worked by night, writing letters and devoting himself to the completion of In Search of Lost Time. He died in 1922.
July 10, 1968
Jorge Volpi (full name Jorge Volpi Escalante, born July 10, 1968), is a Mexican novelist and essayist, best known for his novels such as En busca de Klingsor. Trained as a lawyer, he gained notice in the 1990s with his first publications and participation in the pronouncement of the Crack Manifesto with several other young writers to protest the state of Mexican literature and promote their own work. Volpi’s novels are distinct from magical realism and other trends of Latin American literature as they focus on the actions of characters and research into academic topics, especially history and science and do not always focus on Latin American characters and settings. His work has been translated into twenty five languages and recognized with awards such as Biblioteca Breva Award and the Planta-Casa de América as well as a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. In addition to his writing he has worked as a cultural attaché, the director of Canal 22 in the State of Mexico and is currently the director of the Festival Internacional Cervantino.
July 19, 1910
Francisco Coloane Cárdenas (American Spanish: [f?an?sisko kolo?ane]; July 19, 1910 – August 5, 2002) was a Chilean novelist and short fiction writer whose works have been translated into many languages. Some of his books were adapted to theatre and film. He was born in Quemchi, Chiloé Province, on the southern Chilean island of Chiloé, and his literary career expanded from Perros, Caballos y Hombres ("Dogs, Horses and Men") in 1935 to the publication of his memoirs Los Pasos del Hombre (The Steps of Man) in 2000. Among his most famous works (translated into English, French, Italian, Greek, German, Polish and Dutch) are: La Tierra del Fuego se Apagó (Tierra del Fuego Has Burnt Out, 1945), Golfo de Penas (Gulf of Sorrow, 1957), El Camino de la Ballena (The Whale's Path, 1962), El Guanaco Blanco (The White Guanaco, 1980), and El Corazón del Témpano (The Heart of the Iceberg, 1991). Coloane was awarded the Premio Nacional de Literatura (Chilean National Prize for Literature) in 1964. In 1997, he was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters) by the French Republic, where he won considerable notoriety for his work in the 1990s. Coloane was an active member of the Communist Party of Chile for most of his adult life, and a lover of nature who celebrated his 89th birthday by swimming in the freezing waters of the Pacific Ocean – which in his opinion kept him "vital and active". Miguel Littín's movie, Tierra del fuego, is based on a work by Coloane. Following his death, the Chilean government recognized him as a central figure of 20th-century Chilean literature.
July 10, 1902
Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista (10 July 1902 – 16 July 1989) was a Cuban poet, journalist, political activist, and writer. He is best remembered as the national poet of Cuba. Born in Camagüey, he studied law at the University of Havana, but abandoned a legal career and worked as a typographer and journalist. His poetry was published in various magazines from the early 1920s; his first collection, Motivos de son (1930) was strongly influenced by his meeting that year with the African-American poet, Langston Hughes. He drew from son music in his poetry. West Indies, Ltd., published in 1934, was Guillén's first collection with political implications. Cuba's dictatorial Gerardo Machado regime was overthrown in 1933, but political repression intensified. After being jailed in 1936, Guillén joined the Communist Party the next year, traveling to Spain for a Congress of Writers and Artists, and covering the Spanish Civil War as a magazine reporter. After returning to Cuba, he stood as a Communist in the local elections of 1940. This caused him to be refused a visa to enter the United States the following year, but he traveled widely during the next decades in South America, China and Europe. In 1953, after being in Chile, he was refused re-entry to Cuba and spent five years in exile. He returned after the successful Cuban revolution of 1959. From 1961 he served more than 25 years as president of the Unión Nacional de Escritores de Cuba, the National Cuban Writers' Union. His awards included the Stalin Peace Prize in 1954, the 1976 International Botev Prize, and in 1983 he was the inaugural winner of Cuba's National Prize for Literature.
July 10, 1943
Arthur Robert Ashe, Jr. (July 10, 1943 – February 6, 1993) was an American World No. 1 professional tennis player. He won three Grand Slam titles, ranking him among the best tennis players from the United States. Ashe, an African American, was the first black player selected to the United States Davis Cup team and the only black man ever to win the singles title at Wimbledon, the US Open, or the Australian Open. He retired in 1980. He was ranked World No. 1 by Harry Hopman in 1968 and by Lance Tingay of The Daily Telegraph and World Tennis Magazine in 1975. In the ATP computer rankings, he peaked at No. 2 in May 1976. In the early 1980s, Ashe is believed to have contracted HIV from a blood transfusion he received during heart bypass surgery. Ashe publicly announced his illness in April 1992 and began working to educate others about HIV and AIDS. He founded the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS and the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health before his death from AIDS-related pneumonia on February 6, 1993. On June 20, 1993, Ashe was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by then United States President Bill Clinton.
July 10, 1873
Edmund Dene Morel, originally Georges Eduard Pierre Achille Morel de Ville (10 July 1873 – 12 November 1924), was a British journalist, author, pacifist, and politician. In collaboration with Roger Casement, Morel led a campaign against slavery in the Congo Free State, founding the Congo Reform Association and running the West African Mail. He played a significant role in the British pacifist movement during the First World War, participating in the foundation and becoming secretary of the Union of Democratic Control, at which point he broke with the Liberal Party. After the war he joined the Independent Labour Party. Bertrand Russell said of Morel, "No other man known to me has had the same heroic simplicity in pursuing and proclaiming political truth."
July 10, 1856
Nikola Tesla (10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943) was a Serbian American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system. Tesla gained experience in telephony and electrical engineering before immigrating to the United States in 1884 to work for Thomas Edison in New York City. He soon struck out on his own with financial backers, setting up laboratories and companies to develop a range of electrical devices. His patented AC induction motor and transformer were licensed by George Westinghouse, who also hired Tesla for a short time as a consultant. His work in the formative years of electric power development was also involved in the corporate struggle between making alternating current or direct current the power transmission standard, referred to as the War of Currents. Tesla went on to pursue his ideas of wireless lighting and electricity distribution in his high-voltage, high-frequency power experiments in New York and Colorado Springs and made early (1893) pronouncements on the possibility of wireless communication with his devices. He tried to put these ideas to practical use in his ill-fated attempt at intercontinental wireless transmission, which was his unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower project. In his lab he also conducted a range of experiments with mechanical oscillators/generators, electrical discharge tubes, and early X-ray imaging. He even built a wireless controlled boat, one of the first ever exhibited. Tesla was renowned for his achievements and showmanship, eventually earning him a reputation in popular culture as an archetypal 'mad scientist.' His patents earned him a considerable amount of money, much of which was used to finance his own projects with varying degrees of success. He lived most of his life in a series of New York hotels, through his retirement. He died on 7 January 1943. His work fell into relative obscurity after his death, but in 1960 the General Conference on Weights and Measures named the SI unit of magnetic flux density the tesla in his honor. Tesla has experienced a resurgence in interest in popular culture since the 1990s.
July 10, 1918
Ernst Havemann (born July 10, 1918, South Africa) was a South African writer.
July 10, 1946
Amy Knight is a Senior Research Analyst at the library of Congress and a former Woodrow Wilson Fellow. She is the author of THE KGB: POLICE AND POLITICS IN THE SOVIET UNION (Unwin Hyman).
July 10, 1959
Manil Suri (born July 10, 1959) is an Indian-American mathematician and writer of a trilogy of novels all named for Hindu gods. His first novel, The Death of Vishnu (2001), which was long-listed for the 2001 Booker Prize, short-listed for the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize that year. Since then he has published two more novels, The Age of Shiva (2008) and The City of Devi (2013), completing the trilogy.
July 10, 1945
Serena Vitale (Brindisi , July 10, 1945) is an Italian writer and translator who won the Bagutta Prize in 2001 with The Ice House, the Piero Chiara literary prize, and the Naples Prize in 2015.
July 10, 1834
James Abbott McNeill Whistler (July 10, 1834 – July 17, 1903) was an American artist, active during the American Gilded Age and based primarily in the United Kingdom. He was averse to sentimentality and moral allusion in painting, and was a leading proponent of the credo "art for art's sake". His famous signature for his paintings was in the shape of a stylized butterfly possessing a long stinger for a tail. The symbol was apt, for it combined both aspects of his personality—his art was characterized by a subtle delicacy, while his public persona was combative. Finding a parallel between painting and music, Whistler entitled many of his paintings "arrangements", "harmonies", and "nocturnes", emphasizing the primacy of tonal harmony. His most famous painting is Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (1871), commonly known as Whistler's Mother, the revered and oft-parodied portrait of motherhood. Whistler influenced the art world and the broader culture of his time with his artistic theories and his friendships with leading artists and writers.
July 10, 1962
Christian Jungersen (born 10 July 1962 in Copenhagen) is a Danish novelist whose works have been translated into 18 languages. He has published three novels in Danish – Krat (1999), Undtagelsen (2004, published as The Exception in 2006), and Du Forsvinder (2012, scheduled to be published as You Disappear in 2014). Jungersen earned a master’s in communication and social science from Roskilde University. Before publishing his first novel, he taught film at Folkeuniversitetet, an open university in Copenhagen. He also worked as an advertising copywriter, a manuscript consultant, and a TV screenwriter. Over the past decade he has divided his time among the US, Ireland, Denmark, and Malta. Krat (Undergrowth) depicts the intense relationship between two men over the course of nearly 70 years. While they begin as bosom buddies in an upper-class suburb of Copenhagen during the 1920s, they end as retirees who, despite not having spoken in decades, remain just as consumed with each other – but now as mortal enemies. Krat was on the Danish bestseller list for three months when it came out in 1999. It won Bogforum’s Debutant Prize and was nominated for Weekendavisen’s literary prize. When the Danish Arts Foundation awarded Jungersen a three-year fellowship in 2000, it was the first time in 20 years that the foundation had given the honor to a debut novelist. A psychological thriller, The Exception ('Undtagelsen') is told in turn by four women who work for the dysfunctional Danish Center for Genocide Information. When two of them receive death threats, it is unclear whether the threats have been sent by an exposed war criminal or a coworker. Drawing on recent work on the nature of evil, the book makes the case that the same dark impulses that lead to genocide may underlie the bullying that plagues the center's office – and be present in all human beings. The novel was on the bestseller list for a year and a half in Denmark, where it won the P2 Novel Prize and De Gyldne Laurbær ('The Golden Laurels'). In 2009, readers of Denmark's largest newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, voted The Exception the second best Danish novel of the past 25 years, and in 2010 it won another readers' poll of the best Danish novel of the preceding decade. The Exception has been published in 18 countries. It was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, as well as being shortlisted for the Duncan Lawrie Dagger in the United Kingdom, the Grand Prix des Lectrices de Elle in France, and the Martin Beck Award in Sweden. In the US, both The New York Times and Amazon designated the novel as an editor's choice. Jungersen's latest novel, You Disappear ('Du Forsvinder'), is narrated by Mia, whose husband Frederik undergoes radical personality changes due to a slowly growing brain tumor that leaves his intellect, speech and motor control intact. Their lives change even more when it comes out that, in the year before his diagnosis, he embezzled 12 million crowns from the private Copenhagen school where he is headmaster. But was the tumor already determining his actions at the time, absolving him, or should he go to jail? In preparing Frederik's defense, Mia immerses herself in the latest brain research, the emerging neurological portrait of human nature, and the classic metaphysical question of free will. Her reading profoundly affects how she responds to Frederik – and to her own passionate impulses. You Disappear has been both a critical and a commercial success in Denmark since being published there in March 2012. Library and newspaper readers awarded it the Læsernes Bogpris, and it was nominated for two other major honors, Politiken's Literature Prize and the Martha Prize, while staying on the top-10 list of bestselling fiction for an entire year. You Disappear is scheduled to be published in an additional 10 countries in 2013 and 2014, with US publication slated for January 2014 from Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. The American translation by Misha Hoekstra won the Leif & Inger Sjöberg Prize from the American-Scandinavian Foundation.
July 11, 1826
Alexander Nikolayevich Afanasyev (11 July 1826 – 23 October 1871) was a Russian Slavist who published nearly 600 Russian folktales and fairytales, one of the largest folktale collection in the world. The first edition of his collection was published in eight fascicules from 1855–67, earning him the reputation of the Russian counterpart to the Brothers Grimm.
July 11, 1956
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in East Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Iran, and India. He was educated at Delhi University and at Oxford, from which he received a doctorate in social anthropology. He now teaches at Delhi University. THE CIRCLE OF REASON, which took him three years to write, is his first novel.
July 11, 1967
Jhumpa Lahiri (born on July 11, 1967) is an Indian American author. Lahiri's debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and her first novel, The Namesake (2003), was adapted into the popular film of the same name. She was born Nilanjana Sudeshna but goes by her nickname (or in Bengali, her 'Daak naam') Jhumpa. Lahiri is a member of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, appointed by U.S. President Barack Obama. Her book The Lowland, published in 2013, was a nominee for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction.
July 11, 1943
Howard Gardner is a MacArthur Prize Fellow associated with Harvard University, the Boston University School of Medicine, and the Boston Veterans Administration Medical Center. He is the author of many books, including ARTFUL SCRIBBLES (Basic Books, 1980) and ART, MIND, AND BRAIN (Basic Books, 1982). .
July 11, 1942
A native of Ivanhoe, Virginia, David Huddle has lived in Vermont for over four decades. He is the author of twenty previous books, including fiction, essays, and poetry. His novel Nothing Can Make Me Do This (Tupelo, 2011) won the Library of Virginia Award for Fiction, and his Black Snake at the Family Reunion won the Pen New England Award for Poetry. A longtime resident of Vermont, he teaches at the Bread Loaf School of English and the Rainier Writing Workshop.
July 11, 1933
Arthur John Langguth (July 11, 1933 – September 1, 2014), known as A. J. Langguth, was an American author, journalist and educator, born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was Professor Emeritus of the Annenberg School for Communications School of Journalism at the University of Southern California. Langguth was the author of several dark, satirical novels, a biography of the English short story master Saki, and lively histories of the Trail of Tears, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Vietnam War, the political life of Julius Caesar and U.S. involvement with torture in Latin America. A graduate of Harvard College (MA, 1955), Langguth was South East Asian correspondent and Saigon bureau chief for The New York Times during the Vietnam war, using the byline "Jack Langguth". He also wrote and reported for Look Magazine in Washington, DC and The Valley Times in Los Angeles, California. Langguth joined the journalism faculty at USC in 1976. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976, and received the Freedom Forum Award, honoring the nation's top journalism educators, in 2001. He retired from active teaching at USC in 2003. Langguth lived in Hollywood.
July 11, 1919
Benjamin Tammuz (July 11, 1919–July 19, 1989) was an Israeli writer and artist who contributed to Israeli culture in many disciplines, as a novelist, journalist, critic, painter, and sculptor. Benjamin Tammuz was born in Soviet Russia. When he was five years old, he immigrated with his parents to the Land of Israel. He attended the Tachkemoni school and the Herzliya Hebrew High School in Tel Aviv. From an early age, he engaged in writing, sculpture, and painting. He also took an avid interest in art history, going on to study that subject at the Sorbonne in Paris. While growing up, he became a member of the Communist underground. As a youth he was a member of the Canaanite movement. More than his teachers and friends, the artist Yitzhak Danziger was an influence on him. In 1948, Tammuz joined the editorial board of Haaretz. At first he wrote the popular column ‘Uzi & Co.’ Later he edited the children's newspaper Haaretz Shelanu. From 1965, he edited Haaretz's literary and cultural supplement, serving as the art critic there. From 1971 to 1975, he served as cultural attaché at the Israeli embassy in London. From 1979 to 1984, he was invited as a writer-in-residence at Oxford University. Benjamin Tammuz died in 1989 in Tel Aviv.
July 11, 1930
Klaus Wagenbach, a publisher and renowned Kafka expert, has written six books on the author, including Kafka: A Biography of His Youth and Kafka's Prague.
July 12, 1935
Paul Chevigny teaches at New York University Law School and is the author of several books on police abuse, including Police Power (1965) and Cops and Rebels (1972). He has also worked on numerous reports for Americas Watch and other human rights organizations.
July 12, 1948
ELIAS KHOURY, born in Beirut in 1948, is the author of over a dozen novels (including YALO, LITTLE MOUNTAIN, CITY GATES, THE JOURNEY OF LITTLE GANDHI, and THE KINGDOM OF STRANGERS), four volumes of literary criticism, and three plays. His GATE OF THE SUN was a 2006 New York Times Book Review Notable Book and was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science, and The Kansas City Star. Public intellectual and advocate for social justice, Khoury is a Global Distinguished Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. His novels have been translated into Catalan, Portuguese, Norwegian, French, Hebrew, Swedish, German, and Spanish. MAIA TABET, born in Lebanon, is a literary translator and a professional cook. She translated Khoury’s first novel to be published in English, LITTLE MOUNTAIN, and has translated a number of prose texts that have appeared in literary magazines including BANIPAL, WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS, and FIKRAN WA FANN. Currently, she lives in the United States.
July 12, 1904
Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) was born and died in Chile, but as a member of the diplomatic corps he lived in and visited many parts of the world.
July 12, 1929
Tayeb Salih (12 July 1929 – 18 February 2009) was a Sudanese writer. Born in Karmakol, near the village of Al Dabbah in the Northern Province of Sudan, he studied at the University of Khartoum before leaving for the University of London in England. Coming from a background of small farmers and religious teachers, his original intention was to work in agriculture. However, excluding a brief spell as a schoolmaster before coming to England, his working life was in broadcasting. For more than ten years, Salih wrote a weekly column for the London-based Arabic language newspaper al Majalla in which he explored various literary themes. He worked for the BBC's Arabic Service and later became director general of the Ministry of Information in Doha, Qatar. He spent the last 10 years of his working career with UNESCO in Paris, where he held various posts and was UNESCO's representative in the Gulf States. Tayeb Saleh's writing is drawn from his experience of communal village life that is centered on people and their complex relationships. 'At various levels and with varying degrees of psychoanalytic emphasis, he deals with themes of reality and illusion, the cultural dissonance between the West and the exotic orient, the harmony and conflict of brotherhood, and the individual's responsibility to find a fusion between his or her contradictions' (Tayeb Salih (n.d)). It can be said that the motifs of his books are derived from his Islamic background and his experience of modern Africa, both pre- and post-colonial (Tayeb Salih (n.d)). Mawsim al-Hijra ila al-Shamal was published in Arabic in 1966, and in English as Season of Migration to the North in 1969. It is narrated by a young man who returns to his village of Wad Hamad in the northern Shamaliyah province in Sudan, after studying in Europe for seven years, eager to make a contribution to the new postcolonial life of his country. Once back, the narrator discovers a stranger among the familiar faces of childhood: the enigmatic Mustafa Sa’eed. Sa'eed takes the young man into his confidence, 'telling him the story of his own years in London in the early part of the twentieth century, of his brilliant career as an economist, and of the series of fraught and deadly relationships with European women that led to a terrible public reckoning and his return to his native land.' Salih achieved immediate acclaim when Season of Migration to the North was first published in Beirut. In 2001, the book was declared the most important Arabic novel of the 20th century by the Arab Literary Academy. The novel was banned in Saleh's native Sudan for several years despite the fact that it won him prominence and fame worldwide. Urs' al-Zayn (published in English as 'The Wedding of Zein) is a comic novella published in 1969 centering on the unlikely nuptials of the town eccentric Zein. Tall and odd-looking, with just two teeth in his mouth, Zein has made a reputation for himself as the man who falls in love over and over with girls who promptly marry other men- to the point where mothers seek him out in hopes that he will draw the eye of available suitors to their eligible daughters. (The Boston Bibiophile, 2010). the year he stroke up the yearly award Yearly Award, Endorsed by Tayeb Salih during his life and organized by Abdelkarim Mirghani Cultural Centre, Omdurman,Sudan. A group of Salih's friends and fans formed a committee to honour him in 1998. The committee collected $ 20,000 for Tayeb Salih’s personal use. However, he indicated his desire to utilize the money in launching a cultural initiative that supports literary life in Sudan. Abdelkarim Mirghani Cultural Centre's Board of Trustees established an independent secretariat to administer the Prize award and the associated activities. A committee of writers and academics in Sudan receives and evaluates the participating novels, and selects the winners. The winners are announced on the 21st of October of each year and the winning titles are published by Abdelkarim Mirghani Cultural Centre. The award of the Prize is usually accompanied by a conference on various aspects of Sudanese literature. The first Prize was awarded in 2003. In 2008, Abdelkarim Mirghani Cultural Centre launched another prize under the name Tayeb Salih Short Story Writing Prize for Youth.
July 12, 1892
Bruno Schulz (July 12, 1892 – November 19, 1942) was a Polish writer, fine artist, literary critic and art teacher born to Jewish parents. He is regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century. In 1938, he was awarded the Polish Academy of Literature's prestigious Golden Laurel award. Several of Schulz's works have been lost in the Holocaust, including short stories from the early 1940s and his final, unfinished novel The Messiah. Schulz was shot and killed by a German Nazi in 1942 while walking back home toward Drohobycz Ghetto with a loaf of bread.
July 12, 1912
Kenneth Milton Stampp (12 July 1912 – 10 July 2009), Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley (1946–1983), was a celebrated historian of slavery, the American Civil War, and Reconstruction. He was a visiting professor at Harvard University and Colgate University, Commonwealth Lecturer at the University of London, Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Munich, and has held the Harmsworth Chair at Oxford University. In 1989, he received the American Historical Association Award for Scholarly Distinction. Then in 1993, came the prestigious Lincoln Prize for lifetime achievement by the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College.
July 12, 1817
Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.
July 12, 1936
Edla Van Steen (12 July 1936 – 6 April 2018) was a Brazilian journalist, actress and writer. The daughter of a Belgian father and a mother of German descent, she was born in Florianópolis, Santa Catarina and educated at a Catholic boarding school. She began work as a radio broadcaster and then became a journalist in Curitiba. In 1958, she starred in the film Garganta do Diabo (The Devil's Throat). She published a book of short stories Cio (In Heat) in 1965; technically it was her second collection of short stories - an earlier manuscript was lost before it could be published. She founded the art gallery Galeria Multipla and served as its director. Her novel Memórias do Medo (Memories of Fear) was published in 1974. In 1981, it was adapted for television. In 1977, she published her next collection of stories Antes do amanhecer (Before the dawn). The following year, she organized an anthology O Conto da Mulher Brasileira (The Story of the Brazilian Women); she also organized a week in honour of Brazilian writers, sponsored by the São Paulo Ministry of Culture. Her play O último encontro (The Last Encounter) received the Prêmio Molière and the Prêmio Mambembe for best play as well as a prize awarded by the São Paulo association of art critics. She wrote a second play Bolo de nozes (Nut Cake) in 1990. She translated works by playwrights such as Jean-Claude Brisville, Henrik Ibsen and Manfred Karge for the theatre. David George is associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese and chair of foreign languages at Lake Forest College in Illinois.
July 12, 1933
Donald Edwin Westlake (July 12, 1933 – December 31, 2008) was an American writer, with over a hundred novels and non-fiction books to his credit. He specialized in crime fiction, especially comic capers, with an occasional foray into science fiction or other genres. He was a three-time Edgar Award winner, one of only two writers (the other is Joe Gores) to win Edgars in three different categories (1968, Best Novel, GOD SAVE THE MARK; 1990, Best Short Story, ‘Too Many Crooks’; 1991, Best Motion Picture Screenplay, The Grifters). In 1993, the Mystery Writers of America named Westlake a Grand Master, the highest honor bestowed by the society.
July 12, 1955
Timothy Garton Ash CMG FRSA (born 12 July 1955) is a British historian, author and commentator. He is Professor of European Studies at Oxford University. Much of his work has been concerned with the late modern and contemporary history of Central and Eastern Europe. He has written about the Communist regimes of that region, their experience with the secret police, the Revolutions of 1989 and the transformation of the former Eastern Bloc states into member states of the European Union. He has examined the role of Europe and the challenge of combining freedom and diversity, especially in relation to free speech.
July 12, 1967
Catalin Avramescu (born July 12, 1967) is assistant professor of political science at the University of Bucharest.
July 12, 1828
Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky (12 July 1828 – 17 October 1889) was a Russian revolutionary democrat, materialist philosopher, critic, and socialist (seen by some as a utopian socialist). He was the leader of the revolutionary democratic movement of the 1860s, and had an influence on Vladimir Lenin, Emma Goldman, and Serbian political writer and socialist Svetozar Markovi?.
July 12, 1955
TIMOTHY GARTON ASH is a Fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. Celebrated for his essays in The New York Review od Books, he is the author of The Polish Revolution, which won the Somerset Maugham Award; The Uses Of Adversity, which won the Prix Europeen de l’Essai; In Europe’s Name; and The Magic Lantern, his eyewitness account of the Central European revolutions of 1989, which has been translated into fourteen languages. He lives in Oxford with his wife and two sons.
July 12, 1967
Adam Johnson (born July 12, 1967) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and short story writer. He won the Pulitzer for his 2012 novel, The Orphan Master's Son. He is also a professor of English at Stanford University with a focus on creative writing. Johnson was born in South Dakota and raised in Arizona. He earned a BA in Journalism from Arizona State University in 1992; an MFA from the writing program at McNeese State University in 1996; and a PhD in English from Florida State University in 2000. Johnson is currently a San Francisco writer and associate professor in creative writing at Stanford University. He founded the Stanford Graphic Novel Project and was named "one of the nation's most influential and imaginative college professors" by Playboy Magazine. Johnson is the author of the novel The Orphan Master's Son (2012), which Michiko Kakutani, writing in The New York Times, has called, "a daring and remarkable novel, a novel that not only opens a frightening window on the mysterious kingdom of North Korea, but one that also excavates the very meaning of love and sacrifice." Johnson's interest in the topic arose from his sensitivity to the language of propaganda, wherever it occurs. Johnson also wrote the short-story collection Emporium and the novel Parasites Like Us, which won a California Book Award in 2003. His work has been published in Esquire, Harper's Magazine, Tin House, and The Paris Review, as well as Best New American Voices and The Best American Short Stories. Recently his short story "George Orwell was a Friend of Mine" was published by 21st Editions in The Janus Turn with photographs in platinum by George Tice. Johnson's work has been translated into French, Dutch, Japanese, Spanish, German, Italian, Hebrew, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, Serbian, and Macedonian and focuses on characters at the edge of society for whom isolation and disconnection are nearly permanent conditions. Michiko Kakutani described the central theme "running through his tales is also a melancholy melody of longing and loss: a Salingeresque sense of adolescent alienation and confusion, combined with an acute awareness of the randomness of life and the difficulty of making and sustaining connections." According to Daniel Mendelsohn, writing for New York Magazine, Johnson's oh-so-slightly futuristic flights of fancy, his vaguely Blade Runner–esque visions of a cluttered, anaerobic American culture, illustrate something very real, very current: the way we must embrace the unknown, take risks, in order to give flavor and meaning to life. A strain of absurdity also runs through his work, causing it to be described as "a funky new science fiction that was part irony and part pure dread." "Teen Sniper" is about young sniper prodigy enlisted by the Palo Alto police department to suppress the disgruntled workers of Silicon Valley. "The Canadanaut" follows a remote team of Canadian weapons developers who race to beat the Americans to the moon.
July 12, 1979
Petra H?lová (born in Prague, 12 July 1979) is a Czech writer H?lová holds a degree in culturology from Charles University in Prague. She lived in Mongolia for one year as an exchange student after having studied the language and culture for several years and having originally had her interest sparked by "a chance encounter with the film Urga by acclaimed director Nikita Mikhalkov." H?lová rapidly rose to popularity in 2002 with the publication of her début novel Pam?? mojí babi?ce, which became one of the most widely read Czech books of the decade. The novel is told from the point of view of five female narrators from three generations of the same Mongolian family. She chose to set the novel in Mongolia to avoid the necessity of writing about "artificial phenomena" such as career and media, by which she felt Mongolia had been less "polluted" than Europe; this allowed her to focus on writing about the basic feelings of her characters. The novel won a Magnesia Litera Prize as Discovery of the Year, and was voted Book of the Year by the Czech daily Lidové noviny. H?lová's second novel, P?es matný sklo, is set in Prague. The book, divided into three sections, offers a portrait of a relationship between a son (Ond?ej) and his mother (unnamed). The first and third sections are narrated by the son; the second, by the mother. The "frosted" (or "dusty" or "dim") glass of the title presumably refers to the lack of clarity in the way the son and the mother see one another. Her stay as a Fulbright scholar in the Department of Anthropology at CUNY in 2004–05 inspired her third novel, Cirkus Les Mémoires, set in New York. H?lová's fourth novel, Um?lohmotný t?ípokoj, narrated by a 30-year-old Prague call girl with a high-class clientele, won the Ji?í Orten Prize, awarded each year to the author of a work of Czech prose or poetry. The author must be 30 or under at the time the work is finished, and the award carries a prize of 50,000 K? (roughly $3,000). A stage adaptation by Viktorie ?ermáková opened in Prague in 2007. ?ermáková chose to attribute the text to five call girls and one narrator. In 2008, her fifth novel, Stanice Tajga – about a Danish businessman named Hablund who disappears in Siberia after World War II and a man named Erske who, 60 years later, attempts to track him down—received the second annual Josef Škvorecký Award, which carries with it a prize of 250,000 K? (roughly $14,500). In October 2009, Northwestern University Press published the first translation of her work in English, All This Belongs to Me, a translation by Alex Zucker of her début, Pam?? mojí babi?ce.
July 13, 1894
Isaak Emmanuilovoch Babel was born on July 13, 1894, in Odessa, Ukraine, a port city located on the Black Sea. His parents, Manus Yitzkhovich and Feyga Bobel (the original spelling of their last name), were Jewish, and they raised Isaak and his sister in a middle-class household. Soon after his birth, Isaak Babel's family moved to Nikolaev, a port city located about 100 miles away from Odessa. There, his father worked for an overseas agricultural-equipment manufacturer, and Babel, once he reached school age, attended the Count Witte Commercial School. The family returned to Odessa in 1905, and Babel was educated by private tutors until he began attending the Nicholas I Odessa Commercial School No. 1. He graduated from the school in 1911 and went on to study economics at the Kiev Commercial Institute (which was relocated to Saratov in 1915, during the First World War). Babel graduated from the institute in 1916, afterward briefly studying law at the Petrograd Psycho-Neurological Institute. Babel met and befriended writer Maxim Gorky in 1916, and their friendship would become a major force in Babel's life. Gorky began to include Babel's short stories in a journal that he edited, The Chronicle. Thanks to this exposure, Babel was invited to contribute his fiction writing and reporting to other journals as well as to the newspaper New Life. Meanwhile, Babel joined the cavalry of the Russian army in 1917, serving at the Rumanian front and in Petrograd. He was active with the army for several years, during which time he wrote pieces about his military experiences for New Life. In 1919, Babel married Evgenia (also spelled Yevgenia and Eugenia) Gronfein, the daughter of a wealthy agricultural-equipment importer, whom he'd met in Kiev. After his time in the army, he worked for newspapers and dedicated more time to his writing. He published The Story of My Dovecote, a volume of short stories inspired by his own childhood, in 1925. He achieved literary fame with Red Cavalry, published in 1926. This collection of stories, inspired by his experiences in the Soviet-Polish War of 1920, shocked its readers with its tales of brutality and impressed them with its direct language and humor, even in the face of violence. In 1931, Babel published Odessa Tales, a cycle of short stories set in a ghetto of Odessa. Once again, he was praised for his realism, simple writing style and skillful portrayals of characters from the fringes of society—in this case, a band of Jewish gangsters and their leader, Benya Krik. Later in the 1930s, he wrote a play titled Maria (1935) and four novellas, including ‘The Trial’ and ‘The Kiss.’ As the decade progressed, Babel's activities and written works were monitored closely by critics and censors for any hints of disloyalty to the Soviet government. Babel traveled frequently to France (where his estranged wife and daughter, Nathalie, lived), wrote less and spent much time in isolation during these years. His friend and greatest ally, Gorky, died in 1936. Like many of his contemporaries, Babel was persecuted in the ‘great purges’ conducted under Joseph Stalin in the late 1930s. He was arrested by the Soviet secret police in May 1939, at the age of 45, and was charged with belonging to anti-Soviet political organizations and terrorist groups and serving as a spy for France and Austria. (His affair with Evgeniya Gladun-Khayutina, the wife of the head of the secret police, was likely a contributing factor to his arrest.) Though Babel appealed the charges and tried to revoke the testimony he'd given under torture, he was executed on January 27, 1940. After Stalin's death in 1953, Babel's name was cleared and his writing was rehabilitated. His work was gradually published again in the Soviet Union and even in foreign countries. He continues to influence short-story writers around the world.
July 13, 1923
Ashley F. Bryan (born July 13, 1923) is an American writer and illustrator of children's books. Most of his subjects are from the African American experience. He was U.S. nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2006 and he won the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for his contribution to American children's literature in 2009. Ashley Bryan's Freedom Over Me was short-listed for the 2016 Kirkus Prize and received a Newbery Honor.
July 13, 1930
Samuel Eldred Greenlee, Jr. (July 13, 1930 – May 19, 2014) was an African-American writer, best known for his controversial novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door, which was first published in London by Allison & Busby in March 1969 (having been rejected by dozens of mainstream publishers), and went on to be chosen as The Sunday Times Book of the Year. The novel was subsequently made into the 1973 movie of the same name, directed by Ivan Dixon and co-produced and written by Greenlee, that is now considered a 'cult classic'. Born in Chicago, Greenlee attended the University of Wisconsin (BS, political science, 1952) and the University of Chicago (1954-7). He was a member of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity (Beta Omicron 1950). He served in the military (1952-4), earning the rank of first lieutenant, and subsequently worked for the United States Information Agency, serving in Iraq (in 1958 he was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal for bravery during the Baghdad revolution), Pakistan, Indonesia, and Greece between 1957 and 1965. Leaving the United States foreign service after eight years, he stayed on in Greece. He undertook further study (1963-4) at the University of Thessaloniki, and lived for three years on the island of Mykonos, where he began to write his first novel. That was eventually published in 1969 as The Spook Who Sat by the Door, the story of a black man who is recruited as a CIA agent and having mastered the skills of a spy then uses them to lead a black guerrilla movement in the US. Greenlee co-wrote (with Mel Clay) the screenplay for the 1973 film The Spook Who Sat by the Door, which he also co-produced with director Ivan Dixon and which is considered 'one of the more memorable and impassioned films that came out around the beginning of the notoriously polarizing blaxploitation era.' In 2011, an independent documentary entitled Infiltrating Hollywood: The Rise and Fall of the Spook Who Sat by the Door was filmed by Christine Acham and Clifford Ward, about the making and reception of the Spook film, in which Greenlee spoke out about the suppression of the film soon after its release. In a chance meeting with Aubrey Lewis (1935–2001), one of the first Black FBI agents to have been recruited in 1962 by the FBI, Greenlee was told that The Spook Who Sat by the Door was required reading at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. Other works by Greenlee include Baghdad Blues, a 1976 novel based on his experiences traveling in Iraq in the 1950s and witnessing the 1958 Iraqi revolution, Blues for an African Princess, a 1971 collection of poems, and Ammunition (poetry, 1975). In 1990 Greenlee won the Illinois poet laureate award. He also wrote short stories, plays (although he found no producer for any of them), and the screenplay for a film short called Lisa Trotter (2010), a story adapted from Aristophanes' Lysistrata. On May 19, 2014, Greenlee died in Chicago at the age of 83. On June 6, 2014, Chicago's DuSable Museum of African American History sponsored an evening of celebration in his honor, attended by his daughter Natiki Montano.
July 13, 1935
Earl Lovelace (born 13 July 1935) is an award-winning Trinidadian novelist, journalist, playwright, and short story writer. He is particularly recognized for his descriptive, dramatic fiction on Trinidadian culture: 'Using Trinidadian dialect patterns and standard English, he probes the paradoxes often inherent in social change as well as the clash between rural and urban cultures.' As Bernardine Evaristo notes, 'Lovelace is unusual among celebrated Caribbean writers in that he has always lived in Trinidad. Most writers leave to find support for their literary endeavours elsewhere and this, arguably, shapes the literature, especially after long periods of exile. But Lovelace's fiction is deeply embedded in Trinidadian society and is written from the perspective of one whose ties to his homeland have never been broken.' Born in Toco, Trinidad and Tobago, Earl Lovelace was sent to live with his grandparents in Tobago at a very young age, but rejoined his family in Toco when he was 11 years old. His family later moved to Belmont, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and then Morvant. Lovelace attended Scarborough Methodist Primary School, Scarborough, Tobago (1940–47), Nelson Street Boys, R.C., Port of Spain (1948), and Ideal High School, Port of Spain (1948–53, where he sat the Cambridge School Certificate). He worked at the Trinidad Guardian as a proofreader from 1953 to 1954, and then for the Department of Forestry (1954-56) and the Ministry of Agriculture (1956–66). He began writing while stationed in the village of Valencia as a forest ranger. In 1962 his first novel, While Gods Are Falling, won the Trinidad and Tobago Independence literary competition sponsored by British Petroleum (BP). From 1966 to 1967, Lovelace studied at Howard University, Washington, DC, and in 1974 he received an MA in English from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, where he was also Visiting Novelist. Winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980, he spent the year as a visiting writer at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He taught at Federal City College (now University of the District of Columbia), Washington, DC (1971-73), and from 1977 to 1987 he lectured in literature and creative writing at the University of the West Indies at St Augustine. He was appointed Writer-in-Residence in England by the London Arts Board (1995-6), a visiting lecturer in the Africana Studies Department at Wellesley College, Massachusetts (1996-97), and was Distinguished Novelist in the Department of English at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington (1999–2004). He is a columnist for the Trinidad Express, and has contributed to a number of periodicals, including Voices, South, and Wasafiri. Based in Trinidad, while teaching and touring various countries, he was appointed to the Board of Governors of the University of Trinidad and Tobago in 2005, the year his 70th birthday was honoured with a conference and celebrations at the University of the West Indies. Lovelace is the subject of a 2014 documentary film by Funso Aiyejina entitled A Writer In His Place. Lovelace has three daughters and two sons. His artist son Che Lovelace illustrated the jacket of the 1997 US edition of his novel Salt. Earl Lovelace collaborated with his filmmaker daughter Asha Lovelace on writing the film Joebell and America, based on his short story of the same title.
July 13, 1952
David R. Roediger (born July 13, 1952) is the Foundation Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at Kansas University, where he has been since the fall of 2014. Previously, he was an American Kendrick C. Babcock Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His research interests include the construction of racial identity, class structures, labor studies, and the history of American radicalism. He writes from a Marxist theoretical framework.
July 13, 1940
Gustavo Sainz (born July 13, 1940) is a Spanish language author from Mexico. Born in Mexico City, the son of journalist José Luis Sainz, Gustavo Sainz learned how to read at the age of three from his paternal grandmother, and started publishing his work in the city newspapers at the age of ten. When he was in primary school, Sainz founded several school magazines, which he continued to do until college. At the age of eighteen, Sainz left home to work as a journalist in the magazine Visión. In 1960, he entered the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where he began studying law, but ultimately changed to study literature. Sainz's first novel, Gazapo, was published when he was twenty-five and has been translated into fourteen languages. This novel marked the beginning of the literary movement ‘la Onda’, of which other Mexican writers, such as José Agustín and Parmenides García Saldaña, formed part. In 1968, Sainz travelled to the University of Iowa to participate in the International Writing Program, where he started and completed his second novel, Obsesivos días circulares. Sainz's longest novel, A la salud de la serpiente, relates his adventures of this period in Iowa. Upon his return to Mexico, he wrote La princesa del Palacio de Hierro, which won the Premio Xavier Villaurrutia in 1974. It was translated into English by Andrew Hurley and published as ‘The Princess of the Iron Palace’ by Grove Press in 1987. In 2003, he published A troche y moche, which won the prize for the best novel of the year written in Mexico, and its translation intro French won the award for best novel in Quebec. His work includes eighteen published novels, countless articles, and various children's books. Sainz is currently the editor of the magazine Transgresiones. He lives in the United States with his two sons, Claudio and Marcio Sainz, and is a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.
July 13, 1940
Manuel Puig (General Villegas, Argentina, December 28, 1932 - Cuernavaca, Mexico, July 22, 1990) was an Argentinian author. Among his best known novels are La traición de Rita Hayworth (1968) (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth), Boquitas pintadas (1969) (Heartbreak Tango), and El beso de la mujer araña (1976) (Kiss of the Spider Woman), which was made into a film by the Argentine-Brazilian Director, Héctor Babenco and in 1993 into a Broadway musical.
July 13, 1934
Akinwande Oluwole 'Wole' Soyinka (born 13 July 1934) is a Nigerian playwright and poet. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first African to be honored. Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta. After study in Nigeria and the UK, he worked with the Royal Court Theatre in London. He went on to write plays that were produced in both countries, in theatres and on radio. He took an active role in Nigeria's political history and its struggle for independence from Great Britain. In 1965, he seized the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio and broadcast a demand for the cancellation of the Western Nigeria Regional Elections. In 1967 during the Nigerian Civil War, he was arrested by the federal government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for two years. Soyinka has strongly criticised many Nigerian military dictators, especially late General Sanni Abacha, as well as other political tyrannies, including the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. Much of his writing has been concerned with 'the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it'. During the regime of General Sani Abacha (1993–98), Soyinka escaped from Nigeria via the 'Nadeco Route' on a motorcycle. Living abroad, mainly in the United States, he was a professor first at Cornell University and then at Emory University in Atlanta, where in 1996 he was appointed Robert W. Woodruff Professor of the Arts. Abacha proclaimed a death sentence against him 'in absentia'. With civilian rule restored to Nigeria in 1999, Soyinka returned to his nation. He has also taught at the universities of Oxford, Harvard and Yale. From 1975 to 1999, he was a Professor of Comparative Literature at the Obafemi Awolowo University, then called the University of Ife. With civilian rule restored in 1999, he was made professor emeritus. Soyinka has been a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In the fall of 2007 he was appointed Professor in Residence at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California, US.
July 13, 1925
LUIS SPOTA, (13 July 1925, Mexico City - 20 January 1985) Mexico’s most successful serious novelist, was born in Mexico City in 1925. He has written novels, short stories, and movie scripts. In 1951 he won the Ariel Award for the best short movie subject of the year. He became managing editor of the evening edition of Excelsior, an important Mexico City daily, in 1956, since which time he was also been active as a movie director. Mr. Spota lived in Mexico City.
July 13, 1931
Miguel Donoso Pareja (July 13, 1931 - March 16, 2015) was an Ecuadorian writer. He was awarded the Ecuadorian National Prize in literature, the Eugenio Espejo Prize , in 2006 by the President of Ecuador. Donoso Pareja's father was Miguel Donoso Moncayo (1896-1971) from Quito and his mother was Leonor Pareja Diezcanseco from Guayaquil. His uncle was the novelist and diplomat Alfredo Pareja Díez Canseco (1908-1993). Starting in 1951, Donoso Pareja frequented the home of Enrique Gil Gilbert in Guayaquil, where he became involved with other young poets and writers of the time. In 1962, he joined the Communist Party. In 1963 he became the head of fundraising for the weekly "El Pueblo", which was the main publication of the Communist Party in Guayaquil. In just a few weeks the police raided and ransacked his home, accusing him of being a terrorist. They took photos of him with small pieces of metal that appeared to contain gunpowder, and the newspapers published these photos and accused him of having grenades. He was released after 2 days, but great damage had already been done to his reputation. A few weeks later, on July 11, 1963, Ramón Castro Jijón's military junta took control of Ecuador, and Donoso Pareja went underground, newspapers said he "went underground." One afternoon he established a secret meeting with his daughters at the Odeon Cinema, entered when the lights were off and was able to speak to them, but the police had followed him, and they arrested him amidst a great tumult and screaming. He was detained at the prison headquarters for ten months without trial. He was then expelled to Mexico, given a tourist passport, and released without any money. He had to request the help of his friends in order to afford to travel outside the country. In Mexico he worked as a professor of literature and writing at various institutions, including the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the National Institute of Fine Arts. 2 He also worked as a writer for newspapers. In 1976 he directed the magazine "Cambio" together with other famous writers such as Juan Rulfo , Julio Cortázar , José Revueltas , Pedro Orgambide and Eraclio Zepeda , until the magazine was definitively published in 1981. In 1976 he wrote "Day after day", which is a novel about his exile. In 1981, almost 18 years after being expelled from Ecuador, he decided to return to his homeland, leaving behind his job and friends in Mexico. That year he wrote "Never again the sea", a novel about his return from exile. In 1985 Donoso Pareja received a $ 26,000 grant to the Guggenheim Fellowship to write fiction, which then traveled several months to Spain and other European countries and spent all the money, so he returned to Ecuador, locked himself in a borrowed apartment, and wrote 22 love stories, which expressed a deep feeling of loneliness and despair. The stories were published in a book titled "The Same as Forgetting". In 1987 he was elected president of the Ecuadorian House of Culture of Guayas, and permanently moved to Guayaquil. He lived his last years suffering from Parkinson's disease. He died on March 16, 2015. 4 He was cremated and his ashes were thrown into the sea as his last wish.
July 13, 1937
José Agrippino de Paula e Silva (São Paulo, July 13, 1937 - Embu das Artes, July 4, 2007) was a Brazilian writer. Among his books, PanAmérica ( 1967 ) stands out as a fundamental work for the development of the Tropicália movement. The book features irreverant portraits of personalities like Che Guevara, Marilyn Monroe, Cary Grant, John Wayne, Marlon Brando, Cecil B. de Mille, Andy Warhol, among other icons of mass culture. In the book, these characters participate in filming episodes of the Bible and act in scenes without a logical sequence and with a picturesque or cinematic bias. He directed the film Hitler 3º Mundo in 1968, and one of the actors in the film, Jô Soares, commented: For many it is an incomprehensible film, but the truth is that it is the most misunderstood film in Brazilian cinema. It is the damned among the damned . The story of the film is about a samurai (Jô) who controls the business of dwarf beggars and distributes them through the neighborhoods of the city of São Paulo and disputes this market with Captain America, who is Hitler's lover and lives in the Liberdade neighborhood. Cast members Ruth Escobar and Túlio de Lemos , director of photography Jorge Bodanzky.
July 13, 1961
Benjamín Prado is a Spanish novelist, essayist and poet. He was born in Madrid. He has received several prizes for his work, including the Premio Hiperión, the Premio Internacional Ciudad de Melilla, the Premio Internacional Generación del 27 and the Premio Andalucía de Novela.
July 13 , 1881
John Dover Wilson CH (13 July 1881 – 15 January 1969) was a professor and scholar of Renaissance drama, focusing particularly on the work of William Shakespeare. Born at Mortlake (then in Surrey, now in Greater London), he attended Lancing College, Sussex, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and taught at King's College London before becoming Regius Professor of English literature at the University of Edinburgh. Wilson was primarily known for two lifelong projects. He was the chief editor, with the assistance of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, of the New Shakespeare, a series of editions of the complete plays published by Cambridge University Press. Of those editions, the one of Hamlet was his particular focus, and he published a number of other books on the play, supporting the textual scholarship of his edition as well as offering an interpretation. His What Happens in Hamlet, first published in 1935, is among the more influential books ever written on the play, being reprinted several times including a revised second edition in 1959. Wilson's textual work was characterised by considerable boldness and confidence in his own judgement. His work on the complicated matter of the transmission of Shakespeare's texts—none of Shakespeare's manuscripts survive and no published edition of any play was supervised directly by the playwright, so all of the texts are mediated by compositors and printers—was highly respected, though some of his theories have since been eclipsed by new scholarship. However, when the textual principles he painstakingly established did not support the reading that seemed right to him, he would depart widely from them, earning him a reputation for both brilliance and capriciousness; Stanley Edgar Hyman refers to the "valuable (sometime weird)" New Shakespeare. In his interpretations that juxtaposition was heightened without the support of his arduous textual work. These interpretations included a reading of the famous bedroom scene between Hamlet and his mother that remains influential (if frequently questioned) to this day, but also peculiar ideas about covert Lutheranism and almost completely unsourced speculation about Shakespeare's relationship with his son-in-law. The influential Shakespearean W. W. Greg, Wilson's nemesis, once referred to Wilson's ideas as "the careerings of a not too captive balloon in a high wind." In 1969 he completed a posthumously-published memoir, Milestones on the Dover Road.
July 14, 1949
Nick Bantock (born 14 July 1949) is a British artist and author based in Saltspring Island, British Columbia, known for his series, The Griffin and Sabine Trilogy. His books are published by Raincoast Books in Canada and Chronicle Books in the United States.
July 14, 1941
Emmanuel Boundzéki Dongala (born 1941) is a Congolese chemist and novelist. He was Richard B. Fisher Chair in Natural Sciences at Bard College at Simon's Rock until 2014. In 1997, he was dean of Marien Ngouabi University in Brazzaville when war broke out in the Republic of Congo. Bard College president Leon Botstein, who has aided a number of refugee professors, offered him a job teaching chemistry at the American college. As a chemist, his specialty is stereochemistry and asymmetric synthesis, as well as environmental toxicology. He is the author of a number of award-winning novels including Johnny Mad Dog (French: Johnny Chien Méchant) and Little Boys Come from the Stars. His work is featured in the Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry, and he has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. There is a film based on his book Johnny Mad Dog, a 2008 French-Liberian film directed by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire and starring Christopher Minie, Daisy Victoria Vandy, Dagbeh Tweh, Barry Chernoh, Mohammed Sesay and Joseph Duo. He was winner of the 2004 Cezam Prix Littéraire Inter CE for Johnny chien méchant.
July 14, 1917
William Eastlake (1917–1997) was an American writer. His Checkerboard Trilogy consists of the works Go in Beauty (1956), The Bronc People (1958), and Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses (1963). The literary critic Larry McCaffery included the Checkerboard Trilogy in his list of the 20th Century's Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction. Eastlake's book, Castle Keep was made into the 1969 movie, Castle Keep, directed by Sydney Pollack, starring Burt Lancaster, Patrick O'Neal, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Bruce Dern, and Peter Falk.
June 14, 1928
Ernesto 'Che' Guevara (June 14, 1928 – October 9, 1967), commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist. A major figure of the Cuban Revolution, his stylized visage has become a ubiquitous countercultural symbol of rebellion and global insignia in popular culture. As a young medical student, Guevara traveled throughout South America and was radicalized by the poverty, hunger, and disease he witnessed. His burgeoning desire to help overturn what he saw as the capitalist exploitation of Latin America by the United States prompted his involvement in Guatemala's social reforms under President Jacobo Árbenz, whose eventual CIA-assisted overthrow at the behest of the United Fruit Company solidified Guevara's political ideology. Later, in Mexico City, he met Raúl and Fidel Castro, joined their 26th of July Movement, and sailed to Cuba aboard the yacht, Granma, with the intention of overthrowing U.S.-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.[10] Guevara soon rose to prominence among the insurgents, was promoted to second-in-command, and played a pivotal role in the victorious two-year guerrilla campaign that deposed the Batista regime. Following the Cuban Revolution, Guevara performed a number of key roles in the new government. These included reviewing the appeals and firing squads for those convicted as war criminals during the revolutionary tribunals, instituting agrarian land reform as minister of industries, helping spearhead a successful nationwide literacy campaign, serving as both national bank president and instructional director for Cuba's armed forces, and traversing the globe as a diplomat on behalf of Cuban socialism. Such positions also allowed him to play a central role in training the militia forces who repelled the Bay of Pigs Invasion[13] and bringing the Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles to Cuba which precipitated the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Additionally, he was a prolific writer and diarist, composing a seminal manual on guerrilla warfare, along with a best-selling memoir about his youthful continental motorcycle journey. His experiences and studying of Marxism–Leninism led him to posit that the Third World's underdevelopment and dependence was an intrinsic result of imperialism, neocolonialism, and monopoly capitalism, with the only remedy being proletarian internationalism and world revolution. Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to foment revolution abroad, first unsuccessfully in Congo-Kinshasa and later in Bolivia, where he was captured by CIA-assisted Bolivian forces and summarily executed. Guevara remains both a revered and reviled historical figure, polarized in the collective imagination in a multitude of biographies, memoirs, essays, documentaries, songs, and films. As a result of his perceived martyrdom, poetic invocations for class struggle, and desire to create the consciousness of a 'new man' driven by moral rather than material incentives, he has evolved into a quintessential icon of various leftist-inspired movements. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century,[18] while an Alberto Korda photograph of him, titled Guerrillero Heroico (shown), was cited by the Maryland Institute College of Art as 'the most famous photograph in the world'.
July 14, 1932
South African-born Ronald Segal is the founding editor of the Penguin African Library and the author of fourteen books, including The Crisis of India, The Race War, The Americans, and The Black Diaspora.
July 14, 1932
Ronald Sukenick (July 14, 1932 in Brooklyn, New York – July 22, 2004) was an American writer and literary theorist. Sukenick studied at Cornell University, and wrote his doctoral thesis on Wallace Stevens, at Brandeis University. After Roland Barthes announced the "death of the author", Sukenick carried the metaphor even further in "the death of the novel". He drew up a list of what is missing: reality doesn't exist, nor time or personality. He was widely recognized as a controversial writer who, frequently humorously, questioned and rejected the conventions of traditional fiction-writing. In novels, short stories, literary criticism and history, he often used himself, family members or friends as characters, sometimes quoting them in tape-recorded conversations. He did stints as writer in residence at Cornell University, the University of California, Irvine, and Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. But his books were never best-sellers. Sukenick once commented that he had "only forty fans, but they're all fanatics."
July 14, 1860
Owen Wister (July 14, 1860 - July 21, 1938) was an American writer and ‘father’ of western fiction. He is best remembered for writing The Virginian, although he never wrote about the West afterwards.
July 14, 1936
Professor Maureen Ahern (July 14, 1936 - June 20, 2012) was a 1958 magna cum laude graduate of the University of New Hampshire. She earned a Bachelor's and Doctorate degrees, both in Literature, from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima, Peru in 1960 and 1961, respectively. After many years of work and travel throughout Mexico and Peru, Professor Ahern returned to the United States in 1972 and became a Professor of Spanish at Arizona State University. From 1990 until shortly before her death, she was Professor of Spanish, Latin American Literature and Culture at The Ohio State University. David Tipton began translating Peruvian poetry while living in Lima (1964-70). He is a full time writer and apart from translations has published poetry, fiction, and biography. Recent stories have been published in the Arts Council Anthology, New Stories 1, Ambit, and the Yorkshire Review. He is at work on a second novel. His first novel, set in Peru, will be published in 1977.
July 14, 1928
Nodar Dumbadze (July 14, 1928 – September 4, 1984) was a Georgian writer and one of the most popular authors in the late 20th-century Georgia. Born in Tbilisi, he graduated from the Faculty of Economics at Tbilisi State University in 1950. The same year, his first poems and humorous stories appeared in the Georgian press. He edited the satirical magazine Niangi from 1967 until 1972 when he became a secretary of the Union of Georgian Writers and a member of the presidium of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1972. Most of his fame came through his novels Me, Grandma, Iliko and Ilarioni (1960), I Can See the Sun (1962), A Sunny Night (1967), Don’t Be Afraid, Mother! (1971), The White Banners (1973), and The Law of Eternity (1978). His works are remarkable for simplicity and lyricism of the prose, humor, and melancholy coupled with optimism. He was awarded the Shota Rustaveli State Prize in 1975 and the Lenin Prize in 1980. Most of his major works have been dramatized and/or filmed. He died in Tbilisi and was buried there, at the Children’s Town 'Mziuri' founded by him. In September 2009, he was reburied to the Mtatsminda Pantheon. Translator George Nakashidse was born in the Georgian Republic. He is a graduate of Tiflis State University, has studied at Heidelberg University, and holds doctorates in law and philosophy from universities in Prague. He has held the positions of Assistant Professor at the Oriental Institute of Warsaw University and Lecturer in the Language, Literature and History of Georgia at Columbia University. He is currently preparing an anthology of Georgian poetry.
July 14, 1912
Woody Guthrie (1912-1967) wrote more than a thousand folk songs. . Kathy Jakobsen is one of America’s premier folk artists. She lives in Weston, Connecticut.
July 14, 1894
G. B. Harrison (14 July 1894 – 1 November 1991) was one of the leading Shakespeare experts of his time and the editor of the Shakespeare Penguin Classics. During his professional career, Harrison was an English professor at both Queen's University and the University of Michigan. He was a firm believer in traditional Catholicism and was a member of the Advisory Committee of the International Commission of English in the Liturgy. The Advisory Committee was in charge of overseeing and organizing work on a modern English translation of the Latin Mass. In his lifetime, Harrison had an active part in both World Wars and lived a civilian's life in four countries.
July 14, 1895
Frank Raymond "F. R." Leavis (14 July 1895 – 14 April 1978) was a British literary critic of the early-to-mid-twentieth century. He taught for much of his career at Downing College, Cambridge, and later at the University of York.
July 14, 1909
Willard Francis Motley (July 14, 1909 – March 4, 1965) was an African-American author. Motley published a column in the Chicago Defender under the pen-name Bud Billiken. Motley also worked as a freelance writer, and later founded and published the Hull House Magazine and worked in the Federal Writers Project. Motley first and best known novel was Knock on Any Door (1947). Motley was born and grew up in the Englewood neighborhood, South Side, Chicago, in one of the only African-American families residing there. His father was a Pullman porter. Motley graduated from Lewis-Champlain grammar school, and Englewood High School. He is related to the noted artist Archibald Motley. The two were raised as brothers, although Archibald was in fact Willard's uncle. He was hired by Robert S. Abbott to write a children's column called "Bud Says" under the pseudonym "Bud Billiken", for the Chicago Defender. He traveled to New York, California and the western states, earning a living through various menial jobs, as well as by writing for the radio and newspapers. Returning to Chicago in 1939, he lived near the Maxwell Street Market, which was to figure prominently in his later writing. He became associated with Hull House, and helped found the Hull House Magazine, in which some of his fiction appeared. In 1940 he wrote for the Works Progress Administration Federal Writers Project along with Richard Wright and Nelson Algren. In 1947 his first novel, Knock on Any Door, appeared to critical acclaim. A work of gritty naturalism, it concerns the life of Nick Romano, an Italian-American altar boy who turns to crime because of poverty and the difficulties of the immigrant experience. It was an immediate hit, selling 47,000 copies during its first three weeks in print. In 1949 it became a movie starring Humphrey Bogart. In response to critics who charged Motley with avoiding issues of race by writing about white characters, Motley said, "My race is the human race." His second novel, We Fished All Night, was not hailed as a success, and after it appeared Motley moved to Mexico to start over. His third novel, Let No Man Write My Epitaph, picks up the story of Knock on Any Door. Columbia Pictures made it into a movie in 1960. Ella Fitzgerald's music for the film was released on the album Ella Fitzgerald Sings Songs from "Let No Man Write My Epitaph". According to the citation statement for the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame awards, "Motley was criticized in his life for being a black man writing about white characters, a middle-class man writing about the lower class, and a closeted homosexual writing about heterosexual urges. But those more kindly disposed to his work, and there were plenty, admired his grit and heart....Chicago was more complicated than just its racial or sexual tensions, and as a writer his exploration was expansive...." Motley was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2014. On March 4, 1965, Motley died in Mexico City, Mexico at age 55. One final novel, Let Noon Be Fair, was published the following year. Since 1929, Chicago has held an annual Bud Billiken Parade and Picnic, (which served as his pen name during his early career at the Chicago Defender) on the second Saturday of August. The parade travels through the city's Bronzeville, Grand Boulevard and Washington Park neighborhoods on the south side. The bulk of Motley's archive is held in Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University.
July 14, 1931
Harriette Gillem Robinet was born in Washington D.C. She spent her childhood summers in Arlington, Virginia where her mother's father had been a slave under General Robert E. Lee. She attended the College of New Rochelle in New York and received graduate degrees in microbiology from Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. The author of several award-winning books for children, Ms. Robinet makes her home in Oak Park, Illinois.
July 14, 1946
Terry "Tuff" Ryan (July 14, 1946 – May 16, 2007) was an American writer, originally from Defiance, Ohio, who resided in San Francisco for most of her adult life. She was best known for her memoir The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, published in 2001, and released as a film, with the same title, in 2005.
July 14, 1968
Fredrik Strömberg (born 14 July 1968) is journalist and author, writing mostly about comics. He is the chairman of Seriefrämjandet (the Swedish Comics Association), the editor for Bild & Bubbla and the headmaster for a comics art school.
July 15, 1929
Francis Bebey (15 July 1929 in Douala, Cameroon – 28 May 2001 in Paris, France) was a Cameroonian artist, musician, and writer. Bebey attended the Sorbonne, and was further educated in the United States. In 1957, Bebey moved to Ghana at the invitation of Kwame Nkrumah, and took a job as a broadcaster. In the early 1960s, Bebey moved to France and started work in the arts, establishing himself as a musician, sculptor, and writer. His most popular novel was Agatha Moudio's Son. He also worked as a consultant for UNESCO. Bebey released his first album in 1969. His music was primarily guitar-based, although he integrated traditional African instruments as well. His style was groundbreaking, merging Cameroonian makossa with classical guitar, jazz, and pop in a mix that could be intellectual, humorous, or serious. He sang in Duala, English, and French. Bebey helped launch the career of Manu Dibango. Bebey released more than 20 albums over his career. John Williams' piece 'Hello Francis' is written as a tribute to Bebey.
July 15, 1892
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German literary critic, philosopher, social critic, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist. Combining elements of German idealism or Romanticism, Historical Materialism and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory and Western Marxism, and is associated with the Frankfurt School. Among his major works as a literary critic are essays on Goethe's novel Elective Affinities; the work of Franz Kafka and Karl Kraus; translation theory; the stories of Nikolai Leskov; the work of Marcel Proust and perhaps most significantly, the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. He also made major translations into German of the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. His turn to Marxism in the 1930s was partly due to the influence of Bertolt Brecht, whose critical aesthetics developed epic theatre and its Verfremdungseffekt (defamiliarisation, alienation). An earlier influence was friend Gershom Scholem, founder of the academic study of the Kabbalah and of Jewish mysticism. Influenced by the Swiss anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–87), Benjamin coined the term ‘auratic perception’, denoting the aesthetic faculty by means of which civilization may recover an appreciation of myth. Benjamin's work is often cited in academic and literary studies, especially the essays ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923) and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction‘ (1936). Benjamin committed suicide in Portbou at the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape from the Nazis.
July 15, 1926
Driss Chraïbi (July 15, 1926, El Jadida – April 1, 2007, Drôme, France) was a Moroccan author whose novels deal with colonialism, culture clashes, generational conflict and the treatment of women and are often semi-autobiographical. Born in El Jadida and educated in Casablanca, Chraïbi went to Paris in 1946 to study chemistry before turning to literature and journalism. His first novel, The Simple Past, was published in 1954.
July 15, 1917
George Robert Acworth Conquest, CMG (born 15 July 1917) - known as Robert Conquest - is an Anglo-American historian and poet best known for his influential works of Soviet history which include The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purges of the 1930s (1968, 4th ed., 2008). He is currently a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
July 15, 1919
Iris Murdoch (15 July 1919 – 8 February 1999) was an Irish-born British author and philosopher, best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net, was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 1987, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. In 2008, The Times ranked Murdoch twelfth on a list of ‘The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.’
July 15, 1871
José Enrique Camilo Rodó Piñeyro (15 July 1871 – 1 May 1917) was a Uruguayan essayist. He called for the youth of Latin America to reject materialism, to revert to Greco-Roman habits of free thought and self enrichment, and to develop and concentrate on their culture. He cultivated an epistolary relationship with important Hispanic pensadores of that time, Leopoldo Alas (Clarín) in Spain, José de la Riva-Agüero in Peru, and, most importantly, with Rubén Darío, the most influential Latin American poet to date, the founder of modernismo. As a result of his refined prose style and the modernista ideology he pushed, Rodó is today considered the preeminent theorist of the modernista school of literature. Rodó is best known for his essay Ariel (1900), drawn from The Tempest, in which Ariel represents the positive, and Caliban represents the negative tendencies in human nature, and they debate the future course of history, in what Rodó intended to be a secular sermon to Latin American youth, championing the cause of the classical western tradition. What Rodó was afraid of was the debilitating effect of working individuals' limited existence doing the same work, over and over again, never having time to develop the spirit. Among Uruguayan youth, however, he is best known for Parque Rodó, the Montevideo park named after him. For more than a century now, Ariel has been an extraordinarily influential and enduring essay in Latin American letters and culture due to a combination of specific cultural, literary, and political circumstances, as well as for its adherence to Classical values and its denunciation of utilitarianism and what Rodó called ‘nordomanía.’
July 15, 1949
Richard Russo (born July 15, 1949) is an American novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and teacher.
July 15, 1796
Thomas Bulfinch (July 15, 1796 – May 27, 1867 ) was an American writer born in Newton, Massachusetts. Bulfinch belonged to a well-educated Bostonian merchant family of modest means. His father was Charles Bulfinch, the architect of the Massachusetts State House in Boston and parts of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.. Bulfinch supported himself through his position at the Merchants' Bank of Boston.
July 15, 1946
Nick Caistor (born 15 July 1946) is a British translator and journalist, best known for his translations of Spanish and Portuguese literature. He is a past winner of the Valle-Inclán Prize for translation. He is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4, the BBC World Service, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Guardian. He lives in Norwich, and is married to fellow translator Amanda Hopkinson.
July 15, 1961
Jean-Christophe Grangé (born 15 July 1961) is a French mystery writer, journalist, and screenwriter. Grangé was born in Paris. He was a journalist before setting up his own press agency L & G.
July 15, 1947
Jeff Madrick’s most recent book is Why Economies Grow. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and a former economics columnist for the New York Times. He is editor of Challenge magazine and senior fellow at the New School’s Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis.
July 15, 1779
Clement Clarke Moore (July 15, 1779 – July 10, 1863) was a writer and American Professor of Oriental and Greek Literature, as well as Divinity and Biblical Learning, at the General Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church, in New York City. The seminary was developed on land donated by Moore and it continues on this site at Ninth Avenue between 20th and 21st streets, in an area known as Chelsea Square. Moore's connection with the seminary continued for more than 25 years. Moore gained considerable wealth by subdividing and developing other parts of his large inherited estate in what became known as the residential neighborhood of Chelsea. Before this, the urbanized part of the city ended at Houston Street on Manhattan island. For 10 years, Moore also served as a board member of the New York Institution for the Blind. He is credited and is most widely known as the author of the Christmas poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas", first published anonymously in 1823. It later became widely known as "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" and has been published in numerous illustrated versions in various languages. Scholars debate the identity of the author, calling on textual and handwriting analysis as well as other historical sources. James Edward Marshall (October 10, 1942 – October 13, 1992) was an American illustrator and writer of children's books, probably best known for the George and Martha series of picture books (1972–1988). He illustrated books exclusively as James Marshall; when he created both text and illustrations he sometimes wrote as Edward Marshall. In 2007 the U.S. professional librarians posthumously awarded him the biennial Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal for ‘substantial and lasting contribution’ to American children's literature. Marshall was born in San Antonio, Texas, where he grew up on his family's farm. His father worked on the railroad and was a band member in the 1930s. His mother sang in the local church choir. The family later moved to Beaumont, Texas. Marshall said: ‘Beaumont is deep south and swampy and I hated it. I knew I would die if I stayed there so I diligently studied the viola, and eventually won a scholarship to the New England Conservatory in Boston.’ He entered the New England Conservatory of Music but injured his hand, ending his music career. He returned to Texas, where he attended San Antonio College, and later transferred to Southern Connecticut State University where he received degrees in French and history. He lived between an apartment in the Chelsea district of New York City and a home in Mansfield Hollow, Connecticut. It is said that he discovered his vocation on a 1971 summer afternoon, lying in a hammock and drawing. His mother was watching Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and the main characters, George and Martha, ultimately became characters in one of his children's books (as two hippopotami). Marshall continued creating books for children until his untimely death in 1992 of a brain tumor. In 1998, George and Martha became the stars of an eponymous eponymous animated TV show. Marshall was a friend of Maurice Sendak, who called him the ‘last in the line’ of children's writers for whom children's books were a cottage industry. Sendak said that Marshall was ‘uncommercial to a fault’ and, as a consequence, was little recognized by the awards committees. (As illustrator of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Marshall was a runner-up for the Caldecott Medal in 1989; the ‘Caldecott Honor Books’ may display silver rather than gold seals. He won a University of Mississippi Silver Medallion in 1992.) Sendak said that in Marshall you got ‘the whole man’, who ‘scolded, gossiped, bitterly reproached, but always loved and forgave’ and ‘made me laugh until I cried.’ In introduction to the collected George and Martha, Sendak called him the ‘last of a long line of masters’ including Randolph Caldecott, Jean de Brunhoff, Edward Ardizzone, and Tomi Ungerer. Beside the lovable hippopotami George and Martha, James Marshall created dozens of other uniquely appealing characters. He is well known for his Fox series (which he wrote as ‘Edward Marshall’), as well as the Miss Nelson books (or Miss Viola Swamp, written by Harry Allard), The Stupids (written by Allard), the Cut-ups, and many more. James Marshall had the uncanny ability to elicit wild delight from readers with relatively little text and simple drawings. With only two minute dots for eyes, his illustrated characters are able to express a wide range of emotion, and produce howls of laughter from both children and adults.
July 15, 1931
Brian Sewell (15 July 1931 – 19 September 2015) was an English art critic and media personality. He wrote for the London Evening Standard and was noted for his acerbic view of conceptual art and the Turner Prize. The Guardian described him as "Britain's most famous and controversial art critic", while the Standard called him the "nation’s best art critic", and Artnet News called him the United Kingdom's "most famous and controversial art critic"
July 16, 1943
Reinaldo Arenas (July 16, 1943 - December 7, 1990) was a Cuban poet, novelist, and playwright who despite his early sympathy for the 1959 revolution, grew critical of and then rebelled against the Cuban government. Arenas was born in the countryside, in the northern part of the Province of Oriente, Cuba, and later moved to the city of Holguín. In 1963, he moved to Havana to enroll in the School of Planification and, later, in the Faculty of Letters at the Universidad de La Habana, where he studied philosophy and literature without completing a degree. The following year, he began working at the Biblioteca Nacional José Martí. While there, his talent was noticed and he was awarded prizes at Cirilo Villaverde National Competition held by UNEAC (National Union of Cuban Writers and Artists). (Soto 1998) Interestingly, his Hallucinations was awarded ‘first Honorable Mention’ in 1966 although, as the judges could find no better entry, no First Prize was awarded that year (Colchie 2001). His writings and openly gay lifestyle were, by 1967, bringing him into conflict with the Communist government. He left the Biblioteca Nacional and became an editor for the Cuban Book Institute until 1968. From 1968 to 1974 he was a journalist and editor for the literary magazine La Gaceta de Cuba. In 1973, he was sent to prison after being charged and convicted of ‘ideological deviation’ and for publishing abroad without official consent. He escaped from prison and tried to leave Cuba by launching himself from the shore on a tire inner tube. The attempt failed and he was rearrested near Lenin Park and imprisoned at the notorious El Morro Castle alongside murderers and rapists. He survived by helping the inmates to write letters to wives and lovers. He was able to collect enough paper this way to continue his writing. However, his attempts to smuggle his work out of prison were discovered and he was severely punished. Threatened with death, he was forced to renounce his work and was released in 1976. In 1980, as part of the Mariel Boatlift, he fled to the United States. Despite his short life and the hardships imposed during his imprisonment, Arenas produced a significant body of work. His Pentagonia is a set of five novels that comprise a ‘secret history’ of post revolutionary Cuba. It includes the poetical Farewell to the Sea, Palace of the White Skunks and the Rabelaisian Color of Summer. In these novels Arenas’ style ranges from a stark realist narrative to absurd satiric humor. He traces his own life story in what to him is the absurd world of Castro’s Cuba. In each of the novels Arenas himself is a major character, going by a number of pseudonyms. His autobiography, Before Night Falls was on the New York Times list of the ten best books of the year in 1993. In 2000 this work was made into a film, directed by Julian Schnabel, in which Arenas was played by Javier Bardem. In 1987, Arenas was diagnosed with AIDS, but he continued to write and speak out against the Cuban government. He mentored many Cuban Exile writers, including John O’Donnell-Rosales. After battling AIDS, Arenas committed suicide by taking an overdose of drugs and alcohol on December 7, 1990, in New York. In a suicide letter written for publication, Arenas wrote: ‘Due to my delicate state of health and to the terrible depression it causes me not to be able to continue writing and struggling for the freedom of Cuba, I am ending my life. I want to encourage the Cuban people out of the country as well as on the Island to continue fighting for freedom. Cuba will be free. I already am.’
July 16, 1865
George A. Birmingham was the pen name of James Owen Hannay (16 July 1865 – 2 February 1950), Irish clergyman and prolific novelist. Hannay was born in Belfast and educated at Methodist College Belfast from 1883-1884 before attending Trinity College, Dublin. He was ordained in 1889 as a Church of Ireland (Anglican) minister and served as rector of Holy Trinity Church, Westport in County Mayo. His early writings raised the ire of nationalist Catholics, and he withdrew from the Gaelic League in the wake of ongoing protests about the tour of his successful play General John Regan. He became rector of Kildare parish from 1918 to 1920, and after serving as chaplain to the Viceroy of Ireland, he joined the British ambassadorial team in Budapest in 1922. He returned to officiate at Mells, Somerset from 1924 to 1934, after which he was appointed vicar of Holy Trinity Church in the London suburb of Kensington where he served from 1934 to his death in 1950.
July 16, 1928
Anita Brookner (born 16 July 1928) is an English language novelist and art historian who was born in Herne Hill, a suburb of London. She was the only child of Newson Bruckner, a Polish immigrant to Britain, and Maude Schiska, a singer whose father had emigrated from Poland and founded a tobacco factory. Maude changed the family's surname to Brookner because of anti-German sentiment in Britain. Anita Brookner had a lonely childhood, although her grandmother and uncle lived with the family, and her parents, secular Jews, opened their house to Jewish refugees escaping Nazi persecution during the 1930s and World War II. Brookner was educated at the private James Allen's Girls' School. In 1949 she received a BA in History from King's College London, and in 1953 a doctorate in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. Brookner has not married, but took care of her parents as they aged. In 1967 she became the first woman to hold the Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Cambridge University. She was promoted to Reader at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1977, where she worked until her retirement in 1988. Brookner published her first novel, A Start In Life in 1981, at the age of 53. Since then she has published a novel approximately every year. In 1990 she was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). She is a Fellow of King's College London and of Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. Brookner is highly regarded as a stylist. Her novels explore themes of emotional loss and difficulties associated with fitting into society, and typically depict intellectual, middle-class women, who suffer isolation and disappointments in love. Many of Brookner's characters are the children of European immigrants to Britain; a number appear to be of Jewish descent. Brookner's fourth book, Hotel du Lac (1984) was awarded the Booker Prize.
July 16, 1920
Anatole Paul Broyard (July 16, 1920 – October 11, 1990) was an American writer, literary critic and editor for The New York Times. In addition to his many reviews and columns, he published short stories, essays and two books during his lifetime. His autobiographical works, Intoxicated by My Illness (1992) and Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (1993), were published after his death. After his death, Broyard became the center of controversy and discussions related to how he had chosen to live as an adult in New York. A Louisiana Creole of mixed race, he was criticized by some blacks for 'passing' as white as an adult and failing to acknowledge his African-American ancestry. Multiracial advocates though have cited Broyard as an example of someone forging their own racial identity long before it was acceptable in mainstream America.
July 16, 1934
George M. Fredrickson (July 16, 1934 – February 25, 2008) was an American Edgar E. Robinson Professor of U.S. History at Stanford University from 1984 until the time of his retirement in 2002.. He is the author of nine books, including White Supremacy, which won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, the Merle Curti Award, and was a jury nominee for the Pulitzer Prize.
July 16, 1947
Linda K. Hogan (born 1947 Denver) is a Native American poet, storyteller, academic, playwright, novelist, environmentalist and writer of short stories. She is currently the Chickasaw Nation's Writer in Residence.
July 16, 1934
Tomás Eloy Martínez (July 16, 1934 – January 31, 2010) was an Argentine journalist and writer. Born in San Miguel de Tucumán, Martínez obtained a degree in Spanish and Latin American literature from the University of Tucumán, and an MA at the University of Paris. From 1957 to 1961 he was a film critic in Buenos Aires for the La Nación newspaper, and he then was editor in chief (1962-69) of the magazine Primera Plana. From 1969 to 1970 he worked as a reporter in Paris. In 1969 Martínez interviewed former Argentine President Juan Domingo Perón, who was exiled in Madrid. These interviews were the basis for two of his more celebrated novels: La Novela de Perón (1985) and Santa Evita (1995).
July 16, 1935
Arnold Adoff (born July 16, 1935 in Bronx, New York) is an American children's writer. In 1988, the National Council of Teachers of English gave Adoff the Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children. He has said, ‘I will always try to turn sights and sounds into words. I will always try to shape words into my singing poems.’ Adoff grew up in the South Bronx, the son of immigrants from a town near the Polish-Russian border. He enrolled in the Columbia University School of Pharmacy but transferred to City College of New York where he received a B.A. in history and literature. He married Virginia Hamilton in 1960 and they lived in Europe briefly before moving back to New York City. Adoff taught social studies in Harlem and the Upper West Side of New York. Adoff and Hamilton eventually moved to Yellow Springs, Ohio, where Adoff still lives. ‘I began writing for kids because I wanted to effect a change in American society. I continue in that spirit. By the time we reach adulthood, we are closed and set in our attitudes. The chances of a poet reaching us are very slim. But I can open a child's imagination, develop his appetite for poetry, and more importantly, show him that poetry is a natural part of everyday life. We all need someone to point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. That's the poet's job.’ - Arnold Adoff.
July 16, 1943
Stanley Gebler Davies (Dublin, 16 July 1943 - Dalkey, Ireland, 23 June 1994) was an Irish journalist with the Irish Independent as well as with various British magazines (including Punch, The Evening Standard, The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator). Of part-Polish and part-Jewish ancestry, Davies was known for his eccentric views and for his exceptional alcohol intake. In the late 1970s the Evening Standard printed his pithy, 50-word apercus among their longer items; he was also permitted to call Hans Keller a 'twat' on the letters pages of The Listener. As well as his writing (which included a book on James Joyce), he engaged in political activity, having been a Unionist candidate for the constituency of Cork South–West, coming last with 134 votes. He died after a long battle with lung cancer.
July 16, 1919
Born and raised in Toledo, Ohio, Black Arts poet, playwright, and children’s writer Mari Evans (1923–2017) was educated at the University of Toledo, where she studied fashion design. She was influenced by Langston Hughes, who was an early supporter of her writing. In her short-lined poems, grounded in personal narratives, Evans explored the nature of community and the power of language to name and reframe. Her best-known poems include Speak the Truth to the People, To Be Born Black, and I Am a Black Woman. Evans’s poetry collections include Continuum: New and Selected Poems (2007, revised and expanded in 2015); A Dark and Splendid Mass (1992); Nightstar: 1973–1978 (1981); I Am a Black Woman (1970), which won the Black Academy of Arts and Letters poetry award; and Where Is All the Music? (1968). Evans also published the essay collection Clarity as Concept: A Poet’s Perspective (2006). In her essay How We Speak, published in Clarity as Concept, Evans wrote, Listening is a special art. It is a fine art developed by practice. One hears the unexpressed as clearly as if it had been verbalized. One hears silence screaming in clarion tones. Ninety decibels. Hears tears, unshed, falling. Hears hunger gnawing at the back of spines; hears aching feet pushed past that one more step. Hears the repressed hurt of incest, hears the anguish of spousal abuse. Hears it all. Clearly, listening is a fine art. It can translate an obscure text into reality that walks, weeps and carries its own odor. Listening can decode a stranger’s eye and hear autobiography. Listening can watch a listless babe and understand the absence of future, the improbability, in fact, of possibility. Listening, more often than not, is a crushing experience. Evans’s books for younger audiences include I’m Late: The Story of LaNeese and Moonlight and Alisha Who Didn’t Have Anyone of Her Own (2006); Dear Corinne, Tell Somebody! Love, Annie: A Book About Secrets (1999); Singing Black: Alternative Nursery Rhymes for Children (1998, illustrated by Ramon Price); Jim Flying High (1979, illustrated by Ashley Bryan); and J.D. (1973, illustrated by Jerry Pinkney). Evans’s plays include Boochie (1979), Portrait of a Man (1979), River of My Song (1977), and the musicals New World (1984) and Eye (1979, an adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God). Evans’s critical works include Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation (1984) and Black Women Writers: Arguments and Interviews (1983). Her work featured in numerous anthologies, including Black Voices: An Anthology of Afro-American Literature (1968) and Black Out Loud: An Anthology of Modern Poems by Black Americans (1970). The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the John Hay Whitney Foundation, Evans also received an honorary doctorate from Marian College and was featured on a Ugandan postage stamp. She taught at Spelman College, Purdue University, and Cornell University. Evans lived in Indianapolis for nearly 70 years, before her death in 2017.
July 16, 1962
Grant Farred, a native of South Africa, is a professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University. He has previously taught at Williams College, the University of Michigan, and Duke University. He has written several books and served for eight years as editor of South Atlantic Quarterly, and is a leading figure in contemporary African-American Studies, Cultural Studies, and Postcolonial Studies.
July 16, 1955
Guy Garcia was born in Los Angeles and attended the University of California at Berkeley. The author of the novel Obsidian Sky, he is a contributor to the fiction anthologies Iguana Dreams and Pieces of the Heart, and lives in New York City.
July 16, 1932
Christopher John Koch (16 July 1932 – 23 September 2013) was an Australian novelist, known for his 1978 novel The Year of Living Dangerously, which was adapted into an award-winning film. He twice won the Miles Franklin Award (for The Doubleman in 1985, and Highways to a War in 1996). In 1995, he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for contribution to Australian literature, and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters from his alma mater, the University of Tasmania, in 1990.
July 16, 1940
RICHARD LOURIE, an American writer, is a leading translator of contemporary Russian and Polish authors, a journalist, and a producer of film and television documentaries. His books of fiction and nonfiction include The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin (1999), Hunting the Devil (1993), Russia Speaks (1989), and First Loyalty (1983).
July 16, 1943
Patricia S. Churchland is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, and an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute. Her books include Brain-Wise and Neurophilosophy. In 1991, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.
July 16, 1881
Fernando Ortiz Fernández (Havana, 16 July 1881 – 10 April 1969) was a Cuban essayist, anthropologist, ethnomusicologist and scholar of Afro-Cuban culture. Ortiz was a prolific polymath dedicated to exploring, recording, and understanding all aspects of indigenous Cuban culture. Ortiz coined the term transculturation, the notion of converging cultures. Disillusioned with politics in the early period of Cuban history and having been a member of President Gerardo Machado's Liberal Party, and a Liberal member of its House of Representatives from 1917 to 1922, he became active in the early nationalist civic revival movement. Throughout his life Ortiz was involved in the foundation of institutions and journals dedicated to the study of Cuban culture. He was the cofounder of the Cuban Academy of the Language in 1926 and of Surco (founded 1930) and Ultra (1936–47), both journals that provided information on foreign journals. In 1937 he founded the Sociedad de Estudios Afrocubanos (Society of Afro-Cuban Studies) and the journal Estudios Afrocubanos (Afro-Cuban Studies). He helped found the journals Revista Bimestre Cubana, Archivos del Folklore Cubano and Estudios Afrocubanos. Fernando Ortiz also developed a theory of activism within Cuba's political system saying their African traits characterized the Afro-Cubans negatively and primitively. His books, La Africania de la Musica Folklorica de Cuba (1950), and Los Instrumentos de la Musica Afrocubana (1952 - 1955) are still regarded as key references in the study of Afro-Cuban music. One of his most famous students is Miguel Barnet, who has become a leading Cuban novelist, ethnographer and essayist. Fernando Ortiz died in Havana in 1969 and was interred there in the Colon Cemetery. After Ortiz's death the government established the Fernando Ortiz Foundation, which devotes itself to studies of ethnology, sociology and Cuba's popular traditions. In current times the foundation continues the work started by its founder and initiates serious scholarly discussions around many cultural issues, including troubling matters like the survival of elements of racism and racial prejudice, as well as measures that must be taken to confront these problems.
July 16, 1924
Deirdre Cash (July 16, 1924, Albert Park, Australia - March 11, 1963, Melbourne, Australia) was an Australian novelist and torch singer, who wrote her novels under the pseudonym Criena Rohan.
July 16, 1919
Alexander Plaisted Saxton (July 16, 1919 – August 20, 2012) was an American historian, novelist, and university professor. He was the author of the pioneering Indispensable Enemy (1975), one of the founding texts in Asian American studies. Saxton was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts to Eugene and Martha Saxton, one of two children. His older brother was the author Mark Saxton (1914-1988). His father became the editor in chief of Harper & Brothers, his mother taught literature at a private girls' school in Manhattan. Saxton was raised on the East Side of Manhattan, his parents were known to have famous writers over for dinner such as Thornton Wilder and Aldous Huxley. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard (John F. Kennedy was a classmate), but dropped out in his junior year to become a laborer in Chicago. He said he wanted to see "how people live in the other America — the real America." After dropping out of Harvard, Saxton made the intentional transition from a privileged upbringing to the working class where he labored at various times as "a harvest hand, construction gang laborer, engine-wiper, freight brakeman, architectural apprentice, assistant to the assistant editor" of a union newspaper, railroad switchman and columnist for The Daily Worker. Saxton published his first novel, Grand Crossing in 1943, when he was 24 years old. His next novel was his most acclaimed, The Great Midland published in 1948. It examines the 1920s and 1930s labor movement through the lives of a man and a woman. His last novel, Bright Web in the Darkness (1958), is about two women - one white, the other black - who meet in a factory during World War II. Saxton never returned to the novel, two years before his death he said "The novel claims only a brief span in human culture and may not continue to play a key role." While working on the novels, Saxton was a full-time organizer of maritime workers and longshoremen in San Francisco, and he also wrote prolifically for many left-wing publications. Saxton did eventually get his bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago, mainly to appease his parents. During World War II he served with the Merchant Marines. After the war, due to his left-leaning activities and with the Cold War in full swing, he found it difficult to find publishers for his fiction. At the age of 43 he returned to school, earning a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley and soon became a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He said he was part of a generation "radicalized by the Great Depression. Saxton was one of the founding fathers of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center and the creator of new courses in American history, including the first course on Filipino-American history and another on Film and History. He was the author of the pioneering, Indispensable Enemy (1975), one of the founding texts in Asian American history/studies. Saxton taught American history at UCLA from 1968 until his retirement in 1990. Saxton had two daughters, one who survived him and one who died in 1990. His wife Trudy died in about 2002. Saxton's death was by a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Lone Pine, California on August 20, 2012. His daughter said her father wished to choose the time and place of his death, like other transitions in his life.
July 16, 1862
Ida Bell Wells-Barnett (July 16, 1862 – March 25, 1931) was an African-American journalist, newspaper editor, suffragist, sociologist, and an early leader in the civil rights movement. She documented lynching in the United States, showing that it was often used as a way to control or punish blacks who competed with whites, rather than being based in criminal acts by blacks, as was usually claimed by white mobs. She was active in women's rights and the women's suffrage movement, establishing several notable women's organizations. Wells was a skilled and persuasive rhetorician, and traveled internationally on lecture tours.
July 16, 1928
Lawrence Goodwyn (July 16, 1928 – September 29, 2013) was an American writer and political theorist. He was a professor at Duke University. Goodwyn was best known for writing Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America, a book which chronicles the origins and rise of the People's Party. The book was nominated for the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1977. He also wrote Breaking the Barrier: the Rise of Solidarity in Poland; and Texas Oil, American Dreams: a Study of the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association.
July 17, 1889
Erle Stanley Gardner (July 17, 1889 – March 11, 1970) was an American lawyer and author of detective stories. Best known for the Perry Mason series, he also published under the pseudonyms A.A. Fair, Kyle Corning, Charles M. Green, Carleton Kendrake, Charles J. Kenny, Les Tillray and Robert Parr. Born in Malden, Massachusetts, Gardner graduated from Palo Alto High School in 1909, and received his only formal legal education at Valparaiso University School of Law in the state of Indiana. He attended law school for approximately one month, was suspended from school when his interest in boxing became a distraction, then settled in California where he became a self-taught attorney and passed the state bar exam in 1911. He opened his own law office in Merced, California, then worked for five years for a sales agency. In 1921, he returned to the practice of law, creating the firm of Sheridan, Orr, Drapeau and Gardner in Ventura, California. In 1912, he wed Natalie Frances Talbert; they had a daughter, Grace. Gardner practiced at the Ventura firm until 1933, when The Case of the Velvet Claws was published. Much of that novel was set at the historic Pierpont Inn, which was just down the road from his law office. Gardner gave up the practice of law to devote full-time to writing. In 1937 he moved to Temecula, California, where he lived for the rest of his life. In 1968 he married his long-time secretary Agnes Jean Bethell (1902–2002), the ‘real Della Street’. He died on March 11, 1970, in Temecula, California. His ashes were scattered over the Baja California Peninsula. Innovative and restless in his nature, Gardner was bored by the routine of legal practice, the only part of which he enjoyed was trial work and the development of trial strategy. In his spare time, he began to write for pulp magazines, which also fostered the early careers of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. His first story was published in 1923. He created many different series characters for the pulps, including the ingenious Lester Leith, a parody of the ‘gentleman thief’ in the tradition of Raffles; and Ken Corning, a crusading lawyer who was the archetype of his most successful creation, the fictional lawyer and crime-solver Perry Mason, about whom he wrote more than eighty novels. With the success of Perry Mason, Gardner gradually reduced his contributions to the pulp magazines, gradually withdrawing from the pulps until the medium itself became extinct in the 1950s. Thereafter he still published a few short stories in the ‘glossies’ such as Collier's, Sport's Afield, and Look. However the majority of his postwar magazine writings were non-fiction articles on travel, Western history, and forensic science. Early on, Gardner set as a goal the production of 66,000 words a week, a figure he decided upon after reading the work of William Wallace Cook, a fiction writer whose writing Gardner admired, and author of a ‘how-to’ book called The fiction factory: being the experience of a writer who, for twenty-two years, has kept a story-mill grinding successfully. Gardner also devoted thousands of hours to a project called ‘The Court of Last Resort’, which he undertook with his many friends in the forensic, legal and investigative communities. The project sought to review and, if appropriate, to reverse, miscarriages of justice against possibly innocent criminal defendants who were originally convicted owing to poor legal representation; or to the inadequate, careless or malicious actions of police and prosecutors; or most especially, because of the abuse or misinterpretation of medical and other forensic evidence. The resulting 1952 book earned Gardner his only Edgar Award, in the Best Fact Crime category. The character of Perry Mason was portrayed in various Hollywood films of the 1930s and 40s, and a long-running radio program from 1943 to 1955. ‘When Erle Stanley Gardner was reluctant to allow CBS to transform Mason into a TV soap opera, (CBS) created The Edge of Night. For that latter enterprise, John Larkin, radio's best identified Mason, was cast as the protagonist-star, initially as a detective, eventually as an attorney, in a thinly veiled copy of Mason.’ Gardner also created characters for the radio programs Christopher London (1950), starring Glenn Ford, and A Life in Your Hands (1949–1952). ‘As on other Gardner-inspired narratives, someone else actually penned the scripts.’ Eventually Perry Mason became a long-running TV series with Raymond Burr as the title character. Gardner himself made an uncredited appearance as a judge in the final episode of the original series titled ‘The Case of the Final Fade-Out.’ In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mason was revived for a series of made-for-TV movies featuring surviving members of the original cast, including Burr. Under the pen name A. A. Fair, Gardner wrote a series of novels about the private detective firm of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. He also wrote another noteworthy series of novels about District Attorney Doug Selby and his opponent, the rascally Alphonse Baker Carr. This series is an inversion of the motif of the Perry Mason novels, with prosecutor Selby being portrayed as the courageous and imaginative crime solver and his perennial antagonist A.B. Carr being a wily shyster whose clients are always ‘as guilty as hell’. The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center currently archives Gardner's manuscripts. The library has constructed a miniaturized reproduction of his study room. Gardner held a lifelong fascination with Baja California and his written works became an authority on the early exploration of the Mexican peninsula. He used various modes of transportation to traverse Baja, including boat, oversized trucks, airplane and even helicopter.
July 17, 1914
James Otis Purdy (July 17, 1914 – March 13, 2009) was a controversial American novelist, short-story writer, poet, and playwright who, since his debut in 1956, published over a dozen novels, and many collections of poetry, short stories, and plays. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages and in 2013 his short stories were collected in The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy. He has been praised by writers as diverse as Edward Albee, James M. Cain, Lillian Hellman, Francis King, Marianne Moore, Dorothy Parker, Dame Edith Sitwell, Terry Southern, Gore Vidal (who described Purdy as 'an authentic American genius'), Jonathan Franzen (who called him, in Farther Away, 'one of the most undervalued and underread writers in America'), A.N. Wilson, and both Jane Bowles and Paul Bowles. Purdy was the recipient of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Fiction Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1993) and was nominated for the 1985 PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel On Glory's Course (1984). In addition, he won two Guggenheim Fellowships (1958 and 1962), and grants from the Ford Foundation (1961), and Rockefeller Foundation. He worked as an interpreter and lectured in Europe with the United States Information Agency.
July 17, 1949
Novica Tadic was born in 1949 in a small village in Montenegro, but has lived most of his life in Belgrade. He is the most-respected Yugoslavian poet of his generation, Tadic has published seven selections of poetry, but this is the first time his work has t been translated into English. Chalks Simic, who was born in Yugoslavia, has won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry as well as a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, among numerous other awards. His translations of Vasko Popa, in the FIELD Translation Series, received the P.E.N. Translation Prize in 1980.
July 17, 1888
Milán Füst (July 17, 1888, Budapest, Hungary - July 26, 1967, Budapest, Hungary) was a Hungarian writer, poet and playwright. In 1908 he met the writer Ern? Osvát and published his first work in the literary revue Nyugat. He befriended Dezs? Kosztolányi and Frigyes Karinthy. After studying law and economics in Budapest, he became a teacher in a school of business. In 1918, he became the director of Vörösmarty Academy, but was forced to leave the post in 1921. In 1928, a nervous breakdown led him to spend six months in a sanatorium in Baden-Baden. Already since 1904 he had begun working on his long Journal. However, a large part of this work, concerning the period 1944-1945 would later be destroyed. In 1947, he became a teacher at Képz?m?vészeti F?iskola. He received the Kossuth Prize in 1948, and was a considered a contender for the 1965 Nobel Prize. His best-known novel, A feleségem története (The Story of My Wife), was published in 1942.
July 17, 1911
Yang Jiang (17 July 1911 – 25 May 2016), born Yang Jikang, was a Chinese playwright, author, and translator. She wrote several successful comedies, and was the first Chinese person to produce a complete Chinese version of Miguel de Cervantes' novel Don Quixote.
July 17, 1960
Michael Maar (born July 17, 1960 in Stuttgart) is a German literary scholar, germanist and author. For his 1995 doctoral dissertation on Thomas Mann, titled Geister und Kunst, he was awarded the Johann Heinrich Merck Prize by the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung. He was himself elected a member of the academy in 2002. He was a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin from 1997 to 1998, and Visiting Professor at Stanford University in 2002. From 2005 to 2006 he was a Fellow of the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung. In 2008, he became a member of the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste. His 2005 book The Two Lolitas, as well as two articles in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and The Times Literary Supplement the previous year, argued that Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel Lolita was most likely based on an until-then little known 1916 short story by German author Heinz von Lichberg, also titled Lolita and featuring an identical theme. The discovery received strong attention by literary critics and the world press. Maar did not himself accuse Nabokov of plagiarism, but suggested it was a case of cryptomnesia, arguing that Nabokov and Lichberg lived in the same part of Berlin for several years in the 1920s and 1930s and that Lichberg's 1916 book (a collection of short stories) was easily available at the time. His father is the author Paul Maar.
July 17, 1951
Mark Robert Bowden (born July 17, 1951) is an American journalist and writer. He is a National Correspondent for The Atlantic. He is best known for his book Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (1999) about the 1993 U.S. military raid in Mogadishu, Somalia. He has taught journalism and creative writing at Loyola University Maryland, and was Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Delaware from 2013–2017.
July 18, 1938
Obi Benue Egbuna (18 July 1938 – 18 January 2014) was a Nigerian-born novelist, playwright and political activist, most famous for leading the United Coloured People’s Association (UCPA) and being a member of the British Black Panther Movement (1968–72). Egbuna also published several texts on Marxist–Black Power, including Destroy This Temple: The Voice of Black Power in Britain (1971) and The ABC of Black Power Thought (1973). Egbuna was born in Ozubulu, Anambra State, Nigeria. He studied at the University of Iowa and Howard University, Washington, DC, moving to England in 1961 where he lived until 1973. Here he participated in the Antiuniversity of London and became a pioneer of the Black Power movement in Britain. Being heavily influenced by Marxism, Egbuna stressed the importance of an international struggle against capitalism, as a part of the global struggle against racial oppression. In a speech from 1967 at Trafalgar Square, London, Egbuna stated: Black Power means simply that the black of this world are to liquidate capitalist oppression of black people wherever it exists by any means necessary. On 10 November 1967 Egbuna launched the Black Power Manifesto, published by the Universal Coloured People's Association. As spokesperson for the group, he claimed they had recruited 778 members in London during the previous seven weeks. In 1968 Egbuna published Black Power or Death. Egbuna also saw the socialist and communist student movements of the 1960s as problematic to the Black Power Cause. Although ideologically rooted in a similar Marxist intellectual tradition, he saw the student organisations as socialist snobs who decree from the premise that only they have read and can understand Marx. This intellectual snobbery was, according to Egbuna, doing a great harm to the cause they claim to be upholding by ignoring race as a key reason for oppression of black workers: "Nobody in his right mind disputes that the fact that the White worker is a prey to capitalist exploitation, as well as the Black Worker. But equally indisputable is the fact that the White worker is exploited only because he is a worker, not because he is white, while in contrast, the Black Worker is oppressed, not only because he is a worker, but also because he is Black." During the 1960s, many sympathisers of Black Power left their socialist and communist student organisations and subsequently started their own Marxist-orientated Black Power organisations, such as Black Socialist Alliance. As a consequence of the Race Relations Act 1965, incitement of racial violence had become explicitly illegal in the United Kingdom. Several members of Egbuna’s UCPA were fined under this act. Perhaps most noticeable was Roy Sawah, who in a speech 1968 at Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park urged "coloured nurses to give wrong injections to patients, coloured bus crews not to take the fare of black people and Indian restaurant owners to 'put something in the curry'." Egbuna himself was later that year sentenced to prison accused of threatening to kill police and certain politicians. (These charges were dismissed when brought before a court - Obi egbuna Gideon dolo and Peter Martin were released without charge. This was a test case and served to restrict the time for imprisonment on remand with no evidence, up until the recent terror law changes. This technique was used many times by the government to try and squash dissent from mainly civil rights and union activists. From Lisala Dolo Gideon Dolo's son). This provocative language must however be seen in context of the political climate of 1968. On 20 April 1968, the then shadow cabinet Defence Secretary Enoch Powell made his "Rivers of Blood speech" in Birmingham, essentially laying out a highly prejudiced account of black immigration. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. on 4 April that same year is also likely to have influenced and radicalised several Black Power thinkers.
July 18, 1882
Manuel Gálvez (born 18 July 1882 in Paraná, Entre Ríos – died 14 November 1968 in Buenos Aires) was an Argentine novelist, poet, essayist, historian and biographer. Gálvez, a member of one of the leading patrician families of Entre Ríos Province, was educated by the Jesuits before attending the University of Buenos Aires, graduating in 1904 with a law degree. He was employed as a schools inspector from 1906 to 1931. His early political idea were somewhat fluid. At university he had helped to found a highly traditionalist literary review called Ideas but soon after graduation he was involved in liberalism before becoming enamoured of the Spanish Generation of '98. As such along with the likes of Ricardo Rojas he became part of a Hispanidad movement within Argentine literature that sought closer cultural ties with Spain. By widely reading the Hispanidad authors and examining their works for a specifically Argentine audience in his own writing Gálvez has been credited for ensuring the spread of the ideology amongst the country's nationalist intellectuals. He also emphasised the centrality of the Roman Catholic Church to Argentine identity. Between 1906 and 1910 Gálvez became a regular visitor to Spain and these journeys helped to solidify his belief in Hispanidad, as expounded in his 1913 book El Solar de la Raza. Politically he became associated with the rightist nationalism of the country's upper classes and indeed claimed in his collection of essays El Diario de Gabriel Quiroga that he was the first genuine Argentine nationalist in history. He was particularly fixated on the dilution of Argentine culture that he feared was taking place due to what he believed was the influx of Jews, whom he identified with anarchism, Italian peasants, whom he identified with materialism, and international finance, which he believed fuelled decadence and cosmopolitanism. He was the first of the nationalist writers to promote Juan Manuel de Rosas as an archetype of Argentine values, which was later shared by most of his contemporaries. Gálvez's hero worship of Rosas led him to pen a series of five novels set during his rule, to become joint editor of a journal named after Rosas and to serve as Vice President of the Instituto de Investigaciones Historicas 'Juan Manuel de Rosas'. The latter group, which came to specialise in historical revisionism about Argentina, had been established in 1938 by Gálvez, Roberto de Laferrère, Carlos Ibarguren, Ernesto Palacio and Rodolfo and Julio Irazusta. In 1925 Gálvez adopted Italian fascism as his preferred mode of government, arguing that it was the only way to prevent the weak government that he felt was aiding the growth of his declared enemies of communism, immigration and American imperialism. He would also look to the example of the Falange, arguing that these fascist groups were the only ones capable of defending religion and tradition from ‘Satanic’ communism. He denied charges of anti-Semitism, claiming that he opposed Jewish immigration to Argentina simply because he was anti-immigration rather than anti-Jewish, although he regularly criticised perceived Jewish influence in Argentina and as late as 1962 his novel El Mal Metafisico was criticised for the highly stereotypical portrayal of Jewish characters. However despite publicly endorsing versions of fascism he always stopped short of full fascism in his writing due to the innate conservatism of his traditionalism and his main political influences were fellow ultra-traditionalists Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès. Gálvez was a prolific writer whose works covered a number of styles and genres. As a novelist his works included La sombra del convento, El cántico espiritual, Miércoles Santo, La tragedia de un hombre fuerte, La noche toca a su fin y Cautiverio, La muerte en las calles (1949), Nacha Regules (1919) and Historia de arrabal (1923), the latter two works proving his most widely celebrated. He was a literary prize winner for both Los caminos de la muerte (1928) and El general Quiroga (1932). His theatrical works include El hombre de los ojos azules (1928) and Calibán (1943). His volume of work increased significantly in the 1950s, as he wrote Tiempo de odio y angustia (1951), Han tocado a degüello (1840–1842) (1951), Bajo la garra anglo-francesa (1953), Y así cayó Don Juan Manuel (1954), Las dos vidas del pobre Napoleón (1954), El uno y la multitud (1955), Tránsito Guzmán (1956), Poemas para la recién llegada (1957), Perdido en su noche (1958), Recuerdos de la vida literaria (1961), Me mataron entre todos (1962) and La locura de ser santo (1967) amongst others. His first poetic work was 1907's El enigma interior, followed in 1909 by the similar Sendero de humildad. As an essayist, polemicist and critic he published El solar de la raza (1913), La vida múltiple (1916), Amigos y maestros de mi juventud (1944) and El novelista y las novelas (1959) as well as biographies of such historic figures as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Hipólito Yrigoyen and Gabriel García Moreno.
July 18, 1947
Dermot Healy (18 July 1947 – 29 June 2014) was an Irish novelist, playwright, poet and short story writer. A member of Aosdána, Healy was also part of its governing body, the Toscaireacht. Born in Finnea, County Westmeath, he lived in County Sligo, and was described variously as a 'master', a 'Celtic Hemingway' and as 'Ireland's finest living novelist'.
July 18, 1912
Harry Tuchman Levin (July 18, 1912 – May 29, 1994) was an American literary critic and scholar of modernism and comparative literature. Born in Minneapolis, Harry Levin was educated at Harvard University (where he was a contemporary of M. H. Abrams), graduated in 1933, and began teaching there in 1939, the same year he married Elena Zarudnaya. He became Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard in 1960, and retired in 1983. He continued to live near campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts until his death in 1994. He was survived by his widow Elena and their daughter Marina. His course in ‘Comedy on the Stage’ inspired Leonard Lehrman to write the paper, ‘The Threepenny Cradle,’ comparing the Brecht-Weill Threepenny Opera to Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock. In the fall of 1969, in a production of Cradle directed by Lehrman, Levin was the sole patron. In 1970-1971 he encouraged, advised, and became a patron for two other Harvard productions by Lehrman: the U.S. premiere of Brecht's The Days of the Commune, and a triple-bill in memory of Blitzstein, which was attended by Leonard Bernstein. It was at that production that Levin invited Bernstein to become Norton Lecturer at Harvard, which he did, a year later. In 1985, the American Comparative Literature Association began awarding the Harry Levin Prize for books on literary history or criticism and in 1997, Harvard University endowed the new chair (position) of Harry Levin Professor of Literature.
July 18, 1948
Louis Owens (Lompoc July 18, 1948 - Albuquerque, July 25, 2002) was a novelist and scholar of Choctaw, Cherokee, and Irish-American descent. He is known for a series of Native-themed mystery novels and for his contributions to the then-fledgling field of Native American Studies. Owens committed suicide in 2002.
July 18, 1811
William Makepeace Thackeray (18 July 1811 – 24 December 1863) was an English novelist of the 19th century. He was famous for his satirical works, particularly Vanity Fair, a panoramic portrait of English society.
July 18, 1933
Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko (born 18 July 1933) is a Soviet and Russian poet. He is also a novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, actor, editor, and a director of several films.
July 18, 1925
JOAN DASH is the author of several notable books for young readers. She lives in Seattle, Washington.
July 18,1945
Lynn Freed (born 18 July 1945, Durban, South Africa) is an author and academic known for her work as a novelist, essayist, and writer of short stories. Lynn Freed was born and grew up in Durban, South Africa. She came to New York as a graduate student, where she earned both an M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from Columbia University. She has taught Literature and Creative Writing at Bennington College in Vermont, St. Mary's College in Moraga, California, the University of California in Berkeley, the University of Oregon in Eugene, the University of Montana in Missoula and the University of Texas in Austin. Freed is the author of six novels, a collection of short fiction, and a collection of essays. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, Southwest Review, The Georgia Review, Tin House, The Michigan Quarterly, Vogue Magazine, The Georgia Review, Mirabella, House Beautiful, House and Garden, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Ploughshares, and Newsday, among others, and have been broadly anthologized. Four of her novels and her collection of stories have appeared on The New York Times "Notable Books of the Year" list. Her work is also widely translated. She is currently a professor of English at the University of California, Davis, where she teaches in both undergraduate and graduate programs. She lives in Northern California.
July 18, 1948
OLAFUR GUNNARSSON was born in Iceland in 1948. Besides the present volume he has published three novels and two books of poetry. The Icelandic editions of his works are published by Forlagid, Reykjavik. DAVID MCDUFF was born in 1945. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh, where he took his Ph.D. in 1971 with a thesis on the poetry of the Russian modernist, Innokenty Annensky. JUDY PENNANEN is a Canadian artist and book illustrator whose work has frequently accentuated Penumbra Press publications.
July 18, 1918
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela (born 18 July 1918) is a South African anti-apartheid revolutionary and politician who served as President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999. He was the first black South African to hold the office, and the first elected in a fully representative, multiracial election. His government focused on dismantling the legacy of apartheid through tackling institutionalised racism, poverty and inequality, and fostering racial reconciliation. Politically a democratic socialist, he served as the President of the African National Congress (ANC) from 1991 to 1997. Internationally, Mandela was the Secretary General of the Non-Aligned Movement from 1998 to 1999. A Xhosa born to the Thembu royal family, Mandela attended Fort Hare University and the University of Witwatersrand, where he studied law. Living in Johannesburg, he became involved in anti-colonial politics, joining the ANC and becoming a founding member of its Youth League. After the Afrikaner nationalists of the National Party came to power in 1948 and began implementing the policy of apartheid, he rose to prominence in the ANC's 1952 Defiance Campaign, was elected President of the Transvaal ANC Branch and oversaw the 1955 Congress of the People. Working as a lawyer, he was repeatedly arrested for seditious activities and, with the ANC leadership, was prosecuted in the Treason Trial from 1956 to 1961 but was found not guilty. Although initially committed to non-violent protest, in association with the South African Communist Party he co-founded the militant Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in 1961, leading a bombing campaign against government targets. In 1962 he was arrested, convicted of sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the government, and sentenced to life imprisonment in the Rivonia Trial. Mandela served 27 years in prison, first on Robben Island, and later in Pollsmoor Prison and Victor Verster Prison. An international campaign lobbied for his release, which was granted in 1990. Becoming ANC President, Mandela published his autobiography and led negotiations with President F.W. de Klerk to abolish apartheid and establish multi-racial elections in 1994, in which he led the ANC to victory. He was elected President and formed a Government of National Unity. As President, he established a new constitution and initiated the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate past human rights abuses, while introducing policies to encourage land reform, combat poverty and expand healthcare services. Internationally, he acted as mediator between Libya and the United Kingdom in the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing trial, and oversaw military intervention in Lesotho. He declined to run for a second term, and was succeeded by his deputy Thabo Mbeki, subsequently becoming an elder statesman, focusing on charitable work in combating poverty and HIV/AIDS through the Nelson Mandela Foundation. Controversial for much of his life, right-wing critics denounced Mandela as a terrorist and communist sympathiser. He has nevertheless received international acclaim for his anti-colonial and anti-apartheid stance, having received over 250 awards, including the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize, the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Soviet Order of Lenin. He is held in deep respect within South Africa as the ‘Father of the Nation’ and is often known under his Xhosa clan name of Madiba.
July 18, 1952
Per Petterson (born 18 July 1952 in Oslo) is a Norwegian novelist. His debut book was Aske i munnen, sand i skoa (1987), a collection of short stories. He has since published a number of novels to good reviews. To Siberia (1996), set in the Second World War, was published in English in 1998 and nominated for the Nordic Council's Literature Prize. I kjølvannet, translated as In the Wake (2002), is a young man's story of losing his family in the Scandinavian Star ferry disaster in 1990 (Petterson himself lost his mother, father, younger brother and a niece in the disaster); it won the Brage Prize for 2000. His 2008 novel Jeg forbanner tidens elv (I Curse the River of Time) won The Nordic Council's Literature Prize for 2009, with an English translation published in 2010. His breakthrough novel was Ut og stjæle hester (2003), which was awarded two top literary prizes in Norway – the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature and the Booksellers’ Best Book of the Year Award. The 2005 English language translation, Out Stealing Horses, was awarded the 2006 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (the world's largest monetary literary prize for a single work of fiction published in English, €100,000). Out Stealing Horses was named one of the 10 best books of the year in the 9 December 2007 issue of the New York Times Book Review. Petterson is a trained librarian. He has worked as a bookstore clerk, translator and literary critic before becoming a full-time writer. He cites Knut Hamsun and Raymond Carver among his influences.
July 18, 1930
Richard West (18 July 1930 – 25 April 2015) was a British journalist and author best known for his reporting of the Vietnam War and Yugoslavia. He is described by Damian Thompson as "one of the finest foreign correspondents of the 20th century", with a career that covered the span of the Cold War in most of its theatres. Born in London, West attended Marlborough College before his national service spell in Trieste awakened a lifelong interest in Yugoslavia. Starting off his journalistic career at the Manchester Guardian, West became a foreign correspondent in Yugoslavia, Africa, Central America and Indochina. Described by Neal Ascherson as the "paragon of the independent journalist for his generation", he would spend much of the next two decades in Vietnam, Africa and eastern Europe, where he was codenamned Agent Friday by Communist Poland's secret police. Among his books are The Making of the Prime Minister (with Anthony Howard), An English Journey (1981) and Tito and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia (1995). Along with Patrick Marnham and Auberon Waugh, West was one of three signatories to a letter to The Times that called for a British monument to honour those repatriated as a result of the Yalta Conference, it was eventually erected in 1986. He was the grandson of the classics scholar Walter Leaf, and was married to the Irish journalist Mary Kenny. His sons, Patrick West and Ed West, are both journalists, and Richard was the first cousin of the actor Timothy West.
July 19, 1935
Philip Burnett Franklin Agee (July 19, 1935 – January 7, 2008) was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) case officer and writer, best known as author of the 1975 book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, detailing his experiences in the CIA. Agee joined the CIA in 1957, and over the following decade had postings in Washington, D.C., Ecuador, Uruguay and Mexico. After resigning from the Agency in 1968, he became a leading opponent of CIA practices. A co-founder of CovertAction Quarterly, he died in Cuba in January 2008.
July 19, 1949
Thulani Davis (born 1949) is an American playwright, journalist, librettist, novelist, poet, and screenwriter. She is a graduate of Barnard College and attended graduate school at both the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. In 1992, Davis received a Grammy Award for her album notes on Aretha Franklin's Queen Of Soul — The Atlantic Recordings, becoming the first female recipient of this award. Davis wrote for the Village Voice for more than a decade, including authoring the obituary for fellow poet and Barnard alumna June Jordan. Thulani Davis is a contemporary of and collaborator with Ntozake Shange.
July 19, 1912
Author Frank Kane (July 19, 1912, Brooklyn, New York City, NY - November 29, 1968, Manhasset, NY) was born in Brooklyn in 1912, and spent his life in New York working in a number of fields including corporate public relations, journalism, and radio and film, before devoting full-time to writing fiction. Mr. Kane is best known as a prolific writer of many mystery crime books between the 1940s and 1960s. His best known books were the hard-boiled and racy Private Eye Johnny Liddell Mystery Crime series. Kane died unexpectedly in 1968 at the young age of 56.
July 19, 1922
George Stanley McGovern (July 19, 1922 – October 21, 2012) was an American historian, author, U.S. Representative, U.S. Senator, and the Democratic Party presidential nominee in the 1972 presidential election. McGovern grew up in Mitchell, South Dakota, where he was a renowned debater. He volunteered for the U.S. Army Air Forces upon the country's entry into World War II and as a B-24 Liberator pilot flew 35 missions over German-occupied Europe. Among the medals bestowed upon him was a Distinguished Flying Cross for making a hazardous emergency landing of his damaged plane and saving his crew. After the war he gained degrees from Dakota Wesleyan University and Northwestern University, culminating in a PhD, and was a history professor. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1956 and re-elected in 1958. After a failed bid for the U.S. Senate in 1960, he was a successful candidate in 1962. As a senator, McGovern was an exemplar of modern American liberalism. He became most known for his outspoken opposition to the growing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. He staged a brief nomination run in the 1968 presidential election as a stand-in for the assassinated Robert F. Kennedy. The subsequent McGovern–Fraser Commission fundamentally altered the presidential nominating process, by greatly increasing the number of caucuses and primaries and reducing the influence of party insiders. The McGovern–Hatfield Amendment sought to end the Vietnam War by legislative means but was defeated in 1970 and 1971. McGovern's long-shot, grassroots-based 1972 presidential campaign found triumph in gaining the Democratic nomination but left the party badly split ideologically, and the failed vice-presidential pick of Thomas Eagleton undermined McGovern's credibility. In the general election McGovern lost to incumbent Richard Nixon in one of the biggest landslides in American electoral history. Re-elected Senator in 1968 and 1974, McGovern was defeated in a bid for a fourth term in 1980. Throughout his career, McGovern was involved in issues related to agriculture, food, nutrition, and hunger. As the first director of the Food for Peace program in 1961, McGovern oversaw the distribution of U.S. surpluses to the needy abroad and was instrumental in the creation of the United Nations-run World Food Programme. As sole chair of the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs from 1968 to 1977, McGovern publicized the problem of hunger within the United States and issued the ‘McGovern Report’, which led to a new set of nutritional guidelines for Americans. McGovern later served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture from 1998 to 2001 and was appointed the first UN Global Ambassador on World Hunger by the World Food Programme in 2001. The McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program has provided school meals for millions of children in dozens of countries since 2000 and resulted in McGovern's being named World Food Prize co laureate in 2008.
July 19, 1902
Robert Leslie Bellem (July 19, 1902 – April 1, 1968) was an American pulp magazine writer, best known for his creation of Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective. Before becoming a writer he worked in Los Angeles as a newspaper reporter, radio announcer and film extra. After the demise of the pulps, Bellem switched to writing for television, including a number of scripts for The Lone Ranger, Adventures of Superman (1950s version), the original Perry Mason show, 77 Sunset Strip, and other shows.
July 19, 1960
Ethan Andrew Canin (born July 19, 1960) is an American author, educator, and physician. He is a member of the faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. Canin was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, while his parents were vacationing from Iowa City, where his father, Stuart Canin, taught violin at the University of Iowa. He and his family moved around the midwestern and northeastern United States, and eventually settled in San Francisco, California, where he attended Town School and later graduated from San Francisco University High School. He attended Stanford University and earned an undergraduate degree in English. Returning to the University of Iowa, Canin entered the Iowa Writers' Workshop, receiving an MFA in 1984, and went on to attend Harvard Medical School, where he earned an M.D. in 1991. Beginning his medical practice with a residency at the University of California San Francisco, he pursued both medicine and writing for several years, leaving medicine in 1998 to join the faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he still teaches. He is a co-founder of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto.
July 19, 1952
Jayne Anne Phillips was born in West Virginia, USA in 1952. She has taught at the University of Iowa as a Teaching-Writing Fellow and at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California. Two previous short collections of her work, SWEETHEARTS (Truck Press, 1976 and 1978) and COUNTING (Vehicle Editions, 1978), were published in limited editions. She has received a number of awards and prizes for her writing.
July 19, 1933
Constance Curry (born July 19, 1933) grew up in North Carolina and graduated from Agnes Scott College in Atlanta in 1955. After studying abroad as a Fulbright Scholar, she returned to Atlanta in 1960 and was the first white woman appointed to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s executive board. From 1964 to 1975, as a field representative for the American Friend Service Committee, she worked in Mississippi helping the Carter family and others in their desegregation efforts. Atlanta’s Director of Human Services from 1975 to 1990, Curry has held fellowships at the University of Virginia’s Center for Civil Rights and Emory University’s department of Women’s Studies. She has a law degree from Woodrow Wilson College of Law and a certificate from Jerry Farber’s Comedy Course. She lives and writes in Atlanta.
July 19, 1875
Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar Nelson (July 19, 1875 – September 18, 1935) was an American poet, journalist and political activist. Among the first generation born free in the South after the Civil War, she was one of the prominent African Americans involved in the artistic flourishing of the Harlem Renaissance. Her first husband was the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar; she then married physician Henry A. Callis; and last married Robert J. Nelson, a poet and civil rights activist. Gloria T. Hull is a teacher, critic, and poet who has written and spoken extensively about black American women writers, particularly the poets of the Harlem Renaissance. A native of Louisiana and doctoral graduate of Purdue University, she is an associate professor of English at the University of Delaware and co-editor of the award-winning anthology ALL THE WOMEN ARE WHITE, ALL THE BLACKS ARE MEN, BUT SOME IF US ARE BRAVE: BLACK WOMEN’S STUDIES (The Feminist Press. l982). She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Rockefeller Foundation and has been a National Mellon Scholar at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women. Ms. Hull is currently the recipient of a Fulbright Senior Lectureship to the University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica.
July 19, 1910
Henri Grimal (19 July 1910 – 3 November 2012) was a 20th-century French writer and historian, a specialist of the British Empire, the Commonwealth of Nations and the history of decolonisation. Agrégé d'histoire (1939), he taught at the lycée Janson-de-Sailly, the lycée Henri-IV, the lycée Louis-le-Grand, the Sorbonne, as well as at Princeton University.
July 19, 1819
Gottfried Keller (19 July 1819 – 15 July 1890) was a Swiss poet and writer of German literature. Best known for his novel Green Henry (German: Der grüne Heinrich), he became one of the most popular narrators of literary realism in the late 19th century. MICHAEL BULLOCK is well known as a translator and poet. He is associate professor of creative writing at the University of British Columbia. ANNE FREMANTLE, widely known for her writing as well as her translating, is the author of THREE-CORNERED HEART and THIS LITTLE BAND OF PROPHETS: THE BRITISH FABIANS.
July 19, 1936
Norman Manea is a Jewish Romanian writer and author of short fiction, novels, and essays about the Holocaust, daily life in a communist state, and exile. He lives in the United States, where he is a Professor and writer in residence at Bard College.
July 19, 1916
Eve Merriam (July 19, 1916 – April 11, 1992) was an American poet and writer. Merriam's first book was the 1946 Family Circle, which won the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Her book, The Inner City Mother Goose, was described as one of the most banned books of the time. It inspired a 1971 Broadway musical called Inner City and a 1982 musical production called Street Dreams. In 1956 she published Emma Lazarus: Woman with a Torch. In 1981 she won the NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children.Her play Out of Our Father's House, based on her book Growing Up Female in America, was televised in the Great Performances series in 1978. Born as Eve Moskovitz in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After graduating with an A.B. from the Cornell University in 1937, Merriam moved to New York to pursue graduate studies at Columbia University. She was married for a time to writer Leonard C. Lewin. She later married screenwriter Waldo Salt and was actress Jennifer Salt's stepmother. Merriam died on April 11, 1992 in Manhattan from liver cancer.
July 19, 1947
Robert Michael Pyle is a lepidopterist, writer, teacher, and founder of the Xerces Society. He has a Ph.D. in ecology and environmental studies from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies; his dissertation focused on butterfly eco-geography.
July 19, 1931
Miklos Vajda (July 19, 1931, Budapest - April 25, 2017, Budapest) was a Hungarian translator, critic, and editor.
July 19, 1930
Joseph E. Persico (July 19, 1930, Gloversville, NY - August 30, 2014, Albany, NY) was an author. From 1974 to 1977, he was primary speechwriter to Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. At the time of his death, he lived in Guilderland, New York. His book Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial tells the story of the Nuremberg Trials; it was adapted for television as the docudrama Nuremberg.
July 19, 1952
Nancy Folbre is an American feminist economist who focuses on economics and the family, non-market work and the economics of care. She is Professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The Center for Popular Economics is a nonprofit collective of political economists based in Amherst, MA. Since our founding in 1979, thousands of people have participated in our workshops and Institutes. Our programs and publications demystify the economy and put useful economic tools in the hands of people fighting for social and economic justice. We examine root causes of economic inequality and injustice including systems of oppression based on race, class, gender, nation and ethnicity. CPE provides a forum for activists, organizers, educators, and progressive economists to come together, learn from one another and work to build a movement for social and economic justice.
July 19, 1967
Zoran Drvenkar was born in Croatia in 1967 and moved to Germany when he was three years old. He has been working as a writer since 1989 and doesn’t like to be pinned down to one genre. He has written more than twenty novels, ranging from children’s and young adult books to the darker literary novels Sorry and You.
July 19, 1930
James David Rubadiri (19 July 1930 – 15 September 2018) was a Malawian diplomat, academic and poet, playwright and novelist. Rubadiri is ranked as one of Africa's most widely anthologized and celebrated poets to emerge after independence. Rubadiri attended King's College, Budo in Uganda from 1941 to 1950 then Makerere University in Kampala (1952-56), where he graduated from with a bachelor's degree in English literature and History. He later studied Literature at King’s College, Cambridge. He went on to receive a Diploma in Education from the University of Bristol. At Malawi's independence in 1964, Rubadiri was appointed Malawi's first ambassador to the United States and the United Nations. When he presented his credentials to President Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House on 18 August 1964, he expressed the hope that his newly independent country would get more aid from the USA; he said that Malawi needed help to build its democratic institutions and noted that Malawi was already receiving US economic and technical help. That same year Rubadiri appeared on the National Educational Television (New York City) series African Writers of Today. Rubadiri left the Malawian government in 1965 when he broke with President Hastings Banda. As an exile, he taught at Makerere University (1968–75), but he was again exiled during the Idi Amin years. Rubadiri subsequently taught at the University of Nairobi, Kenya (1976–84), and was also briefly, along with Okot p'Bitek, at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, at the invitation of Wole Soyinka. Between 1975 and 1980 he was a member of the Executive Committee of the National Theater of Kenya. From 1984 to 1997 he taught at the University of Botswana (1984–97), where he was dean of the Language and Social Sciences Education Department. In 1997, after Banda's death, Rubadiri was reappointed Malawi's ambassador to the United Nations, and he was named vice-chancellor of the University of Malawi in 2000. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Strathclyde in 2005. On September 15 2018, David Rubadiri died at age 88. Rubadiri's poetry has been praised as being among "the richest of contemporary Africa". His work was published in the 1963 anthology Modern Poetry of Africa (East African Publishers, 1996), and appeared in international publications including Transition, Black Orpheus and Présence Africaine. His only novel, No Bride Price, was published in 1967. It criticized the Banda regime and was, along with Legson Kayira's The Looming Shadow, among the earliest published fiction by Malawians.
July 20, 1924
Thomas Louis Berger (July 20, 1924 – July 13, 2014) was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure. Berger's biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist, descriptions he preferred to reject. His admirers often bemoaned that his talent and achievement were under-appreciated, in view of his versatility across many forms of fiction, his precise use of language, and his probing intelligence. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas Berger grew up in the nearby community of Lockland. He interrupted his college career to enlist in the United States Army in 1943. Berger served in Europe, and was stationed with a medical unit in the first U.S. Occupation Forces in Berlin, experiences which later provided him with background for his first novel, Crazy in Berlin, published in 1958. On his return, he studied at the University of Cincinnati, receiving a B.A. in 1948. He then pursued graduate work in English at Columbia University, leaving his thesis unfinished to enroll in the writers workshop at the New School for Social Research. Here Berger met and married an artist, Jeanne Redpath, in 1950. He supported himself during this time by working as a librarian at the Rand School of Social Science, and was briefly on staff at the New York Times Index. Berger later became a copy editor at Popular Science Monthly, and performed free-lance editing during the early years of his writing career. Eventually, Berger was able to devote himself to writing full-time, particularly after the notoriety gained by his third book, Little Big Man, in 1964. Although he would occasionally put his hand to a short story, a play, or non-fiction article (including a stint as film critic for Esquire), Berger preferred the long narrative form of the novel, and produced a steady run of critically acclaimed books throughout his career. In 1984 his book The Feud was nominated by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the Pulitzer Prize, but the Pulitzer board overrode their recommendation and instead chose William Kennedy's Ironweed. In 1974, Berger was a writer in residence at the University of Kansas, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, in 1975–76. He lectured at Yale University in 1981 and 1982, and was a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Davis, in 1982. A collection of his papers is available at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Berger resided in New York City from 1948 to 1953, and lived the next twelve years in a town on the Hudson River. In subsequent years, he lived in London, Malibu, California, New York City again, Long Island, and then Mount Desert Island in Maine, before once more returning to the banks of the Hudson. He died on July 13, 2014, seven days before his 90th birthday.
July 20, 1934
Henry Dumas was born in Sweet Home, Arkansas, on July 20, 1934, and was killed in Harlem on May 23, 1968. He studied at the City College of New York and at Rutgers University and spent three years in the U.S. Air Force. At the time of his death he was working as a free-lance writer and as a member of the teaching staff of the Experiment in Higher Education at Southern Illinois University in East St. Louis. Dumas was active in the area of ‘little magazine’ writing and publishing, and he was a member of the editorial staff of the Hiram Poetry Review. He leaves behind a wife and two sons. This volume, ARK OF BONES AND OTHER STORIES, and a companion volume, POETRY FOR MY PEOPLE, also published by the Southern Illinois University Press, comprise most of the finished work, published and unpublished, Mr. Dumas had accomplished at the time of his death. Hale Chatfield, coeditor of this volume, is a member of the English faculty at Hiram College in Hiram, Ohio, and founder and editor of the Hiram Poetry Review. He has published two volumes of his own poetry, THE YOUNG COUNTRY AND OTHER POEMS (New York, 1959) and TEETH (Trumansburg, N.Y., 1967); Chatfield received a B.A. degree from Wesleyan University in 1957 and an M.A. degree from Rutgers University in 1963. In July 1968 he was named chairman of the Poetry Advisory Panel to the Ohio Arts Council. Eugene Redmond, the other coeditor of this volume, is currently writer-in-residence at Oberlin College. He has won several prizes for poetry. He holds the B.A. degree in English Literature from Southern Illinois University and the M.A. degree from Washington University. Many of Redmond’s feature and news stories have been used by newspapers and radio stations across the country. He has read his poetry on television and on college campuses, and he appears regularly as a reader and actor with Southern Illinois University’s Performing Arts Training Center, where he is Senior Consultant to director Katherine Dunham. This year October House will publish Redmond’s first book-length collection of poems, THE EYE IN THE CEILING.
July 20, 1925
Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 in Fort-de-France, Martinique. He studied medicine in France, and later specialized in psychiatry. Out of his experiences in a hospital in Algeria during the French-Algerian war, his sympathies turned toward the rebels. He joined the revolution and became its most articulate spokesman. His book, THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH, has become a manifesto for the Third World.
July 20, 1822
Apollon Aleksandrovich Grigoryev (20 July 1822 – 7 October 1864) was a Russian poet, literary and theatrical critic, translator, memoirist and author of popular art songs. Grigoryev was born in Moscow, where his father was secretary to the city magistrate. He was educated at home, and studied at Moscow University. Several of Grigoryev's poems were published in Otechestvennye Zapiski in 1845, followed by a number of short verses, critical articles, theatrical reviews and translations in Repertuar and Pantheon. In 1846, Grigoryev published a poorly received book of poetry; He subsequently wrote little original poetry, focusing instead on translating works by Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet), Byron ("To parizinu" and fragments from Child Harold), Molière and Delavigne. Grigoryev's years in Saint Petersburg were stormy. In 1847 he returned to Moscow, becoming the jurisprudence teacher at the 1st Moscow secondary school and collaborating on Moscow. City. Leaf. In 1847 Grigoryev married Lydia Fedorovna Korsh (sister of writers Evgenii and Valentin Korsh), but for some time he was unproductive. In 1850, Grigoryev became editor of Moskvityanin and leader of the young members of its staff. Despite its "old editorial staff" (Mikhail Pogodin, Stepan Shevyrev and Alexander Veltman), Grigoryev gathered a "young, daring, drunk, but honest and shining by gifts" circle: Alexander Ostrovsky, Aleksey Pisemsky, Almazov, A. Potekhin, Pecherskiy-Melnikov, Edel'son, Lev Mey, Berg and Gorbunov. Although they were not Slavophiles, Moskvityanin attracted them because they could base their social and political ideology on Russian reality. Grigoryev was the chief theorist of the circle, reaching his peak during the early 1860s. Grigoryev wrote for Moskvityanin until it ceased publication in 1856. He then worked for Russian Conversation, Reading Library, the original Russian Word (as one of three editors), Russian Peace, Svetoch, Starchevskiy's Syn Otechestva and Mikhail Katkov's Russian Herald. In 1861, Grigoryev worked for a year at the Dostoyevsky brothers' Epoch. As at Moskvityanin, his circle was pochvennikov (groundbreaking); however, his enthusiasm waned and he returned to St. Petersburg. Grigoryev resumed his bohemian existence, falling into debt before he began writing theatre reviews for several newspapers. Although his reviews were popular, alcoholism had taken its toll and he died in 1864. Grigoryev is buried in Mitrofaniyevsky Cemetery, next to poet Lev Mey. Grigoryev's articles were collected and published in 1876 by Nikolay Strakhov.
July 20, 1965
The French-Djiboutian novelist, poet, and essayist Abdourahman A. Waberi (born July 20, 1965) is one of the leading francophone writers of his generation. His other books include THE LAND WITHOUT SHADOW, HARVEST OF SKULLS, and RIFTS, ROADS AND RAILS. Together or separately, David and Nicole Ball have published nine book-length translations, most recently Waberi’s IN THE UNITED STATES OF AFRICA.
July 20, 1928
PAVEL KOHOUT, a native of Prague, is one of the foremost writers of Czechoslovakia. He worked as a journalist and reporter for radio and television and later entered the Czech diplomatic service as cultural attaché in Moscow. Since 1955 he has devoted himself to writing. He is the author of two collections of poetry, 18 plays and stage adaptations, including POOR MURDERER which premiered in English on Broadway in October 1976 and was described by Clive Barnes in The New York Times as ‘a strange, dazzling and intellectual play that zigzags across the stage and ricochets across the mind.’ In addition, he has to his credit ten screen plays and two works of prose, one of which, FROM THE DIARY OF A COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY, was published in this country to wide critical acclaim.
July 20, 1933
Cormac McCarthy (born Charles McCarthy; July 20, 1933) is an American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. He has written ten novels, spanning the Southern Gothic, Western, and post-apocalyptic genres. McCarthy's fifth novel, Blood Meridian (1985), was on Time magazine's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language books published since 1923. For All the Pretty Horses (1992), he won both the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. All the Pretty Horses, The Road, and Child of God have also been adapted as motion pictures, while Outer Dark was turned into a 15-minute short. McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize (2007) and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Road (2006). In 2010, The Times ranked The Road first on its list of the 100 best fiction and non-fiction books of the past 10 years. Literary critic Harold Bloom named McCarthy as one of the four major American novelists of his time, alongside Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth, and called Blood Meridian "the greatest single book since Faulkner's As I Lay Dying".
July 20, 1943
Leigh Montville (born July 20, 1943 in New Haven, Connecticut) is a newspaper columnist who currently writes a weekly column for The Boston Globe, a sports reporter and author. He is a graduate of the University of Connecticut. Montville is married to Diane Foster and has two children. He lives in Massachusetts and is an ardent supporter of the Boston Red Sox.
July 20, 1952
Nancy Ruttenburg is professor of comparative literature, English, and Slavic literatures and chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University. She is the author of Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship.
July 20, 1944
ANDREW WHEATCROFT was born in 1944, and educated at St. John’s School, the University of Madrid and Christ’s College. Cambridge. His earlier books include: Who’s Who in Military History with John Keegan; The Habsburg Empire: Russia 1860-1920; The Tennyson Album; Arabia and the Gulf 1880-1950. He has acted as General Editor for a major ten-volume history of Britain, and was a consultant for The Times Atlas of World History. He also edited War Economy and the Military Mind.
July 20, 1953
Thomas Loren Friedman (born July 20, 1953) is an American journalist, columnist and author. He writes a twice-weekly column for The New York Times and has written extensively on foreign affairs including global trade, the Middle East, globalization, and environmental issues, and has won the Pulitzer Prize three times.
July 20, 1944
Paul Randolph Violi (July 20, 1944 – April 2, 2011) was an American poet born in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Splurge, Fracas, The Curious Builder, Likewise, and most recently Overnight. Violi was managing editor of The Architectural Forum from 1972–1974, worked on free-lance projects at Universal Limited Art Editions and as chairman of the Associate Council Poetry Committee, he organized a series of readings at the Museum of Modern Art from 1974 to 1983. He also co-founded Swollen Magpie Press, which produced poetry chapbooks, anthologies, and a magazine called New York Times. His art book collaborations with Dale Devereux Barker, most recently Envoy; Life is Completely Interesting, have been acquired by major collections. The expanded text of their first collaboration, Selected Accidents, Pointless Anecdotes, a collection of non-fiction prose, was published by Hanging Loose Press in 2002. Awarded two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Violi also received The John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award in Poetry, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Morton Dauwen Zabel Award, and grants from The Foundation for Contemporary Arts Poetry, The Fund for Poetry, The New York Foundation for the Arts, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, and New York Creative Artists Public Service Fund. Violi died in Cortlandt Manor, New York in 2011 from cancer. At the time of his death, he was teaching in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and in the graduate writing program at the New School University.
July 20, 1945
Charles Bowden (July 20, 1945, Joliet, IL - August 30, 2014, Las Cruces, NM), the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award and the Sidney Hillman Award, was the critically acclaimed author of numerous books, including DOWN BY THE RIVER and SOME OF THE DEAD ARE STILL BREATHING. He was a contributing editor for GQ and Mother Jones, and also wrotes for Harper’s, the New York Times Book Review, Esquire, and Aperture.
July 21, 1914
Philippe Ariès (21 July 1914 – 8 February 1984) was a French medievalist and historian of the family and childhood, in the style of Georges Duby. He wrote many books on the common daily life. His most prominent works regarded the change in the western attitudes towards death. Ariès regarded himself as an "anarchist of the right". He was initially close to the Action française but later distanced himself from it, as he viewed it as too authoritarian, hence his self-description as an "anarchist". Ariès also contributed to La Nation française, a royalist review. However, he also co-operated with many left-wing French historians, especially with Michel Foucault, who wrote his obituary. During his life, his work was often better known in the English-speaking world than it was in France itself. He is known above all for his book L’Enfant et la Vie Familiale sous l’Ancien Régime (1960), which was translated into English as Centuries of Childhood (1962). This book is pre-eminent in the history of childhood, as it was essentially the first book on the subject (although some antiquarian texts were earlier). Even today, Ariès remains the standard reference to the topic. Ariès is most famous for his statement that "in medieval society, the idea of childhood did not exist". Its central thesis is that attitudes towards children were progressive and evolved over time with economic change and social advancement, until childhood, as a concept and an accepted part of family life, from the 17th century. It was thought that children were too weak to be counted and that they could disappear at any time. However, children were considered as adults as soon as they could live alone. The book has had mixed fortunes. His contribution was profoundly significant both in that it recognised childhood as a social construction rather than as a biological given and in that it founded the history of childhood as a serious field of study. At the same time, his account of childhood has by now been widely criticised. Ariès is likewise remembered for his invention of another field of study: the history of attitudes to death and dying. Ariès saw death, like childhood, as a social construction. His seminal work in this ambit is L'Homme devant la mort (1977), his last major book, published in the same year when his status as a historian was finally recognised by his induction into the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), as a directeur d'études.
July 21, 1947
William Seward Burroughs II (February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be ‘one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century’. His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films. He was born to a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, grandson of the inventor and founder of the Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I, and nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence. He left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studied English, and anthropology as a postgraduate, and later attended medical school in Vienna. After being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and U.S. Navy in 1942 to serve in World War II, he dropped out and became afflicted with the drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, while working a variety of jobs. In 1943 while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the mutually influential foundation of what became the countercultural movement of the Beat Generation. Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, primarily drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict, as he lived throughout Mexico City, London, Paris, Berlin, the South American Amazon and Tangier in Morocco. Finding success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), Burroughs is perhaps best known for his third novel Naked Lunch (1959), a controversy-fraught work that underwent a court case under the U.S. sodomy laws. With Brion Gysin, he also popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–64). In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the ‘greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift‘, a reputation he owes to his ‘lifelong subversion’ of the moral, political and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be ‘the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War’, while Norman Mailer declared him ‘the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius’. Burroughs had one child, William Seward Burroughs III (1947-1981), with his second wife Joan Vollmer. Vollmer died in 1951 in Mexico City. Burroughs was convicted of manslaughter in Vollmer's death, an event that deeply permeated all of his writings. Burroughs died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, after suffering a heart attack in 1997.
July 21, 1956
Michael Connelly (born July 21, 1956) is an American author of detective novels and other crime fiction, notably those featuring LAPD Detective Hieronymus ‘Harry’ Bosch and criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller.
July 21, 1920
Mohammed Dib (1920–2003) was an Algerian author. He wrote over 30 novels, as well as numerous short stories, poems, and children's literature in the French language. He is probably Algeria's most prolific and well-known writer. His work covers the breadth of 20th century Algerian history, focusing on Algeria's fight for independence. Dib was born in Tlemcen in western Algeria, near the border with Morocco, into a middle-class family which had descended into poverty. After losing his father at a young age, Dib started writing poetry at 15. At the age of 18, he started working as a teacher in nearby Oujda in Morocco. In his twenties and thirties he worked in various capacities as a weaver, teacher, accountant, interpreter (for the French and British military), and journalist (for newspapers including Alger Républicain and Liberté, an organ of the Algerian Communist Party). During this period he also studied Literature at the University of Algiers. In 1952, two years before the Algerian revolution, he married a French woman, joined the Algerian Communist Party and visited France. In the same year he published his first novel La Grande Maison (The Great House). Dib was a member of the Generation of '52 — a group of Algerian writers which included Albert Camus and Mouloud Feraoun. In 1959, he was expelled from Algeria by the French authorities for his support for Algerian independence, and also because of the success of his novels (which depicted the reality of life in colonial Algeria for most Algerians). Instead of moving to Cairo as many Algerian nationalists had, he decided to live in France, where he was allowed to stay after various writers (including Camus) lobbied the French government. From 1967 he lived mainly in La Celle-Saint-Cloud near Paris. From 1976-1977 Dib was teacher at the University of California at Los Angeles. He also was a professor at the Sorbonne in Paris. In his later years he often travelled to Finland, which was a setting for some of his later novels. He died at La Celle-Saint-Cloud on May 2, 2003. In a tribute, the then French Culture Minister Jean-Jacques Aillagon said that Dib was ‘a spiritual bridge between Algeria and France, between the north and the Mediterranean.’ In his work, Dib was concerned with bringing the authentic experience of Algerian life to a wider, particularly French-speaking, world. The Algerian revolution (1954–1962) profoundly shaped his thinking, and made him eager to bring to the world's attention Algeria's struggle for independence. An advocate of political equality, he believed that ‘the things that make us different always remain secondary.’ Ironically, he has received many awards from the French literary establishment. His debut novel La grande maison was the first part of the Algerian trilogy about a large Algerian family. The main protagonist, Omar, is a young boy growing up in poverty in Algeria just before World War II. The trilogy is presented in a naturalistic style similar to that of Émile Zola. The second part, L'Incendie, published in the same year the Algerian revolution started, was about Omar's life during the second World War. The final part of the trilogy, Le Métier à tisser deals with Omar's adult life as a working man in Algeria. It was published in 1957. The trilogy was partly autobiographical. His later works did not always use the same naturalistic framework of his earlier novels, often adding surrealistic elements. He used Science Fiction in Qui se souvient de la mer (1962), and verse in his last novel L.A. Trip. From 1985 to 1994 he wrote four semi-autobiographical novels about a North African man who visits a Nordic country, has a relationship and child with a woman in this country. The last novel in this series deals with the child visiting her father’s homeland. Dib also helped to translate into French various Finnish books.
July 21, 1911
Herbert Marshall McLuhan (July 21, 1911, Edmonton, Canada - December 31, 1980, Toronto, Canada) was a Canadian professor, philosopher, and public intellectual. His work is one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, McLuhan studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge.
July 21, 1909
Iorwerth Eiddon Stephen Edwards (21 July 1909 – 24 September 1996) — known as I. E. S. Edwards— was an English Egyptologist considered to be a leading expert on the pyramids.Born in London, Edwards attended Merchant Taylors' School where he studied Hebrew and later at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge Cambridge University, gaining a 'First' in Oriental Languages. He was awarded the William Wright studentship in Arabic and received his doctorate in 1933. In 1934 he joined the British Museum as Assistant Keeper in the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities. He published Hieroglyphic Texts for Egyptian Stellae. in 1939. During World War II he was sent to Egypt on military duty. In 1946 he wrote The Pyramids of Egypt, which was published by Penguin Books in 1947. In 1955 he was appointed the Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum and organized the Tutankhamun exhibition in 1972. He remained there until his retirement in 1974. On leaving the British Museum he worked with UNESCO during the rescue of the temple complex at Philae. He was also Vice-President of the Egypt Exploration Society, a Fellow of the British Academy (1962) and was awarded the CBE in 1968 for his services to the British Museum.
July 21, 1944
Buchi Emecheta (born 21 July 1944, in Lagos) is a Nigerian novelist who has published over 20 books, including Second-Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977) and The Joys of Motherhood (1979). Her themes of child slavery, motherhood, female independence and freedom through education have won her considerable critical acclaim and honours, including an Order of the British Empire in 2005. Emecheta once described her stories as ‘stories of the world…[where]… women face the universal problems of poverty and oppression, and the longer they stay, no matter where they have come from originally, the more the problems become identical.’
July 21, 1893
Prior to WWII, the novels of German writer HANS FALLADA (born Rudolf Ditzen) were international bestsellers. But when Jewish producers in Hollywood made his 1932 novel, LITTLE MAN, WHAT NOW? into a major motion picture, the rising Nazis began to take note of him. His struggles increased after he refused to join the Party and was denounced by neighbors for ‘anti-Nazi’ sympathies. Unlike many other prominent artists, however, Fallada decided not to flee Germany. By the end of World War II he'd suffered an alcohol-fueled nervous breakdown and was in a Nazi insane asylum, where he nonetheless managed to write - in code - the brilliant subversive novel, THE DRINKER. After the war, Fallada went on to write EVERY MAN DIES ALONE, based on an actual Gestapo file, but he died in 1947 of a morphine overdose, just before it was published. MICHAEL HOFFMAN is the translator of many of Germany's leading twentieth century authors, including Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, and Thomas Bernhard, and is the winner of the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize. GEOFF WILKES, a Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Queensland, is perhaps the world's foremost English-speaking expert on Hans Fallada, and is the author of HANS FALLADA'S CRISIS NOVELS 1931-1947.
July 21, 1936
OSWALDO FRANCA, JR., was born in Minas Gerais, Brazil, in 1936. He is the owner of a fleet of taxis as well as the author of seven novels. .
July 21, 1933
John Champlin Gardner Jr. (July 21, 1933 – September 14, 1982) was an American novelist, essayist, literary critic and university professor. He is perhaps most noted for his novel Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf myth from the monster's point of view.
July 21, 1899
Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American author and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works. Additional works, including three novels, four short story collections, and three non-fiction works, were published posthumously. Many of his works are considered classics of American literature.
July 21, 1894
Joseph Henry Jackson was born in Madison, New Jersey on July 21, 1894, and received his schooling in the East. After World War I he moved to California and began his literary career. He was associate editor and managing editor of Sunset magazine from 1920-1926, and editor from 1926-1928. In 1929 he became literary editor of the San Francisco Argonaut, and in 1931 he joined the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle, also as literary editor. He gained a wide following with his daily book review column, "A Bookman's Notebook", and with his radio program, "The Reader's Guide", broadcast over NBC's Pacific network. In addition to his work on the Chronicle, he wrote a number of books, including Mexican Interlude (1936), Tintypes in Gold (1939), Anybody's Gold (1941), and My San Francisco (1953), and edited several more -notably Continent's End, a collection of California writing (1944), San Francisco Murders (1947) and The Western Gate: a San Francisco Reader (1952). Jackson made his home in Berkeley and it was there he died in July, 1955.
July 21, 1942
PETER CLARKE was Professor of Modern British History and Master of Trinity Hall at Cambridge. His many books include THE LAST THOUSAND DAYS OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE; THE KEYNESIAN REVOLUTION IN THE MAKING, 1924-1936; and the widely admired final volume of the Penguin History of Britain, HOPE AND GLORY: BRITAIN 1900-2000. He lives with his wife, the Canadian writer Maria Tippett, in Suffolk, England, and Pender Island, British Columbia.
July 21, 1955
Véronique Tadjo (born July 21, 1955) is a writer, poet, novelist, and artist from Côte d'Ivoire. Having lived and worked in many countries within the African continent and diaspora, she feels herself to be pan-African, in a way that is reflected in the subject matter, imagery and allusions of her work. Born in Paris, Véronique Tadjo is the daughter of an Ivorian civil servant and a French painter and sculptor. Brought up in Abidjan, she travelled widely with her family. Tadjo completed her BA degree at the University of Abidjan and her doctorate at the Sorbonne in African-American Literature and Civilization. In 1983, she went to Howard University in Washington, D.C., on a Fulbright research scholarship. In 1979, Tadjo chose to teach English at the Lycée Moderne de Korhogo (secondary school) in the North of Côte d'Ivoire. She subsequently became a lecturer in the English department at the University of Abidjan until 1993. In 1998, she participated in the project "Rwanda: Ecrire par devoir de mémoire" (Rwanda: Writing for the sake of memory) with a group of African writers who traveled to Rwanda to testify to the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath. Her book L'Ombre d'Imana emerged from her time in Rwanda. In the past few years, she has facilitated workshops in writing and illustrating children's books in Mali, Benin, Chad, Haiti, Mauritius, French Guyana, Burundi, Rwanda, the United States, and South Africa. In 2006 she participated in the fall residency of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She has lived in Paris, Lagos, Mexico City, Nairobi and London. Tadjo is currently based in Johannesburg, where since 2007 she has been head of French Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. Tadjo received the Literary Prize of L'Agence de Cooperation Culturelle et Technique in 1983 and the UNICEF Prize in 1993 for Mamy Wata and the Monster, which was also chosen as one of Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century, one of only four children's books selected. In 2005, Tadjo won the Grand prix littéraire d'Afrique noire.
July 21, 1952
Gary R. Edgerton is dean of the College of Communication at Butler University. He was previously eminent scholar, professor, and chair of the Communication and Theatre Arts Department at Old Dominion University. Edgerton has published ten books and more than eighty book chapters, journal articles, and encyclopedia essays on a wide variety of media and culture topics, and is co-editor of the Journal of Popular Film and Television.
July 22, 1943
Pete Dexter (born 1943) is an American novelist. He won the U.S. National Book Award in 1988 for his novel Paris Trout.
July 22, 1929
Solomon Alexander Amu Djoleto (born 22 July 1929) is a Ghanaian writer and educator. Amu Djoleto was born at Manyakpogunor, Manya Krobo, Ghana, the son of Frederick Badu, a Presbyterian minister, and Victoria Shome Tetteh, ‘a modest trader’. He was educated at Accra Academy and St. Augustine's College, Cape Coast before reading English at the University of Ghana. He joined Ghana's Ministry of Education in the 1960s as a teacher and education officer. After studying textbook production at the Institute of Education, University of London, he returned to Ghana to edit the Ghana Teachers' Journal. At one point heading the Ministry of Education's publishing programme, he has continued to work for the Ministry of Education. Djoleto contributed to the poetry anthologies Voices of Ghana (1958) and Messages (1970), and his poems were collected in Amid the Swelling Act. However, he is best known for his novels, the first of which was The Strange Man (1967).
July 22, 1920
Florestan Fernandes (July 22, 1920 – August 10, 1995) was a Brazilian sociologist, politician, and Professor at the University of São Paulo. He was also elected federal deputy twice. He came from a poor family with his mother being a "washerwoman". In youth he took a series of odd jobs and had an erratic education until he attended the university in 1941. In 1945 he graduated and by 1964 was a full professor in sociology. In that same year he won the Prêmio Jabuti. In 1969 he fled to Canada for political reasons and began to teach at the University of Toronto. In 1986 he returned to Brazil and became involved in the Partido dos Trabalhadores. In his treatment of Marxism, he is known for presenting hybrid views that diverged from orthodox theory and from conventional leftist practical concessions. His name is closely associated with the modernization of sociological research in Brazil and Latin America. A sociologist and university professor with more than 50 published works, he transformed social thought in Brazil and established a new standard of sociological research characterized by analytical and critical rigor. He also advanced a new level of intellectual performance. He died at age.
July 22, 1943
Hadi Khorsandi (born 22 July 1943) is a contemporary Iranian poet and satirist. Since 1979, he has been the editor and writer of the Persian-language satirical journal Asghar Agha. He is particularly renowned for his examination of Persian socio-political issues, particularly his open criticism of all forms of dictatorship and religious fundamentalism. He has lived in exile in London since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, following criticism of the new regime. He was the subject of death threats during the 1980s. Khorsandi was the recipient of the Hellman-Hammett Award in 1995. In 2009 he signed an open letter of apology posted to Iranian.com, along with 266 other Iranian academics, writers, artists and journalists, about the persecution of Bahá'ís. He is the father of the British comedian Shappi Khorsandi and British-based journalist, Peyvand Khorsandi.
July 22, 1946
Juan Jesus Armas Marcelo (born Las Palmas, July 22, 1946), also known as Juan José Armas Marcelo or JJ Armas Marcelo , is a Spanish writer and journalist.
July 22, 1921
Sylvia Meagher (July 22, 1921, New York City, NY - January 14, 1989, New York City, NY) worked in the field of international public health, both as an administrator and as a writer of analytical reports, since 1947. She appeared on radio programs and panels and has lectured in various parts of the United States and Canada. Her writing on the Warren Report appeared in such publications as Esquire , The Minority of One , and Studies on the Left . Meagher died in New York City in 1989. Richard Schweiker is a formern politician, who served both in the U.S. House of Representatives and in the Senate. He also served as the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services for President Ronald Reagan. Peter Dale Scott is a former Canadian diplomat and professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a poet and author who has published more than a dozen books and collections of poetry, many revolving around the self-coined concept of "deep politics.
July 22, 1946
Fernando Gomes de Morais (born July 22, 1946) is a Brazilian journalist, biographer, politician and writer. He wrote biographies and books on a series of Brazilian historical personalities and events, many of then were adapted into film. Morais was born in Mariana. He started in journalism when he was 15 years old. In 1961, he was then a courier in a magazine edited by a bank in Belo Horizonte, when he had to cover the absence of their only journalist at a press conference. At age 18 he moved to São Paulo having worked for Veja, Jornal da Tarde, Folha de S. Paulo, TV Cultura and portal IG. He was awarded the Esso Award three times and the Prêmio Abril four times. His first editorial success was A Ilha, an account of a trip to Cuba. After that, Moraes wrote other biographies and non-fiction books, such as Olga, Chatô, o Rei do Brasil and O Mago. Fernando was state deputy for eight years and State Secretary of Culture (1988-1991) and Education (1991-1993) for São Paulo, during the govenment of Orestes Quércia e Luiz Antônio Fleury Filho
July 22, 1961
Poet Lisa Robertson was born in Toronto in 1961. She lived for many years in Vancouver, where she studied at Simon Fraser University, ran an independent bookstore, and was a collective member of the Kootenay School of Writing, a writer-run center for writing, publishing, and scholarship. While in Vancouver, Robertson was also involved in Artspeak Gallery, an alternative gallery that connects the visual arts and writing; she is an honorary member of their board of directors. Robertson is known for working in book-length projects. Her subject matter includes political themes, such as gender and nation, as well as the problems of form and genre; she has written works that explore literary forms such as the pastoral, epic, and weather forecast. Her books of poetry include XEclogue (1993); Debbie: An Epic (1997), nominated for a Governor General’s Award; The Weather (2001), which Robertson wrote during her Judith E. Wilson fellowship at Cambridge University; The Men (2006); and R’s Boat (2010). Her architectural essays are collected in Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (revised ed. 2010), and she has published a work of prose essays, Nilling (2012). Robertson has been the subject of a special issue of Chicago Review and was the Holloway poet-in-residence at the University of California-Berkeley in 2006. In 2005 she was awarded the PIP Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Poetry in English. obertson has taught at the University of California-San Diego, Capilano College, Dartington College of Art, the California College of Art, and the University of Cambridge. She holds no degrees and has no academic affiliation, and supports herself through free-lance writing on art, architecture, astrology, interior design, and food. She currently lives in France.
July 22, 1971
Akhil Sharma (born July 22, 1971) is an award-winning Indian-American author and professor of creative writing.
July 22, 1932
Thomas Elliot Skidmore (Troy, 22 July 1932 – 11 June 2016) was an American historian and scholar who specialized in Brazilian history. Skidmore graduated in political science and philosophy in 1954 from Denison University. He received a Fulbright Fellowship to study philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford where he met his wife Felicity. He received a second B.A. in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1956 and a master's degree in 1959. He obtained his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1960 with a thesis on the German Chancellor Leo von Caprivi. His attention shifted to South America after the Cuban Revolution. His Harvard post-doctorate focused on Brazil. In 1967 he published Politics in Brazil: 1930-64, An Experiment in Democracy. In 1966, Skidmore joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He became a full professor in 1968. In 1986, Skidmore moved to Brown University.
July 22, 1948
Cecilia Vicuña (born July 22, 1948) is a Chilean poet, artist, and filmmaker. Her work is noted for themes of language, memory, decay and exile. Critics also note the relevance of her work to the politics ecological destruction, cultural homogenization, and economic disparity, particularly the way in which such phenomena disenfranchise the already powerless. Vicuña was born and raised in Santiago de Chile in 1948, but went into exile in London in 1973 following the death of President Salvador Allende and the 1973 Chilean coup d'état led by General Augusto Pinochet. In 1980, Vicuña moved to New York City. Cecilia Vicuña was part of a group of artists and poets, Tribu No, that created art actions in Santiago de Chile from 1967 to 1972. She gave the group its name and authored its "No Manifesto." She performs her poetry internationally, frequently in conjunction with exhibitions or art installations, and documents her performances in videos, the Vicuña audio page at Pennsound, and the 2012 collection Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuna which includes transcriptions, commentary, and audience commentaries. Vicuña has authored and published sixteen books of her visual art installations and poetry books, most of which have been translated into several languages. These include Saboramí (1973), a book made in collaboration with Felipe Ehrenberg that resembles a personal diary, The Precarious/Precario (1983), Cloud Net (2000), Instan (2002) and Spit Temple (2010), a collection of her oral performances. In 2009 she co-edited the Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry with Ernesto Livon Grosman, an anthology of 500 years of Latin American Poetry, which the Washington Post called "magisterial". Vicuña creates "precarious works;" characteristic of Vicuña's work is her use of materials that are often fragile, worn by the elements and/or biodegradable: the return to the environment. She describes her work as a way of "hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard." In 1966 she began creating sculptural interventions called precarios, combining ritual and assemblage and typically throw-away materials such as yarn, sticks, feathers, leaves, stones and bones. Linked to the sacred wild Andean vicuña animal by name, Cecilia Vicuña utilized the wool of these animals for her Cloud-Net installation series as a metaphoric tool. The visual language of this series resulted in large-scale warp and weft installations within rural and urban environments—weavings—thus linking Vicuña to the Feminist Art Movement's Pattern and Decoration Movement. Museums that have exhibited her work include the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Santiago, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Art in General, New York City, the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, and MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
July 22, 1938
Jonathan Barker has taught Political Science at the universities of Toronto, Arizona and Dar es Salam. He has researched local politics in Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda and India. Other books include Street-Level Democracy and Rural Communities under Stress.
July 23, 1962
David Brock (born July 23, 1962) is an American liberal political operative, author and commentator who founded the media watchdog group Media Matters for America. He has been described by Time as "one of the most influential operatives in the Democratic Party" while others believe his tactics led to Hillary Clinton's defeat in the 2016 presidential election. Brock, who began his career as a right-wing investigative reporter during the 1990s, wrote the book The Real Anita Hill and the Troopergate story, which led to Paula Jones filing a lawsuit against Bill Clinton. In the late 1990s, he switched sides, aligning himself with the Democratic Party and in particular with Bill and Hillary Clinton.
July 23, 1936
Jean Canavaggio (born 23 July 1936) is a French biographer and former emeritus professor of Spanish literature at the Paris West University Nanterre La Défense. A former student of the École normale supérieure (class 1956), Jean Canavaggio is a biographer and specialist of Cervantès. In 2001, he directed a new translation of his complete novels in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. From 1988 to 1992, he was president of the jury of external agrégation of Spanish. From 1996 to 2001, he was director of the Casa de Velázquez at Madrid. He is corresponding member of the Real Academia de la Lengua and the Real Academia de la Historia (Madrid) and honorary fellow of the Hispanic Society of America (New York). His work in the Cervantian domain is now authoritative.
July 23, 1888
Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was an American novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at age forty-four, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, ‘Blackmailers Don't Shoot‘, was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published just seven full novels during his lifetime (though an eighth in progress at his death was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some several times. In the year before he died, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died on March 26, 1959, in La Jolla, California. Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature, and is considered by many to be a founder, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers, of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction. His protagonist, Philip Marlowe, along with Hammett's Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with ‘private detective,’ both having been played on screen by Humphrey Bogart, whom many considered to be the quintessential Marlowe. Some of Chandler's novels are considered important literary works, and three are often considered masterpieces: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953). The Long Goodbye is praised within an anthology of American crime stories as ‘arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery’.
July 23, 1961
Vikram Chandra (born 1961 in India) is an Indian-American writer. His first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, won the 1996 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book.He is the author of Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995), Love and Longing in Bombay (1997, a collection of short stories), Sacred Games (2006), and Geek Sublime: Writing Fiction, Coding Software. Chandra is married to the writer Melanie Abrams. They both teach creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley. Chandra currently divides his time between Mumbai, Maharashtra, India, and Oakland, California, United States. He has two daughters, Leela and Darshana.
July 23, 1869
Terrot Reaveley Glover (1869–1943) was a Cambridge University lecturer of classical literature. He was a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. He was also a Latinist, and is known for translating Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses to Latin. Glover worked as a lecturer for nearly 20 years. He also wrote some widely known books. Among them are The Jesus of History and Poets and Puritans. He was a Public Orator of Cambridge University between 1920 and 1939, until he was succeeded by W. K. C. Guthrie. Glover was a Baptist. He had six children. He conducted services in Appleton chapel at Harvard University on 19 December 1923 while visiting the university.
July 23, 1907
Elspeth Joscelin Huxley (nee Grant; 23 July 1907 - 10 January 1997) was a polymath, writer, journalist, broadcaster, magistrate, environmentalist, farmer, and government advisor. She wrote 30 books; but she is best known for her lyrical books THE FLAME TREES OF THIKA and THE MOTTLED LIZARD which were based on her experiences growing up in a coffee farm in Colonial Kenya.
July 23, 1918
Janheinz Jahn (July 23, 1918, Frankfurt, Germany - October 20, 1973, Messel, Germany), the author of Muntu, was a noted scholar and editor. He wrote several books on African culture and was the editor of Black Orpheus, a publication dedicated to African and African-American literature and art. He died in 1973.
July 23, 1953
Margot Livesey is a Scottish born writer. She is the author of eight novels, numerous short stories, and essays on the craft of writing fiction. Livesey came to North America during the 1970s where she worked to get her fiction published, reportedly because her boyfriend at the time was also a writer.
July 23, 1959
Referred to as one of America’s most original, influential, and productive of lyric poets, Carl Phillips is the author of a dozen books of poetry and two works of criticism. He was born in Everett, Washington in 1959, and his family moved frequently around the United States. He earned a BA from Harvard, an MAT from the University of Massachusetts, and an MA in creative writing from Boston University. Before teaching English at the university level, he taught Latin at several high schools. He is Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also teaches creative writing. Phillips was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2006, and since 2011 he has served as the judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Phillips’s most recent books of poetry are Wild is the Wind (2018), Reconnaissance (2015), Silverchest (2013, nominated for the Griffin Prize), Double Shadow (2011, winner Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry and finalist for the National Book Award), and Speak Low (2009, finalist for the National Book Award). His other books include Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006, Riding Westward (2006), The Rest of Love (2004), and Rock Harbor (2002).
July 23, 1911
Stratis Tsirkas (true name Yannis Hadziandreas-, born on July 23, 1911 in Cairo (city in which was installed a large Greek community) and died January 27, 1980, is a writer and essayist of Greek language. In Alexandria, he befriended with the writer Constantin Cavafy. He settled in Athens in 1963.
July 23, 1926
Ludvík Vaculík (23 July 1926 in Brumov) is a Czech writer and journalist. A prominent samizdat writer, he is most famous as the author of the ‘Two Thousand Words‘ manifesto of June 1968.
July 23, 1908
Elio Vittorini (23 July 1908 – 12 February 1966) was an Italian writer and novelist. He was a contemporary of Cesare Pavese and an influential voice in the modernist school of novel writing. His best-known work is the anti-fascist novel Conversations in Sicily, for which he was jailed when it was published in 1941. The first U.S. edition of the novel, published in 1949, included an introduction from Ernest Hemingway, whose style influenced Vittorini and that novel in particular. Vittorini was born in Syracuse, Sicily, and throughout his childhood moved around Sicily with his father, a railroad worker. Several times he ran away from home, culminating in his leaving Sicily for good in 1924. For a brief period, he found employment as a construction worker in the Julian March, after which he moved to Florence to work as a type corrector (a line of work he abandoned in 1934 due to lead poisoning). Around 1927 his work began to be published in literary journals. In many cases, separate editions of his novels and short stories from this period, such as The Red Carnation were not published until after World War II, due to fascist censorship. In 1937, he was expelled from the national Fascist Party for writing in support of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. In 1939 he moved once again, this time to Milan. An anthology of American literature which he edited was, once more, delayed by censorship. Remaining an outspoken critic of Benito Mussolini's regime, Vittorini was arrested and jailed in 1942. He joined the Italian Communist Party and began taking an active role in the Resistance, which provided the basis for his 1945 novel Men and not Men. Also in 1945, he briefly became the editor of the Italian Communist daily L'Unità. After the war, Vittorini chiefly concentrated on his work as editor, helping publish work by young Italians such as Calvino and Fenoglio. His last major published work of fiction during his lifetime was 1956's Erica and her Sisters. The news of the events of the Hungarian Uprising deeply shook his convictions in Communism and made him decide to largely abandon writing,[citation needed] leaving unfinished work which was to be published in unedited form posthumously. For the remainder of his life, Vittorini continued in his post as an editor. He also ran as a candidate on an Italian Socialist Party list. He died in Milan in 1966. He was an atheist.
July 24, 1925
Ignacio Aldecoa (24 July 1925 – 15 November 1969) was a Spanish author. José Ignacio de Aldecoa was born in Vitoria-Gasteiz on 24 July 1925, the first child of Simón de Aldecoa and Carmen Isasi. He had a sister called María Teresa, born in 1927. Ignacio's father was a middle-class artisan who ran a family business in industrial decoration and restoration inherited from his father, Laureano de Aldecoa. The young Aldecoa was affectionately known as Iñaki in the home and enjoyed a happy and lively childhood marred only by his experience of school. Aldecoa studied in the Arts Faculty at the University of Madrid. He lived later in the United States of America. His first published works were collections of poetry, published in 1947 and 1949. El fulgor y la sangre was his first novel, published in 1954. It failed to win the important Premio Planeta by just one vote. El fulgor forms part of a projected trilogy: the first part, El fulgor deals with the Civil Guard; the second (Con el viento solano, 1956), deals with to some extent with gypsies, traditional enemies, not to say victims, of the Guards; the third part, Los pozos, never appeared but apparently dealt with bullfighters. The link between the three is that in the first part a guard is murdered by a gypsy; the flight to Madrid and eventual surrender of the killer (Sebástian Vázquez) are related in part two; Vázquez is a friend of the bullfighters and something of an aficionado of the sport - this may have been what leads to the final part. Aldecoa was a fairly prolific writer, he produced about half a dozen novels and as many books of short stories as well as some travel books. He belongs to that second generation of post war novelists who (unlike Cela, Carmen Laforet, Miguel Delibes, e.g.) were still very young when the war ended and had no direct personal involvement in it. Within the obvious limits dictated by prudence, Aldecoa seeks to approach the issue of the Civil War impartially in El fulgor, which contains many flashbacks and reminiscences of the 1930s, though set in 1948. His narrative work reflected the neorealism current in Spain in the 1950s, and his stories have the flavour of an experience felt and lived. He was also a journalist and broadcaster, and wrote four movie scripts. In 1952 Ignacio Aldecoa married Spanish writer and teacher Josefina Rodríguez Álvarez (who changed her name to Josefina Aldecoa after her husband died). They had a daughter, Susana Aldecoa, who is today the Principal of Colegio Estilo. Ignacio Aldecoa died in Madrid in 1969, at age 44.
July 24, 1952
As a boy in Marstal, Denmark, CARSTEN JENSEN (born 24 July 1952, Marstal, Denmark) sailed on his father’s boat, a 220-ton freighter named the Abelone. In 2000, he returned to Marstal to write WE, THE DROWNED. He has also worked as a literary critic and a journalist, reporting from China, Cambodia, Latin America, the Pacific Islands, and Afghanistan. WE, THE DROWNED won Denmark’s most important literary prize, while also being selected by readers of a major daily newspaper as the best Danish novel of the last twenty-five years. It was a bestseller throughout Scandinavia and in Germany, and has also been published in the United Kingdom, Spain, and France.
July 24, 1907
VITALIANO BRANCATI Was born at Pachino, near Syracuse, in 1907, and was educated at Catania where he took a degree in literature In 1924 he joined the Fascist party, but after being ‘Fascist to the roots of his hair’, as he said, he repudiated it completely and THE LOST YEARS, started in 1934 and published in serial in 1938, were the first fruits of his conversion. From 1937 he was a schoolteacher in Catania and Rome, but turned to full-time writing after the war. He was married to the actress Anna Proclemer, and in 1954 died in Turin.
July 24, 1951
John Burdett (born July 24, 1951, England, United Kingdom) is a British crime novelist. He is the bestselling author of Bangkok 8 and its sequels, Bangkok Tattoo, Bangkok Haunts, The Godfather of Kathmandu, and Vulture Peak. His most recent novel in this series, The Bangkok Asset, was published on 4 August 2015. Burdett was born in London, England, the son of a London policeman. Burdett is a former lawyer who practised in Hong Kong. As of 2007, he split his time between southwestern France and Bangkok.
July 24, 1895
Robert Graves was born on July 24, 1895, in Wimbledon, near London. His father, Alfred Perceval Graves, was a Gaelic scholar and minor Irish poet. His mother, Amalie von Ranke Graves, was a relation of Leopold von Ranke, one of the founding fathers of modern historical studies. One of ten children, Robert was greatly influenced by his mother's puritanical beliefs and his father's love of Celtic poetry and myth. As a young man, he was more interested in boxing and mountain climbing than studying, although poetry later sustained him through a turbulent adolescence. In 1913 Graves won a scholarship to continue his studies at St. John's College, Oxford, but in August 1914 he enlisted as a junior officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He fought in the Battle of Loos and was injured in the Somme offensive in 1916. While convalescing, he published his first collection of poetry, OVER THE BRAZIER. By 1917, though still an active serviceman, Graves had published three volumes. In 1918, he spent a year in the trenches, where he was again severely wounded. In January 1918, at the age of twenty-two, he married eighteen-year-old Nancy Nicholson, with whom he was to have four children. Traumatized by the war, he went to Oxford with his wife and took a position at St. John's College. Graves's early volumes of poetry, like those of his contemporaries, deal with natural beauty and bucolic pleasures, and with the consequences of the First World War. OVER THE BRAZIER and FAIRIES AND FUSILIERS earned for Graves the reputation as an accomplished war poet. After meeting the American poet and theorist Laura Riding in 1926, Graves's poetry underwent a significant transformation. Douglas Day has written that the ‘influence of Laura Riding is quite possibly the most important single element in [Graves's] poetic career: she persuaded him to curb his digressiveness and his rambling philosophizing and to concentrate instead on terse, ironic poems written on personal themes.’ In 1927, Graves and his first wife separated permanently, and in 1929 he published GOODBYE TO ALL THAT, an autobiography that announced his psychological accommodation with the residual horror of his war experiences. Shortly afterward, he departed to Majorca with Laura Riding. In addition to completing many books of verse while in Majorca, Graves also wrote several volumes of criticism, some in collaboration with Riding. The couple cofounded Seizin Press in 1928 and Epilogue, a semiannual magazine, in 1935. During that period, he evolved his theory of poetry as spiritually cathartic to both the poet and the reader. Although Graves claimed that he wrote novels only to earn money, it was through these that he attained status as a major writer in 1934, with the publication of the historical novel I, CLAUDIUS, and its sequel, CLAUDIUS THE GOD AND HIS WIFE MESSALINA. (During the 1970's, the BBC adapted the novels into an internationally popular television series.) At the onset of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Graves and Riding fled Majorca, eventually settling in America. In 1939, Laura Riding left Graves for the writer Schuyler Jackson; one year later Graves began a relationship with Beryl Hodge that was to last until his death. It was in the 1940s, after his break with Riding, that Graves formulated his personal mythology of the White Goddess. Inspired by late nineteenth-century studies of matriarchal societies and goddess cults, this mythology was to pervade all of his later work. After World War II, Graves returned to Majorca, where he lived with Hodge and continued to write. By the 1950's, Graves had won an enormous international reputation as a poet, novelist, literary scholar, and translator. In 1962, W. H. Auden went as far as to assert that Graves was England's ‘greatest living poet.’ In 1968 he received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. During his lifetime he published more than 140 books, including fifty-five collections of poetry (he reworked his COLLECTED POEMS repeatedly during his career), fifteen novels, ten translations, and forty works of nonfiction, autobiography, and literary essays. From 1961 to 1966, Graves returned to England to serve as a professor of poetry at Oxford. In the 1970s his productivity fell off; and the last decade of his life was lost in silence and senility. Robert Graves died in Majorca in 1985, at the age of ninety.
July 24, 1928
Griselda Gambaro (born July 24, 1928) is an Argentine writer, whose novels, plays, short stories, story tales, essays and novels for teenagers often concern the political violence in her home country that would develop into the Dirty War. One recurring theme is the desaparecidos and the attempts to recover their bodies and memorialize them. Her novel, Ganarse la muerte, was banned by the government because of the obvious political message. Gambaro is Argentina's most celebrated playwright, and she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982, as well as many other prizes.
July 24, 1933
Jerzy Harasymowicz-Broniuszyc (born on July 24, 1933 in Pu?awy, died on August 21, 1999 in Krakow) - Polish poet, founder of the poetic groups of Muszyna and Barbarus. He came from a family of mixed Ukrainian and Polish-German roots. He belonged to the generation of "Wspó?czesno??", he made his debut in 1953 in the weekly "?ycie Literackie", publishing poems and poetic prose. His first volume of poetry was Miracles published in 1956. He also published in the pages of Creativity, Tygodnik Kulturalny, Tygodnik Powszechny and Dziennik Polski. Harasymowicz was the initiator or protector of several poetic groups: Muszyna (1957-1961), Barbarus (1967-1972) and Tylicz (1969-1976). Winner of numerous awards, including Awards Stanis?aw Pi?tak (1967), Foundation Prizes Ko?cielski (1971), the main award of the Minister of Culture and Art (1975). His work was characterized by "oversaturation" of descriptions, which made the mythologies he invented extremely detailed and that made a real impression. He was interested in the culture of the Lemkos and the Slav-Christian culture, to which he often referred to in his works. From the poetry of Jerzy Harasymowicz comes the term "land of gentleness", to which musician Wojciech Belon referred in his songs, and which later was identified with the sung poetry. Harasymowicz was a fertile writer, dying, he left over 40 volumes of poems, numerous poems and 2 fairy tales for children sold in total in the number of over 700,000. copies. In Krakow's environment, he was widely known as a devotee of Pó?wsia Zwierzyniecki and the bar "Na Stawach" (a famous poem about this bar). At the same time, he declared himself a fanatic [style for improvement] a fan of the Cracovia Sports Club. He wrote poems about Cracovia and its footballers. The most famous is probably the [style to improve] a poem about the goal-keeper directly from the corners in the 2-1 first-league winnings of the Krakow derby of Cezary Tobollik. After the declaration of martial law, he supported Wojciech Jaruzelski and PZPR; "in the years 1983-84 he published in the press a number of poems in which he praised socialism." After the political transformation, he published in Trybuna At the end of his life, he was seriously ill and used the hospitality of the Koma?cza Forest District, living in a building in Mików, located in the forest inspectorate, near Koma?cza. From there, for the last time, he watched his beloved Bieszczady His ashes were scattered over the Bieszczady meadows
July 24, 1916
John Dann MacDonald (July 24, 1916 – December 28, 1986) was an American writer of novels and short stories, known for his thrillers. MacDonald was a prolific author of crime and suspense novels, many of them set in his adopted home of Florida. His best-known works include the popular and critically acclaimed Travis McGee series, and his novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear. In 1972, MacDonald was named a grandmaster of the Mystery Writers of America, and he won a 1980 U.S. National Book Award in the one-year category Mystery. Stephen King praised MacDonald as 'the great entertainer of our age, and a mesmerizing storyteller.' Kingsley Amis said, MacDonald 'is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow, only MacDonald writes thrillers and Bellow is a human-heart chap, so guess who wears the top-grade laurels?'
July 24, 1883
Katia Mann (born Katharina Hedwig Pringsheim; July 24, 1883 – April 25, 1980) was the youngest child and only daughter (among four sons) of the German Jewish mathematician and artist Alfred Pringsheim and his wife Hedwig Pringsheim, who was an actress in Berlin before her marriage. Katia was also a granddaughter of the writer and women's right activist Hedwig Dohm. Her twin brother Klaus Pringsheim was a conductor, composer, music writer and music pedagogue, active in Germany and Japan. She married the writer Thomas Mann.
July 24, 1920
Josef Hirsal (July 24, 1920, Chomutice, Czech Republic - September 15, 2003, Prague, Czech Republic) was born in 1920 in Chomuticky in northeastern Bohemia. He became known in the 1960s as a poet and translator and was blacklisted after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He now lives in Prague. Michael Henry Heim is professor of Slavic languages and literatures at UCLA. He is the author of CONTEMPOORARY CZECH and the translator of numerous works by Czech authors such as Bohumil Hrabal and Milan Kundera, His translations of Dubravka Ugresic’s FORDING THE STREAM OF CONSCIUOSNESS and Felix Roziner’s A CERTAIN FINKELMEYER have also been published by Northwestern University Press.
July 24, 1931
Peter Schrag is a contributing editor and columnist at the Sacramento Bee. He is the author of many books, including Paradise Lost: California's Experience, America's Future (UC Press) and Final Test: The Battle for Adequacy in America's Schools.
July 24, 1962
Thomas J. Sugrue is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North and The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton).
July 24, 1886
Jun'ichiro Tanizaki was born in 1886 and died in 1965, his life and literary career thus spanning the three modern imperial reigns of Meiji, Taisho, and Showa. He was a true "son of Edo,' having been born in Nihombashi, in the low-lying commercial district near Tokyo Bay; yet in his middle and later years he lived mostly in the Kansai, the area around Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe, and the center of Japan's traditional court culture. A passion for the contemporary West (in food, films, and fashion) was relatively short-lived, but he had an enduring interest in serious Western literature, in which he was widely read and which he occasionally translated into Japanese. At the same time, he immersed himself in Kansai culture and traditions, producing, among other works, a great novel of Osaka bourgeois life on the eve of World War II (The Makioka Sisters) and several translations into modern Japanese of the classic novel The Tale of Genji. He is regarded as one of the giants of Japanese literature, and has been introduced to English-speaking readers through translations of some of his principal works, notably: the collection Seven Japanese Tales, Naomi, Some Prefer Nettles, The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi and Arrowroot, The Makioka Sisters, The Key, and Diary of a Mad Old Man. Paul McCarthy took his doctorate in East Asian Language and Civilizations, specializing in modern Japanese literature, at Harvard University in 1975. He has taught Japanese, English, and Comparative Literature at universities in the United States and Japan. He currently lives in Tokyo.
July 24, 1955
Brad Watson is an American author. Originally from Mississippi, he has worked and lived in Alabama and Boston, and now lives in Wyoming where he is an associate professor at the University of Wyoming. Watson has published four books—two novels and two collections of short stories—to critical acclaim.
July 24, 1876
Jean Webster (pseudonym for Alice Jane Chandler Webster, July 24, 1876 – June 11, 1916) was an American writer and author of many books including Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy. Her best-known books feature lively and likeable young female protagonists who come of age intellectually, morally, and socially, but with enough humor, snappy dialogue, and gently biting social commentary to make her books palatable and enjoyable to contemporary readers.
July 24, 1802
Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870), one of the most popular writers of all time, is the author of THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO and THE THREE MUSKETEERS), along with dozens of other works of every genre. His remains were recently removed to the Pantheon, the highest honor that can be bestowed on a French writer. Julie Rose’s many translations include an acclaimed version of Racine’s PHÈDRE, as well as works by Paul Virilio, Jacques Rancière, Chantal Thomas, and many others. Rose was recently awarded the New South Wales Premier’s Translation Prize and the PEN medallion for translation. Lorenzo Carcaterra is the author of STREET BOYS and SLEEPERS, among other books. He lives in New York.
July 25, 1734
Ueda Akinari or Ueda Shusei (July 25, 1734, Osaka – August 8, 1809, Kyoto) was a Japanese author, scholar and waka poet, and a prominent literary figure in 18th century Japan. He was an early writer in the yomihon genre and his two masterpieces, Ugetsu Monogatari (‘Tales of Rain and the Moon’) and Harusame Monogatari (‘Tales of Spring Rain’), are central to the canon of Japanese literature.
July 25, 1900
Enrique Amorim (July 25, 1900 – July 28, 1960) was an Uruguayan novelist and writer, best known for his story Las quitanderas whose plot centres on rural prostitution; also known for his left-wing politics.
July 25, 1925
Malcolm Braly (1925–1980) was born in Portland, Oregon. Abandoned by his parents, Braly lived between foster homes and institutions for delinquent children, and by the time he was forty had spent nearly seventeen years in prison for burglary, serving time at Nevada State Prison, San Quentin, and Folsom State Prison. He wrote three novels behind bars, FELONY TANK (1961), SHAKE HIM TILL HE RATTLES (1963), and IT’S COLD OUT THERE (1966), and upon his release in 1965 began to work on ON THE YARD. When prison authorities learned of the book they threatened to revoke his parole, and he was forced to complete it in secret. Published in 1967, after Braly’s parole had expired, On the Yard received wide acclaim. It was followed by his autobiography, FALSE STARTS: A MEMOIR OF SAN QUENTIN AND OTHER PRISONS (1976), and a final work of fiction, THE PROTECTOR (1979). Malcolm Braly enjoyed fifteen years of freedom before his death in a car accident at age fifty-four.
July 25, 1905
Elias Canetti (1905-1994), Bulgarian-born author of the novel Auto-da-Fé, the sociological study Crowds and Power, and three previously published memoir volumes (The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in my Ear, and The Play of the Eyes), won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981.
July 25, 1910
Kendell Foster Crossen (July 25, 1910 – November 29, 1981) was an American pulp fiction and science fiction writer. He was the creator and writer of stories about the Green Lama (a pulp and comic book hero) and the Milo March detective novels. His pen names included Richard Foster, Bennett Barlay, Kent Richards and Clay Richards, Christopher Monig (allegedly the name of a ghost of the town of Crossen on the Oder), and M. E. Chaber (from the Hebrew word mechaber, meaning author). Some bylines use the abbreviated name Ken Crossen. Kendell Foster Crossen was born in Albany, Ohio (outside Athens), the only child of farmers Sam Crossen and Chlo Foster Crossen. He attended Rio Grande College in Ohio where he played football. He was an amateur boxer and worked at jobs ranging from carnival barker to insurance investigator. In the 1930s he was employed as a writer on Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects, including a New York City Guidebook, before becoming editor of Detective Fiction Weekly. In the 1940s he wrote pulp detective fiction and novels under his own name as well as the pseudonyms Richard Foster, M. E. Chaber, Christopher Monig, Clay Richards, Bennett Barley, and others. He originated the pulp and comic book character the Green Lama, a crime-fighting Buddhist superhero whose powers emerged upon the recitation of the Tibetan mantra "om mani padme hum." He wrote hundreds of radio scripts for Suspense, The Saint, Mystery Theater, and others. His later television credits include 77 Sunset Strip, The Man from Blackhawk, Man and the Challenge, and Perry Mason. In the 1950s Crossen began writing science fiction for publications such as Thrilling Wonder Stories, including the humorous Manning Draco stories about an intergalactic insurance investigator (four of which are featured in the book Once Upon a Star, 1953). His novels in the genre are Murder Out of Mind (1945), Year of Consent (1954), dealing with a 1990 America run by tyrannical "social engineers", and The Rest Must Die (1959), about survivors of a nuclear catastrophe in New York City. Novellas include Passport to Pax (1952) and Things of Distinction (1952). He edited two sci-fi anthologies, Adventures in Tomorrow (1951) and Future Tense (1952). A successful series of tightly plotted novels about a brandy-drinking, poetry-quoting New York insurance investigator named Milo March was published under the name M. E. Chaber from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s: Hangman’s Harvest (1952), No Grave for March (1953), As Old as Cain (1954), The Man Inside (1954; made into a 1958 film), The Splintered Man (1955), A Lonely Walk (1956), The Gallows Garden (1958), A Hearse of Another Color (1958), So Dead the Rose (1959), Jade for a Lady (1962), Softly in the Night (1963), Six Who Ran (1964), Uneasy Lies the Dead (1964), Wanted: Dead Men (1965), The Day It Rained Diamonds (1966), A Man in the Middle (1967), Wild Midnight Falls (1968), The Flaming Man (1969), Green Grow the Graves (1970), The Bonded Dead (1971), and Born to Be Hanged (1973). In some of these plots, March is called to duty in the U.S. Army Reserve. Notable among these is The Splintered Man, in which he rescues a West German scientist captured by the East Germans, who tortured him by plying him with LSD. In 1967, also under the name M. E. Chaber, Crossen published The Acid Nightmare, a cautionary young adult novel in which a teenage boy experiences two LSD trips, one good and one bad. A final Milo March manuscript, set in Vietnam, was completed in 1974, but remains unpublished owing to a difference of opinion with Crossen's publisher, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, who told him it was "too political and too controversial."
July 25, 1931
Vincent Gordon Harding (July 25, 1931 – May 19, 2014) was an African-American historian and a scholar of various topics with a focus on American religion and society. A social activist as well, he was perhaps best known for his work with and writings about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whom Harding knew personally. Besides having authored numerous books such as There Is A River, Hope and History, and Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero, he served as co-chairperson of the social unity group Veterans of Hope Project and as Professor of Religion and Social Transformation at Illiff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado.
July 25, 1902
Eric Hoffer (July 25, 1898– May 21, 1983) was an American moral and social philosopher. He was the author of ten books and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983. His first book, The True Believer (1951), was widely recognized as a classic, receiving critical acclaim from both scholars and laymen, although Hoffer believed that The Ordeal of Change was his finest work.
July 25, 1938
Sudhir Kakar (born 25 July 1938) is an Indian psychoanalyst, novelist and author in the fields of cultural psychology and the psychology of religion.
July 25, 1901
Ruth Krauss (born July 25, 1901, Baltimore, Maryland d. July 10, 1993, Westport, Connecticut) was an author of children's books, one of the most well known being The Carrot Seed, and an author of theatrical poems for an adult audience. Krauss was a graduate of the Parson School of Design. She was a member of the Writers' Laboratory at the Bank Street College of Education in New York during the 1940s. Ruth Krauss married children's book author Crockett Johnson in 1941. They collaborated on many books, among them THE CARROT SEED, HOW TO MAKE AN EARTHQUAKE, IS THIS YOU? and THE HAPPY EGG.
July 25, 1933
David Madden is Writer-in-Residence at Louisiana State University and conducts its creative writing program. He is author of WRIGHT MORRIS; his second novel, CASSANDRA SINGING, appeared in 1969, and THE SHADOW KNOWS, a collection of his stories, won a National Council on the Arts award. He is editor of TOUGH GUY WRITERS OF THE THIRTIES and PROLETARIAN WRITERS OF THE THIRTIES recent titles in this Crosscurrents series; a collection of his essays, THE POETIC IMAGE IN SIX GENRES, has recently been published by Southern Illinois University Press. Harry T. Moore is Research Professor at Southern lllinois University, Among his recent books are TWENTIETH-CENTURY FRENCH LITERATURE TO WORLD WAR II, TWENTIETH-CENTURY FRENCH LITERATURE SINCE WORLD WAR II, and TWENTIETH-CENTURY GERMAN LITERATURE.
July 25, 1955
Robert Young Pelton is a Canadian-American author, journalist and documentary filmmaker. Pelton's work usually consists of conflict reporting and interviews with military and political figures in warzones.
July 25, 1928
Bernice Rubens (26 July 1928 – 13 October 2004) was a Booker Prize-winning Welsh novelist. She was born in Cardiff, Wales, of Russian Jewish descent. She came from a very musical family, both her brothers becoming well-known classical musicians. She was married to Rudi Nassauer, a wine merchant and novelist. They had two daughters, Rebecca and Sharon. In the 1960s they owned 10 Compayne Gardens, NW3, where the poet Jon Silkin rented the attic storey and sublet rooms to David Mercer, later a prolific West End and TV playwright, and Malcolm Ross-Macdonald, later an equally prolific writer of historical novels.
July 25, 1944
Leslie Scalapino (July 25, 1944 – May 28, 2010) was a United States poet, experimental prose writer, playwright, essayist, and editor, sometimes grouped in with the Language poets, though she felt closely tied to the Beat poets. A longtime resident of California's Bay Area, she earned an M.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley. One of Scalapino's most critically well-received works is way (North Point Press, 1988), a long poem which won the Poetry Center Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American Book Award.
July 25, 1926
Tadeusz Witold Szulc (July 25, 1926 – May 21, 2001) was an author and foreign correspondent for The New York Times from 1953 to 1972. Szulc is credited with breaking the story of the Bay of Pigs invasion.
July 25, 1896
Josephine Tey was a pseudonym used by Elizabeth MacKintosh (25 July 1896 – 13 February 1952), a Scottish author best known for her mystery novels. She also wrote as Gordon Daviot, under which name she wrote plays, many with biblical or historical themes.
July 25, 1978
Brian Brodeur (born July 25, 1978) is the author of the poetry collections Natural Causes (2012) and Other Latitudes (2008), as well as the chapbook So the Night Cannot Go on Without Us (2007). New poems and interviews have been published or are forthcoming in AWP Writer’s Chronicle, Crab Orchard Review, Measure, 32 Poems, Shenandoah, and The Southern Review. Brodeur curates the blog ‘How a Poem Happens,’ an online anthology of over 150 interviews with poets. A 2013 Walter E. Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, he is currently a George Elliston Fellow in Poetry in the Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature Program at the University of Cincinnati, where he serves as an assistant editor for The Cincinnati Review.
July 25, 1939
Constance M. Lewallen is Adjunct Curator at University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. As Senior Curator at BAM/PFA from 1999 through 2007, she organized many major exhibitions that toured nationally and internationally, including The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982); Everything Matters: Paul Kos, a Retrospective; Ant Farm, 1968–1978 (with co-curator Steve Seid); A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s; and State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970 (with co-curator Karen Moss).
July 26, 1922
Chairil Anwar (26 July 1922 – 28 April 1949) was an Indonesian poet and member of the ‘1945 generation’ of writers. He is estimated to have written 96 works, including 70 individual poems. Anwar was born and raised in Medan, North Sumatra, before moving to Batavia with his mother in 1940, where he began to enter the local literary circles. After publishing his first poem in 1942, Anwar continued to write. However, his poems were at times censored by the Japanese, then occupying Indonesia. Living rebelliously, Anwar wrote extensively, often about death. He died in Jakarta of an unknown illness. His work dealt with various themes, including death, individualism, and existentialism, and were often multi-interpretable. Drawing influence from foreign poets, Anwar used everyday language and new syntax to write his poetry, which has been noted as aiding the development of the Indonesian language. His poems were often constructed irregularly, but with individual patterns.
July 26, 1901
Nina Nikolayevna Berberova (26 July 1901 – 26 September 1993) was a Russian writer who chronicled the lives of Russian exiles in Paris in her short stories and novels. She visited post-Soviet Russia and died in Philadelphia. Born in 1901 to an Armenian father and a Russian mother, Nina Berberova was brought up in St Petersburg. She left Russia in 1922 with poet Vladislav Khodasevich (who died in 1939). The couple lived in several European cities before settling in Paris in 1925. There Berberova began publishing short stories for the Russian emigre publications Poslednie Novosti (‘The Latest News’) and Russkaia Mysl’ (‘Russian Thought’). The stories collected in Oblegchenie Uchasti (‘The Easing of Fate’) and Biiankurskie Prazdniki (‘Billancourt Fiestas’) were written during this period. She also wrote the first book length biography of composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1936, which was controversial for its openness about his homosexuality. In Paris she was part of a circle of poor but distinguished visiting literary Russian exiles which included Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Nabokov, Boris Pasternak, Tsvetaeva and Mayakovsky. After living in Paris for 25 years, Berberova emigrated to the United States in 1950 and became an American citizen in 1959. Since 1954 was married for George Kochevitsky - the Russian pianist and the teacher.) She began her academic career in 1958 when she was hired to teach Russian at Yale. She continued to write while she was teaching, publishing several povesti (long short stories), critical articles and some poetry. She left Yale in 1963 for Princeton, where she taught until her retirement in 1971. In 1991 Berberova moved from Princeton, New Jersey to Philadelphia. Berberova’s autobiography, which details her early life and years in France, was written in Russian but published first in English as The Italics are Mine (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969). The Russian edition, Kursiv Moi, was not published until 1983. Much of Berberova’s early literary archive (1922–1950) is located in the Boris I. Nicolaevsky Collection at Stanford University. Her later literary archive (after 1950) is in the Nina Berberova Papers and Nina Berberova Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
July 26, 1796
George Catlin (July 26, 1796 – December 23, 1872) was an American painter, author, and traveler, who specialized in portraits of Native Americans in the Old West. Travelling to the American West five times during the 1830s, Catlin was the first white man to depict Plains Indians in their native territory.
July 26, 1934
Austin Ardinel Chesterfield Clarke (born July 26, 1934), is a Canadian novelist, essayist and short story writer who lives in Toronto, Ontario. He has been called ‘Canada's first multicultural writer’. Born in St. James, Barbados, Clarke had his early education there and taught at a rural school for three years. In 1955 he moved to Canada to attend the University of Toronto but after two years turned his hand to journalism and broadcasting. He was a reporter in the Ontario communities of Timmins and Kirkland Lake, before joining the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a freelance journalist. He subsequently taught at several American universities, including Yale University (Hoyt fellow, 1968–70), Duke University (1971-72), and the University of Texas (visiting professor, 1973). In 1973 he was designated cultural attaché at the Barbadian embassy in Washington, DC. He was later General Manager of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation in Barbados (1975-1977). Returning to Canada, in 1977 he ran as a Progressive Conservative candidate in the Ontario election. He was writer in residence at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec (1977) and at University of Western Ontario (1978). From 1988 to 1993 he served on the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. In September 2012, at the International Festival of Authors (IFOA), Clarke was announced as the winner of the $10,000 Harbourfront Festival Prize ‘on the merits of his published work and efforts in fostering literary talent in new and aspiring writers’. Previous recipients of the award (established in 1984) include Dionne Brand, Wayson Choy, Christopher Dewdney, Helen Humphreys, Paul Quarrington, Peter Robinson, Seth, Jane Urquhart and Guy Vanderhaeghe. Clarke was reported as saying: ‘‘I rejoiced when I saw that Authors at Harbourfront Centre had named me this year's winner of the Harbourfront Festival Prize. I did not come to this city on September 29, 1959, as a writer. I came as a student. However, my career as a writer buried any contention of being a scholar and I thank Authors at Harbourfront Centre for saving me from the more painful life of the 'gradual student.' It is an honour to be part of such a prestigious list of authors.’
July 26, 1969
Danielle Fosler-Lussier is Assistant Professor of Music at The Ohio State University.
July 26, 1894
Aldous Huxley was born on 26th July 1894 near Godalming, Surrey. He began writing poetry and short stories in his early twenties, but it was his first novel, CROME YELLOW (1921), which established his literary reputation. This was swiftly followed by ANTIC HAY (1923), THOSE BARREN LEAVES (1925) and POINT COUNTER POINT (1928) - bright, brilliant satires in which Huxley wittily but ruthlessly passed judgment on the shortcomings of contemporary society. For most of the 1920s Huxley lived in Italy and an account of his experiences there can be found in ALONG THE ROAD (1925). The great novels of ideas, including his most famous work BRAVE NEW WORLD (published in 1932 this warned against the dehumanizing aspects of scientific and material 'progress') and the pacifist novel EYELESS IN GAZA (1936) were accompanied by a series of wise and brilliant essays, collected in volume form under titles such as MUSIC AT NIGHT (1931) and ENDS AND MEANS (1937). In 1937, at the height of his fame, Huxley left Europe to live in California, working for a time as a screenwriter in Hollywood. As the West braced itself for war, Huxley came increasingly to believe that the key to solving the world's problems lay in changing the individual through mystical enlightenment. The exploration of the inner life through mysticism and hallucinogenic drugs was to dominate his work for the rest of his life. His beliefs found expression in both fiction (TIME MUST HAVE A STOP, 1944 and ISLAND, 1962) and non-fiction (THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY, 1945, GREY EMINENCE, 1941 and the famous account of his first mescalin experience, THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION, 1954. Huxley died in California on 22nd November 1963.
July 26, 1939
Wopko Jensma (born 26 July 1939 Ventersdorp, South Africa), is a South African poet and artist. Jensma published three collections of poetry before his disappearance in 1993. Jensma's Art is ethnic, based on a theme only he has introduced, Lino printed images of animals drawn as characteristics of people. Wopko's poetry has a jazz feel to it; he used his words as his jazz instrument and his expression is his rhythm. - Sing for our Execution (1973), Where White is the Colour/Where Black is the Number (1974), I Must Show you my Clippings (1977). A selection of Jensma's poems appeared, with a brief biography, in the anthology Ten South African Poets edited and introduced by Adam Schwartzman (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1999). There is an online appreciation of Jensma's poetry and art works, with quotations and some biographical details, by Tony McGregor entitled I write you from afar: Wopko Jensma, enigmatic poet of Africa. He disappeared in 1993.
July 26, 1875
Carl Gustav Jung (26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961), often referred to as C. G. Jung, was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology. Jung proposed and developed the concepts of extraversion and introversion; archetypes, and the collective unconscious. His work has been influential in psychiatry and in the study of religion, philosophy, archeology, anthropology, literature, and related fields. He was a prolific writer, many of whose works were not published until after his death. The central concept of analytical psychology is individuation—the psychological process of integrating the opposites, including the conscious with the unconscious, while still maintaining their relative autonomy. Jung considered individuation to be the central process of human development. Jung created some of the best known psychological concepts, including the archetype, the collective unconscious, the complex, and synchronicity. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a popular psychometric instrument, has been developed from Jung's theory of psychological types. Jung saw the human psyche as ‘by nature religious’ and made this religiousness the focus of his explorations. Jung is one of the best known contemporary contributors to dream analysis and symbolization. Though he was a practising clinician and considered himself to be a scientist, much of his life's work was spent exploring tangential areas such as Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, and sociology, as well as literature and the arts. Jung's interest in philosophy and the occult led many to view him as a mystic, although his ambition was to be seen as a man of science. His influence on popular psychology, the ‘psychologization of religion’, spirituality and the New Age movement has been immense.
July 26, 1875
Antonio Machado, in full Antonio Cipriano José María y Francisco de Santa Ana Machado y Ruiz (26 July 1875 – 22 February 1939), was a Spanish poet and one of the leading figures of the Spanish literary movement known as the Generation of '98. His work, initially modernist, evolved towards an intimate form of symbolism with romantic traits, which itself matured towards a style characterised by both an engagement with humanity on one side and an almost Taoist contemplation of existence on the other, a synthesis that according to Machado echoed the most ancient popular wisdom. In Gerardo Diego's words, Machado "spoke in verse and lived in poetry.
July 26, 1925
Ana María Matute Ana María Matute Ausejo (26 July 1925 – 25 June 2014) was the most prominent woman writer of 20th century Spain. Her novels and short stories have won many prestigious literary awards including the Premio Nacional de Literatura, Premio Nadal, Premio de la Crítica and Premio Café de Gijón. She was the third woman to receive the Cervantes Prize for her literary oeuvre. She is considered to be one of the foremost novelists of the posguerra, the period immediately following the Spanish Civil War. She studied at the international school of Hilversum in the Netherlands. She has been a guest lecturer to the universities of Oklahoma, Indiana and Virginia. Matute was born on 26 July 1925. At the age of four she almost died from a chronic kidney infection, and was taken to live with her grandparents in Mansilla de la Sierra, a small town in the mountains, for a period of recovery. Matute says that she was profoundly influenced by the villagers whom she met during her time there. This influence can be seen in such works as those published in the 1961 anthology Historias de la Artamila (‘Stories about the Artamila’, all of which deal with the people that Matute met during her recovery). Settings reminiscent of that town are also often used as settings for her other work. Matute was ten years old when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, and this conflict is said to have had the greatest impact on Matute's writing. She considered not only ‘the battles between the two factions, but also the internal aggression within each one’. The war resulted in Francisco Franco's rise to power, starting in 1936 and escalating until 1939, when he took control of the entire country. Franco established a dictatorship which lasted thirty-six years, until his death in 1975. The violence brought on by the war continued through much of his reign. Since Matute matured as a writer in this posguerra period under Franco's oppressive regime, some of the most recurrent themes in her works are violence, alienation, misery, and especially the loss of innocence. Her work was sometimes censored by the Franco regime, and at least once she was fined because of her writings. She published her first story, ‘The Boy Next Door,’ when she was only 17 years old. Matute was known for her sympathetic treatment of the lives of children and adolescents, their feelings of betrayal and isolation, and their rites of passage. She often interjected such elements as myth, fairy tale, the supernatural, and fantasy into her works. Matute was a university professor. She traveled to various countries, especially the United States, as a lecturer. She was outspoken about subjects such as the benefits of emotional suffering, the constant changing of a human being, and how innocence is never completely lost. She was an honorary member of the Hispanic Society of America and a member of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. She won the Spanish literary award, the Premio Nadal, in 1958 for the first novel of the trilogy, ‘Los Mercaderes’. On 25 June 2014, Matute died of a heart attack at the age of 88.
July 26, 1885
André Maurois (born Émile Salomon Wilhelm Herzog; 26 July 1885 – 9 October 1967) was a French author. Maurois was born on 26 July 1885 in Elbeuf and educated at the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen, both in Normandy. Maurois was the son of Ernest Herzog, a Jewish textile manufacturer, and his wife Alice Lévy-Rueff. His family had fled Alsace after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and took refuge in Elbeuf, where they owned a woollen mill. During World War I he joined the French army and served as an interpreter and later a liaison officer with the British army. His first novel, Les silences du colonel Bramble, was a witty and socially realistic account of that experience. It was an immediate success in France. It was translated and became popular in the United Kingdom and other English-speaking countries as The Silence of Colonel Bramble. Many of his other works have also been translated into English, as they often dealt with British people or topics, such as his biographies of Disraeli, Byron, and Shelley. In 1938 Maurois was elected to the prestigious Académie française. He was encouraged and assisted in seeking this post by Marshal Philippe Pétain, and he made a point of acknowledging with thanks his debt to Pétain in his 1941 autobiography, ‘Call no man happy’ – though by the time of writing their paths had sharply diverged, Pétain having become Head of State of Vichy France. When World War II began, he was appointed the French Official Observer attached to the British General Headquarters. In this capacity he accompanied the British Army to Belgium. He knew personally the main politicians in the French Government, and on 10 June 1940 he was sent on a mission to London. The Armistice ended that mission. Maurois was demobilised and travelled from England to Canada. He wrote of these experiences in his book, Tragedy in France. Later in World War II he served in the French army and the Free French Forces. His Maurois pseudonym became his legal name in 1947. He died in 1967 in Neuilly-sur-Seine after a long career as an author of novels, biographies, histories, children's books and science fiction stories. He is buried in Neuilly-sur-Seine community cemetery near Paris. Maurois's first wife was Jeanne-Marie Wanda de Szymkiewicz, a young Polish-Russian aristocrat who had studied at Oxford University. She had a nervous breakdown in 1918 and in 1924 she died of septicemia. After the death of his father, Maurois gave up the family business of textile manufacturing. Maurois's second wife was Simone de Caillavet, the granddaughter of Anatole France's mistress Léontine Arman de Caillavet. After Germany occupied France the couple moved to the United States to help with propaganda work against the Nazis.
July 26, 1856
George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60 plays.
July 27, 1951
Bernardo Atxaga (born July 27, 1951 - pseudonym of Joseba Irazu Garmendia) is a Basque writer and self-translator. Atxaga was born in Asteasu, Gipuzkoa, Basque Country), in 1951. He received a diploma in economics from the University of Bilbao, and studied philosophy at the University of Barcelona. He worked as an economist, bookseller, professor of the Basque language, a publisher, and a radio scriptwriter until 1980 when he dedicated himself completely to writing. His first text was published in 1972 in an anthology of Basque authors. His first short story, Ziutateaz (‘About The City’), was published in 1976. His first collection of poetry, Etiopia (‘Ethiopia‘), appeared in 1978. He has written plays, song lyrics, novels and short stories. His book of short stories, Obabakoak (‘Individuals and things of Obaba’), published in 1988 won him much fame and several prizes, such as Spain's National Literature Prize. So far, the book has been translated into more than 20 languages. Atxaga generally writes in the Basque language, Euskara, but translates his works into Spanish as well. Following the example of Obabakoak, several of his other works have been translated into other languages.
July 27, 1934
Michael M. Baden (born July 27, 1934) is an American physician and board-certified forensic pathologist known for his work investigating high-profile deaths and as the host of HBO's Autopsy. He is the Forensic Science Contributor for FOX News Channel and was a frequent guest on Fox News's late-night satire program Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld where he was known as the Death Correspondent. Baden has been author or co-author of more than 80 professional articles and books on aspects of forensic medicine and two popular non-fiction books "Unnatural Death, Confessions of a Medical Examiner" and "Dead Reckoning, the New Science of Catching Killers." He is also the author, with his wife, attorney Linda Kenney Baden, of two recent forensic thrillers, "Remains Silent" and "Skeleton Justice."
July 27, 1940
Bharati Mukherjee (July 27, 1940 – January 28, 2017) was an American writer and professor emerita in the department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Of Bengali origin, Mukherjee was born in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. She later travelled with her parents to Europe after Independence, only returning to Calcutta in the early 1950s. There she attended the Loreto School. She received her B.A. from the University of Calcutta in 1959 as a student of Loreto College, and subsequently earned her M.A. from the University of Baroda in 1961. She next travelled to the United States to study at the University of Iowa. She received her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1963 and her Ph.D. in 1969 from the department of Comparative Literature. After more than a decade living in Montreal and Toronto in Canada, Mukherjee and her husband, Clark Blaise returned to the United States. She wrote of the decision in "An Invisible Woman," published in a 1981 issue of Saturday Night. Mukherjee and Blaise co-authored Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977). They also wrote the 1987 work, The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy (Air India Flight 182). In addition to writing numerous works of fiction and non-fiction, Mukherjee taught at McGill University, Skidmore College, Queens College, and City University of New York before joining Berkeley. Mukherjee has gone on record that she considers herself an American writer, and not an Indian expatriate writer. In a 1989 interview with Ameena Meer, Mukherjee said: "I totally consider myself an American writer, and that has been my big battle: to get to realize that my roots as a writer are no longer, if they ever were, among Indian writers, but that I am writing about the territory about the feelings, of a new kind of pioneer here in America. I’m the first among Asian immigrants to be making this distinction between immigrant writing and expatriate writing. Most Indian writers prior to this, have still thought of themselves as Indians, and their literary inspiration, has come from India. India has been the source, and home. Whereas I’m saying, those are wonderful roots, but now my roots are here and my emotions are here in North America."
July 27, 1940
Richard Bourne is Senior Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at London University. He is author of several books including Assault on the Amazon, Getúlio Vargas of Brazil: Sphinx of the Pampas, and Political Leaders of Latin America.
July 27, 1857
Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge (27 July 1857 – 23 November 1934) was an English Egyptologist, Orientalist, and philologist who worked for the British Museum and published numerous works on the ancient Near East. He made trips to Egypt and the Sudan on behalf of the British Museum to buy antiquities, and helped it build its collection of cuneiform tablets, manuscripts, and papyri. He published many books on Egyptology, helping to bring the findings to larger audiences. In 1920 he was knighted for his service to Egyptology and the British Museum.
July 27, 1969
Faria Chideya (born July 27, 1969, Baltimore, MD) is an ABC News correspondent covering a range of issues from youth to race to politics and the author of the book DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE: FIGHTING CULTURAL MISINFORMATION ABOUT AFRICAN AMERICANS. She is a contributor to Time and to Vibe magazine, which covers urban issues and culture. Chideya has been a writer at MTV News, a CNN political analyst, and a reporter for Newsweek. She lives in New York City.
July 27, 1911
RAYNER HEPPENSTALL (July 27, 1911, Yorkshire, United Kingdom - May 23, 1981, Deal, United Kingdom) was born in Huddersfield and was educated locally, in Calais and at the universities of Leeds and Strasbourg. After serving in the Army during the Second World War he took up a distinguished career as producer for the B.B.C. Features and Drama Department. His previous publications include the novels THE BLAZE OF NOON, THE LESSER INFORTUNE, THE GREATER INFORTUNE, THE CONNECTING DOOR, THE WOODSHED and THE SHEARERS; three books of memoirs; verse; and much criticism, notably THE FOURFOLD TRADITION. In 1966 he was given the Arts Council’s retrospective award for the novel.
July 27, 1899
JOSEPH MONCURE MARCH (July 27, 1899, New York City, NY - February 14, 1977, Los Angeles, CA) was a poet, journalist and screenwriter best known for his two verse narratives, THE WILD PARTY and THE SET-UP, the story of a washed-up black boxer. An editor for The New Yorker in the 1920s, he died in 1977. ART SPIEGELMAN is the author of MAUS, A SURVIVOR’S TALE, for which he received a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992. He was co-founder and editor of RAW, the acclaimed magazine of avant-garde comics, and is currently a contributing editor and artist for The New Yorker. He lives in New York City with his wife, Françoise Mouly, and their two children, Nadja and Dashiell.
July 27, 1933
Gary Baring Nash (born July 27, 1933) is an American historian. He has concentrated on the Revolutionary period, slavery and race, as well as the formation of political communities in Philadelphia and other cities. Nash was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he attended the public schools. He attended Princeton University, where he earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees (BA 1955, PhD 1964). He served in the U.S. Navy from 1955-58 on the John W. Weeks (DD-701), where he was antisubmarine officer and then gunnery officer. After serving as Assistant to the Dean of the Graduate School (1959–62) and completing his doctoral degree, he joined the faculty of Princeton as an instructor in 1964 and an assistant professor in 1965-66. He moved to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he was an assistant professor, 1966–68; associate professor, 1969–72, and full professor from 1972 to the present. He was Dean of the Council for Educational Development from 1980 to 1984 and Dean of Undergraduate and Intercollege Curricular Development at UCLA from 1984 to 1991. Nash co-directed the development of the National History Standards in U.S. and World History from 1992–94, when they were published by the National Center for History in the Schools (NCHS), where he served as Associate Director from 1988-94. He became the Director of NCHS in 1994 and oversaw the revision of the National History Standards published in 1996. Nash served as president of the Organization of American Historians in 1994-95 and was on the OAH Executive Board from 1988 to 1991, and 1992 to 1998. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Antiquarian Society, the American Philosophical Society, and the Society of American Historians. He has served on the History Advisory Council of the College Board (2005–08), the Executive Board of the National Council for History Education (1990-2004), the Advisory Committee of the Skirball Institute on American Values (1988-2003), the National Advisory Council of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania since 2004. In 2008-09, he served as a member of the Second Century National Park Service Commission. Nash is married to Cynthia J. Shelton. He has four children and nine grandchildren. In addition to many books he has authored, co-authored, or co-edited, Nash has made chapter contributions to more than thirty books, has published forty-five articles and over eighty book reviews, op-ed essays, and comments. His article 'Poverty and Poor Relief in Pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia' (William and Mary Quarterly, Jan. 1976) won the Daughters of Colonial Wars' prize for the journal's best article for 1976.
July 27, 1944
Richard Gid Powers, professor of history at the College of Staten Island and Graduate Center, CUNY, is also the author of Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover.
July 27, 1920
Howard Hibbett (July 27, 1920 – March 13, 2019) was a translator and professor emeritus of Japanese literature at Harvard University. He held the Victor S. Thomas Professorship in Japanese Literature.
July 28, 1949
MARIO DELGADO APARAIN is a novelist and short story writer as well as a journalist and university professor. He first became famous in Uruguay for his short stories, which depicted the contrast between country and city life of Uruguayans. He lives in Montevideo, Uruguay, where he works at the Department of Culture, which he previously headed.
July 28, 1927
John Lawrence Ashbery (born July 28, 1927) is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Renowned for its postmodern complexity and opacity, Ashbery's work still proves controversial. Ashbery has stated that he wishes his work to be accessible to as many people as possible, and not to be a private dialogue with himself. At the same time, he once joked that some critics still view him as ‘a harebrained, homegrown surrealist whose poetry defies even the rules and logic of Surrealism.’ ‘No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery,’ Langdon Hammer, chairman of the English Department at Yale University, wrote in 2008. ‘No American poet has had a larger, more diverse vocabulary, not Whitman, not Pound.’ Stephen Burt, a poet and Harvard professor of English, has compared Ashbery to T. S. Eliot, calling Ashbery ‘the last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible’.
July 28, 1932
Natalie Zane Babbitt (née Moore; July 28, 1932 – October 31, 2016) was an American writer and illustrator of children's books. Her acclaimed 1975 novel Tuck Everlasting has been adapted into two feature films and a Broadway musical. She received the Newbery Honor and Christopher Award, and was the U.S. nominee for the biennial international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1982.
July 28, 1804
Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach (28 July 1804 – 13 September 1872) was a German philosopher and anthropologist best known for his book The Essence of Christianity, which provided a critique of Christianity which strongly influenced generations of later thinkers, including Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Richard Wagner, and Friedrich Nietzsche. An associate of Left Hegelian circles, Feuerbach advocated liberalism, atheism, and materialism. Many of his philosophical writings offered a critical analysis of religion. His thought was influential in the development of historical materialism, where he is often recognized as a bridge between Hegel and Marx.
July 28, 1924
Harry Maxwell "Max" Hayward (28 July 1924 in London – 18 March 1979 in Oxford) was a British lecturer on and translator of Russian literature. He has been described as "the best and most prolific translator of Russian prose into English since Constance Garnett". After schooling in London and Liverpool, Hayward went to Magdalen College, Oxford in 1942 on a scholarship to study German. He soon dropped German for Russian, graduating with a first-class degree in 1945. He remained in Oxford for two more years before being proposed by Isaiah Berlin for a scheme for young scholars to be attached to the British Embassy in Moscow. He instead opted to study in 1946-7 at Charles University of Prague. The British Foreign Office then appointed him to the Moscow embassy and he arrived in September 1947, where he would remain for two years. When required to translate for the British ambassador on a visit to Joseph Stalin in the Kremlin, Hayward was too dumb-struck to speak. Returning to Oxford in 1949, Hayward became lecturer in Russian, moving to Leeds University in 1952. In 1955 he returned to work at the British Embassy in Moscow, but his posting was cut short. In 1956 he was taken on by St Antony's College, Oxford. He supervised a number of students who went on to prominent careers, including Strobe Talbott. Although Hayward published no academic monograph and his writings were widely scattered in introductions to books and articles in journals, he became a well-known authority on Russian literature. He was best known as a translator (often jointly with colleagues) of the works of Vladimir Mayakovsky, Isaac Babel, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Boris Pasternak, Andrei Sinyavsky, Andrei Amalrik, Anna Akhmatova and many others. His first full-scale translation, jointly with Manya Harari, was of Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago, a translation they began in 1957. Hayward had known Pasternak's family in Oxford and had once heard Pasternak read his poetry in Moscow in 1948. He received the PEN Translation Prize in 1971. He died in Oxford, aged 54, in 1979.
July 28, 1844
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) was born in Essex, the eldest son of a prosperous middle-class family. He was educated at Highgate School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Classics and began his lifelong friendship with Robert Bridges. In 1866 he entered the Roman Catholic Church and two years later he became a member of the Society of Jesus. In 1877 he was ordained and was priest in a number of parishes including a slum district in Liverpool. From 1882 to 1884 he taught at Stonyhurst College and in 1884 he became Classics Professor at University College, Dublin. In his lifetime Hopkins was hardly known as a poet, except to one or two friends; his poems were not published until 1918, in a volume edited by Robert Bridges.
July 28, 1942
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones (born 28 July 1942) is professor of American history emeritus and an honorary fellow in History at the University of Edinburgh (School of History, Classics and Archaeology), Scotland. He is an authority on American intelligence history, having written two American intelligence history surveys and studies of the CIA and FBI. He has also written books on women and American foreign policy, America and the Vietnam War, and American labor history.
July 28, 1941
Stanislav Alexandrovich Levchenko (born July 28, 1941) is a former Russian KGB major who defected to the United States in 1979. He obtained U.S. citizenship in 1989. Levchenko was born in Moscow, obtained an education at the Institute of Asia and Africa of Lomonosov Moscow State University, and pursued graduate studies at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences. His first KGB work came in 1968, after he had worked for the GRU for two years. He became fully employed by the agency in 1971. In 1975, he was sent undercover abroad, as a journalist working for the Russian magazine New Times (Novoye Vremya) in Tokyo, Japan. Levchenko defected to the United States in October 1979, and was instrumental in detailing the KGB's Japanese spy network to the U.S government, including in Congressional testimony in the early 1980s. After his defection, Levchenko supplied the names of about 200 Japanese agents who had been also defecting earlier. Included in his list were a former labour minister for the Liberal Democratic Party, Hirohide Ishida and Socialist Party leader Seiichi Katsumata Takuji Yamane of the newspaper Sankei Shimbun was also mentioned. A Soviet court condemned Levchenko to death in 1981. Svetlana and Nikolai Ogorodnikov tried to hunt him down in the United States, but they were exposed in the Richard Miller spy case. Levchenko published his English-language autobiography, On the Wrong Side: My Life in the KGB, in 1988. A Japanese version, KGB no Mita Nihon ("The KGB's View of Japan") was published in 1985.
July 28, 1909
Clarence Malcolm Lowry (28 July 1909 – 26 June 1957) was an English poet and novelist who is best known for his 1947 novel Under the Volcano. His first novel, ULTRAMARINE, was published in 1933. During half his writing life he lived in a squatter's shack, built largely by himself, near Vancouver. He died in England in 1957.
July 28, 1943
David C. Martin (born July 28, 1943) is an American television news correspondent, journalist, and author who works for CBS News. He is currently the network's National Security Correspondent reporting from The Pentagon, a position he has held since 1993. Martin has contributed reports to the CBS Evening News, 60 Minutes, and 48 Hours. Martin was born July 28, 1943 in Washington, D.C. He graduated from Yale University in 1965 with a degree in English. He served during the Vietnam War as a naval officer. Martin began at CBS News as a researcher in 1969. His career during the 1970s and early 1980s included stints at Newsweek Magazine and the Associated Press. He became CBS News Pentagon correspondent in 1983.
July 28, 1948
Mbulelo Vizikhungo Mzamane (28 July 1948 – 16 February 2014) was a South African author, poet, and academic. He was described by the late President Nelson Mandela as a visionary leader and one of South Africa’s greatest intellectuals. Mbulelo was born in Port Elizabeth, and grew up first in Soweto and then in the Brakpan-Springs area. His mother Flamma Cingashe Nkonyeni was a nurse and his father Canon Joshua Bernard Mbizo Mzamane was an Anglican priest; both were community leaders. His early schooling was in Soweto, and he later attended high school at St. Christopher's in Swaziland, where he was taught by distinguished writer and journalist Can Themba. Mbulelo did his undergraduate education at the then University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland (UBLS, Roma Campus), obtaining dual degrees in English and Philosophy and a Certificate in education cum laude. He also obtained an M.A. in English from UBLS. He taught at Mabathoana High School in Lesotho before moving to Botswana, from where he was later expelled for political activism. He obtained his PhD in English Literature from the University of Sheffield, England. He held various academic positions in Lesotho, Botswana, England, Nigeria, USA, Germany, Australia and South Africa. In 1976 he was the first recipient of the Mofolo-Plomer Prize for Literature. In 2012 he was the recipient of the African Literature Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, The Fonlon-Nicholls Award, for creative writing, scholarship and human rights advocacy. Mbulelo is also widely known as a writer of fiction and poetry, and his collections of short stories are especially noteworthy. Much of his fiction work was written while in exile and subsequently banned in apartheid South Africa. On 16 February 2014, he died at the age of 65. Mbulelo was an activist against the apartheid government of South Africa. He spent many years in exile in Nigeria and the USA and spread South African literature there and conscientious people on the South African struggle. Mbulelo returned to South Africa in 1993 and in 1994 he became the first post-apartheid Vice Chancellor and Rector of the University of Fort Hare, where he also held the faculty rank of Professor in the Department of English Studies and Comparative Literature. After leaving the University of Fort Hare, he was a vocal contributor to international debate on issues confronting African populations on the continent and in the diaspora of the Americas. Mbulelo chaired and served on numerous boards, including: the African Arts Fund (affiliated to the U.N. Center against Apartheid) and the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism (affiliated to the University of the Witwatersrand). Mbulelo was also the director of the Center for African Literary Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN). He worked closely with Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Nawal El Saadawi as co-chairs of BUWA! African Languages and Literatures into the 21st Century. He was appointed by both former presidents Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki into various advisory boards. He was also involved with some aspects of the National Development Plan. In June 2013 Mbulelo was the guest speaker at the inaugural Can Themba Memorial Lecture alongside Nadine Gordimer and Joe Thloloe. He was the Project Leader and General Editor of the Encyclopaedia of South African Arts Culture and Heritage.
July 28, 1903
Silvina Ocampo Aguirre (July 28, 1903 - December 14, 1993) was an Argentine poet and short-fiction writer. Ocampo was born in Buenos Aires, the youngest of the six children of Manuel Ocampo and Ramona Aguirre. She was educated at home by tutors. One of her sisters was Victoria Ocampo, the publisher of the literarily important Argentine magazine Sur. She studied drawing in Paris under Giorgio de Chirico. She was married to Adolfo Bioy Casares, whose lover she became (1933) when Bioy was 19. They were married in 1940. In 1954 she adopted Bioy’s daughter with another woman, Marta Bioy Ocampo (1954–94), who was killed in an automobile accident just three weeks after Silvina Ocampo’s death, leaving two children. The estate of Silvina Ocampo and Adolfo Bioy Casares was recently (as of 2006) awarded by a Buenos Aires court to yet another love child of Adolfo Bioy Casares, Fabián Bioy. Fabián Bioy died, aged 40, in February 2006. With Fabián Bioy's death, it is likely the many documents and manuscripts of both writers will soon become available to scholars. Ocampo began as a writer with the book of short stories Viaje olvidado in 1937, and followed up with three books of poetry, Enumeración de la patria, Espacios métricos and Los sonetos del jardín. With Espacios métricos, which had been published in 1942 by the publishing house Sur, she won the Premio Municipal in 1954. She won the second prize in the National Poetry Comptetition for Los nombres in 1953 and came back to win the first place prize in 1962 with Lo amargo por dulce. Co-authored with Adolfo Bioy Casares, Ocampo published Los que aman, odian, in 1946, and with Juan Rodolfo Wilcock she published the theatrical work Los Traidores in 1956. With Borges and Bioy Casares, Ocampo co-authored the celebrated Antología de la literatura fantástica in 1940, and also the Antología poética Argentina in 1941.
July 28, 1929
Jacqueline Lee Kennedy Onassis (born Bouvier July 28, 1929 – May 19, 1994) was the wife of the 35th President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, and the First Lady of the United States from 1961 until his assassination in 1963. Bouvier was the elder daughter of Wall Street stockbroker John Vernou Bouvier III and socialite Janet Lee Bouvier. In 1951, she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in French literature from George Washington University and went on to work for the Washington Times-Herald as an inquiring photographer. In 1952, Bouvier met Congressman John F. Kennedy at a dinner party. That November, he was elected as a United States Senator from Massachusetts, and the couple married the following year. They had four children, two of whom died in infancy. As First Lady, she was known for her highly publicized restoration of the White House and her emphasis on arts and culture. On November 22, 1963, she was riding with the President in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas, when he was assassinated. After his funeral, she and her children withdrew from public view. She married Aristotle Onassis, one of the world's richest men, in 1968. Following her second husband's death in 1975, she had a career as a book editor for the final two decades of her life. She is remembered for her lifelong contributions to the arts and preservation of historic architecture, as well as for her style, elegance, and grace. She was a fashion icon, and her famous ensemble of pink Chanel suit and matching pillbox hat has become a symbol of her husband's assassination. She ranks as one of the most popular First Ladies and was named in 1999 on Gallup's list of Most Admired Men and Women in 20th-century America.
July 28, 1866
Helen Beatrix Potter (28 July 1866 – 22 December 1943) was an English author, illustrator, natural scientist and conservationist best known for her imaginative children's books, featuring animals such as those in The Tale of Peter Rabbit, which celebrated the British landscape and country life. Born into a wealthy Unitarian family, Potter, along with her younger brother Walter Bertram (1872–1918), grew up with few friends outside her large extended family. Her parents were artistic, interested in nature and enjoyed the countryside. As children, Beatrix and Bertram had numerous small animals as pets which they observed closely and drew endlessly.
July 28, 1921
Emir Rodríguez Monegal (28 July 1921 – 14 November 1985), born in Uruguay, was a scholar, literary critic, and editor of Latin American literature. From 1969 to 1985, Rodríguez Monegal was professor of Latin American contemporary literature at Yale University. He is usually called by his second surname Emir R. Monegal or Monegal, or erroneously Emir Monegal. Described as 'one of the most influential Latin American literary critics of the 20th century' by the Encyclopædia Britannica, Monegal wrote key books about Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges, and the Britannica Macropædia notice of the later. He was a part in 'The Boom' of 1960s Latin American literature as founder and 1966–1968 editor of his influential magazine Mundo Nuevo. He is remembered as a member of the Generation of 45, a Uruguayan intellectual and literary movement: Carlos Maggi, Manuel Flores Mora, Ángel Rama, Idea Vilariño, Carlos Real de Azúa, Carlos Martínez Moreno, Mario Arregui, Mauricio Muller, José Pedro Díaz, Amanda Berenguer, Tola Invernizzi, Mario Benedetti, Ida Vitale, Líber Falco, Juan Cunha, Juan Carlos Onetti, among others.
July 28, 1959
William Tanner Vollmann (born July 28, 1959) is an American novelist, journalist, war correspondent, short story writer, and essayist. He won the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction for the novel Europe Central. He lives in Sacramento, California, with his wife and daughter.
July 28, 1958
Sarah Schulman, Professor of English at CUNY, Staten Island, is the author of ten novels, three books of nonfiction, and a play.
July 29, 1965
Chang-Rae Lee (born July 29, 1965, Seoul, South Korea) is the author of NATIVE SPEAKER, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, A GESTURE LIFE, and ALOFT. Selected by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best writers under forty, Chang-rae Lee teaches writing at Princeton University.
July 29, 1956
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (born 1956) is an award-winning author, poet and teacher. Her themes include women, immigration, the South Asian experience, history, myth, magical realism and diversity. She writes for adults and children. Her books have been translated into 29 languages, including Dutch, Hebrew, Russian and Japanese. Two novels, The Mistress of Spices and Sister of My Heart, have been made into films. Her short stories, Arranged Marriage, won an American Book Award. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Houston.
July 29, 1931
Jorge Edwards, (born July 29, 1931, Santiago, Chile), Chilean writer, literary critic, and diplomat who gained notoriety with the publication of Persona non grata (1973; Eng. trans. Persona non grata), a memoir of his experiences as the Chilean ambassador to Cuba in the early 1970s. Critical of the revolutionary socialist regime of Cuba’s Fidel Castro, the book created controversy among Latin American writers. In 1999 Edwards was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious literary award in the Hispanic world. After receiving a law degree at the University of Chile in 1958, Edwards began his career as a diplomat, and in 1959 the Chilean government sent him to Princeton University to study political science. His next major assignment took him to Paris, as secretary of the Chilean embassy. His collections of short fiction, which include El patio (1952; The Backyard), Gente de la ciudad (1961; City People), Las máscaras (1967; The Masks), and Temas y variaciones (1969; Themes and Variations), departed from prevailing Chilean literature in that the stories deal not with rural life but with middle-class bureaucrats. Edwards’s novels about Chile include El peso de la noche (1965; Night’s Burden), about the decay of the middle-class family; Los convidados de piedra (1978; The Stone Guests), a story set during the 1973 military coup; El museo de cera (1981; Wax Museum), a political allegory; La mujer imaginaria (1985; The Imaginary Woman), about the liberation of an upper-class, middle-aged female artist; El anfitrión (1987; The Host), a modern retelling of the Faust story; El origen del mundo (1996; The Origins of the World), which centres on leftist Chilean expatriates in Paris; El inútil de la familia (2004; The Worthless One in the Family), a fictionalized account of the life history of Edwards’s uncle; and La casa de Dostoievsky (2008; Dostoievsky’s House), about an unnamed avant-garde poet who travels to 1960s Cuba. Edwards’s nonfiction works include Adiós, poeta (1990; Good-bye, Poet), a study of Pablo Neruda, El whisky de los poetas (1994; The Whiskey of the Poets), and Diálogos en un tejado (2003; Dialogues on a Rooftop).
July 29, 1909
Chester Bomar Himes (July 29, 1909 - November 12, 1984) was an American writer. His works include If He Hollers Let Him Go and a series of Harlem Detective novels. In 1958 he won France's Grand Prix de Littérature Policière. Chester Himes was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, on July 29, 1909. He grew up in a middle-class home in Missouri. When Himes was about 12 years old, his father took a teaching job at Branch Normal College (now University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff), and soon a tragedy took place that would profoundly shape Himes's view of race relations. He had misbehaved and his mother made him sit out a gunpowder demonstration that he and his brother, Joseph Jr., were supposed to conduct during a school assembly. Working alone, Joseph mixed the chemicals; they exploded in his face. Rushed to the nearest hospital, the blinded boy was refused treatment. ‘That one moment in my life hurt me as much as all the others put together,’ Himes wrote in The Quality of Hurt. ‘I loved my brother. I had never been separated from him and that moment was shocking, shattering, and terrifying....We pulled into the emergency entrance of a white people's hospital. White clad doctors and attendants appeared. I remember sitting in the back seat with Joe watching the pantomime being enacted in the car's bright lights. A white man was refusing; my father was pleading. Dejectedly my father turned away; he was crying like a baby. My mother was fumbling in her handbag for a handkerchief; I hoped it was for a pistol.’ Chester's parents were Joseph Sandy Himes and Estelle Bomar Himes; his father was a peripatetic black college professor of industrial trades and his mother was a teacher at Scotia Seminary prior to marriage; the family eventually settled in Cleveland, Ohio. His parents' marriage was unhappy and eventually ended in divorce. Himes attended East High School in Cleveland, Ohio. While he was a freshman at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, he was expelled for playing a prank. In late 1928 he was arrested and sentenced to jail and hard labor for 20 to 25 years for armed robbery and sent to Ohio Penitentiary. In prison, he wrote short stories and had them published in national magazines. Himes stated that writing in prison and being published was a way to earn respect from guards and fellow inmates, as well as to avoid violence. His first stories appeared in 1931 in The Bronzeman and, starting in 1934, in Esquire. His story ‘To What Red Hell’ (published in Esquire in 1934) as well as to his novel Cast the First Stone - only much later republished unabridged as Yesterday Will Make You Cry (1998) - dealt with the catastrophic 1930 prison fire Himes witnessed at Ohio Penitentiary in 1930. In 1934 Himes was transferred to London Prison Farm and in April 1936 he was released on parole into his mother's custody. Following his release he worked at part-time jobs and at the same time continued to write. During this period he came in touch with Langston Hughes, who facilitated Himes's contacts with the world of literature and publishing. In 1936 Himes married Jean Johnson. In the 1940s Himes spent time in Los Angeles, working as a screenwriter but also producing two novels, If He Hollers Let Him Go and The Lonely Crusade that charted the experiences of the wave of black in-migrants, drawn by the city's defense industries, and their dealings with the established black community, fellow workers, unions and management. He also provided an analysis of the Zoot Suit Riots for The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP. By the 1950s Himes had decided to settle in France permanently, a country he liked in part due to his popularity in literary circles. In Paris, Himes' was the contemporary of the political cartoonist Oliver Harrington and fellow expatriate writers Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and William Gardner Smith. It was in Paris in the late 1950s that Chester met his second wife Lesley Himes, née Packard, when she went to interview him. She was a journalist at the Herald Tribune, where she wrote her own fashion column, ‘Monica’. He described her as ‘Irish-English with blue-gray eyes and very good looking’, he also saw her courage and resilience, Chester said to Lesley, ‘You’re the only true color-blind person I’ve ever met in my life.’ After he suffered a stroke, in 1959, Lesley quit her job and nursed him back to health. She cared for him for the rest of his life, and worked with him as his informal editor, proofreader, confidante and, as the director, Van Peebles dubbed her, ‘his watchdog’. After a long engagement, they were married in 1978. Lesley and Chester faced adversities as a mixed race couple but they prevailed. Theirs was a life lived with an unparallelled passion and great humor. Their circle of political colleagues and creative friends included not only such towering figures as Langston Hughes and Richard Wright; it also included figures such as Malcolm X, Carl Van Vechten, Picasso, Jean Miotte, Ollie Harrington, Nikki Giovanni and Ishmael Reed. Bohemian life in Paris would in turn lead them to the South of France and finally on to Spain, where they lived until Chester’s death in 1984. In 1969 Himes moved to Moraira, Spain, where he died in 1984 from Parkinson's Disease. He is buried at Benissa cemetery.
July 29, 1964
T. J. Stiles is an award-winning American biographer who lives in San Francisco, California. His most recent book, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.
July 29, 1912
Davide Lajolo (Vinchio , 29 July 1912 - Milan , 21 June 1984 ) was an Italian writer, politician, and journalist.
July 29, 1962
GULLLERMO MARTINEZ was born in 1962 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he earned a doctorate in mathematics. At the age of twenty, he won the first National Short Story Award for his collection, La Jungla sin Bestias. In 1988, his book Inferno Grande won Argentina’s National Foundation of Arts award. Recently, he pursued graduate work in mathematics at Oxford University. . The translation from the Spanish is by LAURA C. DAIL, whose most recent translation is Paco Ignacio Taibo’s FOUR HANDS.
July 29, 1927
Harry Kurt Victor Mulisch (29 July 1927 – 30 October 2010) was a Dutch writer. He wrote more than 80 novels, plays, essays, poems and philosophical reflections. These have been translated into more than 30 languages. Along with Willem Frederik Hermans and Gerard Reve, Mulisch is considered one of the 'Great Three' of Dutch postwar literature. His novel The Assault became a 1986 film, which won both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award. A 2007 poll revealed his 1992 novel The Discovery of Heaven as the 'Best Dutch Book Ever'. He was regularly thought of as a possible future Nobel laureate. Mulisch was born in Haarlem and lived in Amsterdam from 1958 until his death in 2010. Mulisch's father was from Austria-Hungary and emigrated to the Netherlands after the First World War. During the German occupation in World War II his father worked for a German bank, which also dealt with confiscated Jewish assets. His mother, Alice Schwarz, was Jewish. Mulisch and his mother escaped transportation to a concentration camp thanks to Mulisch's father's collaboration with the Nazis, but his maternal grandmother died in a gas chamber. Mulisch was mostly raised by his parents' housemaid, Frieda Falk. Mulisch said of himself, he did not just write about World War II, he was WWII. Mulisch died in 2010. His death occurred at his Amsterdam home and his family was with him at the time. Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte described his death as 'a loss for Dutch literature and the Netherlands'. Culture minister Halbe Zijlstra bemoaned the demise of the 'Big Three' as Gerard Reve and Willem Frederik Hermans had already died. Marlise Simons of The New York Times said his 'gift for writing with clarity about moral and philosophical themes made him an enormously influential figure in the Netherlands and earned him recognition abroad' The L Magazine?'?s Mark Ashe quoted the American editions of his novels by referring to him as 'Holland's Greatest Author' and 'Holland's most important postwar writer'. Mulisch had two daughters, his daughters Frieda and Anna, with his wife Sjoerdje Woudenberg, and a son, Menzo, from his relationship with Kitty Saal. Also surviving him are his granddaughters Naomi and Lucia Mulisch. Mulisch gained international recognition with the film The Assault (1986), based on his book of the same title (1982). It received an Oscar and a Golden Globe for best foreign movie and has been translated into more than twenty languages. His novel The Discovery of Heaven (1992) is considered his masterpiece, and was voted the best Dutch-language book ever by Dutch readers in a 2007 newspaper poll. It is the book that shaped our generation; it made us love, even obsess, with reading, said Peter-Paul Spanjaard, 32, a lawyer in Amsterdam at the time of Mulisch's death. It was filmed in 2001 as The Discovery of Heaven by Jeroen Krabbé, starring Stephen Fry. Among the many awards he received for individual works and his total body of work, the most important is the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren (Prize of Dutch Literature, a lifetime achievement award) in 1995. A frequent theme in his work is the Second World War. His father had worked for the Germans during the war and went to prison for three years afterwards. As the war spanned most of Mulisch's formative phase, it had a defining influence on his life and work. In 1963, he wrote a non-fiction work about the Eichmann case: Criminal Case 40/61. Major works set against the backdrop of the Second World War are De Aanslag (The Assault), Het stenen bruidsbed, and Siegfried. Mulisch often incorporated ancient legends or myths in his writings, drawing on Greek mythology (e.g. in De Elementen), Jewish mysticism (in De ontdekking van de Hemel and De Procedure), well known urban legends and politics (Mulisch was politically left-wing, once signing a book 'dedicated in admiration' to Fidel Castro).
July 29, 1942
Sten Nadolny, (born 29 July 1942, in Zehdenick, Province of Brandenburg) is a German novelist. His parents, Burkhard and Isabella Nadolny, were also writers. Nadolny grew up in the town of Traunstein, in Upper Bavaria. After receiving his Abitur, he studied history and political science in Munich, Göttingen, Tübingen and Berlin. Nadolny received his PhD in 1976 at the Free University of Berlin. His dissertation was on German disarmament diplomacy at the 1932/33 Geneva Conference, shortly before Hitler came to power. Nadolny's grandfather, Rudolf Nadolny, had led the German delegation. Nadolny worked for about a year as a history teacher before entering the film industry as a production manager, an experience he wrote about in his first novel, the semi-autobiographical Netzkarte. He currently lives in Berlin. Nadolny's first novel, Netzkarte, was published in 1981. Originally, it was written as a script for a film that was never realized. It details the adventures of a young man named Ole Reuter, who purchases a 'Netzkarte', or ticket that allows him to travel by train throughout (then West) Germany. Nadolny revisits the character of Ole Reuter in a sequel, Er oder Ich ('Him or Me'), published in 1999. His best known work is The Discovery of Slowness (1987; originally published in 1983 as Die Entdeckung der Langsamkeit), a fictionalized meditation on the life and lessons of British Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin. A pre-publication portion of the novel titled Kopenhagen 1801 (which would become the fifth chapter) had earned Nadolny the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 1980.
July 29, 1959
Connie Rose Porter (born July 29, 1959) is an African-American writer of young-adult books, and a teacher of creative writing. Porter is best known for her contribution to the American Girl Collection Series as the author of the Addy books: six of her Addy books have gone on to sell more than 3 million copies. In addition, she published two novels with Houghton-Mifflin, All-Bright Court (1991), and Imani All Mine (1999).
July 29, 1918
Mary Lee Settle (July 29, 1918 Charleston, WV - September 27, 2005 Ivy, VA) was an American writer. She won the 1978 National Book Award for her novel Blood Tie and was a founder of the annual PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She attended Sweet Briar College for two years, then moved to New York City in pursuit of a career as an actress and model, and tested for the part of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind. During World War II, she joined the British Women's Auxiliary Air Force, and then the Office of War Information. She taught at Bard College, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and University of Virginia. She lived for many years in Canada, in England, and in Turkey. Settle is most famous for a series of novels called The Beulah Quintet (Prisons, O Beulah Land, Know Nothing, The Scapegoat, The Killing Ground), which cover the history of West Virginia. She wrote several works of non-fiction. She died of lung cancer in Ivy, Virginia on September 27, 2005, aged 87, while writing her last book.
July 29, 1921
Margaret Thaler Singer (July 29, 1921 – November 23, 2003) was a clinical psychologist and researcher with her colleague Lyman Wynne of family communication. She was a prominent figure in the study of undue influence in social and religious contexts. Singer's main areas of research included schizophrenia, family therapy, brainwashing and coercive persuasion. In the 1960s she began to study the nature of social and religious group influence and mind control, and sat as a board member of the American Family Foundation and as an advisory board member of the Cult Awareness Network. She was the co-author of the book Cults in Our Midst.
July 29, 1869
Newton Booth Tarkington (July 29, 1869 – May 19, 1946) was an American novelist and dramatist best known for his novels The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams. He is one of only three novelists to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, along with William Faulkner and John Updike. Although he is little read now, in the 1910s and 1920s he was the U.S.'s greatest living author.
July 29, 1941
Charles Wilkinson is Moses Lasky Professor of Law at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of Fire on the Plateau: Conflict and Endurance in the American Southwest and numerous other books, including standard texts on Indian and Federal public land law.
July 29, 1969
Nathalie Handal (born 29 July 1969) is an American award-winning poet, writer, and playwright. Nathalie Handal was born in Haiti to parents of Palestinian descent, and grew up in Pétionville. Having also lived in Europe, the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, the writer-poet-playwright is acutely aware of the commonality of the human experience and of the fact that ‘we don't exist in the jointed way that we should.’
July 29, 1805
Alexis de Tocqueville was born in 1805 to a noble French family that had survived the French Revolution. His father gained some political power under the reign of the Bourbons, and after the July Revolution of 1830, the family was exiled along with the king. Tocqueville, then twenty-five years old, stayed in France, swearing allegiance to the new government. Shortly thereafter he and a friend, Gustave de Beaumont, sought and received a government assignment to study the prison system of the United States. They arrived in America in 1831. After extensive travels across the young nation, Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America (published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840). The publication of the first volume made Tocqueville a well-known figure, but he led a quiet life, accepting modest governmental posts, traveling around Europe, and marrying an Englishwoman. In 1848, Tocqueville once again rose to political prominence after a prescient speech that foretold of revolution. After serving through the massive upheavals and overthrows of government, Tocqueville retired from political life in 1849. Always weak in health, his lung disease grew progressively worse from that period on. Moving south several times on doctor’s recommendations, Tocqueville succumbed to death in 1859, in Cannes.
July 29, 1905
Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjöld (29 July 1905 – 18 September 1961) was a Swedish diplomat, economist, and author. The second Secretary-General of the United Nations, he served from April 1953 until his death in a plane crash in September 1961. At the age of 47 years, 255 days, Hammarskjöld is the youngest to have held the post. He is one of only three people to be awarded a posthumous Nobel Prize. Hammarskjöld is the only U.N. Secretary-General to die in office; his death occurred en route to cease-fire negotiations. American President John F. Kennedy called Hammarskjöld 'the greatest statesman of our century'
July 30, 1952
Brian Boyd (born 30 July 1952) is a professor of literature known primarily as an expert on the life and works of author Vladimir Nabokov and on literature and evolution. He is a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Boyd emigrated to New Zealand as a child with his family in 1957.
July 30, 1818
Emily Jane Brontë (30 July 1818 – 19 December 1848) was an English novelist and poet, best remembered for her solitary novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature. Emily was the third eldest of the four surviving Brontë siblings, between the youngest Anne and her brother Branwell. She wrote under the pen name Ellis Bell.
July 30, 1945
Sir Thomas Martin Devine (born 30 July 1945), is a Scottish academic historian.Devine's main research interest is the History of Scotland since c. 1600 and its global connections and impact. He is regarded as the leading authority on the history of modern Scotland and its diaspora.
July 30, 1924
William Howard Gass (born July 30, 1924) is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and former philosophy professor. He has written three novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven volumes of essays, three of which have won National Book Critics Circle Award prizes and one of which, A Temple of Texts (2006), won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. His 1995 novel The Tunnel received the American Book Award.
July 30, 1945
Larry Alan Morse grew up in Los Angeles. He attended the University of California at Berkeley and San Francisco State College, and somehow managed to get two degrees in English Lit. He moved to Toronto in the late ‘60s, and has had the usual variety of jobs, including a brief stint in educational television and five years as an administrator at the University of Toronto. Upon returning from extended travels through Southeast Asia, he decided to try and write a novel – something delicate and sensitive and artistic. He discovered just what he was looking for in the true story of Sawney Beane and his family, The Flesh Eaters, the 15th century cannibal clan who ate their way through a good part of Scotland. L. A. Morse has written four other crime novels. The Old Dick won an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America; The Big Enchilada and Sleaze, featuring Sam Hunter, the L. A. private eye.
July 30, 1904
One of the group of talented poets and play- wrights known as Los Contemporáneos, Salvador Novo (July 30, 1904, Mexico City, Mexico - January 13, 1974, Mexico City, Mexico) was official historian of Mexico City and theater director of the Palace of Fine Arts. He received the prestigious Premio Nacional de Literatura in 1969. The late Michael Alderson was an independent scholar and free-lance translator.
July 30, 1935
Carl Oglesby (July 30, 1935 – September 13, 2011) was an American writer, academic, and political activist. He was the President of the leftist student organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) from 1965 to 1966. Carl Oglesby's father was from South Carolina, and his mother from Alabama. They met in Akron, Ohio, where Carl's father worked in the rubber mills. Carl progressed through the Akron Public School System, winning a prize in his final year for a speech in favor of America's Cold War stance. He went to Kent State University; but dropped out in his third year to try to make his way as an actor and playwright in Greenwich Village, a bohemian area of New York. After a year, he returned to Kent State and graduated, writing three plays (including 'a well-received work on the Hatfield-McCoy feud') and an unfinished novel. He worked at odd jobs until, around 1960, he came to Michigan. Oglesby first came into contact with members of SDS in Michigan in 1964. At the time he was thirty years old and had a young family (a wife, Beth, and three children: Aron, Caleb, and Shay). He wrote a critical article on American foreign policy in the Far East in the campus magazine. SDSers read it, and went to meet Carl at his family home to see if he might become a supporter of the SDS. As Oglebsy put it, 'We talked. I got to thinking about things. As a writer, I needed a mode of action [...] I saw that people were already moving, so I joined up.' He became a full-time Research, Information, Publications (RIP) worker for SDS.[citation needed]
July 30, 1946
Jan Nederveen Pieterse (born July 30, 1946) is Mellichamp Professor of Global Studies and Sociology in the Global & International Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara . He specializes in globalization, development studies and cultural studies. Nederveen Pieterse received his doctorate in cultural anthropology from the University of Nijmegen. He speaks Dutch, English, French, German, and Italian and is a noted scholar in the area of globalization and culture, particularly globalization and cultural hybridity. Nederveen Pieterse’s work on globalization involves several dimensions: empire and hegemony, global political economy, development studies, and culture. Work on empire and hegemony includes the early study on Empire and Emancipation (1989). This large study includes kaleidoscopic takes on both empire—traced back to the classical empires, the Crusades, to the new imperialism and contemporary hegemony; and emancipation—with chapters on Native American liberation, African and black emancipation movements, and decolonization movements. Besides historical chapters, the work includes five theoretical chapters, two on empire, two on emancipation, and one on their dialectics. The work on emancipation is taken further in an edited volume, Emancipations, Modern and Postmodern (1992) with contributions by Sandra Harding, Ernesto Laclau, Alberto Melucci, Sudipta Kaviraj, Bhikhu Parekh and others. Globalization or Empire? (2004) continues this interest and combines hegemony and global political economy. The book features chapters on neoliberal globalization, neoliberal empire, globalization and war, global inequality, American exceptionalism, representations of North and South, and capitalisms after Enron. These perspectives are also developed in (co-)edited volumes such as Humanitarian Intervention and beyond: World Orders in the Making (1998), Global Futures: Shaping Globalization (2000), Globalization and Social Movements (2001), Politics of globalization (2009) and Globalization and Emerging Societies: Development and Inequality (2009). The interest in the limits of American hegemony is taken up in Is there hope for Uncle Sam? Beyond the American Bubble (2008) which includes chapters on social inequality in the United States, the financialization of the American economy, pending economic crisis and the rise of new emerging economies. Another area of interest is development studies. The book Development Theory: Deconstructions/ Reconstructions (2001) has been used widely as a textbook from Scandinavia to South Korea and has gone through six printings. A new edition is appearing in 2009. The book combines global political economy with development policy with critical, probing chapters on alternative development, post-development, culture and development and futures of development thinking. Nederveen Pieterse’s first major work on culture and representation is the 1992 study White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture. This interest is developed further in a volume co-edited with Bhikhu Parekh, The Decolonization of Imagination (1997). Particularly well known is Nederveen Pieterse’s work on hybridity. The often cited article on ‘Globalization as Hybridization’ appears in his volume Globalization and Culture: Global Mélange (2003). A second edition appears in 2009. A sequel study is Ethnicities and Global Multiculture: Pants for an Octopus (2007) with probing treatments of ethnicity, social capital, multiculturalism, Islam and cosmopolitanism.The term 'hybridity' originates with agriculture but has recently become very significant to Cultural Studies. Originating from the Latin hybrida, a hybrid is simply anything that is mixed. Key thinkers in the development of Hybridity Theory (HT) include Homi K. Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak, and Paul Gilroy. For Nederveen Pieterse, the concept of hybridity serves as a hermeneutical tool for interpreting the cultural dimensions of globalization. While most assessments of globalization are confined to a narrow time frame (modernity), Nederveen Pieterse considers globalization in broader anthropological terms. In this sense, he argues that globalization belongs to a deep dynamic in which shifting civilizational centers are but the front stage of history with ongoing intercultural traffic forming the backdrop. While globalization is often dismissed as mere westernization, Nederveen Pieterse points out that from an evolutionary perspective, such analysis is historically shallow: The evolutionary backdrop of our common origins in Africa confirms that humanity is a hybrid species. The species' subsequent clustering in different regions of the world has not precluded large-scale contact and population movements across and between continents (Gamble 1993). This mixed heritage is confirmed by the cultures identified by archaeologists which in Paleolithic and Neolithic times sprawl widely and do not coincide with the boundaries of much later times.With contemporary globalization comes new dialectics of borders. Increasing transnationalism in communication, production, consumption and travel goes together with the emergence of new borders (as in rising restrictions on migration) and new politics of risk containment (as in relation to conflict areas). As some borders fade new ones and or internal boundaries emerge; besides the advantages of the erasure of boundaries are not evenly distributed. Contemporary globalization can be understood as a process of hierarchical integration in which integration (the spread of global capitalism and its political and cultural radius) fosters borderlessness while hierarchy imposes new boundaries and forms of stratification.
July 30, 1857
Thorstein Bunde Veblen (born Torsten Bunde Veblen; July 30, 1857 – August 3, 1929) was an American economist and sociologist, and leader of the institutional economics movement. Veblen is credited for the main technical principle used by institutional economists, known as the Veblenian dichotomy. It is a distinction between what Veblen called 'institutions' and 'technology'. Besides his technical work, Veblen was a popular and witty critic of capitalism, as illustrated by his best-known book The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Veblen is famous in the history of economic thought for combining a Darwinian evolutionary perspective with his new institutionalist approach to economic analysis. He combined sociology with economics in his masterpiece, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), where he argued that there was a fundamental split in society between those who make their way via exploitation and those who make their way via industry. In hunter-gatherer societies, this was the difference between the hunter and the gatherer in the tribe, but in feudalism, it became the difference between the landed gentry and the indentured servant. In society's progressively modernized forms, those with the power to exploit are known as the 'leisure class', defined by a commitment to demonstrations of idleness and a lack of productive economic activity. Veblen maintains that as societies mature, conspicuous leisure gives way to 'conspicuous consumption'. Both are performed to demonstrate wealth or mark social status. While Veblen was sympathetic to state ownership of industry, he did not support labor movements of the time. Scholars mostly disagree about the extent to which Veblen's views are compatible with Marxism, socialism, or anarchism. Veblen believed that technological developments would eventually lead to a socialist economy, but his views on socialism and the nature of the evolutionary process of economics differed sharply from Karl Marx's. While Marx saw socialism as the immediate precursor to communism and the ultimate goal for civilization to be achieved by the working class, Veblen saw socialism as an intermediate phase in an ongoing evolutionary process in society that would arise due to natural decay of the business enterprise system. As a leading intellectual of the Progressive Era, Veblen made sweeping attacks on production for profit, and the emphasis on the wasteful role of consumption for status found within many of his works greatly influenced socialist thinkers and engineers who sought a non-Marxist critique of capitalism.
July 30, 1951
Roger Warner is the author of a history published in hardcover as Back Fire: The CIA’s Secret War in Laos and Its Link to the War in Vietnam. In 1995 it won the Overseas Press Club’s award for best non-fiction book on foreign affairs. Steerforth Press reissued the book in paperback under the title Shooting at the Moon: The Story of America’s Clandestine War in Laos. Roger Warner also wrote Haing Ngor: A Cambodian Odyssey, and Invisible Hand. Warner is a documentary filmmaker as well as a writer. A graduate of Yale, he owns the biggest archive of Laos war still photos and film footage in the U.S., much of it shot by C.I.A. case officers.
July 30, 1945
Jean Patrick Modiano (born July 30, 1945) is a French novelist and recipient of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. He previously won the 2012 Austrian State Prize for European Literature, the 2010 Prix mondial Cino Del.
July 30, 1511
Giorgio Vasari (30 July 1511 – 27 June 1574) was an Italian painter, architect, writer, and historian, most famous today for his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, considered the ideological foundation of art-historical writing.
July 31, 1936
IGNACIO de LOYOLA BRANDAO was born on July 31, 1936 in Brazil. He began a career in journalism at the age of sixteen writing reviews for the films that played at the only cinema in his hometown. At twenty, he moved to Sao Paulo, where he worked for the principal newspapers of the state capital until 1979. ZERO was finished in 1969 but was not published until five years later, when it was accepted by an Italian publisher. Not until 1975 was it published in Brazil, bringing considerable scandal, but extraordinary praise and a number of literary prizes, including the Brasilia Prize, a national literary honor. In 1976, it was banned by the Ministry of Justice. Following a national protest in 1977, the ban was lifted in 1979 and ZERO immediately returned to the bestseller list. This is the first English language edition of this international bestseller.
July 31, 1943
Susan Cheever (born July 31, 1943), an American author, is a prize-winning best-selling writer well-known for her memoir, her writing about alcoholism, and her intimate understanding of American history.
July 31, 1933
Cees Nooteboom is the author of five novels, six collections of poetry, five travel books, and a play. He has been awarded several prizes during his career, including, in 1957, Second Prize from the Anne Frank Foundation for his critically acclaimed first novel PHILIP EN DE ANDEREN (PHILIP AND THE OTHERS) and, in 1963, the Van der Hootg Prize for his novel DE RIDDER’S GESTORVEN (THE KNIGHT HAS FALLEN). RITUALS is the first of his books to be translated into English.
July 31, 1904
Brett Halliday (July 31, 1904 - February 4, 1977) was the pseudonym of Davis Dresser, who was born in Chicago, Illinois, but mostly grew up in West Texas. Here he lost an eye to barbed wire as a boy, and thus had to wear an eye patch for the rest of his life. At the age of 14, he ran away from home and enlisted in the U.S. 5th Cavalry Regiment at Fort Bliss, Texas, followed by a year of Border Patrol duty on the Rio Grande. After his service, he returned to Texas to finish high school. In search of adventure, Dresser traveled throughout the Southwest working at various odd jobs, including that of muleskinner, farm hand, deckhand on a freighter in the Gulf of Mexico, laborer in the California oilfields, etc. Eventually, he went to Tri-State College of Engineer, where he received a certificate in civil engineering. Back in Texas, he worked as an engineer and surveyor for several years before turning to writing in 1927. After his first marriage (to Kathleen Rollins, who had two daughters from a previous marriage), Dresser was married to mystery writer Helen McCloy from 1946 to 1961; they had a daughter named Chloe. As partners, they formed a literary agency called Halliday and McCloy. Dresser also established a publishing company Torquil Publishing Company, which published his books as well as those of other authors, from 1953 to 1965. In 1961, he married Mary Savage, also a writer; their son was born in 1965. The first Shayne novel was rejected by 21 publishers before being accepted by Henry Holt & Co. in 1939. The Shayne series went on to be highly successful, reprinted in many editions and translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Swedish, Japanese and Hebrew. A radio series based on the Shayne character was heard during the 1940s.
July 31, 1919
Primo Michele Levi (31 July 1919 – 11 April 1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist and writer. He was the author of several books, novels, collections of short stories, essays, and poems. His best-known works include If This Is a Man (1947) (U.S.: Survival in Auschwitz), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and his unique work, The Periodic Table (1975), linked to qualities of the elements, which the Royal Institution of Great Britain named the best science book ever written. A chemist by training, Primo Levi (1919-87) was arrested as an anti-fascist partisan during World War Two, and deported to Auschwitz in 1944. His books include THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED, IF THIS IS A MAN and THE PERIODIC TABLE.
July 31, 1889
Frans Masereel (31 July 1889 – 3 January 1972) was a Flemish painter and graphic artist who worked mainly in France. He is known especially for his woodcuts. His greatest work is generally said to be the wordless novel Mon Livre d'Heures (Passionate Journey). He completed over 20 other wordless novels in his career. Masereel's woodcuts strongly influenced the work of Lynd Ward and later graphic artists such as Clifford Harper and Eric Drooker. There is a Frans Masereel Centre (Frans Masereel Centrum for Graphix) in the village of Kasterlee in Belgium.
July 31, 1959
Kim Newman is a novelist, critic and broadcaster. His fiction has been translated into many languages and he is a past recipient of, among others, the Horror Writers of America Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Critics' Guild Award for Best Novel. He is also the editor of The BFI Companion to Horror.
July 31, 1880
Premchand (31 July 1880 – 8 October 1936), better known as Munshi Premchand, Munshi being an honorary prefix, was an Indian writer famous for his modern Hindustani literature. He is one of the most celebrated writers of the Indian subcontinent, and is regarded as one of the foremost Hindustani writers of the early twentieth century. Born Dhanpat Rai Srivastav, he began writing under the pen name 'Nawab Rai', but subsequently switched to 'Premchand'. A novel writer, story writer and dramatist, he has been referred to as the 'Upanyas Samrat' ('Emperor among Novelists') by some Hindi writers. His works include more than a dozen novels, around 250 short stories, several essays and translations of a number of foreign literary works into Hindi.
July 31, 1965
Joanne ‘Jo’ Rowling, (born 31 July 1965), pen names J. K. Rowling and Robert Galbraith, is a British novelist best known as the author of the Harry Potter fantasy series.
July 31, 1936
Jorge Sanjinés (born 31 July 1936 in La Paz, Bolivia) is a Bolivian film director and screenwriter. He founded the production group Grupo Ukamau. He won the ALBA Prize for Arts in 2009. Jorge Sanjinés is known for his Marxist agenda, bringing highly political films of a revolutionary aesthetic to peasant and working-class audiences in the Andean highlands. The films that characterized the 'New Latin American Cinema' or Third Cinema provided an alternative to First (Capitalist) Cinema, making the social collective act as the protagonists of these films rather than an individual hero. The 1969 film Blood of the Condor (Yawar Mallku) by Sanjinés reveals the story of the undisclosed sterilization of Andean Indian women by a "Progress Corps" (standing in for the American Peace Corps) clinic. This film is thought to have led to the expulsion of the Peace Corps from Bolivia in an act of anti-imperialist cultural nationalism by the indigenous people. After showings of Yawar Mallku, Sanjinés learned that many peasants had criticism about the difficulty of his films due to the use of flashback for narration, as his film-making was greatly influenced by European art cinema, and about the lack of attention to denouncing the causes of the indigenous peoples' issues. He took this into account when making his next film, called El coraje del pueblo (The Courage of the People), in 1971. El coraje del pueblo worked with untrained actors, many of them peasants themselves. This marked the beginning of a stage in Sanjinés's career characterized by filming "with the people." His next film, El enemigo principal (1973) explores the effects of U.S. imperialism through the relationship between wealthy landowners and the indigenous peasant population. Jorge Sanjinés worked under strained film-making conditions, with limited funding, few production facilities, and little Bolivian movie tradition to draw upon.
July 31, 1932
John Rogers Searle (born 31 July 1932) is an American philosopher. He is currently Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language and Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. Widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy, he began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1959. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Searle was secretary of "Students against Joseph McCarthy". He received all his university degrees, BA, MA, and DPhil, from the University of Oxford, where he held his first faculty positions. Later, at UC Berkeley, he became the first tenured professor to join the 1964–1965 Free Speech Movement. In the late 1980s, Searle challenged the restrictions of Berkeley's 1980 rent stabilization ordinance. Following what came to be known as the California Supreme Court's "Searle Decision" of 1990, Berkeley changed its rent control policy, leading to large rent increases between 1991 and 1994. In 2000 Searle received the Jean Nicod Prize; in 2004, the National Humanities Medal; and in 2006, the Mind & Brain Prize. Searle's early work on speech acts, influenced by J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, helped establish his reputation. His notable concepts include the "Chinese room" argument against "strong" artificial intelligence. In March 2017, Searle was accused of sexual assault.
July 31, 1935
Theodore Weesner (July 31, 1935 – June 25, 2015) was an American author. Born in Flint, Michigan, he is best known for his coming-of-age debut novel, The Car Thief (1972). He subsequently wrote The True Detective (1987), Harbor Lights, Novemberfest, and other novels and short stories.
July 31, 1836
Vasily Sleptsov (1836-1878) wrote fiction for several magazines including Annals of the Fatherland, Russian Speech, and The Contemporary, where he published his novella Hard Times in 1865. He went on to found the magazine The Women’s Herald, established the Znamenskaya commune for women, and became an activist for women’s equality. Michael Katz is CV Starr Professor Emeritus at Middlebury College. He is the author of two monographs and is a renowned translator of Russian literature, and who has published English versions of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Chekhov. William Brumfield is professor of Slavic languages at Tulane University and has published extensively on mid-19th century Russian literature, with a special emphasis on Vasily Sleptsov.
July 31, 1915
Herbert Aptheker was born in New York in 1915, and spent over fifteen years in assembling the material for this work. He has written widely on many subjects, but has specialized in the history of the Negro people in the United States. Among his books are AMERICAN NEGRO SLAVE REVOLTS, ESSAYS IN THE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN NEGRO, THE NEGRO PEOPLE IN AMERICA, and TO BE FREE.
August 1, 1957
Madison Smartt Bell (born August 1, 1957 Nashville, Tennessee) is an American novelist. He is known for his trilogy of novels about Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, published 1995–2004. Raised in Nashville, Bell lived in New York, and London before settling in Baltimore, Maryland. He is a graduate of Princeton University, where he won the Ward Mathis Prize and the Francis Leymoyne Page award, and Hollins University, where he won the Andrew James Purdy fiction award. Bell has taught in various creative writing programs, including the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, and the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. Bell is married to the poet Elizabeth Spires and is a professor at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland. In addition, he has written essays and reviews for Harper's, The New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, The Village Voice. His papers are held at Princeton.
August 1, 1953
Jan Burke is an award-winning author of novels and short stories. She is a winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel. Burke was born 1 August 1953 in Houston, Texas, but has lived in Southern California most of her life. She comes from a close-knit family, and remains close to her parents, two sisters and a brother. Burke's husband is musician Tim Burke, whose bands include Downtight. She attended California State University, Long Beach, and graduated with a degree in history. She worked as a researcher on an oral history project interviewing ‘Rosie the Riveters.’ Later she became the manager of a manufacturing plant for a large corporation. She completed her first novel, Goodnight, Irene in the evenings after work. It was sold unagented and unsolicited to Simon & Schuster. She received a surprising boost from a new fan when, during his first White House interview after taking office, President Bill Clinton said he was reading Goodnight, Irene.
August 1, 1941
Frederick Busch (August 1, 1941 in Brooklyn, New York - February 23, 2006 in Manhattan, New York City) was an American writer. Busch was a master of the short story and one of America’s most prolific writers of fiction long and short. Busch graduated from Muhlenberg College and earned a master's degree from Columbia. He was professor emeritus of literature at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York from 1966 to 2003. He won numerous awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction Award in 1986 and the PEN/Malamud Award in 1991. He is the father of actor Benjamin Busch.
August 1, 1819
Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, poet, and writer of short stories. His works includes the whaling novel Moby-Dick (1851), Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853), Benito Cereno (1855), and Billy Budd, Sailor (1924).
August 1, 1949
Christopher Gilbert was born on August 1, 1949, in Birmingham, Alabama, the son of Floyd and Rosie (Walker) Gilbert. He grew up in Lansing, Michigan, and several of his poems describe his experiences growing up in that town, which was dominated by the automobile industry. Gilbert left Lansing, earning his bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan in 1972, then his master's degree and doctorate in psychology from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1975 and 1986 respectively. During the years in which he earned his education, Gilbert worked as a psychologist and psychotherapist, he did research, and he taught psychology. He worked as a staff psychologist and consultant at the Judge Baker Guidance Center in Boston and as a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He also served as staff psychologist at the Cambridge Family and Children's Services. At night, on weekends, and sometimes in the early morning, Gilbert wrote poetry. He was quoted in Contemporary Authors Online as saying: ‘Sometimes I wrote between breaths.’ Before long, Gilbert became a well-known figure in Boston and Cambridge poetry circles. He participated in Etheridge Knight's Free People's Poetry Workshops and wrote for the Little Apple, a Worcester journal of arts and literature. Many of his poems first appeared in the Worcester Review, published by the Worcester County Poetry Association. Gilbert's poetry collection, ACROSS THE MUTUAL LANDSCAPE, was awarded the 1983 Walt Whitman Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Awarded annually to poets who had not published a standard-edition poetry collection, the prize included both cash and publication by an Academy-selected press. The poems in ACROSS THE MUTUAL LANDSCAPE, or earlier versions, had been published previously in various periodicals including the American Literary Review, Black American Literature Forum, Dark Horse, Mother Jones, Nimrod, Obsidian, The Runner, Small Moon, Sunbury, Telephone, Umbral, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Graywolf Press in Port Townsend, Washington, with help from a Washington State Arts Commission grant, published ACROSS THE MUTUAL LANDSCAPE to good reviews. The poet Denise Levertov wrote for the book jacket: ‘Chris Gilbert's poems are dense with intellectual content and infused with lyrical imagination; his critique of society, his exploration of its interaction with his own soul or spirit, his elegiac celebrations of Robert Hayden or Muriel Rukeyser or invocations of jazz and its artists, don't form separate categories but flow in and out of one another.’.
August 1, 1923
Carter Brown was the literary pseudonym of Alan Geoffrey Yates (1 August 1923 – 5 May 1985), an English-born Australian writer of detective fiction. Born in England, Alan Geoffrey Yates (aka Carter Brown) married and settled in Australia in 1948. He began his working life as a film technician, a salesman and in public relations for Qantas before taking up writing full-time. Yates soon became a literary phenomenon. He wrote westerns under the pseudonym Todd Conway and science fiction under Paul Valdez. He even found the time to write books under various versions of his own name as well as other pseudonyms, Dennis Sinclair and Sinclair MacKellar. But it was his pseudonym Peter Carter Brown then later, Carter Brown ('Peter' was dropped for the US market) who was to become the international best-selling pulp fiction author. The extraordinary early success of Carter Brown in the 1950s meant that Yates was contracted to produce one short novel and two long novels each month. In reality, Yates was truly prolific with 322 published Carter Brown novels, including multiple series variously featuring protagonists Mike Farrell, Andy Kane, Mavis Seidlitz, Lt. Al Wheeler, Rick Holman, Danny Boyd, Larry Baker, Zelda Roxanne, et al. Yet despite the enormity of his output, a 1963 profile in Pix magazine revealed he approached deadlines 'with the reluctance of a long-distance swimmer shivering on the brink of a cold, grey English Channel. In the manic depressive moments of the third night without sleep – when the deadline is long past and the mental block has set solid as concrete, the writer inevitably descends into self-analysis. He knows, of course, that it will be no more help than the last Dexedrine tablet but still clings to the naïve hope that, somehow, sometime, he will find a way of avoiding the recurrence of his present hopeless situation.’ His books, originally published by Horwitz and Signet, were set in the United States and published throughout the Anglo-phone world. In its obituary for Yates in 1985, The New York Times noted that he had written 'some 30 detective novels with American backgrounds before ever having visited the United States ... He said he chose American settings because Australians preferred them.' A rumour spread at the height of his popularity that Yates was one of John F. Kennedy's favourite authors – a rumour which helped propel his sales even further in the North American market. The novels were also popular in Europe where they were translated into French, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Russian, Finnish, German, Portuguese, Romanian, Dutch. In Asia, some of the novels were translated into Thai and Japanese. Carter Brown's huge international success saw reportedly 120 million books in print, second only to The Bible in terms of the number of languages into which they were translated. The success of the books also spawned a comic book series, the 'Carter Brown Murder Mystery Hour' on radio, three French films, a Japanese TV series, and a French literary award for 'The most whiskies drunk in a single novel'. In the early 1980s, Yates and Richard O'Brien of The Rocky Horror Show fame wrote a musical of The Stripper, described in classic Carter Brown terminology as 'the girl who says it all from the neck down'. Yates died of a heart attack in 1985 in Sydney. In 1997, he was posthumously awarded a Ned Kelly, Australia's leading literary award for crime writing, for his lifelong contribution to the art.
August 1, 1954
James Gleick (born August 1, 1954) is an American author and historian of science whose work has chronicled the cultural impact of modern technology. Recognized for his writing about complex subjects through the techniques of narrative nonfiction, he has been called "one of the great science writers of all time". He is part of the inspiration for Jurassic Park character Ian Malcolm. Gleick's books include the international bestsellers Chaos: Making a New Science (1987) and The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (2011). Three of his books have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists; and The Information was awarded the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award in 2012 and the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books 2012. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages.
August 1, 1974
Ross Gay is assistant professor of English at Indiana University and author of the poetry collection Against Which. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Margie: The American Journal of Poetry, Ploughshares, and Sou'wester, among other publications. Gay also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Drew University and is a Cave Canem fellow.
August 1, 1815
Richard Henry Dana Jr. (August 1, 1815 – January 6, 1882) was an American lawyer and politician from Massachusetts, a descendant of an eminent colonial family, who gained renown as the author of the American classic, the memoir Two Years Before the Mast. Both as a writer and as a lawyer, he was a champion of the downtrodden, from seamen to fugitive slaves.
August 1, 1956
Kate Duke (August 1, 1956, New York City, NY - April 20, 2014, New Haven, CT) was a children’s author and illustrator known for her playful concept books starring an affable cast of guinea pigs. Kate said that reading was a favorite pastime all through childhood, and in an interview for Something About the Author noted that Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy was a fictional character she modeled, right down to keeping tabs on the people in her neighborhood. I think I owe Harriet my first conscious awareness of the act of writing as important and meaningful work, she said. When Duke was not in her home studio or garden, she kept a busy schedule of school visits. These occasions are a chance to get in touch with my books’ intended audience and to recharge my memories of what it was like to be a child, she told Something About the Author. I don’t have children of my own, so it’s a real treat to be able to interact with them once in a while. I’m always cheered and inspired by their energy and imagination. Plus, they laugh at my jokes!"
August 1, 1942
Jerome John 'Jerry' Garcia (August 1, 1942 – August 9, 1995) was an American musician who was best known for his lead guitar work, singing and songwriting with the band the Grateful Dead, which came to prominence during the counterculture era. Though he disavowed the role, Garcia was viewed by many as the leader or 'spokesman' of the group. One of its founders, Garcia performed with the Grateful Dead for their entire thirty-year career (1965–1995). Garcia also founded and participated in a variety of side projects, including the Saunders-Garcia Band (with longtime friend Merl Saunders), the Jerry Garcia Band, Old and in the Way, the Garcia/Grisman acoustic duo, Legion of Mary, and the New Riders of the Purple Sage (which Garcia co-founded with John Dawson and David Nelson). He also released several solo albums, and contributed to a number of albums by other artists over the years as a session musician. He was well known by many for his distinctive guitar playing and was ranked 13th in Rolling Stone's '100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time' cover story. Later in life, Garcia was sometimes ill because of his diabetes, and in 1986 went into a diabetic coma that nearly cost him his life. Although his overall health improved somewhat after that, he also struggled with heroin and cocaine addictions, and was staying in a California drug rehabilitation facility when he died of a heart attack in August 1995.
August 1, 1930
Geoffrey Lamont Holder (August 1, 1930 – October 5, 2014) was a Trinidadian-American actor, voice actor, dancer, choreographer, singer, director and painter. He was known for his height (6 ft 6 in, 1.98 m), "hearty laugh", and heavily accented bass voice combined with precise diction. He is particularly remembered as the villain Baron Samedi in the 1973 Bond-movie Live and Let Die and for his 7 Up commercials of the 1970s and 80s.
August 1, 1951
Janice M. Irvine is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of Disorders of Desire: Sex and Gender in Modern American Sexology (1990).
August 1, 1933
Ko Un is author of Beyond Self: 108 Korean Zen Poems and The Sound of My Waves: Selected Poems of Ko Un as well as more than 100 volumes of poetry, short stories, fiction, criticism, essays, and children’s literature, many of which have been best-sellers. His many awards include the Korean Literary Writers Award, Manhae Literary Award, and the Daesan Literary Award.
August 2, 1942
Isabel Allende (born 2 August 1942) is a Chilean writer. Allende, whose works sometimes contain aspects of the ‘magic realist‘ tradition, is famous for novels such as The House of the Spirits (La casa de los espíritus, 1982) and City of the Beasts (La ciudad de las bestias, 2002), which have been commercially successful.
August 2, 1924
JAMES BALDWIN was born in New York City on August 2, 1924. He was the first of nine children and grew up in Harlem where his father was a minister. For six years, after his graduation from high school in 1942, he found work in a variety of minor jobs. When he was twenty-four he left for Europe and lived there almost ten years. During this time, he wrote his first three books: GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, and GIOVANNI’S ROOM. They firmly established him as one of America’s outstanding young writers. In 1937, he returned to New York. , where he lived when not on one of his frequent trips abroad. In 1961, Mr. Baldwin’s fourth book, the collection of brilliant essays entitled NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, brought him broad public recognition as well as distinguished critical attention. Perhaps the most meaningful book ever to discuss being Negro in America, NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME was the recipient of numerous awards and a devoted following. The following year brought similar acclaim for his best-selling novel, ANOTHER COUNTRY. In 1963, the prophetic THE FIRE NEXT TIME jolted both the critical world and the bookbuying public. Instantly acclaimed, as Granville Hick said, as ‘a great document of our times, in literary power as well as in strength of feeling and clarity of insight,’ the book rushed to the top of all the best-seller lists. James Baldwin is also the author of three plays. The first, THE AMEN CORNER, was originally produced at Howard University. It had a long and successful run in Los Angeles, later opened on Broadway in 1965, and, as GOING TO MEET THE MAN was published, another production toured the world under the auspices of the State Department. A dramatization of GIOVANNI’S ROOM was staged by the Actor’s Studio workshop. In 1964, his BLUES FOR MR. CHARLEY opened off Broadway and was published simultaneously in book form. Like THE AMEN CORNER, it has been produced throughout this country and Europe.
August 2, 1949
Bei Dao (born August 2, 1949) is the pen name of Chinese poet Zhao Zhenkai. He was born in Beijing. He chose the pen name because he came from the north and because of his preference for solitude. Bei Dao is the most notable representative of the Misty Poets, a group of Chinese poets who reacted against the restrictions of the Cultural Revolution.
August 2, 1930
Fielding Dawson (August 2, 1930 – January 5, 2002) was a beat-era author of short stories and novels, a student of the Black Mountain College. He was also a painter & collagist whose works were seen in several books of poetry & many literary magazines. Born in New York City, Dawson was known for his stream-of-consciousness style before the term was coined. Much of his work was lax in punctuation to emphasize the immediacy of thought. Additionally, dialogue would often be used to break this up. Though conversational, much of his dialogue could often halt the metre while still staying on track. His lack of deference toward tradition in writing, other than that of the necessity to evoke humanity, often painfully raw, is what puts him in the category of many of his better-known contemporaries, such as Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg. Dawson was still writing up until his unexpected death in January 2002, but by then had made his name known outside of the strictly literary world. He had become a teacher, first in prisons like Sing Sing, and continuing on to work with at-risk students at Upward Bound High School in Hartwick, New York. He wrote often of his experiences in prisons without regret but not without concern. He expected truth in the work of his students, and as disturbing as that could often be, he refused to look away. This passion for reality ran through his life and work.
August 2, 1884
Rómulo Ángel del Monte Carmelo Gallegos Freire (2 August 1884 – 7 April 1969) was a Venezuelan novelist and politician. For a period of some nine months during 1948, he was the first cleanly elected president in his country's history. Rómulo Gallegos was born in Caracas to Rómulo Gallegos Osío and Rita Freire Guruceaga, into a family of humble origin. He began his work as a schoolteacher, writer, and journalist in 1903. His novel Doña Bárbara was first published 1929, and it was because of the book's criticisms of the regime of longtime dictator Juan Vicente Gómez that he was forced to flee the country. He took refuge in Spain, where he continued to write: his acclaimed novels Cantaclaro (1934) and Canaima (1935) date from this period. He returned to Venezuela in 1936 and was appointed Minister of Public Education. In 1937 he was elected to Congress and, in 1940–41, served as councillor of Caracas. In 1945, was involved in the coup d'état that brought Rómulo Betancourt and the ‘Revolutionary Government Junta’ to power, in the period known as El Trienio Adeco. In the 1947 general election he ran for the presidency of the republic as the Acción Democrática candidate and won in what is generally believed to be the country's first honest election.
August 2, 1942
Nell Irvin Painter (born Nell Irvin, 1942) is an American historian notable for her works on southern history of the nineteenth century. She is retired from Princeton University, and served as president of the Organization of American Historians. She also served as president of the Southern Historical Association. She was born Nell Irvin to Dona and Frank E. Irvin, Sr. She had an older brother Frank who died young. Her family moved from Houston, Texas, to Oakland, California when she was ten weeks old. This was part of the second wave of the Great Migration of millions of African Americans from the Deep South to urban centers. Some of their relatives had been in California since the 1920s. The Irvins went to California in the 1940s with the pull of increasing jobs in the defense industry. Nell attended the Oakland Public Schools. Her mother Dona Irvin held a degree from Houston College for Negroes (1937), and later taught in the public schools of Oakland. Her father had to drop out of college in 1937 during the Great Depression; he eventually trained for work as a laboratory technician. He worked for years at the University of California at Berkeley, where he trained many students in lab techniques. Painter earned her B.A. - Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964. During her undergraduate years, she studied French medieval history at the University of Bordeaux, France, 1962–63. She also studied abroad at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, 1965–66. In 1967, she completed an M.A. at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1974, she earned an M.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard University. She returned to study and earned a B.F.A. at Rutgers University in 2009. Painter has received honorary degrees from Dartmouth College, Wesleyan University, and Yale University, among other institutions.
August 2, 1950
Carl Valdemar Jussi Henry Adler-Olsen (born August 2, 1950) is a Danish writer of crime fiction, as well as a publisher, editor and entrepreneur. Jussi Adler-Olsen made his debut as a non-fiction writer in 1984, and as a fiction writer in 1997. Born in Copenhagen, he was the youngest of four children and the only boy. Son of the successful sexologist and psychiatrist Henry Olsen, he spent his childhood with his family in doctors' official residences at several mental hospitals across Denmark. In his late teens, he played in a couple of pop groups as lead guitarist. He graduated from high school in Rødovre (1970), and studied medicine, sociology (passed History of Modern Politics) and film making (exam.art.) until 1978. After a manager career, he began to write full-time in 1995. Adler-Olsen's novels have been sold in more than 40 languages. Outside of Denmark he has enjoyed particular success in Norway, Germany and the Netherlands being a frequent visitor on the top of the bestseller lists e.g. on the New York Times Paperback bestseller list. Adler-Olsen's books have been on the bestseller lists in numerous other countries including Austria, Iceland, France, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.
August 2, 1955
Caleb Carr (born August 2, 1955) is an American novelist and military historian. A son of Lucien Carr, a former UPI editor and a key Beat generation figure, he was born in Manhattan and lived for much of his life on the Lower East Side. He attended New York Friends Seminary, Kenyon College and New York University, earning a B.A. in military and diplomatic history. He writes frequently on military and political affairs and was a contributing editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History until 2008. He currently resides in upstate New York on a farm estate called 'Misery Mountain' in the town of Berlin, New York, in Rensselaer County. Carr ran as a Democrat for the Rensselaer County Legislature in 2005 but came in fourth of four candidates.
August 2, 1951
Edward Belbruno is President of Innovative Orbital Design, visiting research collaborator in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University, and a consultant on advanced astrodynamics with NASA. He is the author of Capture Dynamics and Chaotic Motions in Celestial Mechanics (Princeton).
August 2, 1949
James Mackenzie Fallows (born August 2, 1949) is an American writer and journalist. He has been a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly for many years. His work has also appeared in Slate, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and The American Prospect, among others. He is a former editor of U.S. News & World Report, and as President Jimmy Carter's chief speechwriter for two years was the youngest person ever to hold that job. Fallows has been a visiting professor at a number of universities in the U.S. and China, and holds the Chair in U.S. Media at the United States Studies Centre at University of Sydney. He is the author of eleven books, including National Defense, for which he received the 1983 National Book Award, Looking at the Sun (1994), Breaking the News (1996), Blind into Baghdad (2006), Postcards from Tomorrow Square (2009), China Airborne (2012), and Our Towns (2018).
August 2, 1946
Kenji Nakagami (August 2, 1946 - August 12, 1992) was born in 1946 in Shingu, a coastal town in the Kumano region of eastern Japan. His parents belonged to a class of social outcasts, and he was raised within an ever-changing family circle of stepfathers, stepbrothers and half sisters. His teenage years were overshadowed by the suicide of his older brother. At nineteen he traveled to Tokyo where he started to publish short stories and reviews, supporting himself with a series of manual labor jobs. The first of his works to make an impact was Misaki ("The Cape"), a highly charged account of life in the Shingu ghetto. In 1977 he firmly established his reputation with Karekinada ("The Sea of Dead Trees"), which was widely hailed as a masterpiece. He later returned to Kumano and worked tirelessly to promote the arts and folklore of Kumano and to restore pride in its oppressed minority. His prolific output included the short-story collections Juryoku no miyako ("Gravity's Capital," 1981), Kumano-shu ("The Kumano Collection," 1982) and the novels Kiseki ("Miracles," 1988) and Sanka ("Paean," 1989). Kenji Nakagami died in 1992, aged forty-six. The Translator: Andrew Rankin, an Englishman, studied at the universities of Cambridge, London and Tokyo and lived in Japan for eight years.
August 2, 1906
Vincent Lushington "Roi" Ottley (August 2, 1906-October 2, 1960) was an American journalist and writer. Although largely forgotten today, he was among the most famous African American correspondents in the United States during the mid-20th century.Ottley was born in New York City on August 2, 1906, to Jerome Peter and Beatrice Ottley, the second of their three children. He attended public schools in the city, and in 1926 went to St. Bonaventure College in Allegany, New York. From 1928 he studied journalism at the University of Michigan. He later studied part-time at St. John's Law School and Columbia University, both in New York City. Ottley worked for the Amsterdam News from 1931 to 1937. In 1943 he published New World A-Coming: Inside Black America, which described life for African Americans in Harlem, New York City, in the 1920s and 1930s. The book won the Life in America prize, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and a Peabody Award, and was adapted for radio. During World War II Ottley reported from Europe for Liberty Magazine, PM, and the Pittsburgh Courier. He later worked for the Chicago Tribune, and for CBS and BBC radio. Ottley's other published works include Black Odyssey: The Story of the Negro in America, 1948; No Green Pastures, 1951; and Lonely Warrior: The Life and Times of Robert S. Abbot, 1955. Two were published posthumously: White Marble Lady in 1965, and The Negro in New York: An Informal Social History, 1626–1940 in 1967. Ottley died on October 2, 1960 from a heart attack.
August 2, 1878
Sir Richard Olaf Winstedt KBE CMG (2 August 1878 – 2 June 1966), or more commonly R. O. Winstedt, was an English Orientalist and colonial administrator with expertise in British Malaya. Winstedt was born in Oxford and educated at Magdalen College School and New College, Oxford, from which he received an MA. His brother was Eric Otto Winstedt, a Latinist and gypsiologist. In 1902 he became a cadet in the Federated Malay States Civil Service, and was posted to Perak where he studied Malay language and culture. In 1913 he was appointed District Officer in Kuala Pilah, and in 1916 appointed to the Education Department. In 1920 he received his DLitt degree from Oxford. He served as the first President of Raffles College, Singapore, 1928–1931. During his presidency, he also served as acting Secretary to the High Commissioner, 1923, Director of Education for Straits Settlements and Federated Malay States (FMS), as a member of Legislative Council, Straits Settlements, 1924–1931 and as a member of the FMS Federal Council, 1927–1931. He was president of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1927, 1929 and 1931. After a term as General Adviser to Johore, 1931–1935, Winstedt retired from the Malayan Civil Service. He returned to England and was appointed Lecturer, then Reader, and ultimately Honorary Fellow, in Malay at the School of Oriental Studies in London, where he also served as a member of the Governing Body, 1939–1959. During World War II, he broadcast in Malay to Japanese-occupied Malaya. He retired from active teaching in 1946. Winstedt served on numerous boards and advisory groups, most notably at the Royal Asiatic Society in London, of which he was repeatedly the president and a Gold Medallist in 1947. Other organisations included the Association of British Malaya, of which he was president in 1938, the Colonial Office Advisory Committee on Education, 1936–1939, and the Royal India Society. He was a Fellow of the British Academy, an Honorary Member of the Southeast Asia Institute, the Royal Batavian Society, and the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde.
August 3, 1909
Walter Van Tilburg Clark (August 3, 1909 — November 10, 1971) was an American novelist, short story writer, and educator. He ranks as one of Nevada's most distinguished literary figures of the 20th century and is known primarily for his novels and short stories. As a writer, he taught himself to use the familiar materials of the western saga to explore the human psyche and to raise deep philosophical issues.
August 3, 1943
Steven Millhauser (born August 3, 1943) is an American novelist and short story writer. He won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel Martin Dressler. The prize brought many of his older books back into print. Millhauser was born in New York City, grew up in Connecticut, and earned a B.A. from Columbia University in 1965. He then pursued a doctorate in English at Brown University. He never completed his dissertation but wrote parts of Edwin Mullhouse and From the Realm of Morpheus in two separate stays at Brown. Between times at the university, he wrote Portrait of a Romantic at his parents' house in Connecticut. His story ‘The Invention of Robert Herendeen’ (in The Barnum Museum) features a failed student who has moved back in with his parents; the story is loosely based on this period of Millhauser's life. Until the Pulitzer Prize, Millhauser was best known for his 1972 debut novel, Edwin Mullhouse. This novel, about a precocious writer whose career ends abruptly with his death at age eleven, features the fictional Jeffrey Cartwright playing Boswell to Edwin's Johnson. Edwin Mullhouse brought critical acclaim, and Millhauser followed with a second novel, Portrait of a Romantic, in 1977, and his first collection of short stories, In The Penny Arcade, in 1986. Possibly the most well-known of his short stories is ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’, based on a pseudo-mythical tale of a magician who stunned audiences in Vienna in the latter part of the 19th century. It was made into the film, The Illusionist (2006). Millhauser's stories often treat fantasy themes in a manner reminiscent of Poe or Borges, with a distinctively American voice. As critic Russell Potter has noted, ‘in (Millhauser's stories), mechanical cowboys at penny arcades come to life; curious amusement parks, museums, or catacombs beckon with secret passageways and walking automata; dreamers dream and children fly out their windows at night on magic carpets.’ Millhauser's collections of stories continued with The Barnum Museum (1990), Little Kingdoms (1993), and The Knife Thrower and Other Stories (1998). The unexpected success of Martin Dressler in 1997 brought Millhauser increased attention. Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories made the New York Times Book Review list of ‘10 Best Books of 2008’ . Millhauser lives in Saratoga Springs, New York and teaches at Skidmore College.
August 3, 1936
Athan George Theoharis (born August 3, 1936 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin) is an American historian, professor of history emeritus at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As well as his extensive teaching career, he is noteworthy as an expert on the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, and U.S. intelligence agencies, having written and edited a large number of books on these and related subjects.
August 3, 1915
Martin Moritz Thomsen Titus (1915–1991), known as Moritz Thomsen, was an American writer, farmer and Peace Corps volunteer. He worked and wrote in the small town of Rio Verde, Ecuador. His books have been praised by writers such as Paul Theroux, Thomas Cahill and Larry McMurtry.
August 3, 1937
Diane Wakoski (born August 3, 1937) is an American poet. Wakoski is primarily associated with the deep image poets, as well as the confessional and Beat poets of the 1960s. She received considerable attention in the 1980s for controversial comments linking New Formalism with Reaganism. Wakoski was born in Whittier, California and studied at the University of California, Berkeley and graduated in 1960 with a Bachelor of Arts, where she participated in Thom Gunn's poetry workshops. It was there that she first read many of the modernist poets who would influence her writing style. Her early writings were considered part of the deep image movement that also included the works of Jerome Rothenberg, Robert Kelly, and Clayton Eshleman, among others. She also cites William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski as influences. Her poetry career began in New York City, where she moved with La Monte Young in 1960, and lived until 1973. Her later work is more personal and conversational in the Williams mode. Wakoski is married to the photographer Robert Turney, and is University Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. Wakoski's literary works have been recognized and highlighted at Michigan State University in their Michigan Writers Series. Her work has been published in more than twenty collections and many slim volumes of poetry. Her selected poems, Emerald Ice, won the William Carlos Williams Prize from the Poetry Society of America in 1989. She is best known for a series of poems collectively known as "The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems." Many of her books have been published in fine editions by Black Sparrow Press.
August 3, 1945
Heike Doutine was born in Thuringia (East Germany) in 1945. She started writing poetry while still in elementary school and published her first volume of poems at nineteen. She now lives in Hamburg where she studied at the University of Hamburg and later worked as a free-lance journalist. She is married and has a small son. Heike Doutine’s novels have already earned her a European reputation, but GERMAN REQUIEM (published in German under the title WANKE NICHT MEIN VATERLAND) is the first to be translated into English.
August 3, 1944
Peter Charles Hoffer is a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Georgia, where he has taught since 1978. He teaches and writes on early American history, legal history, and historical methods. A graduate student of Bernard Bailyn while at Harvard University, Hoffer has also taught at Ohio State University, the University of Notre Dame, and Brooklyn College.
August 3, 1926
Roger George Kennedy (August 3, 1926 – September 30, 2011) was an American polymath whose career included banking, television production, historical writing, and museum administration, the last as director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, before the Clinton administration selected him to head the National Park Service in 1993.
August 3, 1932
Marco Antonio Montes de Oca (August 3, 1932 - February 7, 2009) was a Mexican poet and painter. Montes de Oca was a prolific and influential poet whose principal books include: Ruina de la infame Babilonia (1953), and Delante de la luz cantan los pájaros (1959), which won the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize. He also wrote a self-titled memoir in 1967, and a book of short stories Las fuentes legendarias (1966), and also dedicated a lot of time to painting and sculpturing. Some of Montes de Oca's poetry was translated into English by Laura Villaseñor, including the books: The heart of the flute in 1978 (with an introduction by Octavio Paz), and Twenty-One Poems in 1982. He died of a heart attack in Mexico City on February 7, 2009.
August 3, 1920
Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park (3 August 1920 – 27 November 2014), known as P. D. James, was an English crime writer. She rose to fame for her series of detective novels starring police commander and poet Adam Dalgliesh.
August 3, 1972
Tore Renberg (born August 3, 1972) made his literary debut in 1995 with the collection of short prose Sovende floke (Sleeping Tangle) for which he won the prestigious Tarjei Vesaas' Debutant Prize. Since then he has written several novels and children's books, one collection of prose and made one book of collages. In 2004 he was selected one of the ten best writers in Norway under 35 by the Norwegian Festival of Literature and the influential weekly newspaper Morgenbladet. Enthusiastically received by critics in both Norway and Sweden, the novel Mannen som elsket Yngve (The Man Who Loved Yngve) (2003) was also Renberg’s definite mainstream breakthrough. So far the novel has sold 120.000 copies in Norway. Its loose sequel Kompani Orheim (The Orheim Company) (2005) was received equally well and won Norway’s most prestigious readers’ prize, the NRK P2 Listener’s Prize, and was nominated for the Brage Prize. In 2006, Renberg published the two short novels Farmor har kabel-TV / Videogutten (Grandma's Got Cable TV / Video Boy) in one volume. Renberg then wrote the script for the film version of The Man Who Loved Yngve, which was an instant success when it appeared in Norwegian cinemas in 2008, selling more than 174.000 tickets. The film eventually won four Amanda prizes, including the prize for best Norwegian film, and was nominated for the Nordic Council Film Prize. In November 2008 the film won the award for best film at the Nordic film festival in Lübeck, Germany. A short film based on Video Boy will appear on the big screen in 2011-2012. The third book in the series of freestanding novels about Jarle Klepp, Charlotte Isabel Hansen, was released in 2008, again to critical acclaim. A great success among bookreaders, it won the Norwegian Booksellers' Prize the same autumn and was made into a film in 2011, once again with Renberg as the script writer. Renberg's second novel about Jarle Klepp, Kompani Orheim, was made into a film in 2012. During the 90s Renberg distinguished himself as a literary critic, working in the literary magazine Vagant and hosting the literary television programme Leseforeningen on NRK. In addition to writing the film script for The Man who Loved Yngve, he has written the script for the movie 'Alt for Egil' (2004). Renberg is also a musician, and has played in a number of bands.
August 4, 1792
Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822) was one of the major English Romantic poets, and is regarded by some critics as amongst the finest lyric poets in the English language. A radical in his poetry as well as his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition for his poetry grew steadily following his death.
August 4, 1904
Witold Marian Gombrowicz (August 4, 1904 in Maloszyce, near Kielce, Congress Poland, Russian Empire - July 24, 1969 in Vence, near Nice, France) was a Polish novelist and dramatist. His works are characterized by deep psychological analysis, a certain sense of paradox and an absurd, anti-nationalist flavor. In 1937 he published his first novel, Ferdydurke, which presented many of his usual themes: the problems of immaturity and youth, the creation of identity in interactions with others, and an ironic, critical examination of class roles in Polish society and culture. He gained fame only during the last years of his life but is now considered one of the foremost figures of Polish literature. Gombrowicz was born in Maloszyce, in Congress Poland, Russian Empire to a wealthy gentry family. He was the youngest of four children of Jan and Antonina (née Kotkowska.) In 1911 his family moved to Warsaw. After completing his education at Saint Stanislaus Kostka’s Gymnasium in 1922, he studied law at Warsaw University (in 1927 he obtained a master’s degree in law.) He spent a year in Paris where, he studied at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Internationales. He was less than diligent in his studies, but his time in France brought him in constant contact with other young intellectuals. He also visited the Mediterranean. When he returned to Poland he began applying for legal positions with little success. In the 1920s he started writing, but soon rejected the legendary novel, whose form and subject matter were supposed to manifest his ‘worse’ and darker side of nature. Similarly, his attempt to write a popular novel in collaboration with Tadeusz Kepinski turned out to be a failure. At the turn of the 20’s and 30’s he started to write short stories, which were later printed under the title Memoirs Of A Time Of Immaturity. From the moment of this literary debut, his reviews and columns started appearing in the press, mainly in the ‘Kurier Poranny (Morning Courier). He met with other young writers and intellectuals forming an artistic café society in ‘Zodiak’ and ‘Ziemianska’, both in Warsaw. The publication of Ferdydurke, his first novel, brought him acclaim in literary circles. Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Gombrowicz took part in the maiden voyage of the famous Polish cruise liner, Chrobry, to South America. When he found out about the outbreak of war in Europe, he decided to wait in Buenos Aires till the war was over but was actually to stay there until 1963 - often, especially during the war, in great poverty. At the end of the 40s Gombrowicz was trying to gain a position among Argentine literary circles by publishing articles, giving lectures in Fray Mocho café, and finally, by publishing in 1947, a Spanish translation of Ferdydurke written with the help of Gombrowicz’s friends. Today, this version of the novel is considered to be a significant literary event in the history of Argentine literature; however, when published it did not bring any great renown to the author, nor did the publication of Gombrowicz’s drama ‘Slub’ in Spanish (‘The Wedding’, ‘El Casamiento’) in 1948. From December 1947 to May 1955 Gombrowicz worked as a bank clerk in Banco Polaco, the Argentine branch of PeKaO SA Bank. In 1950 he started exchanging letters with Jerzy Giedroyc and from 1951 he started having works published in the Parisian journal ‘Culture,’ where, in 1953, fragments of ‘Dziennik’ (‘Diaries’) appeared. In the same year he published a volume of work which included the drama ‘Slub’ (‘The Wedding’) and the novel ‘Trans-Atlantyk’, where the subject of national identity on emigration was controversially raised. After October 1956 four books written by Gombrowicz appeared in Poland and they brought him great renown despite the fact that the authorities did not allow the publication of ‘Dziennik’ (‘Diaries’), and later organized a slanderous campaign against Gombrowicz in 1963 who was then staying in West Berlin. In the 1960s Gombrowicz became recognized globally and many of his works were translated, including ‘Pornografia’ (‘Pornography’) and ‘Kosmos’ (‘Cosmos’.) His dramas were staged in many theatres all around the world, especially in France, Germany and Sweden. In 1963 he returned to Europe, where he received a scholarship from the Ford Foundation during his stay in Berlin, and in 1964 he spent three months in Royaumont abbey near Paris, where he employed Rita Labrosse, a Canadian from Montreal who studied contemporary literature, as his secretary. In 1964 he moved to Vence near Nice in the south of France, where he spent the rest of his life. There he enjoyed the fame which culminated in May 1967 with the International Publishers Prize (Prix Formentor) and six months before his death, married Rita Labrosse. Gombrowicz wrote in Polish, however, in view of his decision not to allow his works to be published in his native country until the ban on the unabridged version of ‘Dziennik’, in which he described the Polish authorities slanderous attacks on him, was lifted he remained a largely unknown figure to the general reading public until the first half of the 1970s. Despite this, his works were printed in Polish by the Paris Literary Institute of Jerzy Giedroyc and translated into more than 30 languages. Morover, his dramas were repeatedly staged in the most important theatres in the whole world by the prominent directors such as: Jorge Lavelli, Alf Sjoeberg, Ingmar Bergman along with Jerzy Jarocki and Jerzy Grzegorzewski in Poland.
August 4, 1859
KNUT HAMSUN was born in 1859 in the Gudbransdal Valley of central Norway, and died in 1952, at the age of ninety-three. In 1920 he was awarded the Nobel Prize.
August 4, 1951
Stephen Kinzer (born August 4, 1951) is an American author, journalist and academic. He was a New York Times correspondent, has published several books, and currently writes for several newspapers and news agencies.
August 4, 1934
Rutger Kopland (born Rudi van den Hoofdakker) (4 August 1934, Goor – 11 July 2012, Glimmen) was a Dutch poet who gained great popularity for his "accessible, thoughtful style, his mild irony, his sentimentality" and whose collections sold over 200,000 copies.
August 4, 1965
DENNIS LEHANE’S A DRINK BEFORE THE WAR won the Shamus Award presented by the Private Eye Writers of America for Best Private Investigator First Novel and vas a Boston Globe best-seller. Lehane was born and raised in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and still lives in the Boston area. He holds an M.F.A. in creative writing.
August 4, 1912
Virgilio Piñera Llera (Cárdenas, Cuba, August 4, 1912 – Havana, October 18, 1979) was a Cuban author, playwright, poet, short-story writer, and essayist. Among his most famous poems are 'La isla en peso' (1943), and 'La gran puta' (1960). He was a member of the 'Origenes' literary group, although he often differed with the conservative views of the group. In the late 1950s he co-founded the literary journal Ciclón. Following a long exile in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Piñera returned to Cuba in 1958, months before the Cuban Revolutionary won. His work includes essays on literature and literary criticism, several collections of short stories compiled under the title of Cold Tales, a great number of dramatic works, and three novels: La carne de René (Rene's Flesh), Presiones y Diamantes (Pressures and Diamonds), and Las pequeñas maniobras (Small Maneuvers). His work is seen today as a model by new generations of Cuban and Latin American writers. Some believe that his work influenced that of Reinaldo Arenas, who wrote in his memoir Before Night Falls of Piñera's time in Argentina and friendship there with Witold Gombrowicz. The magazine Unión posthumously published autobiographical writing by Piñera in which he discussed how he concluded he was gay. However, his work can not be reduced to his open discussions on homosexuality in a time when such a topic was taboo, especially in the Spanish Caribbean. Piñera's literary and cultural perspective went beyond sexuality, to express concerns on national and continental identity, philosophical approaches to theater, writing and politics. This focus drew fire from the Spanish American literary establishment of his time, including Cuban poets Cintio Vitier and Roberto Fernandez Retamar, and leaders like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Due to Piñera's social points of view and especially to his homosexuality, he was censured by the revolution, and died without any official recognition. As more of his work has been translated into English, Piñera's work has been rediscovered by American academia as a testimony of 20th century resistance against totalitarian systems.
August 4, 1950
Ramona Lofton (born August 4, 1950), better known by her pen name Sapphire, is an American author and performance poet. Ramona Lofton was born in Fort Ord, California, one of four children of an army couple who relocated within the United States and abroad. After a disagreement concerning where the family would settle, her parents separated, with Lofton's mother "kind of abandoning them". Lofton dropped out of high school and moved to San Francisco, where she attained a GED and enrolled at the City College of San Francisco before dropping out to become a "hippie". In the mid-1970s Lofton attended the City College of New York and obtained an MFA degree at Brooklyn College. Lofton held various jobs before starting her writing career, working as a performance artist as well as a teacher of reading and writing. Lofton moved to New York City in 1977 and became heavily involved with poetry. She also became a member of a gay organization named United Lesbians of Color for Change Inc. She wrote, performed and eventually published her poetry during the height of the Slam Poetry movement in New York. Lofton took the name "Sapphire" because of its one-time cultural association with the image of a "belligerent black woman," and also because she said she could more easily picture that name on a book cover than her birth name. Sapphire self-published the collection of poems Meditations on the Rainbow in 1987. As Cheryl Clarke notes, Sapphire's 1994 book of poems, American Dreams is often erroneously referred to as her first book. One critic referred to it as "one of the strongest debut collections of the 1990s". Her first novel, Push, was unpublished before being discovered by literary agent Charlotte Sheedy, whose interest created demand and eventually led to a bidding war. Sapphire submitted the first 100 pages of Push to a publisher auction in 1995 and the highest bidder offered her $500,000 to finish the novel. The book was published in 1996 by Vintage Publishing and has since sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Sapphire noted in an interview with William Powers that "she noticed Push for sale in one of the Penn Station bookstores, and that moment it struck her she was no longer a creature of the tiny world of art magazines and homeless-shelters from which she came". The novel brought Sapphire praise and much controversy for its graphic account of a young woman growing up in a cycle of incest and abuse. A film based on her novel premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2009. It was renamed Precious to avoid confusion with the 2009 action film Push. The cast included Gabourey Sidibe, Mo'Nique, who won the Academy Award for her portrayal of Precious' mother Mary, Mariah Carey, and Lenny Kravitz. Sapphire herself appears briefly in the film as a daycare worker. Sapphire's writing was the subject of an academic symposium at Arizona State University in 2007. In 2009 she was the recipient of a Fellow Award in Literature from United States Artists. Sapphire has focused on bringing to light the parts of life that do not receive attention. In her words, A major focus of my art has been my determination to reconnect to the mainstream of human life a segment of humanity that has been cast off and made invisible. I have brought into the public gaze women who have been marginalized by sexual abuse, poverty, and their blackness. Through art I have sought to center them in the world.
August 4, 1922
Sheldon S. Wolin (August 4, 1922 – October 21, 2015) was an American political theorist and writer on contemporary politics. A political theorist for fifty years, Wolin became Professor of Politics, Emeritus, at Princeton University, where he taught from 1973 to 1987. During a teaching career which spanned more than forty years, Wolin also taught at University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Santa Cruz, Oberlin College, Oxford University, Cornell University, and University of California, Los Angeles. He was a great teacher of undergraduate and particularly graduate students, serving as a mentor to many students who themselves became prominent scholars and teachers of political theory. Wolin’s books include Politics and Vision and Tocqueville between Two Worlds (both Princeton). .
August 4, 1941
Gordon Jarvie was born on August 4, 1941 in Edinburgh and educated at Trinity College Dublin and the University of Sussex, where he gained an MPhil in 1968. He has worked as a teacher and editor at Purdue University in the USA, as well as for publishers such as Collins and Oxford University Press. In the 1990s, he began to focus more on his poetry, and has since published two collections, Ayrshire Recessional (1998) and Time’s Traverse: Poems 1991–2001 (2002) and several pamphlets. Although most of Jarvie’s poetry is written in English, he has also produced work in Scots. His poems have appeared in Lallans, Poetry Scotland, The Herald, Northwords Now and Scottish Poetry in Translation among others. More recently, he has collected his work in thematically focused volumes, such as Climber’s Calendar (Loose Scree, 2007), containing his hill poems, and the collection of Breton poetry, La Baudunais (Les Hauts-Fonds, 2009), his Fife poetry in Out and About Poetry Mainly from the East Neuk, Fife (2012), and his Irish poetry in Bessy Bell and Other Irish Intersections (2013). For the National Museums Scotland, Jarvie edited the ‘Scottie Books’ series with his wife Frances, including Robert Burns in Time and Place (2009) and There Shall Be a Scottish Parliament (2013). Jarvie is also the editor of several poetry anthologies, including The Scottish Reciter (Blackstaff Press, 1993), The Kist Anthology (Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum, 1996), and 100 Favourite Scottish Poems to Read Out Loud (Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2007). As well as poetry, he has also authored books on language, punctuation and etymology, notably the Bloomsbury Grammar Guide and Bloomsbury Dictionary of Idioms. He lives at Crail, in the East Neuk of Fife.
August 4, 1920
John Joseph Maria Figueroa (4 August 1920 – 5 March 1999) was a Jamaican poet and educator. He played a significant role in the development of Anglophone Caribbean literature both as a poet and an anthologist. He contributed to the development of the University College of the West Indies as an early member of staff, and had a parallel career as a broadcaster, working for various media organizations including the BBC. He also taught in Jamaica, Britain, the United States, Africa and Puerto Rico. Figueroa was born in Jamaica, where he was educated at St George's College. He won a scholarship to attend Holy Cross College, Massachusetts, graduating in 1942, after which he taught at St George's College and at Wolmer Boys' College in Jamaica. In 1946 he went on a British Council fellowship to London University to study for a teaching diploma and a master's degree in education. He subsequently taught in some London schools, and spent six years as an English and philosophy lecturer at the Institute of Education. He also contributed criticism, stories and poetry to the BBC's Caribbean Voices radio programme produced by Henry Swanzy In Jamaica Figueroa became the first West Indian to be appointed to a chair at the University College of the West Indies, and the first Dean of the Faculty of Education. Between 1964 and 1966 he was a visiting professor first at Rhode Island University and then Indiana University. In the early 1970s he became Professor of Humanities leading the Department of Education of the Centro Caribeno de Estudios Postgraduados, Puerto Rico. He later spend time as a professor at the University of Jos in Nigeria. In the 1980s he moved to the UK, where he worked for the Open University, was a Fellow at the Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick, and an adviser in multicultural education in Manchester. He edited the pioneering two-volume anthology Caribbean Voices (vol 1: Dreams and Visions and vol 2: The Blue Horizons, 1966 and 1970 respectively), comprehensive landmark collections of West Indian poetry. He was also the first general editor of the Heinemann Caribbean Writers Series. He also played an important role in the development of Caribbean studies as a founder member of the Caribbean Studies Association and the Society for Caribbean Studies. His own poetry "reflects his origins as a Jamaican of [Hispanic] descent and a Catholic who, whilst deeply committed to the Caribbean, was concerned to maintain [the diversity of its] heritage without apology. He insisted that drums were not the only Caribbean musical instrument (no doubt a dig at Kamau Brathwaite) and championed Derek Walcott's relationship to the classical and European literary tradition. Ironically, one of Figueroa's most effective poems is in Nation language." In the words of Andrew Salkey, "The phrase 'cosmopolitan poet' does not really adequately describe him or the impact that he has had on Anglophone Caribbean poetry, but it certainly goes some way in defining a part of his concern in not being tagged as regional or provincial. This is so because he is absolutely free from national limitations."
August 4, 1893
Born in 1893, reared in Copenhagen, and awarded the M.A. degree in Danish, English, and German in 1919, Tom Kristensen (4 August 1893 – 2 June 1974) established himself firmly in the Danish world of letters in the 1920’s with a remarkably versatile offering of poetry, fiction, a travel book on Spain, and critical essays on literature for the Copenhagen newspaper Politiken. In 1930, at the close of that highly productive decade, he published his finest novel, HAVOC, now available for the first time in English. Readers of HAVOC will not be surprised to learn that Tom Kristensen is considered one of Denmark’s most distinguished living writers.
August 4, 1920
Helen Amelia Thomas (August 4, 1920 – July 20, 2013) was an American reporter and author best known for her longtime membership in the White House press corps. She covered the White House during the administrations of ten U.S. presidents—from the start of the Kennedy administration to the second year of the Obama administration. Thomas worked for the United Press and post-1958 successor United Press International (UPI) for 57 years, first as a correspondent, and later as White House bureau manager. She then served as a columnist for Hearst Newspapers from 2000 to 2010, writing on national affairs and the White House. Thomas was the first female officer of the National Press Club, the first female member and president of the White House Correspondents' Association and the first female member of the Gridiron Club. She wrote six books; her last, with co-author Craig Crawford, was Listen Up, Mr. President: Everything You Always Wanted Your President to Know and Do (2009). Thomas retired from Hearst Newspapers on June 7, 2010, following controversial comments she made about Jews, Israel, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and her claims that "Congress, the White House, Hollywood and Wall Street are owned by Zionists", that led to numerous allegations of anti-Semitism. She then served as an opinion columnist for the Falls Church News-Press until February 2012.
August 4, 1884
Béla Balázs (4 August 1884, Szeged – 17 May 1949, Budapest), born Herbert Bauer, was a Hungarian-Jewish film critic, aesthete, writer and poet. Balázs was the son of German-born parents, adopting his nom de plume in newspaper articles written before his 1902 move to Budapest, where he studied Hungarian and German at the Eötvös Collegium. Balázs was a moving force in the Sonntagskreis or Sunday Circle, the intellectual discussion group which he founded in the autumn of 1915 together with Lajos Fülep, Arnold Hauser, György Lukács and Károly (Karl) Mannheim. Meetings were held at his flat on Sunday afternoons; already in December 1915 Balázs wrote in his diary of the success of the group. He is perhaps best remembered as the librettist of Bluebeard's Castle which he originally wrote for his roommate Zoltán Kodály, who in turn introduced him to the eventual composer of the opera, Béla Bartók. This collaboration continued with the scenario for the ballet The Wooden Prince. The collapse of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic under Béla Kun in 1919 began a long period of exile in Vienna and Germany and, from 1933 until 1945, the Soviet Union. György Lukács, a close friend during their youth, became a bitter enemy during the ordeal of the Stalinist purges. In Vienna he became a prolific writer of film reviews. His first book on film, Der Sichtbare Mensch (The Visible Man) (1924), helped found the German ‘film as a language’ theory, which also exerted an influence on Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin. A popular consultant, he wrote the screenplay for G. W. Pabst's film of Die Dreigroschenoper (1931), which became the object of a scandal and lawsuit by Brecht (who admitted to not reading the script) during production. Later, he co-wrote (with Carl Mayer) and helped Leni Riefenstahl direct the film Das Blaue Licht (1932). Riefenstahl later removed his and Mayer's name from the credits because they were Jewish. One of his best known films is Somewhere in Europe (It Happened in Europe, 1947), directed by Géza von Radványi). His last years were marked by petty vexations at home and ever increasing recognition in the German-speaking world. In 1949, he received the most distinguished prize in Hungary, the Kossuth Prize. Also in 1949, he finished Theory of the Film published posthumously in English (London: Denis Dobson, 1952). In 1958, the Béla Balázs Prize was founded and named for him as an award to recognize achievements in cinematography.
August 5, 1889
Conrad Potter Aiken was born in Savannah, Georgia, on August 5, 1889. When he was a small boy, his father killed his mother and committed suicide himself, a tragedy that had a profound impact on Aiken’s development. He was raised by a great-great-aunt in Massachusetts and graduated from Harvard in 1912, the same period as T. S. Eliot and E. E. Cummings. During this time, he was also a contributing editor to Dial magazine, where he befriended Ezra Pound. His first collection of poetry, Earth Triumphant, was published in 1914, establishing his reputation as a poet. He avoided military service during World War I by claiming that, as a poet, he was part of an ‘essential industry’. During the 1920s and 1930s Aiken travelled extensively between England and North America and married three times, once to Jessie McDonald, then to Clarissa M. Lorenz and later the artist Mary Hoover. (Joan Aiken, the children’s book writer, is Aiken and McDonald’s daughter.) Most of Aiken’s poetry reflects an intense interest in psychoanalysis and the development of identity. Of the many influences Aiken acknowledged, the writings of Freud, William James, Edgar Allan Poe, and the French Symbolists are most evident in his work. The forms and sounds of music pervade all of Aiken’s highly introspective poetry, collected in The Jig of Forslin (1916); The Charnel Rose (1918); Selected Poems (1929), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1930; Brownstone Eclogues (1942); The Kid (1947); Collected Poems (1953), which won the National Book Award; and Collected Poems 1916-1970 (1970). His work in Collected Novels (1964), including Blue Voyage (1927), shows Aiken to be a master of interior monologue. His novels had a profound influence on the works of many young writers of the day, including his protégé, Malcolm Lowry. Aiken was Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress (now the U.S. Poet Laureate) from 1950-52. His other honors included the Bollingen Prize, the Gold Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a National Medal for Literature. Aiken’s critical essays are compiled in A Reviewer’s ABC (1958); his Collected Short Stories appeared in 1960. As editor of Emily Dickinson’s Selected Poems (1924), Aiken was largely responsible for establishing her posthumous literary reputation. The Selected Letters of Conrad Aiken (1978) contains correspondence with such literary colleagues as Wallace Stevens, Harriet Monroe, and Edmund Wilson, and his autobiographical book Ushant (1952) affords much insight into other literary figures he knew, mingling personal references with mention of his associates. Conrad Aiken died in Savannah in 1973.
August 5, 1850
Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant (5 August 1850 – 6 July 1893) was a popular French writer, considered one of the fathers of the modern short story and one of the form's finest exponents.
August 5, 1942
Sergio Ramírez Mercado (born August 5, 1942 in Masatepe, Nicaragua) is a Nicaraguan writer and intellectual who served in the leftist Government Junta of National Reconstruction and as Vice President of the country 1985-1990 under the presidency of Daniel Ortega. Born in Masatepe in 1942, he published his first book, Cuentos, in 1963. He graduated from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua of León in 1964, where he obtained the Gold Medal for being the best student. In 1977 Ramírez became head of the 'Group of Twelve', a group of prominent intellectuals, priests, businesspeople, and members of civil society who publicly stated their support for the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) in its struggle to topple the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle. With the triumph of the Revolution in 1979, he became part of the Junta of the Government of National Reconstruction, where he presided over the National Council of Education. He was elected vice-president of Nicaragua in 1984 and was sworn in 1985. Though the FSLN lost power to the UNO coalition headed by Violeta Barrios de Chamorro in 1990, Ramírez continued to serve as the leader of the Sandinista block in the National Assembly until 1995, when he founded the Movimiento de Renovación Sandinista (MRS) because of his differences with other leaders of the FSLN, such as former president Daniel Ortega, on issues of democratic reform. He has since become retrospectively critical of certain Sandinista policies that he views as having turned the country against the FSLN. He made an unsuccessful bid for president on the MRS ticket in 1996. Since then, Ramírez has retired definitively from politics. He currently lives in Managua, Nicaragua. He married his wife, Gertrudis 'Tulita' Guerrero Mayorga, in 1964. He has three children: Sergio, Maria, and Dorel and 6 Grandchildren: Elianne, Carlos Fernando, Camila, Alejandro, Luciana and Andres. Even during his years in politics, Ramírez continued to publish his work, for which he has won numerous awards and distinctions.
August 5, 1926
Per Wahlöö (1926-1975) was a Swedish writer and journalist, who published with his wife Maj Sjöwall the widely translated series novels of Martin Beck and his colleagues at the Central Bureau of Investigation in Stockholm. Its style has been described as ‘reportal. spare, disciplined and full of sharply observed detail. .’ The critic and awarded mystery writer H.R.F. Keating selected Roseanna (1965) in 1987 for his list of the one hundred best crime novels. Several of the books have also been adapted into screen. Per Wahlöö was born in Göteborg, the son of Waldemar and Karin (Svensson) Wahlöö. After graduating from the University of Lund in 1946, he worked as a journalist, covering criminal and social issues for a number of newspapers and magazines. In the 1950s Wahlöö was engaged in radical political causes, activities that resulted in his deportation from Franco's Spain in 1957. Before becoming a full-time writer, he wrote a number of television and radio plays, and was managing editor of several magazines. As a novelist Wahlöö made his debut with HIMMELSGETEN (1959), which was followed by others dealing with abuses of power and the dark side of the society. Wahlöö's science fiction thrillers include MORD PÅ 31 (1965, THE THIRTY-FIRST FLOOR), which was filmed as Kamikaze in 1989, starring the director Rainer Werner Fassbinder in his final screen role. The story was set in a futuristic Germany. STÄLSPRANGET (1968, STEEP SPRING) depicted a deadly plague in Sweden. The protagonist in both novels was Chief Inspector Jensen. GENERALERNA (1965), a trial novel set in a military state, reflected Wahlöö's views on dictatorship. LASTBILEN (1962) was published in the United States as A NECESSARY ACTION and in Britain as THE LORRY. UPPDRAGET (1963), set in a Latin American country, gained an international success. It was translated into English under the title The Assignment. In 1961 Wahlöö met Maj Sjöwall when they were working for magazines published by the same company. At that time Wahlöö was married, Sjöwall was a single parent of a daughter. They became lovers and married. The carefully planned crime novel series was created in the evenings, after their children had been put to bed. Starting from ROSEANNA (1965), their project ended ten years and ten books later with TERRORISTERNA (1975). According to Wahlöö, their intention was to ‘use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideological pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type.’ The narrative focused on realistic police routine and teamwork – rather the deductive leaps of a Hercule Poirot type individual – and was compared to Georges Simenon. The first three novels, ROSEANNA, a story of rape-murder of an American girl whose body in found in a Swedish canal, THE MAN WHO WENT UP IN SMOKE (1966) and THE MAN ON THE BALCONY (1967), were straightforward police procedural novels. They introducing the central characters – the solid, methodical detective Martin Beck with failing marriage, ex-paratrooper Lennart Kollberg, who hates violence and refuses to carry a gun, Gunvald Larsson, wildman and a drop-out from high society, Einar Rönn from the rural north of Sweden and patrolmen Kristiansson and Kvant, the necessary comic pair. Beck considers himself ‘stubborn and logical, and completely calm’. He lives in a small apartment in Stockholm with his wife, Inga, and two children. In the following books Beck's relationship with his wife deteriorates, and he begins an affair with the liberal Rhea Nilsen. THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN (1968), about the investigation of the murder of eight occupants of a Stockholm bus, was made into a film in 1973, directed by Stuart Rosenberg and starring Walter Matthau, Bruce Dern, and Lou Gossett. The story was set in San Francisco. The film shared its Bay area locale with Dirty Harry (1971), but was otherwise more downbeat. At the end of THE LOCKED ROOM (1972), Sjöwall and Wahlöö show their sympathy towards a bank robber; however, they abhor sexual violence. In COP KILLER (1974) Lennart Kollberg writes his resignation, because of his socialist world view. The later novels, and especially the last, THE TERRORIST, is a bitter analysis of the welfare state, and openly sides with criminals-as-revolutionaries. At the end, Beck is deeply ambivalent about remaining a policeman, because he fears that he is contributing to the violent nature of Swedish society rather than preventing it. The novel was published after Wahlöö's death in Stockholm on June 23, 1975. Though a joint venture, the book was mostly written by Wahlöö, who was already very ill. Wahlöö's other works include translations into Swedish of some Ed McBain's 87th Precinct procedural novels and Noel Behn's political thriller THE KREMLIN LETTER, filmed by John Huston in 1970. With Sjöwall he also edited the literature magazine Peripeo, and wrote a comparative study of police methods in Sweden, the United States, Russia, and England. ‘He was an extreme Left-winger with a taste for popular sport,’ said the English mystery writer Julian Symons of Wahlöö, ‘and his interest in British football. was passionate. The books he wrote with Maj Sjöwall represents an attempt to bring his political feelings into a literary form with a wide appeal.’.
August 5, 1907
Eugène Guillevic (August 5, 1907 Carnac – March 19, 1997 Paris) was one of the better known French poets of the second half of the 20th century. Professionally, he went under just the single name ‘Guillevic’. He was born in the rocky landscape and marine environment of Brittany. His father, a sailor, was a policeman and took him to Jeumont (Nord) in 1909, Saint-Jean-Brévelay (Morbihan) in 1912, and Ferrette (Haut-Rhin) in 1919. After a BA in mathematics, he was placed by the exams of 1926, in the Administration of Registration (Alsace, Ardennes). Appointed in 1935 to Paris as senior editor at the Directorate General at the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs, he was assigned in 1942 to control the economy. He was from 1945 to 1947 in the Cabinets of Ministers Francis Billoux (National Economy) and Charles Tillon (Reconstruction). In 1947 after the ouster of Communist ministers, he returned to the Inspector General of Economics, where his work included studies of the economy and planning, until his retirement in 1967. He was a pre-war friend of Jean Follain, who introduced him to the ‘Sagesse’ group. Then he belonged to the ‘School of Rochefort’. He was a practicing Catholic for about thirty years. He became a communist sympathizer during the Spanish Civil War, and in 1942 joined the Communist Party when he joined with Paul Éluard, and participated in the publications of the underground press (Pierre Seghers, Jean Lescure).
August 5, 1929
Alfred Alvarez (born 5 August 1929) is an English poet, novelist, essayist and critic who publishes under the name A. Alvarez and Al Alvarez.
August 5, 1889
Jenaro Prieto (5 August 1889 Santiago, Chile - 5 March 1946 Chile) was Chilean journalist, writer and politician. He served as a member of the National Congress of Chile for the Conservative Party during the 1930s. Amongst his best known works as a writer is the novel The Partner (1928) which has been turned into several films.
August 5, 1946
Ron Silliman is the author of more than twenty volumes of poetry. His most recent books include Woundwood, Under Albany, MultiPlex, and N/O.and the weblog ‘Silliman’s Blog’.
August 6, 1916
Richard Hofstadter (6 August 1916 – 24 October 1970) was an American historian and public intellectual of the mid-20th century. Hofstadter, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. Rejecting his earlier approach to history from the far left, in the 1950s he embraced Consensus history, becoming the ‘iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus’, largely because of his emphasis on ideas and political culture rather than the day-to-day doings of politicians. His influence is ongoing, as modern critics profess admiration for the grace of his writing, and the depth of his insight. His most important works are Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 (1944); The American Political Tradition (1948); The Age of Reform (1955); Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963), and the essays collected in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964). He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize: in 1956 for The Age of Reform, an unsentimental analysis of the populism movement in the 1890s and the progressive movement of the early 20th century; and in 1964 for the cultural history Anti-intellectualism in American Life.
August 6, 1809
Alfred Tennyson (6 August 1809 – 6 October 1892) was Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular British poets.
August 6, 1900
Ji?í Weil (6 August 1900, Praskolesy - 13 December 1959, Prague) was a Czech writer. He was Jewish. His noted works include the two novels Life with a Star (Život s hv?zdou), and Mendelssohn Is on the Roof (Na st?eše je Mendelssohn), as well as many short stories, and other novels. A member of the Czech avant-garde association of artists Dev?tsil, an award winning novelist, a literary translator, a journalist and a curator, Ji?í Weil is only gradually gaining renown after years of relative obscurity. He was the one of the first writers to address the Soviet Purges in a novel, the very first writer to set a novel in a GULAG, and among the first writers to address the fate of Czech Jews in World War II. Ji?í Weil was born in Praskolesy, a village about 40 kilometers outside Prague on August 6, 1900. He was the second son born to upper-middle-class Orthodox Jewish parents. Weil graduated from secondary school in 1919. As a student he had already begun writing mainly verses, but had also begun planning his three-part novel, M?sto, which he planned to publish under the pseudonym, Ji?í Wilde. Upon graduation, Weil was accepted to Charles University in Prague where he entered the Department of Philosophy and also studied Slavic philology and comparative literature. He was a favourite student of F.X. Šalda. He completed his doctoral dissertation, 'Gogol and the English Novel of the 18th Century', in 1928. In 1921, Weil joined the Young Communists and attained a position of leadership in the group. He had a keen interest in Russian literature and Soviet culture. About that same time, his first articles were published about cultural life in the Soviet Union in the Newspaper Rudé Právo. He also became one of the first translators of contemporary Russian literature into the Czech language and bringing works by Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Lugovskoy and Marina Tsvetaeva to Czech readers. He was the first person to translate the works of Vladimir Mayakovsky into Czech. In 1922, Weil traveled for the first time to the Soviet Union with a youth delegation. He writes about an ill-fated meeting with the poet Sergei Esenin in his feuilleton, Busta básníkova. Weil worked in Moscow from 1933 to 1935 as a journalist and translator of Marxist literature in the publishing department of the Comintern, the international wing of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In this capacity, he helped translate Vladimir Lenin’s The State and Revolution into Czech. After the 1934 assassination of Sergei Kirov, which marked the beginning of the Stalinist Purges, Weil found himself on shaky ground in Moscow and in the Communist party. He was expelled from the Communist Party and exiled to Central Asia. The circumstances of his expulsion and his subsequent deportation to Central Asia have never been fully explained, but these experiences marked a turning point for Weil. They are described in a samizdat biography by Weil's friend, Jaroslava Vondrá?ková, Mrazilo - tálo. In 1935, Weil returned to Prague and published his novel Moskva-hranice (1937), an account of the purges. The Munich Agreement heralded trouble for Europe’s Jewish population, but Weil was unable to join relatives in Great Britain. During the Nazi occupation, Weil was assigned to work at the Jewish Museum in Prague. He was called to be interned at the Terezín (Theresienstadt) ghetto in November 1942, but he decided not to go, instead staging his own death. Weil survived the rest of the war by hiding in various illegal apartments, with several acquaintances and even spent time hiding in a hospital. Despite the tremendous hardship, Weil continued to write. After the war, Weil reintegrated into cultural life and from 1946 to 1948, he worked as an editor at ELK. He published a lyrical book of tributes to fallen comrades, Bárvy (Colours), a novel, Makanna otec div?, which won the Czechoslovak book prize that year, and a small book of reminiscences about Julius Fu?ík. After 1948, Weil lost his position and the press was nationalized. From 1949 on, Weil's work focuses on Jewish themes. His book Life with a Star, published without fanfare in 1949, is probably his best-known work. It received varying critical attention, but a firestorm of controversy over it erupted in 1951. Critics decried it as decadent, existentialist, highly subjective and the product of a cowardly culture. It was roundly criticized from both an ideological and a religious standpoint and was banned. He resumed work at the Jewish Museum, where he was instrumental in the creation of an exhibition of children's drawings from Terezín, I Never Saw Another Butterfly, and the creation of a monument for Jewish citizens murdered by Nazis in the Pinkas Synagogue, for which he wrote a prose poem, Žalozp?v za 77 297 ob?tí. In the thaw following the death of Klement Gottwald, Weil was readmitted to the Writers' Union. Weil worked continuously until his death from leukemia in 1959. In recent years, Weil's 'Star' is considered a classic. According to Philip Roth (who was largely responsible for introducing Weil to American readers) the book is 'without a doubt, one of the outstanding novels I've read about the fate of a Jew under the Nazis. I don't know another like it.' Michiko Kakutani adds that it is 'one of the most powerful works to emerge from the Holocaust: it is a fierce and necessary work of art.' And Siri Hustvedt has written ; 'When I mention this astounding novel to people, I am almost always met with blankness. It may be that its subject matter, the Nazi occupation of Prague, is grim. I don't know. What I do know is that I read the book when it came out - (the English translation, published in 1989, 40 years after its first publication in Czechoslovakia) - and it burned itself into me. The words German, Nazi and Jew never appear. There is nothing coy about these omissions. They are essential to the novel's uncanny immediacy, its urgent telling of a human story which, despite its particularity, refuses to locate itself in the past.' Beyond 'Life with a Star' and 'Mendelssohn is on the Roof' Weil's fiction is woefully underrepresented in English-language translations. A limited edition of 'Colors,' was recently available through University of Michigan Press in a limited run. At this writing, his other novels have not been translated into English. Only Life with a Star and Mendelssohn is on the Roof, Moskva-hranice, and D?evená lžice have been reprinted in Czech. The 110th anniversary of the birth of Ji?í Weil marked by premiere of concert performance of a ballet 'MAKANNA' written by the Czech composer and organist Irena Kosíková, based on his novel Makanna otec div?. The concert featured Jan Židlický as narrator, the Czech cellist František Brikcius and the Talich Chamber Orchestra conducted by Maestro Jan Talich. 'Makanna' was held under the auspices of Sir Tom Stoppard and Václav Havel to commemorate the 110th anniversary of the birth of Ji?í Weil (1900–1959) and as part of the 'Daniel Pearl World Music Days' and made possible by the cooperation of the National Gallery, the Jewish Museum in Prague, and the City of Prague.
August 6, 1900
William Hillcourt (August 6, 1900 – November 9, 1992), known within the Scouting movement as "Green Bar Bill", was an influential leader in the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) organization from 1927 to 1992. Hillcourt was a prolific writer and teacher in the areas of woodcraft, troop and patrol structure, and training; his written works include three editions of the BSA's official Boy Scout Handbook, with over 12.6 million copies printed, other Scouting-related books and numerous magazine articles. Hillcourt developed and promoted the American adaptation of the Wood Badge adult Scout leader training program. Hillcourt was Danish, but moved to the United States as a young adult. From his start in Danish Scouting in 1910 until his death in 1992, he was continuously active in Scouting. He traveled all over the world teaching and training both Scouts and Scouters, earning many of Scouting's highest honors. His legacy and influence can still be seen today in the BSA program and in Scouting training manuals and methods for both youth and adults. Hillcourt was born in 1900 in Aarhus, Denmark and was the youngest of three sons of a building contractor. He was given the name Vilhelm Hans Bjerregaard Jensen. Around 1930, he changed his name by anglicizing "Vilhelm", translating "Bjerregaard" into "Hill-court" and dropping "Jensen". His first published work was a poem about trolls and elves, printed by an Aarhus newspaper when he was nine years old. For Christmas 1910, Hillcourt's brother gave him a Danish translation of Scouting for Boys by Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scout movement. He went on to earn the highest award in Danish Scouting, Knight-Scout in 1918, at age 17. He was selected to represent his troop at the 1st World Scout Jamboree in Olympia in 1920 where he first met Baden-Powell, with whom he was later to work. While Hillcourt studied pharmacy in Copenhagen, he became more involved in Scouting. As a Scout leader, he became a Scoutmaster, national instructor, writer and then the editor for the Danish Scouting journal. He wrote his first book, The Island, recounting his early Scouting experiences. After deciding to experience Scouting around the world and to return home with the best ideas, Hillcourt worked his way through Europe and England and then arrived in the United States in February 1926. He was soon hired by the BSA's national office and worked for the BSA until he retired as a professional Scouter in 1965. In 1933 Hillcourt married Grace Brown, the personal secretary of Chief Scout Executive James E. West. Hillcourt worked at a BSA camp at Bear Mountain in Harriman State Park, New York, in 1926 where he became an instructor in American Indian dance. He then worked for the BSA Supply Division where he broke his leg when a crate fell on him. He met James West while working at the national office. West solicited Hillcourt's thoughts on Scouting in the U.S. Hillcourt later sent West an 18-page memo detailing issues with the lack of patrol structure and leadership. He recommended that the BSA write a handbook for patrol leaders, and that it needed to be written by someone who had been both a patrol leader and a Scoutmaster. West hired Hillcourt as a writer and editor and was later persuaded to commission Hillcourt to write the first Handbook for Patrol Leaders which was published in 1929. From 1932 until his retirement in 1965, Hillcourt was a major contributor to Boys' Life, the magazine for Scouting youth. Each monthly issue included a page on advancement and Scoutcraft, outdoor Scouting skills, and included his signature superimposed over the two green bars that are the emblem of the patrol leader, which led to his moniker "Green Bar Bill" and its adoption as the logo of his regular Boys' Life column. Hillcourt was tasked to write a new manual for Scoutmasters in 1934 and worked with his good friend and colleague E. Urner Goodman, the national program director of the BSA. He and his wife moved to a house in Mendham Borough, New Jersey, to be near Schiff Scout Reservation, the BSA's national training center, so he could be in place to put this theories to a practical test. In order to do so, he founded Troop 1 of Mendham in 1935 as a unit directly chartered to the National Council of the BSA. As the Scoutmaster, he used Troop 1 to test and validate his work for 16 years. The Baden-Powells visited Schiff in 1935 and began a steadfast friendship with the Hillcourts. Baden-Powell died in 1941. After World War II, Baden-Powell's widow, Olave Baden-Powell, allowed Hillcourt to edit Aids to Scoutmastership into the World Brotherhood Editions to help the Scouting movement recover from the war. She then allowed Hillcourt access to Baden-Powell's letters, diaries and sketchbooks when she and Hillcourt co-authored the narrative biography of Baden-Powell, Baden-Powell: The Two Lives of a Hero. The BSA national office moved from New York City to North Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1954, and the Hillcourts moved with it. He completed the sixth edition of the Boy Scout Handbook in time for the BSA's 50th anniversary in 1960. To encourage the creation of Rovering in the U.S., J. S. Wilson travelled from the UK to oversee a Wood Badge course in May 1936 at Schiff. Hillcourt was a participant in that first course and four days later, he was the senior patrol leader for the second course. He received his Wood Badge beads in 1939 and was appointed as the deputy camp director for Wood Badge. After World War II, Wood Badge was revived and Hillcourt was the Scoutmaster for a test course begun on July 31, 1948, at Schiff and the first standard course at Philmont Scout Ranch. As the national director of training, Hillcourt wore five Wood Badge beads, a tradition that has been discontinued in the U.K. Scout Association, however other countries still continue the use of the five Wood Badge Beads and are still worn by the National Volunteer Leader of Wood Badge Training of each country as well as by special decree of Gilwell Park today. In the year before his retirement on August 1, 1965, the national council began a program to update the Wood Badge program and shift its emphasis from teaching Scoutcraft to leadership skills. After he was officially retired, his opinion was still sought after and respected. Dr. John W. Larson, Director of Boy Scout Leader Training for the National Council, was working with Béla H. Bánáthy and Bob Perin, Assistant National Director, Volunteer Training Service, to adapt the leadership competencies of the White Stag Leadership Development Program into a new Wood Badge syllabus.Hillcourt was among the few on the National Staff who strongly resisted the change to the Wood Badge program. He attended the presentation that Larson made to the national Scout committee on the new Wood Badge curriculum. Larson later reported, "He fought us all the way ... He had a vested interest in what had been and resisted every change. I just told him to settle down, everything was going to be all right." Hillcourt presented an alternative to Larson's plan to incorporate leadership into Wood Badge. Chief Scout Executive Joseph Brunton asked Larson to look at Hillcourt's plan, and Larson reported back that it was the same stuff, just reordered and rewritten. Larson's plan for Wood Badge was approved and he moved ahead to begin implementing the proposed changes. Hillcourt later in life Hillcourt retired from the BSA on August 1, 1965. In 1971, he and Grace finally completed the world tour he had started in 1926; along the way they attended the 13th World Scout Jamboree in Fujinomiya, Japan. Grace Hillcourt died in 1973. Rather than live alone, Bill moved into the home of his good friends Carson and Martha Buck. The BSA had introduced the "Improved Scouting Program" in 1972, along with a new edition of the Boy Scout Handbook. Many of the changes were intended to expand Scouting to a broader base of youth and to make Scouting more "in tune with the times". Many Scouters, including Hillcourt, were critical of the new program changes, exclaiming that the de-emphasis on traditional outdoor skills had taken the "outing out of Scouting". This change proved to be unsuccessful, deterring existing adherents and attracting relatively few new enrolments. To remedy this situation, Hillcourt convinced Chief Scout Executive Harvey L. Price that a new handbook was needed. Hillcourt then came out of retirement and spent a year writing and editing the 1979 edition of The Official Boy Scout Handbook, returning to the focus of Scoutcraft. In addition, he helped to develop the All Out for Scouting program that launched the return to the old standards. Hillcourt was regarded as a prominent figure and guide in BSA's recovery from its experiment earlier in that decade. Hillcourt was recognized for his service to youth by the BSA with the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award on May 19, 1978. In 1980, the BSA presented Hillcourt with their highest national honor, the Silver Buffalo Award and was cited as "The Voice of Scouting". The World Scout Committee of the World Organization of the Scout Movement recognized him for exceptional services to world Scouting in 1985 with the Bronze Wolf Award. In the same year, an article in the Scouting magazine proclaimed Hillcourt as "the foremost influence on development of the Boy Scouting program." In this travel schedule during the last 12 months of 1985, Were trips to Dallas, Washington, Knoxville, Houston, San Francisco, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and other points on the east and west side of the United States. in the Abroad at international achievement level managed to cover, in addition attending the "World Conference", the first in Germany, an inter-American scout conference in Brazil (with parallel trips to Argentina with Paraguay), to serve as scoutmaster in the Wood Badge scoutmastership for "South Explorers Leaders and Center –Leadership Course in Troop", finishing North of South America in Caracas, Venezuela And was assigned as Troop Head and Director of the Field-School "Paramacay"; To celebrate during the month of August his 85 years of age with his old friends explorers in Copenhagen, Denmark. And then, of course, in the middle of the times, he continued to camp in the different events that took place during his campaign, and did not fail to make a presence with his uninterrupted record, with the Jamboree. In 1990 he also became a member of Firecrafter, an American Scouting service organization. Travel and appearances at Scouting events both local and worldwide were part of his routine until he died, for which he was referred to as Scoutmaster to the World. Hillcourt died at the age of 92, in Stockholm, Sweden, while traveling on a Scouting tour with Carson Buck in 1992. He is buried with his wife Grace in St. Joseph's Cemetery in Mendham, New Jersey, at Row 8, Block I, near Mortimer L. Schiff Scout Reservation, where he had lived for so many years. His legacy in Scouting and his influence continue in the programs and training of Scouting. Consequently, his writings are still used within the Scouting movement and his material continues to be reprinted in Scouting magazine. The Longhouse Council operates the William Hillcourt Scout Museum and Carson Buck Memorial Library at Camp Woodland in New York to "keep the traditions of Scouting alive" through the preservation of the history that is a foundation for today's Scouting movement.
August 6, 1946
Frank Asch (born August 6, 1946 in Somerville, New Jersey) is an American children's writer, best known for his Moonbear picture books. In 1968, Asch published his first picture book, George's Store. The following year, he graduated from Cooper Union with a BFA. Since then he has taught at a public school in India, as well as at a Montessori school in the United States, and conducted numerous creative workshops for children. He has written over 60 books, including Turtle Tale, Mooncake, I Can Blink and Happy Birthday Moon. In 1989 he wrote Here Comes the Cat! in collaboration with Vladimir Vagin.
August 6, 1868
Paul Claudel (1868-1955) was the author of numerous plays including Le Pain dur and Le Soulier de satin, and several volumes of poetry, the most famous of which is Five Great Odes. James Lawler is a translator and scholar of modern French poetry, especially that of the Symbolists. Most recently he wrote Poetry and Moral Dialectic: Baudelaire’s ‘Secret Architecture.’
August 6, 1927
Bertène Juminer (August 6, 1927 in Cayenne, Guyana - March 26 , 2003 in Trois-Rivières, Guadeloupe) was a Antillo-Guyanese doctor, rector and writer.
August 6, 1874
Georges Lefebvre (6 August 1874 – 28 August 1959) was a French historian, best known for his work on the French Revolution and peasant life. He coined the term 'history from below', which was later popularised by the British Marxist Historians.
August 6, 1958
John Mullan is professor of English at University College London and the author of How Novels Work. A broadcaster and journalist as well as an academic, he has been described as having ‘a scholar’s knowledge worn with a journalist’s lightness of touch.’ He writes a weekly column on contemporary fiction for the Guardian newspaper.
August 6, 1930
David Robinson is a film critic, historian of popular performing arts, and Director of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival.
August 7, 1938
Helen Caldicott is an Australian-born pediatrician. In the early 1980s, she founded and was the first President of Physicians for Social Responsibility, an organization which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. She is the author of Nuclear Madness, Missile Envy, and If You Love This Planet, published by Norton.
August 7, 1928
Stephen Marlowe (born Milton Lesser, August 7, 1928 in Brooklyn, New York, died February 22, 2008 (aged 79), in Williamsburg, Virginia) was an American author of science fiction, mystery novels, and fictional autobiographies of Christopher Columbus, Miguel de Cervantes, and Edgar Allan Poe. He is best known for his detective character Chester Drum, whom he created in the 1955 novel The Second Longest Night. Lesser also wrote under the pseudonyms Adam Chase, Andrew Frazer, C.H. Thames, Jason Ridgway, Stephen Wilder and Ellery Queen. Lesser attended the College of William & Mary, earning his degree in philosophy, marrying Leigh Lang shortly after graduating. The couple divorced in 1962. He was drafted into the United States Army during the Korean War. He was awarded the French Prix Gutenberg du Livre in 1988 for The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus, and in 1997 he was awarded the "Life Achievement Award" by the Private Eye Writers of America. He also served on the board of directors of the Mystery Writers of America. He lived with his second wife Ann in Williamsburg, Virginia.
August 7, 1952
Tiina Nunnally (born August 7, 1952) is an American author and translator. Nunnally was born in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and St. Louis Park, Minnesota. She was an AFS exchange student to Århus, Denmark in 1969–70. She received her MA in 1976 from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a PhC from the University of Washington in 1979. She has a long association with the Department of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Washington, but she is not a salaried faculty member. Since 2002 she has lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her husband Steven T. Murray, both full-time freelance literary translators. Nunnally is an award-winning translator of Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, who sometimes uses the pseudonym Felicity David when edited into UK English. Her translation of Kristin Lavransdatter III: The Cross by Sigrid Undset won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize in 2001, and Peter Høeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow won the American Translators Association's Lewis Galantière Prize. Her first novel, Maija, won a Governor's Writers Award from the State of Washington in 1996. Since then two more of her novels have been published. The Swedish Academy honored Nunnally in 2009 with a special award for her contributions to 'the introduction of Swedish culture abroad'.
August 7, 1911
Nicholas Ray (born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle, Jr., August 7, 1911 – June 16, 1979) was an American film director best known for the movie Rebel Without a Cause. Ray is also appreciated by a smaller audience of cinephiles for a large number of narrative features produced between 1947 and 1963 including Bigger Than Life, Johnny Guitar, They Live by Night, and In a Lonely Place, as well as an experimental work produced throughout the 1970s titled We Can't Go Home Again, which was unfinished at the time of Ray's death from lung cancer. Ray's compositions within the CinemaScope frame and use of color are particularly well-regarded. Ray was an important influence on the French New Wave, with Jean-Luc Godard famously writing in a review of Bitter Victory, 'cinema is Nicholas Ray.'
August 7, 1942
Sverre Bagge is professor emeritus of medieval history at the University of Bergen in Norway. His books include 'Kings, Politics, and the Right Order of the World in German Historiography'
August 7, 1955
Vladimir Georgievich Sorokin (born 7 August 1955) is a contemporary postmodern Russian writer and dramatist, one of the most popular in modern Russian literature. Sorokin was born on 7 August 1955 in Bykovo, Moscow Oblast, near Moscow. In 1972 he made his literary debut with a publication in the newspaper Za Kadry Neftyanikov (Russian: ?? ????? ??????????, For the workers in the petroleum industry). He studied at the Gubkin Institute of Oil and Gas in Moscow and graduated in 1977 as an engineer. After graduation he worked for one year for the magazine Shift (Russian: ?????), before he had to leave due to his refusal to become a member of the Komsomol. Throughout the 1970s, Sorokin participated in a number of art exhibitions and designed and illustrated nearly 50 books. Sorokin's development as a writer took place amidst painters and writers of the Moscow underground scene of the 1980s. In 1985, six of Sorokin's stories appeared in the Paris magazine A-Ya. In the same year, French publisher Syntaxe published his novel Ochered' (The Queue). Sorokin's works, bright and striking examples of underground culture, were banned during the Soviet period. His first publication in the USSR appeared in November 1989, when the Riga-based Latvian magazine Rodnik (Spring) presented a group of Sorokin's stories. Soon after, his stories appeared in Russian literary miscellanies and magazines Tretya Modernizatsiya (The Third Modernization), Mitin Zhurnal (Mitya's Journal), Konets Veka (End of the Century), and Vestnik Novoy Literatury (Bulletin of the New Literature). In 1992, Russian publishing house Russlit published Sbornik Rasskazov (Collected Stories) – Sorokin's first book to be nominated for a Russian Booker Prize. In September 2001, Vladimir Sorokin received the People's Booker Prize; two months later, he was presented with the Andrei Bely Prize for outstanding contributions to Russian literature. In 2002, there was a protest against his book Blue Bacon Fat, and he was investigated for pornography. Sorokin's books have been translated into English, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Italian, Polish, Japanese, Serbian, Korean, Romanian, Estonian, Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, Croatian and Slovenian, and are available through a number of prominent publishing houses, including Gallimard, Fischer, DuMont, BV Berlin, Haffman, Mlinarec & Plavic and Verlag der Autoren. One of his recent novels, Day of the Oprichnik, describes a dystopian Russia in 2027, with a Tzar in the Kremlin, a Russian language with numerous Chinese expressions, and a "Great Russian Wall" separating the country from its neighbors. He was awarded in 2015 the Premio Gregor von Rezzori for this novel.
August 7, 1533
Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga (August 7, 1533 – November 29, 1594) was a Spanish nobleman, soldier and epic poet, born in Madrid. While in Chile (1556–63) he fought against the Araucanians (Mapuche), and there he began the epic poem La Araucana, considered one of the greatest Spanish historical poems. This heroic work in 37 cantos is divided into three parts, published in 1569, 1578, and 1589. It tells of the courageous insurrection of the Araucanians and also relates the history of Chile and of contemporary Spain.
August 7, 1964
Antonio Manzini was born on August 7, 1964 in Rome, Lazio, Italy. He is an actor, a screenwriter, a director, and the author of two murder mysteries featuring Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone. Black Run is the first of these novels to be translated into English. He lives in Italy.
August 7, 1951
Austin Bay’s resume is manifold: Author and syndicated columnist, professor, developmental aid advocate, radio commentator, retired reserve soldier, war game designer, principal in a training simulations and technology consulting company.
August 7, 1944
Nancy Morejón (born August 7, 1944 in Havana) is a Cuban poet, critic, and essayist. She was born and raised in a district of old Havana to working-class parents, Angélica Hernández Domínguez and Felipe Morejón Noyola. Her father is of African heritage and her mother of Chinese, European and African extraction. She graduated with honours at the University of Havana, having studied Caribbean and French Literature, and she is fluent in French and English. She later taught French. She is a well-regarded translator of French and English into Spanish, particularly Caribbean writers, including Edouard Glissant, Jacques Roumain and Aimé Césaire, René Depestre. Her own poetry has been translated into English, German, French, Portuguese, Gallego, Russian, Macedonian, and others. She is as of 2013 director of Revista Union, journal of Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (the Union of Writers and Artists; UNEAC); in 2008 she was elected president of the writer's section of UNEAC. She has produced a number of journalistic, critical, and dramatic works. One of the most notable is her book-length treatments of poet Nicolás Guillén. In 1982 she was awarded the Cuban "Premio de la crítica" (Critic's Prize) for Piedra Pulida, and in 2001 won Cuba's National Prize for Literature, awarded for the first time to a black woman. This national prize for literature was created in 1983; Nicolás Guillén was the first to receive it. She also won the Golden Wreath of the Struga poetry evenings for 2006. She has toured extensively in the United States and in other countries; her work has been translated into over ten languages, including English, Swedish and German. She has lectured at universities throughout the country and has served as teacher at Wellesley College and the University of Missouri-Columbia, which, in 1995, conducted a two-day symposium on her work and published the papers in a special issue of the Afro-Hispanic Review. Howard University Press at Washington D.C. published in 1999 a collection of critical essays on her work: Singular Like A Bird: The Art of Nancy Morejon, compiled and prefaced by Miriam DeCosta-Willis, Ph.D. An ant collection of her poems entitled Richard trajo su flauta y otros argumentos (Richard brought his flute),d edited by Mario Benedetti, Visor Books, was published in Madrid during the Spring of 2005. Her work explores a range of themes: the mythology of the Cuban nation, the relation of the blacks of Cuba within that nation. She often expresses an integrationist stance, in which Spanish and African cultures fuse to make a new, Cuban identity. Much of her work—and the fact that she has been successful within the Cuban regime—locates her as a supporter of Cuban nationalism and the Cuban Revolution. In addition, she also voices the situation of women within her society, expressing concern for women's experience and for racial equality within the Cuban revolution; often black women are protagonists in her poems, most notably in the widely anthologized Mujer Negra (Black Woman). Her work also treats the grievous fact of slavery as an ancestral experience.
August 7, 1933
Wilma Johanna Stockenström (born August 7, 1933) is a South African writer, translator, and actor. She writes in the Afrikaans language, and along with Sheila Cussons, Elisabeth Eybers, Antjie Krog and Ina Rousseau, she is one of the leading female writers in the language. She was born in Napier in the Overberg district. After finishing high school, she studied at Stellenbosch University, where she obtained a BA in Drama in 1952. She moved to Pretoria in 1954, and married the Estonian linguist Ants Kirsipuu. She has lived in Cape Town since 1993. She is one of a handful of writers to have won the Hertzog prize in two different categories. She won it first for poetry in 1977 and then for fiction in 1991. Her 1981 novel Die kremetartekspedisie was translated into English by the Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee under the title The Expedition to the Baobab Tree. She has also been translated into Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Turkish and Swedish.
August 7, 1950
Yuri Tsivian studied film history in Riga (Latvia) and Moscow (Russia) combining it with studying semiotics under the guidance of Yuri Lotman (1922 – 1993), a prominent cultural scholar of the Tartu University (Estonia) in collaboration with whom Yuri has written a book on film language Dialogues with the Screen (Tallinn,1994). The author of over one hundred publications in sixteen languages, Yuri Tsivian is also credited with launching two new fields in the studies of film and culture: carpalistics and cinemetrics. The former studies and compares different uses of gesture in theater, visual arts, literature and film; the latter uses digital tools to explore the art of film editing.
August 7, 1942
Caetano Veloso was born on August 7, 1942 in Santo Amaro da Purificaçâo. Bahia, Brazil. He lives in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro.
August 7, 1955
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Pennsylvania State University-Altoona. She has four other books of poetry, including Where the Road Turns and Becoming Ebony, part of the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry.
August 7, 1959
PETER GIZZI is the author of six collections of poetry including Threshold Songs and In Defense of Nothing. He works at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
August 8, 1898
M. Ageyev is believed to be the nom-de-plume of Russian author Mark Lazarevich Levi (August 8, 1898, Moscow - August 5, 1973, Yerevan). His best-known work, Novel With Cocaine (also translated as the Cocain Romance), was published in 1934 in the Parisian émigré publication, Numbers. Nikita Struve has alleged it to be the work of another Russian author employing a pen name, Vladimir Nabokov; this idea was debunked by Nabokov's son Dmitri in his preface to ‘The Enchanter‘. Levi's life is shrouded in mystery and conjecture. He seems to have returned to the U.S.S.R. in 1942 and spent the rest of his life in Yerevan, where he died on August 5, 1973.
August 8, 1950
Sarah Dunant (born 8 August 1950) is a British novelist, journalist, broadcaster, and critic. She is married with two daughters, and lives in London and Florence.
August 8, 1941
Mike Phillips, OBE (born 8 August 1941), is a British writer and broadcaster of Guyanese descent. Phillips was born in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1942, and migrated to Britain as a child in 1956. He was educated at the University of London (English), the University of Essex (Politics), and received a Postgraduate Certificate in Education from Goldsmiths College, London. Phillips worked for the BBC as a journalist and broadcaster between 1972 and 1983, then became a lecturer in media studies at the University of Westminster. In 1992 he became a full-time writer. He has said, 'One of the experiences that made me a writer was the realisation that I was written out of a small piece of literary history in the film Prick Up Your Ears, the biography of controversial playwright Joe Orton, author of Entertaining Mr Sloane. Orton and his friend Kenneth Halliwell were frequent visitors to Essex Road Library where I worked as a library assistant. I regularly spoke to them and didn't know that they were defacing the books, an act that eventually put them in jail. When the scene was depicted on film I felt I should have been included, and realised that you can't rely on others to write your story, sometimes you have to do it yourself.' Phillips is best known for his crime fiction, including four novels featuring black journalist Sam Dean: Blood Rights (1989; serialised on BBC TV), The Late Candidate (1990), Point of Darkness (1994), An Image to Die For (1995). He is also the author of London Crossings: A Biography of Black Britain (2001), a series of interlinked autobiographical essays and stories. With his brother, the political journalist Trevor Phillips, he wrote Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (1998, HarperCollins, ISBN 0-00-255909-9) to accompany a BBC television series. He writes for The Guardian newspaper, and was formerly cross-cultural curator at the Tate and a trustee of the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Heritage Lottery Fund.
August 8, 1843
Eugenio Cambaceres (1843–1888) was an Argentine writer and politician. In the 1880s he wrote four books, with Sin rumbo (1885) being his masterpiece. His promising literary career was cut short when he died of tuberculosis. Cambaceres was born and died in Buenos Aires. He was the son of a French chemist father who immigrated to Argentina in 1833 and a mother native to Buenos Aires. Cambaceres went to secondary school at the Colegio Nacional Central and then went on to receive a law degree from the Universidad de Buenos Aires. Quickly launching into politics, he was elected to the Argentine Chamber of Deputies and was named secretary of the Club del Progreso in 1870, and in 1873 became Vice President of said organization. However, his denunciations of fraud within his own party led to his downfall, and although he was re-elected to the legislature in 1876 he soon resigned his post and left public life to devote himself to literature. From his career as a liberal politician, perhaps his most important contribution was a controversial tract in a local magazine advocating the separation of Church and State that was quite polemic at the time. As a writer, he combined the naturalism of Émile Zola and the Goncourt brothers and a localized realist character with four novels of a pessimistic nature. His first two novels were Pot-pourri (1881) and Música sentimental: Silbidos de un vago [Sentimental Music: Whistles of a Lazy Man] (1884). Both lack a precise plot and leave many threads hanging, containing stories of adultery within a pessimistic and weary atmosphere. The novelty of dealing with such a lurid topic and in such a crude manner provoked a scandalous repercussion and critics did not hesitate in directly attacking Cambaceres. This changed the composition and style of his later works, which were much better received. In 1885 he released his most significant novel, Sin Rumbo [Without Direction], where he offered good descriptions of the landscape of sexual pathology, including interesting anecdotes. The year before he died 1887, he published En la sangre (In the Blood), a story about the son of Italian immigrants of humble origin that advances his social standing by marrying the daughter of a wealthy estate, only to squander his fortune and end up with a miserable life. Through his writing, Cambaceres dealt with the problems associated with the arrival of Immigrants to Argentina and the social changes of his time, but ended up taking the perspective of the high bourgeoisie that critiqued the lower classes and European immigration. Eugenio Cambaceres traveled to Europe and was in Paris when he died at 45 years of age, in 1888. His daughter, Rufina Cambaceres, was only four years old.
August 8, 1947
Jon Katz (born August 8, 1947) is an American journalist, author, and photographer. He was a contributor to the online magazine HotWired, the technology website Slashdot, and the online news magazine Slate.
August 8, 1944
Jean-Paul Kauffmann (8 August 1944, Saint-Pierre-la-Cour, Mayenne) is a French journalist and writer, a former student of the École supérieure de journalisme de Lille (40th class).An amateur of Bordeaux wines, he has published several books on this subject. With Courlande (Fayard, 2009), the story of a journey is the plot of several quests including that of the identity of a country, Courland. He was awarded the Prix de la langue française in 2009 for all his work.
August 8, 1947
Keith (K.) Scott Christianson (August 8, 1947 – May 14, 2017) was an American author and journalist, who wrote several popular works about forensic science, crime, prison and the death penalty, about American history and politics, and about other popular subjects such as the history of incarceration, runaway slaves and historical highlights of visualization.
August 8, 1923
LATIFA AL-ZAYYAT (1923-96) struggled all her life to uphold just causes national integrity, the welfare of the poor, human rights, freedom of expression, and the rejection of all forms of imperialist hegemony. As a professor of English literature at Ain Shams University, her critical output was no less prolific than her creative writing but the creative, academic, and political strands of her personality were interwoven. The Open Door is generally recognized as her magnum opus. MARILYN BOOTH received her D.Phil. in Arabic literature and modern Middle East history from St. Antony’s College, Oxford. She has published several volumes of translation and is the author of Bayram al-Tunisi’s Egypt: Social Criticism and Narrative Strategies.
August 9, 1954
George Albon is the author of EMPIRE LIFE (Littoral Books, 1998), Thousands Count Out Loud (lyric& press, 2000), BRIEF CAPITAL OF DISTURBANCES (Omnidawn Publishing, 2003), STEP (The Post-Apollo Press, 2006), MOMENTARY SONGS (Krupskaya, 2008), ASPIRATION (Omnidawn Publishing, 2013), and FIRE BREAK (Nightboat Books, 2013). His work has appeared in HAMBONE, NEW AMERICAN WRITING, O Anthology 4, Avec Sampler 1, and the anthologies The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry, BAY POETICS, and Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard. His essay ‘The Paradise of Meaning’ was the George Oppen Memorial Lecture for 2002. He lives and works in San Francisco.
August 9, 1908
A. I. ‘ Buzz’ Bezzerides (August 9, 1908 – January 1, 2007) was an American novelist and screenwriter, best known for writing Noir and Action motion pictures, especially several of Warners' ‘social conscience’ films of the 1940s. He was born Albert Isaac Bezzerides in Samsun, Ottoman Empire (now in Turkey), to a Greek-Armenian family who immigrated to America before he was two. He wrote the novel The Long Haul (1938), which got him into the screenwriting business. He wrote such action feature movies as They Drive by Night (1940) - which was based on his novel, The Long Haul (1938), Desert Fury (1947), Thieves' Highway (1949), On Dangerous Ground (1952), Beneath the 12 Mile Reef(1953), Track of the Cat (1954), and Kiss Me Deadly (1955). He was one of the co-creators of the western television series The Big Valley. Bezzerides' most famous script was Kiss Me Deadly, which was a masterful film noir and influenced many directors in France shortly after its release. Bezzerides transformed the novel by Mickey Spillane into an apocalyptic, atomic-age paranoia film noir. When asked about his script, and his decision to make ‘the great whatsit’ the Pandora's Box objective of a ruthless cast of characters, Bezzerides commented: ‘People ask me about the hidden meanings in the script, about the A-bomb, about McCarthyism, what does the poetry mean, and so on. And I can only say that I didn't think about it when I wrote it . . . I was having fun with it. I wanted to make every scene, every character, interesting. A girl comes up to Ralph Meeker, I make her a nympho. She grabs him and kisses him the first time she sees him. She says, ‘You don't taste like anybody I know.’ I'm a big car nut, so I put in all that stuff with the cars and the mechanic. I was an engineer, and I gave the detective the first phone answering machine in that picture. I was having fun.’ In 1940, Warner Bros. offered Bezzerides $2,000 for movie rights to his 1938 novel The Long Haul. He learned later that the script based on his book had already been written. The film, They Drive By Night, starred Humphrey Bogart and George Raft. Bezzerides' third novel, Thieves' Market (1949), was adapted to a film known as Thieves' Highway, directed by Jules Dassin. The studio also offered Bezzerides a contract to be a screenwriter at a salary of $300 a week. Bezzerides also worked alongside William Faulkner and befriended him. Also, Bezzerides, who at the time was working as a communications engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, later wrote: ‘I had no idea whether it was guilt or conscience, or greed to swindle more stories out of me, that motivated Warner Bros. to offer me a seven-year contract ... Whatever their reason, I grabbed their offer so I could quit my putrid career as a communications engineer by becoming a writer, writing scripts in an entirely new world.’ His first film credit was 1942's Juke Girl, which starred Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan. Bezzerides had begun writing short stories as a student at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, he studied Electrical Engineering. He was first published in a 1935 issue of Story Magazine, which printed his story titled Passage Into Eternity.
August 9, 1949
Jonathan Kellerman (born August 9, 1949) is an American psychologist, and Edgar and Anthony Award-winning author of numerous bestselling suspense novels. His writings on psychology (and specifically psychopathology) include Savage Spawn: Reflections on Violent Children. Most of his fictional stories feature the character of Alex Delaware, a child psychologist who consults for the police, assisted in his investigations by LAPD detective Milo Sturgis, who is what Kellerman describes as "gay, but so what?" He has also written numerous essays, an art book on vintage guitars entitled With Strings Attached and two children's books that he illustrated. In 2015 he received the APA Award for Lifetime Contributions to Psychology.
August 9, 1908
Tommaso Landolfi (August 9, 1908–1979) was an Italian author and translator. Born in Pico, province of Frosinone, he wrote numerous grotesque tales and novels, sometimes on the border of speculative fiction, science fiction and realism. He focused his translation efforts upon Russian and German authors such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Outside Italy, Landolfi's most known and translated work is AN AUTUMN STORY. Its story is, in more ways than one, a metaphor for an end to the old and the beginning of the new. While ghosts, terror and war dominate the landscape, and a gothic horror story is the main plot, there is nonetheless a sense that this book is a lamentation on an epoch that came to a violent end during World War II. Landolfi is also the author of a collection of stories, WORDS IN MOTION, and GOGOL’S WIFE. Tommaso Landolfi died in Rome.
August 9, 1922
Philip Arthur Larkin (9 August 1922 – 2 December 1985) was an English poet, novelist and librarian. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945, followed by two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), and he came to prominence in 1955 with the publication of his second collection of poems, The Less Deceived, followed by The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974). He contributed to The Daily Telegraph as its jazz critic from 1961 to 1971, articles gathered in All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961–71 (1985), and he edited The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973). His many honours include the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He was offered, but declined, the position of Poet Laureate in 1984, following the death of Sir John Betjeman.
August 9, 1880
Ramón Pérez de Ayala (9 August 1880, in Oviedo – 5 August 1962, in Madrid) was a Spanish writer. He was the Spanish ambassador to England in London (1931-1936) and voluntarily exiled himself to Argentina via France because of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Pérez de Ayala was educated at Jesuit schools, the experience of which he satirized in the novel A.M.D.G. (1910). There is some debate regarding to which generation of Spanish writers Pérez de Ayala belongs. His early realistic novels reveal ties with the Generation of 98. However, some argue that Ramon Pérez de Ayala was a member of the Generation of 1914, a group which did not entirely fit with either the Generation of 98 or the Generation of 27. He was elected to the Royal Spanish Academy in 1928, and received nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1931, 1934 and 1947. He was appointed director of the Prado Museum in 1931 a position that he left temporarily in 1932 to become the Spanish ambassador to Britain. Perez de Ayala received an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1936. He was succeeded as director of the Prado Museum by Pablo Picasso in 1936. After 1916, his novels became increasingly mature and lyrical, his characters becoming symbolic representatives of general human problems. To this period belongs his masterpieces, Belarmino y Apolonio (1921) (translated as "Belarmino and Apolonio"), Tiger Juan (1926) and El curandero de su honra (The Healer of his Honour) (1927). La paz del sendero (The Peace of the Path) (1903), El sendero innumerable (1916), and El sendero andante (1921), his major poetic works, show the influence of French symbolism. He also wrote satiric essays and dramatic criticism.
August 9, 1910
Robert Hans van Gulik (August 9, 1910 – September 24, 1967) was a Dutch orientalist, diplomat, musician (of the guqin), and writer, best known for the Judge Dee historical mysteries, the protagonist of which he borrowed from the 18th-century Chinese detective novel Dee Goong An. His talents as a linguist suited him for a job in the Dutch Foreign Service, which he joined in 1935; and he was then stationed in various countries, mostly in East Asia (Japan and China). While in Chongqing, he married a Chinese woman, Shui Shifang, the daughter of a Qing dynasty Imperial mandarin, and they had four children together. During World War II van Gulik translated the 18th-century detective novel Dee Goong An into English under the title Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (first published in Tokyo in 1949). The main character of this book, Judge Dee, was based on the real statesman and detective Di Renjie, who lived in the 7th century, during the Tang Dynasty (AD 600–900), though in the novel itself elements of Ming Dynasty China (AD 1300–1600) were mixed in. Thanks to his translation of this largely forgotten work, van Gulik became interested in Chinese detective fiction. Van Gulik's intent in writing his first Judge Dee novel was, as he wrote in remarks on The Chinese Bell Murders, "to show modern Chinese and Japanese writers that their own ancient crime-literature has plenty of source material for detective and mystery-stories."
August 9, 1880
Ramón Pérez de Ayala (9 August 1880, in Oviedo – 5 August 1962, in Madrid) was a Spanish writer. He was the Spanish ambassador to England in London (1931-1936) and voluntarily exiled himself to Argentina via France because of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Pérez de Ayala was educated at Jesuit schools, the experience of which he satirized in the novel A.M.D.G. (1910). There is some debate regarding to which generation of Spanish writers Pérez de Ayala belongs. His early realistic novels reveal ties with the Generation of 98. However, some argue that Ramon Pérez de Ayala was a member of the Generation of 1914, a group which did not entirely fit with either the Generation of 98 or the Generation of 27. He was elected to the Royal Spanish Academy in 1928, and received nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1931, 1934 and 1947. He was appointed director of the Prado Museum in 1931 a position that he left temporarily in 1932 to become the Spanish ambassador to Britain. Perez de Ayala received an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1936. He was succeeded as director of the Prado Museum by Pablo Picasso in 1936. After 1916, his novels became increasingly mature and lyrical, his characters becoming symbolic representatives of general human problems. To this period belongs his masterpieces, Belarmino y Apolonio (1921) (translated as "Belarmino and Apolonio"), Tiger Juan (1926) and El curandero de su honra (The Healer of his Honour) (1927). La paz del sendero (The Peace of the Path) (1903), El sendero innumerable (1916), and El sendero andante (1921), his major poetic works, show the influence of French symbolism. He also wrote satiric essays and dramatic criticism.
August 9, 1945
Martín Sánchez-Jankowski who directs the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues and is Chair of the Center for Ethnographic Research has taught at Berkeley since 1984. He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in political science. His research has focused on inequality in advanced and developing societies with a particular interest in the sociology of poverty. He has done field work with gangs, in poor neighborhoods, schools, and the illicit underground economy, and is currenttly engaged in a ten year study of social change among indigenous peoples in India, the Fiji Islands, and the US. His research has been directed toward understanding the social arrangements and behavior of people living in poverty and he has published a number of books on the topic including: City Bound: Urban Life and Political Attitudes Among Chicano Yourth (1986); Islands in the Street: Gangs and American Urban Society (1991); Cracks in the Pavement: Social Change and Resilience in Poor Neighborhoods (2008); Burning Dislike: Ethnic Violence in Schools (2016); co-authored with five Berkeley colleagues Inequality By Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth (1996); and co-edited The Management of Purpose: Lewis Anthony Dexter (2010); and Children in Crisis: Ethnographic Studies in Interanational Contexts (2013). He is in the process of finishing two books that report the findings from
August 9, 1841
Johan Jacob Krohn (born August 9, 1841 in Copenhagen , died January 5, 1925 ) was a Danish school director, author and poet. He was a student from the Metropolitan School in 1860 , theologian candidate in 1867 and the son of sculptor and medalist FC Krohn and Sophie Susanne Købke. He worked at the private school of Krebs' school in Copenhagen in 1880-1914. Johan Krohn wrote a number of narratives for children, which in the late 1800s and early 1900s were collected in several volumes with the collections entitled Stories for Children. He is, however, most known as the author of the children 's book Peter's Christmas , with the Christmas song " You Green, Lovely Tree ." This song is included in the Norwegian Hymn Book 2013. Peter's Christmas was published anonymously in 1866 , but the book has been reprinted several times, with the original illustrations of the brother Pietro Krohn and the friend Otto Haslund , later with new artists like Mads Stage (2002). Johan Krohn also edited - as many of the children's poetry writers did - childrens magazines, among other things. the much widespread children's Christmas presents.
August 9, 1949
Gregory Orfalea is an American writer, the author or editor of nine books, including his most recent works, the biography Journey to the Sun: Junipero Serra's Dream and the Founding of California and a short story collection, The Man Who Guarded the Bomb.
August 9, 1908
Herman G. Weinberg (9 August 1908 – 7 November 1983) was an American subtitler, film journalist and author. He pioneered the use of English subtitles for foreign films, beginning in the early days of sound film and continuing until the 1960s. He subtitled more than 300 foreign films, including many classics. He wrote several books on film as well as an autobiography, A Manhattan Odyssey (1982). He was an expert on the films of Ernst Lubitsch, Josef von Sternberg and Erich von Stroheim.
August 10, 1912
Jorge Amado de Faria (August 10, 1912 - August 6, 2001) was a Brazilian writer of the Modernist school. He was the best-known of modern Brazilian writers, His work dealt largely with the poor urban black and mulatto communities of Bahia.
August 10, 1910
Aldo Buzzi (10 August 1910 – 9 October 2009) was an author and architect. Born in Como, Italy, Buzzi graduated from Milan School of Architecture in 1938. Though primarily an author of travel and gastronomy books, he also worked as an architect; as assistant director, scene writer, and screen writer for various film production companies in the former Yugoslavia, and in Rome, Italy, and France.
August 10, 1900
René Crevel (10 August 1900 – 18 June 1935) was a French writer involved with the surrealist movement.
August 10, 1878
Alfred Döblin (August 10, 1878 – June 26, 1957) was a German expressionist novelist, best known for Berlin Alexanderplatz. He was born in Stettin, Pomerania, now Szczecin in Poland, the son of a Jewish merchant. The family moved to Berlin in 1898, where Döblin studied medicine, first at the University of Berlin, then at Freiburg University. During his student years, he became interested in German philosophy, especially that of Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. After graduating, he worked as a journalist in Regensburg and Berlin, before actually beginning a psychiatric practice in the working class neighborhood of Alexanderplatz. During this time, he wrote several novels, but none of them were published until 1915, when Die Drei Sprünge des Wang-Lung was published. It tells the story of political upheaval in 18th century China. He won the Fontane Prize for it. He was garnering popularity through several expressionist short stories in the magazine Der Sturm. Eventually he dropped out of the Expressionist Movement, but many of his Sturm stories were published in 1913 in a collection called Die Ermordung einer Butterblume. During World War I, Döblin served as a doctor with the German Army, but continued his writing. His historical novel, Wallenstein, set during the Thirty Years’ War, was written during this period. In 1920 Döblin joined the Association of German Writers (Schutzverband Deutscher Schriftsteller), and in 1924 he became its president. He reviewed plays for the Prager Tageblatt for several years, and was a member of the Group 1925 with Bertolt Brecht. In 1924 he published Berge, Meere und Giganten, a dystopic view of a future in which technology confronts man and nature. In 1929, Berlin Alexanderplatz was published. Partly written in colloquial German, with many viewpoint characters and a narrative style reminiscent of John Dos Passos and James Joyce, it tells the story of a criminal who is drawn deeper and deeper into an underworld he cannot rise out of. When the Nazis took power in Germany, Döblin fled to Switzerland and then the United States, working for MGM in Hollywood. His novel Das Land Ohne Tod (The Land without Death), set in South America, was published in 1937. In 1941, Döblin converted to Roman Catholicism, citing Søren Kierkegaard and Baruch Spinoza as influences. Döblin returned to Europe in 1945, working for the French Ministry of Cultural Affairs. He returned to Germany, settling in Baden-Baden, where he worked as an education officer and a magazine publisher, but, unhappy with the political environment in his native country, he settled in France (he had become a French citizen in 1936). His two outstanding contributions from this period are a historical novel, November 1918, and Hamlet, an expression of his hopes for the future of Europe. As he had Parkinson, in 1956 Döblin entered a sanitarium in Freiburg im Breisgau. He remained mostly paralyzed for the rest of his life, dying in Emmendingen the following year.
August 10, 1963
Moses Isegawa, also known as Sey Wava (born 10 August 1963), is a Ugandan author. He has written novels set against the political turmoil of Uganda, which he left in 1990 for the Netherlands. His debut novel, Abyssinian Chronicles, was first published in Amsterdam in 1998, selling more than 100,000 copies and gaining him widespread national attention. It was also very well reviewed when published in English in the United Kingdom and United States, in 2001. Isegawa became a naturalized Dutch citizen, but he returned to live in Uganda in 2006.
August 10, 1932
Vladimír Páral (born August 10, 1932) is a Czech fiction writer, and one of the greatest stylists among contemporary authors, and his unique prose works just as well in English as it does in Czech. Although Paral's darkly comic vision is of a degraded Communist society, it is in many ways just as applicable to ours. His world is one where people will do almost anything to attain their dreams, where people long for certainties, and where freedom is nothing but another fairy tale.
August 10, 1938
Tony Ross (born 10 August 1938) is a British illustrator and author of children's picture books. In Britain he may be known best for illustrating the Horrid Henry series by Francesca Simon. He has also illustrated the Amber Brown series by Paula Danziger, the Dr. Xargle series by Jeanne Willis, and the Harry The Poisonous Centipede series by Lynne Reid Banks. For his contribution as a children's illustrator he was U.K. nominee for the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2004. In 1986 Ross won the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis, picture books category, for Ich komm dich holen!, the German-language edition of I'm coming to get you! (Andersen, 1984). For the third Dr. Xargle book with Willis, Dr. Xargle's book of Earth Tiggers, about cats, he was highly commended runner up for the 1990 Kate Greenaway Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject. Among WorldCat participating libraries, the eight most widely held works by Ross are Amber Brown books written by Danziger. The most widely held book written and illustrated by Ross is I Want Two Birthdays (2008), which is represented in ten languages. Ross was born in London. He studied at the Liverpool School of Art and Design and had many jobs, including a cartoonist. In Britain, Ross was a commended runner up for the annual Greenaway Medal.
August 10, 1930
Barry Unsworth (10 August 1930 – 4 June 2012) was an English writer known for his historical fiction. He published 17 novels, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, winning once for the 1992 novel Sacred Hunger.
August 10, 1895
A native of the Ukraine, Mikhail Zoshchenko (1895-1958) was the son of an artist of noble descent. Dropping out of the law course at the University of St. Petersburg, he volunteered in 1914, served as an officer, and was gassed and wounded. In 1913 he volunteered again, this time for the Red Army. After the Revolution came his years of wandering: he was a carpenter, trapper, cobbler, policeman, detective, gambler, clerk, and actor. In 192i he was one of the founders of the literary circle, the Serapion Brotherhood, and published his first story in 1922. According to his friends, Zoshchenko was a confirmed hypochondriac and much given to melancholy.
August 10, 1964
Ricardo Cortez Cruz was born in Decatur, Illinois, on August 10, 1964. During high school and college he worked as a sports intern and newsroom clerk for the Decatur Herald and Review and as a sports clerk/writer for the Bloomington Pantagraph. He holds a master’s degree in writing from Illinois State University, where he was awarded the 1987—1988 Robert Brome Creative Writing Award, and is currently completing his doctorate there. His fiction has been published in Black Ice magazine, and a story is forthcoming in Fiction International. His hobbies include stereo mixing and basketball. He is currently living large in Bloomington, Illinois and working on a second novel, FIVE DAYS OF BLEEDING, that uses the blues, jazz, and mutilation to tell its story.
August 10, 1941
ROBERT E. HEMENWAY (August 10, 1941 - July 31, 2015) was associate professor of English at the University of Kentucky. He edited a memoir of the Harlem Renaissance, Taylor Gordon’s BORN TO BE, and published essays about black authors in such journals as the Black Scholar and the College Language Association Journal.
August 10, 1934
Stanley Ira Kutler (August 10, 1934 – April 7, 2015) was an American historian, best known for his lawsuit against the National Archives and Richard Nixon that won the release of tape recordings Nixon made during his White House years, particularly those in relation to the Watergate scandal.
August 10, 1903
Ward Moore (August 10, 1903 – January 28, 1978) was the working name of American writer Joseph Ward Moore. According to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ‘he contributed only infrequently to the field, [but] each of his books became something of a classic.’ Moore began publishing with the novel Breathe the Air Again (1942), about the onset of the Great Depression. The story is told from multiple viewpoints, and Ward Moore himself appears briefly as a character in the novel. His most famous work is the alternate history novel Bring the Jubilee (1953). This novel, narrated by Hodge Backmaker, tells of a world in which the South won the American Civil War, leaving the North in ruins. Moore's other novels include Cloud By Day, in which a brush fire threatens a town in Topanga Canyon; Greener Than You Think, a novel about unstoppable Bermuda Grass; Joyleg (co-authored with Avram Davidson), which assumes the survival of the State of Franklin; and Caduceus Wild (co-authored with Robert Bradford), about a medarchy, a nation governed by physicians. Moore is also known for the two short stories (since collected) ‘Lot’ (1953) and ‘Lot's Daughter’ (1954) which arepostapocalyptic tales with parallels to the Bible. The film Panic in Year Zero! (1962) was (without giving credit) based on Lot andLot's Daughter. His short story ‘Adjustment’, in which an ordinary man adjusts to a never-never land in which his wishes are fulfilled, and makes the environment adjust to him as well, has been reprinted several times.Moore was born in Madison, New Jersey, a western suburb of New York City. His parents were Jewish and had married in 1902, the previous year. His grandfather Joseph Solomon Moore (1821–1892) had been a successful German-born commission merchant and the statistician of the New York custom house, the author of several books on the tariff question and a friend of Carl Schurz. Five months after Ward Moore's birth, he moved with his parents to Montreal, where his mother's family lived. In 1913 they returned to New York. Moore's parents divorced and remarried around this time, and his father died in 1916. His mother's second husband and Moore's stepfather was the noted German jazz band leader Julian Fuhs. Moore attended De Witt Clinton High School in New York, where according to one widely repeated story he was expelled for antiwar activity during World War I; elsewhere he claimed that he dropped out of school in order to write. He later attended Columbia College. Moore claimed to have spent several years tramping around the United States as a hobo during the early 1920s. In the mid-1920s he managed a bookshop in Chicago, where he befriended one of the store's patrons, the young poet Kenneth Rexroth. Moore appears in Rexroth's memoir An Autobiographical Novel as the mad bohemian poet/bookseller/science fiction writer ‘Bard Major’. Rexroth claimed that ‘Major’ had been on the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Milwaukee and was expelled for Trotskyist deviationism, but the factual basis for this tale, if any, is obscure. In 1929 Moore relocated to California, where he was to live for the rest of his life. Starting in 1937 he participated in the Federal Writers Project of the WPA, where his friend Rexroth was an administrator in the San Francisco office. His picaresque first novel Breathe the Air Again, was about the labor struggle in California during the 1920s. It had autobiographical elements and was widely and favorably reviewed. It was intended to be the first of a trilogy but the remaining volumes were never published. During the 1940s Moore wrote book reviews, articles and short stories for a number of magazines and newspapers, including Harper's Bazaar, the San Francisco Chronicle, Jewish Horizons, and The Nation. By 1942 Moore was married to his first wife, Lorna Lenzi. He had seven children. Starting in 1950 he was book review editor of Frontier, a West Coast political monthly similar in outlook to The Nation. In the early 1950s he began writing regularly for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He was a friend of the magazine's California-based editors, Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas, and soon became a popular favorite with the magazine's readers. Though he was never terribly prolific, his science fiction stories penned during the 1950s were entertaining and well crafted and were well received. In the 1960s his literary output diminished, and his last two novels were completed with the help of collaborators. His 1953 speculative if-the-South-had-won-the-Civil-War novel Bring the Jubilee was brought back into print at the time of the Civil War centennial and found an appreciative new audience among Civil War buffs. In 1965 he remarried; his second wife was the science fiction writer Raylyn Moore (née Crabbe; 1928–2005). The couple moved to Pacific Grove, California where he died in 1978.
August 10, 1946
Emine Sevgi Özdamar is a writer, director, and actress of Turkish origin who resides in Germany and has resided there for many years. Özdamar's art is unique in that it is influenced by her life experiences, which straddle the countries of Germany and Turkey throughout times of turmoil in both. One of her most notable accomplishments is winning the 1991 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize. Özdamar's literary work has received much recognition and scholarly attention. A lover of poetry, she found great inspiration in the works of Heinrich Heine and Bertolt Brecht, especially from an album of the latter's songs which she had bought in the 1960s in Berlin.
August 10, 1903
Judson Pentecost Philips (August 10, 1903 – March 7, 1989) was an American writer who wrote more than 100 mystery and detective novels under the pseudonyms Hugh Pentecost and Philip Owen, as well as under his own name. As Judson Philips, he also wrote numerous pulp sports novels in the 1930s. Philips was born in Northfield, Massachusetts and traveled widely before completing his education and graduating from Columbia University in 1925. Philips started writing short stories for pulp fiction magazines in the 1920s and 1930s. He also wrote plays and a newspaper column. He was a prolific mystery writer, especially under the Hugh Pentecost moniker. His novels benefited from strong characterization, fair play with the reader, and unstilted language. He created several series characters, most of them "amateur" sleuths. Perhaps the best known is Pierre Chambrun, the suave manager of a New York luxury hotel who often has to solve murders among the rich and famous.
August 10, 1924
ARNOLD A. ROGOW (August 10, 1924, Harrisburg, PA - February 14, 2006, Manhattan, New York City, NY) taught at Stanford, the University of Iowa, and the City University of New York. He is the author of many other hooks, including THOMAS HOBBES: RADICAL IN THE SERVICE OF REACTION, JAMES FORRESTAL: A STUDY OF PERSONALITY, POLITICS, AND POLICY, and THE DYING OF THE LIGHT. He lived in New York City.
August 10, 1902
Curt Siodmak (August 10, 1902 – September 2, 2000) was a German-American novelist and screenwriter. He is known for his work in the horror and science fiction film genres, with such films as The Wolf Man and Donovan's Brain (the latter adapted from his novel of the same name). He was the younger brother of noir director Robert Siodmak.
August 10, 1903
Judson Pentecost Philips (August 10, 1903 – March 7, 1989) was an American writer who wrote more than 100 mystery and detective novels under the pseudonyms Hugh Pentecost and Philip Owen, as well as under his own name. As Judson Philips, he also wrote numerous pulp sports novels in the 1930s. Philips was born in Northfield, Massachusetts and traveled widely, before completing his education at Columbia University, where he graduated in 1925. Philips started writing short stories for pulp fiction magazines in the 1920s and 1930s. He also wrote plays and a newspaper column. A number of his mystery novels were published under his own name as well as the Hugh Pentecost moniker, all of which benefited from strong characterization, fair play with the reader, and unstilted language to describe interesting situations. In 1973, he received the Grand Master Award, the highest honor bestowed by the Mystery Writers of America. Phillips died of complications resulting from emphysema in 1989, at the age of 85, in Canaan, Connecticut
August 11, 1932
Fernando Arrabal Terán (born August 11, 1932) is a Spanish playwright, screenwriter, film director, novelist and poet. Arrabal was born in Melilla, Spain, but settled in France in 1955; he describes himself as ‘desterrado,’ or ‘half-expatriate, half-exiled.’ Arrabal has directed seven full-length feature films; he has published over 100 plays, 14 novels, 800 poetry collections, chapbooks, and artist’s books; several essays, and his notorious ‘Letter to General Franco’ during the dictator’s lifetime. His complete plays have been published in a number of languages, in a two-volume edition totaling over two thousand pages. The New York Times theatre critic Mel Gussow has called Arrabal the last survivor among the ‘three avatars of modernism.’ In 1962 Arrabal co-founded the Panic Movement with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor, inspired by the god Pan, and was elected Transcendent Satrap of the Collège de Pataphysique in 1990. Forty other Transcendent Satraps have been elected over the past half-century, including Marcel Duchamp, Eugène Ionesco, Man Ray, Boris Vian, Dario Fo, Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard.
August 11, 1897
Louise Bogan (August 11, 1897 – February 4, 1970) was an American poet. She was appointed the fourth Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress in 1945. As poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine for nearly 40 years, Bogan played a major role in shaping mainstream poetic sensibilities of the mid-20th Century. The Poetry Foundation notes that Bogan has been called by some critics the most accomplished woman poet of the twentieth century. It further notes that, ‘Some critics have placed her in a category of brilliant minor poets described as the ‘reactionary generation.’ This group eschewed the prevailing Modernist forms that would come to dominate the literary landscape of the era in favor of more traditional techniques. Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Brett C. Millier named Bogan ‘one of the finest lyric poets America has produced,’ and added that ‘the fact that she was a woman and that she defended formal, lyric poetry in an age of expansive experimentation made evaluation of her work, until quite recently, somewhat condescending.’
August 11, 1955
Tim Cockey is the author of the award-winning Hitch series: The Hearse You Came In On, Hearse of a Different Color, Hearse Case Scenario, and Murder in the Hearse Degree. He has been a story analyst for many major film and television companies, including American Playhouse, ABC, and Hallmark Entertainment. He grew up in Baltimore and now lives in New York City.
August 11, 1944
Joanna Cole (born August 11, 1944), is an American writer of children’s books. She is most famous as the author of The Magic School Bus series. She has written over 250 books ranging from her first book Cockroaches to her famous series Magic School Bus, which is illustrated by Bruce Degen. Cole was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in the suburb East Orange. She loved science as a child, and had a teacher she says was a little like Ms. Frizzle. She attended the University of Massachusetts and Indiana University before graduating from the City College of New York with a B.A. in psychology. After some graduate education courses, she spent a year as a librarian in a Brooklyn elementary school. Cole subsequently became a letters correspondent at Newsweek, then associate editor for the SeeSaw book club at Scholastic, and then a senior editor for Doubleday Books for Young Readers. She went freelance in 1980, writing children's books and articles for Parents magazine. The first Magic School Bus book was written in 1985 and published the following year. The Magic School Bus has enjoyed continued success and has sold millions of copies in multiple languages.
August 11, 1917
Sebastian de Grazia (August 11, 1917, Chicago, IL - 2001, Princeton, NJ) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author. Born in Chicago, he received his bachelor's degree and a doctorate in political science from the University of Chicago. During World War II he served in the Office of Strategic Services, predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency as an analyst. In 1962-1988 he taught political philosophy at Rutgers University. He received the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for his 1989 book Machiavelli in Hell. He is also the author of The Political Community (1948), Errors of Psychotherapy (1952), and A Country with No Name (1997). De Grazia has been described as the "father of leisure". Of Time, Work, and Leisure (1962) puts forward the idea that traditionally leisure was not a matter of recreation as much as of contemplation, of expanding one's awareness and understanding of the world, and that the social context of this understanding of leisure has to a large extent been lost, and with it the notion of leisure being the pursuit of philosophy
August 11, 1936
Andre Jules Dubus II (August 11, 1936 - February 24, 1999) was an American short story writer, essayist, and autobiographer.
August 11, 1921
Alexander Murray Palmer "Alex" Haley (August 11, 1921 – February 10, 1992) was an American writer and the author of the 1976 book Roots: The Saga of an American Family. ABC adapted the book as a television miniseries of the same name and aired it in 1977 to a record-breaking audience of 130 million viewers. In the United States the book and miniseries raised the public awareness of African American history and inspired a broad interest in genealogy and family history. Haley's first book was The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published in 1965, a collaboration through numerous lengthy interviews with the subject, a major African-American leader. He was working on a second family history novel at his death. Haley had requested that David Stevens, a screenwriter, complete it; the book was published as Alex Haley's Queen. It was adapted as a film of the same name released in 1992.
August 11, 1905
Roger Mais (11 August 1905 - 21 June 1955) was a Jamaican journalist, novelist, poet, and playwright. He was born to a middle-class family in Kingston, Jamaica. By 1951, he had won ten first prizes in West Indian literary competitions. His integral role in the development of political and cultural nationalism is evidenced in his being awarded the high honour of the Order of Jamaica in 1978.Roger Mais was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and was educated at Calabar High School. He worked at various times as a photographer, insurance salesman, and journalist, launching his journalistic career as a contributor to the weekly newspaper Public Opinion from 1939 to 1952, which was associated with the People's National Party. He also wrote several plays, reviews, and short stories for the newspaper Focus and the Jamaica Daily Gleaner, concerning his articles with social injustice and inequality. He used this approach to reach his local audience and to primarily push for a national identity and anti-colonialism. Mais published more than a hundred short stories, most being found in Public Opinion and Focus. Other stories are collected in Face and Other Stories and And Most of All Man, published in the 1940s. Mais's play, George William Gordon, was also published in the 1940s, focusing on the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. It played an important role in the rehabilitation of the eponymous character, who was in conventional colonial history described as a rebel and traitor, but who would be proclaimed, on the centenary of the rebellion, a national hero. In 1944, Mais wrote the anti-British satirical tirade ‘Now We Know,’ criticizing British colonial rule. It resulted in his incarceration of six months in the Spanish Town Penitentiary. This period of imprisonment was instrumental in the development of his first novel, The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953), a work about working-class life in the Kingston of the 1940s. ‘Why I Love and Leave Jamaica’, an article written in 1950, also stirred many emotions. It labelled the bourgeoisie and the ‘philistines’ as shallow and criticized their impacting role on art and culture. In addition, Mais's wrote more than thirty stage and radio plays. The plays Masks and Paper Hats and Hurricane were performed in 1943, Atlanta in Calydon in 1950; The Potter's Field was published in Public Opinion (1950) and The First Sacrifice in Focus (1956). Mais left for England in 1952. He lived in London, then in Paris, and for a time in the south of France. He took an alias, Kingsley Croft, and showcased an art exhibition in Paris. His artwork also appeared on the covers of his novels. In 1953, his novel The Hills Were Joyful Together was published by Jonathan Cape in London. Soon afterwards, Brother Man (1954) was published, a sympathetic exploration of the emergent Rastafari movement. Then the following year, Black Lightning was published. While Mais's first two novels had urban settings, Black Lightning (1955) centred on an artist living in the countryside. In 1955 Mais was forced to return to Jamaica after falling ill with cancer; he died that same year in Kingston at the age of 50. His short stories were collected in a volume entitled Listen, The Wind, thirty-two years after his death. Mais's novels have been republished posthumously several times, an indication of his continuing importance to Caribbean literary history. He also had an influence on younger writers of the pre-independence period, notably John Hearne. Many of Mais's manuscripts have been deposited in the library of the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953) is written in the style of a narrative. It takes place in a ‘yard’ consisting of individuals and families living in a confinement of shacks shaped squarely, leaving a yard in the center. In this yard, daily and public life of the tenement unfolds. Mais took inspiration from Trinidadian C. L. R. James's novel Minty Alley and short story ‘Triumph’, which illustrated ‘yard’ life. Mais's The Hills Were Joyful Together is basically a depiction of slum life, portraying the upset of poverty in these yards. Mais claimed that he was ‘concerned with setting down objectively the hopes, fears, [and] frustrations of these people’. He wanted the novel to be ‘essentially realistic, even to the point of seeming violent, rude, expletive, functional, primitive, raw’. Brother Man (London: Cape, 1954) stood as a statement of protest, as well as being a major contributor to a nativist aesthetic. Mais was interested in the creole, the political reconstructionism of the 1930s, and the sociocultural problems of the ‘yards.’ There was a need for a nativist aesthetic. There was talk about a renewed self-government and the formation of a West Indian federation, provoking writers and intellectuals from the region to reflect on this optimistic future and to search for forms to give it a local face. Brother Man was Mais's contribution to this movement. The novel is situated in Kingston's slums. It portrays the daily condition of poverty of the society. Kamau Brathwaite refers to this as the ‘jazz novel’, where the ‘words are 'notes' that develop into riffs, themes, and 'choruses,' themselves part of a call/response design based on the aesthetic principle of solo/duo/trio improvisatons, with a return, at the end of each 'chorus,' to the basic group/ensemble community.’ Unlike the first two novels, Black Lightning (1955) takes place in the countryside. The novel centres on Jake, a blacksmith and a sculptor. He looks to Samson as a model of a man's independence and decides to carve a structure of Samson in mahogony. But when his wife elopes with another man, Jake's finished sculpture comes out as a blinded Samson leaning on a little boy. Jake is then blinded by lightning and has to depend on his friends to live. The tragic discovery of his dependence on humanity eventually drives Jake to his suicidal death. In 1938, major riots and uprising broke out all throughout the Caribbean islands (primarily in Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad). In Jamaica, riots emerged in the 1938 Montego Bay and among the banana loaders, firemen, and sanitation workers in Kingston. It was in Kingston, where Mais was headed to volunteer to help quell the rioting, that he had an apparent change of heart. He seemingly emerged with a completely alternative mindset, as explained in John Hearne's 1955 ‘A Personal Memoir’, and took the side of the workers/rioters. Many saw this as the event that spurred Mais' political involvement. At the end of this critical year, new leaders, including Mais, appropriately emerged to direct and push for political and social changes. Roger Mais' works, which include short stories, plays, reviews, and ‘think pieces’ among other genres, all generally have a political undertone to some degree. He contributed to a left-wing political newspaper called Public Opinion from 1939 to 1952 before he left Jamaica. The other writers of the post-1930s had similar ambitions, a period being characterized as ‘a more determined and confident nationalism.’ His stories appeared in Public Opinion and Focus, two journalistic publications. He also published two collections, Face and Other Stories and And Most of All Man. His main concerns were social injustice/inequality and colonialism. His stories and poems have been described as ‘propaganda’, where he illustrated poverty to the full extent. Some have gone so far as to say that his works were ‘weapons of war’, dealt ‘in a long and famous stream of realism’ (Norman Washington Manley). This sort of realism allowed for his readers/audience to understand the poverty in a way which was brutally honest. Examples of these works are The Hills Were Joyful Together and Brother Man. He adamantly denounced England as ‘exploitive’, ‘enslaving’, and disloyal and Winston Churchill for ‘hypocrisy and deception’. Subsequently, Mais was charged with sedition and sentenced to a six-month sentence. The Jamaican public was sympathetic to his imprisonment and helped to incite controversy and public commotion. It is in this sense that Mais was able to involve the Rastafari movement, a Jamaican cultural movement, in his novel Brother Man, in which he is able to identify with the anti-colonialism and afrocentrism of the Rastafari movement. Arguably, another important political contribution was his work to build a national identity, and he did this by: ‘'nativizing' the subjects and concerns of his writing’, ‘supplying a corrective to colonialism by [...] reclaiming subverted or disregarded histories’, and ‘gave authority to the island's language and voice’ (Hawthorne). This essentially means he would intentionally present protagonists that spoke in the local West Indian dialect to connect with his local audience, a significant change in attitude from previous works by other authors. Mais would also include nationalist propaganda demonstrating forgotten Jamaican culture and history. Other similar influential writers of Jamaican heritage include Vera Bell, Claude Thompson, Una Marson, John Hearne, Philip Sherlock, John Figueroa, and Louise Bennett-Coverly. Raised into a middle-class family with full access to ‘cultured’ traditions, Mais often incorporated a romantic idea into his writings. He drew from his Western education inspirations that lead to his use of ‘tragic,’ ‘visionary,’ and ‘poetic’ elements within books and plays. His belief in individualism and the writer's freedom to pursue imagination are reflected in many of his early works. However, Mais later recognized the tension between his colonial heritage and the nationalist movement and changed direction. By adopting a realistic stance, Mais decided to assume a literary style that would be more representative of the Caribbean national consciousness. This particular form allowed Mais to present ‘unambiguous, direct truths about the people and culture.’ Many of his later novels thus portray sufferings and despairs undergone by innocent people under British rule. One inspiration that he wove into his writings sprang from the 1938 People's National Party that was launched by Norman Manley. The movement aimed to grant Jamaica self-government, which sparked concurrent enthusiasm within the literary field. Besides Roger Mais another author, Vic Reid also incorporated into his works Manley's ambitious drive to independence. Reid's novel New Day is a historical account of Jamaica from 1865 to 1944. Like Mais, Reid finds primary sources particularly useful in modeling political messages into stories. During the 1930s, the first endeavours were made to write and introduce plays related to Caribbean life. Before that period, plays were European-based, with European actors as well. Shows consisted of Romeo and Juliet and reading of Shakespearian plays, but progress towards expressing Caribbean life was being made. The year symbolized an advance for Caribbean theatre. The desire to represent local life and history of the Caribbeans onstage were produced, and the theatre's capability to entertain and to raise concerning questions were acknowledged. George William Gordon acts as a representation for the lower class, alluding to the oppressions they were forced to endure throughout the play. The form of George William Gordon indicates that the scenes are meant to be performed in public. Therefore, the play not only represents the people, but also functions as a voice for the people so that their cries can be heard. The unfair court system, the low wages and their repercussions are stated clearly in the work by anonymous persons acting as a uniting voice for the people. It forms an identity for the Black underclass majority, which was Mais's ultimate goal in his work.
August 11, 1913
Sir Angus Frank Johnstone-Wilson, CBE (11 August 1913 – 31 May 1991) was an English novelist and short story writer. He was awarded the 1958 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot and later received a knighthood for his services to literature.
August 11, 1892
Eiji Yoshikawa (August 11, 1892, Naka-ku, Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan - September 7, 1962, Tsukiji, Tokyo, Japan) was born in 1892, of an impoverished samurai warrior family. With little more than a primary-school education, he became by turns a day laborer, a dockside painter, a tool-maker, and a dozen other unre1ated things, until a Tokyo newspaper hired him as a reporter. After the great earthquake of 1923 destroyed the newspaper office, he decided to become a writer. Since then he has produced a succession of bestsellers, among which THE HEIKE STORY has topped a million copies.
August 11, 1915
Suzanne Césaire [née Roussi] (11 August 1915 – 16 May 1966), born in Martinique, an overseas department of France, was a French writer, teacher, scholar, anti-colonial and feminist activist, and Surrealist. Her husband was the poet and politician Aimé Césaire. Césaire (née Roussi) was born on 11 August 1915 in Poterie, Martinique, to Flore Roussi (née William), a school teacher, and Benoït Roussi, a sugar factory worker. She began her education at her local primary school in Rivière-Salée in Martinique (which still had the status of a French colonial territory at that time), before attending a girls' boarding-school in the capital, Fort-de-France. Having completed her secondary education, she went to study literature in Toulouse and then in Paris at the prestigious École normale supérieure from 1936-1938. During her first year as a student in Paris, Suzanne (then still named Roussi) meet Léopold Sédar Senghor, who introduced her to Aimé Césaire, a fellow student at the École normale supérieure. The following year, on 10 July 1937, the couple married at the town hall of the 14th arrondissement in Paris. During their studies, the Césaires were both part of the editorial team of the militant journal L'Étudiant noir. In 1938 the couple had their first child. The following year they returned to Martinique where they both took up teaching jobs at the Lycée Schoelcher. They went on to have six children together, divorcing in April 1963 after 25 years of marriage. Césaire wrote in French and published seven essays during her career as a writer. All seven of these essays were published between 1941 and 1945 in the Martinique cultural journal Tropiques, of which she was a co-founder and editor along with her husband, Aimé Césaire, and René Ménil, both of whom were notable French poets from Martinique. Her writing explored themes such as Caribbean identity, civilisation, and surrealism. While her writing remains largely unknown to Anglophone readers, excerpts from her essays "Leo Frobenius and the Problem of Civilisations", "A Civilisation’s Discontent", "1943: Surrealism and Us", and "The Great Camouflage" can be found translated into English in the anthology The Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean (Verso, 1996), edited by Michael Richardson. Césaire had a particular affinity with surrealism, which she described as "the tightrope of our hope". In her essay "1943: Surrealism and Us", she called for a Martinican surrealism: Our surrealism will then deliver it the bread of its depths. Finally those sordid contemporary antinomies of black/white, European/African, civilised/savage will be transcended. The magical power of the mahoulis will be recovered, drawn forth from living sources. Colonial stupidity will be purified in the blue welding flame. Our value as metal, our cutting edge of steel, our amazing communions will be recovered." Césaire also developed a close relationship with André Breton following his visit to Martinique in 1941. She dedicated an essay to him ("André Breton, poet", 1941) and received a poem dedicated to her in return ("For madame Suzanne Césaire", 1941). This encounter with André Breton opened the way for her development of Afro-Surrealism. Her writing is often overshadowed by that of her husband, who is the better known of the two. However, in addition to her important literary essays, her role as editor of Tropiques can be regarded as an equally significant (if often overlooked) contribution to Caribbean literature. Tropiques was the most influential francophone Caribbean journal of its time and is widely acknowledged for the foundational role it played in the development of Martiniquan literature. Césaire played both an intellectual and administrative role in the journal's success. She managed the journal's relations with the censor — a particularly difficult role given the oppositional stance of Tropiques towards the war-time Vichy government — as well as taking responsibility for the printing. The intellectual impact she had on the journal is underlined by her essay "The Great Camouflage", which was the closing article of the final issue. Despite her substantial written and editorial contribution to the journal, the collected works of Tropiques, published by Jean-Michel Place in 1978, credits Aimé Césaire and René Ménil as the journal's catalysts. Tropiques published its last issue in September 1945, at the end of World War Two. With the closing of the journal, Suzanne Césaire stopped writing. The reasons for this are unknown. However, journalist Natalie Levisalles suggests that Suzanne Césaire would have perhaps made different choices if she had not had the responsibilities of mothering six children, teaching, and being the wife of an important politician and poet, Aimé Césaire. Indeed, her first daughter, Ina Césaire, remembers her saying regularly: "Yours will be the first generation of women who choose." Having stopped writing she pursued her career as a teacher, working in Martinique and Haiti. She was also an active feminist and participated in the Union des Femmes Françaises. Césaire was a pioneer in the search for a distinct Martiniquan literary voice. Though she was attacked by some Caribbean writers, following an early edition of Tropiques, for aping traditional French styles of poetry as well as supposedly promoting "The Happy Antilles" view of the island advanced by French colonialism, her essay of 1941, "Misère d'une poésie", condemned what she termed "Littérature de hamac. Littérature de sucre et de vanille. Tourisme littéeraire" [Literaure of the hammock, of sugar and vanilla. Literary tourism]. Her encounter with André Breton opened the way for her development of Afro-Surrealism, which followed in the footsteps of her use of surrealist concepts to illuminate the colonial dilemma. Her dictum - "La poésie martinique sera cannibale ou ne sera pas" [Cannibal poetry or nothing] - was an anti-colonial appropriation of a surrealist trope. Suzanne Césaire's repudiation of simple idealised answers - whether assimilationist, Africanist, or creole - to the situation of colonialism in the Caribbean has proved increasingly influential in later postcolonial studies.
August 11, 1900
Sir Denis William Brogan (born 11 August 1900 in Glasgow; died 5 January 1974), Scottish author and historian. He studied in Glasgow, Oxford, and Harvard. From 1939 to 1968, he was a fellow of Peterhouse and professor of political science in Cambridge. He became known for broadcast radio talks, chiefly on historical themes, and as a panellist on BBC radio's Round Britain Quiz, when he affected a testy, hyperacademic persona. In 1963, he received a knighthood. He was the brother of journalist Colm Brogan and the father of historian Hugh Brogan.
August 11, 1962
Bragi Ólafsson (born 11 August 1962 in Reykjavík, Iceland) is a musician and a writer. Internationally he is best known for his work as a bassist in The Sugarcubes, the avant-garde pop band from Iceland that brought fame to Björk, who went on to solo success with her unique brand of diverse musical genres. The Sugarcubes, who favored strange, offbeat melodies, came together in 1986, but the Sugarcubes' members had played together in different combinations in various Icelandic groups before. Bragi and Einar Örn Benediktsson (trumpet / vocals) had released records on Einar's own label, Gramm. In 1986 Bragi also launched his writing career, publishing his first book, a poetry volume called Dragsúgur (Draught). In 1992 The Sugarcubes disbanded as Björk began her solo career. Bragi, meanwhile, has continued to work on Bad Taste Ltd., the company formed by the Sugarcubes to publish poetry and sign other bands but is no longer a practising musician. He enjoys considerable success as a novelist, playwright and poet in Iceland, having twice been nominated to the Icelandic Literature Prize.
August 11, 1910
George Casper Homans (August 11, 1910 – May 29, 1989) was an American Sociologist, founder of behavioral sociology and the Social Exchange Theory. Homans is best known for his research in social behavior and his works including The Human Group, Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms, his Exchange Theory and the many different propositions he made to better explain social behavior.
August 11, 1947
Tom Miller is the author of six previous books, among them TRADING WITH THE ENEMY: A YANKEE TRAVELS THROUGH CASTRO’S CUBA,THE PANAMA HAT TRAIL, and ON THE BORDER. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
August 11, 1963
Alexander Nemerov, Professor in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University, is author of The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812-1824 (California, 2001) and Frederic Remington and Turn-of-the-Century America (1995).
August 11, 1972
Jeremy Prestholdt is Assistant Professor History at the University of California, San Diego.
August 11, 1938
Bapsi Sidhwa (born August 11, 1938) is a Pakistani novelist who writes in English and is resident in America. She is best known for her collaborative work with Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta: Sidhwa wrote both the 1991 novel Ice Candy Man which served as the basis for Mehta's 1998 film Earth as well as the 2006 novel Water: A Novel which is based upon Mehta's 2005 film Water.
August 11, 1936
Jonathan Dermot Spence (born 11 August 1936) is a British-born American historian and public intellectual specialising in Chinese history. He was Sterling Professor of History at Yale University from 1993 to 2008. His most widely read book is The Search for Modern China, a survey of the last several hundred years of Chinese history based on his popular course at Yale. A prolific author, reviewer, and essayist, he has published more than a dozen books on China. He retired from Yale in 2008. Spence's major interest is modern China, especially the Qing Dynasty, and relations between China and the West. Spence frequently uses biographies to examine cultural and political history. Another common theme is the efforts of both Westerners and Chinese "to change China," and how such efforts were frustrated.
August 11, 1923
Jack O'Dell (a.k.a. Hunter Pitts O'Dell), born August 11, 1923, is a prominent African-American member of the Civil Rights Movement. Jack O'Dell was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1923. O’Dell was raised there by his grandfather, a janitor at a public library, and his grandmother. He attended an all-black college Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans from 1941 until 1943. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Merchant Marines, which functioned as a branch of the military forces for the duration of the conflict. During this time, he joined the National Maritime Union, one of the few racially integrated labor unions in the U.S. During the 1950s, Jack O'Dell was a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). He worked with Martin Luther King Jr. O'Dell was a director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Because of O'Dell's past involvement with the Communist Party, King received pressure from many liberal leaders—including the Kennedy brothers, John and Robert—to distance himself from O'Dell. After conferring with King, O'Dell decided to accept a less prominent post within the movement in order not to alienate important allies of the Civil Rights struggle; nevertheless, he continued to play a decisive role in the SCLC, as well as in King's move towards the political left towards the end of his life. Jack O'Dell worked closely with the Rev. Jesse Jackson. He was a senior foreign policy advisor to the "Jesse Jackson for President" campaign in 1984. He also worked with Jackson as an international affairs consultant to the National Rainbow Coalition. O'Dell wrote for Freedomways, an African-American political journal, from its beginning in 1961 to its end in 1985. He was Chair of the Pacifica Foundation, which supports the Pacifica Radio Network, from 1977 to 1997. Jack O'Dell lives with his wife, Jane Power, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He is active in mentoring new generations of political activists—as well as historians of the Civil Rights Movement—in the Pacific Northwest.
August 12, 1867
Edith Hamilton (August 12, 1867 – May 31, 1963) was a German-American educator and author who was ‘recognized as the greatest woman Classicist‘. She was sixty-two years old when The Greek Way, her first book, was published in 1930. It was instantly successful, and is the earliest expression of her belief in ‘the calm lucidity of the Greek mind’ and ‘that the great thinkers of Athens were unsurpassed in their mastery of truth and enlightenment’. In 1957, when the Book-of-the-Month Club selected The Greek Way (1930) as a featured book, it enhanced her efforts at directing the American mind towards Ancient Greece, despite it having been published twenty-seven years earlier. Moreover, by then, she already had published other books, among them The Roman Way (1932), Mythology (1942), and The Echo of Greece (1957); to date, at the high school and university levels, Mythology remains the premier introductory text about its subject. The New York Times has described her as the Classical Scholar who ‘brought into clear and brilliant focus the Golden Age of Greek life and thought ... with Homeric power and simplicity in her style of writing’.
August 12, 1955
Gish Jen, born Lillian Jen (August 12, 1955, is a contemporary American writer and speaker. Gish Jen is a second generation Chinese American. Her parents emigrated from China in the 1940s, her mother was from Shanghai and her father was from Yixing. Born in Long Island, New York, she grew up in Queens, then Yonkers, then Scarsdale. Her works include four novels: Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, The Love Wife, and World and Town. She has also written a collection of short fiction, Who's Irish?
August 12, 1937
Walter Dean Myers (born Walter Milton Myers; August 12, 1937 – July 1, 2014) was an American writer of children's books best known for young adult literature. He wrote more than one hundred books including picture books and nonfiction. He won the Coretta Scott King Award for African-American authors five times. His 1988 novel Fallen Angels is one of the books most frequently challenged in the U.S. because of its adult language and its realistic depiction of the Vietnam War. He also sat on the Board of Advisors of the Society of Children's Book Writer's and Illustrators (SCBWI)
August 12, 1876
Mary Roberts Rinehart (August 12, 1876 – September 22, 1958) was an American writer, often called the American Agatha Christie, although her first mystery novel was published 14 years before Christie's first novel in 1920. Rinehart is considered the source of the phrase "The butler did it" from her novel The Door (1930), although the novel does not use the exact phrase. Rinehart is also considered to have invented the "Had-I-But-Known" school of mystery writing, with the publication of The Circular Staircase (1908).
August 12, 1947
Stefano Benni (born 12 August 1947) is an Italian satirical writer, poet and journalist. His books have been translated into around 20 foreign languages and scored notable commercial success.
August 12, 1930
Richard Cavendish (12 August 1930 – 21 October 2016) was a British historian who wrote extensively on the subjects of occultism, religion, the tarot, mythology, and English history.
August 12, 1945
J. D. "Sandy" McClatchy (August 12, 1945 – April 10, 2018) was an American poet and literary critic. He was editor of the Yale Review and president of The American Academy of Arts and Letters.
August 12, 1928
Fatima Meer (12 August 1928 – 12 March 2010) was a South African writer, academic, screenwriter, and prominent anti-apartheid activist. Fatima Meer was born in Durban, into a middle-class family of nine, where her father Moosa Ismail Meer, a newspaper editor of The Indian Views, instilled in her a consciousness of the racial discrimination that existed in the country. Her mother was Rachel Farrell, the second wife of Moosa Ismail Meer. She completed her schooling at the Durban Indian Girls High School and subsequently attended the University of the Witwatersrand where she was a member of a Trotskyist group and the University of Natal, where she completed a Masters degree in Sociology. In 1946, Meer joined many other South African Indians in a passive resistance campaign against apartheid, during which she started the Student Passive Resistance Committee. She also helped to establish the Durban District Women's League, an organisation started in order to build alliances between Africans and Indians as a result of the race riots between the two groups in 1949. After the National Party gained power in 1948 and started implementing their policy of apartheid, Meer’s activism increased; she was one of the founding members of the Federation of South African Women, which spearheaded the historical women's march on the Union Buildings on 9 August 1956. As a result of her activism, Meer was first "banned" in 1952 ("banning" was a government practice that, among other things, limited the number of people a person could meet at any one time as well as a person's movements and also prohibited a person from being published). She was one of the leaders of the Women's March in 1956. In the 1960s, she organised night vigils to protest against the mass detention of anti-apartheid activists without trial. During the 1970s she was again banned and later detained without trial for trying to organize a political rally with Black Consciousness Movement figure Steve Biko. She narrowly survived an assassination attempt shortly after her release from detention in 1976 when she was shot at her family home in Durban, but not harmed. Her son, Rashid, went into exile in the same year. She was attacked again and blamed the second attack on the Black Consciousness Movement She was a strong supporter of the Iranian Revolution and boycotted Salman Rushdie's trip to South Africa in 1998 claiming that he was a blasphemer. Meer was on the staff of the University of Natal from 1956 to 1988 and was also a visiting professor at a number of universities in South Africa, the U.S., India, Mauritius, the Caribbean and Britain. While at the University of Natal, Meer and her colleague Leo Kuper were subjected to surveillance by the apartheid government, and classes taught in the department were infiltrated by government spies, resulting in a chilling effect. Meer became a fellow of the London School of Economics, and received two honorary doctorates for her work for human and women's rights.
August 12, 1952
HANS-ULRICH TREICHEL was born in Germany in 1952. A poet, essayist, and novelist, he lives in Berlin and Leipzig, where he teaches at the German Literature Institute. His previous novel, LOST, was translated into twenty-one languages and is being made into a film.
August 12, 1925
Thor Vilhjálmsson (August 12, 1925 – March 2, 2011) was an Icelandic writer. He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. Over the course of his life Vilhjálmsson wrote novels, plays and poetry and also did translations. In 1988 he won the Nordic Council Literature Prize for his novel Justice Undone (Icelandic: Grámosinn glóir). In 1992, he won the Swedish Academy Nordic Prize, known as the 'little Nobel'. Bernard Scudder was born in Canterbury in 1954 and has Lived in Iceland since 1977. This is the third contemporary Icelandic novel to be published in his translation, following Einar Mär Gudmundsson's Epilogue of the Raindrops (Shad Thames) and Olaf Olafsson's Absolution (Random House). He is the translator of four of the eight poets in the Shad Thames anthology Brushstrokes of Blue and is at present a member of the team producing an English translation of the complete Icelandic Sagas.
August 13, 1930
Tomás Borge Martínez (13 August 1930 – 30 April 2012, often spelled as Thomas Borge in American newspapers) was a cofounder of the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua and was Interior Minister of Nicaragua during one of the administrations of Daniel Ortega. He was also a renowned statesman, writer, and politician. Tomás Borge also held the titles of "Vice-Secretary and President of the FSLN", member of the Nicaraguan Parliament and National Congress, and Ambassador to Peru. Considered a hardliner, he led the "prolonged people's war" tendency within the FSLN until his death. In 2010, he stated in an interview: "I am proud to be a Sandinista, to continue being faithful to the red and black flag of our party, to continue being faithful to our revolutionary organization; and to die proud of raising the front, and not having been disloyal to my principles, nor disloyal with my friends nor my companions, nor with my flag, nor with my cries of war."
August 13, 1948
Cynthia Harrod-Eagles (born 13 August 1948 in Shepherd's Bush, London, England), is a British writer of romance and mystery novels since 1972. She also used the pseudonym Emma Woodhouse and Elizabeth Bennett.
August 13, 1926
Roy A(ubrey) K(elvin) Heath (13 August 1926 - 14 May 2008) was a Guyanese writer, most noted for his ‘Georgetown Trilogy’ of novels (also published in an omnibus volume as THE ARMSTRONG TRILOGY, 1994), consisting of FROM THE HEAT OF THE DAY (1979), ONE GENERATION (1980), and GENETHA (1981). Heath said that his work was ‘intended to be a dramatic chronicle of twentieth-century Guyana’. Educated at Central High School, Georgetown, he worked as a Treasury clerk (1944-51) before leaving Guyana for England in 1951. He attended the University of London (1952-6), earning a B.A. Honours degree in Modern Languages. He also studied law and was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1964 (and the Guyana bar in 1973), although he never practiced as a lawyer, pursuing a career since 1959 as a writer and a schoolteacher in London, where he lived until his death at the age of 81. In 1974 his first novel, A MAN COME HOME, was published. This was followed four years later by THE MURDERER (1978), which won the Guardian Fiction Prize that same year and was described by the Observer as ‘mysteriously authentic, and unique as a work of art’. His other published novels are KWAKU; OR, THE MAN WHO COULD NOT KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT (1982), OREALLA (1984), THE SHADOW BRIDE (1988) and THE MINISTRY OF HOPE (1997). Heath also wrote non-fiction, including SHADOWS ROUND THE MOON: CARIBBEAN MEMOIRS (1990), plays - INEZ COMBRAY was produced in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1972, in which year he won the Guyana Theatre Guild Award - and short stories. He was awarded the Guyana Literature Prize in 1989.
August 13, 1960
George Packer (born August 13, 1960) is an American journalist, novelist, and playwright. He is best known for his writings for The New Yorker about U.S. foreign policy and for his book The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq. More recently, he wrote The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, covering the history of America from 1978 to 2012. That book won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in November 2013.
August 13, 1973
Kamila Naheed Shamsie (born 13 August 1973) is a Pakistani novelist who writes in the English language Shamsie is the daughter of journalist and editor Muneeza Shamsie and granddaughter of Begum Jahanara Habibullah. She was brought up in Karachi where she attended Karachi Grammar School. She has a BA in Creative Writing from Hamilton College,and an MFA from the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she was influenced by the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali. In 2007, she moved to London and is now a dual national of the UK and Pakistan. Shamsie wrote her first novel, In The City by the Sea, while still in college, and it was published in 1998. It was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in the UK, and Shamsie received the Prime Minister's Award for Literature in Pakistan in 1999. Her second novel, Salt and Saffron, followed in 2000, after which she was selected as one of Orange's 21 Writers of the 21st century. Her third novel, Kartography, received widespread critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys award in the UK. Both Kartography and her next novel, Broken Verses, have won the Patras Bokhari Award from the Academy of Letters in Pakistan[citation needed]. Her fifth novel Burnt Shadows was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction. In 2009, Kamila Shamsie donated the short story "The Desert Torso" to Oxfam's Ox-Tales project – four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the Air collection. In 2010, Shamsie won an Award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. She attended the 2011 Jaipur Literature Festival, where she spoke about her style of writing. She participated in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty-Six Books, with a piece based on a book of the King James Bible. In 2013 she was included in the Granta list of 20 best young British writers. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. A God in Every Stone was shortlisted for the 2015 Walter Scott Prize.
August 13, 1909
Charles Williams (August 13, 1909 – ca. April 7, 1975) was an American author of crime fiction. He is regarded by some critics as one of the finest suspense novelists of the 1950s and 1960s. His 1951 debut, the pulp paperback novel Hill Girl, sold more than a million copies. A dozen of his books have been adapted for movies, most popularly Dead Calm.
August 13, 1884
Johanna van Ammers-Küller (13 August 1884, Noordeloos — 23 January 1966, Bakel) was a Dutch writer. She was one of the most successful European female writers in the interwar period, through her reputation suffered as a result of her collaboration during World War II. Johanna Küller grew up in Delft, the only child of middle-class parents. By the age of 18 she was engaged to Rudolf van Ammers, an engineer, and she married him when she was 21. He became head of the Municipal Lighting Works in Leiden.
August 13, 1930
Tomás Borge Martínez (13 August 1930 – 30 April 2012, often spelled as Thomas Borge in American newspapers) was a cofounder of the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua and was Interior Minister of Nicaragua during one of the administrations of Daniel Ortega. He was also a renowned statesman, writer, and politician. Tomás Borge also held the titles of "Vice-Secretary and President of the FSLN", member of the Nicaraguan Parliament and National Congress, and Ambassador to Peru. Considered a hardliner, he led the "prolonged people's war" tendency within the FSLN until his death. In 2010, he stated in an interview: "I am proud to be a Sandinista, to continue being faithful to the red and black flag of our party, to continue being faithful to our revolutionary organization; and to die proud of raising the front, and not having been disloyal to my principles, nor disloyal with my friends nor my companions, nor with my flag, nor with my cries of war."
August 13, 1867
Sir William Alexander Craigie (August 13, 1867, Dundee, United Kingdom - September 2, 1957, Watlington, United Kingdom) was a philologist and a lexicographer. A graduate of the University of St Andrews, he was the third editor of the Oxford English Dictionary and co-editor of the 1933 supplement.
August 13, 1933
Madhur Jaffrey (born Bahadur, 13 August 1933) is an Indian-born actress, food and travel writer, and television personality. She is recognized for bringing Indian cuisine to the Americas with her debut cookbook, An Invitation to Indian Cooking (1973), which was inducted into the James Beard Foundation’s Cookbook Hall of Fame in 2006. She has written over a dozen cookbooks and appeared on several related television programs, the most notable of which was Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cookery, which premiered in the UK in 1982. She is the food consultant at Dawat, considered by many food critics to be among the best Indian restaurants in New York City. She played an instrumental part in bringing together film makers James Ivory and Ismail Merchant and acted in several of their films such as Shakespeare Wallah (1965), for which she won the Silver Bear for Best Actress award at the 15th Berlin International Film Festival. She has appeared in dramas on radio, stage and television. In 2004 she was named an honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire in recognition of her services to cultural relations between the United Kingdom, India and the United States, through her achievements in film, television and cookery. Her childhood memoir of India during the final years of the British Raj, Climbing the Mango Trees, was published in 2006.
August 13, 1949
Philippe Petit (born 13 August 1949) is a French high-wire artist who gained fame in 1974 for his high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, on the morning of 7 August. For his unauthorized feat (which he referred to as ‘le coup’) 1,350 feet (400 metres) above the ground, he rigged a 450-pound (200-kilogram) cable and used a custom-made 26-foot (8-metre) long, 55-pound (25-kilogram) balancing pole. He performed for 45 minutes, making eight passes along the wire. The next week, he celebrated his 25th birthday. All charges were dismissed in exchange for his doing a performance in Central Park for children. Since then, Petit has lived in New York, where he has been artist-in-residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, also a location of other aerial performances. He has done wire walking as part of official celebrations in New York, across the United States, and in France and other countries, as well as teaching workshops on the art. In 2008, Man on Wire, a documentary directed by James Marsh about Petit's walk between the towers, won numerous awards. He was also the subject of a children's book and an animated adaptation of it, released in 2005. The Walk, a movie based on Petit's walk, was released in 2015, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Petit. He also became adept at equestrianism, fencing, carpentry, rock-climbing, and bullfighting. Spurning circuses and their formulaic performances, he created his street persona on the sidewalks of Paris. In the early 1970s, he visited New York City, where he frequently juggled and worked on a slackline in Washington Square Park.
August 13, 1934
Leonard L. Richards, Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, grew up in California, and earned his AB, MA, and Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley and Davis. He has also taught at San Francisco State College and the University of Hawaii. His "Gentlemen of Property and Standing": Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America won the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Award in 1970. The Life and Times of Congressman John Quincy Adams was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 and The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780-1860 took the second-place Lincoln Prize in 2001. He is also the author, with William Graebner, of The American Record (1981, 1987, 1995, 2000, 2005) and of Shay’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle (2002). He and his wife live in Amherst, Massachusetts.
August 13, 1803
Prince Vladimir Fyodorovich Odoyevsky (13 August [O.S. 1 August] 1803 – 11 March [O.S. 27 February] 1869) was a prominent Russian philosopher, writer, music critic, philanthropist and pedagogue. He became known as the 'Russian Hoffmann' on account of his keen interest in phantasmagoric tales and musical criticism.
August 14, 1926
Alice Adams (August 14, 1926 – May 27, 1999) was an American novelist, short story writer, and university professor. Alice Adams was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and attended Radcliffe College, graduating in 1946. She married Mark Linenthal, with whom she lived in Paris for one year, followed by a move to Palo Alto where he attended Stanford University. Their only child, artist Peter Linenthal, was born in 1951. During the early 1950s, a psychiatrist told her she should stay married but stop writing; she ignored that advice and finally sold her short story, Winter Rain, to Charm magazine. Soon after that her marriage broke up, and she spent many years as a single mother, working as a secretary. Her first novel was, Careless Love (1966); in 1969 she began publishing stories in The New Yorker and received growing recognition. Her domestic partner from 1965-1987 was interior designer Robert McNie; she enjoyed close friendships with authors Max Steele, Ella Leffland, and Diane Johnson, and editors Frances Kiernan, William Abrahams, and Victoria Wilson. She wrote eleven novels, including the bestseller Superior Women, but is best known and most admired for her short stories, collected in Beautiful Girl (1979), To See You Again (1982), Return Trips (1985), After You've Gone (1989), and The Last Lovely City (1999), as well a in the posthumous selection called The Stories of Alice Adams (2002). Adams's place in late-twentieth-century American literature has been earned, writes Christine C. Ferguson, 'not only by the skill and deftness of her prose, but also by her challenge to hackneyed dismissal of love's redemptive possibilities. She presents a world where the potential for smart and independent women to have their cake and eat it, too, to enjoy professional and romantic success, stubbornly persists even if not often realized. No romanticist, Adams never flinches from describing all the vagaries and disappointments that afflict sexual and platonic relationships, but neither does she ever permit these descriptions to produce a sense of crushing pessimism.' She received numerous awards, including the O. Henry Lifetime Achievement Award and Best American Short Stories Award. She was a visiting writer at Stanford University, the University of California, Davis, and the University of California at Berkeley. Adams sometimes followed a pattern she called ABDCE in outlining a short story, which she described to her friend Anne Lamott. 'The letters stand for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw [the reader] in, make us want to know more. Background is where you ... see and know who these people are, how they've come to be together, what was going on before the opening of the story. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they care most about. The plot – the drama, the actions, the tension – will grow out of that. You move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different for the main characters, different in some real way. And then there is the ending: what is our sense of who these people are now, what are they left with, what happened, and what did it mean?' Adams died at home in San Francisco, California, in 1999. She is survived by her son, artist Peter Linenthal.
August 14, 1903
Eduardo Mallea (14 August 1903, Bahía Blanca – 12 November 1982, Buenos Aires) was an Argentine essayist, cultural critic, writer and diplomat. In 1931 he became editor of the literary magazine of La Nación.
August 14, 1945
Steve Martin is one of today’s most talented performers. He has had huge success as a film actor, with such credits as Roxanne, Father of the Bride, Parenthood, The Spanish Prisoner, L.A. Story, and Bowfinger (for which he wrote the screenplay). In addition to his bestselling collection of comic pieces, Pure Drivel, and bestselling novel The Pleasure of My Company, he has also written a play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile. His work appears frequently in The New Yorker and the New York Times. He lives in Los Angeles.
August 14, 1953
Diane McKinney-Whetstone (born August 14, 1953) is an African American author and is a member of the University of Pennsylvania Creative Writing program faculty. Her works of fiction have won numerous awards, including the BCALA Literary Award for Fiction from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, Inc. in 2005 and 2009. The second of five daughters born to Pennsylvania State Senator Paul McKinney and his wife Bessie, with an older brother and sister from her mother’s first marriage. Diane received a BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975. She is married to Greg Whetstone and they have twins, Taiwo, a daughter and Kehinde, a son. McKinney-Whetstone began writing when she was 39, joining the Rittenhouse Writer's Group, founded by University of Pennsylvania instructor James Rahn. She won a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant for a 500-page first draft. Her first novel, Tumbling, was published in 1996 by William Morrow and Company.
August 14, 1967
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, journalist, commentator and a Marxist intellectual. He is the George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. In 2013–2014, he was the Edward Said Chair at the American University of Beirut. Prashad is the author of seventeen books. In 2012, he published five books, including Arab Spring, Libyan Winter (AK Press) and Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today (The New Press). His book The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (2007) was chosen as the Best Nonfiction book by the Asian American Writers' Workshop in 2008 and it won the Muzaffar Ahmed Book Award in 2009. In 2013, Verso published his The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. He is author of No Free Left: The Futures of Indian Communism (LeftWord Books, 2015) and the editor of Letters to Palestine (Verso Books, 2015), a book that includes the writings of Teju Cole, Sinan Antoon, Noura Erakat, and Junot Diaz. Prashad is also a journalist. He writes regularly for Frontline, The Hindu, Alternet and BirGun, and is a contributing editor for Himal Southasian. He usually writes on the Middle Eastern politics, development economics, North-South relations and current events. In 2015, Prashad joined as the Chief Editor of the New Delhi-based publisher LeftWord Books. He is also an advisory board member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, part of the global BDS movement.
August 14, 1937
John Womack Jr. (born 1937) is an historian of Latin America, particularly of Mexico, the Mexican Revolution (1910–1921) and Emiliano Zapata. In June 2009 he retired from his post as the Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics at Harvard University.
August 14, 1943
Alfred Corn (born August 14, 1943) is an American poet and essayist. Alfred Corn was born in Bainbridge, Georgia in 1943 and raised in Valdosta, Georgia. Corn graduated from Emory University in 1965 with a B.A. in French literature. Corn earned an M.A. in French literature at Columbia University in 1967. Corn travelled to France on a Fulbright Scholarship where he met Ann Jones, whom he would later marry. After he and Ann Jones divorced, he was partnered with the architect Walter Brown in the years 1971-1976,and then with J.D. McClatchy from 1977 until 1989. In 1976, Corn published his first book of poetry ALL ROADS AT ONCE. Corn was awarded the 1982 Levinson Prize by Poetry Magazine. Corn received an Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1983 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986. In 1987, he was awarded a Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets. In 1997 Corn wrote the novel, PART OF HIS STORY. As of 2008, Corn has written nine books of poetry, one novel, and one book of essays.
August 14, 1867
John Galsworthy (14 August 1867 – 31 January 1933) was an English novelist and playwright. Notable works include The Forsyte Saga (1906–1921) and its sequels, A Modern Comedy and End of the Chapter. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932.
August 14, 1953
Michelle Huneven is an American novelist and journalist. Huneven was born and raised in a Jewish family in Altadena, California, where she returned to live in 2001. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa and attended the Methodist Claremont School of Theology.
August 14, 1959
Earvin "Magic" Johnson Jr. is an American retired professional basketball player and current president of basketball operations of the Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association. He played point guard for the Lakers for 13 seasons.
August 14, 1933
Thomas Francis Dermot Pakenham, 8th Earl of Longford (born 14 August 1933), known simply as Thomas Pakenham, is an Anglo-Irish historian and arborist who has written several prize-winning books on the diverse subjects of African history, Victorian and post-Victorian British history, and trees. He is the son of The 7th Earl of Longford, a Labour minister, and Elizabeth Longford. He has seven siblings, among them Lady Antonia Fraser, a writer who was married to playwright Harold Pinter; Lady Rachel Billington, also a writer and married to director Kevin Billington; Lady Judith Kazantzis, a poet; and The Hon. Kevin Pakenham, who works in the City of London. He is also the cousin of former Labour deputy leader, Harriet Harman. Thomas Pakenham, Lord Longford, does not use his title and did not use his courtesy title before succeeding his father. However, he has not disclaimed his British titles under the Peerage Act 1963, and the Irish peerages cannot be disclaimed as they are not covered by the Act. Following the House of Lords Act 1999 he is not entitled, as a hereditary peer, to sit in the House of Lords. His father was created a life peer in addition to his hereditary titles in order to be able to retain his seat in the upper house.
August 14, 1903
RAMÓN DIAZ SANCHEZ (August 14, 1903 - November 8, 1968) was born in Puerto Cahello, Venezuela, in 1903. He worked in factories and offices; was a reporter, a municipal judge, a newspaper editor; and served as Director for Culture and the Fine Arts of his country’s Ministry of Education. He was the author of several novels as well as volumes of short stories arid essays. His home was in Caracas until his death. JOHN UPTON, the translator, earned an M.A. from the University of Madrid and has lived for a number of years in various Spanish-speaking countries. He now resides in Carmel, California. . .
August 14, 1925
George C. Schoolfield (August 14, 1925 - July 21, 2016) was a professor emeritus of German and Scandinavian literatures at Yale University. He was the former editor of "Scandinavian Studies" and author of many books on Finland's literature and cultural history, most recently "Helsinki of the Czars: A Cultural History, 1808-1918,
August 14, 1912
Lúcio Cardoso (August 14, 1912, Curvelo, Minas Gerais, Brazil - September 28, 1968, Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) turned away from the social realism fashionable in 1930s Brazil and opened the doors of Brazilian literature to introspective works such as those of Clarice Lispector—his greatest follower and admirer. Margaret Jull Costa has translated dozens of works from both Spanish and Portuguese, including books by Javier Marías and José Saramago. Her translations have received numerous awards, including the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In 2014 she was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. Robin Patterson was mentored by Margaret Jull Costa, and has translated Our Musseque by José Luandino Vieira.
August 14, 1936
Paul Roazen (August 14, 1936, in Boston – November 3, 2005) was a political scientist who became a preeminent historian of psychoanalysis. Roazen received his A.B. at Harvard University in 1958. He then studied at the University of Chicago and Magdalen College, Oxford, before returning to Harvard for his PhD dissertation, which bore on Freud's political and social thought. After teaching at Harvard as an assistant professor in Government, he accepted an appointment in Social and Political Science at York University in Toronto in 1971, where he taught until his early retirement in 1995. In 1965 Roazen began to interview surviving friends, relatives, colleagues and patients of Sigmund Freud. His first 'big' book, Freud and his followers, was based on hundreds of hours of material. This was a path-breaking and influential work, which remains a basic reference for historians of psychoanalysis today. Roazen was the first non-psychoanalyst whom Anna Freud allowed to access the archives of the British Psychoanalytic Institute. He was able to see the huge material Ernest Jones had used to write his biography of Freud.
August 15, 1785
Thomas Penson De Quincey (15 August 1785 – 8 December 1859) was an English essayist, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). In publishing this work, many scholars suggest that De Quincey inaugurated the tradition of addiction literature in the West, changing the perception of drugs in the European imagination forever. De Quincey wrote his famous CONFESSIONS at a time when opium was as easily available as aspirin today, and almost as frequently used, and when its dangers were not understood. Though something of a fugitive from respectable society, he shared his addiction with some of the most distinguished men of his age. But the CONFESSIONS are not about drug-addiction. ‘They are a meditation on the mechanism of the imagination, an exploration of the interior life of an altogether exceptional being.’ Brilliantly gifted and charming, De Quincey suffered from what he himself called a ‘chronic passion of anxiety’ which led him from the security and success he might have enjoyed into the direst poverty, and into the experiences which form the subjects of the terrible, drug-induced dreams he describes so superbly.
August 15, 1919
Benedict 'Ben' Kiely (15 August 1919 – 9 February 2007) was an Irish writer and broadcaster from Omagh, County Tyrone.
August 15, 1954
Karl Stig-Erland ’Stieg’ Larsson (15 August 1954 – 9 November 2004) was a Swedish journalist and writer. He is best known for writing the ‘Millennium trilogy‘ of crime novels, which were published posthumously. Larsson lived much of his life in Stockholm and worked there in the field of journalism and as an independent researcher of right-wing extremism. He was the second best-selling author in the world for 2008, behind Khaled Hosseini. The third novel in the Millennium trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, became the most sold book in the United States in 2010 according to Publishers Weekly By March 2015, his series had sold 80 million copies worldwide.
August 15, 1912
Guido Morselli (August 15, 1912 - July 30, 1973) was an Italian novelist and essayist. Guido Morselli was born in Bologna, the second son of a well-to-do family belonging to Bolognese bourgeoisie. Giovanni, his father, was a manager of Carlo Erba, a pharmaceutical firm, while his mother, Olga Vincenzi, was the daughter of one of the most prestigious lawyers in Bologna. The family moved to Milan in 1914. Morselli's childhood was quite serene, but his mother suffered from Spanish flu in 1922 and had to be committed to hospital for a long time. The absence of his mother had a strong impact on Guido's personality, also due to his father's frequent travels; when Olga died in 1924 the loss struck the twelve-year-old boy powerfully. The relations between Guido and his father, who was often away from home, deteriorated. Guido developed a restless, unsociable character; he did not like school, though he was quite brilliant and loved reading. Guido failed his final secondary school exams in 1930 at the Liceo Parini, and barely managed to pass them in the following year. He studied law at the Università Statale di Milano to please his authoritarian father, but he started writing short journalistic essays without even trying to have them published. After his graduation in 1935 he served in the Italian Army, attending the officer course for the Alpini corps. He then was sent to an infantry regiment in Milan. Subsequently he lived for a long time abroad (1936–37), writing reportages and short stories which remain unpublished. His father strives to push Guido towards a managerial career, and has him hired at Caffaro (a chemical company) as a promoter. This experience only lasted one year, and it worsened the relations between father and son. After the death of his beloved sister Luisa in 1938, Guido managed to obtain life income from his father which enabled him to devote himself to those activities he really loved: reading, researching, and writing. He kept writing short essays, and began a diary, which he continued till his death. All his novels and essays were posthumously published after Morselli committed suicide in 1973, due to the rejection of his manuscripts by many publishing houses, which were unable to assess their literary value.
August 15, 1858
Edith Nesbit (married name Edith Bland; 15 August 1858 – 4 May 1924) was an English author and poet; she published her books for children under the name of E. Nesbit. She wrote or collaborated on over 60 books of fiction for children. She was also a political activist and co-founded the Fabian Society, a socialist organisation later affiliated to the Labour Party.
August 15, 1902
Iris Margaret Origo, Marchesa of Val d'Orcia, DBE (15 August 1902 — 28 June 1988), née Cutting, was an Anglo-Irish biographer and writer. She lived in Italy, and devoted much of her life to the improvement of the Tuscan estate at La Foce, near Montepulciano, which she purchased with her husband in the 1920s.
August 15, 1771
Sir Walter Scott (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832) was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet. Scott was the first English-language author to have a truly international career in his lifetime.
August 15, 1946
DENIS BOYLES is a journalist and writer whose pieces have appeared In The New York Times, Geo, Playboy, and other publications. He has spent many years in Africa.
August 15, 1868
Jan Welzl (15 August 1868, Záb?eh, Moravia, Austria-Hungary – 19 September 1948 Dawson City, Yukon, Canada) was a Czech traveller, adventurer, hunter, gold-digger, Eskimo chief and Chief Justice on island New Siberia and later story-teller and writer. He is known under the pseudonym Eskymo Welzl or the nickname Arctic Bismarck. Rudolf T?snohlídek began to write down his adventures on the basis of conversations with him. Pavel Eisner continued this but did not finish and later Bed?ich Golombek and Edvard Valenta completed the work. The book T?icet let na zlatém severu ("Thirty Years in the Golden North") had great success in Czechoslovakia and also abroad, where people suspected that "Eskymo Welzl" did not exist and that the real author was Karel ?apek who wrote the preface to foreign editions. The asteroid 15425 Welzl, discovered on 24 September 1998, is named after him.
August 15, 1885
Edna Ferber (August 15, 1885 – April 16, 1968) was an American novelist, short story writer and playwright. Her novels included the Pulitzer Prize-winning So Big (1924), Show Boat (1926; made into the celebrated 1927 musical), Cimarron (1929; made into the 1931 film which won the Academy Award for Best Picture), Giant (1952; made into the 1956 Hollywood movie) and Ice Palace (1958), filmed in 1960.
August 15, 1911
Cecily Joan Mackworth (15 August 1911 – 22 July 2006) was a Welsh author and explorer.
August 15, 1941
Laura Mulvey is Postgraduate Programme Coordinator at the BFI. She is the author of Visual and Other Pleasures and Fetishism and Curiosity (BFI, 1996) and has directed films in collaboration with Peter Wollen.
August 15, 1949
Alejandro Murguía was born in California, but raised in Mexico City. His experiences as an international volunteer in the Nicaraguan Insurrection of 1979 are recounted in his second collection of short stories Southern Front (American Book Award,1991). He lives in San Francisco, where he teaches Latin American literature at San Francisco State University. He was named Poet Laureate of San Francisco in 2012.
August 16, 1920
Henry Charles Bukowski (born Heinrich Karl Bukowski; August 16, 1920 — March 9, 1994) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually having over 60 books in print. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a ‘laureate of American lowlife.’.
August 16, 1895
Albert Cohen (August 16, 1895, Corfu, Greece - October 17, 1981, Geneva, Switzerland) was a Greek-born Romaniote Jewish Swiss novelist who wrote in French. He worked as a civil servant for various international organizations, such as the International Labour Organization. He became a Swiss citizen in 1919. Born Abraham Albert Cohen in Corfu, Greece, in 1895, to Greek Jewish parents. Albert’s parents, who owned a soap factory, moved to Marseille, France when he was a child. Albert Cohen discusses this period in his novel ‘Le livre de ma mère’ (The Book of my Mother). He studied at a private Catholic school. In 1904, he started high school at Lycée Thiers, and graduated in 1913. In 1914, he left Marseille for Geneva, Switzerland and enrolled in Law school. He graduated from Law School in 1917 and enrolled in Literature School in 1917 until 1919. In 1919, he became a Swiss citizen. That same year he married Elisabeth Brocher. In 1921, they gave birth to a daughter, Myriam. In 1924 his wife died of cancer. In 1925, Albert Cohen became director of Revue Juive (The Jewish Review), a periodical whose writers include Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. From 1926 to 1931, he served as a civil servant in Geneva. In 1931 He married his second wife, Marianne Goss. During the German occupation, in 1940, Cohen fled to Bordeaux, then to London. The Jewish Agency for Palestine then made him responsible to establish contacts with exiled governments. On January 10, 1943, Cohen’s mother died in Marseille. That same year, he met his future third wife, Bella Berkowich. In 1944, he became an attorney for the Intergovernmental Committee for Refugees. In 1947, Cohen returned to Geneva. In 1957, He turned down the post of Israeli Ambassador in order to pursue his literary career. He is buried in the Jewish Cemetery of Veyrier, near Geneva. ohen's literary career began in 1921 with the publication of a collection of poems, Paroles juives, followed by a prizewinning play, Ezchiel, in 1927. He then began work on the story of Solal of the Solals, the ever-evolving and transforming story that he would tell in four novels: Solal (1930); Mangeclous, translated as Nailcruncher (1938); and ultimately the large manuscript from which Belle du Seigneur and Les Valeureux were to evolve in 1968 and 1969. Cohen’s masterpiece, Belle du Seigneur, originally included the novel that was later published as Les valeureux. Belle du Seigneur is called ‘the book of love’, and tells Solal's passionate, cruel yet realistic love affair with Ariane Deume - a married non-Jewish woman. In 1968, the novel received the French Academy award. Since then, the novel has been one of the biggest sellers of the prestigious Gallimard White Collection.
August 16, 1937
William Francis Pepper (born August 16, 1937) is a former attorney based in New York City who is most noted for his efforts to prove government culpability and the innocence of James Earl Ray in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as the King family, in subsequent years. Pepper has also been trying to prove the innocence of Sirhan Sirhan in the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. He is the author of several books. He has been active in other government conspiracy cases, including the 9/11 Truth movement, and has advocated that George W. Bush be charged with war crimes.
August 16, 1902
Wallace Henry Thurman (August 16, 1902 - December 26, 1934) was an American novelist active during the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote essays, worked as an editor, and was a publisher of short-lived newspapers and literary journals. He is best known for his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), which explores discrimination within the black community based on skin color, with lighter skin being more highly valued. Thurman was born in Salt Lake City to Beulah and Oscar Thurman. When Thurman was less than a month old, his father abandoned his wife and son. It was not until Wallace was 30 years old that he met his father. Between his mother's many marriages, Wallace and his mother lived in Salt Lake City with Emma Jackson, his maternal grandmother. Jackson ran a saloon from her home, selling alcohol without a license. Thurman's early life was marked by loneliness, family instability and illness. He began grade school at age six in Boise, Idaho, but his poor health eventually led to a two-year absence from school, during which he returned to his grandmother Emma in Salt Lake City. From 1910 to 1914, Thurman lived in Chicago. Moving with his mother, he finished grammar school in Omaha, Nebraska. During this time, he suffered from persistent heart attacks. While living in Pasadena, California in the winter of 1918, Thurman caught influenza during the worldwide Influenza Pandemic. He recovered and returned to Salt Lake City, where he finished high school. Thurman was a voracious reader. He enjoyed the works of Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Havelock Ellis, Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire and many others. He wrote his first novel at the age of 10. He attended the University of Utah from 1919 to 1920 as a pre-medical student. In 1922 he transferred to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, but left without earning a degree. While in Los Angeles, he met and befriended the writer Arna Bontemps, and became a reporter and columnist for a black-owned newspaper. He started a magazine, Outlet, intended to be a West Coast equivalent to The Crisis, operated by the NAACP. In 1925 Thurman moved to Harlem. During the next decade, he worked as a ghostwriter, a publisher, and editor, as well as writing novels, plays, and articles. In 1926, he became the editor of The Messenger, a socialist journal addressed to blacks. There he was the first to publish the adult-themed stories of Langston Hughes. Thurman left the journal in October 1926 to become the editor of World Tomorrow, which was owned by whites. The following month, he collaborated in founding the literary magazine Fire!! Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists. Among its contributors were Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Bruce Nugent, Aaron Douglas, and Gwendolyn B. Bennett. He was able to publish only one issue of Fire!!. It challenged such figures as W. E. B. Du Bois and African Americans who had been working for social equality and racial integration. Thurman criticized them for believing that black art should serve as propaganda for those ends. He said that the New Negro movement spent too much energy trying to show white Americans that blacks were respectable and not inferior. Thurman and others of the "Niggerati" (the deliberately ironic name he used for the young African American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance) wanted to show the real lives of African Americans, both the good and the bad. Thurman believed that black artists should fully acknowledge and celebrate the arduous conditions of African American lives. As Singh and Scott wrote, "Thurman's Harlem Renaissance is, thus, staunch and revolutionary in its commitment to individuality and critical objectivity: the black writer need not pander to the aesthetic preferences of the black middle class, nor should he or she write for an easy and patronizing white approval." During this time, Thurman's flat in a rooming house, at 267 West 136th Street in Harlem, became the central meeting place of African-American literary avant-garde and visual artists. Thurman and Hurston mockingly called the room "Niggerati Manor." He had painted the walls red and black, which were the colors he used on the cover of Fire!! Nugent painted murals on the walls, some of which contained homoerotic content. In 1928, Thurman was asked to edit a magazine called Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life; its contributors included Alain Locke, George Schuyler, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson. He put out only two issues. Thurman married Louise Thompson on August 22, 1928. The marriage lasted only six months. Thompson said that Wallace was a homosexual and refused to admit it. They had no children together. Thurman died at the age of 32 from tuberculosis, which many suspect was exacerbated by his long fight with alcoholism. Langston Hughes described Thurman as "...a strangely brilliant black boy, who had read everything and whose critical mind could find something wrong with everything he read." Thurman's dark skin color attracted comment, including negative reactions from both black and white Americans. He used such colorism in his writings, attacking the black community's preference for its lighter-skinned members. Thurman wrote a play, Harlem, which debuted on Broadway in 1929 to mixed reviews. The same year his first novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929) was published. The novel is now recognized as a groundbreaking work of fiction because of its focus on intra-racial prejudice and colorism within the black community, where lighter skin has historically been favored. Three years later Thurman published Infants of the Spring (1932), a satire of the themes and the individuals of the Harlem Renaissance. He co-authored The Interne (1932), a final novel written with Abraham L. Furman, a white man.
August 16, 1962
SOLVEJ BALLE (born August 16, 1962) studied at the University of Copenhagen, at the Sorbonne and at Cornell University. She is co-editor of the literary magazine Den bla port, and is author of a previous novel. According to the Law has been acquired for publication in Sweden, Norway, Germany, Holland and Spain. She is married to a neuro-pathologist and lives in Frederiksberg. BARBARA HAVELAND, a Scot married to a Norwegian and resident in Denmark, has translated Peter Hoeg's Borderliners and The History of Danish Dreams.
August 16, 1914
Beatrice Schenk de Regniers (August 16, 1914 - March 1, 2000) was an American writer of children's picture books. Beatrice Schenk de Regniers was born in Lafayette, Indiana, and studied social work administration at the University of Chicago, earning her M.Ed. in 1941. During the 1940s she worked in the US and in a Yugoslav refugee camp on the Sinai peninsula. During the 1950s she was a free-lance writer of nonfiction, humor, short stories, and columns, as well as children's books. Her first book was The Giant Story, a picture book illustrated by Maurice Sendak, published by Harper in 1953. From 1961 she worked at Scholastic, Inc. as the founding editor of its "Lucky Book Club", four days weekly with Monday reserved for her own writing. She retired twenty years later. She wrote over fifty books, ten of which were published under the pseudonym of Tamara Kitt, including The Adventures of Silly Billy (1961), and The Boy Who Fooled the Giant (1963). Illustrator Beni Montresor won the annual Caldecott Medal for May I Bring a Friend?, published by Atheneum Books in 1964.
August 16, 1897
John Leslie Hotson, commonly known as Leslie Hotson or J. Leslie Hotson (16 August 1897 – 16 November 1992) was a scholar of Elizabethan literary puzzles. He was born at Delhi, Ontario, on 16 August 1897. He studied at Harvard University, where he obtained a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. He went on to hold a number of academic posts. Hotson was known for his tenacious archival research and his interest in coded information. He had a number of notable successes, but not all of his "decodings" have been accepted by other scholars. He discovered the identity of Ingram Frizer, the killer of Christopher Marlowe, and reconstructed the shape of the original Shakespearean theater. He also unearthed the letters that Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote to his divorced wife Harriet; produced evidence of Shakespeare's father as a wool dealer; illuminated Shakespeare's early years in Stratford-upon-Avon; and identified John Day as the killer of Henry Porter, a minor Elizabethan dramatist. Some of his solutions to literary puzzles are still in dispute. He claimed to have identified one Nicholas Colfox as the murderer of Thomas of Woodstock by "decoding" Chaucer's The Nun's Priest's Tale. He also claimed to have identified Mr W H, the person to whom Shakespeare's sonnets were dedicated, as a William Hatcliffe of Lincolnshire. He later argued that a miniature colour portrait by Nicholas Hilliard depicted Shakespeare as a young man. As the New York Times stated in his obituary: "it was chiefly as a Shakespearian detective that Dr Hotson remained in the public eye, sometimes to the annoyance of rival scholars who discounted his theories." His first major work, The Death of Christopher Marlowe — which made his name — is still in print. He stumbled across the evidence while decoding Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale in the archives of the English Public Records Office in 1923–24. He died on 16 November 1992 in North Branford, Connecticut.
August 16, 1921
Shiv K. Kumar (16 August 1921, Lahore, British India – 1 March 2017, Hyderabad, India) was an Indian English poet, playwright, novelist, and short story writer.
August 16, 1645
Jean de La Bruyère (16 August 1645 – 11 May 1696) was a French philosopher and moralist.
August 16, 1927
Herbert Lottman (August 16, 1927, Brooklyn - August 27, 2014, Paris) was an American author who specialized in writing biographies on French subjects. An influential biographer, he published 17 biographies, 15 of which were related to French culture, commerce, or politics; including works on Albert Camus, Colette, Gustave Flaubert, Henri Philippe Pétain, Jules Verne, and the Rothschild banking family of France. He wrote that, just before dying, Albert Camus was pledged to marry. Camus's estate tried to block his book, partly because of this controversial statement. Born in Brooklyn, Lottman was the son of a Broadway press agent. His brother, Evan A. Lottman, is an Oscar nominated film editor. He graduated from New York University in 1948 with degrees in English and biology. He won a Fulbright Scholarship which enabled him to pursue further studies in Paris. There he met and married his first wife Michele before returning to New York to attend graduate school at Columbia University; graduating with a Masters in English in 1951. In 1956 Lottman moved to Paris where he briefly attempted to pursue a career as a novelist. He ultimately settled on managing the Paris branch of the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux, writing freelance articles for magazines, and working as a biographer, publishing his first book, Detours From the Grand Tour, in 1970. He also worked for Publishers Weekly as a writer for four decades. In 1991 Lottman was appointed Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and was later made an Officer in 1996. He died at his home in Paris at the age of 87 and is buried at the Montparnasse Cemetery.
August 16, 1953
WENDELL MAYO is also author of three more full-length story collections: Centaur of the North; B. Horror and Other Stories; and a novel-in-stories, In Lithuanian Wood. He's recipient of the Premio Aztlán, an NEA fellowship, and a Fulbright to Lithuania. Over one-hundred of his short stories have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including Yale Review, Harvard Review, New Letters, Missouri Review, Prism International, and others.
August 16, 1932
Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo (August 16, 1932–1967) was a Nigerian poet, teacher, and librarian, who died fighting for the independence of Biafra. He is today widely acknowledged as an outstanding postcolonial English-language African poet and one of the major modernist writers of the 20th century.
August 16, 1942
Eileen Spinelli was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has authored more than 40 children’s books, including Somebody Loves You, Mr. Hatch (1996); When Mama Comes Home Tonight (1998), winner of an Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Platinum Award; In My New Yellow Shirt (2001), winner of a Bank Street College of Education Best Children’s Books of the Year award; Do You Have a Hat? (2004), winner of a Carolyn W. Field Award; Sophie’s Masterpiece: A Spider’s Tale (2004); and A Big Boy Now (2012). Her books of poetry include Feathers: Poems About Birds (2004), Tea Party Today (2006), and When You Are Happy (2006). Spinelli’s poetry has been noted for its imaginative and charming images. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, the children’s writer Jerry Spinelli.
August 16, 1600
Sister Maria Celeste (16 August 1600 – 2 April 1634), born Virginia Gamba, was the daughter of the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei and Marina Gamba. Virginia was the eldest of three siblings, with a sister Livia and a brother Vincenzio. All three were born out of wedlock, and the two daughters were considered unworthy for marriage. Troubled by monetary problems, Galileo placed them in the San Matteo convent shortly after Virginia's thirteenth birthday. When she took the veil in 1616 Virginia chose her religious name, Maria Celeste, in honor of the Virgin Mary, and her father's love of astronomy. From her cloister Maria Celeste was a source of support not only for her Poor Clares sisters, but also for her father. Maria Celeste served as San Matteo's apothecary (herself being of frail health). She sent her father herbal treatments for his various maladies while additionally seeing to the convent's finances and sometimes staging plays inside the convent's walls. Maria Celeste frequently asked her father for help, and kept the convent afloat through his influence. Galileo helped repair windows and made sure the convent clock was in order. The Inquisition tried Galileo for heresy in 1633. He was forced to recant his view that the Earth was not the center of the universe, and he was confined to house arrest for the remainder of his life. Soon after Galileo returned to Arcetri in disgrace, Maria Celeste contracted dysentery; she died on April 2, 1634, aged 33. Galileo described Maria Celeste as ‘a woman of exquisite mind, singular goodness, and most tenderly attached to me’. After Galileo's death, 124 letters from Maria Celeste written between 1623 and 1633 were discovered among his papers. Galileo's responses to Maria Celeste—possibly describing what kind of help she brought to his work and describing his state of mind during the Roman trial—seem to have been lost.
August 17, 1959
Jonathan Earl Franzen (born August 17, 1959) is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel, The Corrections, a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His most recent novel, Freedom (2010), garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline 'Great American Novelist'. Franzen writes for The New Yorker magazine. His 1996 Harper's essay Perchance to Dream bemoaned the state of contemporary literature. Oprah Winfrey's book club selection in 2001 of The Corrections led to a much publicized feud with the talk show host. In recent years, Franzen has become recognized for his purveyance of opinions on everything from social networking services such as Twitter ('the ultimate irresponsible medium') and the proliferation of e-books ('just not permanent enough') to the disintegration of Europe ('The people making the decisions in Europe are bankers. The technicians of finance are making the decisions there. It has very little to do with democracy or the will of the people.') and the self-destruction of America ('almost a rogue state')
August 17, 1932
Gabriel Morris Kolko (August 17, 1932; Died: May 19, 2014) was an American-born Canadian historian and author. His research interests included American capitalism and political history, the Progressive Era, and US foreign policy in the 20th century.
August 17, 1863
Gene Stratton-Porter (August 17, 1863 – December 6, 1924), born Geneva Grace Stratton, was an American author, early naturalist, and nature photographer. She used her position and income as a well-known author to support conservation of Limberlost Swamp and other wetlands in the state of Indiana. She wrote several best-selling novels and well-received columns in national magazines.
August 17, 1939
Alexander Louis Theroux (born 1939) is an American novelist and poet whose best known novel is perhaps Darconville’s Cat (1982). He was awarded the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 1991 and the Clifton Fadiman Medal for Fiction in 2002 by the Mercantile Library in New York City. He is the brother of novelist Paul Theroux. His first novel, Three Wogs, was written during a stay in London. His second novel, Darconville’s Cat was nominated for the National Book Award. He published the fable, Master Snickup’s Cloak, which was illustrated by Brian Froud in 1979. That was followed by several other fables, The Schinocephalic Waif and The Wragby Cars with illustrations by Stan Washburn in 1974. In 1987 he published An Adultery, and his longest, most satirical novel Laura Warholic was published in 2009. Several of his non-fiction books on color, The Primary Colors (1994) and The Secondary Colors (1996) were briefly on the best-seller list in Los Angeles. As a writer, he is known for his encyclopedic, highly-allusive style, and learned wit.
August 17, 1924
Evan Shelby Connell Jr. (August 17, 1924 – January 10, 2013) was a U.S. novelist, poet, and short-story writer. He also published under the name Evan S. Connell, Jr. His writing covered a variety of genres, although he published most frequently in fiction. In 2009, Connell was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize, for lifetime achievement. On April 23, 2010, he was awarded a Los Angeles Times Book Prize: the Robert Kirsch Award, for "a living author with a substantial connection to the American West, whose contribution to American letters deserves special recognition."
August 17, 1887
Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr., ONH (17 August 1887 – 10 June 1940), was a Jamaican political leader, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator who was a staunch proponent of the Black nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements, to which end he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL). He founded the Black Star Line, part of the Back-to-Africa movement, which promoted the return of the African diaspora to their ancestral lands. Prior to the twentieth century, leaders such as Prince Hall, Martin Delany, Edward Wilmot Blyden, and Henry Highland Garnet advocated the involvement of the African diaspora in African affairs. Garvey was unique in advancing a Pan-African philosophy to inspire a global mass movement and economic empowerment focusing on Africa known as Garveyism. Promoted by the UNIA as a movement of African Redemption, Garveyism would eventually inspire others, ranging from the Nation of Islam to the Rastafari movement (which proclaims Garvey as a prophet). The intent of the movement was for those of African ancestry to ‘redeem‘ Africa and for the European colonial powers to leave it. His essential ideas about Africa were stated in an editorial in the Negro World entitled ‘African Fundamentalism’, where he wrote: ‘Our union must know no clime, boundary, or nationality… to let us hold together under all climes and in every country…’ Robert A. Hill is director of the Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers Project in the African Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is also Associate Professor of History. Barbara Bair is associate editor of the American series of the Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers Project and associate editor, with Robert Hill, of Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons, a centennial companion volume to The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers.
August 17, 1925
Born in Stamford, Connecticut, and educated at Harvard University, John Hawkes taught at Brown University for thirty years. Although he published his first novel, THE CANNIBAL, in 1949, it was THE LIME TWIG (1961) that first won him acclaim. Thomas Pynchon is said to have admired the novel and thought Hawkes an unmatched stylist. His second novel, THE BEETLE LEG (1951), an intensely surrealistic western set in a Montana landscape that T. S. Eliot might have conjured, came to be viewed by many critics as one of the landmark novels of 20th century American literature. Hawkes died in Providence, Rhode Island.
August 17, 1953
Herta Müller (born 17 August 1953) is a German novelist, poet, essayist and recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Ni?chidorf, Timi? County in Romania, her native language is German. Since the early 1990s she has been internationally established, and her works have been translated into more than twenty languages. Müller is noted for her works depicting the effects of violence, cruelty and terror, usually in the setting of Communist Romania under the repressive Nicolae Ceau?escu regime which she has experienced herself. Many of her works are told from the viewpoint of the German minority in Romania and are also a depiction of the modern history of the Germans in the Banat, and Transylvania. Her much acclaimed 2009 novel The Hunger Angel (Atemschaukel) portrays the deportation of Romania's German minority to Stalinist Soviet Gulags during the Soviet occupation of Romania for use as German forced labor. Müller has received more than twenty awards to date, including the Kleist Prize (1994), the Aristeion Prize (1995), the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (1998) and the Franz Werfel Human Rights Award (2009). On 8 October 2009, the Swedish Academy announced that she had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, describing her as a woman 'who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed'.
August 17, 1932
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
August 17, 1947
Sylvia Nasar is the author of A Beautiful Mind which inspired the academy award winning movie and was translated into 30 languages. She was an economics correspondent for the New York Times and is the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Business Journalism at Columbia University. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Newsweek and other leading publications, and her new book is Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius.
August 17, 1931
Alfred William Brian Simpson, QC (Hon.), JP, FBA (17 August 1931 – 10 January 2011) usually referred to as Brian Simpson, was a British legal historian and the emeritus Charles F. and Edith J. Clyne Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. Born in Kendal, Cumbria, Simpson was educated at Oakham School and The Queen's College, Oxford, where he took a First in Law. He was a fellow and tutor of Lincoln College, Oxford from 1955-1973, before various professorships at the Universities of Kent (1975-1983), Chicago, Michigan, Cambridge and Toronto. As a result of national service with the Nigeria Regiment, he retained an interest in Africa and was Dean of the Faculty of Law of the University of Ghana in 1968-69. His most serious works of legal history were a "History of the Land Law" (2nd Edition, 1986) and a "History of the Law of Contract" (1975), but he is best remembered for his "Cannibalism and the Common Law" (1984) and "Leading Cases in Common Law" (1995). At the end of his career he also wrote two works on twentieth century human rights: "In the Highest Degree Odious: Detention without Trial in Wartime Britain" (1992) and "Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention" (2001). Simpson returned to an aspect of his own legal education at Oxford in a book published posthumously in September, 2011, Reflections on `The Concept of Law,' delineating the environment in which H. L. A. Hart had produced the classic of jurisprudence in the setting of Oxford linguistic philosophy.
August 17, 1946
Stephen Wright (born 1946) is a novelist based in New York City known for his use of surrealistic imagery and dark comedy. His work has varied from hallucinatory accounts of war (Meditations in Green), a family drama among UFO cultists (M31: A Family Romance), carnivalesque novel on a serial killer (Going Native), to a picaresque taking place during the Civil War (The Amalgamation Polka). He has taught writing courses at various universities, including Princeton University, Brown University, and The New School. Going Native was ranked #13 on Larry McCaffery's 20th Century's Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction.
August 17, 1893
Mary Jane 'Mae' West (August 17, 1893 – November 22, 1980) was an American actress, singer, playwright, screenwriter, and sex symbol whose entertainment career spanned seven decades. Known for her bawdy double entendres, West made a name for herself in vaudeville and on the stage in New York before moving to Hollywood to become a comedienne, actress, and writer in the motion picture industry. In consideration of her contributions to American cinema, the American Film Institute named West 15th among the greatest female stars of all time. One of the more controversial movie stars of her day, West encountered many problems, including censorship. When her cinematic career ended, she continued to perform in Las Vegas, in the United Kingdom, and on radio and television, and to record rock and roll albums. Asked about the various efforts to impede her career, West replied: 'I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it.'
August 17, 1939
Edward Sanders (born August 17, 1939) is an American poet, singer, social activist, environmentalist, author, publisher and longtime member of the band The Fugs. He has been called a bridge between the Beat and Hippie generations. Sanders is considered to have been active and "present at the counterculture's creation."
August 17, 1948
Dalya Cohen-Mor is a Middle East scholar and an award-winning author. Her books include A Matter of Fate: The Concept of Fate in the Arab World as Reflected in Modern Arabic Literature; Mothers and Daughters in Arab Women’s Literature: The Family Frontier; Fathers and Sons in the Arab Middle East; and Arab Women Writers: An Anthology of Short Stories, also published by SUNY Press.
August 18, 1925
Brian Wilson Aldiss (born 18 August 1925) is an English writer and anthologies editor, best known for science fiction novels and short stories. His byline reads either Brian W. Aldiss or simply Brian Aldiss, except for occasional pseudonyms during the mid-1960s. Greatly influenced by science fiction pioneer H. G. Wells, Aldiss is a vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society. He is also (with the late Harry Harrison) co-president of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group. Aldiss was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 2000 and inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2004. He has received two Hugo Awards, one Nebula Award, and one John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His influential works include the short story 'Super-Toys Last All Summer Long', the basis for the Stanley Kubrick-developed Steven Spielberg film A.I. Artificial Intelligence.
August 18, 1912
Elsa Morante (18 August 1912 – 25 November 1985) was an Italian novelist, perhaps best known for her novel La storia (History). Elsa Morante was born in Rome, Italy, in 1912, the daughter of Irma (née Poggibonsi), a schoolteacher, and Francesco Lo Monaco, from Sicily. Her mother was Jewish and her father was Sicilian. Her stepfather was Augusto Morante. Except for a period during World War II, she resided in her home city until her death in 1985. She married the novelist Alberto Moravia in 1941, and through him she met many of the leading Italian thinkers and writers of the day. Morante began writing short stories which appeared in various publications and periodicals, including periodicals for children, in the 1930s. Her first book was a collection of some of the stories, Il Gioco Segreto, published in 1941. It was followed in 1942 by a children's book, Le Bellissime avventure di Caterì dalla Trecciolina (rewritten in 1959 as Le straordinarie avventure di Caterina). Towards the end of World War II, Morante with her husband, novelist and film critic Alberto Moravia, fearful because both were of half Jewish descent, fled to the area around the Ciociara region near Rome, a flight that inspired Morante's ‘La storia’ and Moravia's ‘La Ciociara’ (translated into English as ‘Two Women‘ and later made into a film with Sofia Loren). Southern Italy is the backdrop for much of her work. She began translating Katherine Mansfield during this period, as well as working on her first novel—she even risked returning to war-torn Rome to retrieve the manuscript of ‘Menzogna e sortilegio’ and obtain winter clothes. Following the war, Morante and Moravia met American translator William Weaver, who helped them to find an American audience. Her first novel, 1948's Menzogna e sortilegio, won the prestigious Viareggio Prize, and was later published in the United States as House of Liars in 1951. However, Morante and others found the English translation quite poorly done, to Morante's great disappointment. Morante's next novel, L'isola di Arturo, appeared in 1957 and won the Strega Prize. Much of the work she had written in the meantime, she had destroyed, although she did publish a novella, The Andalusian Shawl, and a poem, The Adventure. Her next work, Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini (The World Saved by Children), a mix of poetry, songs and a play, many addressed to her lover Bill Morrow, an American, did not appear until 1968. Freudian psychology, Plato, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Simone Weil have all been cited as influences on her writing. Morante and Moravia separated in 1961, and Morante continued to write sporadically. La storia (History), a story about Rome during World War II, appeared in 1974, which although a bestseller in Italy for the publishing house Einaudi, issued in an economical paperback edition at Morante's request, provoked a furious and at times negative reaction from literary critics on the left, who disliked its anti-ideological polemic. After her friend Pasolini wrote a negative review of the book, she broke off their friendship. Her final novel, 1982's Aracoeli, has been seen as a summation, albeit by some critics a pessimistic one, of motifs and trends present in all of her writing, such as the importance of children and childhood, and private worlds in which fantasy provides an escape from dreary external realities. The first English language biography of Morante, A Woman of Rome, by the American writer Lily Tuck, was published in 2008.
August 18, 1922
Alain Robbe-Grillet (18 August 1922 – 18 February 2008) was a French writer and filmmaker. He was, along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon, one of the figures most associated with the Nouveau Roman (new novel) trend. Alain Robbe-Grillet was elected a member of the Académie française on 25 March 2004, succeeding Maurice Rheims at seat No. 32. He was married to Catherine Robbe-Grillet (née Rstakian). Alain Robbe-Grillet was born in Brest (Finistère, France) to a family of engineers and scientists. He was trained as an agricultural engineer. During the years 1943 and 1944, Robbe-Grillet participated in compulsory labor in Nuremberg, where he worked as a machinist. The initial few months were seen by Robbe-Grillet as something of a holiday, since, in-between the very rudimentary training he was given to operate the machinery, he had free time to go to the theatre and the opera. In 1945, Robbe-Grillet completed his diploma at the National Institute of Agronomy. Later, his work as an agronomist took him to Martinique, French Guinea, Guadeloupe, and Morocco. He died in Caen after succumbing to heart problems. Robbe-Grillet's first published novel was The Erasers (Les Gommes), which was issued by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1953. After that, he dedicated himself full-time to his new occupation. His early work was praised by eminent critics, such as Roland Barthes and Maurice Blanchot. Around the time of his second novel, he became a literary advisor for Les Éditions de Minuit and occupied this position from 1955 until 1985. After publishing four novels, in 1961, he worked with Alain Resnais, writing the script for Last Year in Marienbad (L'Année dernière à Marienbad), and he subsequently wrote and directed his own films. In 1963, Robbe-Grillet published For a New Novel (Pour un Nouveau Roman), a collection of previously-published theoretical writings concerning the novel. From 1966 to 1968, he was a member of the High Committee for the Defense and Expansion of French (Haut comité pour la défense et l'expansion de la langue française). In addition, Robbe-Grillet also led the Centre for Sociology of Literature (Centre de sociologie de la littérature) at the Université Libre de Bruxelles from 1980 to 1988. From 1971 to 1995, Robbe-Grillet was a professor at New York University, lecturing on his own novels. Although Robbe-Grillet was elected to the Académie française in 2004, in his eighties, he never was formally received by the Académie because of disputes regarding the Académie's reception procedures. Robbe-Grillet both refused to prepare and submit a welcome speech in advance, preferring to improvise his speech, as well as refusing to purchase and wear the Académie's famous green tails (habit vert) and sabre, which he considered outdated.
August 18, 1910
David Francis Dodge (Berkeley, California, August 18, 1910 – August 8, 1974) was an American author of mystery/thriller novels and humorous travel books. His first book was published in 1941. His fiction is characterized by tight plotting, brisk dialogue, memorable and well-defined characters, and (often) exotic locations. His travel writing documented the (mis)adventures of the Dodge family (David, his wife Lucy and daughter Kendal) as they roamed around the world. Practical advice and information for the traveler on a budget are sprinkled liberally throughout the books. David Dodge was born in Berkeley, California, the youngest child of George Andrew Dodge, a San Francisco architect, and Maude Ellingwood Bennett Dodge. Following George's death in an automobile accident, Maude "Monnie" Dodge moved the family (David and his three older sisters, Kathryn, Frances, and Marian) to Southern California, where David attended Lincoln High School in Los Angeles but did not graduate. After leaving school, he worked as a bank messenger, a marine fireman, a stevedore, and a night watchman. In 1934, he went to work for the San Francisco accounting firm of McLaren, Goode & Company, becoming a Certified Public Accountant in 1937. On July 17, 1936, he was married to Elva Keith, a former Macmillan Company editorial representative, and their only daughter, Kendal, was born in 1940. After the attack on Pearl Harbor he joined the U.S. Naval Reserve, emerging three years later with the rank of Lieutenant Commander. David Dodge's first experience as a writer came through his involvement with the Macondray Lane Players, a group of amateur playwrights, producers, and actors whose goal was to create a theater purely for pleasure. The group was founded by George Henry Burkhardt (Dodge's brother-in-law) and performed exclusively at Macondria, a little theater located in the basement of Burkhardt's house at 56 Macondray Lane on San Francisco's Russian Hill. His publishing career began in 1936 when he won First Prize in the Northern California Drama Association's Third Annual One Act Play Tournament. The prize-winning play, "A Certain Man Had Two Sons," was subsequently published by the Banner Play Bureau, of San Francisco. Another Dodge play, "Christmas Eve at the Mermaid," co-written by Loyall McLaren (his boss at McLaren, Goode & Co.), was performed as the Bohemian Club's Christmas play of 1940, and again in 1959. In 1961, the Grabhorn Press published the play in a volume entitled Shakespeare in Bohemia. His career as a writer really began, however, when he made a bet with his wife that he could write a better mystery novel than the ones they were reading during a rainy family vacation. He drew on his professional experience as a CPA and wrote his first novel, Death and Taxes, featuring San Francisco tax expert and reluctant detective James "Whit" Whitney. It was published by Macmillan in 1941 and he won five dollars from Elva. Three more Whitney novels soon followed: Shear the Black Sheep (Macmillan, 1942), Bullets for the Bridegroom (Macmillan, 1944) and It Ain't Hay (Simon & Schuster, 1946), in which Whit tangles with marijuana smugglers. With its subject matter and extremely evocative cover art on both the first edition dust jacket and the paperback reprint, this book remains one of Dodge's most collectible titles. Upon his release from active duty by the Navy in 1945, Dodge left San Francisco and set out for Guatemala by car with his wife and daughter, beginning his second career as a travel writer. The Dodge family's misadventures on the road through Mexico are hilariously documented in How Green Was My Father (Simon & Schuster, 1947). His Latin American experiences also produced a second series character, expatriate private investigator and tough-guy adventurer Al Colby, who first appears in The Long Escape (Random House, 1948). After two more well-received Colby books in 1949 and 1950, Dodge abandoned series characters and focused on stand-alone suspense adventures set in exotic locales around the world; To Catch a Thief was Dodge's greatest career success, primarily due to the fact the Alfred Hitchcock purchased film rights before the novel was even published in 1952 and turned it into the 1955 Paramount film starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. For the remainder of his career, Dodge alternated between mystery and travel writing, continuing the saga of the Dodge family as they bumble and bargain their way around the world. The Poor Man’s Guide to Europe, a "tipsheet for nickel-nursers and skinflints" appeared in 1953 and was so successful that Random House issued annual revised editions from 1954 to 1959. It was also a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Although this book was a more traditional—and practical—travel book, it too was liberally sprinkled with anecdotes of the Dodge family's personal experiences. He also wrote numerous travel articles for various magazines, appearing as a regular contributor to Holiday Magazine from 1948 to 1968. In 1968, David and Elva settled in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Elva died on October 17, 1973. David died less than a year later in August 1974. They are both buried in San Miguel. Although a writer by profession, Dodge's true love was travel. He was fond of explaining that while many writers traveled in order to gather material to write about, his goal was to write in order to gather money to travel. In 2005, Hard Case Crime reprinted Dodge's second Al Colby novel, Plunder of the Sun, and in 2006 published his last completed novel, The Last Match. The manuscript, which remained unsold at the time of his death, was discovered among his papers and is the first new Dodge material to be published in 35 years. Bruin Books reprinted Death and Taxes and To Catch a Thief in 2010, and The Long Escape the following year.
August 18, 1967
Carolin Emcke is a journalist, political theorist, and writer. She has a doctorate in philosophy and has been a visiting lecturer in political theory at Yale. As a staff writer for the foreign news desk of Der Spiegel, she has written about war crimes and human rights violations around the world. In 2006 she was awarded the Ernst Bloch Förderpreis, a German award given to scholars and philosophers of extraordinary promise. She lives in Berlin.
August 18, 1959
Winona LaDuke, of the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, is an internationally renowned Native American Indian activist. She was one of Ms. Magazine's 'Women of the Year' for 1997, and was the recipient of the Women's Actions for New Directions (WAND) award in 1998. She has been profiled in People, Sierra, E, Minnesota Monthly, and Utne Reader magazines and was selected by Time magazine as one of the '50 For the Future: America's most promising leaders age 40 and under.' She was Ralph Nader's vice-presidential candidate on the Green Party ticket in the 1996 presidential election. From the Anishinaabe nation (Ojibwe/Chippewa), Winona lives on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota.
August 18, 1908
Olav H. Hauge (August 18, 1908, Ulvik, Norway - May 23, 1994, Ulvik, Norway) lived all his life in Ulvik, a village in the west of Norway on the Hardangerfjord. He translated many English and American writers into Norwegian.
August 18, 1946
Roberto Pazzi is an Italian novelist and poet. His works have been translated into twentysix languages. Pazzi graduated in classics in Bologna with a thesis on Luciano Anceschi and aesthetics on the poetry of Umberto Saba.
August 18, 1962
Fred Moten lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches at the University of California, Riverside. He is author of Arkansas (Pressed Wafer); In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press); I ran from it but was still in it. (Cusp Books); Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works); B Jenkins (Duke University Press); and The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions), which is a finalist for the National Book Award.
August 18, 1969
Timothy David Snyder (born August 18, 1969) is an American author, historian and academic specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, and the Holocaust. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Snyder is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
August 18, 1967
Brian Michael Bendis (born August 18, 1967) is an American comic book writer and artist. He has won critical acclaim, including five Eisner Awards for both his creator-owned work and his work on various Marvel Comics books. Starting with crime and noir comics, Bendis eventually moved to mainstream superhero work. With Bill Jemas and Mark Millar, Bendis was the primary architect of the Ultimate Marvel Universe, launching Ultimate Spider-Man in 2000. He relaunched the Avengers franchise with New Avengers in 2004, and has also written the Marvel "event" storylines "Secret War" (2004–2005), "House of M" (2005), "Secret Invasion" (2008), "Siege" (2010) and "Age of Ultron" (2013). Though Bendis has cited comic book writers such as Frank Miller and Alan Moore, his own writing influences are less rooted in comics, drawing on the work of David Mamet, Richard Price, and Aaron Sorkin, whose dialogue Bendis feels are "the best in any medium." In addition to writing comics he has worked in television, video games and film, and began teaching writing at University of Oregon in Fall 2013. He has also occasionally taught at Portland State University. In 2014, Bendis wrote Words for Pictures, a book about comics published by Random House.
August 18, 1872
Hugo Bettauer (18 August 1872 – 26 March 1925), born Maximilian Hugo Bettauer, was a prolific Austrian writer and journalist, who was murdered by a Nazi Party follower on account of his opposition to antisemitism. He was well known in his lifetime; many of his books were bestsellers and in the 1920s a number were made into films, most notably Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1925), which dealt with prostitution, and Die Stadt ohne Juden (The City Without Jews, directed by Hans Karl Breslauer, 1924), a satire against antisemitism. Peter Hoyng is Associate Professor of German at Emory University. Chauncey J. Mellor is Professor of German at the University of Tennessee. Kenneth R. Janken is Professor in the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina.
August 19, 1943
Bruce Arnold Ackerman (born August 19, 1943) is an American constitutional law scholar. He is a Sterling Professor at Yale Law School. In 2010, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers.
August 19, 1909
JERZY ANDRZEYEVSKI was born in Warsaw in 1909 and has lived there all his life. His first book, a collection of short stories, appeared in 1936. Two years later his first novel won him two literary awards. Since the war Andrzeyevski’s prolific output of novels, plays, short stories and articles has gained him a leading position among Polish writers, and his last novel to appear in English, The Inquisitors, was unanimously hailed by Polish critics as a major contribution to contemporary literature. The film version of ASHES AND DIAMONDS was awarded the International Critics’ Prize at the Venice Film Festival of 1959, but the book has never before been translated into English.
August 19, 1930
Francis McCourt (August 19, 1930 – July 19, 2009) was an Irish-American teacher and writer. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his book Angela's Ashes, a tragicomic memoir of the misery and squalor of his childhood.
August 19, 1689
Samuel Richardson (19 August 1689 – 4 July 1761) was an 18th-century English writer and printer. He is best known for his three epistolary novels: Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady (1748) and The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753). Richardson was an established printer and publisher for most of his life and printed almost 500 different works, including journals and magazines. At a very early age, Richardson was apprenticed to a printer, whose daughter he eventually married. He lost his first wife along with their five sons, and eventually remarried. Although with his second wife he had four daughters who lived to become adults, they had no male heir to continue running the printing business. While his print shop slowly ran down, at the age of 51 he wrote his first novel and immediately became one of the most popular and admired writers of his time. He knew leading figures in 18th-century England, including Samuel Johnson and Sarah Fielding. In the London literary world, he was a rival of Henry Fielding, and the two responded to each other's literary styles in their own novels. His name was on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list established by the pope containing the names of books that Catholics were not allowed to read.
August 19, 1903
James Gould Cozzens (August 19, 1903 - August 9, 1978) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist. He is often grouped today with his contemporaries John O'Hara and John P. Marquand, but his work is generally considered more challenging. Despite initial critical acclaim, his popularity came gradually. Cozzens was a critic of modernism, and he was quoted in a featured article in Time as saying, ‘I can't read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up.’.
August 19, 1936
Ferruccio Brugnaro (born 19 August 1936) is an Italian poet.
August 19, 1956
Margaret Cezair-Thompson (born August 19, 1956) is the author of a widely acclaimed previous novel, THE TRUE HISTORY OF PARADISE. Born in Jamaica, West Indies, she teaches literature and creative writing at Wellesley College.
August 19, 1961
Jonathan Coe (born 19 August 1961) is an English novelist and writer. His work has an underlying preoccupation with political issues, although this serious engagement is often expressed comically in the form of satire. For example, What a Carve Up! reworks the plot of an old 1960s spoof horror film of the same name. It is set within the "carve up" of the UK's resources which some feel was carried out by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative governments of the 1980s. One claim to fame that Coe has is writing the longest sentence in the literature of the English language, one that appeared in The Rotters' Club and appears to hold the record at 13,955 words (ahead of James Joyce's soliloquy by Molly Bloom in Ulysses).
August 19, 1843
Charles Montagu Doughty (August 19, 1843 – January 20, 1926) was an English poet, writer, and traveller born in Theberton Hall, Saxmundham, Suffolk and educated at private schools in Laleham and Elstree, and at a school for the Royal Navy, Portsmouth. He was a student at King's College London, eventually graduating from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1864. He was the father of Freda and Dorothy Doughty. He is best known for his 1888 travel book Travels in Arabia Deserta, a work in two volumes which, though it had little immediate influence upon its publication, slowly became a kind of touchstone of ambitious travel writing, one valued as much for its language as for its content. T. E. Lawrence rediscovered the book and caused it to be republished in the 1920s, contributing an admiring introduction of his own. Since then the book has gone in and out of print. The book is a vast recounting of Doughty's treks through the Arabian deserts, and his discoveries there. It is written in an extravagant and mannered style, largely based on the King James Bible, but constantly surprising with verbal turns and odd inventiveness. Among authors who have praised the book are the British novelist Henry Green, whose essay on Doughty, ‘Apologia,’ is reprinted in his collection Surviving. Green's novels arguably show some direct stylistic influence of Doughty's book, as noted by John Updike in his introduction to the collection of Green's novels Loving; Living; Party Going Doughty's epic poem The Dawn in Britain, originally published 1906 in six volumes, provides a preparatory basis and ideal to Laura (Riding) Jackson and Schuyler B. Jackson's project of establishing an access to what they argue is an inherent meaning of words in their Rational Meaning: a New Foundation for the Definition of Words and Supplementary Essays. The Jacksons hail Doughty's work as being exemplary of this access to meaning through the linguistic understanding he demonstrates in his diction, in the care he takes with his choice of words, which favors pre-Shakespearean English for reasons ‘fundamentally linguistic, rather than literary.’ Whole sections of the Jacksons' book examine Doughty's linguistic care and thinking.
August 19, 1938
Joe Frank (August 19, 1938 – January 15, 2018) was a French-born American radio personality and humorist known best for his often philosophical, humorous, surrealist, and sometimes absurd monologues and radio dramas. Frank was born Joseph Langermann in Strasbourg, France, near the border of Germany, to father Meier Langermann (then aged 51, a Polish-born shoe manufacturer) and mother Friederike "Fritzi" Passweg (then aged 27). Frank was born months before the family fled from Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jewish people in their native Poland Legislation to allow the family and others into the country was passed by the US Congress twice, the first having been vetoed by President Roosevelt. His father died of kidney failure when Joe was five years old. The next year his mother married Teddy Frank and changed Joe's last name. In his twenties, Frank studied at Hofstra University in New York and later at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 1964, he taught five grades of English at the Sands Point Academy for Gifted Children in Sands Point, NY. From 1965-1975, Joe taught English and Russian literature and philosophy at the Dalton School in Manhattan and later, while working as a music promoter (1976-1977), became interested in the power of radio. In 1977, Frank started volunteering at Pacifica Network station WBAI in New York, performing experimental radio involving monologues, improvisational actors, and live music during late-night, free-form hours. In 1978, he moved to Washington, D.C., to serve as a co-anchor for the weekend edition of National Public Radio's All Things Considered, his first paying radio job. During this period he wrote, performed in, and produced 18 dramas for the "NPR Playhouse," which won several awards. His 1982 monologue "Lies" was used, without permission, as the inspiration for the Martin Scorsese movie After Hours. (He later settled out of court for a "handsome" settlement.) In 1986, on the invitation of Ruth Hirschman Seymour, the general manager of NPR's Santa Monica, California affiliate KCRW, Frank moved to Santa Monica, where he wrote, produced, and performed in his own weekly hour-long radio program, "Joe Frank: Work In Progress." While at KCRW, Frank received several accolades. Joe Frank continued to work at KCRW until 2002, and his work evolved, as evidenced by the diverse series he produced. The first was "Work in Progress," then "In The Dark," followed by "Somewhere out There", and finally "The Other Side." Beginning in 2004, Frank began creating full-length shows for subscribers to his web site. In 2012, Frank started producing periodic half-hour shows for KCRW's "UnFictional" series. He continued to produce all-new shows for the series until months before his death. Starting in 2003, Frank performed on stage at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, CA, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, Illinois; at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco; and in Los Angeles at the Hammer Museum and Largo at the Coronet, as well as other venues. His 230-hour body of work continues to be re-aired on the Pacifica Radio affiliate station KPFA in Berkeley, California and many NPR stations including WNYC New York, and KCRW Santa Monica. The radio station at the University of California at Davis, KDVS and the independent station WFMU in Jersey City also re-air shows. In 2012, Frank returned to KCRW for episodes of the station's "UnFictional" program. Frank had surgery to treat colon cancer in May 2014. Frank was hospitalized in December 2015 due to a gastrointestinal perforation following a routine medical procedure. This led to heart issues and Joe's complete recovery took a full year. His colon cancer returned in July 2017; he had surgery in October 2017 to excise a tumor in his colon in October 2017. He died on January 15, 2018 after multiple reversals following the surgery. Frank's radio programs are often dark and ironic and employ a dry sense of humor and the sincere delivery of ideas or stories that are patently absurd. Subject matter often includes religion, life's meaning, death, and Frank's relationships with women. Frank's voice is distinctive, resonant, authoritative, and, because of his occasional voice-over work, often oddly familiar. At the 2003 Third Coast Festival, he explained that he was recording in Dolby and playing back without it, which created Joe's now familiar intimate and gritty sound. A 1987 Los Angeles Times article described it as a voice "like dirty honey" and "rich as chocolate." The repetitive cadence of the music, drones and Frank's dry, announcer-like delivery are sometimes mixed with recorded phone calls with actor/friends such as Larry Block, Debi Mae West and Arthur Miller (not the playwright), broken into segments over the course of each hour-long program. Frank's series "The Other Side" included excerpts from Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield's Dharma talks at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. In an interview on KPFA's "Morning Show," Kornfield was asked about working with Joe Frank. Kornfield explained that, although he had never met or talked to Joe Frank or heard his show, he didn't mind Frank using the lectures and that many of his meditation students had found Kornfield through the show.
August 19, 1856
Harold Frederic (born Harold Henry Frederick; August 19, 1856 – October 19, 1898) was an American journalist and novelist.
August 19, 1952
MILTON HATOUM is a professor of literature at the Federal University of Amazonas and a visiting professor of Latin American literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of one previous novel, The Tree of the Seventh Heaven. The Brothers was awarded the Jabuti Prize, Brazil’s most prestigious award for fiction, in 2000. Milton Hatoum lives in Sâo Paulo. JOHN GLEDSON, the translator, is Professor Emeritus of Brazilian Studies at the University of Liverpool. A literary critic and historian, he has translated the work of several Brazilian authors, including Roberto Schwarz and Machado de Assis.
August 19, 1951
Ana Miranda is a Brazilian poet and novelist born in Fortaleza, Ceará in 1951. She grew up in Brasilia and has lived in Rio de Janeiro since 1969. Her main work of note has been historical, including her award-winning 1989 novel A Boca do Inferno, which was published in English in 1991.
August 19, 1949
Lynne Olson (born August 19, 1949) is an American author, historian and journalist. She was born on August 19, 1949 and is married to Stanley Cloud, with whom she often writes. In 1969 she graduated from University of Arizona. Before becoming a writer she worked for the Associated Press and the Baltimore Sun. She has written several books on the history of the World War II era, which have received positive critical reviews. In 2002 she won the Christopher Award for her book Freedom's Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970.
August 19, 1947
Dick Russell is a former staff writer for TV Guide magazine, a staff reporter for Sports Illustrated, and has contributed numerous articles to publications ranging from Family Health to The Village Voice. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts and Los Angeles.
August 19, 1947
Roger S. Bagnall is Professor of Ancient History and Director at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University.
August 19, 1631
John Dryden (19 August 1631 – 12 May 1700) was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who was made England's first Poet Laureate in 1668. He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden.
August 20, 1932
Vasily Pavlovich Aksyonov (August 20, 1932 - July 6, 2009) was a Soviet and Russian novelist. He is known in the West as the author of THE BURN (from 1975) and GENERATIONS OF WINTER (from 1992), a family saga depicting three generations of the Gradov family between 1925 and 1953. Vasily Aksyonov was born to Pavel Aksyonov and Yevgenia Ginzburg in Kazan, USSR on August 20, 1932. His mother, Yevgenia Ginzburg, was a successful journalist and educator and his father, Pavel Aksyonov, had a high position in the administration of Kazan. Both parents were prominent communists. In 1937, however, both were arrested and tried for her alleged connection to Trotskyists. They were both sent to Gulag and then to exile, and each served 18 years, but remarkably survived. Later, Yevgenia came to prominence as the author of a famous memoir, INTO THE WHIRLWIND, documenting the brutality of Stalinist repression. Aksyonov remained in Kazan with his nanny and grandmother until the NKVD arrested him as a son of ‘enemies of the people‘, and sent him to an orphanage without providing his family any information on his whereabouts. Aksyonov remained there until rescued in 1938 by his uncle, with whose family he stayed until his mother was released into exile, having served 10 years of forced labour. In 1947, Vasily joined her in exile in the notorious Magadan, Kolyma prison area, where he graduated from high school. Vasily's half-brother Alexei (from Ginzburg's first marriage to Dmitriy Fedorov) died from starvation in besieged Leningrad in 1941. His parents, seeing that doctors had the best chance to survive in the camps, decided that Aksyonov should go into the medical profession. He therefore entered the university in Kazan and graduated in 1956 from the Leningrad Medical Institute and worked as a doctor for the next 3 years. During his time as a medical student he came under surveillance by the KGB, who began to prepare a file against him. It is likely that he would have been arrested had the liberalization that followed Stalin's death in 1953 not intervened. Reportedly, during the liberalisation that followed Stalin's death in 1953, Aksyonov came into contact with the first Soviet countercultural movement of zoot-suited hipsters called stilyagi (the ones 'with style'). As a result He fell in love with their slang, fashions, libertine lifestyles, dancing and especially their music. From this point on began his lifelong romance with jazz. Interest in his new milieu, western music, fashion and literature turned out to be life-changing for Aksyonov, who decided to dedicate himself to chronicling his times through literature. He remained a keen observer of youth, with its ever-changing styles, movements and trends. Like no other Soviet writer, he was attuned to the developments and changes in popular culture. In 1956, he was ‘discovered’ and heralded by the Soviet writer Valentin Kataev for his first publication, in the liberal magazine ‘Youth.’ His first novel, COLLEAGUES (1961), was based on his experiences as a doctor. His second, TICKET TO THE STARS (1961), depicting the life of Soviet youthful hipsters, made him an overnight celebrity. In the 1960s Aksyonov was a frequent contributor to the popular ‘Yunost’ (‘Youth’) magazine, and eventually became a staff writer. Aksyonov thus reportedly became a leading figure in the so-called 'youth prose' movement and a darling of the Soviet liberal intelligentsia and their western supporters: his writings stood in marked contrast to the dreary, socialist-realist prose of the time.’ Aksyonov's characters spoke in a natural way, using hip lingo, they went to bars and dance halls, had premarital sex, listened to jazz and rock'n'roll and hustled to score a pair of cool American shoes. There was a feeling of freshness and freedom about his writings, similar to the one emanating from black-market recordings of American jazz and pop. He soon became one of the informal leaders of the Shestidesyatniki -- which translates roughly as ‘the '60s generation’ -- a group of young Soviets who resisted the Communist Party's cultural and ideological restrictions. 'It was amazing: We were being brought up robots, but we began to listen to jazz,' Aksyonov said in a 2007 documentary about him. For all his hardship, Aksyonov, as a prose stylist, was at the opposite pole from Mr. Solzhenitsyn, becoming a symbol of youthful promise and embracing fashion and jazz rather than dwelling on the miseries of the gulag. Ultimately, however, he shared Mr. Solzhenitsyn's fate of exile from the Soviet Union. However, Aksyonov's open pro-Americanism and liberal values eventually led to problems with the KGB. And his involvement in 1979 with an independent magazine, ‘Metropol,’ led to an open confrontation with the authorities. His next two celebrated and dissident novels, THE BURN and THE ISLAND OF CRIMEA, could not be published in the USSR. The former explored the plight of intellectuals under communism and the latter was an imagining of what life might have been like had the white army staved off the Bolsheviks in 1917. When THE BURN was published in Italy in 1980, Aksyonov accepted an invitation for him and his wife Maya to leave Russia for the US. Soon afterwards, he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship, regaining it only 10 years later during Gorbachev's perestroika. Aksyonov spent the next 24 years in Washington, D.C. and Virginia, where he taught Russian Literature at George Mason University.He [also] taught literature at a number of [other] American universities, including USC and Goucher College in Maryland. [and] worked as a journalist for Radio Liberty. He continued to write novels, among which was the ambitious GENERATIONS OF WINTER (1994), a multi-generational saga of Soviet life describing the lives of three generations of a Soviet family between the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and Stalin's death in 1953. This later became a successful Russian TV mini-series. The TV mini-series consisted of 24 episodes and was broadcast on Russian television in 2004. In 1994, he also won the Russian Booker Prize, Russia's top literary award, for his historical novel VOLTAIRIAN MEN AND WOMEN, about a meeting between the famous philosopher Voltaire and Empress Catherine II. In 2004, he settled in Biarritz, France, and returned to the U.S. less frequently, dividing his time between France and Moscow. His novel Moskva-kva-kva (2006) was published in the Moscow-based magazine Oktyabr. Aksyonov was translated into numerous languages, and in Russia remained influential. He was reportedly ‘forever a hipster [and] was used to being in the avant garde, be it in fashion or literary innovation.’ He was described as ‘a colourful man, with his trademark moustache, elegant suits, expensive cars, and a love for grand cities, fine wine and good food.’ On July 6, 2009, he died in Moscow at the age of 76 and is survived by Maya and a son, Aleksei.
August 20, 1945
Kent Anderson (born August 20, 1945) is an American author, Vietnam War veteran, former police officer and former university professor born in 1945 in North Carolina. He has written novels, various articles and scenarios.
August 20, 1909
William Lindsay Gresham (August 20, 1909 – September 14, 1962) was an American novelist and non-fiction author particularly well-regarded among readers of noir. His best-known work is Nightmare Alley (1946), which was adapted into a 1947 film starring Tyrone Power. Gresham was born in Baltimore, Maryland. As a child, he moved to New York with his family, where he became fascinated by the sideshow at Coney Island. Upon graduating from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn in 1926, Gresham drifted from job to job, and worked as a folk singer in Greenwich Village. In 1937, Gresham served as a volunteer medic for the Loyalist forces during the Spanish Civil War. There, he befriended a former sideshow employee, Joseph Daniel "Doc" Halliday, and their long conversations inspired much of his work, particularly Gresham's two books about the American carnival, the nonfiction Monster Midway and the fictional Nightmare Alley. Returning to the United States in 1939, after a troubling period that involved a stay in a tuberculosis ward and a failed suicide attempt, Gresham found work editing true crime pulp magazines. In 1942, Gresham married Joy Davidman, a poet, with whom he had two children, David and Douglas. Gresham was an abusive and alcoholic husband. Davidman, an ethnically Jewish atheist, became a fan of the writings of C. S. Lewis, which led eventually to her conversion to Christianity. After a violent encounter with Gresham, who wanted a divorce, Davidman ultimately agreed to end her marriage to Gresham and later married Lewis, their relationship forming the inspiration for the play and movie Shadowlands. Gresham married Davidman's first cousin, Renee Rodriguez, with whom he had been having an affair and who was herself suffering an abusive marriage. Gresham joined Alcoholics Anonymous and developed a deep interest in Spiritualism, having already exposed many of the fraudulent techniques of popular spiritualists in his two sideshow-themed books and having written a book about Houdini with the assistance of noted skeptic James Randi. He was also an early enthusiast of Scientology but later denounced the religion as another kind of spook racket. In 1962, Gresham's health began to take a turn for the worse. He had started to go blind and was diagnosed with tongue cancer. On September 14, 1962, he checked into the Hotel Carter, Manhattan — which he had often frequented while writing Nightmare Alley over a decade earlier. There, 53-year-old Gresham took his life with an overdose of sleeping pills. His death went generally unnoticed by the New York press, but for a mention by a bridge columnist. In his pocket they found business cards reading, "No Address. No Phone. No Business. No Money. Retired."
August 20, 1909
Martin A. Hansen was born on August 20, 1909 in a small village called Strøby in Denmark. He was a writer, known for The Liar (1970). He died on June 27, 1955 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
August 20, 1922
Lionel Edmond Kochan (20 August 1922 – 25 September 2005) was a British historian, journalist and publisher. He is best known for his work in Jewish history, having become an academic historian in his 30s and formerly specialising in European history.
August 20, 1914
Colin MacInnes (20 August 1914 – 22 April 1976) was an English novelist and journalist. MacInnes was born in London, the son of singer James Campbell McInnes and novelist Angela Thirkell, who was the granddaughter of the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones and also related to Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin. MacInnes's family relocated to Australia during 1920, MacInnes returning during 1930. For much of his childhood, he was known as Colin Thirkell, the surname of his mother's second husband; later he used his father's name McInnes, afterwards changing it to MacInnes. He worked in Brussels from 1930 until 1935, then studied painting in London at the London Polytechnic school and the School of Drawing and Painting in Euston Road. Towards the end of his life, he stayed at the home of Martin Green, his publisher, and Green's wife Fiona, in Fitzrovia, where MacInnes spent time, regarding their small family as his own adoptive one until his death. MacInnes served in the British intelligence corps during the Second World War, and worked in occupied Germany after the European armistice. These experiences resulted in the writing of his first novel, To the Victors the Spoils. Soon after his return to England, he worked for BBC Radio until he could earn a living from his writing. He was the author of a number of books depicting London youth and black immigrant culture during the 1950s, in particular City of Spades (1957), Absolute Beginners (1959) and Mr Love & Justice (1960), known collectively as the 'London trilogy'. Many of his books were set in the Notting Hill area of London, then a poor and racially mixed area, home to many new immigrants and which suffered a race riot during 1958. Openly bisexual, he wrote on subjects including urban squalor, racial issues, bisexuality, drugs, anarchy, and 'decadence'. Mr Love & Justice concerns two characters, Frank Love and Edward Justice, during late 1950s London. Mr Love is a novice ponce (pimp); Mr Justice is a police officer newly transferred to the plain-clothes division of the Vice Squad. Gradually their lives intermesh. Absolute Beginners was filmed in 1986 by director Julien Temple. In 2007 a stage adaptation by Roy Williams was performed at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, London. City of Spades was adapted by Biyi Bandele as a radio play, directed by Toby Swift, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 28 April 2001. MacInnes occurs as a character in Tainted Love (2005), Stewart Home's novel of 1960s and 1970s counterculture. Billy Bragg's 2008 album Mr. Love & Justice borrowed its title from the MacInnes novel of the same name. Bragg's previous album, England, Half English (2002), was also named after a MacInnes book.
August 20, 1901
Salvatore Quasimodo (August 20, 1901 – June 14, 1968), pen name of Salvatore Ragusa, was an Italian author and poet. In 1959 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature ‘for his lyrical poetry, which with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our own times’. Along with Giuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale, he is one of the foremost Italian poets of the 20th century. Quasimodo was born in Modica, Sicily to Gaetano and Clotilde Ragusa. In 1908 his family moved to Messina, as his father had been sent there to help the population struck by a devastating earthquake. The impressions of the effects of natural forces would have a great impact on the young Quasimodo. In 1919 he graduated from the local Technical College. In Messina he also made friends with Giorgio La Pira, future mayor of Florence. In 1917 Quasimodo founded the short-lived Nuovo giornale letterario (‘New Literary Journal’), in which he published his first poems. In 1919 he moved to Rome to finish his engineering studies, but poor economic conditions forced him to find a work as a technical draughtsman. In the meantime he collaborated with several reviews and studied Greek and Latin. In 1929, invited by Elio Vittorini, who had married Quasimodo's sister, he moved to Florence. Here he met poets such as Alessandro Bonsanti and Eugenio Montale. In 1930 he took a job with Italy's Civil Engineering Corps in Reggio Calabria. Here he met the Misefari brothers, who encouraged him to continue writing. Developing his nearness to the hermetic movement, Quasimodo published his first collection, Acque e terre (‘Waters and Earths’) in that year. In 1931 he was transferred to Imperia and then to Genoa, where he got acquainted with Camillo Sbarbaro and other personalities of the Circoli magazine, with which Quasimodo started a prolific collaboration. In 1932 he published with them a new collection, Oboe sommerso, including all his lyrics from 1930-1932. In 1934 Quasimodo moved to Milan. Starting from 1938 he devoted himself entirely to writing, working with Cesare Zavattini and for Letteratura, official review of the Hermetic movement. In 1938 he published Poesie, followed by the translations of Lirici Greci (‘Greek Poets’) published by Corrente di Vita in 1939. Though an outspoken anti-Fascist, during World War II Quasimodo did not take part in the Italian resistance against the German occupation. In that period he devoted himself to the translation of the Gospel of John, of some of Catullus's cantos, and several episodes of the Odyssey. In 1945 he became a member of the Italian Communist Party. In 1946 he published another collection, Giorno dopo giorno (‘Day After Day’), which made clear the increasing moral engagement and the epic tone of social criticism of the author. The same theme characterized his next works, La vita non è sogno (‘Life Is Not a Dream’), Il falso e il vero verde (‘The False and True Green’) and La terra impareggiabile (‘The Incomparable Land’). In all this period Quasimodo did not stop producing translations of classic authors and collaborating as a journalist for some of the most prestigious Italian publications (mostly with articles about the theatre). In the 1950s Quasimodo won the following awards: Premio San Babila (1950), Premio Etna-Taormina (1953), Premio Viareggio (1958) and, finally, the Nobel Prize for Literature (1959). In 1960 and 1967 he received honoris causa degrees from the Universities of Messina and Oxford, respectively. In his last years the poet made numerous voyages to Europe and America, giving public speeches and public lectures of his poems, which had been translated in several foreign languages. In June 1968, when he was in Amalfi for a discourse, Quasimodo was struck by a cerebral hemorrhage. He died a few days later in the hospital in Naples. He was interred in the Cimitero Monumentale in Milan. Traditional literary critique divides Quasimodo's work into two major periods: the hermetic period until World War II and the post-hermetic era until his death. Although these periods are distinct, they are to be seen as a single poetical quest. This quest or exploration for a unique language took him through various stages and various modalities of expression. As an intelligent and clever poet, Quasimodo used a hermetical, ‘closed’ language to sketch recurring motifs like Sicily, religion and death. Subsequently, the translation of authors from Roman and Greek Antiquity enabled him to extend his linguistic toolkit. The disgust and sense of absurdity of World War II also had its impact on the poet's language. This bitterness, however, faded in his late writings, and was replaced by the mature voice of an old poet reflecting upon his world.
August 20, 1897
Tarjei Vesaas (20 August 1897, Vinje - 15 March 1970) was a Norwegian poet and novelist. Born in Vinje, Telemark, Vesaas is widely considered to be one of Norway's greatest writers of the twentieth century and perhaps its most important since World War II. Vesaas spent much of his youth in solitude, seeking comfort and solace in nature. He was guilt-ridden by his refusal to take over the family farm, and this guilt permeates much of his authorship. The destruction he witnessed after World War I made a deep impression on him. He married the writer Halldis Moren Vesaas and moved back to his home district of Vinje in 1934. His authorship covers almost 50 years, from 1923 to 1970. Written in Nynorsk, his work is characterized by simple, terse, and symbolic prose. His stories are often about simple rural people that undergo a severe psychological drama and who according to critics are described with immense psychological insight. Commonly dealing with themes such as death, guilt, angst, and other deep and intractable human emotions, the Norwegian natural landscape is a prevalent feature in his works. His debut was in 1923 with Children of Humans (Menneskebonn), but he had his breakthrough in 1934 with The Great Cycle (Det store spelet). His mastery of the nynorsk language, landsmål (see Norwegian language), has contributed to its acceptance as a medium of world class literature. The most famous of his works are Is-slottet (The Ice Palace), a story of two girls who build a profoundly strong relationship, and The Birds, a story of an adult of a simple childish mind, which through his tenderhearted empathy and imagination bears the role of a seer or writer. A prolific author, he won a number of awards, including the Gyldendal's Endowment in 1943, The Nordic Council's Literature Prize in 1963 for his novel The Ice Palace and the Venice Prize in 1953 for The Winds. He was mentioned as being considered for the Nobel Prize for Literature on three separate occasions (1964, 1968 and 1969). Several of his books have been translated into English – many of them published by Peter Owen Publishers– among them Spring Night, The Birds, Through Naked Branches, and The Ice Palace.
August 20, 1960
Kenneth Wishnia was born in Hanover, NH to a roving band of traveling academics. He earned a B.A. from Brown University (1982) and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from SUNY Stony Brook (1996). He teaches writing, literature and other deviant forms of thought at Suffolk Community College in Brentwood, Long Island, where he is a professor of English. Ken’s novels have been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, and Macavity Awards, and have made Best Mystery of the Year lists at Booklist, Library Journal, and The Washington Post. His short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Murder in Vegas, Long Island Noir, Queens Noir, Politics Noir, Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail, and elsewhere. His most recent novel, The Fifth Servant, was an Indie Notable selection, one of the ‘Best Jewish Books of 2010’ according to the Association of Jewish Libraries, a finalist for the Sue Feder Memorial Historical Mystery Award, and winner of a Premio Letterario ADEI-WIZO, a literary prize awarded by the Associazione Donne Ebree d’Italia, the Italian branch of the Women’s International Zionist Organization. He is married to a wonderful Catholic woman from Ecuador, and they have two children who are completely insane.
August 20, 1940
Jacques Bouveresse (born August 20, 1940) is a philosopher who has written on subjects including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Robert Musil, Karl Kraus, philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of mathematics and analytical philosophy. Bouveresse has been called "an avis rara among the better known French philosophers in his championing of critical standards of thought." He is now Emeritus Professor at the Collège de France where until 2010 he held the chair of philosophy of language and epistemology. His disciple Claudine Tiercelin was appointed to a chair of metaphysics and philosophy of knowledge upon his retirement.
August 20, 1947
Charles T. Clotfelter is Z. Smith Reynolds Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Economics and Law at Duke University. He is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. His books include Buying the Best: Cost Escalation in Elite Higher Education (Princeton).
August 20, 1885
Dino Campana (20 August 1885 – 1 March 1932) was an Italian visionary poet. His fame rests on his only published book of poetry, the Canti Orfici ("Orphic Songs"), as well as his wild and erratic personality, including his ill-fated love affair with Sibilla Aleramo. He is often seen as an Italian example of a poète maudit.
August 20, 1912
Philip Kapleau (August 20, 1912 – May 6, 2004) was a teacher of Zen Buddhism in the Sanbo Kyodan tradition, a blending of Japanese S?t? and Rinzai schools.
August 20, 1890
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937), known as H. P. Lovecraft, was an American author who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction. Virtually unknown and only published in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, he is now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors in his genre. Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, where he spent most of his life. His father was confined to a mental institution when Lovecraft was three years old. His grandfather, a wealthy businessman, enjoyed storytelling and was an early influence. Intellectually precocious but sensitive, Lovecraft began composing rudimentary horror tales by the age of eight, but suffered from overwhelming feelings of anxiety. He encountered problems with classmates in school, and was kept at home by his highly strung and overbearing mother for illnesses that may have been psychosomatic. In high school, Lovecraft was able to better connect with his peers and form friendships. He also involved neighborhood children in elaborate make-believe projects, only regretfully ceasing the activity at seventeen years old. Despite leaving school in 1908 without graduating—he found mathematics particularly difficult—Lovecraft had developed a formidable knowledge of his favored subjects, such as history, linguistics, chemistry, and astronomy. Although he seems to have had some social life, attending meetings of a club for local young men, Lovecraft, in early adulthood, was established in a reclusive "nightbird" lifestyle without occupation or pursuit of romantic adventures. In 1913 his conduct of a long running controversy in the letters page of a story magazine led to his being invited to participate in an amateur journalism association. Encouraged, he started circulating his stories; he was 31 at the time of his first publication in a professional magazine. Lovecraft contracted a marriage to an older woman he had met at an association conference. By age 34, he was a regular contributor to the newly founded Weird Tales magazine; he turned down an offer of the editorship. Lovecraft returned to Providence from New York in 1926 and, over the next nine months, he produced some of his most celebrated tales, including "The Call of Cthulhu", canonical to the Cthulhu Mythos. Never able to support himself from earnings as author and editor, Lovecraft saw commercial success increasingly elude him in this latter period, partly because he lacked the confidence and drive to promote himself. He subsisted in progressively straitened circumstances in his last years; an inheritance was completely spent by the time he died at the age of 46.
August 20, 1934
Thomas Cornelius Mangold (born 20 August 1934) is a British broadcaster, journalist and author. For 26 years he was an investigative journalist with the BBC Panorama current affairs television programme. Tom Mangold was born in Hamburg and came to Britain as a child, attending Dorking County Grammar School. He did National Service with the Royal Artillery. He is married, lives in London, has three daughters by previous marriages, and works as a freelance reporter specialising in intelligence and travel. Mangold was a reporter with the Sunday Mirror and then the Daily Express. After spending nearly two years investigating the Profumo Affair, he joined BBC TV News in 1964 to be a war correspondent covering conflicts in Aden, Vietnam, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, the Middle East and Afghanistan. In 1971 he moved to BBC TV Current Affairs working first for 24 Hours, then Midweek, becoming involved in some of the first investigative news documentaries of the BBC. In 1976 Mangold transferred to Panorama, still concentrating on investigative journalism and making over 100 documentaries in 26 years. In 1993 he won both the Business / Consumer Investigative Reports category in the CableACE Award in and also the Royal Television Society's Journalism Award. These were followed in 1996 by the bronze award in the Best Investigative Report Category at the New York Television Festival and in 1999 he won Investigative Reporting / News Documentary category in the Chicago International Television Competition. Between 2004 and 2008 Mangold helped Mayfield, Kentucky resident Susan Galbreath investigate and solve the case of the murder of Jessica Currin, which had occurred in 2000 but remained unsolved until 2008. Galbreath had contacted Mangold after seeing some of his Panorama programmes on local cable TV. Mangold has been described in The Times as "the doyen of broadcasting reporters."
August 20, 1935
David Ruelle is professor emeritus of mathematical physics at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in France and distinguished visiting professor of mathematics at Rutgers University. His books include Chance and Chaos.
August 20, 1946
Hilary Tham (August 20, 1946 – June 24, 2005), also known as Hilary Tham Goldberg, was a Malaysian-born American poet. Tham studied English literature in Malaysia before marrying an American Peace Corps worker. She then converted to Judaism and immigrated to the U.S. Tham published many books of poetry and was editor-in-chief for the nonprofit poetry publishing house, Word Works. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Hilary Tham was born in Klang, Malaysia. She attended a convent school run by Irish nuns, a Catholic school run by Dominican monks, and a prep school in Kuala Lumpur. She received her bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Malaya in 1969. She converted to Judaism after marrying Jewish-American Peace Corps worker, Joseph Goldberg, in Malaysia. In 1971, the couple immigrated to the United States, first settling in New Jersey and then moving to Arlington, Virginia two years later. She chaired the Northern Virginia Coalition, a nonprofit organization that helped to resettle Vietnamese refugees, and served as sisterhood president at her synagogue, which is now the Congregation Etz Hayim in Arlington. Tham was editor-in-chief for Word Works, a nonprofit poetry publishing house, and was poetry editor for the Potomac Review. She taught creative writing at various nearby schools, including Yorktown High School and Williamsburg Middle School, and was an Oriental brush painter. She died in Arlington at the age of 58 from metastatic lung cancer. Tham reflected upon both Asian and American culture in her work. She has been categorized as a "Chinese-Malaysian writer with Judaic influences.
August 20, 1904
Joseph Reese Strayer (1904–1987) was an American medievalist historian. He was a student of and mentored by Charles H. Haskins, America's first prominent medievalist historian. Strayer taught at Princeton University for many decades, starting in the 1930s. He was chair of the history department (1941–1961) and president of the American Historical Association in 1971.
August 21, 1871
Leonid Nikolaievich Andreyev (21 August 1871 – September 12, 1919) was a Russian playwright, novelist and short-story writer. He is one of the most talented and prolific representatives of the Silver Age period in Russian history. Andreyev's style combines elements of realist, naturalist and symbolist schools in literature.
August 21, 1931
Matthew Joseph Bruccoli (August 21, 1931 – June 4, 2008) was an American professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He was the preeminent expert on F. Scott Fitzgerald. He also wrote about writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and John O'Hara, and was editor of the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Bruccoli's interest in Fitzgerald began in 1947 when he heard a radio broadcast of Fitzgerald's short story 'The Diamond as Big as the Ritz'. That week he tracked down a copy of The Great Gatsby, 'and I have been reading it ever since,' he told interviewers. Bruccoli graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1949, and studied at Cornell University where one of his professors was Vladimir Nabokov and at Yale University where he was a founder member of the fledgling Manuscript Society, graduating in 1953. He was awarded a master's degree and doctorate from the University of Virginia in 1960. Bruccoli, who also taught at the University of Virginia and the Ohio State University, spent nearly four decades teaching at the University of South Carolina. He lived in Columbia, South Carolina, where, according to his New York Times obituary, he 'cut a dash on campus, instantly recognizable by his vintage red Mercedes convertible, Brooks Brothers suits, Groucho mustache and bristling crew cut that dated to his Yale days. His untamed Bronx accent also set him apart' (Grimes). Over the course of his career, he authored over 50 books on F. Scott Fitzgerald and other literary figures. His 1981 biography of Fitzgerald, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, is considered the standard Fitzgerald biography. He has edited many of Fitzgerald's works, from This Side of Paradise to Fitzgerald's unfinished final novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon. Bruccoli has also edited Scott's wife Zelda Fitzgerald's only novel Save Me the Waltz. While studying Fitzgerald, Bruccoli and his wife Arlyn began to collect all manner of Fitzgerald memorabilia. Bruccoli owned the artist's copy of Celestial Eyes, the cover art by Francis Cugat which appeared on the first edition, and most modern editions, of The Great Gatsby. In 1969, Bruccoli befriended F. Scott and Zelda's daughter Frances 'Scottie' Fitzgerald. In 1976, Bruccoli and the Fitzgeralds' daughter Scottie (as Scottie Fitzgerald Smith) published The Romantic Egoists, from the scrapbooks that F. Scott and Zelda had maintained throughout their lives of photographs and book reviews. Later in life Bruccoli and his wife donated their collection to the Thomas Cooper Library at USC. The collection is valued at nearly $2 million. Bruccoli was general editor of the 'Pittsburgh Series in Bibliography,' published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. As part of this series, he produced F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Descriptive Bibliography and, with Richard Layman, Ring W. Lardner: A Descriptive Bibliography (1976). A working draft of the Lardner book was prepared in the summer of 1973 by Bruccoli, who 'put his then-graduate-research-assistant Layman to work on checking it. Layman displayed so much aptitude for the assignment that a collaboration seemed obligatory.' Along with Richard Layman, a Dashiell Hammett scholar and former graduate assistant, and businessman C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr., Bruccoli launched the Dictionary of Literary Biography. The 400-volume reference work contains biographies of more than 12,000 literary figures from antiquity to modern times. Bruccoli continued working at the University of South Carolina until being diagnosed with a brain tumor, and died June 4, 2008.
August 21, 1912
Robert Lloyd Fish (21 August 1912 – 23 February 1981) was an American writer of crime fiction. His first novel, The Fugitive, gained him the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Allan Poe Award for best first novel in 1962, and his short story 'Moonlight Gardener' was awarded the Edgar for best short story in 1972. His 1963 novel Mute Witness, written under the pseudonym Robert L. Pike, was filmed in 1968 as Bullitt, starring Steve McQueen.
August 21, 1930
Joseph Prince McElroy (born August 21, 1930) is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He is noted for writing difficult fiction. Joseph McElroy was born on August 21, 1930, in Brooklyn, New York, the only child of Joseph Prince and Louise (née Lawrence) McElroy. McElroy's father was a scholarship student to Harvard University who majored in chemistry, but later worked as a stockbroker. He died when McElroy was 15 years old. McElroy grew up in Brooklyn Heights. He graduated from Poly Prep Country Day School in 1947 and was given an Alumni Distinguished Achievement Award in 2007 from the school's Board of Governors. He attended Williams College, from where he earned a Bachelor's degree in 1951. The following year, he earned a Masters degree from Columbia University. He served in the Coast Guard from 1952–54, and then returned to Columbia to complete his Ph.D. in 1961. In 1961, McElroy married Joan Leftwich, of London, in London. She is the daughter of Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews. Her father, Joseph Leftwich, was a translator and anthologizer of Yiddish poetry. The McElroys' only child, a daughter Hanna, was born in 1967. McElroy assisted with the birth. McElroy taught English at the University of New Hampshire (1956–62) and retired from teaching in 1995, after 31 years in the English department at Queens College, City University of New York. McElroy's writing is often grouped with that of William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon, due to the encyclopedic quality of his novels, particularly the 1,192 pages of Women and Men (1987). His short fiction was first published in literary journals. Echoes of McElroy's work can be found in that of Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace. McElroy's work often reflects a preoccupation with how science functions in American society; Exponential, a collection of essays published in Italy in 2003, collects science and technology journalism written primarily in the 1970s and 1980s for the New York Review of Books. In 1980, McElroy and his class at Queens College interviewed Norman Mailer. He interviewed Harry Mathews in 2002 for the Village Voice. McElroy commented on his own fiction and his influences in his ‘Neural Neighborhoods’ essay.
August 21, 1947
Lucius Shepard (born August 21, 1947 in Lynchburg, Virginia) is an American writer. Classified as a science fiction and fantasy writer, he often leans into other genres, such as magical realism. His work is infused with a political and historical sensibility and an awareness of literary antecedents. Shepard's first short stories appeared in 1983, and his first novel, Green EYES, appeared in 1984. At the time, he was considered part of the cyberpunk movement. Shepard came to writing late, having first enjoyed a varied career, including a stint playing rock and roll in the Midwest and extensive travel throughout Europe and Asia. Lucius Shepard has won several awards for his science fiction: in 1985 he won John W. Campbell Award for best new writer, followed in 1986 with a best novella Nebula Award for his story ‘R&R’, which would later become part of his 1987 novel LIFE DURING WARTIME. His novella ‘Barnacle Bill the Spacer’ won a Hugo in 1993. His poem ‘White Trains’ won the Rhysling Award in 1988. THE ENDS OF THE EARTH COLLECTION won a World Fantasy Award in 1992. His novella ‘Vacancy’ won a Shirley Jackson Award in 2008.
August 21, 1937
ROBERT STONE is the author of six previous novels: A HALL OF MIRRORS, DOG SOLDIERS (winner of the National Book Award), A FLAG FOR SUNRISE, CHILDREN OF LIGHT, OUTERBRIDGE REACH, And DAMASCUS GATE. His story collection, BEAR AND HIS DAUGHTER was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
August 21, 1871
Leonid Nikolaievich Andreyev (21 August 1871 – September 12, 1919) was a Russian playwright, novelist and short-story writer. He is one of the most talented and prolific representatives of the Silver Age period in Russian history. Andreyev's style combines elements of realist, naturalist and symbolist schools in literature.
August 21, 1946
Joel Best is Professor and Chair of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware. He is the author of Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists (California, 2001), Random Violence: How We Talk about New Crimes and New Victims (California, 1999), and Threatened Children: Rhetoric and Concern about Child-Victims (1990).
August 21, 1925
R. Mugo Gatheru (born 21 August 1925) is a Kenyan writer. His autobiographical A Child of Two Worlds describes growing up in colonial Kenya. Gatheru was born to a squatter family living on a European farm. He attended medical school in Nairobi, but was forced to continue his education abroad after he protested the treatment of Africans by the colonial rulers. After a year in India, he spent eight years from 1950 in the United States before studying law in England. He returned to Kenya when it gained independence in 1963.
August 21, 1954
Carlo Gébler (born 21 August 1954) is an Irish writer, television director, and teacher. His publications include novels, short stories, plays, historical works and memoirs. He is a member of Aosdána.
August 21, 1917
Joshua de Souza Montello (born August 21, 1917 — Rio de Janeiro, March 15, 2006) was a journalist, teacher, playwright and writer from Brazil. Among his works are the drums of São Luís, in 1965, the trilogy made up of the novels lost twice, in 1966, and Gloria, of 1977, and by romance around midnight, in 1985. Montello worked as Director of the National Library and the National Theater, wrote for the magazine Headline and the Jornal do Brazil, in addition to working in the Government of President Juscelino Kubitschek. Josué Montello's works were translated into English, French, Spanish, German and Swedish. Some of his novels were scripted for the cinema; in 1976, one afternoon, another afternoon received the title of love to 40; and, in 1978, the monster, was filmed as the monster of Santa Teresa. Died in March 2006, victim of heart failure. Montello was interned in Casa de Saúde São José, Rio de Janeiro, more than a year for treatment of respiratory problems. The body was hidden in the Academia Brasileira de Letras and buried in the late afternoon in São João Batista Cemetery. The translator, Miss Myriam Henderson, has been living in Brazil for some years and is thoroughly acquainted with contemporary Brazilian literature.
August 21, 1938
Mudrooroo (Colin Thomas Johnson) was born in Narrogin, Western Australia in 1938 and has since travelled extensively throughout Australia and the world. Mudrooroo is active in Aboriginal cultural affairs. He is a member of the Aboriginal Arts Unit committee of the Australia Council, and was a co-founder with Jack Davis of the Aboriginal Writers, Oral Literature and Dramatists’ Association. He has also piloted Aboriginal literature courses at Murdoch University, the University of Queensland, the University of the Northern Territory and Bond University. Mudrooroo is a prolific writer of poetry, prose and criticism. His first novel, Wild Cat Falling, was published in 1965. Doin’ Wild Cat was first published in 1988, and Wildcat Screaming in 1992.
August 21, 1947
Lucius Shepard (born August 21, 1947 in Lynchburg, Virginia) is an American writer. Classified as a science fiction and fantasy writer, he often leans into other genres, such as magical realism. His work is infused with a political and historical sensibility and an awareness of literary antecedents. Shepard's first short stories appeared in 1983, and his first novel, Green EYES, appeared in 1984. At the time, he was considered part of the cyberpunk movement. Shepard came to writing late, having first enjoyed a varied career, including a stint playing rock and roll in the Midwest and extensive travel throughout Europe and Asia. Lucius Shepard has won several awards for his science fiction: in 1985 he won John W. Campbell Award for best new writer, followed in 1986 with a best novella Nebula Award for his story ‘R&R’, which would later become part of his 1987 novel LIFE DURING WARTIME. His novella ‘Barnacle Bill the Spacer’ won a Hugo in 1993. His poem ‘White Trains’ won the Rhysling Award in 1988. THE ENDS OF THE EARTH COLLECTION won a World Fantasy Award in 1992. His novella ‘Vacancy’ won a Shirley Jackson Award in 2008.
August 21, 1952
Eric Sundquist (born August 21, 1952) is an American scholar of the literature and culture of the United States. Sundquist earned his B.A. from the University of Kansas and his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.
August 21, 1932
Melvin ‘Block’ Van Peebles (born August 21, 1932) is an American actor, director, screenwriter, playwright, novelist and composer. He is most famous for creating the acclaimed film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, which heralded a new era of African-American focused films. He is the father of actor and director Mario Van Peebles.
August 22, 1920
Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012) was an American fantasy, science fiction, horror and mystery fiction writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and for the science fiction and horror stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951), Bradbury was one of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers. Many of Bradbury's works have been adapted into comic books, television shows and films.
August 22, 1937
Herbert R. Kohl is an educator best known for his advocacy of progressive alternative education and as the author of more than thirty books on education. He founded the 1960s Open School movement and is credited with coining the term "open classroom."
August 22, 1940
Yambo Ouologuem (born August 22, 1940) is a Malian writer. His first novel, Le Devoir de Violence (English: Bound to Violence, 1968), won the Prix Renaudot. He later published Lettre à la France nègre (1969), and Les mille et une bibles du sexe (1969) under the pseudonym Utto Rodolph. Le Devoir de Violence was initially well-received, but critics later charged that Ouologuem had plagiarized passages from Graham Greene and other established authors. Ouologuem turned away from the Western press as a result of the matter, and even today remains reclusive. Yambo Ouloguem was born an only son in an aristocratic Malian family in 1940 in Bandiagara, the main city in the Dogon region of Mali (then a part of French Soudan). His father was a prominent landowner and school inspector. He learned several African languages and gained fluency in French, English, and Spanish. After matriculating at a Lycée in the capital city of Bamako, he went to Paris in 1960, where he studied sociology, philosophy and English at Lycée Henry IV and from 1964 to 1966 he taught at the Lycée de Clarenton in suburban Paris, while studying for a doctorate in sociology at the École Normale Supérieure. His major work, Le devoir de violence (1968), resulted controversy and a continuing academic debate over charges of plagiarism. In 1969, he published out a volume of biting essays, Lettre à la France nègre as well as an erotic novel, Les Milles et un bibles du sexe, published under the pseudonym of Utto Rodolph. After the plagiarism controversy over Le Devoir de violence, Ouloguem returned to Mali in the late seventies. Until 1984, he was the director of a Youth centre near Mopti in central Mali, where he wrote and edited a series of children's textbooks. He is reputed to have been leading a secluded Islamic life as a Marabout since then. His major work, Le Devoir de violence (published in English as Bound to Violence) was published in 1968 by Editions du Seuil. It was met with wide critical acclaim, winning the Prix Renaudot that very year, the first African author to do so. Ouloguem became a celebrity, and Le Monde called him one of 'the rare intellectuals of international stature presented to the world by Black Africa', comparing him to Leopold Sedar Senghor. It was translated into English (Bound to Violence) by Ralph Manheim in 1971. Ouloguem's novel is harshly critical of African nationalism, and 'reserves its greatest hostility for the violence Africans committed against other Africans'. Some critics felt that the praise and initial response of 'authenticity' for the novel, which is often historically inaccurate, was a Western response. These critics viewed it as a rejection of a glorified view of African history: a review in The Nation says that Ouologuem has 'shattered the ... myth of a glorious African past'. However, it was soon mired in controversy, as some of the passages appear to have been plagiarized from Graham Greene's It's a Battlefield and the French novel The Last of the Just (Le Dernier des justes, 1959) by Andre Schwartz-Bart. After a lawsuit by Greene, the book was banned in France, and has only recently been re-published. At the time, Ouloguem claimed that he had originally used quotations on some of the controversial passages, but his original manuscript is not available to verify this. He also claimed that in some early interviews, he had openly spoken of excerpting these passages, which is why it was not as controversial in France. Since 1977, the English edition carries the note: 'The Publishers acknowledge the use of certain passages on pages 54-56 from It's a Battlefield by Graham Greene.' Le devoir de violence delineates the seven-and-a-half centuries of history of central Mali (the Dogon region), from 1202 to 1947, when a fictitious nation, Nakem-Zuiko, is on the threshold of independence. The first part of the book deals with several powerful Malian empires, particularly the pre-colonial Toucouleur Empire which had Bandiagara as its capital, and the pre-Islamic Bambara Empire it replaced. It points out how African rulers collaborated with the slave traders, selling a hundred million citizens to be carried off into slavery. The narrative is marked by violence and eroticism, depicting sorcery and black magic as natural human activity. In the second, colonial part of the story, the protagonist, Raymond Spartacus Kassoumi, descended from slaves, is sent to France to be groomed for a political career. The story also highlights the process by which servility or 'negraille' (a word coined by Ouologuem) is ingrained in the black population. The book is notable for its 'cultural sweep: legends, myths, chronicles, religious matter woven into an opulent narrative; for eloquence: the cadence and music of the prose'. The book has been defended by a number of critics including Kwame Anthony Appiah, who views it as a rejection of the 'first generation of modern African novels—the generation of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Laye’s L’Enfant noir'. Despite the controversy, the book remains one of the landmarks of postcolonial African literature. Ouologuem's best-known works were republished English in The Yambo Ouologuem Reader: The Duty of Violence, A Black Ghostwriter's Letter to France and The Thousand and One Bibles of Sex, by Africa World Press, 2008. His legacy is explored in a contemporary light in Yambo Ouologuem: Postcolonial Writer, Islamic Militant, a recent anthology edited by Christopher Wise that includes an account of Wise's own attempt to find Ouologuem in Africa. Wise has called 'Ouologuem's decision to return to Mali and wash his hands of writing in French ... an incalculable loss to world literature.' Ouloguem has also written notable poetry, some of which has appeared in Nouvelle Somme. He is anthologized in Poems of Black Africa (ed. Wole Soyinka, 1975) and the Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry (1984).
August 22, 1893
Dorothy Parker (August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967) was an American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist, best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles. From a conflicted and unhappy childhood, Parker rose to acclaim, both for her literary output in such venues as The New Yorker and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed as her involvement in left-wing politics led to a place on the Hollywood blacklist. Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a 'wisecracker'. Nevertheless, her literary output and reputation for her sharp wit have endured.
August 22, 1935
Edna Annie Proulx (born August 22, 1935) is an American journalist and author. She has written most frequently as Annie Proulx but has also used the names E. Annie Proulx and E.A. Proulx. Her second novel, The Shipping News (1993), won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and was adapted as a 2001 film of the same name. Her short story 'Brokeback Mountain' was adapted as an Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe Award-winning major motion picture released in 2005. She won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her first novel, Postcards.
August 22, 1915
David T. Dellinger (August 22, 1915 – May 25, 2004) was an influential American radical pacifist and an activist for nonviolent social change. He achieved peak notoriety as one of the Chicago Seven, who were put on trial in 1968.
August 22, 1880
George Joseph Herriman (August 22, 1880 – April 25, 1944) was an American cartoonist best known for the comic strip Krazy Kat (1913–1944). More influential than popular, Krazy Kat had an appreciative audience among those in the arts. Gilbert Seldes' article "The Krazy Kat Who Walks by Himself" was the earliest example of a critic from the high arts giving serious attention to a comic strip. The Comics Journal placed the strip first on its list of the greatest comics of the 20th century. Herriman's work has been a primary influence on cartoonists such as Will Eisner, Charles M. Schulz, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Bill Watterson, and Chris Ware. Herriman was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, to mulatto Creole parents, and grew up in Los Angeles. After he graduated from high school in 1897, he worked in the newspaper industry as an illustrator and engraver. He moved on to cartooning and comic strips—a medium then in its infancy—and drew a variety of strips until he introduced his most famous character, Krazy Kat, in his strip The Dingbat Family (fr) in 1910. A Krazy Kat daily strip began in 1913, and from 1916 the strip also appeared on Sundays. It was noted for its poetic, dialect-heavy dialogue; its fantastic, shifting backgrounds; and its bold, experimental page layouts. In the strip's main motif, Ignatz Mouse pelted Krazy with bricks, which the naïve, androgynous Kat interpreted as symbols of love. As the strip progressed, a love triangle developed between Krazy, Ignatz, and Offisa Pupp. Herriman lived most of his life in Los Angeles, but made frequent trips to the Navajo deserts in the southwestern U.S. He was drawn to the landscapes of Monument Valley and the Enchanted Mesa, and made Coconino County the location of his Krazy Kat strips. His artwork made much use of Navajo and Mexican themes and motifs against shifting desert backgrounds. He was a prolific cartoonist who produced a large number of strips and illustrated Don Marquis's books of poetry about Archy and Mehitabel, an alley cat and a cockroach. Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst was a proponent of Herriman and gave him a lifetime contract with King Features Syndicate, which guaranteed Herriman a comfortable living and an outlet for his work despite its lack of popularity.
August 22, 1878
Ladislav Klíma (22 August 1878 – 19 April 1928), was a Czech philosopher and novelist influenced by George Berkeley, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. His philosophy is referred to varyingly as existentialism and subjective idealism. Ladislav Klíma was born in the town of Domažlice in western Bohemia. He came from a moderately wealthy family. After expulsion from the school system in 1895 for allegedly insulting the State, the Church, and — out of what he described as historical analphabetism — the Habsburgs, he lived alternately in Tyrol, Zurich, and Prague. As part of his philosophy he only ever took on short term work. For a time he also lived off occasional royalties from his publications and the periodic generosity of his friends. While only part of Klíma’s work was published before his death, many manuscripts were edited posthumously, among which were his stories and letters. Many manuscripts he destroyed himself. Klíma spent the later part of his life living in a hotel, shining shoes for a living, drinking spirits and eating vermin. Klíma died of tuberculosis and is buried in Prague. Klíma rejected the norms of contemporary Czech society in both the way he lived and in what he wrote. Culture, moral values and the world itself are all rejected and reality is subjected to the will of the individual. Much of Klíma’s philosophy is expressed in "World as Consciousness and Nothing" ("Sv?t jako v?domí a nic", 1904). He took ideas from his philosophical predecessors to the extreme and tried to incorporate them into his practical life. For Berkeley, each object exists only because it is perceived, to be is to be perceived. Klíma takes this a stage further and suggests that the individual creates the world with his own will. Where the highest achievement for Schopenhauer is the man who denied his will, Klíma conversely suggests that the realization of one’s own will is the primary achievement. This brings Klíma close to Nietzsche with his will to power liberating itself from the bounds of the bourgeois world and affirming itself. Klíma's individuality lies not only in his conception of philosophy, but also in his attempt to conform to it in his personal life. His autobiographical writings illustrate his attempts to grasp his own power and to shout his "Deus sum" ("I am God"). He tested his own deity in a life without any money, and in non-conformism that rejected all conventions, including a job. All this was to lead Klíma to control of self. However, Klíma also had friends and patrons who supported him in difficulties. Utrpení knížete Sternenhocha (The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch: Prague 1928) is his most famous novel. In a series of journal entries, the book chronicles the descent into madness of Prince Sternenhoch, who moves from the life of a nobleman to a life filled with suffering, eccentricity, bouts of madness and self-torment. Having sunk to the lowest level, he eventually attains an ultimate state of bliss and salvation.
August 23, 1946
Robert Graham Irwin (born 23 August 1946) is a British historian, novelist, and writer on Arabic literature. Irwin read modern history at the University of Oxford, and did graduate research at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) under the supervision of Bernard Lewis. His thesis was on the Mamluk reconquest of the Crusader states, but he failed to complete it. From 1972 he was a lecturer in medieval history at the University of St. Andrews. He gave up academic life in 1977 in order to write fiction, while continuing to lecture part-time at Oxford, Cambridge and SOAS. Irwin is currently a Research Associate at SOAS, and the Middle East editor of The Times Literary Supplement. He has published a history of Orientalism and is an acknowledged expert on The Arabian Nights. Many of Irwin's novels focus on Arabic themes. This includes his first, the acclaimed dark fantasy novel The Arabian Nightmare, which was inspired by Jan Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. Later novels would focus on diverse subjects, such as British Surrealism (Exquisite Corpse) and Satanism in Swinging London (Satan Wants Me). A character from Satan Wants Me, the Satanist Charlie Felton, has a cameo in the 1969 episode of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic. Alan Moore, the comic's creator, has described Irwin as a 'fantastic writer'. In 2006, Irwin published For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies, his critique of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978). Among various points, he maintains that Said focused his attention on the British and French in his critique of Orientalism, while it was German scholars who made the original contributions. He notes that Said linked the academic Orientalism in those countries with imperialist designs on the Middle East, yet, by the 19th and the early 20th centuries, it was more proper to regard Russia as an empire having imperialist designs on the Caucasus region and Central Asia. Irwin maintains that the issue of Russia's actual imperialist designs is avoided by Said. Another of Irwin's key points is that oriental scholarship, or 'Orientalism', 'owes more to Muslim scholarship than most Muslims realise.' Maya Jasanoff in the London Review of Books argued: '...Irwin's factual corrections, however salutary, do not so much knock down the theoretical claims of Orientalism as chip away at single bricks. They also do nothing to discount the fertility of Orientalism for other academics. The most thought-provoking works it has inspired have not blindly accepted Said's propositions, but have expanded and modified them.'
August 23, 1926
Clifford James Geertz (August 23, 1926 – October 30, 2006) was an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology, and who was considered "for three decades. the single most influential cultural anthropologist in the United States." He served until his death as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Fred Inglis is Honorary Professor of Cultural History at the University of Warwick.
August 23, 186
Edgar Lee Masters (August 23, 1868 – March 5, 1950) was an American attorney, poet, biographer, and dramatist. He is the author of Spoon River Anthology.
August 23, 1912
Jara Ribnikar born in Hajek ( Czech Republic Jara Ribnikarová, born Hájek , Hradec Kralove , August 23, 1912 - Belgrade , April 30, 2007 ) was a writer, translator and participant in the National Liberation Struggle. She was born on August 23, 1912 . in Hradec Kralove , Czech Bohemia , then in Austro-Hungarian , and today in the Czech Republic. She was the daughter of Emil Hajek , director of the Music School Stankovic and the other wife of Vladislav Ribnikar , director of " Politika ". The workers' movement was accessed in 1939 . years. After the occupation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia , 1941 . For some time, for some time, he carried out a courier service for the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia . Together with her husband, Vladislav worked on the "Information Bulletin". She participated in the National Liberation Struggle since 1941 . years. May 1943 . In the year 2000 she was transferred to the liberated territory. She was at TANJUG Agency since its inception in 1943 . years. During the war, she was led by the Yugoslav Red Cross and was at Titov's headquarters She was a communist and a leftist until her death, and in the 1990s she was a member of the Yugoslav Left . She was President of the Association of Writers of Serbia and Member of the Council of Peoples of the Federal Assembly of the SFRY . She was one of the founders and first president of the Serbian-Czech Friendship Society, which briefly operated in Belgrade in 1991. She is the winner of the 7th Prize Award , the Ivan Goran Kova?i? Award, the "Forum" award and the Association of Serbian Writers Award. She died on April 30, 2007 . in the Dr Dragiša Mišovi? Hospital. Her son is Darko Ribnikar . Her sister was Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Jiri Dinstbir. He is the bearer of the Partisan monuments of 1941 and other Yugoslav decorations , among which are the Order of the Republic with the Golden Crown , the Order of Fraternity and Unity and the Order of Courage.
August 23, 1958
Wang Shuo (born August 23, 1958) is a Chinese author, director, actor, and cultural icon. He has written over 20 novels, television series and movies. His work has been translated into Japanese, French, English, Italian, and many other languages. He has enormous cultural status in China and has become a nationally celebrated author. Wang Shuo grew up in an army compound in Beijing. His family was of Manchu ancestry. When he was an adolescent, his parents were sent to the countryside as part of the Cultural Revolution, leaving him and his brother alone in Beijing among other children whose parents were also away. He joined the navy as a medical assistant where he spent four years. He later pursued a career as a writer. Many lines from his works have become popular slang. Recently, Wang turned down an offer from Francis Ford Coppola's production company. In 2007, Wang Shuo became active once again and went on many talk shows. Wang Shuo is described by some traditional Chinese critics as a 'spiritual pollutant' for his hooligan style of writing. His work describes the culturally confused generation after the Cultural Revolution, marked by rebellious behavior. During the 90's Wang Shuo was the most popular and famous writer in China. Despite his hooligan style, his collected works were never banned and only one film based on his novels was not allowed to be shown in China until 2004, not because of his political stance, but rather due to his style. Wang Shuo is a national bestseller in China and has influenced generations of Chinese readers. With over 20 novels and 10 million copies in print, Wang Shuo's influence ranges from students to workers, and from drifters to intellectuals. His works mark the beginning of a new writing style in China, influencing many new authors. His satire is less of a direct confrontation with the Communist autocracy than it is a mockery of their lack of cool and a statement of utter indifference to any political or nationalistic correctness. In his writing style, Wang Shuo has focused on the ‘living language’ which is spoken by ordinary people in the street. He has also used a lot of the Beijing dialect, which makes his works very vivid and attractive.
August 23, 1903
Gay Wilson Allen (August 23, 1903, Lake Junaluska, NC - August 6, 1995, born in 1903 in North Carolina), received his A.B. and A.M. from Duke University and his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin. In 1946 he started teaching English at New York University, in 1948 as a full professor. He contributed to many periodicals, including The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The American Scholar and The Saturday Review. His books include American Prosody and Literary Criticism: Pope to Croce. His The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman, won the Tamiment Award for the best biography of the year in 1955, and was followed by Walt Whitman as Man, Poet, and Legend. He was a member of the American Association for Psychical Research.
August 24, 1902
Felipe Alfau (1902–1999), was a Spanish American (Catalan American) novelist and poet. Like his contemporaries Luigi Pirandello and Flann O'Brien, Alfau is considered a forerunner of later postmodern writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, and Gilbert Sorrentino. Born in Barcelona, Alfau emigrated with his family at the age of fourteen to the United States, where he lived the remainder of his life. Alfau earned a living as a translator; his sparse fictional and poetic output remained obscure throughout most of his life. Alfau wrote two novels in English: LOCOS: A COMEDY OF GESTURES and CHROMOS. LOCOS — a metafictive collection of related short stories set in Toledo and Madrid, involving several characters that defy the wishes of the author, write their own stories, and even assume each others' roles — was published by Farrar and Rinehart in 1936. The novel, for which Alfau was paid $250, received some critical acclaim, but little popular attention. The novel was republished in 1987 after an editor for the small publisher Dalkey Archive Press found the book at a barn sale in Massachusetts, read it, and contacted Alfau after finding his telephone number in the Manhattan phone book. The novel's second incarnation was modestly successful, but Alfau refused payment, instructing the publisher to use the earnings from LOCOS to fund some other unpublished work. When asked if he had written any other books, Alfau provided the manuscript for CHROMOS, which had been resting in a drawer since 1948. CHROMOS, a comic story of Spanish immigrants to the United States contending with their two cultures, went on to be nominated for the National Book Award in 1990. Alfau also wrote a book of poetry in Spanish, SENTIMENTAL SONGS (La poesia cursi), written between 1923 and 1987 and published in 1992, and a book of children's stories, OLD TALES FROM SPAIN, written in 1929.
August 24, 1872
Sir Henry Maximilian 'Max' Beerbohm (London 24 August 1872 – 20 May 1956 Rapallo) was an English essayist, parodist, and caricaturist best known today for his 1911 novel Zuleika Dobson.
August 24, 1899
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges (24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in the Spanish language literature. His work embraces the ‘character of unreality in all literature’. His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and The Aleph (El Aleph), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and also to the fantasy genre. Critic Ángel Flores, the first to use the term magical realism to define a genre that reacted against the dominant realism and naturalism of the 19th century, considers the beginning of the movement to be the release of Borges's A Universal History of Infamy (Historia universal de la infamia). However, some critics would consider Borges to be a predecessor and not actually a magical realist. His late poems dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family travelled widely in Europe, including stays in Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955 he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He became completely blind at the age of 55; as he never learned braille, he became unable to read. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. In 1961 he came to international attention when he received the first Prix International, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In 1971 he won the Jerusalem Prize. His work was translated and published widely in the United States and in Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages. He dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland. His international reputation was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by his works being available in English, by the Latin American Boom and by the success of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Writer and essayist J. M. Coetzee said of him: ‘He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists.’
August 24, 1936
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, DBE, known as A. S. Byatt (born 24 August 1936), is an English novelist, poet and Booker Prize winner. In 2008, The Times newspaper named her on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
August 24, 1951
Oscar Jerome Hijuelos (August 24, 1951 – October 12, 2013) was an American-born novelist of Cuban descent. During a year-long convalescence from a childhood illness spent in a Connecticut hospital he lost his knowledge of Spanish, his parents' native language. For his second novel, adapted for the movie The Mambo Kings, he became the first Hispanic to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Hijuelos died at age 62 in 2013 after collapsing with a heart attack while playing tennis in New York.
August 24, 1952
Linton Kwesi Johnson is Britain's most influential black poet. The author of four previous collections of poetry and numerous record albums, he is known world-wide for his fusion of lyrical verse and reggae (dub).
August 24, 1958
Christopher John ‘Chris’ Offutt (born August 24, 1958) is an American writer. His is most widely known for his short stories and novels, but he has also published two memoirs, nonfiction articles and, in 2005, had a story in a comic book collection by Michael Chabon and another in the anthology Noir. He has written episodes for the TV series True Blood and Weeds.
August 24, 1955
Gary Phillips (b. 1955) is a critically acclaimed author of mysteries and graphic novels. Raised in South Central Los Angeles, Phillips grew up reading comics, classic pulp and detective fiction, and the likes of Iceberg Slim and took inspiration from all this when he created his first series character, Ivan Monk, in the early 1990s. A private detective adept at navigating the racial tensions of modern L. A. and beyond, Monk has appeared in four novels and one short story collection, Monkology (2011). Phillips introduced his second series character, Martha Chainey, in High Hand (2000), and followed that rollicking tale of a showgirl’s mafia troubles with another book and short story. Besides writing several stand alones like The Jook and The Underbelly, and editing anthologies such as Orange County Noir, Phillips has found success in the field of graphic novels, penning illustrated stories such as The Rinse and High Rollers. When not writing, he spends his time smoking the occasional cigar and pondering why his poker abilities haven’t improved. Phillips continues to live and work in Los Angeles.
August 24, 1963
YRSA SIGURDARDOTTIR (born in 1963) lives with her family in Reykjavik. She is a director of one of Iceland’s largest engineering firms. Her work is climbing bestseller lists all over the world.
August 24, 1922
Howard Zinn (August 24, 1922 – January 27, 2010) was an American historian, academic, author, playwright, and social activist. Before and during his tenure as a political science professor at Boston University from 1964-88 he wrote more than 20 books, which included his best-selling and influential A People's History of the United States. He wrote extensively about the civil rights and anti-war movements, as well as of the labor history of the United States. His memoir, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, was also the title of a 2004 documentary about Zinn's life and work.
August 24, 1899
Iraj Pezeshkzad was born in Tehran in 1928 and educated in Iran and then France, where he received his law degree. He is a retired diplomat, journalist, and writer. He is the author of several plays, short stories, and novels, including My Uncle Napoleon. Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi is senior lecturer of Persian language and linguistics at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University. Patricia J. Higgins is a University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Emerita at the State University of New York Plattsburgh.
August 24, 1902
When Harry Söderman (August 24, 1902, Stockholm, Sweden - March 16, 1956, Tangier, Morocco) died suddenly in Tangier in March of 1956 he was Europe’s leading active criminologist and authority on police systems. His fame was worldwide, both as a detective and police officer, and as a contributor to the rapidly expanding field of scientific and technical police work. As the Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science said of him in 1952: ‘His eminent name belongs with that honored company of Bertillon, Gross, Galton, Locard, Heindl, Balthazard. Osborn, Mitchell and many others. who have left society far safer and stronger because they have lived.’ In a sense, his interest in crime and criminals commenced at birth. His father, Pehr Söderman, was a police administrator and sheriff in northern Sweden, and from boyhood on young Harry read and studied avidly in the field in which he was later to specialize. By the time he went, at the age of 24, to study police science under the world famous Edmond Locard at Lyons he already possessed a substantial reputation based on a series of articles on police work in Near-Eastern and Asiatic countries which he had contributed, as a roving correspondent, to the Swedish Police Journal. After returning to Sweden as both teacher and practicing criminologist, Dr. Söderman’s fame continued to grow. In 1939 he was the organizer and first Director of Sweden’s new National Institute of Technical Police, a post which he held until his retirement in 1953. The National Institute, under his guidance and supervision, became the foremost Scandinavian institution of its kind. While in this post, he also undertook many police and organizing missions in foreign countries; be has been honored by the governments of Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Finland, and his native Sweden. Throughout most of his life as a working criminologist, Harry Soderman devoted much time and thought to helping the development of an international organization of police officers. With a handful of associates, be revived the famous International Police Commission in the chaotic years following the end of World War II, and was, until his death, a Reporter General to the Commission. Of all his many awards and distinctions, this was the one which mattered most to him, as the reader will discern in the pages of his book. Although he published over a hundred scientific papers, monographs, and books, he is best known in the United States for his definitive text on police work, Modern Criminal Investigation, written in collaboration with the late Chief Inspector John J. O’Connell of the New York City Police Department. It has been through numerous printings, and revisions, and remains the standard work in its field throughout most of the free world.
August 24, 1902
Fernand Braudel (24 August 1902 – 27 November 1985) was a French historian and a leader of the Annales School. His scholarship focused on three main projects: The Mediterranean (1923–49, then 1949–66), Civilization and Capitalism (1955–79), and the unfinished Identity of France (1970–85). His reputation stems in part from his writings, but even more from his success in making the Annales School the most important engine of historical research in France and much of the world after 1950. As the dominant leader of the Annales School of historiography in the 1950s and 1960s, he exerted enormous influence on historical writing in France and other countries. He was student of Henri Hauser (1866-1946). Braudel has been considered one of the greatest of the modern historians who have emphasized the role of large-scale socioeconomic factors in the making and writing of history. He can also be considered as one of the precursors of world-systems theory.
August 24, 1887
Donald Henderson Clarke (1887-1958) was an American writer and journalist, known for his romantic novels, mystery fiction, and screenplays. Clarke was born August 24, 1887 in South Hadley, Massachusetts and died March 27, 1958 in Delray Beach, Florida. John Ford directed many of his screenplays.
August 24, 1898
Malcolm Cowley (August 24, 1898 – March 27, 1989) was an American novelist, poet, literary critic, and journalist.
August 24, 1949
Diamela Eltit (born 1949, Santiago de Chile) is a writer and a Spanish professor from Chile. She currently holds a teaching appointment at New York University, where she teaches creative writing. Eltit received a bachelor's degree in literature and works in the Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana. She was culture attaché during Patricio Aylwin's government at the Chilean Embassy in Mexico. In her books, she breaks traditional novel conventions with sordid places, marginal characters and a prose marked by an ambiguous speech and exaltations to the body of the injured or hurt woman. She's one of the members of the so-called generación del 87, after Salvador Allende's administration. Eltit is and was, especially during the junta government, a performance artist and social examiner. Her work often subverts the norm and examines the structure of oppression and repressed desire. ltit is married to Jorge Arrate, the communist candidate in the 2009 Chilean presidential elections. Eltit supported Arrate in his campaign.
August 24, 1933
Robert Hendrickson is the author of more than twenty-five books including American Literary Anecdotes and God Bless America: The Origins of Over 1,500 Patriotic Words and Phrases. He has a deep-rooted love for the English language. He lives in Peconic, New York.
August 24, 1591 baptised
Robert Herrick (baptised 24 August 1591 – buried 15 October 1674 was a 17th-century English lyric poet and cleric. He is best known for his book of poems, Hesperides. This includes the carpe diem poem To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time, with the first line Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.
August 24, 1935
Andrew Kopkind (August 24, 1935 – October 23, 1994) was an American journalist. He was renowned for his reporting during the tumultuous years of the late 1960s; he wrote about the anti-Vietnam War protests, American Civil Rights Movement, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panther Party, the Weathermen, President Johnson's "Great Society" initiatives, and California gubernatorial campaign of Ronald Reagan.
August 24, 1929
Paul Lendvai (born August 24, 1929 as Lendvai Pál) is a Hungarian-born journalist who became an Austrian citizen. He moved to Austria in 1957, and is working as an author and journalist.
August 24, 1966
Philip Stephens was born on August 24, 1966 in Glendale, Arizona, and raised outside the small town of Kearney, Missouri. His first book of poems, The Determined Days, is forthcoming in the spring of 2000 from the Overlook Press as part of the Sewanee Writers' Series.
August 25, 1949
Martin Amis (born 25 August 1949) is a British novelist, the author of some of Britain's best-known modern literature, including MONEY (1984) and LONDON FIELDS (1989). He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. The Times named him in 2008 as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition and the excesses of late-capitalist Western society with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus been portrayed as the undisputed master of what The New York Times called ‘the new unpleasantness.’ Influenced by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father Sir Kingsley Amis, he has inspired a generation of writers with his distinctive style, including Will Self and Zadie Smith. The Guardian writes that his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis called a ‘terrible compulsive vividness in his style. that constant demonstrating of his command of English,’ and that the ‘Amis-ness of Amis will be recognizable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop.’.
August 25, 1925
Thea Astley (25 August 1925 – 17 August 2004) was an Australian novelist and short story writer. She was a prolific writer who was published for over 40 years from 1958. At the time of her death, she had won more Miles Franklin Awards, Australia's major literary award, than any other writer. As well as being a writer, she taught at all levels of education - primary, secondary and tertiary. Astley has a significant place in Australian letters as she was ‘the only woman novelist of her generation to have won early success and published consistently throughout the 1960s and 1970s, when the literary world was heavily male-dominated’.
August 25, 1959
Penelope Evans was born in Wales but spent the majority of her growing up in Scotland. After reading Classics at St. Andrews, she came to London to train and practise as a criminal barrister. Assisting in cases that ranged from defending drunk drivers to Libyan bombers gave her enough material to write twenty books - but so far she has limited herself to eight, the latest beng THE TRICK OF THE DEAD.
August 25, 1889
Waldo David Frank (1889-1967) was a prolific American novelist, historian, political activist, and literary critic, who wrote extensively for The New Yorker and The New Republic during the 1920s and 1930s. Frank is best known for his studies of Spanish and Latin American literature and culture and his work is regarded as an intellectual bridge between the two continents. A radical political activist during the years of the Great Depression, Frank delivered a keynote speech to the first congress of the League of American Writers and was the first chair of that organization. Frank broke with the Communist Party, USA in 1937 over its treatment of exiled Soviet leader Leon Trotsky, whom Frank met in Mexico in January of that year.
August 25, 1836
Francis Bret Harte (August 25, 1836 – May 5, 1902) was an American author and poet, best remembered for his short fiction featuring miners, gamblers, and other romantic figures of the California Gold Rush. In a career spanning more than four decades, he wrote poetry, fiction, plays, lectures, book reviews, editorials, and magazine sketches in addition to fiction. As he moved from California to the eastern U.S. to Europe, he incorporated new subjects and characters into his stories, but his Gold Rush tales have been most often reprinted, adapted, and admired.
August 25, 1744
Johann Gottfried von Herder (25 August 1744 – 18 December 1803) was a German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the periods of Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang, and Weimar Classicism.
August 25, 1923
Álvaro Mutis Jaramillo (August 25, 1923 – September 22, 2013) was a Colombian poet, novelist, and essayist and author of the compendium The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. He was awarded the 2002 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Mutis was born in Bogotá and lived in Brussels from the age of two until eleven, where his father, Santiago Mutis Dávila, held a post as a diplomat. They would return to Colombia by ship for summer holidays. During this time Mutis' family stayed at his grandfather's coffee and sugar cane plantation, Coello. For Álvaro Mutis, the impressions of these early years, his reading of Jules Verne and of Pablo Neruda's Residencia en la tierra, and, especially, contact with 'el trópico' (the tropics), are the mainspring of his work. Mutis studied high school in Bogotá under the tutelage of the Colombian poet Eduardo Carranza. Although he never finished school, he entered the literary world in Bogotá as a poet, a member of the Cántico group that emerged in 1940s. In 1948 Mutis and Carlos Patiño published a chapbook of poems called La balanza. He lived in Mexico City since 1956, gaining renown there as the result of Octavio Paz's positive reviews of his work. Mutis' poetry was first published in 1948 and his first short stories in 1978. His first novella featuring Maqroll, La nieve del Almirante (The Snow of the Admiral) was published in 1986 and gained him popular and critical acclaim. He has received many literary awards, including the Prix Médicis (France, 1989), Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras (Spain, 1997), Premio Miguel de Cervantes (Spain, 2001), and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (United States, 2002), for The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, a volume collecting all seven novellas about Maqroll the Gaviero. Mutis has combined his career as a writer of poetry and prose with a diverse set of non-literary occupations. Like his protagonist Maqroll, Mutis traveled widely in his professional roles including five years as Standard Oil's public relations director and over 20 years as sales manager for Twentieth Century Fox and Columbia Pictures in their Latin American television divisions. Latin Americans first became familiar with his voice when he did the narration for the Spanish-language television version of The Untouchables. The late Octavio Paz was a champion of Mutis' early poetry. In the 1950s, Mutis spent 15 months in a Mexican prison as a consequence of his handling of money intended for charitable use by Standard Oil. His experience in prison had a lasting influence on his life and work, and is chronicled in the book Diario de Lecumberri. Mutis' close friend, Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez, called him 'one of the greatest writers of our time.' Mutis' works are most widely read in Latin America and Europe. Mutis is not well known in the anglophone world, probably because he is not easy to categorize. His literary work is not part of what is commonly understood in the American academy as 'Latin American Literature'. Maqroll, his most well-known character, is of indeterminate origin, nationality, age and physiognomy. He is not evidently from Latin America and does not represent anything particularly Latin American in character. Maqroll is a solitary traveler who brings a stranger's detachment to his encounters and his lovers; he searches for meaning in a time of violence and inhumanity. In this sense some literary critics has compared Maqroll to Sophocles' Oedipus.
August 25, 1891
Alberto Savinio, real name Andrea Francesco Alberto de Chirico (25 August 1891 - 5 May 1952) was an Italian writer, painter, musician, journalist, essayist, playwright, set designer and composer. He was the younger brother of 'metaphysical' painter Giorgio De Chirico. His work often dealt with philosophical and psychological themes, and he also was heavily concerned with the philosophy of art. Throughout his life, Savinio composed five operas and authored at least forty-seven books, including multiple autobiographies and memoirs. Savinio also extensively wrote and produced works for the theater. Savinio’s work received mixed reviews during his lifetime, often due to his pervasive use of surrealism. He was influenced by and a contemporary of Apollinaire, Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, and Fernand Léger.
August 25, 1959
Lane Smith (born August 25, 1959) is an American illustrator and writer of children's books. Smith was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but moved to Corona, California at a young age. He spent summers in Tulsa, and cites experiences traveling there via Route 66 as inspirations for his work, saying that "[o]nce you've seen a 100-foot cement buffalo on top of a donut-stand in the middle of nowhere, you're never the same." He studied at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, at the encouragement of his high-school art teacher, Dan Baughman, helping to pay for it by working as a janitor at Disneyland. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in illustration, and moved to New York City, where he was hired to do illustrations for various publications including TIME, Mother Jones and Ms. Smith is married to Molly Leach, who has designed many award-winning books, including nearly all of Smith's. Smith is most noted for his work on children's books. He has illustrated works by Florence Parry Heide, Judith Viorst, Bob Shea, Dr. Seuss, Jack Prelutsky, Eve Merriam, Roald Dahl and George Saunders. He has both written and illustrated several books, most notably It's a Book (2010), which was a New York Times bestseller for over six months and has been translated into over twenty-five languages; Madam President (2008); and John, Paul, George, and Ben (2006). He received his second Caldecott Medal honor for Grandpa Green (2012). On May 5, 2015, Roaring Brook Press published Smith's first middle-grade novel, Return to Augie Hobble, which received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. He is also known for several children's picture books created with writer Jon Scieszka. The two teamed up The Stinky Cheese Man, which was a New York Times "Best Illustrated Book" and a Caldecott Honor Book, and The True Story of the Three Little Pigs. Smith has also illustrated some volumes of Scieszka's The Time Warp Trio novels. He is a four-time recipient of the New York Times??'? Best Illustrated Book award. In 2012 he was named a Carle Honor Artist for lifelong innovation in the field of children's books. In 2014 he received the Society of Illustrators' Lifetime Achievement award. Smith's artistic talents have also been featured in other books and mediums. He illustrated one edition of Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach, and was Conceptual Designer for the 1996 Disney movie adaptation. He contributed conceptual designs for Disney and Pixar's Monsters, Inc. and the film adaptation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
August 25, 1865
Luis Gonzalez Obregon (Guanajuato, August 25, 1865 - City of Mexico, June 19, 1938 ) was a Mexican writer, bibliophile, and historian and one of the most eminent men of Mexico, in the field of History and Of letters. He was a member of the Mexican Academy of Language, and held chair XI on December 1, 1916. He was the 4th librarian and the 1st librarian-archivist there. From 1919 to 1922 he was director of the Mexican Academy of History, and occupied chair 10 from 1919 to 1938.
August 25, 1957
Michael Hofmann received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1988. He is currently teaching at the University of Florida at Gainesville.
August 25, 1954
Eddie Little (August 25, 1954 – May 20, 2003) was a widely acclaimed American author. He wrote Another Day in Paradise, later made into a film of the same name directed by Larry Clark. Little was also the author of "Outlaw LA" an ongoing article published in LA Weekly. His writings were a rugged portrayal of coming of age in the underbelly of society and heroin addiction. His books were largely autobiographical, and although his supporting characters tended to be fictional, the narrators were almost parallel with himself. Little died of a heart attack in a Los Angeles motel room, at the age of 48.
August 25, 1921
Brian Moore (25 August 1921 – 11 January 1999), who has been described as 'one of the few genuine masters of the contemporary novel', was a novelist and screenwriter from Northern Ireland who emigrated to Canada and later lived in the United States. He was acclaimed for the descriptions in his novels of life in Northern Ireland after the Second World War, in particular his explorations of the inter-communal divisions of The Troubles. He was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1975 and the inaugural Sunday Express Book of the Year award in 1987, and he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times (in 1976, 1987 and 1990). Moore also wrote screenplays and several of his books were made into films.
August 25, 1940
Diana Souhami is the author of many highly acclaimed books: The Trial of Radclyffe Hall (short-listed for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography, and winner of the U.S. Lambda Literary Award), Gertrude and Alice , Greta and Cecil , the bestselling Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter , and Gluck: Her Biography . She was awarded the Whitbread Award for Biography for Selkirk's Island . She lives in London.
August 25, 1931
Tchicaya U Tam'si (25 August 1931 - 22 April 1988 ) was a Congolese author born Gérald-Félix Tchicaya; his pen name means "small paper that speaks for a country" in Kikongo. Born in Mpili, near Brazzaville, French Equatorial Africa (now Congo) in 1931, U Tam'si spent his childhood in France, where he worked as a journalist until he returned to his homeland in 1960. Back in Congo, he continued to work as a journalist; during this time he maintained contact to the politician Patrice Lumumba. In 1961, he started to work for UNESCO. He died in 1988 in Bazancourt, Oise, near Paris. Since 1989, the Tchicaya U Tam'si Prize for African Poetry is awarded every two years in the Moroccan city of Asilah. U Tam'si's poetry incorporates elements of surrealism; it often has vivid historic images, and comments African life and society, as well as humanity in general.
August 25, 1944
Sherley Anne Williams (August 25, 1944 – July 6, 1999) was an American poet, novelist, professor, vocalist, Jazz poet, and social critic. Many of her works tell stories about her life in the African-American community. Williams was born in Bakersfield, California. When she was young her family picked cotton in order to earn money. At the age of eight her father died of tuberculosis and when she was sixteen her mother died. She graduated from Thomas Alva Edison High School in Fresno, California in 1962. In 1966 she earned her bachelor's degree in English at what is now California State University, Fresno and she received her master's degree at Brown University in 1972. The following year (1973) she became a professor of English Literature at the University of California at San Diego. She traveled to Ghana under a 1984 Fulbright grant. Her works include collections of poetry such as The Peacock Poems (1975), the novel Dessa Rose (1986), and two picture books. She also published the groundbreaking non-fiction work Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study of Neo-Black Literature in 1972. Williams is also known for her music which mainly consisted of blues and jazz poetry. In 1982 Williams wrote, recorded, and self-published her debut single titled Some One Sweet Angel Chile. The single was re-released by Blues Economique Records in 1984. The music for Some One Sweet Angel Chile was composed by Bertram Turetzky. In the early 1990s Williams reconnected with Bertram Turetzky for some recording sessions for Turetzky's album called Compositions And Improvisations which also featured various jazz and blues artists such as Vinny Golia, Jerome Rothenberg, Quincy Troupe, and Nancy Turetzky. Williams is credited as a vocalist for her contributions to Turetzky's album. Three of the songs featured on the album were previously-written Williams poems recorded in musical format: "One-Sided Bed Blues", "Big Red And His Brother", and "The Wishon Line". The album was recorded at Studio 101 in Solana Beach, California during the summer of 1992, and released by Nine Winds Records in 1993.
August 25, 1950
Jógvan Isaksen (born 25 August 1950 in Tórshavn) is a Faroese writer and literary historian. He is best known for his crime novels and for his book about Faroese literature Færøsk Litteratur (1993, in Danish). He is leader of the Faroese publication house Mentunargrunnur Studentafelagsins which has its address in the Faroe Islands, but its committee is located in Copenhagen. This publication house published Faroese books, it is the oldest Faroese publication house, founded in 1910. Jógvan Isaksen is the son of Magnhild Isaksen and Reimar Isaksen, who both come from the village of Gøta. After finishing high school in 1970 he moved to Denmark in order to study Nordic Philology at Aarhus University. He finished his MA in Scandinavian Literature Science in 1982. Since 1986 he has been associate Professor in Faroese language and Faroese literature at the University of Copenhagen. Since 2000 he has been main editor of the magazine Nordisk litteratur (Nordic Literature) by the Nordic Council. Since 1978 Isaksen has also worked as a writer. His crime fiction novels are popular in the Faroe Islands and often best sellers just before Christmas. Some of these books have been translated into other languages. Isaksen has also written some children's books and books about Faroese writers and literature. For his literature work about the Faroese writer Hanus Kamban (at that time his name was Hanus Andreassen) and for his work for Faroese Literature, Isaksen received the Faroese Literature Prize in 1994. In 2006 he received one of the prizes of the Faroese Government, called Heiðursgáva landsins. The crime fiction Blíð er summarnátt á Føroyalandi was Isaksen's first crime fiction novel and one of the first crime fictions written in Faroese, where the story also happens in the Faroe Islands. It has been translated into Danish, Icelandic and German.
August 26, 1880
Wilhelm Albert Wlodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, known as Guillaume Apollinaire (Rome, 26 August 1880 - 9 November 1918, Paris) was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother. Among the foremost poets of the early 20th century, he is credited with coining the word Surrealism and writing one of the earliest works described as surrealist, the play The Breasts of Tiresias (1917, used as the basis for a 1947 opera). Two years after being wounded in World War I, he died in the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 at age 38.
August 26, 1914
Julio Cortázar (August 26, 1914 - February 12, 1984) was a Belgian-born Argentine intellectual and author of experimental novels and short stories. He was married three times, to Aurora Bernárdez, Ugné Karvelis and Carol Dunlop. Most of his work was written in Paris, France from 1951 until his demise. Hopscotch is Julio’s magnum opus. Julio Cortázar was born to Argentine parents on August 26, 1914, in Brussels, Belgium, where his father was involved in a commercial venture as part of Argentina’s diplomatic presence. Many years later, Cortázar would say ‘my birth was a product of tourism and diplomacy.’ Because the Cortázar family were nationals of a neutral country not involved in World War I, they were able to pass through Switzerland and later reach Barcelona, where they lived for a year and a half. Cortázar regularly played at the Park Güell and its colourful ceramics would remain vivid in his memory for many years. When Cortázar was four years old, his family returned to Argentina. He spent the rest of his childhood in Banfield, near Buenos Aires, together with his mother and his only sister, who was one year his junior. During his childhood, Cortázar’s father abandoned the family; Cortázar would never see him again. In Banfield Cortázar lived in a house with a yard out back from which he obtained inspiration for future stories. His time in Banfield, however, was not happy; he would later describe it, in a letter to Graciela M. de Solá (December 4, 1963) as ‘full of servitude, excessive touchiness, terrible and frequent sadness.’ Cortázar was a sickly child and spent much of his childhood in bed reading. His mother selected the books for him to read, introducing her son most notably to the works of Jules Verne, whom Cortázar admired for the rest of his life. He was to say later, in the magazine Plural (issue 44, Mexico City, 5/1975) ‘I spent my childhood in a haze full of goblins and elfs, with a sense of space and time that was different to everybody else’s.’ Although he never completed his studies at the University of Buenos Aires where he studied Philosophy and Languages, he taught in several provincial secondary schools. In 1938 he published a volume of sonnets under the pseudonym Julio Denis. He would later disparage this volume. In 1944, he became professor of French literature at the National University of Cuyo. In 1949, he published a play, Los Reyes (The Kings), based on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. In 1951, in opposition to the government of Juan Domingo Perón, Cortázar emigrated to France, where he lived and worked until his demise. From 1952, he worked for UNESCO as a translator. His translation projects included Spanish renderings of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Mémoires d’Hadrien and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Alfred Jarry and Comte de Lautréamont were other decisive influences. Julio Cortázar wrote most of his major works in Paris. In later years he underwent a political transformation, becoming actively engaged with human rights causes in Latin America and openly supporting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. He died reportedly of leukemia in Paris in 1984 and was interred there in the Cimetière de Montparnasse with Carol Dunlop. Some people have stated that he died from AIDS contracted via a blood transfusion; sources close to Cortázar have denied this. He did suffer from melomania. Julio Cortázar is highly regarded as a master of short story narrations. Collections like Bestiario (1951), Final del juego (1956) and Las armas secretas (1959) contain many of the best examples of surrealist writing in postmodern literature. Selections from those volumes were published in 1967 in English translations by Paul Blackburn under the title Blow-Up and Other Stories in deference to the English title of Michelangelo Antonioni’s celebrated film noir of 1966 (Blowup) inspired by Julio Cortázar’s story Las Babas del Diablo. Cortázar also influenced Jean-Luc Godard to write Week End with La Autopista del Sur. One of his most notable short fictions is El Perseguidor (The Pursuer), based on the life of jazz musician Charlie Parker. He also published several novels, including Los Premios (The Winners - 1960), Hopscotch (Rayuela -1963), 62: A Model Kit (62 Modelo para Armar - 1968) and Libro de Manuel (A Manual for Manuel - 1973). They were later translated by Gregory Rabassa. Julio Cortázar’s masterpiece, Hopscotch, has been praised by other Latin American writers including José Lezama Lima, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. The novel has an open-ended structure that invites the reader to choose between a linear and a non-linear mode of reading. Cortázar’s employment of interior monologue and stream of consciousness is reminiscent of modernists like James Joyce, but his main influences were Surrealism, the French Nouveau roman and the improvisatory aesthetic of jazz. He also published poetry, drama and various works of non-fiction. One of his last works was a collaboration with his third wife, Carol Dunlop, entitled The Autonauts of the Cosmoroute; it related, partly in mock-heroic style, the couple’s extended expedition along the autoroute from Paris to Marseille in a Volkswagen camper nicknamed Fafner.
August 26, 1941
Barbara Ehrenreich (born August 26, 1941) is an American feminist, democratic socialist, and political activist who describes herself as ‘a myth buster by trade’, and has been called ‘a veteran muckraker‘ by The New Yorker. During the 1980s and early 1990s she was a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America. She is a widely-read and award-winning columnist and essayist, and author of 21 books. Ehrenreich is perhaps best known for her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. A memoir of Ehrenreich's three-month experiment surviving on minimum wage as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing-home aide, and Wal-Mart clerk, it was described by Newsweek magazine as ‘jarring’ and ‘full of riveting grit’, and by The New Yorker as an ‘exposé’ putting ‘human flesh on the bones of such abstractions as 'living wage' and 'affordable housing' .'
August 26, 1904
Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood (26 August 1904 – 4 January 1986) was an English novelist.
August 26, 1885
Jules Romains, born Louis Henri Jean Farigoule (August 26, 1885 – August 14, 1972), was a French poet and writer and the founder of the Unanimism literary movement. His works include the play Knock ou le Triomphe de la médecine, and a cycle of works called Les Hommes de bonne volonté (Men of Good Will). Jules Romains was born in Saint-Julien-Chapteuil in the Haute-Loire but went to Paris to attend first the lycée Condorcet and then the prestigious École normale supérieure. He was close to the Abbaye de Créteil, a utopian group founded in 1906 by Charles Vildrac and René Arcos, which brought together, among others, the writer Georges Duhamel, the painter Albert Gleizes and the musician Albert Doyen. He received his agrégation in philosophy in 1909. In 1927, he signed a petition (that appeared in the magazine Europe on April 15) against the law on the general organization of the nation in time of war, abrogating all intellectual independence and all freedom of expression. His name on the petition appeared with those of Lucien Descaves, Louis Guilloux, Henry Poulaille, Séverine... and those of the young Raymond Aron and Jean-Paul Sartre from the École normale supérieure. During World War II he went into exile first to the United States where he spoke on the radio through the Voice of America and then, beginning in 1941, to Mexico where he participated with other French refugees in founding the Institut Français d'Amérique Latine (IFAL). A writer on many varied topics, Jules Romain was elected to the Académie française on 4 April 1946, occupying chair 12 (of 40). He served as President of PEN International, the worldwide association of writers from 1936 to 1941. In 1964, Jules Romains was named citizen of honor of Saint-Avertin. Following his death in Paris in 1972, his place in the Académie française was taken by Jean d'Ormesson. Jules Romains is remembered today, among other things, for his concept of Unanimism and his cycle of novels in Les Hommes de bonne volonté (The Men of Good Will), a remarkable literary fresco depicting the odyssey over a quarter century of two friends, the writer Jallez and politician Jerphanion, who provide an example in literature of Unanimism. Romains originally considered unanimism to mean an opposition to individualism or to the exaltation of individual particularities; universal sympathy with life, existence and humanity. In later years, Romains defined it as connected with the end of literature within 'representation of the world without judgment',[this quote needs a citation] where his social ideals comprise the highest conception of solidarity as a defense of individual rights. The Red Envelope catalog company, in their 2007 Holiday catalog, surprisingly featured Les Createurs on the cover in a photograph, showing a female model playfully frustrated with her husband, a male model posing as a detached intellectual, half-heartedly helping her to decorate the Christmas tree, while his attention is focused on reading Les Createurs.
August 26, 1875
John Buchan (26 August 1875 – 11 February 1940) was a Scottish novelist, historian and Unionist politician who served as Governor General of Canada, the 15th since Canadian Confederation. After a brief legal career, Buchan simultaneously began his writing career and his political and diplomatic careers, serving as a private secretary to the colonial administrator of various colonies in southern Africa. He eventually wrote propaganda for the British war effort in the First World War. Buchan was in 1927 elected Member of Parliament for the Combined Scottish Universities, but he spent most of his time on his writing career, notably writing The Thirty-Nine Steps and other adventure fiction.
August 26, 1957
Poet Nikky Finney was born in 1957 in South Carolina. The daughter of a lawyer and teacher, Finney’s parents were both active in the Civil Rights movement and her childhood was shaped by the turmoil and unrest of the South in the 1960s and ‘70s. In an interview with the Oxford American, Finney noted: I've never been far away from the human-rights struggle black people have been involved with in the South. That has been one of the backdrops of my entire life. Finney’s engagement with political activism has also influenced her trajectory as a poet. Carefully weaving the personal and political, Finney’s poetry is known for its graceful, heartfelt synthesis of the two. Influenced by Lucille Clifton and Nikki Giovanni, Finney’s poems explore subjects ranging from the human devastation of Hurricane Katrina to Rosa Parks to the career path of Condoleezza Rice. Speaking about her latest book, the National Book Award-winner Head Off & Split (2011), Finney told the Lexington Herald-Leader: I know the sound of the '60s and '70s. There was a lot of standing with signs, there was a lot of shouting. I wanted to be a poet who didn't shout, who said things but said them with the most beautiful attention to language … I've been really working on this for 30 years, exploring how those two paths intersect, the path where the beautifully said thing meets the really difficult-to-say thing, and that's where I think this book finds its light. In addition to Head Off & Split, Finney’s books of poetry include On Wings Made of Gauze (1985), Rice (1995), Heartwood (1997), and The World is Round (2003). She edited the collection Black Poets Lean South (2007), an anthology of poets associated with Cave Canem, where Finney is on faculty. Finney is also a founding member of the Affrilachian Poets, a group of black Appalachian poets. She has received numerous awards for her work, including a PEN America Open Book Award and the Benjamin Franklin Award for Poetry. Finney is the Provost’s Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, and lives in Lexington.
August 26, 1928
Naïm Kattan, (born August 26, 1928) is a Canadian novelist, essayist and critic of Iraqi Jewish origin. Born in Baghdad, Iraq, Kattan spent the first years of his life growing up in Jewish Baghdad. He studied at the University of Baghdad from 1945 until 1947 and at the Sorbonne from 1947 until 1951. He emigrated to Montreal in 1954. He is the author of more than 30 books, translated into several languages. Those years of his life are explored throughout his novel Farewell, Babylon. First published in French as Adieu, Babylone in 1975, his novel was translated by Sheila Fischman and published in English in 2005. The early years of Kattan’s life were complicated. Kattan recalls in Farewell, Babylon the experiences of growing up in a community torn between Jewish and Arab nationalisms, the horrors of the 1941 farhoud, and anti-Semitism, but also Jewish successes in the cosmopolitan Arab city. In 1947, Kattan was awarded a scholarship from the government of France, and left Iraq to study literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. After taking an unplanned trip to New York City in 1952, Kattan planned to move to Montreal, Quebec, because of its status as a French speaking metropolis. He arrived in Montreal in 1954. In partnership with the Canadian Jewish Congress, Naim Kattan founded Le Cercle Juif, a publication dedicated to building cultural ties between Jewish and French Canada in the 1950, which was the first non-Catholic French-language periodical published in Montreal. Kattan went on to write a literary column in Le Devoir, and for close to 25 years he headed the writing and publishing division of the Canada Council for the Arts Writing and Publication program.
August 26, 1916
Allan Merson (August 26, 1916 - October 28, 1995, Lyndhurst, United Kingdom) was Senior Lecturer in History at Southampton University and has contributed to publications specialising in the history of opposition to the Nazi régime.
August 26, 1936
Indres Elatchininathan Naidoo (born 26 August 1936, died 8 January 2016) was a South African anti-apartheid activist. An early member of the people’s liberation army, Umkhonto we Sizwe, Naidoo served 10 years in prison on Robben Island for sabotage between 1963 and 1973. After his release from prison, Naidoo played a leading role in the revival of the struggle in the 1970s until he was obliged to go into exile in 1977. He served the African National Congress (ANC) in Mozambique and in the German Democratic Republic. The ANC was unbanned in 1990, and Naidoo returned to South Africa the following year. When the ANC won the 1994 general election, Naidoo was appointed to the Senate and served in Parliament until 1999. In 2014, Naidoo was awarded the Order of Mendi for Bravery in Silver. Indres Naidoo was the son of Roy Naidoo and Manonmoney Ama Naidoo, grandson of Thambi Naidoo, and brother of Shanthie Naidoo and Prema Naidoo. Indres Naidoo worked as a clerk and became the main support of the family after the death of his father Narainsamy Thambi Naidoo, a leading political activist, in 1953. Indres was an active member of the Transvaal Indian Youth Congress and he became Secretary in 1953. He was elected an Executive Committee member of the Transvaal Indian Congress in 1958, and he was one of the founders of the Human Rights Committee in 1973. He was recruited as a member of Umkhonto we Sizwe ("Spear of the Nation") (MK), the military wing of the African National Congress (ANC) in 1961 and joined the South African Communist Party (SACP) in 1961. On 17 April 1963, he was arrested with two other Indians - Reggie Vandayar (who was Indres’s MK commander) and Shirish Nanabhai - after they blew up a railway tool shed and tried to dynamite a railway signal relay case. Subsequently two of his other comrades were also arrested Abdullay Jassat and Laloo Chiba. Indres and his friends were among the first to be caught in the Transvaal while committing sabotage as members of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) ("Spear of the Nation"), the military wing of the African National Congress (ANC), after they had been betrayed by a spy. They were also among the first victims of policemen who were specially trained in brutal and sophisticated torture of freedom fighters.In 1976, he left South Africa and was sent to work in Maputo, Mozambique for the ANC. While in Mozambique, Indres worked in the office of the ANC and was actively involved in activities of MK, of which he was a leading member. He was transferred to the ANC Headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia in 1987. After a year, he was sent to Berlin, GDR, as deputy representative of the ANC from 1988 to 1991. The South African regime attempted to assassinate him in Mozambique and in the GDR. He returned to South Africa in 1991 after the bans on the ANC and MK were withdrawn. After the democratic elections in 1994, he was elected an ANC Senator and then a Member of Parliament from 1994 until 1999. In 1982, Penguin published Island in Chains, a book by him on his experiences in Robben Island prison. The second edition in 2003 contains an epilogue describing his activities in Mozambique, Lusaka and Berlin. Indrasena (Indres) Elatchininathan Naidoo passed away on 3 January 2016 at 2 Military Hospital, Cape Town, Western Cape. He is survived by his wife Gabriele Blankenburg.
August 26, 1932
Lygia Bojunga Nunes is Brazil’s most popular and important contemporary author of children’s books. She has won every major Brazilian award for children’s literature and in 1982 was the recipient of the international Hans Christian Andersen Award. She has written ten books for children and her work has been translated into thirteen languages. In 1986 a theater adaptation of MY FRIEND THE PAINTER was awarded the prestigious Moliere Prize. Lygia Bojunga Nunes divides her time between her homes in Brazil and in London.
August 26, 1908
Marguerite Young was the author of one novel, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling; two books of poetry, Prismatic Ground and Moderate Fable; and the nonfiction epic Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias. She taught creative writing at Indiana, Columbia, Fairleigh Dickinson, and Fordham Universities, the University of Iowa, and the New School for Social Research. She was born in 1908 in Indiana, lived in New York City for forty-seven years, and, during the last two years of her life, returned to Indianapolis. Harp Song for a Radical began as an essay on Debs and Indiana, and became for Marguerite Young a life-long work. She died before finishing her final editing of the book--a task completed by her friend of many years, Charles Ruas. Charles Ruas was born in China, was educated at Princeton University and the Sorbonne and was the recipient of both a Fulbright and a Danforth Fellowship. From 1974 to 1977, he was arts director of the New York radio station, WBAI, where he conducted a program interviewing writers, among them Marguerite Young. Charles Ruas is currently a guest professor of American Literature and Civilization at Stendhal University in Grenoble, France.
August 26, 1916
Milton Hindus (August 26, 1916, The Bronx, New York City, NY - May 28, 1998, Waltham, MA) was a scholar of American and European literature and was one of the original 13 professors that founded Brandeis University in 1948. He taught there until his retirement in 1981. A native New Yorker, Professor Hindus was teaching at the University of Chicago when he was recruited as by Brandeis. He devoted much of his time in recent years to the work of Charles Reznikoff, a Brooklyn-born poet and editor (1894-1976). Professor Hindus wrote ''Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet'' (1984), and ''Charles Reznikoff: A Critical Essay'' (1977), and worked on ''The Collected Letters of Charles Reznikoff.' He wrote ''Celine: The Crippled Giant'' (1950), a critical biography of the French writer Louis Ferdinand Celine, which was reissued as a paperback in 1997. Hindus was fascinated by Celine’s poetry, but repelled by his anti-semitism. Hindus corresponded with Celine for several years and the two eventually met for a series of meetings in Denmark in 1949. He also wrote ''The Proustian Vision'' (1954), ''A Reader's Guide to Marcel Proust'' (1962), and ''F. Scott Fitzgerald: An Introduction and Interpretation'' (1967). He was the author of ''Leaves of Grass: One Hundred Years Later'' (1955), which remains in print and earned him the Walt Whitman Prize of the Poetry Society of America. He also edited ''Walt Whitman'' for the Critical Heritage Series (1997). Also among his 16 books were ''The Jewish East Side: 1881-1924'' (1995), and ''A World at Twilight: A Portrait of East European Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust'' (1971). He graduated in 1936 from City College, where he earned a master of arts degree in 1938. Before joining the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1946, he did postgraduate work at Columbia University and lectured at Hunter College and the New School for Social Research in New York. Hindus once wrote 'My conviction is that the most important life is that of the mind, and if this does not transpire through all the writer's work, then indeed he has written in vain.'
August 26, 1961
MAJA HADERLAP (born 26 August 1961) is a Slovenian-German Austrian writer and translator. She studied German language and literature at the University of Vienna and has a PhD in Theatre Studies. Between years 1992 and 2007 she worked as drama supervisor at the Klagenfurt City Theatre and was editor for the Carinthian Slovene minority literary magazine Mladje. Haderlap writes poetry, prose and essays in both Slovenian and German. Her work has been published in numerous international literary journals and anthologies. She was awarded the Ingebjorg-Bachmann-Preis and the Rauriser Literaturpreis for her debut novel Engel des Vergessens (Angel of Oblivion). TESS LEWIS is a translator of German and French. She has been awarded translation grants from PEN America & UK, an NEA Translation Fellowship, and a Max Geilinger Translation Grant for her translation of Philippe Jaccottet. She is an Advisory Editor of The Hudson Review and writes essays on European literature for numerous literary journals.
August 27, 1871
Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser (August 27, 1871 – December 28, 1945) was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of choice and agency. Dreiser's best known novels include Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925).
August 27, 1927
Nessim Joseph Dawood (27 August 1927 – 20 November 2014) was an Iraqi translator, who is best known for his translation of the Quran. Nessim Joseph Dawood was born in Baghdad to a Jewish family. His real surname was Yehuda. The name on his Iraqi ID card consisted of his own given name, plus those of his father and paternal grandfather, Nessim Yosef [Joseph] David. He changed "David" to "Dawood" when he applied for a passport. His nom de plume became N.J. Dawood. Bilingual in Arabic and English, he started tutoring schoolmates in English. He came to England as an Iraq state scholar in 1945, and studied English Literature and Classical Arabic at the University of London in the first cohort of students to resume normal university studies after the Second World War. After graduating in 1949, he worked as a journalist and was invited by Sir Allen Lane – the founder of Penguin Books – to translate a selection of Tales from the Thousand and One Nights into English, to mark the publication of Penguin No. 1001 in 1954. This translation achieved a wide readership: an unexpurgated version that reflected the Arabic original – yet was effortlessly readable in contemporary English – appealed to a broad audience. Readings and dramatic adaptations from his translation of the Tales were broadcast on BBC radio. It was reissued in the Penguin Classics and a further selection (Aladdin and Other Tales) was published in 1957, also in the Penguin Classics. Both books were combined into a single volume (Tales from the Thousand and One Nights) in 1973. The founder of the Penguin Classics was Dr. E. V. Rieu, CBE – a classicist and an accomplished Greek and Latin scholar who had translated inter alia the Iliad and the Odyssey. Rieu revolutionized the art of translation, and became a mentor and key influence upon Dawood’s approach to the translator’s craft. Rieu and Lane proposed a new translation of the Koran, which at that time was largely unknown to British readers. The only previous translations were in an archaic, literal style; the aim was to produce a modern translation that would be accessible to the English-speaking reader. The first edition was published in 1956 as Penguin No. L52. In this edition, Dawood rearranged the chapters (surahs) into more-or-less chronological order, to make them easier to understand, in line with the chronological approach found in the Old and New Testaments. Later revisions of his translation reverted to the traditional sequence of the surahs (arranged in descending order of length). His translation of the Koran is still thought to be the best-selling English language version – it has been reprinted at least 70 times, appearing in several revised editions and formats. For N J Dawood, the Koran was a lifelong work in progress – constantly revised and refined in the course of an entire career. Language and use of English change constantly over time: for example, terms such as Men and Mankind did not have the same gender-specific connotations for the reader of the 1950s that might apply today, so have been censored. Dawood’s translation has never been out of print; a new revised edition was published in May 2014. He died on 20 November 2014.
August 27, 1933
Kerstin Lillemor Ekman (born 27 August 1933 in Risinge, Finspång, Östergötland County) is a Swedish novelist. Kerstin Ekman wrote a string of successful detective novels (among others De tre små mästarna and Dödsklockan) but later went on to psychological and social themes. Among her later works is Mörker och blåbärsris (1972) (set in northern Sweden) and Händelser vid vatten (1993), in which she returned to the form of the detective novel. Ekman was elected member of the Swedish Academy in 1978, but left the Academy in 1989, together with Lars Gyllensten and Werner Aspenström, due to the debate following death threats posed to Salman Rushdie. According to the rules of the Academy, however, she will remain a passive member for the entirety of her life.
August 27, 1935
Sir Michael De Courcy Fraser Holroyd CBE FRHistS FRSL (born 27 August 1935) is an English biographer. Holroyd was born in London, the son of Basil de Courcy Fraser Holroyd and his wife, Ulla Knutsson-Hall. He was educated at Eton College, though he has often claimed Maidenhead Public Library as his alma mater. In 1964 he published his first book, a biography of writer Hugh Kingsmill, but his reputation was consolidated in 1967-68 with the publication of his life of Lytton Strachey (which playwright Christopher Hampton later used extensively when writing the screenplay for the 1995 film Carrington). Holroyd has also written biographies of Augustus John and, in four volumes, of George Bernard Shaw. His latest book, A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers (2010), concerns the Villa Cimbrone on the Gulf of Salerno and the Edwardian literary and society figures who lived there such as Ernest Beckett, 2nd Baron Grimthorpe. Holroyd acted as Chairman of the Society of Authors, 1973–83, and from 1985 to 1988 was president of the English branch of PEN. His awards include the 2001 Heywood Hill Literary Prize and the 2005 David Cohen Prize for literature. In 2006, he was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN for ‘a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature’. He was President of the Royal Society of Literature from 2003 to 2008 and was knighted in the 2007 New Years' Honours List. Holroyd is a Patron of Dignity in Dying. Holroyd is married to author Dame Margaret Drabble.
August 27, 1925
Saiichi Maruya (August 27, 1925-October 13, 2012) was an award-winning and highly popular novelist, translator, and critic. He was born in the town of Tsuruoka, Japan in 1925, and was conscripted into the army at the age of nineteen during World War II. His novel SINGULAR REBELLION was published in English in 1986 to critical acclaim, with the New York Times Review celebrating it for being ‘funny, light on its feet, and providing exceptional insight into the ways of the Japanese.’ Maruya’s translation of James Joyce’s ULYSSES is considered the definitive Japanese edition. He lived in Tokyo
August 27, 1959
Jeanette Winterson (born 27 August 1959) is an award-winning English writer, who became famous with her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a semi-autobiographical novel about a sensitive teenage girl rebelling against conventional values. Some of her other novels have explored gender polarities and sexual identity. Winterson is also a broadcaster and a professor of creative writing. She is a two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award, which focuses on LGBT issues.
August 27, 1966
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at the New Yorker. Her books include The Mansion of Happiness, The Whites of Their Eyes (Princeton), New York Burning, and The Name of War.
August 27, 1962
Born in Reykjavik in 1962, Sjón is a celebrated Icelandic author whose novels have been published in over thirty-five languages. He won the Nordic Council's Literary Prize for his novel The Blue Fox(the Nordic countries' equivalent of the Man Booker Prize) and the novel From The Mouth Of The Whale was shortlisted for both the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. The novel Moonstone – The Boy Who Never Was received every literary prize in Iceland, including the coveted Icelandic Literary Prize. CoDex 1962, a novel in three books written over 25 years, was published in Iceland in 2016 to great acclaim. As a poet, librettist, and lyricist, Sjón has published more than a half dozen poetry collections, written four opera libretti, and lyrics for various artists. In 2001 he was nominated for an Oscar for his lyrics in the film Dancer In The Dark. Sjón is the president of PEN International's Icelandic Centre and lives in Reykjavik with his wife and two children. Victoria Cribb has spent the last twenty-five years immersed in Iceland’s language and literature. After reading Old Icelandic at Cambridge, she took an MA in Scandinavian Studies at University College London and a BPhil in Icelandic at the University of Iceland, before working in Iceland for a number of years as a publisher, journalist, and translator. Since 2002 she has lived in London, working as a freelance translator, and currently also teaches Icelandic at University College London and in Cambridge. Her translations include Sjón’s The Blue Fox, From the Mouth of the Whale, The Whispering Muse, and Moonstone, and three novels in collaboration with Olaf Olafsson, as well as countless other works of fiction and nonfiction, published in books, anthologies, and magazines.
August 27, 1870
Amado Nervo (August 27, 1870 – May 24, 1919) also known as Juan Crisóstomo Ruiz de Nervo, was a Mexican poet, journalist and educator. He also acted as Mexican Ambassador to Argentina and Uruguay. His poetry was known for its use of metaphor and reference to mysticism, presenting both love and religion, as well as Christianity and Hinduism. Nervo is noted as one of the most important Mexican poets of the 19th century. Amado Nervo was born in Tepic, Nayarit (1870). His father died when Nervo was 9 years old. Two more deaths were to mark his life: the suicide of his brother Luis, who was also a poet, and the death of his wife Ana Cecilia Luisa Daillez, just 11 years after marriage. His early studies were at the Colegio San Luis Gonzaga, located in Jacona, Michoacán. After graduation, he began studying at the Roman Catholic Seminary in nearby Zamora. His studies at the seminary included science, philosophy and the first year of law. It was here, that Nervo cultivated an interest in mystical theories, which were reflected in some of his early works. While Nervo had early plans to join the priesthood, economic hardship led him to accept a desk job in Tepic. He later moved to Mazatlán, where he alternately worked in the office of a lawyer and as a journalist for El Correo de la Tarde (The Evening Mail). He went on to become a successful poet, journalist, and international diplomat. In 1894, Nervo continued his career in Mexico City, where he became known and appreciated, working in the magazine Azul, with Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera. It was during this time that he was introduced to the work of Luis G. Urbina, Tablada, Dávalos, Rubén Darío, José Santos Chocano, and Campoamor. His background in journalism and news reporting flourished during these years, as he continued writing for El Universal, El Nacional, and El Mundo. He maintained a formal partnership with El Mundo through June 1897. In October 1897, El Mundo launched a supplement called La Comedia del Mundo, with Nervo taking responsibility for the overall production. In January 1898, the supplement was established independently from El Mundo and changed its name to La Comedia. Nervo gained a national reputation in the literary community after the publication of his novel El bachiller (The Bachelor) and his books of poetry, including Místicas (Mystical) and Perlas Negras (Black Pearls). In 1898, Nervo founded, along with Jesús Valenzuela, La Revista Moderna (The Modern Magazine). The magazine was the successor to Azul. He was the cousin of the renowned artist Roberto Montenegro Nervo. His cousin's first illustrations were produced for La Revista Moderna magazine. In 1902, Nervo wrote "La Raza de Bronce" ("The Bronze Race") in honor of Benito Juárez, former president of Mexico. In 1919, Bolivian writer Alcides Arguedas used the term in his novel, Raza de Bronce. In 1925, the term was used by Mexican luminary José Vasconcelos in his essay, La Raza Cósmica. Nervo spent the first years of the twentieth century in Europe, particularly in Paris. While there, he was an academic correspondent of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua. While in Paris, Nervo befriended Enrique Gómez Carrillo and Aurora Cáceres, for whom he wrote a prologue for the book La rosa muerta. When Nervo moved back to Mexico, he was appointed the Mexican Ambassador to Argentina and Uruguay. In 1901, while he was in Paris he met and married Ana Cecilia Luisa Dailliez. They lived happily until her death in 1912. Out of his grief and desperation, Nervo wrote his most important work, La Amada Inmóvil (The Immovable Loved One), published posthumously in 1922.
August 27, 1925
Frederick "Fred" Edmund Emery (27 August 1925 – 10 April 1997) was an Australian psychologist. He was one of the pioneers in the field of organizational development (OD), particularly in the development of theory around participative work design structures such as self-managing teams. He was widely regarded as one of the finest social scientists of his generation. His contribution to the theory and practice of organizational life will remain important well into the 21st century, particularly amongst those who feel uncomfortable with hierarchical bureaucracy and want to replace it with something more human and democratic.
August 27, 1770
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 – November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher and an important figure of German idealism. He achieved wide renown in his day and, while primarily influential within the continental tradition of philosophy, has become increasingly influential in the analytic tradition as well. Although Hegel remains a divisive figure, his canonical stature within Western philosophy is universally recognized. Hegel's principal achievement is his development of a distinctive articulation of idealism sometimes termed "absolute idealism", in which the dualisms of, for instance, mind and nature and subject and object are overcome. His philosophy of spirit conceptually integrates psychology, the state, history, art, religion, and philosophy. His account of the master–slave dialectic has been highly influential, especially in 20th-century France. Of special importance is his concept of spirit (Geist: sometimes also translated as "mind") as the historical manifestation of the logical concept and the "sublation" (Aufhebung: integration without elimination or reduction) of seemingly contradictory or opposing factors; examples include the apparent opposition between nature and freedom and between immanence and transcendence. Hegel has been seen in the 20th century as the originator of the thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad; however, as an explicit phrase, it originated with Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Hegel has influenced many thinkers and writers whose own positions vary widely. Karl Barth described Hegel as a "Protestant Aquinas", while Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that "all the great philosophical ideas of the past century—the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology, German existentialism, and psychoanalysis—had their beginnings in Hegel. Yirmiyahu Yovel is Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School University and Chairman of the Jerusalem Spinoza Institute. His books include Kant and the Philosophy of History; Spinoza and other Heretics (Princeton), and Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews. .
August 27, 1896
Miyazawa Kenji (27 August 1896 – 21 September 1933) was one of Japan’s most important experimental poets. His first book of poems, Spring and Asura, was published in 1924. Hiroaki Sato is a translator and essayist living in New York. He writes a monthly column for the Japan Times.
August 27, 1936
Joel Kovel (August 27, 1936 Brooklyn - April 30, 2018, New York City) was an American scholar and author, known as the founder of "Eco-socialism. Joel Stephen Kovel was born on August 27, 1936, in Brooklyn, New York. His parents, immigrant Jews, were Louis Kovel (an accountant known for the "Kovel Rule") and Rose Farber. He attended Baldwin Senior High School (New York) in Baldwin, Nassau County, New York. In 1957, he received his B.S. summa cum laude from Yale University. In 1961, he received his M.D. from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and in 1977 was a graduate of the Psychoanalytic Institute, Downstate Medical Center Institute, Brooklyn, New York.
August 27, 1943
Sindiwe Magona (born 27 August 1943) is a South African writer. A native of the former Transkei region, she grew up in a township near Cape Town, where she worked as a domestic and completed her secondary education by correspondence. Magona later graduated from the University of South Africa and earned a Master of Science Degree in Organisational Social Work from Columbia University. In 1993 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from Hartwick College, Oneonta, and in 1997 she was a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in the non-fiction category. She had starred as Singisa in the isiXhosa classic drama Ityala Lamawele. She worked in various capacities for the United Nations over 20 years, retiring in 2003, and currently lives in South Africa. In 2007 she was awarded the Grinzane Award for writing that addresses social concerns, the Molteno Gold Medal for promoting the Xhosa culture and language, as well as a Lifetime Achievement Award for contribution to South African Literature. In 2011 she was given the Order of iKhamanga, a Presidential Award and the highest such award in South Africa, and in 2012 she was joint winner with Nadine Gordimer of the Imbokodo Award. In the 2013 computer-animated adventure comedy film Khumba she was the voice actor for the character Gemsbok Healer. She is Writer-in-Residence at the University of the Western Cape and is currently working at Georgia State University. She published her autobiography To My Children's Children in 1990. In 1998, she published Mother to Mother, a fictionalized account of the Amy Biehl killing, which she adapted to a play. This was performed at the Baxter Theatre complex in late 2009 and the film rights to the novel were acquired by Type A Films in 2003. She has also written autobiographies and short story collections. Her novel Beauty's Gift was shortlisted for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Book, Africa Region. In 2009, Please, Take Photographs, her first collection of poems, was published.
August 27, 1933
HANNE MARIE SVENDSEN was born in Skagen, Denmark, a fishing village and arts colony. A graduate of the University of Copenhagen, Ms. Svendsen worked for a number of years for the Danish State Broadcasting Company and later became director of the university’s theater and literature department. She won the 1985 Danish Literary Critics’ Prize for THE GOLD BALL, her fourth novel, which has been translated into ten languages.
August 28, 1903
Bruno Bettelheim (August 28, 1903 – March 13, 1990) was an Austrian-born American child psychologist and writer. He gained an international reputation for his work on Freud, psychoanalysis, and emotionally disturbed children.
August 28, 1913
William Robertson Davies, CC, OOnt, FRSC, FRSL (August 28, 1913 – December 2, 1995) was a Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor. He was one of Canada's best-known and most popular authors, and one of its most distinguished ‘men of letters’, a term Davies is variously said to have gladly accepted for himself and to have detested. Davies was the founding Master of Massey College, a graduate residential college associated with the University of Toronto.
August 28, 1952
RITA DOVE, born in 1952 in Akron, Ohio, graduated from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and received an M.F.A. in creative writing from the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her first collection of poems, THE YELLOW HOUSE ON THE CORNER, was published in 1980, followed by MUSEUM (1983) and THOMAS AND BEULAH (1986), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1985, a collection of short stories, FIFTH SUNDAY, appeared. Ms. Dove has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Other honors include a General Electric Foundation Award in 1987, the 1988 Ohio Governor’s Award, and two honorary doctorates (from her alma mater, Miami University and from Knox College in Illinois). After teaching creative writing at Arizona State University, Ms. Dove spent the 1988/89 academic year as a Mellon Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. Now a professor of English at the University of Virginia, her first novel will be published in 1990. She lives in Charlottesville with her husband, the novelist Fred Viebahn, and their daughter.
August 28, 1924
Recipient of the prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1989, Janet Frame has long been admired for her startlingly original prose and formidable imagination. A native of New Zealand, she is the author of eleven novels, four collections of stories, a volume of poetry, a children's book, and her heartfelt and courageous autobiography.
August 28, 1749
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German writer, artist, and politician. His body of work includes epic and lyric poetry written in a variety of metres and styles; prose and verse dramas; memoirs; an autobiography; literary and aesthetic criticism; treatises on botany, anatomy, and colour; and four novels. In addition, numerous literary and scientific fragments, and more than 10,000 letters written by him are extant, as are nearly 3,000 drawings.
August 28, 1916
Charles Wright Mills (August 28, 1916 – March 20, 1962) was an American sociologist, and a professor of sociology at Columbia University from 1946 until his death in 1962. Mills was published widely in popular and intellectual journals, and is remembered for several books, among them The Power Elite, which introduced that term and describes the relationships and class alliances among the U.S. political, military, and economic elites; White Collar, on the American middle class; and The Sociological Imagination, where Mills proposes the proper relationship in sociological scholarship between biography and history. Mills was concerned with the responsibilities of intellectuals in post-World War II society, and advocated public and political engagement over uninterested observation. Mills' biographer, Daniel Geary, writes that his writings had a 'particularly significant impact on New Left social movements of the 1960s.' In fact, Mills popularized the term 'New Left' in the U.S. in a 1960 open letter, Letter to the New Left.
August 28, 1896
Liam O'Flaherty (28 August 1896 – 7 September 1984) was a significant Irish novelist and short story writer and a major figure in the Irish literary renaissance.
August 28, 1948
Candace Slater is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches courses in Brazilian literature and culture. She has been doing research on folk and popular traditions in Brazil, other parts of Latin America, and the Iberian Peninsula for much of her scholarly career. Her background in the social sciences and literature is evident in her concern for the ways that folk and popular stories work within the world. She began doing research on the Brazilian literatura de cordel in the late 1970s, and actually sold cordel pamphlets for several months in an open-air market in Recife in order to better engage in conversations with the cordel's traditional customers. She is presently completing a book that compares past and present versions of cordel tales, pilgrimage narratives, and accounts of enchanted nature. The author of seven books and numerous articles, she has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Tinker Foundation. The Brazilian government has recognized her work with both the Ordem de Rio Branco and the Ordem de Mérito Cultural — an honor rarely awarded to non-Brazilians. Slater's books include Entangled Edens: Visions of the Amazon (2003), Dance of the Dolphin: Transformation and Disenchantment in the Amazonian Imagination (1994), Stories on a String: The Brazilian Literatura de Cordel (1989), and Trail of Miracles: Stories from a Pilgrimage in Northeast Brazil (1986).
August 28, 1925
Yury Valentinovich Trifonov (28 August 1925 – 28 March 1981) was a leading representative of the so-called Soviet 'Urban Prose'. He was considered a close contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981.
August 28, 1814
Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu (28 August 1814 – 7 February 1873) was an Irish writer of Gothic tales and mystery novels. He was the leading ghost-story writer of the nineteenth century and was central to the development of the genre in the Victorian era. Three of his best-known works are Uncle Silas, Carmilla and The House by the Churchyard.
August 28, 1904
Alexander (Alex) Hepple (28 August 1904 – 16 November 1983) was a trade unionist, politician, anti-apartheid activist and author and was the last leader of the original South African Labour Party. Hepple was born in La Rochelle, a suburb of Johannesburg to Thomas and Alice Hepple, founding members of the South African Labour Party in 1908. His father immigrated to South Africa from Sunderland in the north-east of England and was a shop steward of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and a leader during its strike action in 1913. Alex Hepple was a democratic socialist and anti-fascist who was an activist from an early age. He was elected to the Transvaal Province's provincial council in 1943 as a Labour Party MLA and then as a Labour Member of Parliament in the House of Assembly of South Africa in the 1948 and 1953 general election. Hepple was leader of the South African Labour Party from 1953 to 1958 and moved it towards liberal policies on race in opposition to the apartheid National Party government. He also founded and chaired the anti-apartheid Treason Trial Defence Fund from 1956 to 1961 and chaired the South African Defence and Aid Fund from 1960 to 1964. However, the white working class electorate that had supported the Labour Party by and large rejected Hepple's policies and repudiate the Labour Party in the 1958 elections in which the Labour Party lost all five of its seats, including Hepple's. He continued and expanded his activism after losing his parliamentary seat. In 1962, he and his wife, Josephine, re-established the newspaper, Forward only to see it closed by government censorship in 1964. The Hepples then moved to England where they founded the International Defence and Aid Fund's Information Service, an organization that reported on repression and detentions by the apartheid government. In 1967, Hepple wrote Verwoerd, a biography of South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd who was considered the architect of apartheid. He also wrote South Africa: a political and economic history in 1966 as well as articles and pamphlets on South African politics. Hepple died in 1983 in exile in Canterbury, England and was celebrated by the African National Congress whose secretary-general Alfred Nzo, wrote that Hepple "was known and loved by the oppressed people of South Africa for his opposition to the draconian apartheid policies of the South African regime." His son, Bob Hepple, was a South African and British academic and lawyer who was "Nelson Mandela’s legal advisor through his 1962 trial". "Hepple was also one of the original Rivonia Trial accused". Bob Hepple was "knighted in 2004." "He was awarded the South African Order of Luthuli (Gold) in 2014".
August 28, 1945
George B. Kirsch is Professor of History at Manhattan College and the author of several books, including The Creation of American Team Sports. He is the editor of two volumes of Sports in North America: A Documentary.
August 28, 1892
Edward Powys Mathers (28 August 1892 – 3 February 1939) was an English translator and poet, and also a pioneer of compiling advanced cryptic crosswords. Powys Mathers was born in Forest Hill, London, the son of a newspaper proprietor. He was educated at Loretto and Trinity College, Oxford. He is well known as the translator of J. C. Mardrus's French version of One Thousand Nights and One Night. His English version of Mardrus appeared in 1923, and is known as Mardrus/Mathers. He is known also for the translations The Garden of Bright Waters: One Hundred and Twenty Asiatic Love Poems (1920); and of the Kashmiri poet Bilhana in Bilhana: Black Marigolds (1919), a free interpretation in the tradition of Edward FitzGerald. These are not scholarly works, and are in some cases based on intermediate versions in European languages. Some of his translations were set to music by Aaron Copland. He was also a composer of cryptic crosswords for The Observer under the pseudonym "Torquemada" from 1926 until his death. Under this pseudonym, he reviewed detective stories from 1934 to 1939.
August 28, 1923
William Modisane (28 August 1923 – 1 March 1986), better known as Bloke Modisane, was a South African writer, actor and journalist. William "Bloke" Modisane, the eldest son of Joseph and Ma-Willie Modisane, grew up in Sophiatown, a multiracial suburb in Johannesburg, South Africa. His father was murdered and his sister died of malnutrition. To make ends meet, his mother ran a shebeen. As Modisane would write in his autobiography: "My mother wanted a better life for her children, a kind of insurance against poverty by trying to give me a prestige profession, and if necessary would go to jail whilst doing it." He joined Drum magazine as a journalist and became one of "the Drum Boys" during Drum?s halcyon days in the 1950s, along with Henry Nxumalo, Can Themba, Es'kia Mphahlele and Lewis Nkosi. Modisane was also the jazz critic at Drum?s sister publication, the weekly tabloid Golden City Post. His nickname of "Bloke" was inspired a character in the Leslie Charteris novels featuring "The Saint". Modisane tried to facilitate non-racial progress in the arts by making concerts and theatre available to Black audiences and tried to further the efforts of the Arts Federation and the Union of South African Artists, both of which were non-racial. He wrote a number of short stories that were published in Drum. One such story, "The Situation", derived from the Tsotsitaal (slang) for educated Blacks who rise above their station (i.e. situated above their station) but do not really fit into their new milieu. (Don Mattera mentioned this when describing the journalists: "There was a definite class division. We were in the streets, and they were in the desks. And we used to call such people situations.") Modisane found an outlet in acting. He joined the African Theatre Workshop and played in the first production of Athol Fugard's No-Good Friday (1958). He shared the writing credits on Come Back, Africa, a 1959 film filmed mainly in Sophiatown. Becoming frustrated by the political situation and oppression under the apartheid regime, Modisane moved in 1959 to England, where in 1963 his autobiography, Blame Me On History, was published. This detailed his despair at the bulldozing of Sophiatown (mirroring Can Themba's short story "Requiem for Sophiatown") and his frustration and anger with apartheid. As a result, the book was banned in South Africa in 1966. Modisane continued acting and had a leading role in Jean Genet's The Blacks at the Royal Court Theatre in London. He appeared in an uncredited role in the 1964 movie Guns at Batasi, which starred Richard Attenborough, John Leyton, and Mia Farrow. In the 1968 action classic Dark of the Sun, Modisane had a small but memorable supporting role as Corporal Kataki, a sensitive soldier caught up in the rage and horror of the 1960s Congo civil wars. This particular film starred Rod Taylor, Kenneth More, and Yvette Mimieux. It was a major box-office success when first released. In the early 1960s Modisane settled in Dortmund, West Germany, where he died in 1986 at the age of 63.
August 28, 1961
Brian Pinkney (born August 28, 1961) is one of the most celebrated talents in children's publishing. In his career he has won two Caldecott Honors, a Coretta Scott King medal, a "Boston Globe-Horn Book" Award, and three Coretta Scott King Honors. For Simon & Schuster he illustrated "The Faithful Friend, " which won the Caldecott Honor and Coretta Scott King Honor, "Sukey and the Mermaid, " which won the Coretta Scott King Honor, and "The Adventures of Sparrowboy, " which won the "Boston Globe-Horn Book" Award. He lives with his wife and two children in Brooklyn, New York -- which is where this story takes place.
August 28, 1937
Allen Say is an Asian American writer and illustrator. He is best known for Grandfather's Journey, a children's picture book detailing his grandfather's voyage from Japan to the United States and back again, which won the 1994 Caldecott Medal for illustration.
August 28, 1951
Patricia J. Williams (born August 28, 1951) is an American legal scholar and a proponent of critical race theory, a school of legal thought that emphasizes race as a fundamental determinant of the American legal system.[. She is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. She has served on the faculties of the University of Wisconsin School of Law, City University of New York Law School, and Golden Gate University School of Law. Williams was a fellow at the School of Criticism and Theory, Dartmouth College, as well as at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Williams practiced as deputy city attorney for the Office of the Los Angeles City Attorney and as staff lawyer for the Western Center on Law and Poverty. She is published widely in the areas of race, gender, and law, and on other issues of legal theory and legal writing. Her books include The Alchemy of Race and Rights; The Rooster's Egg; and Seeing a ColorBlind Future: The Paradox of Race. Williams has also been a columnist for The Nation. Williams was a MacArthur fellow, and served on the board of trustees at Wellesley College. She earned her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1975 and her B.A. from Wellesley College in 1972.
August 28, 1932
CARLENE HATCHER POLITE (August 28, 1932 – December 7, 2009) was born in Detroit, Michigan. She studied dance with Martha Graham in New York and was subsequently invited to join the original Alvin Ailey Company. A member of Actors’ Equity, she has had experience as an actress and theater manager. In the sixties, Ms. Polite returned to Michigan, served as assistant to Coleman Young, was elected to the Democratic State Central Committee, and did organizational work for the Detroit Council for Human Rights. From 1964 to 1971 she lived in Paris, where her first novel, THE FLAGELLANTS, was published; American, British, Italian, and Dutch editions followed. She was an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the State University of New York, teaching creative writing and Afro-American literature.
August 28, 1894
Edison Tesla Marshall (August 28, 1894 - October 29, 1967) was an American short story writer and novelist. Marshall was born on August 28, 1894 in Rensselaer, Indiana. He grew up in Medford, Oregon, and attended the University of Oregon from 1913 to 1916. He served in the U.S. Army with the rank of second lieutenant. His 1917 World War I draft registration card indicated he was a 'professional writer' employed by The American Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post, and that he was missing his thumb on his left hand. He married Agnes Sharp Flythe; they had two children, Edison and Nancy. In 1926, they moved to Augusta, Georgia. For some of his work, he used the pseudonym Hall Hunter. His novel Benjamin Blake was adapted into a film in 1942, Son of Fury, starring Tyrone Power; another one Yankee Pasha-The Adventures of Jason Starbuck was adapted into the film Yankee Pasha, starring Mamie Van Doren in 1954 as was The Vikings, starring Kirk Douglas, in 1958.He held the Gold Cross, Order of Merit from the University of Miami. He died on October 29, 1967 in Augusta.
August 28, 1960
Magdalena Wagnerová (born August 28, 1960) is a Czech writer. The daughter of photographer Josef Prošek and Irena Wenigová, a translator, she was born in Prague and studied screenwriting and script editing at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. She works as an editor. Wagnerová has written short stories for children, radio plays and scripts for film and television. Her preferred genre is the fairy tale. She wrote scripts for the Czech film and television series Saturnin and for the televised fairy tale Ho?ké víno.
August 29, 1926
René Depestre (born 29 August 1926 Jacmel, Haiti) is a Haitian poet and former communist activist. He lived in Cuba as an exile from the Duvalier regime for many years and was a founder of the Casa de las Americas publishing house. He is best known for his poetry. He did his primary studies with the Breton Brothers of Christian Instruction. His father died in 1936, and René Depestre left his mother, his two brothers and his two sisters to go live with his maternal grandmother. From 1940 to 1944, he completed his secondary studies at the Pétion college in Port-au-Prince. His birthplace is often evoked in his poetry and his novels, in particular Hadriana in All My Dreams (1988). Étincelles (Sparks), his first collection of poetry, appeared in 1945, prefaced by Edris Saint-Amand. He was only nineteen years old when the work was published. The poems were influenced by the marvelous realism of Alejo Carpentier, who planned a conference on this subject in Haiti in 1942. Depestre created a weekly magazine with three friends: Baker, Alexis, and Gerald Bloncourt: The Hive (1945–46). ‘One wanted to help the Haitians to become aware of their capacity to renew the historical foundations of their identity’ (quote from Le métier à métisser). The Haitian government at the time seized the 1945 edition which was published in honor of André Breton, which led to the insurrection of 1946. Depestre met with all his Haitian intellectual contemporaries, including Jean Price-Mars, Léon Laleau, and René Bélance, who wrote the preface to his second collection, Gerbe de sang, in 1946. He also met with foreign intellectuals. He took part in and directed the revolutionary student movements of January 1946, which led to the overthrow of President Élie Lescot. The Army very quickly seized power, and Depestre was arrested and imprisoned before being exiled. He pursued his studies in letters and political science at the Sorbonne from 1946 - 1950. In Paris, he met French surrealist poets as well as foreign artists, and intellectuals of the négritude (Black) movement who coalesced around Alioune Diop and Présence Africaine. Depestre took an active part in the decolonization movements in France, and he was expelled from French territory. He left for Prague, from where he was driven out in 1952. He went to Cuba, invited by the writer Nicolás Guillén, where again he was stopped and expelled by the government of Fulgencio Batista. He was denied entry by France and Italy. He left for Austria, then Chile, Argentina and Brazil. He remained in Chile long enough to organize, with Pablo Neruda and Jorge Amado, the Continental Congress of Culture. After Brazil, Depestre returned to Paris in 1956 where he met other Haitians, including Jacques-Stephen Alexis. He took part in the first Pan-African congress organized by Présence Africaine in September 1956. He wrote in Présence Africaine and other journals of the time such as Esprit, and Lettres Francaises. He returned to Haiti in (1956–57). Refusing to collaborate with the Duvalierist regime, he called on Haitians to resist, and was placed under house arrest. Depestre left for Cuba in 1959, at the invitation of Che Guevara. Convinced of the aims of the Cuban Revolution, he helped with managing the country (Ministry for Foreign Relations, National Publishing, National Council of Culture, Radio Havana-Cuba, Las Casas de las Américas, The Committee for the Preparation of the Cultural Congress of Havana in 1967). Depestre travelled, taking part in official activities (the USSR, China, Vietnam, etc.) and took part in the first Pan-African Cultural Festival (Algiers, 1969), where he met the Congolese writer Henri Lopes, with whom he would work later, at UNESCO. During his various travels and his stay in Cuba, Rene Depestre continued working on a major piece of poetry. His most famous collection of poetry is undoubtedly Un arc-en-ciel pour l'Occident chrétien (Rainbow for the Christian Occident) (1967), a mix of politics, eroticism, and Voudoo, topics that are found in all of his works. Poet in Cuba (1973) is a reflection on the evolution of the Cuban revolution. Pushed aside by the Castrist régime in 1971, Depestre broke with the Cuban experiment in 1978 and went back to Paris where he worked at the UNESCO Secretariat. In 1979, in Paris, he published Le Mat de Cocagne, his first novel. In 1980, he published Alléluia pour une femme-jardin, for which he was awarded the Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle in 1982. Depestre left UNESCO in 1986 and retired in the Aude region of France. In 1988, he published Hadriana in All My Dreams, which received many literary awards, including the Prix Théophraste Renaudot, the Prix de la Société des Gens de Lettres, the Prix Antigone of the town of Montpellier, and the Belgian Prix du Roman de l'Académie royale de la langue et de la littérature françaises. He obtained French citizenship in 1991. He continued to receive awards and honors, in particular the Prix Apollinaire de poésie for his personal Anthology (1993) and the Italian Grisane Award for the theatrical adaptation of Mat de Cocagne in 1995, as well as bursaries (Bourse du Centre National du Livre, in 1994, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1995). He was the subject of a documentary film by Jean-Daniel Lafond, Haiti in All Our Dreams, filmed in Montreal (1996). Depestre also published major essays. Bonjour et adieu à la négritude (Hello and Good-bye to Négritude) presents a reflexion on his ambivalent position regarding the négritude movement started by Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire and Leon-Gontran Damas. Impressed by Aime Césaire, who came to Haiti to speak about surrealism and négritude, he was fascinated by créole life, or the créolo-francophonie, which did not stop him from questioning the concept of négritude. Rebellious of the concept since his youth, which he associated with ethnic essentialism, he measured the historical range and situated the movement in the world history of ideas. He revisited this topic (critical re-situation of the movement) in his two collections, Ainsi parle le fleuve noir (1998) and Le Métier à métisser (1998). He paid homage to Césaire and his visionary work within the context of the créole movement in Martinique: ‘Césaire with only one word ended this empty debate: at the start of historical decolonization, In Haiti and around the world, there is the genius of Toussaint Louverture’ (Le Métier à métisser 25). His experience in Cuba - his fascination and his falling out with the ‘castrofidelism’ ideology and its constraints - is also examined in these two texts, as well as marvelous realism, the role of the erotic, Haitian history and the very contemporary topic of globalization. Far from seeing himself as an exile, Depestre prefers being described as a nomad with multiple roots, a ‘banyan‘ man - in reference to the tree which he so often evokes right down to its rhizomic roots - even described as a ‘géo-libertin’. Rene Depestre lives today in a small village in the Aude, Lézignan-Corbières, with his second wife, who is Cuban. He writes every morning, looking at the vineyards, just as he used to devour the view of Jacmel Bay from his grandmother's veranda. His work has been published in the United States, the former Soviet Union, France, Germany, Italy, Cuba, Peru, Brazil, Vietnam, the former German Democratic Republic (East-Germany), Argentina, and Mexico. His first volume of poetry, Sparks (Etincelles) was published in Port-au-Prince in 1945. Other publications include Gerbe de sang (Port-au-Prince, 1946), Végétation de clartés, preface by Aimé Césaire, (Paris, 1951), Traduit du grand large, poème de ma patrie enchainée, (Paris, 1952), Minerai noir, (Paris, 1957), Journal d'un animal marin (Paris, 1964), Un arc-en-ciel pour l'occident chrétien poeme mystère vaudou, (Paris, 1966). His poetry has appeared in many French, Spanish and German anthologies and collections. More current works include Anthologie personnelle (1993) and Actes sud, for which he received the Prix Apollinaire. He has spent many years in France, and was awarded the French literary prize, the prix Renaudot, in 1988 for his work Hadriana dans Tous mes Rêves. He lives in Lézignan-Corbières. He is a special envoy of UNESCO for Haiti. He is the uncle of Michaëlle Jean, the Governor General of Canada from 2005 to 2010.
August 29, 1912
Stephen Gould Fisher (August 29, 1912 – March 27, 1980) was an American author best known for his pulp stories, novels and screenplays. He is one of the few pulp authors to go on to enjoy success as both an author in slick magazines, such as the Saturday Evening Post, and as an in-demand writer in Hollywood.
August 29, 1862
Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck (29 August 1862 – 6 May 1949) was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who was a Fleming, but wrote in French. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911 'in appreciation of his many-sided literary activities, and especially of his dramatic works, which are distinguished by a wealth of imagination and by a poetic fancy, which reveals, sometimes in the guise of a fairy tale, a deep inspiration, while in a mysterious way they appeal to the readers' own feelings and stimulate their imaginations'. The main themes in his work are death and the meaning of life. His plays form an important part of the Symbolist movement.
August 29, 1954
Bernard John Scudder (29 August 1954 – 15 October 2007) was an award-winning British translator from Icelandic into English. His translations include the work of best-selling crime writer Arnaldur Indriðason and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. Scudder's translation of Indriðason's novel Silence of the Grave won the 2005 Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger.
August 29, 1929
Thom Gunn (29 August 1929 – 25 April 2004), born Thomson William Gunn, was an Anglo-American poet who was praised for his early verses in England, where he was associated with The Movement and his later poetry in America, even after moving toward a looser, free-verse style. After relocating from England to San Francisco, Gunn wrote about gay-related topics—particularly in his most famous work, The Man With Night Sweats in 1992—as well as drug use, sex, and his bohemian lifestyle. He won major literary awards.
August 29, 1955
Chus Pato’s pentalogy Decrúa broke the poetic mould in Galicia. She teaches history and geography. Erín Moure has published seventeen books of poetry, and has translated thirteen volumes from French, Spanish, Galician and Portuguese into English.
August 29, 1944
Timothy Ferris is an American science writer and the best-selling author of twelve books, including The Science of Liberty and Coming of Age in the Milky Way, for which he was awarded the American Institute of Physics Prize and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
August 29, 1952
Karen S. Hesse is an American author of children's literature and literature for young adults, often with historical settings. She won the Newbery Medal for Out of the Dust.
August 29, 1944
Endesha Ida Mae Holland (August 29, 1944 – January 25, 2006) was an American scholar, playwright, and civil rights activist.
August 29, 1907
Joseph Wechsberg (29 August 1907 – 10 April 1983) was a Jewish Czech writer, journalist, musician, and gourmet. Born in Ostrava, in Moravia, Czechoslovakia, he and his wife requested and received asylum in the United States in 1939 when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. His mother was among the Czech Jews interned by the Nazis and later died at Auschwitz. Over his career he was a prolific writer who wrote over two dozen works of nonfiction, including books on music and musicians, and contributed numerous articles to publications such as The New Yorker.
August 29, 1938
Sylvia Molloy is an Argentine writer and critic who has taught at Princeton, Yale and NYU, from where she retired in 2010. At NYU she held the Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities. She is the author of two novels.
August 29, 1940
Sir Adam Roberts (born 29 August 1940) is Emeritus Professor of International Relations at Oxford University, a senior research fellow in Oxford University's Department of Politics and International Relations, and an emeritus fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. Roberts was born in Penrith, Cumbria, the son of the poet and teacher Michael Roberts and the writer and editor Janet Adam Smith. He went to Westminster School, London, 1953–8. He studied Modern History at Oxford University (Magdalen College), 1959–62, winning the Stanhope Historical Essay Prize, 1961.
August 29, 1632
John Locke FRS (29 August 1632 – 28 October 1704), was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and known as the "Father of Classical Liberalism". Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Sir Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social contract theory. His work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence. Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as Hume, Rousseau, and Kant. Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. He postulated that, at birth, the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa. Contrary to Cartesian philosophy based on pre-existing concepts, he maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception. Mark Goldie is a member of the editorial board of the Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke, and former editor of the Historical Journal. He has published extensively in the field of British political, religious, and intellectual history, 1650-1800. Among his edited volumes are The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450-1700, The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, Locke's Political Essays (Cambridge) and Selected Correspondence (Oxford).
August 30, 1943
Robert Dennis Crumb (born August 30, 1943), known as Robert Crumb and R. Crumb, is an American cartoonist and musician. His work displays a nostalgia for American folk culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and satire of contemporary American culture. His work has attracted controversy, especially for his depiction of women and non-white races. Crumb first rose to prominence after the 1968 debut of Zap Comix, which was the first successful publication of the underground comix era. Countercultural characters such as Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural, and the images from his 'Keep on Truckin'' strip, were among his popular creations. Following the decline of the underground, he moved towards biographical and autobiographical subjects, while refining his drawing style, a heavily crosshatched pen-and-ink style inspired by late 19th- and early 20th-century cartooning. Much of his work appeared in a magazine he founded, Weirdo (1981–1993), which was one of the most prominent publications of the alternative comics era. He is married to cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb, with whom he has frequently collaborated. In 1991, Crumb was inducted into the comic book industry's Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame.
August 30, 1811
Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier (30 August 1811 – 23 October 1872) was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, art critic and literary critic. While Gautier was an ardent defender of Romanticism, his work is difficult to classify and remains a point of reference for many subsequent literary traditions such as Parnassianism, Symbolism, Decadence and Modernism. He was widely esteemed by writers as diverse as Balzac, Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, Flaubert, Proust and Oscar Wilde.
August 30, 1924
Beryl Agatha Gilroy (née Answick) (30 August 1924 – 4 April 2001) was a novelist and teacher, and ‘one of Britain's most significant post-war Caribbean migrants’. Born in what was then British Guiana (now Guyana), she moved in the 1950s to the United Kingdom, where she became the first black headteacher in London. She was the mother of academic Paul Gilroy. Beryl Gilroy was born in Skeldon, Berbice, Guyana. She grew up in a large, extended family, largely under the influence of her maternal grandmother, Sally Louisa James (1868–1967), a herbalist, manager of the family small-holding, keen reader, imparter to the young Beryl of the stories of ‘Long Bubbies’, Cabresses and Long Lady and a treasury of colloquial proverbs. Gilroy did not enter full-time schooling until she was twelve. From 1943 to 1945, she attended teacher training college in Georgetown, gaining a first-class diploma. She subsequently taught and lectured on a Unicef nutrition programme. In 1951, at the age of 27, she was selected to attend university in the United Kingdom. Between 1951 and 1953 she attended the University of London pursuing a Diploma in Child Development. Although Gilroy was a qualified teacher, racism prevented her getting a post for some time, and she had to work as a washer, a factory clerk and maid. She taught for a couple of years, married and spent the next twelve years at home bringing up and educating her children, furthering her own higher education, reviewing and reading for a publisher. In 1968 she returned to teaching and eventually became the first Black headteacher in London. Her experiences of those years are told in Black Teacher (1976). Later she worked as a researcher at the Institute of Education, University of London, and developed a pioneering practice in psychotherapy, working mainly with Black women and children. She gained a PhD in counselling psychology from an American university in 1987 while working at the Institute of Education. In 2000 she was also awarded an honorary doctorate from the Institute ‘in recognition of her services to education’. She died of a heart attack at the age of 76 on 4 April 2001. As noted by Roxann Bradshaw: ‘Two days later over one hundred Anglopjone women writers from around the world gathered at Goldsmith College in London, where Dr Gilroy had been scheduled to deliver a keynote address at the 4th annual Caribbean Women Writers Association conference. The news of her death was received with great sorrow for the passing of one of the first wave of Anglophone women writers, whose contribution to Caribbean women's literature is invaluable.’ An orange skirt suit worn by Beryl Gilroy was included in an exhibition entitled Black British Style at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2004. Gilroy's creative writing began in childhood, as a teacher for children and then in the 1960s when she began writing what was later published by Peepal Tree Press as In Praise of Love and Children. Between 1970 and 1975 she wrote the pioneering children’s series Nippers, which contain probably the first reflection of the Black British presence in UK writing for children. It was not until 1986 that her first novel, the award-winning Frangipani House was published (Heinemann). It won a GLC Creative Writing Prize in 1982. Set in an old person’s home in Guyana, it reflects one of her professional concerns: the position of ethnic minority elders and her persistent emphasis on the drive for human freedom. Boy Sandwich (Heinemann) was published in 1989, followed by Stedman and Joanna: A Love in Bondage (Vantage, 1991), and a collection of poems, Echoes and Voices (Vantage, 1991). Then came Sunlight and Sweet Water (Peepal Tree, 1994), Gather the Faces, In Praise of Love and Children and Inkle and Yarico (all Peepal Tree, 1994). Her last novel, The Green Grass Tango (Peepal Tree) was published in 2001, sadly after Beryl Gilroy’s death in April of that year. Gilroy's early work examined the impact of life in Britain on West Indian families and her later work explored issues of African and Caribbean diaspora and slavery. In 1998, a collection of her non-fiction writing, entitled Leaves in the Wind, came out from Mango Publishing. It included her lectures, notes, essays, dissertations and personal reviews.
August 30, 1901
John Gunther (August 30, 1901 – May 29, 1970) was an American journalist and author. His success came primarily by a series of popular sociopolitical works, known as the "Inside" books (1936–1972), including the best-selling Inside U.S.A. in 1947. However, he is now best known for his memoir Death Be Not Proud, on the death of his beloved teenage son, Johnny Gunther, from a brain tumor.
August 30, 1974
Camilla Läckberg's novels have all become #1 bestsellers in Sweden. Her thriller THE ICE PRINCESS, winner of the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière for Best International Crime Novel, has been published in over twenty-five countries. She lives in Stockholm.
August 30, 1797
Mary Shelley (née Wollstonecraft Godwin; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin, and her mother was the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary Godwin's mother died when she was eleven days old; afterwards, she and her older half-sister, Fanny Imlay, were reared by her father. When Mary was four, Godwin married his neighbour, Mary Jane Clairmont. Godwin provided his daughter with a rich, if informal, education, encouraging her to adhere to his liberal political theories. In 1814, Mary Godwin began a romantic relationship with one of her father’s political followers, the married Percy Bysshe Shelley. Together with Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, they left for France and travelled through Europe; upon their return to England, Mary was pregnant with Percy's child. Over the next two years, she and Percy faced ostracism, constant debt, and the death of their prematurely born daughter. They married in late 1816 after the suicide of Percy Shelley's first wife, Harriet. In 1816, the couple famously spent a summer with Lord Byron, John William Polidori, and Claire Clairmont near Geneva, Switzerland, where Mary conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein. The Shelleys left Britain in 1818 for Italy, where their second and third children died before Mary Shelley gave birth to her last and only surviving child, Percy Florence. In 1822, her husband drowned when his sailing boat sank during a storm near Viareggio. A year later, Mary Shelley returned to England and from then on devoted herself to the upbringing of her son and a career as a professional author. The last decade of her life was dogged by illness, probably caused by the brain tumour that was to kill her at the age of 53. Until the 1970s, Mary Shelley was known mainly for her efforts to publish Percy Shelley's works and for her novel Frankenstein, which remains widely read and has inspired many theatrical and film adaptations. Recent scholarship has yielded a more comprehensive view of Mary Shelley’s achievements. Scholars have shown increasing interest in her literary output, particularly in her novels, which include the historical novels Valperga (1823) and Perkin Warbeck (1830), the apocalyptic novel The Last Man (1826), and her final two novels, Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837). Studies of her lesser-known works such as the travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844) and the biographical articles for Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia (1829–46) support the growing view that Mary Shelley remained a political radical throughout her life. Mary Shelley's works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practised by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and the Enlightenment political theories articulated by her father, William Godwin.
August 30, 1940
Carmel Bird (born 1940) is an Australian writer of novels, short stories and essays. She has also written books on the art of writing, and has edited anthologies of essays and stories. In 2016, she was awarded the Patrick White Award. Carmel Power was born in Launceston, Tasmania, in 1940, and educated there. She started teaching in 1961, and taught for twenty years. She now lives in Central Victoria. She is twice divorced, and has a daughter named Camilla. She published an early work as "Jack Power", Power being her original surname. Bird has taught fiction writing at Melbourne, Deakin, Latrobe, Monash, Swinburne and RMIT Universities. Her first collection of short stories, called Births, Deaths and Marriages, was published in 1983, and her most recent novel (2010) is Child of the Twilight, a novel concerned with medical science and faith. Her most recent collection of short fiction is My Hearts Are Your Hearts (2015), and her most recent non-fiction is Fair Game (2015).
August 30, 1931
Michael Craton (born August 30, 1931, London, United Kingdom - September 21, 2016) was a professor of history at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. He is the author of several books, including Empire, Enslavement, and Freedom in the Caribbean and A History of the Bahamas.
August 30, 1925
Laurent de Brunhoff (born August 30, 1925, Paris, France) is an author and illustrator, known primarily for continuing the Babar the Elephant series of children's books, created by his father, Jean de Brunhoff.
August 30, 1944
Mary Tyler "Molly" Ivins (August 30, 1944 – January 31, 2007) was an American newspaper columnist, author, political commentator, and humorist. Born in California and raised in Texas, Ivins attended Smith College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She began her journalism career at the Minneapolis Tribune where she became the first female police reporter at the paper. Ivins joined the Texas Observer in the early 1970s and later moved to The New York Times. She became a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald in the 1980s, and then the Fort Worth Star-Telegram after the Times Herald was sold and shuttered. The column was subsequently syndicated by Creators Syndicate and carried by hundreds of newspapers. A biography of Ivins, Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life, was co-written in 2010 by PEN-USA winning presidential biographer Bill Minutaglio and W. Michael Smith.
August 30, 1933
WALTER LAFEBER, one of the premier historians of American foreign policy, is the author of America, Russia and the Cold 1945-1980 and The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical Perspective. He teaches history at Cornell University.
August 30, 1945
Libuše Moníková (30 August 1945 in Prague – 12 January 1998 in Berlin) was a Czech writer, publishing in the German language. In 1968, following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, she left to Western Germany.
August 31, 1947
Michael André Bernstein was Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of THE TALE OF THE TRIBE: EZRA POUND AND THE MODERN VERSE EPIC (Princeton) and PRIMA DELLA RIVOLUZIONE, a volume of poetry (National Poetry Foundation/University of Maine at Orono).
August 31, 1941
Knut Faldbakken (born Hamar, 31 August 1941) is a Norwegian novelist. Faldbakken studied psychology at Oslo University, and then worked as a journalist. He visited a number of countries, working variously as a bookkeeper, sailor, and factory worker, and began writing books in 1967 while living in Paris. He was editor of the literary magazine Vinduet (THE WINDOW) between 1975 and 1979.
August 31, 1941
JOHN KAYE has been a journalist, playwright, and screenwriter on films including American Hot Wax and Where the Buffalo Roam. He recently made his directorial debut with Forever Lulu, released on video as Along for the Ride, and is also the author of Stars Screaming. John Kaye lives in Los Angeles.
August 31, 1894
Charles Reznikoff (August 31, 1894 – January 22, 1976) was an American poet known for his long work, Testimony: The United States (1885-1915), Recitative (1934-1979). The term Objectivist was first coined for him. The two-volume Testimony was based on court records and explored the black experience in the United States. He followed this with Holocaust (1975), based on court testimony about Nazi death camps during World War II. When Louis Zukofsky was asked by Harriet Monroe to provide an introduction to what became known as the Objectivist issue of Poetry, he contributed his essay, Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff. This established the name of the loose-knit group of 2nd generation modernist poets and the two characteristics of their poetry: sincerity and objectification.
August 31, 1908
William Saroyan (August 31, 1908 – May 18, 1981) was an American dramatist and author. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1940, and in 1943 won the Academy Award for Best Story for the film adaptation of his novel The Human Comedy. An Armenian American, Saroyan wrote extensively about the Armenian immigrant life in California. Many of his stories and plays are set in his native Fresno. Some of his best-known works are The Time of Your Life, My Name Is Aram and My Heart's in the Highlands. He is recognized as ‘one of the most prominent literary figures of the mid-20th century.’ Stephen Fry describes Saroyan as ‘one of the most underrated writers of the [20th] century.’ Fry suggests that ‘he takes his place naturally alongside Hemingway, Steinbeck and Faulkner.’
August 31, 1921
Raymond Henry Williams (31 August 1921 – 26 January 1988) was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. Some 750,000 copies of his books have sold in UK editions alone and there are many translations available. His work laid the foundations for the field of cultural studies and the cultural materialist approach.
August 31, 1929
Julio Ramón Ribeyro Zúñiga (August 31, 1929, Lima, Peru - December 4, 1994, Lima, Peru) was a Peruvian writer best known for his short stories. He was also successful in other genres: novel, essay, theater, diary and aphorism. In the year of his death, he was awarded the US$100,000 Premio Juan Rulfo de literatura latinoamericana y del Caribe. His work has been translated into numerous languages, including English. The characters in his stories, often autobiographical and usually written in simple but ironic language, tend to end up with their hopes cruelly dashed. But despite its apparent pessimism, Ribeyro's work is often comic, its humor springing from both the author's sense of irony and the accidents that befall his protagonists. The collective work of his short stories is published under the title La palabra del mudo (The Word of the Mute). Ribeyro studied literature and law in Universidad Católica in Lima. In 1960 he immigrated to Paris where he worked as a journalist in France Presse and then as cultural advisor and ambassador to UNESCO. He was an avid smoker, as described in his short story ¨Sólo para fumadores¨ (Smokers Only) and he died as a result of his addiction. Born in Lima on August 31, 1929. Son Julio Ramon Ribeyro Rabines Bonello and Mercedes Zúñiga, was the first of four children (two boys and two girls). His family was middle class, but in earlier generations had belonged to the upper class, for among his ancestors illustrious figures of Peruvian culture and politics, conservative and civilista.1 In his childhood he lived in Santa Beatriz had a middle-class Lima neighborhood and then moved to Miraflores, residing in the neighborhood of Santa Cruz, adjacent to the huaca Pucllana. His school education was received in the Champagnat College of Miraflores. The death of his father affected him a lot and complicated economic situation of their families. Later, he studied Arts and Law at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, between 1946 and 1952, where he met Pablo Macera, Alberto Escobar and Luis Felipe Angell 'Sofocleto' among other youth with intellectual and artistic interests. He began his writing career with Grey life story published in the journal Email Bolivarian in 1948. In 1952 he won a journalism fellowship awarded by the Institute of Hispanic Culture, which allowed him to travel to Spain. He traveled by boat to Barcelona and from there went to Madrid, where he spent a year and made studies at the Complutense University in that city. He also wrote some stories and articles. To culminate his fellowship in 1953, traveled to Paris to prepare a thesis on French literature at the Sorbonne University. By then wrote his first book The featherless buzzards, a collection of stories of urban issues, regarded as one of its most successful narrative writing. But dropped out and remained in Europe doing odd jobs, alternating his stay in France with brief periods in Germany and Belgium. Thus it was that between 1954 and 1956 was in Munich, where he wrote his first novel, Chronicle of San Gabriel. He returned to Paris and then traveled to Antwerp in 1957, where he worked in a factory photo products. In 1958, he returned to Germany and spent some time in Berlin, Hamburg and Frankfurt. During his European stay I had to make many trades to survive, and recycler of newspapers, concierge, charger packages on the subway, seller of printed matter, etc.. He returned to Lima in 1958. Worked as a professor at the National University of San Cristobal de Huamanga in Ayacucho, whose request was devoted to the creation of an Institute for Popular Culture, in 1959. In 1960 he published his novel Chronicle of San Gabriel, which earned him the National Novel Prize that year. In 1961, he returned to Paris, where he worked as a journalist for ten years, Agence France Press. He was also cultural attache at the Peruvian Embassy in Paris, also play as a cultural consultant and ambassador of Peru to UNESCO. He married Alida Lamb and they had one child. In 1973, he operated a first lung cancer, caused by their addiction to cigarettes as a result of which he received a long treatment. Inspired by this experience, he wrote a book entitled 'Only for smokers'. In 1983, he received the National Book Award, and ten years later, the National Culture. Generous with his friends and with young writers, Ribeyro never had enemies and was always very appreciated by his contemporaries. After being confirmed as ambassador to Unesco in the late 1980s, had a very rough verbal exchange with his compatriot and friend Mario Vargas Llosa, following unleashed debate in Peru around the proposed nationalization of banks first Garcia government, which divided public opinion in the country. Ribeyro criticized Mario to support the conservative sectors of the country, thus opposed, he said, to the emergence of the popular classes. Vargas Llosa jumped at the opportunity to answer in her memoir A Fish in the Water (1993), pointing out their lack of consistency, which led him to appear subservient to every single shift government to maintain its junior diplomat in Unesco.2 However, apart from this painful episode, Vargas Llosa has consistently praised the literary work of Ribeyro, whom he considers as one of the great storytellers of speaking. The relationship between the two authors, who shared flat in Paris was otherwise complex and full of misterios. His last years were spent traveling between Europe and Peru. In the last year of his life he had decided definitely lie in their homeland in Peru. He died on December 4, 1994, days after getting the Juan Rulfo Prize for Literature. Translator Dianne Douglas is an associate professor of Spanish at Louisiana Tech University.
August 31, 1903
César Moro (August 31, 1903 – January 10, 1956) is the pseudonym of Alfredo Quíspez Asín Mas, a Peruvian poet and painter. Most of his poetic works are written in French; he was the only Latin American poet included in the 1920s and '30s surrealist journals of André Breton and the first Latin American artist to join the surrealist group on his own initiative, as opposed to being recruited by Breton. Moro moved to Paris on August 30, 1925 initially to pursue ballet dancing, but shortly after focused his artistic efforts on creating art and poetry. He participated in his first group exhibition at the Cabinet Maldoror in Brussels alongside Santos Balmori, Jaime Colson, and Isaías de Santiago. He contributed to the Surrealist artistic and literary movement while in France, becoming fully integrated into the group by the 1930s. He openly criticized the politics of the time by contributing writings to La mobilisation contre la guerre n'est pas la paix (Mobilization Against the War is Not Peace), an anti-war manifesto. Moro embraced the Surrealist's critiques of bourgeois social values and cultural hierarchies. He used Surrealist art and literature to "articulate his own marginality or sense of invisibility as a homosexual man negotiating his place in the international art world." Around 1926, Moro briefly adopted a more cubist style of painting and shifted away from depicting Peruvian scenes. This likely came as a "response to expectations of primitivism and nationally specific subject matter in Paris." Moro returned to Lima in 1933 and attempted to establish himself as a leader of Surrealism in South America, following in the footsteps of César Vallejo and José Carlos Mariátegui who had both published analyses of Surrealism. He produced art and literature while in Peru, established a museum, and taught art classes for the mentally ill at Hospital Larco Herrera. In 1935, he co-organized the first ever Surrealist Exposition in South America with Emilio Adolfo Westphalen at the Academy Alcedo in Lima. In 1938 Moro was forced to flee Lima in order to avoid arrest for publishing and distributing a "clandestine pamphlet in support of the Spanish Republic." Moro relocated in Mexico City as a cultural ambassador to the French government. Here, he connected with various progressive artists of the time, including Wolfgang Paalen, Alice Rahon, Xavier Villaurrutia, Remedios Varo, Gordon Onslow Ford, and Leonora Carrington. Moro organized the 1940 Exposición internacional del surrealismo (International Exposition of Surrealism) at the Galería de Arte Mexicano in Mexico City, with help from Wolfgang Paalen and with guidance from André Breton. The exhibition included work by artists from all over Europe, South America, and the United States. Four of Moro's artworks were included in the international section of the exposition, including Pedestrian (1926), Untitled Painting with the Inscription "Eluard" (1926), The Art of Reading the Future (1935), and Cover for the Blind (1939). In 1944 Moro broke with the Surrealist movement and established close connections with Mexican artists of Los Contemporáneos. In Mexico, Moro had his poetry published in various journals and periodicals, and had his avant-garde and surrealist texts circulated throughout the country. In 1948 Moro returned to Lima where he taught at the Alianza Francesa and the Colegio Militar Leoncio Prado until his death in 1956. Moro's friend André Coyné, a French poet and art critic, is credited with safeguarding and organizing Moro's works after his death.
August 31, 1935
Eldridge Cleaver (August 31, 1935 – May 1, 1998) was a leading member of the Black Panther Party, a convict, and a writer. His most famous book is SOUL ON ICE, a collection of essays praised by The New York Times Book Review at the time of its publication as ‘brilliant and revealing.’ Cleaver was a prominent member of the Black Panthers, having the titles Minister of Information, and Head of the International Section of the Panthers while in exile in Cuba and Algeria. As editor of the official Panther's newspaper, Cleaver's influence on the direction of the Party was rivaled only by founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Cleaver and Newton eventually fell out with each other, resulting in a split which weakened the Party. He later turned to the right, becoming a LDS church member and a Republican Party member.
August 31, 1944
Stephanie Coontz (born August 31, 1944) is an author, historian, and faculty member at Evergreen State College. She teaches history and family studies and is Director of Research and Public Education for the Council on Contemporary Families, which she chaired from 2001-2004. Coontz has authored and co-edited several books about the history of the family and marriage.
August 31, 1866
Bernt August Goll (August 31, 1866 in Bergen - December 31, 1936 in Copenhagen ) was a Danish legal expert. He advocated for reforms particularly in criminal law and in legal framework for illegitimate children. August Goll also served as Chief Magistrate of Aarhus, Denmark. He is buried at Vestre Cemetery in Copenhagen .
August 31, 1937
Mark Sergeyevich Kharitonov (born 31 August 1937) is a Russian novelist, poet, essayist, and translator. He was awarded the first Russian Booker Prize in 1992 for his novel Lines of Fate. Kharitonov was born in Zhytomyr, Ukrainian SSR, in 1937. He studied at the Moscow State Pedagogical University. He later worked as a teacher, executive secretary for a newspaper, editor for a publishing house, and as a writer beginning in 1969. He has also made many translations, including works by Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig, Elias Canetti, Hermann Hesse, and Thomas Mann. After the publication in 1976 of his work A Day in February in the magazine Novy Mir, Soviet editors refused to publish his works until 1988, when he was able to publish a collection of prose. His novel Lines of Fate, written between 1981 and 1985, brought him international recognition upon its publication in 1992. The novel was awarded the first Russian Booker Prize that year. In the novel, the narrator, a literary historian named Anton Lizavin, attempts to piece together the details of the life of a fictional Soviet writer and philosopher named Semyon Milasevich, whose works have been forgotten and neglected. He does this by examining Milasevich's writings, done on candy wrappers, the only paper available to him after the Russian Revolution of 1917, and through various archival research. Kharitonov's works, like those of Vladimir Makanin, Viktor Pelevin and others, use a combination of realism and postmodernism. According to critic Neil Cornwell, Lines of Fate shows the influence of Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse. Lines of Fate won the Russian Booker Prize by beating out the contributions of much better known authors like Vladimir Makanin and Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. His winning of the prize made him a recognized writer, making it easier to publish more of his works, including those he had written prior to Lines of Fate. He published a modernist novel Return from Nowhere in 1995. He is married to Galina Edelman with one son and two daughters.
August 31, 1939
Dennis Beynon Lee (born August 31, 1939) is a Canadian poet, teacher, editor, and critic born in Toronto, Ontario. He is also a children's writer, well known for his book of children's rhymes, Alligator Pie.
August 31, 1830
Charles Nordhoff (31 August 1830 – 14 July 1901) was an American journalist, descriptive and miscellaneous writer. He was born in Erwitte, Germany (Prussia) in 1830, and emigrated to the United States with his parents in 1835. He was educated in Cincinnati, and apprenticed to a printer in 1843. In 1844, he went to Philadelphia where he worked for a short time in a newspaper office. He then joined the United States Navy in 1845 (aged 15), where he served three years and made a voyage around the world in the USS Columbus (1819), which was engaged in first attempts at opening up Japan to the U.S.A, and in establishing full diplomatic relations with China. After his Navy service, he remained at sea from 1847 in the merchant service, and then whaling, mackerel fishery ships until 1854 (aged 24). From 1853 to 1857, he worked in various newspaper offices, first in Philadelphia, then in Indianapolis. He was then employed editorially by Harpers in 1857 until 1861, when he went to work the next ten years on the staff of the New York Evening Post, 1861-1667, and he later contributed to the New York Tribune. From 1871 to 1873 Nordhoff traveled in California and visited Hawaii. He then became Washington correspondent of the New York Herald 1874-1890. Nordhoff died in San Francisco, California. The Valley of Cross Purposes, an extensive biography by Carol Frost, PhD, was published in 2017 He was the father of Walter Nordhoff (1855-1937), author of The Journey of the Flame, penned under the name "Antonio de Fierro Blanco", and of Evelyn Hunter Nordhoff (ca. 1865–1898), America's first female bookbinder and printmaker. He was the grandfather of Charles Bernard Nordhoff, co-author of Mutiny on the Bounty. The town of Ojai, California, was named for him originally. It was changed due to anti-German sentiment of the World War I era, though the local high school retains his name. Nordhoff Street, in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, is named in his honor.
August 31, 1930
Charmaine Maureen Solomon (born 31 August 1930) is an Australian cook, author of 31 cookbooks and the creator of her own brand of spice blends and marinades. The Sydney Morning Herald and much of the public has called her "the Queen of Asian cooking in Australia" and part of "the holy trinity of cookbook authors". She is named in Who's Who in Australia and credited by various commentators with introducing Asian food to Australian households. Her 1976 book, The Complete Asian Cookbook, has sold over one million copies in five languages and is regarded as one of Australia's most influential cookbooks. Solomon was born Charmaine Maureen Poulier in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), to Burgher parents. Her mother was originally from Burma. At 18 she became the assistant to the editor of the women's pages of the Ceylon Daily News, an English language morning paper. She interviewed royalty, film stars, movie directors, authors and covered social events. In 1956 she married Rangoon-born musician Reuben Kelly Solomon and they had two daughters before moving to Australia in 1959, where they later had two sons. Solomon taught herself to cook in part to calm her fears of being in an unfamiliar place while Reuben worked nights as a musician. In 1964 she came second in the Woman's Day Butter White Wings Bake Off and attracted the attention of cookbook author Margaret Fulton, who invited her to join Woman's Day as a food writer. She worked at the magazine for 11 years, including three as food editor, then became the cookery editor of Belle magazine. She was a regular columnist for The Sun-Herald and The Sydney Morning Herald and was the food editor of Family Circle magazine for three years. Her first book, the South East Asian Cookbook, was published in 1972 and The Complete Asian Cookbook followed in 1976. Over the next three decades she wrote 29 more books. Solomon was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in 2007 for service to food media, particularly as the author of Asian cookery books. Her Encyclopaedia of Asian Food won a silver medal in the 1996 Julia Child Cookbook Awards and a silver ladle in the 1997 World Food Media Best Food Book awards. The line of spice pastes and marinades she developed with husband Reuben won a Jaguar Award for Excellence in 1998 and she won Best Vegetarian Book in English for The Complete Vegetarian Cookbook in the 2002 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards.
August 31, 1955
Gary Stephen Webb (August 31, 1955 – December 10, 2004) was an American investigative journalist. He began his career working for newspapers in Kentucky and Ohio, winning numerous awards and building a strong reputation for investigative writing. Hired by the San Jose Mercury News, Webb contributed to the paper's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. Webb is best known for his "Dark Alliance" series, which appeared in The Mercury News in 1996. The series examined the origins of the crack cocaine trade in Los Angeles and claimed that members of the anti-communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua had played a major role in creating the trade, using cocaine profits to support their struggle. It also suggested that the Contras may have acted with the knowledge and protection of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The series provoked outrage, particularly in the Los Angeles African-American community, and led to four major investigations of its charges. The Los Angeles Times and other major papers published articles suggesting the "Dark Alliance" claims were overstated. After an internal review, The Mercury News ultimately published a statement in May 1997 acknowledging shortcomings in the series' reporting and editing. Webb resigned from The Mercury News in December 1997. He became an investigator for the California State Legislature, publishing a book based on the "Dark Alliance" series in 1998, and doing freelance investigative reporting. Webb committed suicide on December 10, 2004. The "Dark Alliance" series remains controversial. Critics view the series' claims as inaccurate or overstated, while supporters point to the results of a later CIA investigation as vindicating the series. Criticism has also been directed at the follow up reporting in the Los Angeles Times and other papers for focusing on problems in the series rather than re-examining the earlier CIA-Contra claims.
September 1 , 1942
Perhaps Portugal's preeminent contemporary novelist, ANTONIO LOBO ANTUNES was born in Lisbon on September 1, 1942. He is a doctor by training. He is the author of three other novels and of articles on Lewis Carroll. SOUTH OF NOWHERE is his first work to be translated into English. Antonio Lobo Antunes is married and lives in Lisbon.
September 1, 1957
NELSON GEORGE IS the author of six books on Black culture and music, including WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO? and THE DEATH OF RHYTHM & BLUES, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award. A graduate of St. John’s University, George was Billboards Black music editor for seven years before becoming a regular columnist for the Village Voice in 1989. He is the coauthor of the film, Strictly Business. Nelson George was born and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
September 1, 1922
Rosa Cuthbert Guy (September 1, 1922 – June 3, 2012) was a Trinidad-born American writer, acclaimed for her books of fiction for adults and young people. She died of cancer on Sunday, June 3, 2012. Born in Diego Martin, on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, Rosa and her sister Ameze were left with relatives when their parents, Audrey and Henry Cuthbert, emigrated in 1927 to the United States. The children joined their parents in Harlem in 1932. However, the following year their mother became ill, and Rosa and her sister were sent to Brooklyn to live with a cousin, whose espousal of Garveyism and black nationalistic politics deeply affected Rosa. On their mother's death in 1934 they returned to Harlem to live with their father, who remarried, but he too died in 1937. Subsequently Rosa and her sister lived in foster homes. Rosa left school at the age of fourteen and took a job in a garment factory to support herself and her sister. In 1941, when she was nineteen, Rosa met and married Warner Guy. While her husband was serving in the Second World War she continued working in the factory, and a co-worker introduced her to the American Negro Theatre, where she studied acting; other graduates included Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier. In 1942, her son Warren Guy, Jr, was born. After the war, Rosa Guy moved to Connecticut with her husband and son, but five years later, on the dissolution of her marriage, she returned to New York. In 1950, along with John Oliver Killens, Rosa Guy formed a workshop that was to become the Harlem Writers Guild (HWG), whose aim was ‘to develop and aid in the publication of works by writers of the African Diaspora’. Its members and participants included Willard Moore, Walter Christmas, Maya Angelou, Dr. John Henrik Clarke, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Alice Childress, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Douglas Turner Ward. More than half of all successful African-American writers were associated with the workshop between 1950 and 1971. Guy also belonged to the Black nationalist literary organization On Guard for Freedom, founded by Calvin Hicks on the Lower East Side of New York City. Among On Guard's other members were LeRoi Jones, Sarah E. Wright and Harold Cruse. Rosa Guy's work has received The New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year citation, and the American Library Association’s Best Book Award. In 1954, Rosa Guy wrote and performed in her first play, Venetian Blinds, which was successfully produced Off-Broadway at the Tropical Theater. Most of Guy's books are about the dependability of family members that care and love each other. Her 1985 novel, My Love, My Love: Or, The Peasant Girl - commonly described as a Caribbean re-telling of Hans Christian Andersen's ‘The Little Mermaid‘, but ‘with a dash of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet‘ - was the basis for the Broadway musical Once on This Island, which ran for a year from 1990 to 1991.
September 1, 1873
HANNA ASTRUP LARSEN (September 1, 1873 - December 3, 1945) was an author, translator and editor of Norwegian descent, daughter of Rev. Peter Laurentius Larsen, Luther College's (Decorah) first president, and Mrs. Ingeborg Astrup Larsen. She grew up in Decorah, Iowa and was home schooled by her mother. Through Norwegian American connections, Hanna was given the opportunity in January 1897, at the age of 24, to join her sister Marie in South Africa at a Zulu Mission Station while accompanied by her uncle and aunt. During her three years in Zululand on the Entumeni Mission, Hanna was able to gain a first hand knowledge of Zulu culture as well as a collection of objects that were later donated to Luther College. Once back in Decorah in the spring of 1900, Hanna was able to look at the world with a new cultural perspective. She was educated under private tutorship and from 1901 to 1904 was the assistant editor of Amerika, at Madison, Wisconsin. In 1904-05 she served as special writer for San Francisco Call and San Francisco Chronicle, and from 1908 to 1912 contributed articles to newspapers and magazines in New York. She was literary editor of American-Scandinavian Review, New York City, 1913-21, and editor after that, also serving as literary secretary of the American Scandinavian Foundation, and thus editor of about seventy books published by it. She also translated a number of books and short stories from the Danish language, republished in this country. The Swedish Vasa Medal was awarded to Miss Larsen in 1931 in recognition of her literary work, also the Norwegian Distinguished Service Medal in 1933 and the Royal Danish Medal of Merit in 1937.
September 1, 1945
Scott Spencer is the author of nine previous novels, including A SHIP MADE OF PAPER, WAKING THE DEAD, and the international bestseller ENDLESS LOVE. He has written for Rolling Stone, the New York Times, The New Yorker, GQ, and Harper’s, and has taught writing at Columbia University, the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Williams College, and for the Bard Prison Initiative. He lives in Rhinebeck, New York.
September 1, 1890
Arthur William Upfield (1 September 1890 - 13 February 1964) was an Australian writer, best known for his works of detective fiction featuring Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte ('Bony') of the Queensland Police Force, a half-caste Aborigine. Born in England, Upfield moved to Australia in 1910 and fought with the Australian military during the First World War. Following his war service, he travelled extensively throughout Australia, obtaining a knowledge of Australian Aboriginal culture that would later be used extensively in his written works. In addition to his detective fiction, Upfield was also a member of the Australian Geological Society and was involved in numerous scientific expeditions. Upfield's works remained popular after his death, and in the 1970s were the basis for an Australian television series entitled ‘Boney’.
September 1, 1937
ELENA CASTEDO was born on September 1, 1937 in Barcelona, Spain, and raised in Chile, and has lived on four continents. She received an M.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University The former editor of the Inter-American Review of Bibliography and the author of a critical study of Chilean theater, she lives in McLean, Virginia.
September 1, 1932
Raymond Durgnat (1 September 1932 – 19 May 2002) was a British film critic, who was born in London of Swiss parents. During his life he wrote for virtually every major English language film publication. In 1965 he published the first major critical essay on Michael Powell, who had hitherto been "fashionably dismissed by critics as a 'technician’s director'", as Durgnat put it. His many books include Films and Feelings (1967), A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence (1970), and The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock (1974). He wrote principally for Films and Filming (in the 1960s), Film Comment (in the 1970s) and Monthly Film Bulletin (in the 1980s), and taught at various art schools and universities, notably St Martin's College and the Royal College of Art, where his students included Tony Scott. Toward the end of his life he was visiting professor at the University of East London.
September 1, 1935
Stuart MacGregor (September 1, 1935, Edinburgh, United Kingdom - January 25, 1973, Jamaica) was a Scottish poet, novelist and songwriter. MacGregor attended medical school in Edinburgh and practised as an anaesthesiologist. He later taught social medicine, both in Scotland and the West Indies. In 1958, with Hamish Henderson, MacGregor co-founded the Edinburgh University Folk Society and was its first President. He wrote a number of widely recorded folk songs about Edinburgh life including the humorous ‘Sandy Bell's Man’ about dating medical students and the romantic ‘Coshieville.’ MacGregor's poetry appeared in a collection published by Reprographia in 1970, The Four Points of a Saltire. This featured the work of four Scottish poets, the others being Sorley MacLean, George Campbell Hay and William Neill. MacGregor's two novels were THE MYRTLE AND THE IVY (1967) and THE SINNER (1973), both set in the Edinburgh folk scene. MacGregor died in a car crash in 1973, aged thirty-seven.
September 1, 1917
Carlos Martinez Moreno (September 1, 1917, Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay - February 21, 1986, Mexico City, Mexico) was a writer, journalist and Uruguayan lawyer. His childhood was spent in Cologne, then in Melo, and finally in Montevideo. At age 19 he entered the Law School of the University of the Republic and graduated in 1948. In 1949, he was appointed Public Defender for civil and criminal matters. Although Carlos Martinez Moreno was a renowned criminal defense attorney, he also developed a reputation as an important writer. At the age of 20, he was a theatrical critic, first for El País and El Diario, and then in 1942 for the weekly Marcha. His first stories were published in a variety of student magazines, and later in Mundo Uruguayo. Most of the stories were published under the pseudonym of Alejandro Tour.
September 1, 1932
Lenrie Leopold Wilfred Peters (1 September 1932 – 28 May 2009) was a Gambian surgeon, novelist, poet and educationist. Peters was born in Bathurst (now Banjul).His parents were Lenrie Ernest Ingram Peters and Kezia Rosemary. Lenrie Sr. was a Sierra Leone Creole of West Indian or black American origin. Kezia Rosemary was a Gambian Creole of Sierra Leonean Creole origin. Lenrie Jr. grew up in Bathurst and moved to Sierra Leone in 1949, where he was educated at the Prince of Wales School, Freetown, gaining his Higher School Certificate in science subjects. In 1952 he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, to read Natural Sciences, graduating with a B.Sc. in 1956; from 1956 to 1959 he worked and studied at the University College Hospital, London, and 1959 was awarded a Medical and Surgery diploma from Cambridge. Peters worked for the BBC from 1955 to 1968, on their Africa programmes. While at Cambridge he was elected president of the African Students' Union, and interested himself in Pan-Africanist politics. He also began writing poetry and plays, as well as starting work on his only novel, The Second Round (published in 1965). Peters worked in hospitals in Guildford and Northampton before returning to the Gambia, where he had a surgical practice in Banjul. He was a fellow of the West African College of Surgeons and the Royal College of Surgeons in England. Peters was President of the Historic Commission of Monuments of the Gambia, was president of the board of directors of the National Library of the Gambia and Gambia College from 1979 to 1987, and was a member and President of the West African Examination Council (WAEC) from 1985 to 1991. He died in Dakar, Senegal, aged 76.
September 1, 1954
Amy Wilentz is an American journalist and writer. She is a Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches in the Literary Journalism program. Wilentz was Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker, and is a contributing editor at The Nation.
September 1, 1875
Edgar Rice Burroughs was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1875. After serving a short time in the 7th U.S. Cavalry, Burroughs was a shopkeeper, gold miner, cowboy, and policeman before becoming a full-time writer. His first novel, Tarzan of the Apes, was published in 1914, and along with its 22 sequels has sold over 30 million copies in 58 languages. Author of numerous other jungle and science fiction novels and novellas, including The Land That Time Forgot, Burroughs had a writing career that spanned almost 30 years, with his last novel, The Land of Terror, being published in 1941. He died in 1950 at his ranch near Tarzana, the California town named for his legendary hero.
September 2, 1934
Jack Agüeros (September 2, 1934 – May 4, 2014) was an American community activist, poet, writer, and translator, and the former director of El Museo del Barrio.
September 2, 1912
David Daiches (2 September 1912 – 15 July 2005) was a Scottish literary historian and literary critic, scholar and writer. He wrote extensively on English literature, Scottish literature and Scottish culture. He was born in Sunderland, into a Jewish family with a Lithuanian background—the subject of his 1956 memoir, Two Worlds: An Edinburgh Jewish Childhood. He moved to Edinburgh while still a young child, about the end of World War I, where his father, Rev. Dr. Salis Daiches was a prominent rabbi. He studied at George Watson's College and won a scholarship to University of Edinburgh where he won the Elliot prize, and went on to Balliol College, Oxford where he became the Elton exhibitioner. Daiches is the father of Jenni Calder, also a Scottish literary historian. His brother was the prominent Edinburgh QC Lionel Daiches.
September 2, 1940
Jules Régis Debray (born 1940) is a French communist intellectual, journalist, government official and professor. He is known for his theorization of mediology, a critical theory of the long-term transmission of cultural meaning in human society; and for having fought in 1967 with Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara in Bolivia.
September 2, 1926
Sergio Galindo (September 2, 1926 - January 3, 1993) was a Mexican novelist and short-story writer. He was born in Jalapa in the state of Veracruz, a region of Mexico that figures prominently in much of his writing. His most widely acclaimed novels are El Bordo (The Precipice, 1960) and Otilia Rauda (1986), the latter filmed as La Mujer del Pueblo in 2001. Galindo studied at the Mexican National Autonomous University (UNAM) and in Paris. He was the founder and first director of the University of Veracruz Press, where he also founded and edited the journal La Palabra y el Hombre (The Word and the Man). He was Director of the Palacio de Bellas Artes (National Institute of Fine Arts) from 1974 to 1976. Galindo was awarded the following prizes and honours: Honorary Officer of the Order of the British Empire, Polish award for Cultural Merit, Order of the Star of Yugoslavia, Mariano Azuela Prize, the Bellas Artes Literature Prize, the Xavier Villarrutia Prize and the José Fuentes Mares National Prize for Literature. He was elected to the Mexican Academy of the Language in 1975 and to the Spanish Royal Academy the following year. In 2006, the University of Veracruz and its International University Book Festival inaugurated an annual prize for first novels by Latin American writers, called the Premio Latinoamericano de Primera Novela Sergio Galindo. His works have been translated into English, French, Polish, German and Italian.
September 2, 1894
Joseph Roth was born in 1894, in a small Galician town on the eastern borders of the Hapsburg Empire. After serving in the Austro-Hungarian Army (1916-18), he worked as a journalist in Vienna and in Berlin as a traveling European correspondent. In January 1933 he left Germany and lived mainly in Paris and the south of France. He was one of the central figures in the emigre intellectual opposition to the Nazis. He died in Paris in 1939, leaving behind thirteen novels as well as many stories and essays.
September 2, 1840
Giovanni Carmelo Verga (2 September 1840 – 27 January 1922) was an Italian realist (Verismo) writer, best known for his depictions of life in his native Sicily, and especially for the short story (and later play) Cavalleria Rusticana and the novel I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree)
September 2, 1805
José Esteban Antonio Echeverría (September 2, 1805 – January 19, 1851) was an Argentine poet, fiction writer, cultural promoter, and political activist who played a significant role in the development of Argentine literature, not only through his own writings but also through his organizational efforts. He was one of Latin America's most important Romantic authors. Echeverría spent five decisive years in Paris (1825 to 1830), where he absorbed the spirit of the Romantic Movement, then in its heyday in France. He became one of the movement's promoters once he returned to Argentina. Once he returned to Buenos Aires, he wrote "Los Consuelos" in 1834 and "Las rimas" in 1837. He was a member of the group of young Argentine intellectuals who in 1840 organized the Asociación de Mayo ("May Association", after the May Revolution that initiated Argentina's move towards independence). This institution aspired to develop a national literature responsive to the country's social and physical reality. Echeverría also devoted himself to the overthrow of the caudillo of Buenos Aires, Juan Manuel de Rosas. In 1840 he was forced to go into exile in nearby Uruguay, where he wrote La Insurrección del Sur and El Matadero. He remained in Uruguay until his death in 1851. His remains are said to be buried at Buceo Cemetery. Echeverría's renown as a writer rests largely on his powerful short story El matadero ("The Slaughter Yard", often mistranslated as "The Slaughterhouse"), written in sometime during 1838-1840 but not published until 1871), a landmark in the history of Latin American literature. It is mostly significant because it displays the perceived clash between "civilization and barbarism", that is, between the European and the "primitive and violent" American ways. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, another great Argentine writer and thinker, saw this clash as the core of Latin American culture. Read in this light, "The Slaughterhouse" is a political allegory. Its more specific intention was to accuse Rosas of protecting the kind of thugs who murder the cultivated young protagonist at the Buenos Aires slaughterhouse. Rosas and his henchmen stand for barbarism, the slain young man for civilization. Echeverría's La cautiva ("The Captive"), a long narrative poem about a white woman abducted by Mapuche Indians, is also among the better-known works of 19th-century Latin American literature.
September 2, 1952
LESLIE COCKBURN is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair. She has produced and directed two dozen documentaries covering wars for CBS and ABC News, and was a correspondent for PBS’s Frontline. She has won numerous awards for her journalism, including an Emmy and a National press Club Award.
September 2, 1887
Sir Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart, KCMG (2 September 1887 – 27 February 1970) was a British diplomat (Moscow, Prague), journalist, author, secret agent and footballer. His 1932 book, Memoirs of a British Agent, became an international bestseller, and brought him to the world's attention. It tells of his failed effort to sabotage the Bolshevik revolution in Moscow in 1918; his co-conspirators were double agents working for the Bolsheviks. In the end the "Lockhart Plot", was a cunning `sting' deliberately manufactured and controlled by Soviet master spy Felix Dzerzhinsky with the goal of discrediting the British and French governments.
September 2, 1946
Augustus Richard Norton, Professor of International Relations and Anthropology at Boston University, was a military observer for the United Nations in southern Lebanon when Hezbollah and rival Shi’i parties were taking form there in the early 1980s.
September 2, 1950
R. Gary Patterson (September 2, 1950 - May 26, 2017) was a native Tennessean, whose first book, The Walrus Was Paul, examined the urban legend that Paul McCartney had died and been replaced with an imposter during the 1960's. His subsequent works, Hellhounds on Their Trail and Take a Walk on the Dark Side, established Patterson as the preeminent expert on rock music myths, legends, and curses.
September 2, 1937
Pentti Saarikoski was one of the most important poets in the literary scene of Finland during the 1960s and 1970s. His body of work comprises poetry and translations, among them such classics as Homer's Odyssey and James Joyce's Ulysses.
September 2, 1934
Donald B. Redford is a historian and archaeologist who has worked extensively in Egypt since 1975, directing a number of important excavations, notably at Mendes and Karnak. A professor at Pennsylvania State University, he is the author of many books, including Akhenaten: The Heretic King (Princeton). He is also the editor of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt.
September 3, 1931
Samir Amin was born in Cairo, the son of two doctors, his father Egyptian and his mother French. He lived in Port Said in northern Egypt and attended the French lycée there, receiving his baccalaureate in 1947. Amin then enrolled at the Lycée Henri IV in Paris to study mathematics and at the Institut d’études Politiques to study law, which at the time was the way to study economics. He received a diploma in political science in 1952 and a license in law and economics in 1953 and then opted to pursue a doctorate in economics. He also obtained a diploma in statistics from the Institut de Statistiques de L’université de Paris in 1956. In June 1957, Amin received a doctorate in economics under the direction of Maurice Byé and with the additional guidance of François Perroux. As a student, Amin spent much of his time as a militant with various student movements and from 1949 to 1953 helped publish the journal Étudiants Anticolonialistes, through which he met many of the future members of Africa’s governing elite. From 1957 to 1960, Amin worked in Cairo on economic development issues for the Egyptian government, then moved to Bamako, Mali, where he was an adviser to the Malian planning ministry (1960-1963). In 1963 he moved to Dakar, Senegal, where he took a fellowship (1963-1970) at the Institut Africain de Développement Économique et de Planification (IDEP). He became a director at IDEP (1970-1980) and subsequently was named director of the Third World Forum (1980–). Amin has at various times held professorships in Poitiers, Dakar, and Paris. The author of more than thirty books, Amin’s brilliant 1957 dissertation, subsequently published in 1970 as L’accumulation à l’échelle mondiale; critique de la théorie dusous-développement (translated in 1974 as Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment ), was the earliest significant work to argue that underdevel-opment in much of the world was a direct consequence of the way the capitalist economy functions. He argued that this polarization is due to transfers of profits from the poor countries to the rich, which help alleviate potential under-consumptionist problems in the industrial economies, allowing the industrial world to pay higher salaries or offer lower prices to consumers than would be possible were the labor theory of value to work simply at the national level. Amin’s new emphasis on the global economy as a unit of analysis is intended to explain global salary and price differences within a Marxist labor theory of value. Even his later works (e.g. Obsolescent Capitalism and Beyond U.S. Hegemony ) have built on this model to critique imperialist projects generally and post–September 11, 2001 U.S. hegemonic efforts more particularly. Amin argues for a polycentric world that can counteract monopolies in areas such as technology, finance, natural resources, media, and weapons production that consistently hurt poor countries. Amin’s reliance on a labor theory of value and underconsumptionist theory has limited his analytical outlook and led him to make overly simplistic predictions even as it has allowed a holistic historical materialistic perspective. Nevertheless, his criticisms of neoclassical equilibrium models and imperialistic projects have long since been joined by those of economists and social scientists from many different theoretical persuasions.
September 3, 1971
Kiran Desai (born 3 September 1971) is an Indian author. Her novel The Inheritance of Loss won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award. Desai is the daughter of Anita Desai, herself short-listed for the Booker Prize on three occasions. She was born in Chandigarh on the 3rd of september , and spent the early years of her life in Pune and Mumbai. She studied in the Cathedral and John Connon School. She left India at 14, and she and her mother then lived in England for a year, and then moved to the United States, where she studied creative writing at Bennington College, Hollins University, and Columbia University. Her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, was published in 1998 and received accolades from such notable figures as Salman Rushdie. It won the Betty Trask Award, a prize given by the Society of Authors for the best new novels by citizens of the Commonwealth of Nations under the age of 35. Her second book, The Inheritance of Loss, (2006) was widely praised by critics throughout Asia, Europe and the United States. It won the 2006 Man Booker Prize, as well as the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award. In August 2008, Desai was a guest on Private Passions, the biographical music discussion programme hosted by Michael Berkeley on BBC Radio 3. In May 2007 she was the featured author at the inaugural Asia House Festival of Cold Literature. She was awarded a 2013 Berlin Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin.
September 3, 1941
Sergei Donatovich Dovlatov-Mechik (September 3, 1941 in Ufa, USSR – August 24, 1990 in New York City) was a Russian journalist and writer. Dovlatov was born on September 3, 1941 in Ufa, Republic of Bashkiria, USSR, where his family had been evacuated during World War II from Leningrad. His mother, Nora Dovlatova, was Armenian and worked as a proofreader, and his father, Donat Mechik, was Jewish and a theater director. After 1945 he lived with his mother in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). Dovlatov studied at the Finnish Department of Leningrad State University, but flunked after two and a half years. He was drafted into the Soviet Internal Troops and served as a prison guard in high-security camps. Later, he earned his living as a journalist in various newspapers and magazines in Leningrad and then as a correspondent of the Tallinn newspaper ‘Sovetskaja Éstonia’. He supplemented his income by being a summer tour guide in the Pushkin preserve, a museum near Pskov. Dovlatov wrote prose fiction, but his numerous attempts to get published in the Soviet Union were in vain. Unable to publish in the Soviet Union, Dovlatov circulated his writings through samizdat and by having them smuggled into Western Europe for publication in foreign journals; an activity that caused his expulsion from the Union of Soviet Journalists in 1976. The typeset 'formes' of his first book were destroyed under the order of the KGB. In 1976, some stories by Dovlatov had been published in Western Russian-language magazines, including ‘Continent’, ‘Time and us’, resulting in his expulsion from the Union of Journalists of the USSR. In 1979 Dovlatov emigrated from the Soviet Union with his mother, Nora, and came to live with his wife and daughter in New York, where he later co-edited ‘The New American’, a liberal, Russian-language émigré newspaper. In the mid 1980s, Dovlatov finally achieved recognition as a writer, being printed in the prestigious magazine ‘The New Yorker‘. Dovlatov died on August 24, 1990 in New York and was buried at the Mount Hebron Cemetery.
September 3, 1940
Eduardo Hughes Galeano (born 3 September 1940) is a Uruguayan journalist, writer and novelist. His best known works are Memoria del fuego (Memory of Fire Trilogy, 1986) and Las venas abiertas de América Latina (Open Veins of Latin America, 1971) which have been translated into 20 languages and transcend orthodox genres: combining fiction, journalism, political analysis, and history. The author himself has proclaimed his obsession as a writer saying, ‘I'm a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America above all and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia.’
September 3, 1849
Sarah Orne Jewett (September 3, 1849 – June 24, 1909) was an American novelist, short story writer and poet, best known for her local color works set along or near the southern seacoast of Maine. Jewett is recognized as an important practitioner of American literary regionalism.
September 3, 1929
Enrique Lihn Carrasco (3 September 1929 – 10 July 1988) was a Chilean poet, playwright, and novelist. The son of Enrique Lihn Doll and María Carrasco Délano, he married Ivette Mingram (1932–2008). They had one daughter, the actress Andrea María Lihn Mingram. Linh was born in Santiago, Chile. He aspired to be a painter but after a failed attempt at pursuing this ambition during university he abandoned that dream to pursue writing. He proceeded to develop into a poet, playwright, and novelist and would teach literature at the University of Chile. Lihn viewed both the past and the future as forms of death, and his emphasis on this point is evident throughout his literary works. His worked revolved around his anger for the contemporary dictatorship, as Chile was governed by a military junta. Works layered with social, political, and religious commentary are common throughout Lihn's canon. His final book, Diario de Muerte was written in the six weeks preceding his death from cancer in Santiago. The evening before his death, he corrected the proofs. A fictionalized version of Lihn appeared in Alejandro Jodorowsky's autobiographical film Endless Poetry (2016).
September 3, 1926
Alison Lurie (born September 3, 1926) is an American novelist and academic. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1984 novel Foreign Affairs. Although better known as a novelist, she has also written numerous non-fiction books and articles, particularly on children's literature and the semiotics of dress. Lurie was born in Chicago but grew up in White Plains, New York, the daughter of Bernice (Stewart) and Harry Lawrence Lurie, a Latvian-born professor. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1947. The next year she married Jonathan Peale Bishop, then a graduate student at Harvard. Bishop was a critic and essayist who, in the 1970s and later, became a writer of autobiographically-inflected books about Catholic Christianity. He taught at Amherst College, in Massachusetts (1957–61), and then at Cornell University (1961-). Lurie moved along with him. Lurie and Bishop have three sons; they divorced in 1985 after a long separation. She is currently married to the writer Edward Hower. She spends part of her time in London, part at Cornell, and part in Key West. In 1970, Lurie began to teach in the English Department at Cornell, where she was tenured in 1979. She taught Children’s Literature (a new field in the 1970s) and writing. In 1989 she was named the F. J. Whiton Professor of American Literature at Cornell. She is now emerita.
September 3, 1940
Kevin Starr (September 3, 1940, San Francisco, CA - January 14, 2017, San Francisco, CA) is the author of the series Americans and the California Dream, including the previously published AMERICANS AND THE CALIFORNIA DREAM, 1850-1915, and INVENTING THE DREAM: CALIFORNIA THROUGH THE PROGRESSIVE ERA. The next installment is THE DREAM ENDURES: CALIFORNIA THROUGH THE GREAT DEPRESSION. He taught at the University of San Francisco.
September 3, 1963
Johan Theorin was born in 1963 in Gothenburg, Sweden, and has spent every summer of his life on northern Oland. He is a journalist and scriptwriter. His second novel, NIGHT BLIZZARD, will be published by Delacorte in 2009.
September 3, 1942
Irwin Gellman has had a fascinating career as an author, scholar, speaker and businessman. Dr. Gellman taught for a decade at Morgan State College in Baltimore and also served as an academic dean. From 2001-2003, he was a Research Fellow at the California State Library. At Chapman University, he held the Allergan Chair of Modern American History from 1999-2000 and was Director of the Center for Cold War Studies from 1997-2000. He was Trustees' Professor from 1997-2000. He also taught at the University of California, Irvine in 1999 and 2001. After moving back to the East Coast in late 2004, he served as a Visiting Professor of History from 2005-2012 and as Visiting Scholar from 2013-2014 at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He has given speeches across the United States; has been widely interviewed on radio and television; and has been featured in documentaries about President Eisenhower. He was also part of the July 20, 2009 NPR radio program, "How They Saw It," A remembrance of the July 20, 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. A respected author, Dr. Gellman's first three books offered deep insights about Franklin Roosevelt and his administration. His fourth and fifth books cover the period between 1946-1960 and highlight the impact of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon and the politics of that era.
September 3, 1911
Naomi Lewis (3 September 1911 – 5 July 2009) was a British poet, essayist, literary critic, anthologist and reteller of stories for children. She is particularly noted for her translations of the Danish children's author, Hans Christian Andersen, as well as for her critical reviews and essays. Her first published work, A Visit to Mrs. Wilcox (1957) included a selection of these articles and won immediate acclaim, becoming a Book Society recommendation. Over the sixty years of her literary career, Naomi Lewis produced a vast number of works; as a reviewer, an anthologist and as a poet in her own right. Deborah King was born in Dorset and studied at the Hornsey School of Art in London. After working free-lance as an illustrator for several years, her first book, ‘Rook’ was published in 1980 to much critical acclaim, breaking new ground as a non-fiction picture book with an environmental message. Over the next twenty years, she became an established author with eleven more titles to her name.
September 3, 1931
Fritz J. Raddatz (3 September 1931 – 26 February 2015) was a professor of literature at the Technical University of Hanover.
September 3, 1963
Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1996. He is the author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers and What the Dog Saw. Prior to joining The New Yorker, he was a reporter at the Washington Post. Gladwell was born in England and grew up in rural Ontario. He now lives in New York.
September 3, 1958
Kettly Mars was born in 1958 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where she resides today. She is the author of three novels and two story collections. Jeanine Hermann is a translator for Artforum magazine and has translated the works of numerous authors, most recently Julia Kristeva’s Hatred and Forgiveness, and Eric Laurrent’s Do Not Touch. Herman is a chevalier in the French Order of Arts and Letters. Madison Smartt Bell is a professor of English at Goucher College and is known for his trilogy of novels about the Haitian Revolution.
September 4, 1954
Carmen Boullosa (born September 4, 1954 in Mexico City, Mexico) is a leading Mexican poet, novelist and playwright. Her work is eclectic and difficult to categorize, but it generally focuses on the issues of feminism and gender roles within a Latin American context. Her work has been praised by a number of prominent writers, including Carlos Fuentes, Alma Guillermoprieto and Elena Poniatowska, as well as publications such as Publishers Weekly. She has won a number of awards for her works, and has taught at universities such as Georgetown University, Columbia University and New York University (NYU), as well as at universities in nearly a dozen other countries. She is currently Distinguished Lecturer at the City College of New York. She has two children -- Maria Aura and Juan Aura -- with her former partner, Alejandro Aura --and is now married to Mike Wallace, the Pulitzer-prize winning co-author of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. Boullosa has written over a dozen novels, and some of these works have been translated into five different languages. Her bestselling novel, Son vacas, somos puercos (1991) was translated into English in 1997 as They're Cows, We're Pigs. The story is narrated in the first person by an old man looking back on his life. He was kidnapped and sent from his native France on a slave ship to the West Indies at the age of thirteen. To gain his freedom, he joins a group of pirates (or ‘pigs’), allowing Boullosa to compare two very different societal and political systems—traditional Europe and carefree pirates. In La milagrosa, a novel written in 1993, the protagonist is a girl who has the power to heal the sick and perform other miracles while she sleeps. She falls in love with Aurelio Jimenez, a detective sent to discredit her, even though she fears that her powers will disappear if she spends time with people. It ends ambiguously, leaving an unsolved murder without closure. Duerme, another popular work published in 1995, tells the story of Claire, a French woman whose mother was a prostitute. Attempting to escape the same profession, she arrives in Spain dressed as a man. To save a subject of the Spanish king, she reveals herself as a female and prepares to take his punishment of death by hanging. Beforehand, however, she is wounded in the left breast and her blood is replaced by water from the lakes of Mexico City. The water's magical powers make it possible for her to survive the punishment. She is also famous for her Teatro herético (1987), a compilation of three parodies in play format—Aura y las once mil vírgenes, Cocinar hombres, and Propusieron a María. The first tells the story of a man called by God to ‘deflower’ eleven thousand virgins in his life, so that heaven's overpopulation problem might be addressed, since the women will have to wait in purgatory for a time. The man then uses his sexual encounters as material for his television commercials and becomes a successful advertising agent. Cocinar hombres tells the story of two girls who find themselves to have become young adult witches overnight, so as to fly over the earth tempting but not satisfying men. Finally, the third play satirically recounts the conversation between Joseph and Mary before Mary gives birth to Jesus and ascends to heaven.
September 4, 1768
François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand (4 September 1768 – 4 July 1848) was a French writer, politician, diplomat and historian. He is considered the founder of Romanticism in French literature.
September 4, 1926
Ivan Illich (4 September 1926 – 2 December 2002) was an Austrian philosopher, Roman Catholic priest, and 'maverick social critic' of the institutions of contemporary Western culture and their effects on the provenance and practice of education, medicine, work, energy use, transportation, and economic development.
September 4, 1913
Victor Gordon Kiernan (4 September 1913 – 17 February 2009) was professor emeritus of modern history at Edinburgh University and recognized as one of the most wide-ranging of global historians. He was a man of letters close to the Edwardian era but infused with a radical consciousness from the Great Depression and from a decade of witnessing anticolonial struggles in the Indian subcontinent. While his middle name came from one of British imperialism's greatest heroes, General Gordon of Khartoum, Kiernan emerged as one of the nation's foremost ideological warriors against Empire. V.G. Kiernan made immense contributions to the postwar flowering of British Marxist historiography that transformed the understanding of social history. Seeking escape paths from a congealing Stalinism, this intellectual movement grew from several figures, among them the Blakean visionary E.P. Thompson, the don of seventeenth-century radical dissent Christopher Hill, the radical medievalist Rodney Hilton, the encyclopedic Kiernan, and the scholar of primitive rebellion and large-scale economic change Eric Hobsbawm. Brash and confident in wielding the best of the left's cultural arsenal, they welcomed open-ended dialogue with non-Marxist traditions. Kiernan in his lifetime received fewer public accolades than Thompson, Hilton, Hill and Hobsbawm, provoking the latter two to proclaim that they had created a Victor Kiernan Appreciation Society. Writing in the Telegraph of Calcutta on February 22, Rudrangshu Mukherjee reflected that most of the British Marxist historians ‘believed that [Kiernan] was the most erudite and widely read among them all.’ His mastery of Persian and Urdu, as well as an array of modern European languages and classical Greek and Latin, contributed to his intellectual mystique. He wrote works ranging from the classical verse of Horace to the social context of Shakespeare's plays to historical dissections of European empires and the ‘new imperialism’ represented by the United States, as well as translations and analyses of the golden age of Urdu poetry.
September 4, 1908
Richard Nathaniel Wright (September 4, 1908 – November 28, 1960) was an African-American author of novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially those involving the plight of African Americans during the late 19th to mid-20th centuries. Many believe his work helped change race relations in the United States in the mid-20th century. Wright was born on a plantation in Roxie, Mississippi, and lived in the South until 1927, when he moved to Chicago. He later resided in New York City, and died in Paris as an expatriate. Among his many works are NATIVE SON, BLACK BOY, THE OUTSIDER, SAVAGE HOLIDAY, and LAWD TODAY!
September 4, 1966
MAREK KRAJEWSKI (born 4 September 1966, in Wroc?aw) is an award-winning Polish crime writer and linguist.[ is an award-winning Polish crime writer and linguist. He is best known for his series of five Chandleresque novels set in pre-war Wroc?aw (which was, at the time, Breslau) with the policeman Eberhard Mock as the protagonist. These novels have been translated into 14 languages: English, French, German, and Italian, among others. DANUSIA STOK is the translator of all five books in the Inspector Mock series, as well as The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski.
September 4, 1924
Ray Russell (September 4, 1924 - March 15, 1999) was a pioneer of the modern horror genre. As an editor at Playboy, he helped publish such writers as Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, and Charles Beaumont. His best known work, Sardonicus, was called by Stephen King perhaps the finest example of the modern Gothic ever written. He received the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1991. Laird Barron is a writer of horror fiction. He has received three Shirley Jackson Awards, for his collections The Imago Sequence and Other Stories and Occultation and Other Stories and for his novella Mysterium Tremendum. His other works include two novels, The Light Is the Darkness and The Croning, and a story collection, The Beautiful Things That Awaits Us All. He lives in upstate New York.
September 4, 1876
Constancio Carlos Vigil (September 4, 1876 – September 24, 1954) was a Uruguayan-Argentine writer and prominent publisher. Constancio Vigil was born in Rocha, Uruguay, in 1876. His father, a local politician, was forced to relocate to the nation's capital, Montevideo, following a political dispute. The young man graduated from the Universidad de la República, started as a poetry contributor to writer José Enrique Rodó, and became a journalist for El Nacional and, in 1901, founded his first periodical, Alborada ("Dawn"). He was named Editor-in-chief of La Prensa, a newspaper aligned with the Partido Blanco ("White Party"). Political intrigue once again intruded in the young man's life, however, when the newspaper was forcibly shuttered in 1903, leading Vigil to relocate to neighboring Buenos Aires, Argentina. The ambitious journalist created three magazines between 1904 and 1911: the children's weekly Pulgarcito (akin to "Tom Thumb"), Germinal, and his most successful early periodical, the general interest weekly, Mundo Argentino ("Argentine World"). Much as Pulgarcito had been before competition led to its 1907 closure, Mundo Argentino was a heavily illustrated magazine packed with advertisements and coupons and centered on a particular genre without being limited to it. The magazine, by 1912, boasted a weekly circulation of over 36,000, though the versatile businessman sold it at its peak to Editorial Haynes in 1917; by then, Mundo Argentino sold 118,000 copies a week (in a country with fewer than 5 million adults). Vigil parlayed the sale into the establishment of a new publishing house: Editorial Atlántida. The company would publish his new titles: a news and commentary magazine, Atlántida (1918), the sports weekly El Gráfico, the children's magazine Billiken (both in 1919), and for women, Para Tí ("For You," 1922); the latter three remain the oldest Argentine magazines still in publication, became circulation leaders in the Spanish-speaking world. The noted publisher published a series of best-selling children's books through Atlántida, as well. He authored a total of 134 books from 1915, including 50 children's titles such as El Erial ("The Wild Field"), El Mono Relojero ("The Monkey Repairs Watches"), ¡Upa!, and Hormiguita Viajera ("Traveling Ant"). Vigil remained active during the great depression, which until the late 1930s caused severe hardship in Argentine society. He marshalled his publishing empire's reach to foster "Billiken Committees" - groups of middle-class schoolchildren guided by the namesake magazine to raise donations of food and money for the needy; these groups reportedly grew to over 40,000 children before the project ended. These efforts and his donations of reading material to schools led to his being honored with the naming of 3,000 schools, auditoria, and libraries in Argentina, over the decades. He was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize jointly by numerous Latin American newspapers, in 1934, and later awarded the Papal Lateran Cross by Pope Pius XII. Constancio Vigil was at his editor's desk in Buenos Aires when he died in 1954, at age 78. Following his death, Atlántida Publishing became increasingly associated with Argentina's often violent, later dictatorships. One of its founder's well-known aphorisms advised, however, that: One should stay far from those who live off others' patriotism.
September 4, 1945
Steve Bernard Miles Chimombo (born 4 September 1945 Zomba) is a Malawian writer, poet, editor and teacher. He was educated at Zomba Catholic Secondary School, then at the University of Malawi where he earned a B.A. At the University of Wales, he took a teaching diploma in English as a Second Language. At Columbia University in the United States, he was awarded his M.A. and Ph.D. in teaching. After studying at Leeds, England, Chimombo returned to Malawi to edit the literary bulletin Outlook-lookout. He is a professor of English at Chancellor College in Malawi and is considered one of the nation's leading writers. In 1988 his Napolo Poems gained him honorable mention for the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa. He is married to Moira Chimombo.
September 4, 1882
Leonhard Frank, (born September 4, 1882, Würzburg, Germany, died August 18, 1961, Munich, Germany.), German Expressionist novelist and playwright who used sensationalism and a compact and austere prose to dramatize a favourite theme—the destruction of the individual spirit by bourgeois society. After studying painting in Munich in 1904 and working as a commercial artist, Frank turned to literature. In 1914 his open opposition to World War I forced him to flee to Switzerland. The same year he published his first book, Die Räuberbande (1914; The Robber Band). The story of rebellious young boys who seek to create the ideal society but end up as ‘good citizens,’ it embodies the main theme of his writings—the humorous exposure and realistic portrayal of the narrowness of the middle classes. While in Switzerland he also published Die Ursache (1915; The Cause of the Crime), an attack on repressive educational systems, and Der Mensch ist gut (1917; ‘Man Is Good’), a revolutionary denunciation of war. Frank returned to Germany in 1918. His belief in the necessity of the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of socialism was expressed in his novel Der Bürger (1924; A Middle-Class Man) and in Das ochsenfurter Männerquartett (1927; The Singers). During the same period he wrote his masterpiece, Karl und Anna (1926; Carl and Anna), a realistic, if sentimental, account of a soldier who seduces his comrade’s wife. In 1933 Frank’s books were banned and burned by the Nazis, and he immigrated again to Switzerland. From there he went to Paris, where in 1940 he was confined in an internment camp. After several escapes and reinternments, he fled to the United States. In Los Angeles Leonhard Frank lived at 6500 Yucca Street in Hollywood. While Thomas Mann was writing Doktor Faustus, Leonhard Frank played a crucial role listening to and discussing Mann's novel with him. Frank returned to Germany in 1950; his last important work, Links, wo das Herz ist (1952; Heart on the Left) was published in 1952.
September 4, 1957
Henry Garfield was born in Philadelphia on September 4, 1957, one month before the launching of Sputnik. He moved with his family to the Maine Coast just in time to get caught up in the 1967 American League pennant race and become a Red Sox fan for life. The author's great-great-grandfather was James A. Garfield, the twentieth U.S. President. He now lives in Bangor, Maine with his second wife, Elaine Garfield, RN, who works in the surgical department at a local hospital. He teaches writing at the University of Maine and is a contributing editor and feature writer for Bangor Metro Magazine.
September 4, 1954
Donna Levin (born September 4, 1954) is a San Francisco-based author, editor and writing teacher. She has published the novels Extraordinary Means (Arbor House, 1987), California Street (Simon and Schuster, 1990) and There’s More Than One Way Home (Chickadee Prince Books, 2017). Born in the city of Oakland, California, Levin graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in theater arts, and earned a J.D. from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. Levin taught for many years for the University of California, Berkeley Extension as an instructor in the creative writing department. Levin drew from her experiences as a workshop leader there and at other venues to write two books on the craft of fiction, Get That Novel Started (Writer’s Digest Books, 1992) and Get That Novel Written (Writer’s Digest Books, 1996). Levin’s papers are part of the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University, and her novels are part of the collection of California Fiction in the California State Library. Extraordinary Means is a literary fantasy in which a young woman, although diagnosed in an irreversible coma, is able to observe her family members debate over whether or not to withdraw life support. It is loosely drawn from the real-life controversy surrounding the Karen Ann Quinlan case. California Street, categorized as "romance suspence" by Marilyn Stasio of The New York Times was published at a time when the number of women mystery writers was proliferating. The protagonist is Joel Abramowitz, a compassionate but flawed psychoanalyst who inadvertently becomes involved in the disappearance of one woman and the murder of another. There’s More Than One Way Home is a retelling of Anna Karenina set in contemporary San Francisco. The novel features an autistic son, and is an addition to the new genre of "autism lit."
September 4, 1934
Helga Ruebsamen (4 September 1934 – 8 November 2016) was a Dutch writer. She received the Ferdinand Bordewijk Prijs in 1998 for Het lied en de waarheid.
September 4, 1954
Tyler Stovall (born September 4, 1954) is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of The Rise of the Paris Red Belt. He lives in Berkeley, California.
September 4, 1927
Robert Fossier (4 September 1927 – 25 May 2012) was a French Historian, specializing in the Western Middle Ages.
September 5, 1900
Alice Maria Augusta Ekert Redwood (born September 5, 1900 in Hamburg as Alice Maria Augusta Ekert, died on 17 June 1995 in London) was a German writer. She was the daughter of the British export businessman Maximilian Ekert, of Swedish-Russian origin, and his German-Jewish wife Hedwig Mendelson, In 1920 Alice Ekert married the dentist Ludwig Redwood. And during the 1920s she published her first poems. In 1933, Ekert emigrated with her husband to London. Later, in 1939, the family moved to Bangkok. The stay in Bangkok lasted until 1952. Ekert also traveled extensively in Asia, Australia and the Caribbean. In 1952 she returned with her husband to Hamburg. She worked as a journalist before becoming a novelist and writer of travel books. After the death of her husband in 1959, Ekert moved to London, where she lived until her death in Hampstead. She is buried at Highgate Cemetery in London. Her first novel, RICE FROM SILVER BOWLS, was an international bestseller that has been translated into numerous languages. Many of her novels are set in exotic surroundings, and were great commercial successes, especially in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. In total, her works have sold more than three million copies worldwide. Critics and their works have not always agreed as to the literary merit of her works, and have pointed to clichéd romance and a certain ‘English’ dry humor to support their dismissal of her work.
September 5, 1940
MONTSERRAT FONTES has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities for study on Faulkner, O’Connor, and McCullers. Her roots in Mexican culture are deep. Her maternal grandfather, a presidential candidate there, was executed in 1927, while her paternal grandfather was with President Venustiano Carranza when Carranza was murdered. Her grandmother’s ranch in Sonora was burned by Pancho Villa no less than three times. Fontes grew up in a border town in Texas and now lives near Los Angeles where she teaches high school.
September 5, 1905
Arthur Koestler CBE (5 September 1905, Budapest – 3 March 1983, London) was an author of essays, novels and autobiographies. Koestler was born in Budapest but, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. His early career was in journalism. In 1931 Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany but, disillusioned by Stalinist atrocities, he resigned from it in 1938 and in 1940 published a devastating anti-totalitarian novel, DARKNESS AT NOON, which propelled him to international fame. Over the next 43 years, Koestler espoused many political causes and wrote novels, biographies, and numerous essays. In 1968, he was awarded the prestigious Sonning Prize ‘for outstanding contribution to European culture’ and, in 1972, he was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE). In 1976, Koestler was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and, three years later, with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia in its terminal stages. He committed suicide along with his wife in 1983 in London.
September 5, 1936
Jonathan Kozol (born September 5, 1936) is an American writer, educator, and activist, best known for his books on public education in the United States.
September 5, 1920
Jean Lartéguy (5 September 1920 – 23 February 2011) was the nom de plume of Jean Pierre Lucien Osty, a French writer, journalist, and former soldier. He was born in 1920 in Maisons-Alfort, Val-de-Marne and died in 2011. Larteguy is credited with first envisioning the "ticking time bomb" scenario in his 1960 novel Les centurions. Lartéguy was born into what he called "one of those families of poor mountain peasants whose names are found inscribed on war memorials, but not in history books." Both his father and uncle had served in the First World War. With his country conquered by the Germans, Lartéguy escaped from France into Spain in March 1942. He remained there for nine months and spent time in a Franquist jail before joining the Free French Forces as an officer in the 1st Commando Group (1er groupe de commandos). During the war, he fought in Italy; Vosges and Belfort, France; and Germany. He remained on active duty for seven years until becoming a captain in the reserves in order to enter the field of journalism. Lartéguy received numerous military awards, including the Légion d'honneur, the Croix de guerre 1939-1945, and the Croix de guerre T.O.E. After his military service, Lartéguy worked as a war correspondent, particularly for the magazine Paris Match. He covered conflicts in Azerbaijan, Korea, Palestine, Indochina, Algeria, and Vietnam. In pursuit of a story at the start of the Korean War, Lartéguy volunteered for the French Battalion and was wounded by an enemy hand grenade during the Battle of Heartbreak Ridge. In Latin America, he reported on various revolutions and insurgencies, and in 1967 encountered Che Guevara shortly before his capture and execution. In the July 1967 issue of Paris Match, Lartéguy wrote a major article entitled "Les Guerilleros", where he wrote: "At a time when Cuban revolutionaries want to create Vietnams all over the world, the Americans run the risk of finding their own Algeria in Latin America." In 1955, he received the Albert Londres Prize for journalism. His experiences as a soldier and war correspondent influenced his writing. Some of the most emphasized topics in his writing are decolonization, nationalism, the expansion of Communism, the state of post-war French society, and the unglamorous nature of war. His novel Les chimères noires evokes the role played by Roger Trinquier during the Katanga Crisis. Published in 1963 it portrays vividly the chaos of civil war in the Congo after the murder of Patrice Lumumba and the conflict between Moise Tshombe's secessionist government and the United Nations Forces. The novel is very critical of Belgian colonialism and is also a reliable expression of European views of Central Africa after independence. Several of his book titles were translated into English, with the most successful being his Algerian War series: The Centurions and The Praetorians. The former was adapted into a major motion picture in 1966, entitled Lost Command and starred Anthony Quinn. Both have been interpreted as Roman a clef glamorizing Vietnam veterans deeply engaged in Algerian politics, such as Marcel Bigeard and Jacques Massu. Also, with his novel The Centurions, Lartéguy is credited with being the first to envision the 'ticking time bomb' scenario, which has regained relevance in recent debates on the use of torture in a counter-terrorism role. His novels have been read by military professionals, including General David Petraeus, in the new context of modern terrorism.
September 5, 1957
Marcel Möring (born Enschede, 5 September 1957) is a Dutch writer. He received the Ferdinand Bordewijk Prijs in 2007 for his novel Dis.
September 5, 1914
Nicanor Segundo Parra Sandoval (5 September 1914 – 23 January 2018) was a Chilean poet, mathematician, and physicist. He is considered one of the most influential poets in spanish language of the 20th century often compared with Pablo Neruda. Parra described himself as an "anti-poet," due to his distaste for standard poetic pomp and function; after recitations he would exclaim "Me retracto de todo lo dicho" ("I take back everything I said"). Parra, the son of a schoolteacher, was born in 1914 in San Fabián de Alico, Chile, near Chillán in southern Chile. He comes from the artistically prolific Parra family of performers, musicians, artists, and writers. His sister, Violeta Parra, was a folk singer, as was his brother Roberto Parra Sandoval. In 1933, he entered the Instituto Pedagógico of the University of Chile, and qualified as a teacher of mathematics and physics in 1938, one year after his first book, Cancionero sin Nombre, appeared. After teaching in Chilean secondary schools, in 1943 he enrolled in Brown University in the United States to study physics. In 1948, he attended Oxford University to study cosmology. He returned to Chile as a professor at the Universidad de Chile in 1946. Since 1952, Parra has been professor of theoretical physics in Santiago and has read his poetry in England, France, Russia, Mexico, Cuba, and the United States. He has published several books. Parra chooses to leave behind the conventions of poetry; his poetic language renounces the refinement of most Latin American literature and adopts a more colloquial tone. His first collection, Poemas y Antipoemas (1954) is a classic of Latin American literature, one of the most influential Spanish poetry collections of the twentieth century. It is cited as an inspiration by American Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg. On December 1, 2011, Parra won the Spanish Ministry of Culture's Cervantes Prize, the most important literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world. On June 7, 2012, he won the Premio Iberoamericano de Poesía Pablo Neruda.
September 5, 1896
The son of a well-to-do railway building contractor, Heimito von Doderer was born and has lived most of his life in Vienna, is considered Austria’s most eminent novelist. He was a prisoner of war in Russia in World War I, fought in Hitler’s Luftwaffe in World War II. Of his ten books of fiction and five other works, The Demons, meticulously translated by Richard and Clara Winston, is the first to see English. Gravid Times. Von Doderer knows his city intimately and writes of a time when that city was politically gravid. Yet his people have virtually no political awareness. The two political riots in the book do not grow out of the book, they erupt into it. In fact, Von Doderer’s judgment on his people may be that, ignoring the urgencies of their time, they failed to safeguard the best things in it. But half a million is a lot of words in which to make that point obscurely. One wag has dubbed the book ‘the Ninth Symphony of Viennese gossip.’ But it does not resemble Beethoven as much as it does another Viennese, Gustav Mahler. Like Mahler’s symphonies, the book is ambitious, traditional though not conservative, often beautiful, but long rather than large. – TIME Magazine, Friday, Oct. 13, 1961. Heimito von Doderer seems to personify the classic image of the writer. He never earned his living through a ‘prosaic’ profession but struggled for many unsuccessful and difficult years in his chosen vocation before finally, and somewhat late in the day, achieving a breakthrough with his epic novel Die Strudlhofstiege (‘The Strudlhof Steps’). In 1956 he continued the theme of this work in his masterpiece Die Dämonen (The Demons), was in 1957 awarded the Austrian State Prize for Literature and, regarded as one of the great Austrian novelists, received numerous distinctions and requests for lecture tours right up to the time of his death on 23 December 1966 following an unsuccessfull operation for cancer. From the outset, he saw himself as an aristocratic dandy and enjoyed posing for photos as an archer at his parents’ home at the Riegelhof in Prein on the Rax. He always referred to his modest lodgings, which he decorated with quivers and bows, as his ‘studios.’ World War I, in which the calvary officer served in the infantry, focused his vague, literary aspiration she studied history and received a doctorate in 1925on one sole aim: he wanted to become a writer and would in the future subordinate all other activities to the achievement of this goal. From 1916 to 1920, during his four years as a prisoner of war in Siberia and cut off from the outside world, he was able to concentrate on what was important to him because, despite all the hardships he had to endure, his position as an officer meant that he received the basic essentials. As a writer with no fixed income he often had to forgo material things. Without the support of his parents he would barely have been able to survive into the fifties. He was 32 before he moved into his first rented apartment. Sometimes he shared these small lodgings with other artists such as, for example, the studio at Buchfeldgasse 6, in Vienna’s 8th district, that he shared from September 1938 with the painter Albert Paris Gütersloh, a man whom Doderer much admired and whose theories on art he expounded in his essay Der Fall Gütersloh (‘The Gütersloh Case’). The site of his last lodgings, a modest two-room apartment that he moved into in 1956, is marked by a memorial plaque and, just down the road, in the same street, there are Doderer memorial rooms in the municipal district office for Alsergrund, Vienna’s 9th district. (Franz Carl) Heimito von Doderer was born on 5 September 1896 as the sixth and last child of the wealthy Viennese architect and building contractor Wilhelm von Doderer. The Doderer family was also related by marriage to Heinrich von Ferstel, one of the leading architects of buildings along Vienna’s Ringstrasse. When in 1869 Ferstel took over the planning of the Wartholz, a hunting lodge in Reichenau, he often went hiking with Doderer’s grandfather through the Rax, Schneeberg and Semmering mountains, which soon became an elegant resort area frequented by the Viennese ‘Ringstraße society.’ It was here in Prein on the Rax that Carl Wilhelm von Doderer found the plot of land on which, at the turn of the century, he was to build the Riegelhof as a summer retreat for his large family. In the Strudlhofstiege Doderer transports the reader back in time to the atmosphere of this ‘rural fin de siécle’ and is unique in capturing the magic of the mountain scenery; the life of the jeunesse dorée, their games of tennis with the mountains in the background and their hikes through the Rax, which were given to reflection. The grade school pupil René Stangeler, a barely disguised self-portrait of Doderer himself, observes the other members of the family, his sisters and their erotic experiences, his parents, and their guests, who were only too glad to exchange the heat of the Viennese summer for the cool air and rural yet refined atmosphere of the area against the magnificent backdrop of the Rax. It seems strange that Doderer only began writing the Strudlhofstiege, in which he portrayed the aura of the Ringstraße society, in 1946. With this novel, published in 1951, Doderer established his reputation as a writer. By this time, Doderer was already 55 years old. The late recognition of his works was endangered through his brief membership of the then outlawed Nazi Party in Austria, which he evidently joined less for ideological reasons than from opportunist motives, in order to gain admission to the Reichsschrifttumskammer, the Association of Writers of the time. However, Doderer soon became disenchanted with the party and left it in order to seek spiritual refuge in Catholicism. After the war he was ostrasized for several years because of this dark episode on his life, although Monsignore Otto Mauer, known as the ‘artists’ pastor’ and himself beyond any shadow of a doubt anti-Nazi, had already spoken out on his behalf in 1946. During the first five years following the war, Doderer published his works under the pseudonym René Stangeler. While his works show frequent indications of his undeniably conservative attitude, there is no evidence of any fascist views. His membership in the Nazi party may have been one of the reasons why he never received the Nobel Prize. On the cover flaps of his great work Die Dämonen (The Demons) the following text appears: ‘The Demons is one of the most important novels about city life to be written in this century. Figures from the Viennese upper middle class and the nobility, workers and intellectuals, mingle with characters from the demi-monde and the underworld and are woven into an ambivalent social web. Behind the elegant charms of tea parties and tennis tournaments lurk insecurity, political instability and sexual dissoluteness. The action is squeezed between the autumn of 1926 and the summer of 1927 and, from the first moment on, the events lead up to the burning down of the Ministry of Justice, to which Doderer refers as a ‘crushing blow for Austrian freedom.’ Although the destinies of the individual characters are connected mostly indirectly with this historic event, it is part of Doderer’s creative composition that several of their live’s problems are solved on this day. Doderer himself regarded The Demons, on which he worked from 1931 to 1940 and then again from 1951 to 1956, as his main work and constructed Die Strudlhofstiege (1951) especially to serve as a ‘ramp’ for it. In The Demons we meet many characters from the Strudlhofstiege again but the novel also describes the fire at the Ministry of Justice, which marked the beginning of an increasingly serious conflict between the Conservative and Socialist parties of the time, culminating in the civil war of 1934 and the ensuing authoritarianism of the corporate state. Alongside the gripping story a creative web of multiple strands which are then unravelled Doderer,as in all his novels, weaves in a second layer of philosophical, astonishingly direct reflections. For his own orientation through the complicated network of the plot, he prepared ‘blueprints’ on a piece of paper, which he then fixed onto a wooden board. Doderer’s attitude toward women was very unusual, not to say bizarre. Although he was married twice, he continued to lead the life of a bachelor. In his first marriage to Gusti Hasterlik in 1930 although this was preceded by a relationship of many years’ standing, the couple never actually lived together under one roof. His second marriage, to Emma Maria Thoma, was no less strange. He met her during the two years he spent in Dachau, at that time a suburb of Munich and popular with artists and writers; only later did it achieve tragic fame as a Nazi concentration camp. His wife stayed in the Bavarian town of Landshut while Doderer returned to Vienna and resumed his bachelor existence. During his visits to Maria he again assumed the role of a husband. Between visits, his obsession for ‘FLs’ (his abbreviation for ‘fat ladies’) led him to seek them through newspaper advertisements, together with his nephew Kurt Meyer. He even submitted them to an ‘examination,’ the results of which feature in the chapter entitled ‘Fat Ladies’ in The Demons. Whereas the ‘fat ladies’ remained hidden from the outside world, in Vienna he was often seen in the company of Dorothea Zeeman, a young writer thirteen years his junior. His wife and his girlfriend were to hound each other with mutual antipathy until well after Doderer’s death. Dorothea Zeeman refers to this relationship, albeit somewhat tactlessly at times, with the ‘gentlemen riders and feudal lords of former times’ out of ‘leather and lavender’ in her book Jungfrau und Reptil. Most of the female characters portrayed in Doderer’s novels are no ‘dumb blondes’ but vivacious, elegant, capricious and self-assured women, in complete contrast to the ideal of womanhood propagated at the time of his great works and typified particulary in the ‘Heimatfilm,’ a sentimental film genre set in a regional background and popular in Austria in the fifties. Recognition of familiar people and places forms part of the enjoyment for Doderer’s readers, especially for those familiar with the mountains of the Semmering and Rax in Lower Austria and, in Vienna, the two neighboring districts of Döbling (here Doderer lived in seven different lodgings), which Doderer referred to as the ‘garden suburbs,’ and Alsergrund in the city’s 9th district. An itinerary for Doderer fans would include Café Brioni, Doderer’s favorite haunt in Alsergrund, near today’s Franz Josef Railway Station, the twin houses named the ‘Miserowsky’schen Zwillinge’ in the Porzellangasse and, naturally, the Strudlhof Steps in a small side street not far from Doderer’s last apartment in the Währingerstrasse. It is here that the strands of the story of the same name all come together. In the meantime, the Strudlhof Steps have become a magnet for initiated Doderer readers. Doderer’s novels are also romans à clef. The main characters in the Strudlhofstiege were drawn from his own immediate surroundings. His vivacious and temperamental sister Helga reappears in the novel as Etelka, his sister Astri, of whom he was particularly fond, is encountered as Asta. Ernö Hauer, Helga’s Hungarian diplomat husband, becomes Pista Grauermann, while his friend, Countess Lotte Paumgarten, is portrayed as the young violinist Quapp and Doderer’s short-term wife, Gusti Hasterlik, appears as Grete Siebenschein. Doderer himself, as already mentioned, is disguised as René Stangeler. With their local color and spirit of the age, the Strudlhofstiege and Die Dämonen, which was to become a great historical novel dealing with the events around the fire at the Ministry of Justice on 15 July 1927, both reflect the typically Austrian mood and flavor of the cultivated and wealthy Viennese society of the Ringstrasse era. Doderer masterfully creates a world rich in details and emotions, which succeeds in fully enveloping his readers. For Doderer, too, was part of that world, even in the fifties, which had long since heralded the dawning of a new age, and when he, a gentleman of the old school, had already become an anachronistic figure. But precisely this feature made him so distinctive..
September 5, 1908
Josué de Castro, born Josué Apolônio de Castro (5 September 1908 in Recife – 24 September 1973 in Paris), was a Brazilian physician, expert on nutrition, geographer, writer, public administrator, and activist against world hunger. His book Geopolitics of Hunger was granted with The Franklin D. Roosevelt Foundation Award, in 1952. Two years later, he received the International Peace Prize. He taught at the University of Brazil (today's UFRJ) and was chairman of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). He was also a member of the Brazilian parliament and a diplomat. His political rights came to an end with the military coup of 1964, when he moved to France. For many years he was president of the Association Médicale Internationale pour l’Etude des Conditions de Vie et de Santé and member of other international organizations. He taught at Paris 8 University until his death.
September 5, 1958
Yevgenia Markovna Albats (born 5 September 1958) is a Russian investigative journalist, political scientist, writer and radio host. As of 2011, she works as a chief editor of The New Times magazine. She holds a position in the leadership of the Russian Jewish Congress.
September 5, 1966
Bliss Broyard is the author of My Father, Dancing (1999), a New York Times notable book of the year, and One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life -- A Story of Race & Family Secrets (2007). Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthology and The Art of the Essay, and she is a frequent contributor to Elle Magazine and The New York Times Book Review. Broyard lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughter.
September 5, 1953
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON is Professor of Greek at California State University, Fresno, and is the author of THE WESTERN WAY OF WAR.
September 5, 1935
Ward S. Just (born September 5, 1935 in Michigan City, Indiana) is an American writer. He is the author of 17 novels and numerous short stories.
September 5, 1950
Nanci Kincaid is an American novelist who wrote a short story collection titled Pretending the Bed Is a Raft, as well as novels Crossing Blood, Balls, Verbena, and As Hot As It Was You Ought to Thank Me. The film My Life Without Me was based on the title story in Pretending the Bed Is a Raft.
September 5, 1945
Roxie Munro has created more than thirty-five books for young readers and fourteen covers for thenbsp; New Yorker . She is an artist who embraces both the old and the new. Her fine art is exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States, and her innovative apps can be found throughout the virtual world.
September 5, 1932
Marilyn Tausend (September 5, 1932 - January. 22, 2018) was born in Colorado Springs, CO, Marilyn lived in and traveled to many parts of the US, as well as the world, her passion for history, culture and food the incentive for her travels. She is well-known as an accomplished author of five Mexican cookbooks, one of which earned the Julia Child Cookbook award, and for the culinary tours she led to Mexico, but Marilyn's passions reached far beyond food. Marilyn was an active and dedicated Democrat, volunteering countless hours to causes dear to her heart at both the state and national level. Marilyn was also passionate about plants, and could always be found on a grey winter day, peering through catalogues, planning for the arrival of spring. A visit to the gardens of her Gig Harbor home attests to her joy and companionship with plants.
September 6, 1925
Andrea Calogero Camilleri (6 September 1925 – 17 July 2019) was an Italian writer. Originally from Porto Empedocle, Sicily, Camilleri began university studies in the Faculty of Literature at the University of Palermo, but did not complete his degree. meanwhile publishing poems and short stories. From 1948 to 1950 he studied stage and film direction at the Silvio D'Amico Academy of Dramatic Arts (Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatica) and began to take on work as a director and screenwriter, directing especially plays by Pirandello and Beckett. His parents knew, and were, reportedly, "distant friends" of, Pirandello, as he tells in his essay on Pirandello, Biography of the Changed Son. His most famous works, the Montalbano series, show many Pirandellian elements: for example, the wild olive tree that helps Montalbano think is on stage in his late work The Giants of the Mountain. With RAI, Camilleri worked on several TV productions, such as Le inchieste del commissario Maigret with Gino Cervi. In 1977 he returned to the Academy of Dramatic Arts, holding the chair of Film Direction and occupying it for 20 years. In 1978 Camilleri wrote his first novel Il Corso Delle Cose ("The Way Things Go"). This was followed by Un Filo di Fumo ("A Thread of Smoke") in 1980. Neither of these works enjoyed any significant amount of popularity. In 1992, after a long pause of 12 years, Camilleri once more took up novel writing. A new book, La Stagione della Caccia ("The Hunting Season") turned out to be a best-seller. In 1994 Camilleri published the first in a long series of novels: La forma dell'Acqua (The Shape of Water) featured the character of Inspector Montalbano, a fractious Sicilian detective in the police force of Vigàta, an imaginary Sicilian town. The series is written in Italian but with a substantial sprinkling of Sicilian phrases and grammar. The name Montalbano is a homage to the Spanish writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán; the similarities between Montalban's Pepe Carvalho and Camilleri's fictional detective are noteworthy. Both writers make use of their protagonists' gastronomic preferences. This feature provides an interesting quirk which has become something of a fad among his readership even in mainland Italy. The TV adaptation of Montalbano's adventures, starring Luca Zingaretti, further increased Camilleri's popularity to such a point that in 2003 Camilleri's home town, Porto Empedocle – on which Vigàta is modelled – took the extraordinary step of changing its official name to that of Porto Empedocle Vigàta, no doubt with an eye to capitalising on the tourism possibilities thrown up by the author's work. On his website, Camilleri refers to the engaging and multi-faceted character of Montalbano as a "serial killer of characters," meaning that he has developed a life of his own and demands great attention from his author, to the demise of other potential books and different personages. Camilleri added that he writes a Montalbano novel every so often just so that the character will be appeased and allow him to work on other stories. In 2012, Camilleri's The Potter's Field (translated by Stephen Sartarelli) was announced as the winner of the 2012 Crime Writers' Association International Dagger. The announcement was made on 5 July 2012 at the awards ceremony held at One Birdcage Walk in London. In his last years Camilleri lived in Rome where he worked as a TV and theatre director. About 10 million copies of his novels have been sold to date and are becoming increasingly popular in the UK (where BBC Four broadcast the Montalbano TV series from mid-2011), Australia and North America. In addition to the degree of popularity brought him by the novels, Andrea Camilleri became even more of a media icon thanks to the parodies aired on an RAI radio show, where popular comedian, TV host and impressionist Fiorello presents him as a raspy voiced, caustic character, madly in love with cigarettes and smoking, since in Italy, Camilleri was well known for being a heavy smoker of cigarettes. He considered himself a "non-militant atheist". On 17 June 2019, Camilleri suffered a heart attack. He was admitted to hospital in a critical condition. He died on 17 July 2019. He has been buried in the Protestant Cemetery of Rome.
September 6, 1860
Jane Addams (September 6, 1860 – May 21, 1935) was a pioneer American settlement social worker, public philosopher, sociologist, author, and leader in women's suffrage and world peace.
September 6, 1936
BRUCE ARNOLD (born 6 September 1936 in London), novelist and biographer, is the literary Editor of the Irish independent, and has worked as a journalist in Ireland for the past thirty years. He lives in Dublin.
September 6, 1950
GRETCHEN GERZINA teaches at Vassar College, New York. Of her last book, a life of the painter Dora Carrington, The Times of London wrote ‘fascinating’ and the New Statesman ‘a heady story . . . fascinating, psychologically sympathetic and well researched.’
September 6, 1920
BARBARA GUEST (1920–2006) published over twenty volumes of poetry, and earned awards including the Robert Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Society of America.
September 6, 1921
CARMEN LAFORET (September 6, 1921, Barcelona, Spain - February 28, 2004, Madrid, Spain) had a profound impact on Spanish literature. Her debut novel, Nada, was awarded the first Premio Nadal in 1944-She also wrote a collection of short stories and five other novels, including Al doblar la esquina (Around the Block) and La mujer nueva (The New Woman), which won Spain’s National Prize for Literature in 1955.
September 6, 1950
Béatrice Longuenesse (born September 6, 1950 )is a Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University. Her work focuses on Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and the philosophy of mind and language. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
September 6, 1965
Christopher Nolan (6 September 1965 – 20 February 2009) was an Irish poet and author. He grew up in Mullingar, Ireland, but later moved to Dublin to attend college. He was educated at the Central Remedial Clinic School, Mount Temple Comprehensive School and at Trinity College, Dublin. His first book was published when he was fifteen. He won the Whitbread Book Award for his autobiography in 1988. He was also awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters in the UK, the medal of excellence from the United Nations Society of Writers, and a Person of the Year award in Ireland.
September 6, 1880 or 1883
Joel Augustus Rogers (September 6, 1880 or 1883 – March 26, 1966) was a Jamaican author, journalist, and historian who contributed to the history of Africa and the African diaspora, especially the history of African Americans in the United States. His research spanned the academic fields of history, sociology and anthropology. He challenged prevailing ideas about race, demonstrated the connections between civilizations, and traced African achievements. He was one of the greatest popularizers of African history in the 20th century.
September 6, 1944
Barbara Summers (September 6, 1944 - November 2014) was an American writer and educator who had also had a long and successful career as a fashion model, working for 17 years with Ford Models, one of America’s top agencies. Her 1998 book, Skin Deep, the story of Black models in America and abroad, is a definitive work on black women in the modeling industry. She spent more a decade interviewing fashion professionals on three continents to record their experiences.
September 6, 1933
Dai Vaughan was born on September 6, 1933 in Kingston-Upon-Hull, East Riding of Yorkshire, England as David Vaughan Jones. He is known for his work on Decision: British Communism (1978), Mafia No! (1967) and Orient: Club for a Fiver (1995). He died on June 6, 2012 in London, England.
September 6, 1972
China Tom Miéville (born 6 September 1972) is an English fantasy fiction author, comic writer, political activist and academic. He often describes his work as weird fiction and allied to the loosely associated movement of writers sometimes called New Weird. Miéville has won numerous awards, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award (three times), the British Fantasy Award (twice), the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel (four times) and Best Science Fiction Novel, Locus Awards for Best Novelette and Best Young Adult Books, as well as the Hugo, Kitschies and World Fantasy Awards. Miéville is active in left-wing politics in the UK and has previously been a member of the International Socialist Organization (US), and the short-lived International Socialist Network.
September 7, 1944
Martin Booth (7 September 1944 – 12 February 2004) was a prolific British novelist and poet. He also worked as a teacher and screenwriter, and was the founder of the Sceptre Press. Booth was born in Lancashire, but was brought up mainly in Hong Kong, where he first attended Kowloon Junior School, the Peak School then King George V School, and left in 1964. He made his name as a poet and as a publisher, producing elegant volumes by British and American poets, including slim volumes of work by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. His own books of verse include The Knotting Sequence (1977), named for the village in which Booth was living at the time. The book features a series of lyrics in which he seeks links between the present and the Saxon past, and the man called Knot who gave his name to the village. Booth also accumulated a library of contemporary verse, which allowed him to produce anthologies and lectures. In the late 1970s Booth turned mainly to writing fiction. His first successful novel, Hiroshima Joe, was published in 1985. The book is based on what he heard from a man he met as a boy in Hong Kong and contains passages set in that city during the Second World War. Booth was a veteran traveller who retained an enthusiasm for flying, also expressed in his poems, such as ‘Kent Says’ and In Killing the Moscs. His interest in observing and studying wildlife resulted in a book about Jim Corbett, a big-game hunter and expert on man-eating tigers. Many of Booth's works were linked to the British imperial past in China, Hong Kong and Central Asia. Booth was also fond of the United States, where he had many poet friends, and of Italy, which features in many of his later poems and in his novel A Very Private Gentleman (1990). These interests form a thread through his later novels, travel books and biographies. Booth's novel Industry Of Souls was shortlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize. Booth died of cancer in Devon in 2004, shortly after completing Gweilo, a memoir of his Hong Kong childhood written for his own children. The 2010 film The American, starring George Clooney, was based on his novel A Very Private Gentleman.
September 7, 1941
Alexandra Day (born 1941) is an American children’s book author. Alexandra Day is a pseudonym; her real name is Sandra Louise Woodward Darling. She is the author of Good Dog, Carl, which tells the story of a Rottweiler named Carl who looks after a baby named Madeleine. The book was first published in 1985 by Day’s own publishing company, Green Tiger Press. Good Dog, Carl has been followed by a whole series of popular Carl books, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Day was born in 1941 in Cincinnati, Ohio. She and her husband, Harold Darling, founded a publishing company, Green Tiger Press, in 1970. Meanwhile, Day began a career in illustration, and illustrated her first book in 1983: The Teddy Bears' Picnic, based on a popular children's song by Jimmy Kennedy. Day and her husband live in Seattle, Washington.
September 7, 1870
Aleksandr Ivanovich Kuprin (7 September 1870 in the village of Narovchat in the Penza Oblast – August 25, 1938 in Leningrad) was a Russian writer, pilot, explorer and adventurer who is perhaps best known for his story The Duel (1905).
September 7, 1961
Lois-Ann Yamanaka (born September 7, 1961 in Ho’olehua, Moloka’i, Hawaii) is an American poet and novelist from Hawaii. Many of her critically acclaimed literary works are written in Hawaiian Pidgin, and some of her writing has dealt with controversial ethnic issues. In particular, her works confront themes of Asian American families and the local culture of Hawaii. Lois-Ann Yamanaka was born September 7, 1961 in Ho’olehua, Molokai, Hawaii. Her parents, Harry and Jean Yamanaka, raised her and her four younger sisters in the sugar plantation town of Pahala. Both of her parents were school teachers, though her father later became a taxidermist. Following in her parents footsteps, Lois-Ann also joined them in their passion for education: In 1983, she received a Bachelor’s Degree, and in 1987 her Master's Degree, both in Education at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Yamanaka then went on to become an English and Language Arts resource teacher. Inspired by her own students' honesty demonstrated within poetry assignments, she began writing on her own. Little did she know she would become a breakthrough writer who would receive significant criticism after expressing minority and racial issues experienced by herself and others alike within the Pidgin speaking community of Hawaii. She completed her first book, Saturday Night at the Pahala Theater, in 1993, which, was coined ‘'witty' and 'street-smart'‘ by Kiana Davenport in Women's Review of Books. The novel, ‘composed of four verse novellas narrated by working-class Hawaiian teenagers . . . explore(d) such subjects as ethnic identity, sexual awakening, drug use, and abusive relationships.’ Lawrence Chua, of the Voice Literary Supplement, wrote, ‘Her poetry is enabled by its elegant structure as much as its indolent diction. Saturday Night is not a lonely specimen of street life but a bold push at the borders of meaning and memory.’ After its publication in 1993, Saturday Night at the Pahala Theater received several awards including the Pushcart Prize for poetry and later, the fiction award given by the Association for Asian American Studies. In 1996, Yamanaka’s second book, Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers, again told through Pidgin, was a coming-of-age story made up of, ‘a series of connected vignettes’, that, ‘examin(ed) larger issues of class and ethnicity’. Lauren Belfer, of the New York Times Book Review, claimed the book to be, ‘somewhat impenetrable’...leaving ‘haunting images’ in the minds of readers. Again in 1997, Yamanaka completed her third book, Blu’s Hanging 'which created even more of an uproar among Asian American critics. As the novel treated characters of both Filipino and Japanese American backgrounds within the Hawaiian landscape, she was given the Asian American Studies National Book Award in 1998, however, it was annulled almost immediately after because of her lack of censorship in a stereotypical context. Other well-known Asian American authors such as Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston emerged in support of Yamanaka during the controversy. The work was deemed, ‘a well-wrought but painful work’ by Anna Quan Leon in the Library Journal. In defending herself and work, Yamanaka spoke out against criticism in telling, ‘Newsweek reporter Donna Foote that 'the distinction between the narrator and the author is not being made'‘. Following Blu's Hanging, Yamanaka published, ''Heads by Harry', which dealt with homosexuality and gender identity issues. The book received mixed reviews; ‘to some extent, Yamanaka has replaced racism with sexism and homophobia, 'safer topics'‘, concluded Nation reviewer Mindy Pennybacker. However, Michael Porter, the New York Times Book Review critic applauded Yamanaka's efforts in stating, ‘{she} delivers a precise look at this vibrant 'Japanese-American' culture yet still speaks to anyone who has experienced the joy, security and small humiliations of family life’. Name Me Nobody'' was her fourth book geared towards a much more adolescent-based audience. In illustrating the difficulties of young 'teen hood' and the surrounding superficialities, the ‘'vignettes of young girlhood praised for their vivid images and expert distillation of language' related a Horn Book reviewer...'Yamanaka provides young adult literature with a fresh and welcome voice ‘noteworthy for its complexity and richness'.’ In 2004, Silent Years, a short film based on Yamanaka's screenplay was released. Silent Years is the story of a thirteen-year-old girl who finds herself caught between her abusive uncle and older boyfriend. Based upon two poems from her collection, Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre, is described as a ‘brutal coming-of-age story’. The film was locally produced and directed by Honolulu-native and University of Southern California film school graduate, James Sereno. In 2006, Yamanaka explored a spiritual approach in the novel, Behold the Many', which is set on the island of Oahu. In the book, a young woman is haunted by ghosts which ends in what a Kirkus Review contributor called a, ‘beautifully tragic’ outcome. Carol Haggas, of Booklist wrote the book was a, ‘richly atmospheric novel which paints a chillingly spectral portrait of souls tormented by love and guilt.’ Lois-Ann Yamanaka is currently married to John Inferrera. In between writing, she and her husband continue to teach. Together they have a son, John jr. and live in Honolulu, Hawaii. Lois-Ann also is co-owner of a writing school, Na`au. While Yamanaka believes that her characters ‘know the sound of their own voice,’ and admits to being highly inspired by her own experiences growing up amongst Hawaii life and culture, including the pidgin language, she also attributes much of her work to the other authors who have inspired and influenced her. In an interview, Yamanaka states what a huge influence reading William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury has had on her. In no way does Yamanaka compare her work to that of Faulkner, only that such works help keep her humble and rooted. She describes her experience as, ‘In the presence of this genius, I felt embarrassed.’ Yamanaka also cites June Jordan, Ai, Thulanie Davis, and Jessica Hagedorn as major inspirations in terms of their use of voice in poetry. In general, Yamanaka counts herself lucky to be in the same category as other female Asian American writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan.
September 7, 1950
David Henry Bradley, Jr. (born September 7, 1950, in Bedford, Pennsylvania) is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon and author of South Street and the The Chaneysville Incident, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1982. The Chaneysville Incident, inspired in part by the real-life discovery of the graves of a group of runaway slaves on a farm near Chaneysville in Bedford County, PA, where Bradley was born, also earned Bradley a 1982 Academy Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Bradley has published essays, book reviews, and interviews in periodicals and newspapers such as Esquire, Redbook, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker. He also appeared on the June 12, 2011 episode of 60 Minutes in a segment regarding the censored version of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
September 7, 1967
Nathaniel Deutsch is a professor at The University of California, Santa Cruz, where he is also the Co-Director of the Center for Jewish Studies and the Director of the Institute for Humanities Research. Deutsch attended the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. as well as his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees. Deutsch was formerly a professor at Swarthmore College, a visiting professor at Stanford University, and the Workmen's Circle/Dr. Emanuel Patt Visiting Professor in Eastern European Jewish Studies at the YIVO Institute. In 2006, Deutsch was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006 to support his research on the Jewish ethnographer S. An-sky. In 2007, The New York Times ran an op-ed piece in which Deutsch called for the Bush administration to take immediate action to preserve the Iraqi Mandean community.
September 7, 1952
René Vázquez Diaz is considered one of the most gifted Cuban writers in exile. He is the author of THE IMAGINARY ERA (1986), BELOVED TRAITOR (1993), and FREDRIKA IN PARADISE (2000). He was born in Cuba in 1952. As an adolescent he distinguished himself at a selective center for gifted young scholars, which gave him the opportunity to study Marine Engineering in Poland in 1973. In spite of a secure professional career, he followed his literary bent and requested asylum in Sweden, where he would begin a new life. David F. Davis resides in Los Angeles, where he teaches languages and translates literary works. Among his recent translations is STEPS UNDER THE WATER, by Alicia Kozameh (University of California Press).
September 7, 1917
Jacob Lawrence (September 7, 1917 – June 9, 2000) was an African-American painter known for his portrayal of African-American life. But not only was he a painter, storyteller, and interpreter; he also was an educator. Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamic cubism," though by his own account the primary influence was not so much French art as the shapes and colors of Harlem. He brought the African-American experience to life using blacks and browns juxtaposed with vivid colors. He also taught and spent 15 years as a professor at the University of Washington. Lawrence is among the best-known 20th-century African-American painters. He was 23 years old when he gained national recognition with his 60-panel Migration Series, painted on cardboard. The series depicted the Great Migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North. A part of this series was featured in a 1941 issue of Fortune Magazine. The collection is now held by two museums: the odd-numbered paintings are on exhibit in the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the even-numbered are on display at MOMA in New York. Lawrence's works are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Phillips Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and Reynolda House Museum of American Art. He is widely known for his modernist illustrations of everyday life as well as epic narratives of African American history and historical figures.
September 7, 1917
Jacob Lawrence (September 7, 1917 – June 9, 2000) was an African-American painter known for his portrayal of African-American life. But not only was he a painter, storyteller, and interpreter; he also was an educator. Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamic cubism," though by his own account the primary influence was not so much French art as the shapes and colors of Harlem. He brought the African-American experience to life using blacks and browns juxtaposed with vivid colors. He also taught and spent 15 years as a professor at the University of Washington. Lawrence is among the best-known 20th-century African-American painters. He was 23 years old when he gained national recognition with his 60-panel Migration Series, painted on cardboard. The series depicted the Great Migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North. A part of this series was featured in a 1941 issue of Fortune Magazine. The collection is now held by two museums: the odd-numbered paintings are on exhibit in the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the even-numbered are on display at MOMA in New York. Lawrence's works are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Phillips Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and Reynolda House Museum of American Art. He is widely known for his modernist illustrations of everyday life as well as epic narratives of African American history and historical figures. Elizabeth Hutton Turner is a professor of Modern Art at University of Virginia.
September 7, 1727
William Smith (September 7, 1727 – May 14, 1803) was the first provost of the College of Philadelphia, which became the University of Pennsylvania. He was also the founder of Washington College in Chestertown Maryland, and St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. Martin West was director of Fort Ligonier, a museum and restored/reconstructed British fort in western Pennsylvania, from 1981 until retiring in 2011. He served on the Advisory Council of George Washington Scholars at Mount Vernon and has been an adjunct lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh (Oakland) and St. Vincent College. He annotated Washington's autobiographical "Re- marks" for George Washington Remembers: Reflections on the French and Indian War and contributed to The Life of George Rogers Clark, 1752-1818: Triumph and Tragedies and The Great Allegheny Passage. West is a graduate of Miami University and holds a M.A. in public history from Wright State University.
September 8, 1474
Ludovico Ariosto (8 September 1474 – 6 July 1533) was an Italian poet. He is best known as the author of the romance epic Orlando Furioso (1516). The poem, a continuation of Matteo Maria Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, describes the adventures of Charlemagne, Orlando, and the Franks as they battle against the Saracens with diversions into many sideplots. Ariosto composed the poem in the ottava rima rhyme scheme and introduced narrative commentary throughout the work.
September 8, 1933
Michael Frayn is a celebrated British playwright and is also the author of eight novels (including HEADLONG and SPIES) and three screenplays. He lives in London.
September 8, 1945
Daniel H. La Botz is a prominent American labor union activist, academic, journalist, and author. He was a co-founder of Teamsters for a Democratic Union and has written extensively on worker rights in the United States and Mexico.
September 8, 1952
Walter F. Morris Jr. is an American cultural preservationist. He is coordinator of Mexican initiatives the NGO Aid to Artisans, based in Hartford, Connecticut. He is a member of the Board of the Pellizzi Collection of Textiles of Chiapas. He is a research associate at the Science Museum of Minnesota. He is program coordinator for lead-free pottery of the United States Agency for International Development.
September 8, 1954
Jon Scieszka (born September 8, 1954) is an American children's writer, best known for picture books created with the illustrator Lane Smith. He is also a nationally recognized reading advocate, and the founder of Guys Read – a web-based literacy program for boys whose mission is ‘to help boys become self-motivated, lifelong readers.’ In 2008 was named the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature by the Librarian of Congress. His Time Warp Trio series, which teaches kids history, has been adapted into a television show.
September 8, 1947
Marianne Wiggins (born 1947) is an American author. She is noted for the unusual characters and storylines in her novels. She has won the Whiting Writers' Award, an NEA award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Wiggins was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Her family was of Greek and Scots ancestry. Her father, a farmer, preached in a conservative Christian church founded by her grandfather. She married at 17, just after graduating from Manheim Township High School and promptly gave birth to a daughter, Lara, whom she raised in Martha’s Vineyard. Lara is now a professional photographer in Los Angeles. Wiggins lived in London for 16 years and for brief stints in Paris, Brussels and Rome. She and Salman Rushdie wed in January 1988. On a book tour in the US, the couple learned on February 14, 1989 that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had ordered Rushdie killed for blasphemy in the book THE SATANIC VERSES. As a result, Wiggins went into protective hiding in Great Britain, along with Rushdie. In 1993, the two divorced. ‘I have lived a really interesting life,’ she told Pamela J. Johnson in July 2006. ‘I haven’t lived it so I can excavate material for my writing.’ She added, ‘I’m a novelist. I don’t have those muscles. It’s not about me. It’s about what I’ve imagined. It’s the universal voice that I want to move forward. That’s my natural voice.’ She currently lives in Los Angeles, California, where she has been in the English department of the University of Southern California since fall, 2005. Wiggins won a Whiting Writer's Award in 1989. Ten authors annually win this award, currently $40,000, not for a specific work, but for exceptional talent and promise. She was a National Book Award Finalist in 2003 for EVIDENCE OF THINGS UNSEEN.
September 8, 1947
Ann Beattie (born September 8, 1947) is an American short story writer and novelist. She has received an award for excellence from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story form. Her work has been compared to that of Alice Adams, J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, and John Updike. She holds an undergraduate degree from American University and a master's degree from the University of Connecticut.
September 8, 1906
Denys Louis de Rougemont (September 8, 1906 – December 6, 1985), known as Denis de Rougemont, was a Swiss writer and cultural theorist who wrote in French. One of the non-conformists of the 1930s, he addressed the perils of totalitarianism from a Christian point of view. After the Second World War, he promoted European federalism.
September 8, 1804
Eduard Friedrich Mörike (8 September 1804 – 4 June 1875) was a German Romantic poet. Mörike was born in Ludwigsburg. His father was Karl Friedrich Mörike (d. 1817), a district medical councilor; his mother was Charlotte Bayer. He attended the Latin school at Ludwigsburg, and the seminary at Urach (1818) where he made the acquaintance of Wilhelm Hartlaub and Wilhelm Waiblinger. He then studied theology at the Seminary of Tübingen where he met Ludwig Bauer, David Friedrich Strauss and F. T. Vischer. He followed an ecclesiastical career, becoming a Lutheran pastor. In 1834 he was appointed pastor of Cleversulzbach near Weinsberg, and, after his early retirement for reasons of health, in 1851 became professor of German literature at the Katharinenstift in Stuttgart. This office he held until his retirement in 1866; but he continued to live at Stuttgart until his death. In what political and social views he espoused, he was monarchist and conservative.
September 8, 1886
Siegfried Loraine Sassoon (8 September 1886 – 1 September 1967) was an English poet, writer, and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches and satirised the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's view, were responsible for a jingoism-fuelled war. Sassoon became a focal point for dissent within the armed forces when he made a lone protest against the continuation of the war in his "Soldier's Declaration" of 1917, culminating in his admission to a military psychiatric hospital; this resulted in his forming a friendship with Wilfred Owen, who was greatly influenced by him. Sassoon later won acclaim for his prose work, notably his three-volume fictionalised autobiography, collectively known as the "Sherston trilogy".
September 8, 1948
Stephen Rosskamm Shalom is a professor of political science at William Paterson University in New Jersey. He is a writer on social and political issues and is a contributor to Znet and Democratic Left, the publication of Democratic Socialists of America.
September 9, 1922
Bernard Bailyn is Winthrop Professor of History, Harvard University, and Editor-in-Chief of The John Harvard Library.
September 9, 1935
Gopal Baratham (9 September 1935 - 23 April 2002) was a Singaporean author and neurosurgeon. He was known for his frank style and his ability to write about topics that were often considered controversial in the conservative city-state. Born to a physician and a nurse, Baratham decided to follow his parents and entered the medical profession. However, his youth was marked by the experience of the Japanese occupation. In 1954 he registered at the Medical College of the University of Malaya, Singapore, and, after studying at the Royal London Hospital in 1965, he entered the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Edinburgh in 1969. He finished his studies by 1972, when he was already 36 years old, to become a surgeon at the Thomson Road General Hospital in Singapore. He headed the Neurosurgery Department at the Tan Tock Seng Hospital between 1984 and 1987, and went into private practice after relinquishing his post as department head. He retired full-time from medical practice in 1999. Baratham died of pneumonia on the 23 of April, 2002. He was 66. Baratham had been in hospital for about a month for pneumonia and heart problems. He had had open-heart surgery in 1989. Baratham began his passion for writing in the 1960s, and never stopped writing throughout his medical career. His first novel, FUEL IN VACANT LOTS, was however never finished. In 1974 he was able to get his first short story, ‘Island’, published in Commentary, the publication of the National University of Singapore Society. It was only in 1981 that his first book collection of short stories entitled FIGMENTS OF EXPERIENCE was published. In 1991, Dr. Baratham published his most successful novel, A CANDLE OR THE SUN, which he had started working on in 1983. The novel was published in London and not in Singapore due to its controversial nature. The novel was loosely based on the case of the so-called Marxist plotters, a group of Catholic activists whom the Singapore government had declared to be Communists and subsequently arrested. The same year he also published an erotic love-story called Sayang set in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. He won the S.E.A. Write Award and was elected the president of the ASEAN Association of Neurosurgeons. In 1994, Dr. Baratham wrote an account of the events surrounding the sentencing to caning of the American teenager Michael Fay, called THE CANING OF MICHAEL FAY.
September 9, 1907
Joseph Leon Edel (9 September 1907 – 5 September 1997) was a North American literary critic and biographer. He was the elder brother of North American philosopher Abraham Edel. The Encyclopædia Britannica calls Edel ‘the foremost 20th-century authority on the life and works of Henry James.’ His work on James won him both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.
September 9, 1911
Paul Goodman (September 9, 1911 – August 2, 1972) was an American sociologist, poet, writer, anarchist, and public intellectual. Goodman is now mainly remembered as the author of Growing Up Absurd (1960) and an activist on the pacifist Left in the 1960s and an inspiration to that era's student movement. He is less remembered as a co-founder of Gestalt Therapy in the 1940s and '50s. Paul Goodman was born in New York City to Barnett and Augusta Goodman, both immigrants. He had a Hebrew school education, and graduated first in his class at Townsend Harris High School. His brother Percival Goodman, with whom Paul frequently worked, was an architect especially noted for his many synagogue designs. As a child, Goodman freely roamed the streets and public libraries of his native New York City, experiences which later inspired his radical concept of ‘the educative city’. He graduated from The City College of New York in 1932 and completed his Ph.D. work at the University of Chicago in 193[9?]. (He was not officially awarded his Ph.D. until 1953, for the dissertation which was later published by the University of Chicago as The Structure of Literature.) Goodman was a prolific writer of essays, fiction and poetry. Although he had been writing short stories since 1932, his first novel, THE GRAND PIANO, was published in 1942. In the mid-1940s, together with C. Wright Mills, he contributed to Politics, the journal edited during the 1940s by Dwight Macdonald. In 1947, he published two books, KAFKA'S PRAYER and COMMUNITAS, a classic study of urban design coauthored with his brother Percival Goodman. Fame came only with the 1960 publication of his GROWING UP ABSURD: PROBLEMS OF YOUTH IN THE ORGANIZED SYSTEM. Goodman also knew and worked with other leading New York intellectuals, including Daniel Bell, Norman Mailer, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Norman Podhoretz, Mary McCarthy, Lionel Trilling, and Philip Rahv. In addition to Politics, his writings appeared in Partisan Review, The New Republic, Commentary, The New Leader, Dissent and The New York Review of Books. Goodman was strongly influenced by Otto Rank's ‘here-and-now’ approach to psychotherapy, fundamental to Gestalt therapy, as well as Rank's post-Freudian book ART AND ARTIST (1932). In the late 1940s, Fritz Perls asked Goodman to write up the notes which were to become the seminal work for the new therapy, Part II of Perls, Goodman, and Hefferline (1951) GESTALT THERAPY: EXCITEMENT AND GROWTH IN THE HUMAN PERSONALITY. A year later, Goodman would become one of the Group of Seven - Fritz and Laura Perls, Isadore From, Goodman, Elliot Shapiro, Paul Weiss, Richard Kitzler - the founding members of the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy. Goodman wrote on a wide variety of subjects; including education, Gestalt Therapy, city life and urban design, children's rights, politics, literary criticism, and many more. In an interview with Studs Terkel, Goodman said ‘I might seem to have a number of divergent interests - community planning, psychotherapy, education, politics - but they are all one concern: how to make it possible to grow up as a human being into a culture without losing nature. I simply refuse to acknowledge that a sensible and honorable community does not exist.’ He was equally at home with the avant-garde and with classical texts, and his fiction often mixes formal and experimental styles. The style and subject matter of Goodman's short stories influenced those of Guy Davenport. In 1967, Goodman's son Matthew died in a mountain climbing accident. Paul's friends claimed that he never recovered from the resulting grief, and his health began to deteriorate. He died of a heart attack at his farm in New Hampshire just before his 61st birthday.
September 9, 1964
Aleksandar Hemon (born September 9, 1964) is a Bosnian American fiction writer, essayist, and critic. He is the winner of a MacArthur Foundation grant. He has written five books: The Book of My Lives (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013); Love and Obstacles: Stories (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009); The Lazarus Project: A Novel (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Awards, and was named as a New York Times Notable Book and New York magazine's No. 1 Book of the Year; Nowhere Man (New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2002), also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Question of Bruno: Stories (New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2000). He frequently publishes in The New Yorker, and has also written for Esquire, The Paris Review, the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, and the Sarajevo magazine BH Dani.
September 9, 1962
Eva Elisabeth ‘Liza’ Marklund (born 9 September 1962) is a Swedish journalist and crime writer. She was born in Pålmark near Piteå, Norrbotten. Her novels, most of which feature the fictional character Annika Bengtzon, a newspaper journalist, have been published in thirty languages. Marklund is the co-owner of Sweden's third largest publishing house, Piratförlaget and a columnist in the Swedish tabloid Expressen. She is also a Unicef ambassador. The Postcard Killers, a crime thriller written in collaboration with American bestselling author James Patterson, is Marklund's twelfth book. It was published on January 27, 2010, in Sweden, and became number one on the Swedish bestseller list in February 2010. It was published on 16 August 2010 in the United States. At the end of August, it reached number one in the New York Times best-seller list, making Liza Marklund the second Swedish author (the first one being Stieg Larsson with the Millennium Trilogy) ever to reach the number one spot. Marklund lives in Spain with her husband Mikael. Since her debut in 1995, Liza Marklund has written eight crime novels and co-authored two documentary novels with Maria Eriksson and one non-fiction book about female leadership with Lotta Snickare. Marklund's crime novels featuring crime reporter Annika Bengtzon have become international bestsellers. She won the ‘Poloni Prize’ (Polonipriset) 1998 for ‘Best Swedish Crime Novel by a Female Writer’ and ‘The Debutant Prize’, (Debutantpriset) 1998 for ‘Best First Novel of the Year’ with the crime novel Sprängaren (The Bomber), published in 1998. Marklund was named Author of the Year in Sweden 1999 by the Swedish trade union SKTF, won the radio network RixFM's Swedish Literary Prize in 2007, and was selected the fifteenth most popular woman in Sweden of 2003 and the fourth most popular woman in Sweden of 2004 in a yearly survey with 1,000 participants, conducted by ICA-kuriren, a publication published by a Swedish supermarket chain. Her books have been number one bestsellers in all five Nordic countries. In 2002 and 2003, two of Liza Marklund's crime novels were listed on the international bestseller lists by the online magazine Publishing Trends, Prime Time ranking #13 and The Red Wolf ranking #12. In Scandinavia and Germany, her non-fiction novels have become the center of a heated controversy.
September 9, 1908
Cesare Pavese (9 September 1908 – 27 August 1950) was an Italian poet, novelist, literary critic and translator; he is widely considered among the major authors of the 20th century in his home country. Cesare Pavese was born in Santo Stefano Belbo, in the province of Cuneo. It was the village where his father was born and where the family returned for the summer holidays each year. He started infant classes in San Stefano Belbo, but the rest of his education was in schools in Turin. His most important teacher at the time was Augusto Monti, writer and educator, whose writing style was devoid of all rhetoric. As a young man of letters, Pavese had a particular interest in English-language literature, graduating from the University of Turin with a thesis on the poetry of Walt Whitman. Among his mentors at the university was Leone Ginzburg, expert on Russian literature and literary critic, husband of the writer Natalia Ginzburg and father of the future historian Carlo Ginzburg. In those years, Pavese translated both classic and recent American and British authors that were then new to the Italian public. Pavese moved in antifascist circles. In 1935 he was arrested and convicted for having letters from a political prisoner. After a few months in prison he was sent into ‘confino’, internal exile in Southern Italy, the commonly used sentence for those guilty of lesser political crimes. (Carlo Levi and Leone Ginzburg, also from Turin, were similarly sent into confino.) A year later Pavese returned to Turin, where he worked for the left-wing publisher Giulio Einaudi as editor and translator. Natalia Ginzburg also worked there. Pavese was living in Rome when he was called up into the fascist army, but because of his asthma he spent six months in a military hospital. When he returned to Turin, German troops occupied the streets and most of his friends had left to fight as partisans. Pavese fled to the hills around Serralunga di Crea, near Casale Monferrato.He took no part in the armed struggle taking place in that area. During the years in Turin, he was the mentor of the young writer and translator Fernanda Pivano, his former student at the Liceo D'Azeglio.Pavese gave her the American edition of SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY, which came out in Pivano's Italian translation in 1943.After the war Pavese joined the Italian Communist Party and worked on the party's newspaper, L'Unità. The bulk of his work was published during this time. Toward the end of his life, he would frequently visit Le Langhe, the area where he was born, where he found great solace. Depression, the failure of a brief love affair with the actress Constance Dowling, to whom his last novel was dedicated, and political disillusionment led him to his suicide by an overdose of barbiturates in 1950. That year he had won the Strega Prize for La Bella Estate, comprising three novellas: 'La tenda', written in 1940, 'Il diavolo sulle colline'(1948) and 'Tra donne sole' (1949). Leslie Fiedler wrote of Pavese's death ‘. .for the Italians, his death has come to have a weight like that of Hart Crane for us, a meaning that penetrates back into his own work and functions as a symbol in the literature of an age.’ The circumstances of his suicide, which took place in a hotel room, mimic the last scene of Tra Donne Sole (AMONG WOMEN ONLY), his penultimate book. His last book was 'La Luna e i Falò', published in Italy in 1950 and translated into English as THE MOON AND THE BONFIRES by Louise Sinclair in 1952.
September 9, 1921
Richard Scott Prather (September 9, 1921 – February 14, 2007) was an American mystery novelist, best known for creating the 'Shell Scott' series. He also wrote under the pseudonyms David Knight and Douglas Ring. Prather was born in Santa Ana, California and spent a year at Riverside Junior College (now Riverside Community College). He served in the United States Merchant Marine during World War II, from 1942 through the end of the war in 1945. That year he married Tina Hager and began working as a civilian chief clerk of surplus property at March Air Force Base in Riverside, California. He left that job to become a full-time writer in 1949. The first Shell Scott mystery, 'Case of the Vanishing Beauty' was published in 1950. It would be the start of a long series that numbered more than three dozen titles featuring the Shell Scott character. Prather had a disagreement with his publisher Pocket Books and sued them in 1975. He gave up writing for several years and grew avocados.
September 9, 1934
Sonia Sanchez (born Wilsonia Benita Driver, September 9, 1934) is an African-American poet most often associated with the Black Arts Movement. She has authored over a dozen books of poetry, as well as plays and children's books. She was a recipient of 1993 Pew Fellowships in the Arts. Sanchez was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 9, 1934. Her mother died when Sanchez was only a year old, so she was sent to live with her paternal grandmother. She then lived with family and friends until 1943, when she moved to Harlem to live with her father, her sister, and her stepmother, who was her father's third wife. In 1955, Sanchez received a B.A. in Political Science from Hunter College, where she had also taken several creative writing courses. Later, she completed postgraduate work at New York University, where she studied poetry with Louise Bogan. Although her first marriage to Albert Sanchez did not last, Sonia Sanchez would retain her professional name. Sanchez then married poet Etheridge Knight. They later divorced. In 1972, she joined the Nation of Islam, but left the organization after three years in 1975 because her views on women's rights conflicted with theirs. She has three children and three grandchildren. She taught 5th Grade in NYC at the Downtown Community School, until 1966. Sanchez has taught as a professor at eight universities and has lectured at over 500 college campuses across the US, including Howard University. She advocated the introduction of Black Studies courses in California. Sanchez was the first to create and teach a course based on Black Women and literature in the United States. Sanchez was the first Presidential Fellow at Temple University, where she began working in 1977, where she held the Laura Carnell chair until her retirement in 1999. She is currently a poet-in-residence at Temple University. She has read her poetry in Africa, the Caribbean, China, Australia, Europe, Nicaragua, Canada, and Cuba. In 2000, Sanchez has also appeared twice on Bill Cosby's CBS show. Sanchez is a member of the Plowshares, the Brandywine Peace Community and MADRE. She also supports MOMS AND in Alabama and the National Black United Front. Sanchez was a very influential part of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Arts Movement. Sanchez was an advocate for the people. She was a member of CORE (Congress for Racial Equality), where she met Malcolm X. She wrote many plays and books that had to do with the struggles and lives of Black America. Sanchez has edited two anthologies on Black literature, We Be Word Sorcerers: 25 Stories by Black Americans and 360° of Blackness Coming at You. Sanchez is also known for her innovative melding of musical formats—like the blues—and traditional poetic formats like haiku and tanka. She also tends to use incorrect spelling to get her point across. In 1969, Sanchez was awarded the P.E.N. Writing Award. She was awarded the National Education Association Award 1977–1988. She also won the National Academy and Arts Award and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Award in 1978–1979. In 1985, she was awarded the American Book Award for Homegirls and Handgrenades. She has also been awarded the Community Service Award from the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, the Lucretia Mott Award, the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Humanities, and the Peace and Freedom Award from the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. One of her more recent contemporary endeavors includes a spoken word interlude on 'Hope is an Open Window' a song co-written by Diana Ross from her 1998, 'Every Day is a New Day' album. Sanchez became Philadelphia's first Poet Laureate, after being appointed by Mayor Michael Nutter. She served in that position from 2012 to 2014.
September 9, 1928
Manuel Scorza (September 9, 1928 – November 27, 1983) was an important Peruvian novelist, poet, and political activist, exiled under the regime of Manuel Odría. He was born in Lima. He is best known for the series of five novels, known collectively as ‘The Silent War,’ that began with Redoble por Rancas (1970). All five have been translated into more than forty languages, including English. He died when his plane, Avianca Flight 011, crashed on approach to Madrid's Barajas Airport after striking a series of hilltops. The crash killed 181 passengers, including Uruguayan literary critic Ángel Rama and Mexican writer Jorge Ibargüengoitia.
September 9, 1951
Bob Shacochis (born September 9, 1951) is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary journalist. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University.
September 9, 1924
Georg Henrik Tikkanen (9 September 1924, Helsinki – 19 May 1984) was a Finnish author, known primarily for anti-war literature. Several of his works are either autobiographical or semi-autobiographical. Though Finnish, he published primarily in his mother tongue, Swedish. He was born and lived much of his life in Helsinki, and died of leukemia in Espoo. He was married to the Finnish writer Märta Tikkanen.
September 9, 1754
Vice Admiral William Bligh, FRS, RN (9 September 1754 – 7 December 1817) was an officer of the British Royal Navy and a colonial administrator. A historic mutiny occurred during his command of HMS Bounty in 1789; Bligh and his loyal men made a remarkable voyage to Timor, after being set adrift in the Bounty's launch by the mutineers. Fifteen years after the Bounty mutiny, he was appointed Governor of New South Wales in Australia, with orders to clean up the corrupt rum trade of the New South Wales Corps, resulting in the so-called Rum Rebellion.
September 9, 1900
ames Hilton (9 September 1900 – 20 December 1954) was an English novelist best remembered for several best-sellers, including Lost Horizon and Goodbye, Mr. Chips. He also wrote Hollywood screenplays.
September 9, 1927
Penelope Houston (9 September 1927 – 26 October 2015) was an English film critic and journal editor. She edited Sight & Sound for almost 35 years.
September 9, 1924
Phyllis R. Klotman (September 9, 1924 – March 30, 2015) was a film theorist, archivist, professor and later dean for women’s affairs at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is well known for establishing the Black Film Center/Archive at IU and championing African-American filmmakers. Klotman is the author of Another Man Gone: The Black Runner in Contemporary Afro-American Literature (1977); Frame by Frame: A Black Filmography (1979); and Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary Film and Video (1999).
September 9 , 1890
D. S. Mirsky is the English pen-name of Dmitry Petrovich Svyatopolk-Mirsky, often known as Prince Mirsky (9 September, 1890 – c. 7 June 1939), a Russian political and literary historian who promoted the knowledge and translations of Russian literature in Britain and of English literature in the Soviet Union. He was born in Kharkov Governorate and died near Magadan.
September 9, 1934
Stanley George Payne (born September 9, 1934 in Denton, Texas) is a historian of modern Spain and European Fascism at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He retired from full-time teaching in 2004 and is currently Professor Emeritus at its Department of History. Payne is one of the most famous modern theorists of fascism.
September 9, 1949
Daniel Pipes (born September 9, 1949) is an American historian, writer, and commentator. He is the president of the Middle East Forum, and publisher of its Middle East Quarterly journal. His writing focuses on American foreign policy and the Middle East. After graduating with a PhD from Harvard in 1978 and studying abroad, Pipes taught at a number of universities, including Harvard, Chicago, Pepperdine, and the U.S. Naval War College. He then served as director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, before founding the Middle East Forum. He served as an adviser to Rudy Giuliani's 2008 presidential campaign. Pipes has written sixteen books and was the Taube Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
September 9, 1948
Sherod Santos was born in Greenville, South Carolina. He attended San Diego State University for both his BA and MA, before continuing his studies at the University of California, Irvine and the University of Utah. His numerous awards and honors include poetry awards from the Academy of American Poets, a Pushcart Prize, the Oscar Blumenthal Prize from Poetry magazine and several fellowships. He is a member of the faculty at the University of Missouri, Columbia.
September 9, 1948
Stephen Suleyman Schwartz (born September 9, 1948) is an American Sufi journalist, columnist, and author. He has been published in a variety of media, including The Wall Street Journal. He is the founder and executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Islamic Pluralism. In 2011–2012 he was a member of Folks Magazine's Editorial Board. He has been an adherent of the Hanafi school of Islam since 1997. His criticism of Islamic Fundamentalism, especially the Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam, has attracted controversy. Schwartz was born in Columbus, Ohio to Horace Schwartz, a Jewish independent bookseller. His mother, the daughter of a Protestant preacher, was a career social services worker. Schwartz later described both of his parents as "radical leftists and quite antireligious", his father a "fellow traveller", his mother a member of the Communist Party. He was baptized in the Presbyterian church as an infant. The family moved to San Francisco when he was young, where his father Horace became a literary agent. At Lowell High School Schwartz made his first serious writing attempts, focusing initially on poetry. He became affiliated with Leninist communism until 1984. After college, Schwartz became a member and officer in the Sailors' Union of the Pacific, as well as an employee of locals affiliated with the AFL-CIO. Among others, he founded a small semi-Trotskyist group FOCUS. In 1985, the S.U.P. commissioned Schwartz to write Brotherhood of the Sea: A History of the Sailors' Union of the Pacific as part of its of 100th anniversary commemoration. In the 1990s, Schwartz spent a decade as a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. He was a member of the local union at the Chronicle, a branch of the Newspaper Guild. At the end of 1997, he converted to Islam. In 1999, Schwartz left the Chronicle, and moved to Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he lived for the next 18 months. Schwartz supported the Iraq War. On March 25, 2005, Schwartz launched the Center for Islamic Pluralism. The Center is a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., with Schwartz as executive director.
September 9, 1942
Barbara Tedlock, Ph.D., is the granddaughter of an Ojibwe midwife and herbalist and was trained and initiated as a shaman by the K’iche’ Maya of highland Guatemala. She is currently Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at SUNY Buffalo and Research Associate at the School of American Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. For many years she co-edited The American Anthropologist with her husband, Dennis Tedlock. The author of four previous books and numerous essays, she divides her time between Buffalo, New York, and Santa Fe, New Mexico.
September 9, 1921
Ramón Eduardo Ruiz (September 9, 1921, San Diego, CA - July 6, 2010, Rancho Santa Fe, CA) was Professor emeritus of History at the University of California, San Diego.
September 9, 1952
Mark Klett (born September 9, 1952) is an American photographer. Klett was born in Albany, New York. After graduating from St. Lawrence University with a B.S. in Geology in 1974, he worked as a photographer with the U.S. Geological Survey. Klett's photographic work focuses on explorations of man’s interaction with the American landscape, and more recently on issues of photography in time including rephotography.
September 9, 1754
Vice Admiral William Bligh, FRS, RN (9 September 1754 – 7 December 1817) was an officer of the British Royal Navy and a colonial administrator. A historic mutiny occurred during his command of HMS Bounty in 1789; Bligh and his loyal men made a remarkable voyage to Timor, after being set adrift in the Bounty's launch by the mutineers. Fifteen years after the Bounty mutiny, he was appointed Governor of New South Wales in Australia, with orders to clean up the corrupt rum trade of the New South Wales Corps, resulting in the so-called Rum Rebellion.
September 9, 1828
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (9 September [O.S. 28 August] 1828 – 20 November [O.S. 7 November] 1910), also known as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright and philosopher who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Tolstoy was a master of realistic fiction and is widely considered one of the greatest novelists of all time. He is best known for two long novels, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). Tolstoy first achieved literary acclaim in his 20s with his semi-autobiographical trilogy of novels, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth (1852–1856) and Sevastopol Sketches (1855), based on his experiences in the Crimean War. His fiction output also includes two additional novels, dozens of short stories, and several famous novellas, including The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Family Happiness, and Hadji Murad. In addition to novels and short stories, he also wrote plays and philosophical essays on Christianity, nonviolent resistance, art and pacifism. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker, social reformer, and Georgist. His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Bevel.
September 10, 1939
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. After receiving her PhD in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly established Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. Her 1977 book The Great Sioux Nation was the fundamental document at the first international conference on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, held at the United Nations’ headquarters in Geneva. Dunbar-Ortiz is the author or editor of seven other books, including Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico. She lives in San Francisco.
September 10, 1897
Georges Albert Maurice Victor Bataille (10 September 1897 – 9 July 1962) was a French intellectual and literary figure working in literature, anthropology, philosophy, economy, sociology and history of art. Eroticism, sovereignty, and transgression are at the core of his writings.
September 10, 1903
Cyril Vernon Connolly (10 September 1903 – 26 November 1974) was an English intellectual, literary critic and writer. He was the editor of the influential literary magazine Horizon (1940–1949) and wrote ENEMIES OF PROMISE (1938), which combined literary criticism with an autobiographical exploration of why he failed to become the successful author of fiction that he had aspired to be in his youth.
September 10, 1973
György Dragomán (born 10 September 1973) is a Hungarian author and literary translator. His best-known work, The White King (2005) has been translated to at least 28 languages. He was born in Târgu Mure? (Marosvásárhely) Transylvania, Romania. In 1988, his family moved to Hungary. He attended high school in the western Hungarian city of Szombathely, then college in Budapest, getting a degree in English and Philosophy. He has received various literary awards for his writings, such as the Sándor Bródy Prize (2003).
September 10, 1957
Andreï Sergueïevitch Makine (born 10 September 1957) is a Russian-born French novelist. He also publishes under the pseudonym Gabriel Osmonde. Makine's novels include Dreams of My Russian Summers (1995) which won two top French awards, the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis. He was elected to seat 5 of the Académie française on 3 March 2016, succeeding Assia Djebar.
September 10, 1912
William Everson (September 10, 1912 – June 3, 1994), also known as Brother Antoninus, was an American poet of the San Francisco Renaissance and was also a literary critic and small press printer.
September 10, 1951
ELISEO ALBERTO, winner of the first International Alfaguara Prize in Fiction (1998), was born in Arroyo Naranjo, Cuba. He has written screenplays for film and television, and has taught at the International Film School in San Antonio de los Baños in Cuba, the Center for Cinematographic Training of Mexico, and the Sundance Institute. He lives in Mexico City.
September 10, 1937
Jared Mason Diamond (born September 10, 1937) is an American ecologist, geographer, biologist, anthropologist and author best known for his popular science books The Third Chimpanzee (1991); Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997, awarded a Pulitzer Prize); Collapse (2005); and The World Until Yesterday (2012). Originally trained in physiology, Diamond is known for drawing from a variety of fields, including anthropology, ecology, geography and evolutionary biology. He is a professor of geography at UCLA. In 2005, Diamond was ranked ninth on a poll by Prospect and Foreign Policy of the world's top 100 public intellectuals.
September 10, 1957
Pawe? Huelle (born 10 September 1957 in Gda?sk, Poland) is a Polish prose writer. Huelle studied Polish philology at Gda?sk University, and later became a journalist. He worked for a time for the press service of Solidarno?? (Solidarity). He has also taught literature, philosophy, and history. He was director of the Polish Television in his home town from 1994 to 1999. His literary debut came in 1987 with Weiser Dawidek, made into a film, Weiser, by Wojciech Marczewski in 2000. In 2001, we won the Paszport Polityki Award for his book Mercedes-Benz. Z listów do Hrabala, and in 2008 he was nominated to Nike Award for his novel Ostatnia wieczerza ("The Last Supper").
September 10, 1929
Reinhard Lettau (10 September 1929, Erfurt – 17 June 1996, Karlsruhe) was a German-American writer. He never used his middle name, Adolf, if he could avoid it. He emigrated to the US in the middle of the 1950s and was a professor of German Literature at the University of California, San Diego from 1967 to 1991. He was an active member of the Group 47. He gave incendiary speeches at the Freie Universität Berlin denouncing the Springer Press. He was thereupon expelled from West Germany because he was a foreigner—he carried an American passport. He returned to Germany in 1991 after German reunification. He received the War Blind Prize for radio plays in 1979, the Berlin Literature Prize in 1993, and the Bremen Literature Prize in 1995.
September 10, 1942
Maniyambath Mukundan, commonly known as M. Mukundan (born 10 September 1942), is one of the pioneers of modernity in Malayalam literature, born in Mayyazhi (Mahé), a one-time French territory in India. He is known in Kerala as Mayyazhiyude Kathakaaran (The story-teller of Mayyazhi). His native village of Mayyazhi figures in his early works: Mayyazhippuzhayude Theerangalil, Daivathinte Vikrithikal, Appam Chudunna Kunkiyamma and Lesli Achante Kadangal. He was born on 10 September 1942 at Mahe, then a French overseas territory and, since the 50's a part of Puducherry Union Territory in South India. His first literary work was a short story published in 1961. Mukundan has so far published 12 novels and ten collections of short stories (which totals 171 in numbers till 2012). Mukundan's latest four novels Adithyanum Radhayum Mattu Chilarum, Oru Dalit Yuvathiyude Kadanakatha, Kesavante Vilapangal and Nritham carries a change in structure and approach. Oru Dalit Yuvathiyude Kadanakatha reveals how Vasundhara, an actress has been insulted in the course of acting due to some unexpected situations. It proclaims the postmodern message that martyrs are created not only through ideologies, but through art also. Kesavante Vilapangal (Kesavan's Lamentations) one of his most recent works tells the story of a writer Kesavan who writes a novel on a child named Appukkuttan who grows under the influence of E. M. S. Namboodiripad. It won the Vayalar Award in 2003. Daivathinte Vikrithikal (God's Mischief) collected the Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award and NV Prize. Ee Lokam Athiloru Manushyan received the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award. Daivathinte Vikrithikal has been translated into English and published By Penguin Books India. In 2008, Mukundan's magnum opus Mayyazhippuzhayude Theerangalil fetched him the award for the best novel published in the last 25 years.[citation needed] Three of his novels were made into feature films in Malayalam . Mukundan wrote the script and one of them secured a state film award. Mukundan's novel Pravasam (sojourn in non-native land) and tells the story of a Malayali whose journeys carry him around the world. The French government conferred on him the title of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 1998 for his contribution to literature. His novel Delhi Gadhakal (Tales from Delhi) was released in November 2011. In this work, the author takes us through his recollections in India's capital city, New Delhi. He served as the president of Kerala Sahitya Akademi from October 2006 until March 2010.
September 10, 1890
Sir Mortimer Wheeler (September 10, 1890, Glasgow, United Kingdom - July 22, 1976, Leatherhead, United Kingdom), who has been Director of the National Museum of Wales and Keeper of the London Museum, was the first Director of the Institute of Archaeology in the University of London, and later Director General of Archaeology in India and Adviser in Archaeology to the Government of Pakistan. In the intervals of war service, during which he attained the rank of Brigadier in the Eighth Army, he excavated Roman forts in Wales, the Roman city of Verulamium, the famous prehistoric fortress-town of Maiden Castle in Dorset, and other sites both in this country and in northern France. Whilst in India, he discovered the site of a Roman trading-station on the coast of the Bay of Bengal and carried out a series of excavations on prehistoric and early historic sites, including those of the Indus Civilization of the third millennium s.c. He is now Professor of the Archaeology of the Roman Provinces in the University of London, and President of the Society of Antiquaries of London. In addition to his more academic work, he has broadcast widely on archaeological subjects, particularly in the well-known television programme, Animal, Mineral, or Vegetable.
September 10, 1938
James S. Trefil (born September 10, 1938) is an American physicist (Ph.D. in Physics at Stanford University in 1966) and author of more than thirty books. Much of his published work focuses on science for the general audience. Dr. Trefil has previously served as Professor of Physics at the University of Virginia and he now teaches as Robinson Professor of Physics at George Mason University. Among Trefil's books is Are We Unique?, an argument for human uniqueness in which he questions the comparisons between human intelligence and artificial intelligence. Trefil also regularly gives presentations to judges and public officials about the intersections between science and the law.
September 10, 1886
H.D. (born Hilda Doolittle, 1886–1961) was an American writer who exerted enormous influence on modernist poetry and prose. ANNETTE DEBO is professor of English at Western Carolina University. She is the author of The American H.D. and the coeditor of Approaches to Teaching H.D.’s Poetry and Prose.
September 10, 1956
James Marten is Professor of History at Marquette University, where he has been a faculty member since 1986. He is a past president of both the Society of Civil War Historians and of the Society for the History of Children and Youth, and the author or editor of more than fifteen books.
September 11, 1903
Theodor W. Adorno (born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund; September 11, 1903 – August 6, 1969) was a German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society. He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, for whom the work of Freud, Marx and Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society. He is widely regarded as one of the 20th century's foremost thinkers on aesthetics and philosophy, as well as one of its preeminent essayists. As a critic of both fascism and what he called the culture industry, his writings—such as Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Minima Moralia (1951) and Negative Dialectics (1966)—strongly influenced the European New Left. Amidst the vogue enjoyed by existentialism and positivism in early 20th-century Europe, Adorno advanced a dialectical conception of natural history that critiqued the twin temptations of ontology and empiricism through studies of Kierkegaard and Husserl. As a classically trained pianist whose sympathies with the twelve-tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg resulted in his studying composition with Alban Berg of the Second Viennese School, Adorno's commitment to avant-garde music formed the backdrop of his subsequent writings and led to his collaboration with Thomas Mann on the latter's novel Doctor Faustus, while the two men lived in California as exiles during the Second World War. Working for the newly relocated Institute for Social Research, Adorno collaborated on influential studies of authoritarianism, anti-semitism and propaganda that would later serve as models for sociological studies the Institute carried out in post-war Germany. Upon his return to Frankfurt, Adorno was involved with the reconstitution of German intellectual life through debates with Karl Popper on the limitations of positivist science, critiques of Heidegger's language of authenticity, writings on German responsibility for the Holocaust, and continued interventions into matters of public policy. As a writer of polemics in the tradition of Nietzsche and Karl Kraus, Adorno delivered scathing critiques of contemporary Western culture. Adorno's posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, which he planned to dedicate to Samuel Beckett, is the culmination of a lifelong commitment to modern art which attempts to revoke the ‘fatal separation’ of feeling and understanding long demanded by the history of philosophy and explode the privilege aesthetics accords to content over form and contemplation over immersion.
September 11, 1912
Theodore H. "Ted" Draper (September 11, 1912 – February 21, 2006) was an American historian and political writer. Draper is best known for the 14 books he completed during his life, including work regarded as seminal on the formative period of the American Communist Party, the Cuban Revolution, and the Iran-Contra Affair. Draper was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the 1990 recipient of the Herbert Feis Award for Nonacademically Affiliated Historians from the American Historical Association.
September 11, 1959
ANDRE DUBUS III is the author of BLUESMAN, THE CAGE KEEPER AND OTHER STORIES, and HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG (a National Book Award Finalist and Oprah Book Club Selection). His writing has received many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Magazine Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He lives with his family north of Boston.
September 11, 1885
David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930) was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works, among other things, represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialization. In them, some of the issues Lawrence explores are emotional health, vitality, spontaneity and instinct. Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile which he called his ‘savage pilgrimage.’ At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as, ‘The greatest imaginative novelist of our generation.’ Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical ‘great tradition’ of the English novel.
September 11, 1957
James McBride is an author, musician and screenwriter. His landmark memoir, The Color of Water, is considered an American classic. His debut novel Miracle at St. Anna was translated into a film directed by icon Spike Lee. He has also written for the Boston Globe, People, Washington Post, Essence, Rolling Stone, National Geographic, and the New York Times. James plays saxophone and tours with his six piece jazz/r&b band. He received the Stephen Sondheim Award and the Richard Rodgers Foundation Horizon Award for his musical 'Bo-Bos' co-written with playwright Ed Shockley. A native New Yorker, he studied composition at The Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio and received his Masters in Journalism from Columbia University in New York at age 22. He holds several honorary doctorates and is currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. He is married with three children.
September 11, 1910
Manuel Mujica Láinez (11 September 1910, Buenos Aires, Argentina- 21 April 1984, Cruz Chica, La Cumbre, Córdoba, Argentina) was an Argentine novelist, essayist and art critic. His parents belonged to old and aristocratic families, being descended from the founder of the city, Juan de Garay, as well as from notable men of letters of 19th century Argentina, such as Florencio Varela and Miguel Cané. As was traditional at the time, the family spent protracted periods in Paris and London so that Manuel, known proverbially and famously as Manucho, could become proficient in French and English. He completed his formal education at the Colegio Nacional de San Isidro, later dropping out of Law School. In spite of their proud ancestry, the Mujica-Laínez family was not notably well-off by this time, and Manucho went to work at Buenos Aires' newspaper La Nación as literary and art critic. This permitted him to marry in 1936, his bride being a beautiful patrician girl, Ana de Alvear, descended from Carlos María de Alvear. They had two sons (Diego and Manuel) and a daughter (Ana). 1936 was also the year of the 25-year-old's first publication, Glosas castellanas. Mujica Lainez was a member of the Argentine Academy of Letters and the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1982 he received the French's Legion of Honor. He died at his Villa ‘El Paraíso’ (The Paradise) in Cruz Chica, Córdoba Province, in 1984. Mujica Láinez was preeminently a narrator and enumerator of Buenos Aires, from its earliest colonial times to the present. The society of Buenos Aires, especially high society, its past triumphs and present decadence, its quirks and geographies, its language and lies, its sexual vanities and dreams of love: he relished bringing all this to his elegantly written, quietly ironic, subtly subversive page. He was also a great translator. He translated Shakespeare's Sonnets and works by Racine, Moliére, Marivaux, and others.
September 11, 1934
Leon Rooke, CM (born September 11, 1934) is a Canadian novelist. He was born in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina in the United States. Educated at the University of North Carolina, he moved to Canada in 1969. He now lives in Toronto, Ontario. Rooke helped to found the Eden Mills Writers' Festival in 1989. In 2002, Rooke championed THE STONE ANGEL by Margaret Laurence in that year's edition of Canada Reads. Rooke's work also appears in Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts. In 2007, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada.
September 11, 1862
William Sydney Porter (September 11, 1862 – June 5, 1910), known by his pen name O. Henry, was an American writer. O. Henry's short stories are known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization, and clever twist endings.
September 11, 1852
Clorinda Matto de Turner (11 September 1852 in Cusco – 25 October 1909) was a Peruvian writer who lived during the early years of Latin American independence. Her own independence inspired women throughout the region as her writings sparked controversy in her own culture. She was born and raised in Cuzco, Peru. Matto de Turner's father was Ramón Torres Mato and her mother was Grimanesa Concepción Usandivares. When her mother died, she became known as Azucena de los Andes ("Lily of the Andes") throughout the region. Matto de Turner was baptized Grimanesa Martina Mato, but was called Clorinda among her friends and family. She originally had one "T" in her last name, but after studying the Inca culture she added the extra "T" to give the name an Inca flavor. Growing up in Cuzco, the former Inca capital, Matto spent most of her days on her family's estate, Paullo Chico, which is near the village of Coya. As a teenager, Matto attended the school that is now known as the Escuela Nacional de Educandas (National Women’s Secondary School). There she took some very unconventional courses that were viewed as unfeminine in the culture. She majored in independent studies, which included Philosophy, Natural History, and Physics. Matto left school at the age of sixteen to spend more time taking care of her brother and father. In 1871, at the age of 19, Matto married an Englishman, Dr. Turner, a wealthy landowner. Shortly after their marriage they moved to Tinta, where they lived for 10 years. In Tinta, Matto de Turner became more aware of Peru’s two histories: the colonial and the Inca. She became very familiar with indigenous culture, and the more she learned, the more she embraced it. Much of her writing is inspired by what she learned from her acquaintance with this culture. She found work as a journalist, with local and foreign papers. In 1878, Matto de Turner founded El Recreo de Casco, a magazine offering literature, science, art and education. She became known for literary works that portrayed indigenous people in a positive light, in contrast to the mainstream views of her society. Even though she was of white ancestry, she did not agree with the oppressive treatment of Peru's indigenous peoples, and she used her writings to speak out on their behalf. Matto de Turner also used her writings to campaign for better education for women. In 1881, her husband died, leaving the estate bankrupt. Unable to improve her financial situation in Tinta, Matto de Turner moved to Arequipa where she worked as editor in chief at the newspaper La Bolsa Americana. While there she published two volumes of "tradiciones cuzqueñas," one in 1884 and another in 1886. She also wrote the drama Himacc-Suacc (1884) and translated the four Gospels into Quechua, a language spoken by the indigenous people in Peru. Besides her literary works she also got involved in politics, and raised money for the development of the battleship Almirante Grau. Matto de Turner eventually moved from Tinta to live in Lima, although with her political and controversial writings she often thought it would be safer to live outside of Peru. In Lima she joined many different literary organizations and publications. In 1887, Matto de Turner became director of El Peru Ilustrado, where she published many of her novels. She published three novels between 1889 and 1895: Aves Sin Nido (Birds Without a Nest), Indole (Character), and Herencia (Heredity). These novels talk about the indigenous people getting stripped of all their civil rights as well as getting persecuted by the community and the self-indulgent priests. Matto de Turner's most famous novel was Aves Sin Nido (1889). This novel was controversial because it was about a love affair between a white man and an indigenous woman, which was considered a disgrace among Latin American society during this time, and because it spoke of the immorality of the priests during that period. The reason the characters in the novel couldn’t marry was because they eventually learned that they were both fathered by the same philandering priest. Aves Sin Nido was not Matto de Turner's only controversial work. She also published a controversial story written by a Brazilian writer by the name of Henrique Coelho Neto in her newspaper, El Perú Illustrado. Her controversial writings led to her excommunication by the Archbishop. In 1895, she moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she continued her literary activities. In 1900, she wrote Boreales, Miniaturas y Porcelanas (Northerners, Miniatures, and Porcelain) a collection of essays which includes "Narraciones históricas," and important histroriographical contribution that shows her deep sorrow at being exiled from Peru and her longing to return. In Buenos Aires Matto de Turner founded Búcaro Americano; she also gave numerous public lectures and wrote many articles for the press. Matto de Turner spent most of her time teaching at a local university as a Professor. In 1908, she visited Europe for the first time in her life, she made sure to carefully document this in the book Viaje de Recreo (Trip of Amusement). The book was released in newspapers upon her death in 1909.
September 11, 1930
FRED E. BASTEN has written, collaborated on, or contributed to nearly 40 books over the last 30 years, in addition to having a successful career in advertising. He lives in Santa Monica, California.
September 11, 1869
Caterina Albert i Paradís (L'Escala, Spain, 11 September 1869 — 27 January 1966), better known by her penname Víctor Català, was a Spanish writer in Catalan and Spanish who participated in the Modernisme movement and was the author of one of the signature works of the genre, Solitud (Solitude) (1905). Her literary skill was first recognized in 1898, when she received the Jocs Florals (floral games) prize; soon thereafter, she began using the pseudonym Victor Català, taking it from the protagonist of a novel she never finished. Despite her success as a dramatist and her forays into poetry, she is best known for her work in narrative literature, with the force of her style and the richness of her diction being especially noted. She died in her hometown of l’Escala, Catalonia, in 1966 and is interred in the Cementiri Vell de l’Escala.
September 11, 1927
Amram Ducovny (September 11, 1927 – August 23, 2003) was an American non-fiction, play and novel writer. Ducovny, born as Duchovny, was born and raised in New York City area. His father, Moshe Duchovny, who came to the United States in 1918, from Berdychiv, Russian Empire (now in Ukraine), was a noted Yiddish writer and journalist, who, among the others, wrote for the Morning Journal. His son, David Duchovny, is the well-known actor and writer. In 2003, Amram Ducovny died from heart disease in Paris, where he lived. He was 75 years old at the time of his death.
September 11, 1948
Author of the double Lambda Literary Award-winning Black lesbian vampire novel, THE GILDA STORIES, Jewelle Gomez currently lives in San Francisco after twenty-two years in New York.
September 11, 1883
Olive Beaupré Miller (née Olive Kennon Beaupré) (September 11, 1883 – March 25, 1968) was an American writer, publisher and editor of children's literature. Olive Kennon Beaupré was born in Aurora, Illinois on September 11, 1883 to William S. and Julia (Brady) Beaupré. She received her B.A. from Smith College in 1904. In 1919 Miller established a company, The Book House for Children, to publish popular children’s literature edited by herself to meet her standards: "First,--To be well equipped for life, to have ideas and the ability to express them, the child needs a broad background of familiarity with the best in literature; Second,--His stories and rhymes must be selected with care that he may absorb no distorted view of life and its actual values, but may grow up to be mentally clear about values and emotionally impelled to seek what is truly desirable and worthwhile in human living; Third,--The stories and rhymes selected must be graded to the child's understanding at different periods of his growth, graded as to vocabulary, as to subject matter and as to complexity of structure and plot." Earlier versions of The Book House contained some short stories (such as Little Black Sambo and The Tar Baby) which were later recognized to be racist and were removed from the set, and replaced with newer stories of, e.g. The U.S. Space Program. The company was also remarkable for its large female staff when most women did not work outside the home. Illustrators for the series included Maude and Miska Petersham, Donn Philip Crane, Hilda Hanway, Milo Winter, and Peter Newell. Maud and Miska Petersham were husband and wife, whose collaboration lasted over 50 years and yielded over 120 books, many singled-out for their outstanding illustrations, including the coveted CALDECOTT MEDAL.
September 11, 1937
Tomas Venclova (born September 11, 1937) is professor of Russian and East European Literatures at Yale University.
September 11, 1917
Agnar Thordarson (Born September 11, 1917, Died August 12, 2006) was an Icelandic author who made his mark as novelist, playwright, and short-story writer. Besides The Sword, his best known novels are The Cock Crows Twice and Heart at Stake. Among his many plays, Atoms and Madams has enjoyed especially great success and has been published in English translation. Paul Schach was Professor of Germanic Languages in the University of Nebraska. He is the author of numerous studies in the field of Old Norse and medieval literature and culture.
September 11, 1924
Marja-Liisa Orvokki Vartio (née Sairanen, 1955-1966 Haavikko; 11 September 1924 Sääminki, Finland – 17 June 1966 Savonlinna, Finland) was a Finnish poet and prose writer. Her writing career was short but influential. She was one of the leading modernist writers in Finland. She studied art history and modern literature in University of Helsinki. She married an art dealer in 1945 and was introduced into Helsinki’s writing and artistic circles. Her first collection s of poetry were published in 1952. In 1955 she married writer Paavo Haavikko. Around that time she started to write prose. Vartio published nine works of prose and poetry. Her works describe how the world changed in the twentieth century and the inluence of this on human beings, especially on women. In her poetry she used folk literature as an inspiration. One of her novels, Hänen olivat linnut (The Parson’s Widow) was published after her death. It tells about an old woman and her maid. The novel is considered Vartio's most central work.
September 11, 1950
Jeffrey Stout is professor of religion at Princeton University. His previous books include Ethics After Babel and Democracy and Tradition (both Princeton). He is past president of the American Academy of Religion and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
September 12, 1921
Stanislaw Lem (12 September 1921 – 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy and satire. His books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 27 million copies. He is known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has been made into a feature film three times. In 1976 Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science-fiction writer in the world. In 1996, he received the prestigious Polish award, the Order of the White Eagle. His works explore philosophical themes; speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of mutual communication and understanding, despair about human limitations and humanity's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books. Translations of his works are difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, alien or robotic poetry, and puns.
September 12, 1943
MICHAEL ONDAATJE was born in Sri Lanka. He left there at the age of eleven to go to school in England. He went to Canada in 1962 and now lives in Toronto, where he teaches at Glendon College, York University. His books include a fictional memoir about his family in Sri Lanka, RUNNING IN THE FAMILY; COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER, a novel based on the life and music of Buddy Bolden; and THE COLLECTED WORKS OF BILLY THE KID. His books of poetry include THERE’S A TRICK WITH A KNIFE I’M LEARNING TO DO and SECULAR LOVE.
September 12, 1948
Caio Fernando Abreu (September 12, 1948, Santiago, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil - February 25, 1996, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) was an award-winning journalist, novelist, short-story writer, and playwright who portrayed, as no other contemporary writer, the myriad contradictions of urban Brazil. His untimely death, as well as his courageous stand on AIDS and the growing popular interest in gay literature, will likely result in renewed attention to his playful yet urgent brand of postmodern writing. Adria Frizzi is a translator and critic who teaches in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Texas at Austin.
September 12, 1924
Amílcar Lopes da Costa Cabral (12 September 1924 – 20 January 1973) was a Guinea-Bissauan and Cape Verdean agricultural engineer, writer, and a nationalist thinker and political leader. He was also one of Africa's foremost anti-colonial leaders. Also known by his nom de guerre Abel Djassi, Cabral led the nationalist movement of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde Islands and the ensuing war of independence in Guinea-Bissau. He was assassinated on 20 January 1973, about eight months before Guinea-Bissau's unilateral declaration of independence. He was deeply influenced by Marxism, and became an inspiration to revolutionary socialists and national liberatonalists world-wide.
September 12, 1846
Anna Grigoryevna Dostoyevskaya (12 September 1846, Saint Petersburg – 9 June 1918, Yalta) was a Russian memoirist, stenographer, assistant, and the second wife of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (since 1867). She was also one of the first female philatelists in Russia. She wrote two biographical books about Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Anna Dostoyevskaya's Diary in 1867, which was published in 1923 after her death, and Memoirs of Anna Dostoyevskaya (also known as Reminiscence of Anna Dostoyevskaya, published in 1925. Beatrice Stillman is a writer and translator with a special interest in the situation of women in literature and society. She has recently published a translation of the controversial Soviet feminist novel, A Week Like Any Other Week.
September 12, 1933
Marvin E. Gettleman (1933-2017) was the coeditor of the best-selling anthology Vietnam and America. He was also emeritus professor of history at Brooklyn Polytechnic University.
September 12, 1945
Sherril Jaffe is the PEN Award winning author of ten books. A MacDowell fellow, she holds an MFA from Bennington. Jaffe works as a professor of creative writing and literature at Sonoma State University and lives in San Francisco, CA.
September 12, 1937
Henri Lopes held many senior positions in the Congo-Brazzaville government, including that of Prime Minster. He now works in Paris, where he is Assistant Director General o UNESCO. His most recent novel, THE LAUGHING CRY, has also been translated into English.
September 12, 1931
Kristin Elaine Hunter (September 12, 1931 – November 14, 2008) was an African-American writer from Pennsylvania. She sometimes wrote under the name Kristin Hunter Lattany. She is best known for her first novel, God Bless the Child, published in 1964. Hunter was born Kristin Elaine Eggleston in Philadelphia, to George L. Eggleston and the former Mabel Manigault, and attended Haddon Heights High School until 1947. When she was aged 14, she began writing a column about young people for the Pittsburgh Courier, continuing to do so until 1952, the year after she graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where she received her bachelor's degree in Education (1951). In 1955 she won a national television competition for her script Minority of One. Her first and most acclaimed novel, God Bless the Child, was published in 1964, and won the Philadelphia Athenaeum Literary Award. Like most of her work, it confronts complex issues of race and gender. Her 1966 novel The Landlord was made into a movie by Hal Ashby (United Artists, 1970). Her 1973 collection of short stories, Guests in the Promised Land, was nominated for the National Book Award. In 1972, she began teaching in the English department at the University of Pennsylvania, eventually retiring from the university in 1995. She was also a visiting professor at Emory University. She received the Moonstone Black Writing Celebration Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996. Commenting on her own work, she said: "The bulk of my work has dealt—imaginatively, I hope—with relations between the white and black races in America. My early work was 'objective,' that is, sympathetic to both whites and blacks, and seeing members of both groups from a perspective of irony and humor against the wider backdrop of human experience as a whole. Since about 1968 my subjective anger has been emerging, along with my grasp of the real situation in this society, though my sense of humor and my basic optimism keep cropping up like uncontrollable weeds." She married writer Joseph Hunter in 1952. They divorced in 1962, and she married John Lattany in 1968. She died in 2008, aged 77, of a heart attack after collapsing in her home in Magnolia, New Jersey.
September 12, 1966
Anthony William Vivian Loyd (born 12 September 1966) is an English journalist, a noted war correspondent.
September 12, 1910
Frank Edward Manuel (12 September 1910 – 2003) was an American historian, Kenan Professor of History, emeritus, at New York University and Alfred and Viola Hart University Professor, emeritus, at Brandeis University. He was known for his work on the idea of utopia.
September 12, 1936
Hugh Rawson (September 12, 1936 - June 1, 2013) was involved in the book, magazine, and newspaper businesses all his working life. Among other things, he served as director of Penguin USA’s reference books operation, edited the Bulletin of The Authors Guild, wrote a column about American words and phrases for American Heritage magazine, and assisted William Safire on the last edition of Safire’s Political Dictionary. His books titles include Rawson’s Dictionary of Euphemisms & Other Doubletalk; Wicked Words, which is the opposite of Euphemisms in that it tells you everything you might want to know about so-called bad words, and Devious Derivations, a book about folk etymologies. He also is the author of Unwritten Laws: The Unofficial Rules of Life as Handed Down by Murphy and other Sages and he co-authored with Hillier Krieghbaum An Investment in Knowledge, a history-study of a National Science Foundation program for training teachers of science and mathematics. Rawson also collaborated with his wife, Margaret Miner, on four dictionaries of quotations: The Oxford Dictionary of American Quotations, The New International Dictionary of Quotations, A Dictionary of Quotations from the Bible, and A Dictionary of Quotations from Shakespeare.
September 13, 1876
Sherwood Anderson (September 13, 1876 – March 8, 1941) was an American novelist and short story writer, known for subjective and self-revealing works. Self-educated, he rose to become a successful copywriter and business owner in Cleveland and Elyria, Ohio. In 1912, Anderson had a nervous breakdown that led him to abandon his business and family to become a writer. At the time, he moved to Chicago and was eventually married three more times. His most enduring work is the short-story sequence Winesburg, Ohio, which launched his career.
September 13, 1916
Roald Dahl (13 September 1916 – 23 November 1990) was a British novelist, short story writer, poet, fighter pilot and screenwriter. Born in Wales, to Norwegian parents, he served in the Royal Air Force during World War II, in which he became a flying ace and intelligence officer, rising to the rank of wing commander. Dahl rose to prominence in the 1940s, with works for both children and adults, and became one of the world's best-selling authors. He has been referred to as ‘one of the greatest storytellers for children of the 20th century’. In 2008 The Times placed Dahl 16th on its list of ‘The 50 greatest British writers since 1945’. His short stories are known for their unexpected endings, and his children's books for their unsentimental, often very dark humour. His works include James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The Witches, Fantastic Mr Fox, The Twits, George's Marvellous Medicine and The BFG.
September 13, 1923
Miroslav Holub (13 September 1923 – 14 July 1998) was a Czech poet and immunologist. Miroslav Holub's work was heavily influenced by his experiences as an Immunologist, writing many poems using his scientific knowledge to poetic effect. His work is almost always unrhymed, so lends itself easily to translation. It has been translated into more than 30 languages and is especially popular in the English-speaking world. Although one of the most internationally well-known Czech poets, his reputation continues to languish at home. Holub was born in Plzen. His first book in Czech was Denní služba (1958), which abandoned the somewhat Stalinist bent of poems earlier in the decade (published in magazines). In English, he was first published in the Observer in 1962, and five years later a Selected Poems appeared in the Penguin Modern European Poets imprint, with an introduction by Al Alvarez and translations by Ian Milner and George Theiner. Holub's work was lauded by many, including Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, and his influence is visible in Hughes' collection Crow (1970). In addition to poetry, Holub wrote many short essays on various aspects of science, particularly biology and medicine (specifically immunology) and life. A collection of these, titled The Dimension of the Present Moment, is still in print. In the 1960s, he published two books of what he called 'semi-reportage' about extended visits to the United States. He has been described by Ted Hughes as ‘one of the half dozen most important poets writing anywhere.’
September 13, 1931
Adrienne Kennedy (born September 13, 1931) is a playwright and writer living in New York City Her best-known plays include FUNNYHOUSE OF A NEGRO (which received an Obie in 1964), THE OWL ANSWERS, A RAT’S MASS, and A MOVIE STAR HAS TO STAR IN BLACK AND WHITE. She has published PEOPLE WHO LED TO MY PLAYS and ADRIENNE KENNEDY IN ONE ACT. ‘A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White’ is included in the NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, third edition, volume 2.
September 13, 1940
Born in Junco, Bahia in 1940, Antonio Torres migrated to nearby Alagoinhas to attend high school, afterwards moving to the regional capital Salvador, then to São Paulo, where he worked as a crime reporter on the daily Ultima bra and later in advertising. After several years traveling in Europe during the 1960s, he returned to Brazil. He now lives in Rio de Janeiro.
September 13, 1960
Artyom Genrikhovich Borovik (13 September 1960 – 9 March 2000) was a prominent Russian journalist and media magnate. Borovik died in an aircraft crash at Sheremetyevo International Airport on 9 March 2000. According to historian Yuri Felshtinsky and political scientist Vladimir Pribylovsky, Borovik's death may be linked to his publications about Vladimir Putin just before the presidential elections that took place on 26 March. He died three days prior to the scheduled publication of materials about Putin's childhood. At this time he also conducted an investigation of Moscow apartment bombings.
September 13, 1949
LINDA COLLEY has taught at Cambridge and Yale and is currently Leverhulme Research Professor at the London School of Economics. She is now Shelby M. C. Davis Professor of History at Princeton University.
September 13, 1931
Lauretta Ngcobo (1931, Ixopo, South Africa - November 3, 2015, Johannesburg, South Africa) was a South African writer. The daughter of Simon Gwina, she was born in Ixopo, KwaZulu-Natal, grew up there, and was educated at the University of Fort Hare. She married Abednego Bhekabantu Ngcobo, a founder and member of the executive of the Pan Africanist Congress. In 1963, facing imminent arrest, the family fled the country, moving to Swaziland, then Zambia and finally England, where she taught school for 25 years. Ngcobo returned to South Africa in 1994. Her husband died in 1997. In 2006, she received the Lifetime Achievement Literary Award of the South African Literary Awards. In 2008, she was awarded the Order of Ikhamanga for her work in literature and in promoting gender equality.
September 13, 1885
Aquilino Gomes Ribeiro, ComL (Carregal de Tabosa, Sernancelhe, September 13, 1885 – Lisbon, May 27, 1963), was a Portuguese writer and diplomat. He is considered as one of the great Portuguese novelists of the 20th century. He was nominated for the Nobel Literature Prize in 1960. Natural son of Joaquim Francisco Ribeiro, a priest, and Mariana do Rosário Gomes, he had three older siblings: Maria do Rosário, Melchior and Joaquim. Destinated to priesthood, Aquilino Ribeiro got involved in republican politics, opposing the Portuguese monarchy, and had to exile himself in Paris; he returned to Portugal in 1914, after the Republican Revolution of 1910. He was involved in the opposition to António de Oliveira Salazar and the Estado Novo, whose government tried to censor or ban several of his books. He was married twice: firstly, in 1913 to German Grete Tiedemann (ca. 1890-1927), by whom he had a son, Aníbal Aquilino Fritz Tiedeman Ribeiro in 1914; secondly, in Paris, in 1929, to Jerónima Dantas Machado, daughter of the deposed President of Portugal Bernardino Machado, by whom he had a son Aquilino Ribeiro Machado, born in Paris in 1930, who became the 60th Mayor of Lisbon (1977–1979).
September 13, 1930
Harold B. Segel is professor emeritus of Slavic literatures and of comparative literature at Columbia University. He is the author of over a dozen books, two of which - Twentieth-Century Russian Drama from Gorky to the Present and Turn-of the-Century Cabaret: Berlin, Munich, Paris, Barcelona, Vienna, Krakow, St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Zurich - were published by Columbia University Press.Howard B. Segel is the author of more than a dozen books including Body Ascendant: Modernism and the Physical Imperative, Pinocchio's Progeny, Twentieth Century Russian Drama (CU Press), and Turn-of-the-Century Caberet (CU Press). He is Professor Emeritus of Slavic Literature at Columbia University.
September 13, 1931
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, an anthropologist and animal behaviorist, has published thirteen previous books, including the New York Times bestseller The Hidden Life of Dogs, Dreaming of Lions, The Tribe of Tiger, The Old Way, and The Hidden Life of Deer She lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire.
September 13, 1956
Anne Geddes is an Australian-born photographer, currently living and working in New York. Geddes' books have been published in 83 countries. According to Amazon.com, she has sold more than 18 million books and 13 million calendars.
September 13, 1916
Willard Wilson Savoy (September 13, 1916 – July 8, 1976) was an American novelist, writer and public relations specialist. He was born in Washington, DC. Savoy only published one novel Alien Land, which was received with considerable attention and fanfare when it was released in 1949. His second unfinished novel, entitled for some time Michael Gordon, was rejected for publication in 1954 and 1955.
September 13, 1912
Elliott Arnold (September 13, 1912 – May 13, 1980) was an American newspaper feature writer, novelist, and screenwriter. He was born in Brooklyn, New York and became a feature writer with the New York World-Telegram. Among his books, Elliott Arnold is probably best known for his novel Blood Brother that was adapted as the acclaimed 1950 motion picture Broken Arrow and a 1956 TV series of the same name. His 1949 biography of Sigmund Romberg was made into the 1954 musical film, Deep in My Heart. Elliott Arnold died in New York City in 1980 at the age of sixty-seven.He was married to actress Glynis Johns.
September 13, 1885
Alain Leroy Locke (September 13, 1885 – June 9, 1954) was an American writer, philosopher, educator, and patron of the arts. Distinguished as the first African American Rhodes Scholar in 1907, Locke was the philosophical architect - the acknowledged "Dean" - of the Harlem Renaissance. As a result, popular listings of influential African-Americans have repeatedly included him. On March 19, 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. proclaimed: "We're going to let our children know that the only philosophers that lived were not Plato and Aristotle, but W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke came through the universe.". Charles Molesworth is the coauthor of Alain Locke: Biography of a Philosopher.
September 14, 1920
Mario Benedetti (in full: Mario Orlando Hamlet Hardy Brenno Benedetti Farrugia - September 14, 1920 – May 17, 2009) was an Uruguayan journalist, novelist, and poet, and writer. He was not well known in the English-speaking world, but in the Spanish-speaking world he was considered one of Latin America's most important 20th-century writers. Benedetti was born in Paso de los Toros in the department of Tacuarembó in a family of Italian descent. In 1946 he married Luz López Alegre. He was a member of the 'Generation of 45', a Uruguayan intellectual and literary movement: Carlos Maggi, Manuel Flores Mora, Ángel Rama, Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Idea Vilariño, Carlos Real de Azúa, Carlos Martínez Moreno, Mario Arregui, Mauricio Muller, José Pedro Díaz, Amanda Berenguer, Tola Invernizzi, Ida Vitale, Líber Falco, Juan Cunha, Juan Carlos Onetti, among others. He also wrote in the famous weekly Uruguayan newspaper Marcha. From 1973 to 1985, when a military dictatorship ruled Uruguay, Benedetti lived in exile in Buenos Aires, Lima, Havana and Spain. Following the restoration of democracy, he divided his time between Montevideo and Madrid. He was granted Honoris Causa doctorates by the Universidad de la República, Uruguay, the Universidad de Alicante, Spain and the Universidad de Valladolid, Spain. In 1986 he was awarded Laureate Of The International Botev Prize. On June 7, 2005, he was named the recipient of the Premio Menéndez y Pelayo. His poetry was also used in the 1992 Argentine movie The Dark Side of the Heart (El lado oscuro del corazón) in which he read some of his poems in German. In 2006, Mario Benedetti signed a petition in support of the independence of Puerto Rico from the United States of America. He died in Montevideo on 17 May 2009. He had suffered from respiratory and intestinal problems for more than a year. Before dying, he dictated to his personal secretary, Ariel Silva what would become his last poem. For his poetry and novels Benedetti had won numerous international awards. The Truce, first published in 1960, has since been translated into 19 languages and made into two motion pictures.
September 14, 1916
Eric Bentley (born September 14, 1916) is a British-born American critic, playwright, singer, editor and translator. In 1998, he was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame and is a member of the New York Theater Hall of Fame in recognition of his many years of cabaret performances. Born in Bolton, Lancashire, England, Bentley attended Oxford University, receiving his degree in 1938, and subsequently attended Yale University (B.Litt, 1939 and PhD., 1941), where he received the John Addison Porter Prize. Beginning in 1953, Bentley taught at Columbia University and simultaneously was a theatre critic for The New Republic. Known for his blunt style of theatre criticism, Bentley incurred the wrath of playwrights Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, both of whom threatened to sue him for his unfavorable reviews of their work. From 1960-1961, Bentley was the Norton professor at Harvard University. Bentley is considered one of the preeminent experts on Bertolt Brecht, whom he met at UCLA as a young man and whose works he has translated extensively. He edited the Grove Press issue of Brecht's work, and recorded two albums of Brecht's songs for Folkways Records, most of which had never before been recorded in English. In 1968, he signed the ‘Writers and Editors War Tax Protest’ pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. Bentley was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1969. That same year, he declared his homosexuality. In an interview in the New York Times on November 12, 2006, he claimed he was married twice before coming out at age 53, at which time he left his post as the Brander Matthews Professor of Dramatic Literature at Columbia to concentrate on writing. He has cited his homosexuality as an influence on his theater work, especially his play Lord Alfred's Lover, based on the life of Oscar Wilde. He has written many critical books, including A Century of Hero-Worship, The Playwright as Thinker, Bernard Shaw, What Is Theatre?, The Life of the Drama, Theatre of War, Brecht Commentaries, and Thinking About the Playwright. In addition, he edited The Importance Of Scrutiny (1964), a collection of pieces from Scrutiny: A Quarterly Review, the noted critical periodical, and Thirty Years of Treason: Excerpts from Hearings Before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1938–1968 (1971). His most-produced play, 1972's Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been: The Investigations of Show-Business by the Un-American Activities Committee 1947-1958, was based on the transcripts collected in Thirty Years of Treason. He won a Robert Chesley Award in 2007. Bentley became an American citizen in 1948, and currently lives in New York City.
September 14, 1926
Michel Butor (born 14 September 1926) is a French writer. Michel Marie François Butor was born in Mons-en-Barœul. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, graduating in 1947. He has taught in Egypt, Manchester, Salonika, the United States, and Geneva. He has won many literary awards for his work, including the Prix Apollo, the Prix Fénéon and the Prix Renaudot. Journalists and critics associated his novels with the nouveau roman, but Butor himself has long resisted that association. The main point of similarity is a very general one, not much beyond that; like exponents of the nouveau roman, he can be described as an experimental writer. His best-known novel, La Modification, for instance, is written entirely in the second person. For decades now, he has chosen to work in other forms, from essays to poetry to artist's books to unclassifiable works like Mobile. Literature, painting and travel are subjects particularly dear to Butor. Part of the fascination of his writing is the way it combines the rigorous symmetries that led Roland Barthes to praise him as an epitome of structuralism (exemplified, for instance, by the architectural scheme of Passage de Milan or the calendrical structure of L'emploi du temps) with a lyrical sensibility more akin to Baudelaire than to Robbe-Grillet. Butor was a close friend and colleague of Elinor Miller, a French professor at Embry Riddle University. Butor and Miller worked collaboratively on translations and lectures. In 2002, Miller published a book on Butor entitled Prisms and Rainbows: Michel Butor's Collaborations with Jacques Monory, Jiri Kolar, and Pierre Alechinsky.
September 14, 1895
Ezequiel Martínez Estrada (September 14, 1895 – November 4, 1964) was an Argentine writer, poet, essayist, and literary critic. An admired biographer and critic, he was often political in his writings, and was a confirmed anti-Peronist. While in his middle years he was identified with the ideas of Nietzsche or Kafka, in his last years he was closely identified with the Cuban revolution and Fidel Castro.
September 14, 1931
Ivan Klíma (born 14 September 1931, Prague, born as Ivan Kauders) is a Czech novelist and playwright. He has received the Magnesia Litera Award and the Franz Kafka Prize, among other honors. Klíma's early childhood in Prague was happy and uneventful, but this all changed with the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, after the Munich Agreement. He had been unaware that both his parents had Jewish ancestry; neither were observant Jews, but this was immaterial to the Germans. In November 1941, first his father Vilém Klíma, and then in December, he and his mother and brother were ordered to leave for the concentration camp at Theriesenstadt (Terezín), where he was to remain until liberation by the Russian Liberation Army in May, 1945. Both he and his parents survived incarceration—a miracle at that time—Terezín was a holding camp for Jews from central and southern Europe, and was regularly cleared of its overcrowded population by transports to ‘the East’, death camps such as Auschwitz. Klíma has written graphically of this period in articles in the UK literary magazine, Granta, particularly A Childhood in Terezin. It was while living in these extreme conditions that he says he first experienced ‘the liberating power that writing can give’, after reading a school essay to his class. He was also in the midst of a story-telling community, pressed together under remarkable circumstances where death was ever-present. Children were quartered with their mothers, where he was exposed to a rich verbal culture of song and anecdote. This remarkable and unusual background was not the end of the Klíma's introduction to the great historical forces that shaped mid-century Europe. With liberation came the rise of the Czech Communist regime, and the replacement of Nazi tyranny with proxy Soviet control of the inter-war Czech democratic experiment. Klima became a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Later, his childhood hopes of fairy tale triumphs of good over evil became an adult awareness that it was often ‘not the forces of good and evil that do battle with each other, but merely two different evils, in competition for the control of the world’. The early show trials and murders of those who opposed the new regime had already begun, and Klíma's father was again imprisoned, this time by his own countrymen. It is this dark background that is the crucible out of which Klíma's written material was shaped: the knowledge of the depths of human cruelty, along with a private need for personal integrity, the struggle of the individual to keep whatever personal values the totalitarian regimes he lived under were attempting to obliterate. For his writing abilities, Ivan Klíma was awarded Franz Kafka Prize in 2002 as a second recipient. His two-volume memoir Moje šílené století (‘My Crazy Century’) won the Czech literary prize, the Magnesia Litera, in the non-fiction category in 2010.
September 14, 1929
Ferdinand Léopold Oyono (14 September 1929 – 10 June 2010) was an author from Cameroon whose work is recognised for a sense of irony that reveals how easily people can be fooled. Writing in French in the 1950s, Oyono had only a brief literary career, but his anti-colonialist novels are considered classics of 20th century African literature; his first novel, Une vie de boy—published in 1956 and later translated as Houseboy—is considered particularly important. Beginning in the 1960s, Oyono had a long career of service as a diplomat and as a minister in the government of Cameroon. As one of President Paul Biya's top associates, he ultimately served as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1992 to 1997 and then as Minister of State for Culture from 1997 to 2007. Oyono was born near Ebolowa in the South Province of Cameroon. After obtaining his secondary education in Yaoundé, Oyono studied in Paris. Following Cameroon's independence, Oyono was a member of the Cameroonian delegation to the United Nations in 1960, when the country was admitted to the UN. Oyono subsequently served as Cameroon's ambassador to various countries from 1965 to 1974. He was briefly the Ambassador to Liberia in 1965, then served as ambassador to the Benelux countries and the European Communities from 1965 to 1968 and as ambassador to France, with additional accreditation for Spain, Italy, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, from 1969 to 1974. From 1974 to 1982 he was Cameroon's Permanent Representative to the United Nations; he acted as President of the United Nations Security Council in place of the United Kingdom's Ivor Richard at the 1,866th meeting of the Security Council on 16 December 1975. From 1982 to 1985 he again served as ambassador to various countries: first as ambassador to Algeria and Libya, then as ambassador to the United Kingdom and the Scandinavian countries. In 1985, President Paul Biya recalled Oyono from London and appointed him as Secretary-General of the Presidency of Cameroon. Oyono remained in the post for about a year before Biya instead appointed him as Minister of Town Planning and Housing in 1986. The post of Secretary-General of the Presidency was historically very powerful, but Oyono's stint in the office was associated with a weakening of it under President Biya; significantly, Oyono was moved from the Secretariat-General to an ordinary ministry—effectively a demotion. Although Oyono was dismissed from the government in 1990, he was subsequently appointed as Minister of Foreign Relations on 27 November 1992, serving in that position until he was instead named Minister of State for Culture on 8 December 1997. Oyono was a member of the National Commission for the co-ordination of President Biya's re-election campaign in the October 2004 presidential election and was the president of the campaign's support and follow-up committee in the South Province. After nearly ten years as Minister of State for Culture, Oyono was dismissed from the government on 7 September 2007. Oyono was thought to be a close friend of Paul Biya, and observers attributed his departure from the government to his advanced age and poor health. He had been criticised for reportedly not working at his ministry for months at a time. After leaving the government, Oyono was thought to retain a great deal of influence as ‘an unofficial adviser’ to Biya. Biya appointed him as a roving ambassador on 30 June 2009. As the representative of President Biya, Oyono attended a play commemorating Cameroon's independence struggle and the country's subsequent reunification on 14 May 2010; the play was part of festivities marking Cameroon's 50th year of independence from France. During a visit to Cameroon by Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the 80-year-old Oyono died suddenly in Yaoundé on 10 June 2010. Reportedly Oyono fell ill at the presidential palace after a reception for the Secretary-General; he received immediate medical attention and an ambulance was called, but he quickly died. Later in the day, President Biya released a statement expressing sadness regarding Oyono's death, although the statement gave no details. Secretary-General Ban, meanwhile, expressed sadness during a speech to the National Assembly of Cameroon. An official funeral was held for Oyono with a series of events beginning on 24 June 2010 and concluding with his burial at Ngoazip, near Ebolowa, on 26 June.
September 14, 1948
Marc Reisner (September 14, 1948 – July 21, 2000) was an American environmentalist and writer best known for his book Cadillac Desert, a history of water management in the American West. He was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the son of a lawyer and a scriptwriter, and graduated from Earlham College in 1971. For a time he was on the staffs of Environmental Action and the Population Institute in Washington, D.C. Starting in 1972, he worked for seven years as a staff writer and director of communications for the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York. In 1979 he received an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship, which enabled him to conduct research and write Cadillac Desert, which was first published in 1986. The book was a finalist for both the National Book Critics' Circle Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers' Award (BABRA) that same year. In 1999, a Modern Library panel of authors and critics included it on a list of the 100 most notable English-language works of nonfiction of the 20th century. It was later made into a documentary film series that premiered nationwide on PBS nationwide in 1997 and won a Columbia University/Peabody Award. He went on to write additional books and helped develop a PBS documentary on water management. He was featured as an interviewee in Stephen Ives's 1996 PBS documentary series The West, which was produced by Ken Burns. In 1997 he published a discussion paper for the American Farmland Trust on water policy and farmland protection. Shortly before he died, he had won a Pew Charitable Trusts Fellowship to support efforts to restore Pacific salmon habitat through dam removal. Reisner was also involved in efforts to promote sustainable agronomy and green entrepreneurship. In 1990, in partnership with the Nature Conservancy, he co-founded the Ricelands Habitat Partnership, an innovative program designed to enhance waterfowl habitat on California farmlands and reduce pollution by flooding rice fields in winter instead of burning the rice straw, as was then the common practice. He also joined in efforts to help California rice farmers develop eco-friendly products from compressed rice straw, and a separate project to promote water conservation through water transfers and groundwater banking. For a time, Reisner was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California at Davis, lecturing on the relationship between urbanization and environmental concerns. Reisner died of colon cancer in 2000 at his home in San Anselmo, California, survived by his wife, biochemist Lawrie Mott, and their two daughters. His final book, A Dangerous Place, was completed before his death but did not appear in print until 2003.
September 14, 1817
Hans Theodor Woldsen Storm (14 September 1817 – 4 July 1888), commonly known as Theodor Storm, was a German writer. Storm was born in the small town of Husum, on the west coast of Schleswig, then a formally independent duchy ruled by the king of Denmark. He was one of the most important authors of 19th-century German Literary realism.
September 14, 1580
Born to a family of wealth and distinction in Madrid in 1580, Francisco Gômez de Quevedo y Villegas was one of the most learned and cultivated men of his time. Versed in several languages, he distinguished himself as a poet and wit early in his career, and was highly esteemed by his contemporaries, including the masters Cervantes and Lope de Vega. More interested in politics than in a literary career, Quevedo joined the court of the Duke of Osuna, viceroy of Sicily and later of Naples, whom he served with distinction for seven years. When, in 1620, Osuna incurred the disfavor of Philip III. Quevedo, although no longer in the Duke’s service, was imprisoned. He returned to royal favor on the ascent of Philip IV in 1622, and in 1632 became secretary to the king, but turned down several more important appointments in order to devote himself to his satirical writings. Arrested again in 1639, supposedly for a satirical poem written in an effort to apprise the king of the misdeeds of his prime minister, the Duke of Olivares, Quevejo remained imprisoned until 1643. Embittered and in poor health, he died in 1645. One of the most turbulent and fiery figures of Spanish literature, Quevedo was equally prolific in a number of literary genres. He attacked unerringly men’s weakness he criticized as inept the administration of political favorites that had led to the gradual decline Of Spain. The graft, corruption, and poverty that he witnessed growing in Spain furnished him with material for his greatest literary works. The Suenos, written at intervals from 1606 to 1622, shows his development as a master of the Baroque style conceptismo, a complicated form depending on puns and elaborate conceits. First officially published in 1627, the Suenos was an instant success in Spain, and within a short time was translated into the principal languages of continental Europe. The first English edition appeared in 1640 and reappeared in numerous versions throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the 1667 translation of Roger L’Estrange being the most popular. The last translation was done by William Elliot in Philadelphia in 1832 Professor Woolseys is the first translation in over 140 years. and the only one available in modern Engish. The illustrations in the text are taken from ‘Los Caprichos,’ a famous series of etchings by tie great Spanish master Goya, which were completed in 1799. Deeply embittered by recent deafness, Goya sought solace in Spanish literature, and his art was undoubtedly influenced by Quevedo’s work. The political or anticlerical caricatures in many Of Goya’s drawings make an eminently suitable accompaniment to Quevedo’s satirical text. Wallace Woolsey was formerly Chairman of the Department of Foreign Languages at Texas Woman’s University. He has published translations of two other important works of Spanish literature, THE WITCH OF TRAZMOZ and LA CELESTINA, and is currently working on a study of Zavala’s VIAJE A LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS with a view to translation. He is also the author of high school Spanish texts and workbooks and of numerous articles in scholarly journals.
September 14, 1869
Lyubov Fyodorovna Dostoyevskaya (September 14, 1869 Dresden, Kingdom of Saxony Died November 10, 1926 (aged 57) Gries, Kingdom of Italy) was a Russian writer, memoirist and the second daughter of famous writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his wife Anna. Their first, Sofiya, was born in 1868 and died the same year. Dostoyevskaya was a nervous child and cried a lot. Due to her weak health, nervous system problems, and constant relationship failures, Lyubov had become arrogant, haughty, and peevish. She never married. In later life she became estranged from her mother and moved out of their house. In 1913, after a trip abroad for medical treatment, Lyubov decided to stay there, and she lived abroad until her death in 1926. At that period she was also known under the name Aimée Dostoyevskaya. She died in Italy of pernicious anemia. Although Lyubov Dostoyevskaya was Orthodox, the funeral rite was Catholic by mistake. A simple wooden cross on her grave was soon replaced by a small porphyry tomb. In 1931 Italia Letteraria magazine suggested that since Dostoyevskaya was buried in Italy, it is the Italian government that should establish a memorial. On December 1931 a granite pedestal was constructed, with an epitaph written by the editor of Venezia Tridentina magazine. Resting place of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's daughter in Gries has been preserved after cemetery reconstruction. Her tomb was moved to Bolzano city's cemetery.
September 14, 1933
HANS FAVEREY (1933-1990), born in Paramaribo, Surinam, moved as a child to Amsterdam, where he lived until his death. He was a clinical psychologist, and played the harpsichord, an instrument for which he also composed. Faverey received many literary awards including the Amsterdam Poetry Prize, the Jan Campert Prize, and the prestigious Constantijn Huygens Prize for his work as a whole. FRANCIS R. JONES, Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at Newcastle University, UK, translates from Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Hungarian, Russian, Dutch, Flemish, and Dutch-based Creole. He is the only translator to have won the UK's biennial European Poetry Translation Prize twice.
September 14, 1860
Hannibal Hamlin Garland (September 14, 1860 – March 4, 1940) was an American novelist, poet, psychical researcher essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his fiction involving hard-working Midwestern farmers.
September 14, 1950
Ted Gup is a writer known for his work on government secrecy. He is the author of three books, including The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA, which told the stories of previously unnamed CIA officers killed in the line of duty.
September 14, 1953
Brian McAllister Linn (born September 14, 1953 in the Territory of Hawaii) is professor of history at Texas A&M University and the Harold K. Johnson Visiting Professor of Military History at the U.S. Army War College. He is the author of The U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War, 1899-1902 and Guardians of Empire: The U.S. Army and the Pacific, 1902-1940, winner of the 1997 Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award.
September 14, 1976
Benjamin Moser (September 14, 1976) is an American writer who lives in Utrecht, Netherlands. Born in Houston, Moser attended high school in Texas and France before graduating from Brown University with a degree in History. He briefly studied Chinese and Portuguese. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from Utrecht University. He is the New Books Columnist for Harper's Magazine, a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, and the author of a biography of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector titled Why This World. He discovered the books of Clarice Lispector while studying Portuguese-language literature. He has published translations from the Dutch, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. He speaks six languages in addition to these. He lives with Arthur Japin (a Dutch writer).
September 14, 1949
Manhattan resident Karen Garthe's poems have appeared in Fence, Volt, New American Writing, Chicago Review, American Letters & Commentary, Global City Review, Exquisite Corpse, Brooklyn Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Torque, Beet, Gargoyle, No Roses Review, Colorado Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and other literary journals.
September 14, 1950
John Steptoe (September 14, 1950 – August 28, 1989) was an award-winning author and illustrator for children’s books dealing with aspects of the African-American experience. He is best known for Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters, which was acknowledged by literary critics as a breakthrough in African history and culture. John Steptoe was born in Brooklyn, New York. He began drawing as a young child and received formal art training at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan. He also attended the Vermont Academy, where he studied under the sculptor John Torres, and William Mayors, a widely acclaimed painter. Steptoe began his first picture book, Stevie, when he was only 16 years old. Stevie was published three years later to outstanding critical praise. It received national attention when it appeared in its entirety in Life magazine, which commended it for being "a new kind of book for black children." Since his publication of Stevie, John Steptoe illustrated 15 more picture books, 10 of which he also wrote. The American Library Association named The Jumping Mouse in 1985 and Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters in 1988 Caldecott Honor Books, a prestigious award for children’s book illustrations. Steptoe also received the Coretta Scott King Award for illustration for both Mother Crocodile (written by Rosa Guy) in 1982 and Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters. While all of Steptoe’s works deals with the African-American experience, Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters was widely praised by reviewers and critics as a breakthrough of African history and culture[citation needed]. Based on an African tale from the 19th century, it required Steptoe to research his heritage giving him the chance to awaken his pride in his African ancestry. John Steptoe hoped that his books would lead African-American children to feel pride in their origins as well. Steptoe's son Javaka Steptoe is also a children's book author and illustrator. He won the 2017 Caldecott Medal for his book Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. John Steptoe died on August 28, 1989, at Saint Lukes Hospital in Manhattan of AIDS. He was only 38 years old. At the time of his death, Steptoe was among the few African-American artists who made a career in children’s literature. Following his death, the American Library Association established the John Steptoe Award for New Talent, which is given to affirm new talent and excellence in writing and/or illustration.
September 15, 1946
James Bamford (born September 15, 1946) is an American bestselling author and journalist noted for his writing about United States intelligence agencies, especially the National Security Agency (NSA). Bamford has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, as a distinguished visiting professor and has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Harper's, and many other publications. In 2006, he won the National Magazine Award for Reporting for his article, "The Man Who Sold The War", published in Rolling Stone.
September 15, 1914
Adolfo Bioy Casares (September 15, 1914 – March 8, 1999) was an Argentine fiction writer, journalist, and translator. He was a friend and collaborator with his fellow countryman Jorge Luis Borges, and wrote what many consider one of the best pieces of fantastic fiction, the novella The Invention of Morel. Adolfo Bioy Casares was born in Buenos Aires, the grandson of a wealthy landowner and dairy processor, and the descendant of Patrick Lynch, a successful Irish emigrant. He wrote his first story (‘Iris y Margarita’) at the age of eleven. He was a friend and frequent collaborator of Jorge Luis Borges and wrote many stories with him under the pseudonym of H. Bustos Domecq. Bioy and Borges were introduced in 1932 by Victoria Ocampo, whose sister, Silvina Ocampo (1903–1994), Bioy Casares was to marry in 1940. In 1954 they adopted Bioy’s daughter with another woman, Marta Bioy Ocampo (1954–94), who was killed in an automobile accident just three weeks after Silvina Ocampo’s death, leaving two children. The estate of Silvina Ocampo and Adolfo Bioy Casares was awarded by a Buenos Aires court to yet another love child of Adolfo Bioy Casares, Fabián Bioy, shortly before Fabián Bioy died, aged 40, in February 2006. Bioy won several awards, including the Gran Premio de Honor of SADE (the Argentine Society of Writers, 1975), the French Legion of Honour (1981), the title of Illustrious Citizen of Buenos Aires (1986), and the Miguel de Cervantes Prize (awarded to him in 1991 in Alcalá de Henares). Adolfo Bioy Casares is buried in La Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires. In 2006 Ediciones Destino published a book of Bioy's diary entries on Borges, numbering 1663 pages of anecdotes, witticisms and observations. The best-known novel by Bioy Casares is La invención de Morel (The Invention of Morel). It is the story of a man who, evading justice, escapes to an island said to be infected with a mysterious fatal disease. Struggling to understand why everything seems to repeat, he realizes that all the people he sees there are actually recordings, made with a special machine, invented by Morel, which is able to record not only three-dimensional images, but also voices and scents, making it all indistinguishable from reality. The story mixes realism, fantasy, science fiction and terror. Borges wrote a famous prologue in which he called it a work of ‘reasoned imagination’ and linked it to H. G. Wells' oeuvre. Both Borges and Octavio Paz described the novel as ‘perfect.’ The story is held to be the inspiration for Alan Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad and also an influence on the TV series Lost.
September 15, 1890
Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, DBE (born Miller; 15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976) was an English crime writer of novels, short stories, and plays. She also wrote six romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best remembered for the 66 detective novels and more than 15 short story collections she wrote under her own name, most of which revolve around the investigations of such characters as Hercule Poirot, Miss Jane Marple and Tommy and Tuppence. She also wrote the world's longest-running play, The Mousetrap. Born to a wealthy upper-middle-class family in Torquay, Devon, Christie served in a hospital during the First World War, before marrying and starting a family in London. Although initially unsuccessful at getting her work published, in 1920, The Bodley Head press published her novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles, featuring the character of Poirot. This launched her literary career. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time. Her novels have sold roughly 4 billion copies, and her estate claims that her works rank third, after those of William Shakespeare and the Bible, as the world's most-widely published books. According to Index Translationum, Christie is the most-translated individual author, and her books have been translated into at least 103 languages. And Then There Were None is Christie's best-selling novel with 100 million sales to date, making it the world's best-selling mystery ever, and one of the best-selling books of all time. In 1971, she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace. Christie's stage play The Mousetrap holds the record for the longest initial run: it opened at the Ambassadors Theatre in London on 25 November 1952 and as of 2012 is still running after more than 25,000 performances. In 1955, Christie was the first recipient of the Mystery Writers of America's highest honour, the Grand Master Award, and in the same year Witness for the Prosecution was given an Edgar Award by the MWA for Best Play. Many of her books and short stories have been filmed, and many have been adapted for television, radio, video games and comics.
September 15, 1907
Gunnar Ekelöf (Stockholm, 15 September 1907 - Sigtuna, 16 March 1968) was a Swedish poet and writer. He was a member of the Swedish Academy from 1958. He was also awarded an honorary doctorate in philosophy by Uppsala University in 1958. He won a number of prizes for his poetry.
September 15, 1955
Dan Fesperman (born September 15, 1955 in Charlotte, North Carolina) is a former reporter for The Baltimore Sun and the author of several thrillers. The plots were inspired by the author's own international assignments in Germany, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East. He is a 1977 graduate of the University of North Carolina and lives in Baltimore, Maryland with his wife Liz Bowie, a Baltimore Sun reporter, and their two children.
September 15, 1889
Claude McKay, one of the pioneers of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote several critically acclaimed works of poetry, fiction, and autobiography. Although he lived in New York City for much of his life, McKay produced many of his major books in Europe, the Soviet Union, and North Africa during the 1920s and early 1930s. He died penniless in a Chicago hospital in 1948.
September 15, 1929
John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich, CVO, known as John Julius Norwich, (15 September 1929 – 1 June 2018) was an English popular historian, travel writer and television personality.
September 15, 1977
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 15 September 1977) is a Nigerian writer. She is Igbo. She has been called ‘the most prominent’ of a ‘procession of critically acclaimed young anglophone authors [that] is succeeding in attracting a new generation of readers to African literature’.
September 15, 1885
Marcel Allain (15 September 1885 – 25 August 1969) was a French writer mostly remembered today for his co-creation with Pierre Souvestre of the fictional arch-villain and master criminal Fantômas. The son of a Parisian bourgeois family, Allain studied law before becoming a journalist. He then became the assistant of Souvestre, who was already a well-known figure in literary circles. In 1909, the two men published their first novel, Le Rour. Investigating Magistrate Germain Fuselier, later to become a recurring character in the Fantômas series, appears in the novel. Then, in February 1911, Allain and Souvestre embarked upon the Fantômas book series at the request of publisher Arthème Fayard, who wanted to create a new monthly pulp magazine. The success was immediate and lasting. After Souvestre’s death in February 1914, Allain continued the Fantômas saga alone, then launched several other series, such as Tigris, Fatala, Miss Téria and Férocias, but none garnered the same popularity as Fantômas. In 1926, Allain married Souvestre’s girl-friend, Henriette Kistler. In total, Allain wrote more than 400 novels in his prolific career.
September 15, 1941
Carlton Lindsay Barrett, also known as Eseoghene (born 15 September 1941), is a Jamaican-born poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, journalist and photographer who since 1966 has lived in Nigeria, of which country he became a citizen in the mid-1980s. He initially drew critical attention for his debut novel, Song for Mumu, which on publication in 1967 was favourably noticed by such reviewers as Edward Baugh and Marina Maxwell (who respectively described it as "remarkable" and "significant"); more recently it has been commended for its "pervading passion, intensity, and energy", referred to as a classic, and features on "must-read" lists of Jamaican books. Particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, Barrett was well known as an experimental and progressive essayist, his work being concerned with issues of black identity and dispossession, the African Diaspora, and the survival of descendants of black Africans, now dispersed around the world. One of his sons is the Nigerian writer A. Igoni Barrett, with whom he has also worked professionally
September 15, 1923
John Russell Brown (September 15, 1923, Bristol, United Kingdom - August 25, 2015) was a distinguished Shakespearean scholar who was also involved in practical theatre – he was a close associate of the director Peter Hall at the National Theatre for 15 years from 1973 – but was paradoxically opposed to directors filtering the plays though their own ideas, concepts and interpretations. He edited the Oxford Illustrated History of the Theatre (2001), one of the outstanding books of its kind, with definitive essays by Martin Esslin (on modern theatre 1890-1920), Peter Holland (18th century), Oliver Taplin (Greek theatre) and Peter Thomson (English Renaissance and Restoration drama), Russell Brown himself providing a magisterial, international overview of theatre since 1970. Unlike many Shakespearean scholars, he kept up to date, supporting Hall in his championing of Edward Bond, Howard Brenton and David Hare at the National, and he remained well informed on developments across Europe and in America and Japan.
September 15, 1934
Thomas Anthony "Tomie" dePaola (born September 15, 1934) is an American writer and illustrator who has created more than 200 children's books, and is known best for the PBS Kids TV series Barney & Friends and picture books such as Strega Nona. He received the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for his lifetime contribution to American children's literature in 2011. Though not as well known as for illustrations of children's books, DePaola has also produced significant works of fine art, several of which in locations that are accessible for viewing. These works include the simple, yet very elegant, series of fourteen Stations of the Cross and a depiction of St. Benedict holding the "Rule for Monasteries" with a monastery in the background that reside in the Abbey Church of Our Lady of Glastonbury in Hingham, Massachusetts. He also painted a set of frescoes in the refectory (monks' dining room) of the same abbey, normally open only to the congregation after the abbey's conventual Sunday masses during cool or inclement weather. (This coffee hour takes place in the arbor across the parking lot from the church, the refectory thus remaining closed to visitors, when weather permits.)
September 15, 1938
LYA LUFT has published three volumes of poetry, a collection of essays, and four novels. THE ISLAND OF THE DEAD was originally published in Brazil in 1984 as 0 Quarto Fechado (The Closed Room), and it went on to become a bestseller in that country. As a translator, Luft has rendered into Portuguese works by authors including Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Günter Grass, and Norman Mailer.
September 15, 1254
Marco Polo (September 15, 1254 – January 8–9, 1324) was a Venetian merchant traveller whose travels are recorded in Livres des merveilles du monde (Book of the Marvels of the World, also known as The Travels of Marco Polo, c. 1300), a book that introduced Europeans to Central Asia and China.
September 15, 1756
Karl Philipp Moritz (Hamelin, September 15, 1756 – Berlin, June 26, 1793) was a German author, editor and essayist of the Sturm und Drang, late enlightenment, and classicist periods, influencing early German Romanticism as well. He led a life as a hatter's apprentice, teacher, journalist, literary critic, professor of art and linguistics, and member of both of Berlin's academies.
September 15, 1918
Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., (September 15, 1918, Guyencourt, Delaware, DE - May 9, 2007, Cambridge, MA) was Straus Professor of Business History, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University. He also taught at The Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and All Souls College, Oxford. He is the author of several books in economic and business history, including Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise and Henry Varnum Poor: Business Editor, Analyst, and Reformer. He is coauthor of Pierre S. du Pont and the Making of the Modern Corporation. He is assistant editor of The Papers of Theodore Roosevelt and editor of The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower: The War Years.
September 15, 1789
James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) was born in Burlington, New Jersey, and his family moved to Cooperstown, New York, while he was still an infant. He attended Yale College until he was expelled for bad behavior. He served in the U.S. Navy, resigning in 1811 to get married. With his story The Pilot (1823), Cooper set the style for a new genre of sea fiction. His most famous novels are the Leather-Stocking Tales including The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841), featuring the quintessential American hero Natty Bumppo. Cooper, a keen social critic, wrote several well-regarded naval histories.
September 16, 1939
Breyten Breytenbach (born 16 September 1939) is a South African writer and painter known for his opposition to apartheid, and consequent imprisonment by the South African government. He is informally considered as the national poet laureate by Afrikaans-speaking South Africans of the region. He also holds French citizenship.
September 16, 1950
Henry Louis ‘Skip’ Gates, Jr., (born September 16, 1950) is an American literary critic, educator, scholar, writer, and editor. He was the first African American to receive the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship. He has received numerous honorary degrees and awards for his teaching, research, and development of academic institutions to study black culture. In 2002, Gates was selected to give the Jefferson Lecture, in recognition of his ‘distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.’ Gates has hosted several PBS television miniseries, including the history and travel program Wonders of the African World and the biographical African American Lives and Faces of America. Gates sits on the boards of many notable arts, cultural, and research institutions. He serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, where he is director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.
September 16, 1916
Marie Vieux Chauvet (1916–1973) was a Haitian novelist. Born and educated in Port-au-Prince, her most famous works were the novels Fille d'Haïti (1954), La Danse sur le Volcan (1957), Fonds des Nègres (1961), and Amour, Colère, Folie (1969). The trilogy Amour, Colère, Folie was published by Gallimard press in Paris with the support of Simone de Beauvoir. The trilogy was perceived as an attack on the Haitian despot François Duvalier. Fearing the dictator's legions of Tonton Macoutes, her husband bought all the copies of the book he could find in Haiti, and Chauvet's daughters bought the remaining copies from Gallimard in Paris a few years later. She died in the United States of America.
September 16, 1943
James Alan McPherson (born September 16, 1943) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American short story writer and essayist. He has been a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship. McPherson is a member of the permanent faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. McPherson was born in Savannah, Georgia. He attended Morris Brown College in Atlanta, graduating in 1965. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1968. McPherson won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his short story collection Elbow Room, becoming the first African-American to win the Pulitzer for fiction. He was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981. He has taught English at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Harvard University, and Yale University. He lectured in Japan with Dr. Jerald Walker at Meiji University and Chiba University. In 2000, John Updike selected his short story ‘Gold Coast’ for his collection Best American Short Stories of the Century (Houghton Mifflin). In October 2011 McPherson was honored as the inaugural recipient of the Paul Engle Award from the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature. The Engle Award honors an individual who, like Engle, longtime director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and co-founder of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, represents a pioneering spirit in the world of literature through writing, editing, publishing, or teaching, and whose active participation in the larger issues of the day has contributed to the betterment of the world through the literary arts.
September 16, 1893
Hagar Olsson (1893-1978) was a Finnish-Swedish writer, journalist, critic, friend of the poet Edith Södergran. Olsson wrote in both languages. She was among the first playwrights, who introduced the Expressionistic drama to Finnish public. Olsson's theatre works were also visually pioneering. The set design for her drama S.O.S (1928) was planned by the famous architect Alvar Aalto. In the 1920s and 1930s, Olsson was one of the few major writers in Finland, who was more interested in such themes than pacifism, Pan-Europeanism, and collectivism, than national, social, or historical issues. Hagar Olsson was born in Gustafs (Kustavi), the daughter of a Protestant minister. She spent her early childhood in Åland and Åbo, but in 1906 the family moved to Karelia, the eastern Finland. After finishing her schooling in Viborg, Olsson studied in Helsinki at the Swedish School of Economics from 1913 to 1914, and at the University of Helsinki. Olsson contributed literature critics to the newspaper Dagens Press, later transformed into Svenska Pressen. In the 1920s she was a staff member of the short-lived culture magazine Ultra with Elmer Diktonius. A cosmopolitian, Olsson was interested in new ideas, and she introduced contemporary literature to Finland. A collection of her essays appeared under the title NY GENERATION (1925). Like the members of the literary movement Tulenkantajat, she reacted against the cynicism of the day, and was enthusiastic about the new youth in Russia, Germany, and Italy. Olsson's first novel, LARS THOMAN OCH DÖDEN, appeared in 1916 – in the same year as Edith Södergran's collection of poems Dikter. The novel was about a young man, who is haunted by fear of death and gains new strength from a forest god named Samr. Death theme appeared in the subsequent novels as well elements from fairy tales and mysticism. KVINNAN OCH NÅDEN (1919), written under the influence of Per Lagerkvist, embraced the belief that life continues after death. Among Olsson's major novels are MR JEREMIAS SÖKER EN ILLUSION (1927), in which the protagonist dies in a traffic accident and finds the real adventure and a new world in death. CHITAMBO (1933) reflected the conflict between individualism and collectivism. This autobiographical work, set in Helsinki before and after the Civil War (1917-18), was named after the village in Africa where the famous explorer David Livingstone died. Vega Maria, the protagonist, is named after A.E. Nordenskiöld's ship. After devoting herself to women's rights movement, and a personal crisis, Vega Maria decides to become a great individual like David Livingstone, and follow his example, but in her own country. Vega Maria's father, Mr. Dyster, is a visionary, who is not able to realize his ideas. Her mother tries to find safety in her life through self-denial and conformity. Olsson's play's were heavily experimental and showed her familiarity with the work of Pirandello and the German expressionist Georg Kaiser. S.O.S. (1928) dealt with the guilt of a manufacturer of poison gas, and his transformation into a pacifist through the love of a self-scarifying woman. In the play DET BLÅA UNDRET (1932) a sister and brother represent, respectively, communism and fascism, but at the end they learn to understand each other. DET BLÅSER UPP TIL STORM (1930) was a love story of a working class girl and a middle-class young boy, who propagate new ideas, but eventually the parents of the boy destroy their life. The short story KINESISK UTFLYK (1949), a fantasy about the events of her own life, was dedicated to Olsson's friend Ella Frelander. The dream fantasy, an imitation of a Chinese legend, was built around scenes from the author's life. Olsson's romantic novel, TRÖSNIDAREN OCH DÖDEN (1940), tells the story of a woodcarver, Abel Myyriäinen, who is drawn to mysterious Karelia, the source of his art. He meets a man and his sick daughter Sanni on their way to a monastery. She wants to see Saint Mary before she dies. After her death under a miracle-working icon, Abel follows Sanni's father to her home village and finds again his true calling as an artist. Olsson edited a collection of Edith Södergran's letters, which appeared in 1955. She translated into Swedish works from such Finnish authors as L. Onerva, Johannes Linnankoski, Juhani Aho, Maila Talvio and F.E. Sillanpää. In 1969 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Helsinki. Olsson's memoirs, MÖTE MED KÄRA GESTALTER, was published in 1963. It returned partly to the events of Kinesisk utflykt. In the 1960s she published three collections of short stories, in which she dealt with religious themes. In the title story of HEMKOMST (1961) she examined the daughter-father relationship, which was a recurrent subject in her work. Olsson died in Helsinki on February 21, 1978. She never married. From 1917 to 1920 she was engaged to the poet R.R. Eklund (1895-1946). Olsson's forbidden play LUMISOTA, which she wrote under the shadow of the Winter War (1939-40) and which criticized nationalism and the martial spirit, was not professionally performed until 1982.
September 16, 1823
Francis Parkman, Jr. (September 16, 1823 – November 8, 1893) was an American historian, best known as author of The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life and his monumental seven-volume France and England in North America. These works are still valued as historical sources and as literature. He was also a leading horticulturist, briefly a Professor of Horticulture at Harvard University and author of several books on the topic.
September 16, 1888
Frans Eemil Sillanpää (16 September 1888 – 3 June 1964) was one of the most famous Finnish writers and in 1939 became the first Finnish writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Frans Eemil Sillanpää was born into a peasant farming family in Hämeenkyrö. Although his parents were poor, they managed to send him to school in Tampere. In 1908 he moved to Helsinki to study medicine. Here his acquaintances included the painters Eero Järnefelt and Pekka Halonen, composer Jean Sibelius and author Juhani Aho. Five years later, in 1913 Sillanpää moved from Helsinki to his old home village, married, and devoted himself to writing. He won international fame for his novel Nuorena nukkunut (The Maid Silja/Fallen Asleep While Young) in 1931. In 1939, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for his deep understanding of his country's peasantry and the exquisite art with which he has portrayed their way of life and their relationship with Nature.’ The asteroid 1446 Sillanpää, discovered on January 26, 1938 by the renowned Finnish astronomer and physicist Yrjö Väisälä, was named after him. Sillanpää died on 3 June 1964 in Helsinki aged 75.
September 16, 1851
Emilia Pardo Bazán (16 September 1851 – 12 May 1921) was a Galician (Spanish) novelist, journalist, essayist, critic and scholar from Galicia. Pardo Bazán was born into a noble family in A Coruña, Galicia, Spain. The culture of her birthplace was incorporated into some of her most popular novels, including Los pazos de Ulloa (‘The House of Ulloa’) and its sequel, La madre naturaleza (‘Mother Nature’). She is known for introducing naturalism to Spanish literature, for her detailed descriptions of reality, and for her role in feminist literature of her era. She was acknowledged for her creative stories such as Temprano y con Sol, which explicitly describes an ironic misfortune. She wrote a book called in which she expressed her opinion about equality. She was educated in Madrid. At the age of sixteen she married D. José Antonio de Quiroga y Pérez de Deza, a Galician country gentleman. She became interested in politics, and is believed to have taken an active part in the underground campaign against Amadeo of Spain and, later, against the republic. In 1876 she was the successful competitor for a literary prize offered by the municipality of Oviedo, the subject of her essay being the Benedictine monk Benito Jerónimo Feijoo. This was followed by a series of articles inserted in La Ciencia cristiana, a magazine of the purest orthodoxy, edited by Juan M. Orti y Lara. Her first novel, Pascual López (1879), was followed by Un viaje de novios (1881), in which a discreet attempt was made to introduce the methods of French realism. The novel caused a sensation, which was increased by the appearance of another naturalistic tale, La tribuna (1885), wherein the influence of Émile Zola is unmistakable. Meanwhile, the writer's response to her critics was issued under the title of La cuestion palpitante (1883). Emilia Pardo Bazán memorial in Paco Mermela gerden, A Coruña. The naturalistic scenes of El Cisne de Villamorta (1885) are more numerous, more pronounced, than in any of its predecessors, though the author shrinks from the logical application of her theories by supplying a romantic and inappropriate ending. Probably the best of Emilia Pardo Bazán's work is embodied in Los pazos de Ulloa (1886), translated as The House of Ulloa by , 2013, which recounts the decadent of an aristocratic family, as notable for the heroes Nucha and Julián as for characters including the political bravos, Barbacana and Trampeta. Yet perhaps its most abiding merit lies in its pictures of country life, its poetic realization of Galician scenery portayed in an elaborate, highly-colored style. A sequel, with the significant title of La madre naturaleza (1887), marks a further advance in the path of naturalism, and henceforth Pardo Bazán was universally recognized as one of the chiefs of the new naturalistic movement in Spain. The title was confirmed by the publication of Insolación and Morriña in 1889. In this year her reputation as a novelist reached its highest point. Her later stories, La cristiana (1890), Cuentos de amor (1894), Arco Iris (1895), Misterio (1903) and La quimera (1905), attracted less interest. In 1905 she published a play entitled Verdad, known for its boldness more than its dramatic qualities. Her husband, Xosé Quiroga, purchased Castillo de Santa Cruz in A Coruña, Galicia at an auction and they resided there for years. She died in Madrid in 1921. Roser Caminals-Heath is an associate professor of Spanish language and literature at Hood College. She has written a novel, ONCE REMEMBERED, of which excerpts have been published, as well as several articles and reviews on Spanish literature and translation.
September 16, 1905
Vladimír Holan (September 16, 1905 – March 31, 1980) was a Czech poet famous for employing obscure language, dark topics and pessimistic views in his poems. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in the late 1960s. He was (1945 - 1950) a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Holan was born in Prague, but he spent most of his childhood outside the capital. When he moved back in the 1920s he studied law and started a job as a clerk, a position that was a large source of dissatisfaction for the poet. He lost his father and in 1932 married V?ra Pila?ová. In the same year he published the collection of poems Vanutí (Breezing), which he considered his first piece of poetic art (there were two books preceding it: Blouznivý v?jí? /1926/ and Triumf smrti /1930/). It was his only collection to be reviewed by the knight of Czech critics, František Xaver Šalda, who compared Holan favorably with the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé. In the 1930s Holan continued writing obscure lyrical poetry and slowly started to express his political feelings (reacting to the Spanish Civil War at first). Political poems Odpov?? Francii (The Reply to France), Zá?í 1938 (September 1938) and Zp?v t?íkrálový (Twelfth Night Song) were reactions to the situation in Czechoslovakia from September 1938 till March 1939. They also made him more intelligible and popular. The poem called Sen (The Dream) is a presage of a cruel war (amazingly published in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in April 1939). During the war he published several poetic stories in verse inspired by national humiliation. After the war he published an apocalyptic record of events in his Panychida and chanted about the Red Army in Tob? (To You), Rudoarm?jci (Red Army Soldiers) and Dík Sov?tskému svazu (Thanks to the Soviet Union). He left the Catholic Church and became a member of the Communist Party. In 1949 after the communist takeover he was involved in an incident against Soviet influence in the new regime and his work was on the index of Czech literature. He left the Communist Party and reentered the Catholic Church. In the last years of his life he lived in reclusive poverty in the very heart of Prague on the island of Kampa. In the 1950s and 1960s he wrote longer poems mixing reality and lyrical abstraction. He is best known in English for his postwar works, both the often teasingly obscure longer poem Noc s Hamletem (A Night with Hamlet, 1964) which became the most often translated Czech poem, and his short, gnomic lyrical reflections, with occasional submerged notes of political protest. He became a legendary poet-recluse. He had a daughter, Kate?ina, born in 1949 in his bad years and in addition to the social problems she suffered from Down syndrome (he wrote a poem called Bajaja for her, which with Jaroslav Seifert's Maminka, is one of the basic children's poetry works of Czech modern literature - also illustrated by Ji?í Trnka. When she died in 1977, Holan lost his will to live and ceased writing. He died in a flat in Prague's riverfront Kampa district in 1980 and was buried in Olšany Cemetery.
September 16, 1953
Nancy Louise Huston, OC (born September 16, 1953) is a Canadian-born novelist and essayist who writes primarily in French and translates her own works into English. Huston was born in Calgary, Alberta, in Canada, the city in which she lived until age fifteen, at which time her family moved to Wilton, New Hampshire, where she attended High Mowing School. She studied at Sarah Lawrence College in New York City, where she was given the opportunity to spend a year of her studies in Paris. Arriving in Paris in 1973, Huston obtained a master's degree from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, writing a thesis on swear words under the supervision of Roland Barthes. After many years of marriage to Tzvetan Todorov, with whom she had two children, Huston now shares her life with Swiss painter Guy Oberson. Because French was a language acquired at school and university, Huston found that the combination of her eventual command of the language and her distance from it as a non-native speaker helped her to find her literary voice. Since 1980, Huston has published over 45 books of fiction and non-fiction, including theatre and children's books. Some of her publications are self-translations of previously published works. Essentially she writes in French and subsequently self-translates into English but Plainsong (1993) was written first in English and then self-translated to French as Cantique des plaines (1993) – it was, however, the French version which first found a publisher. She has 25 fiction publications, of which 13 are original fiction and 11 are self-translations. In her fiction, only Trois fois septembre (1989), Visages de l'aube (2001) and Infrarouge (2010), as well as her three children's books, have not been published in English. She has also published two plays but has not yet translated either. She has 14 non-fiction publications, of which 12 are original publications and two are self-translations. The other ten non-fiction publications have not yet been self-translated. While Huston's often controversial works of non-fiction have been well-received, her fiction has earned her the most critical acclaim. Her first novel, Les variations Goldberg (1981), was awarded the Prix Contrepoint and was shortlisted for the Prix Femina. She translated this novel into English as The Goldberg Variations (1996). Her next major award came in 1993 when she was received the Canadian Governor General's Award for Fiction in French for Cantique des Plaines (1993). This was initially contested as it was a translation of Plainsong (1993), but Huston demonstrated that it was an adaptation and kept the prize. A subsequent novel, La virevolte (1994), won the Prix "L" and the Prix Louis-Hémon. It was published in English in 1996 as Slow Emergencies. Huston's novel, Instruments des ténèbres, has been her most successful novel yet, being shortlisted for the Prix Femina, and the Governor General's Award. It was awarded the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens. In 1998, she was nominated for a Governor General's Award for her novel L'Empreinte de l'ange. The next year she was nominated for a Governor General's Award for translating the work into English as The Mark of the Angel. In 1999, she appeared in the film Set Me Free (Emporte-moi), also collaborating on the screenplay. Her works have been translated into many languages from Chinese to Russian. In 2005, she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, and she received the Prix Femina in 2006 for the novel Lignes de faille and which, as Fault Lines, has been published by Atlantic Books and is shortlisted for the 2008 Orange Prize. Her latest novel is Infrarouge (2010). In 2007, she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Liège. In 2010, she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Ottawa. In 2012, she won the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award for her novel, Infrared.
September 16, 1947
ENRIQUE KRAUZE was born on September 16, 1947 in Mexico City and has lived there ever since. Educated as an industrial engineer and a historian, Krause combined both business and literary careers until he joined the prestigious intellectual journal Vuelta, becoming co-editor in 1982. Krauze has written numerous books, essays, and articles on contemporary Mexico. His short biographies of twentieth- century Mexican leaders have sold more than a million copies in Mexico. In the United States he has written for the New York Times, Dissent, the Wall Street Journal, Partisan Review, Time, and the New Republic. His book, Siglo de Caudillos, 1810-1910 (Century of Caudillos, 1810-1910,), published in Mexico in 1994, has been a bestseller there, also winning an important literary prize in Spain, the Premio Comillas. Since 1982, Krauze has been one of Mexico’s leading advocates of democratic reform.
September 16, 1913
FELICIEN MARCEAU (September 16, 1913, Kortenberg, Belgium - March 7, 2012, Paris, France) was born in Cortenberg, Belgium, in 1913. After efforts in the worlds of publishing, radio, and art, he turned his attention to literature and the theatre. Well known in Europe as a novelist, he is best known in America as a playwright, author of THE EGG and LA BONNE SOUPE.
September 16, 1950
Toon Micheils (September 16, 1950, Boxtel, Netherlands - October 5, 2015) was a Dutch photographer. Toon Michiels studied graphic design at the Art Academy in Den Bosch. He later taught at the Academy St. Joost in Breda, the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and the Royal Academy of Art and Design in Den Bosch. In the early seventies, he became known for the photo book ‘Zeldzame mensen’ (Unusual People) about the farming couple Sjo Pol and Marinus Bressers, who lived in poverty near Michiel’s birthplace Boxtel. The photographs from this project were purchased by the Rijksmuseum. Some of them will be on display as from December in the Photo Museum Den Haag. In the late seventies Michiels made several trips through the US. These trips led to the series ‘American Neon Signs By Day And Night’, which was published in book form under the same title. Photos from this series were shown this summer during the Rencontres d’Arles and will be exhibited from January 2016 in the Dutch Photo Museum in Rotterdam.
September 16, 1946
Joanne Ryder studied journalism at Marquette University. For several years she was an editor of children's books in New York, before she quit to write full-time. Ryder is an award-winning author whose books offer a unique blend of poetry and science.
September 16, 1916
Marie Vieux-Chauvet, a seminal writer of postoccupation Haiti, was born in Port-au-Prince in 1916 and died in New York in 1973. She is the author of five novels, including Dance on the Volcano, Fonds des Nègres, Fille d’Haiti, and Les Rapaces. Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokur have translated two novels by Patrick Chamoiseau, Solibo Magnificent and Texaco, the latter of which won the American Translators Association Galantière Prize for Best Book. Their translation of Love, Anger, Madness was supported by a Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Edwidge Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. She is the author of Brother, I’m Dying; Breath, Eyes, Memory; Krik? Krak!; The Farming of Bones; and The Dew Breaker. She lives in Miami with her husband and two daughters.
September 17, 1908
John Creasey (17 September 1908 – 9 June 1973) was an English crime and science fiction writer who wrote more than six hundred novels using twenty-eight different pseudonyms. He created several characters which are now famous, such as The Toff (The Honourable Richard Rollison), Commander George Gideon of Scotland Yard, Inspector Roger West, The Baron (John Mannering), Doctor Emmanuel Cellini and Doctor Stanislaus Alexander Palfrey. The most popular of these was Gideon of Scotland Yard, who was the basis for the television series Gideon's Way and for the John Ford movie Gideon of Scotland Yard (1958), also known by its British title Gideon's Day. The Baron character was also made into a 1960s TV series starring Steve Forrest as The Baron.
September 17, 1935
Kenneth Elton ‘Ken’ Kesey (September 17, 1935 – November 10, 2001) was an American author, best known for his novel ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST (1962), and as a counter-cultural figure who considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. ‘I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie,’ Kesey said in a 1999 interview with Robert K. Elder.
September 17, 1883
William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) was an American poet and physician, born in Rutherford, N.J., educated in Geneva, Switzerland, University of Pennsylvania (M.D., 1906), and University of Leipzig, where he studied pediatrics. Williams began his medical practice in 1910 in Rutherford and was a physician for more than 40 years. As a poet he was closely associated with modernism and imagism. He received his MD from the University of Pennsylvania, where he met and befriended Ezra Pound. Pound became a great influence on his writing, and in 1913 arranged for the London publication of Williams’s second collection, The Tempers. Returning to Rutherford, where he sustained his medical practice throughout his life, Williams began publishing in small magazines and embarked on a prolific career as a poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright. Following Pound, he was one of the principal poets of the Imagist movement, though as time went on, he began to increasingly disagree with the values put forth in the work of Pound and especially Eliot, who he felt were too attached to European culture and traditions. Continuing to experiment with new techniques of meter and lineation, Williams sought to invent an entirely fresh—and singularly American—poetic, whose subject matter was centered on the everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people. His influence as a poet spread slowly during the 1920s and 1930s, overshadowed, he felt, by the immense popularity of Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’; however, his work received increasing attention in the 1950s and 1960s as younger poets, including Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, were impressed by the accessibility of his language and his openness as a mentor. The Early work of Williams shows the influences of the various poetic trends of the time-from metaphorical imagism in Poems (1909) and The Tempers (1913) to free-verse expressionism in Al Que Quiere! (1917), Kora in Hell (1920), and Sour Grapes (1921). Williams observed American life closely, expressed anger at injustice, and recorded his impressions in a lucid, vital style. He developed a verse that is close to the idiom of speech, revealing a fidelity to ordinary things seen and heard. Later volumes of his poetry include Collected Poems (1934), Collected Later Poems (1950), Collected Earlier Poems (1951), Journey to Love (1955), Pictures from Brueghel, and Other Poems (1963; Pulitzer Prize), and a five-volume, impressionistic, philosophical poem, Paterson (1946-58), in which he uses the experience of life in an American city to voice his feelings on the duty of the poet. His essays include those in In the American Grain (1925), Selected Essays (1954), and Embodiment of Knowledge (1974). Among his other works are a collection of short stories, Make Light of It (1950); plays, including A Dream of Love (1948) and Many Loves (1950); and the novels A Voyage to Pagany (1928), a three-volume chronicle of an immigrant family in America, White Mule (1937), In the Money (1940), and The Build-Up (1952). His autobiography appeared in 1951 and his Selected Letters was published in 1957. Williams’s health began to decline after a heart attack in 1948 and a series of strokes, but he continued writing up until his death in New Jersey on March 4, 1963.
September 17, 1932
Robert Brown Parker (September 17, 1932 – January 18, 2010) was an American crime writer. His most famous works were the novels about the private detective Spenser. ABC television network developed the television series Spenser: For Hire based on the character in the mid-1980s; a series of TV movies based on the character were also produced. His works incorporate encyclopedic knowledge of the Boston metropolitan area. Parker was 77 when he died of a heart attack at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts; discovered at his desk by his wife Joan, he had been working on a novel. The Spenser novels have been cited by critics and bestselling authors such as Robert Crais, Harlan Coben and Dennis Lehane as not only influencing their own work but reviving and changing the detective genre.
September 17, 1915
ROBERT CRASSWELLER (September 17, 1915 - July 18, 2004) was a graduate of Carleton College and Harvard Law School. He worked in private law practice, in business ventures in the Caribbean, and on corporate legal staffs, including six years as General Counsel - Latin America for ITT. He also served as visiting professor of Latin American affairs at various universities. He was an author specializing in Latin American subjects. Mr. Crassweller lived in Stamford, Connecticut.
September 17 , 1903
Frank O'Connor (born Michael Francis O'Donovan; 17 September 1903 – 10 March 1966) was an Irish writer of over 150 works, best known for his short stories and memoirs. The Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award is named in his honour.
September 17, 1916
Mary, Lady Stewart (born Mary Florence Elinor Rainbow; 17 September 1916 – 9 May 2014), was a British novelist who developed the romantic mystery genre, featuring smart, adventurous heroines who could hold their own in dangerous situations. She also wrote children's books and poetry, but may be best known for her Merlin series, which straddles the boundary between the historical novel and fantasy.
September 17, 1904
In his nearly half a century on the Harvard faculty Bartlett Jere Whiting (September 17, 1904, Northport, ME - August 24, 1995, Belfast, ME) established a reputation for great learning, influential teaching, and dangerous wit. He died at age 90 on 24 August 1995 in Waldo County Hospital, Belfast, Maine, a short distance from where he had been born in East Northport on 17 September 1904. His family was rooted in the shores of Penobscot Bay, and he met his future wife, Helen Wescott, as a freshman at Belfast High School. Whiting liked to point out (literally with a twinkle in his eye--for he had lost one eye in a childhood accident) that when they graduated in 1921, it was Helen who took first place as valedictorian, while he came in second as salutatorian. She was his intellectual partner for nearly five decades and is recognized as co-author of one of Whiting’s most important books. Whiting was not only an erudite student of folklore but the object of many anecdotes, such as the persistent legend that attributes his advent at Harvard to the curiosity of Abbott Lawrence Lowell on a motoring vacation in Maine: in one version the President is supposed to have called from his car to a boy intently reading under a tree: "What are you reading, lad?" "Aristophanes, sir." "In Greek?" "Why yes, sir." "Get in this car, my boy. You are going to Cambridge with me." Once here, according to another story, young Bartlett restyled himself "B. Jere Whiting," in satirical emulation of a nomenclature prevalent among Brahmins of the time. However it really happened, Jere stuck as his name in town and in scholarship, but he always remained Bartlett down in Maine. After his retirement in 1975 the Whitings returned to their natal ground and to the house where Bartlett was born. Whiting declared that when the inevitable decline into senility came, he preferred to be among his friends in Maine, who never expected more of a Harvard professor. After a Wanderjahr in Europe (1925-26) on a Sheldon Fellowship, Whiting returned to begin teaching in the English Department and to marry Helen. When Whiting took his Ph.D. in 1932, he would have considered himself essentially a philologist, a student of English language and literary history; but with the extensive shifting of disciplinary boundaries, his greatest scholarly contributions came to lie in areas that now pertain equally to the study of folklore. He taught Old and Middle English and Middle Scots, but his undergraduate Chaucer course, with its humorous and perfectly timed lectures, was for generations a showpiece of the Department. Whiting’s supportive attitude toward his graduate students earned him the gratitude of many. In 1974 a selection of former students contributed to a festschrift focused on his Chaucer teaching; later Whiting was honored by a festschrift from the international community of proverb scholars and on his ninetieth birthday by a volume republishing his most influential essays in that field. Whiting’s English Department career included two stints as departmental chair; he was attached to Lowell House from its inception in 1930. He served the Medieval Academy of America in several offices, especially as delegate to the ACLS. This occasioned a series of almost thirty annual reports that grew so famous for their accuracy and esprit that they were republished by the ACLS as a history of the organization from 1948-75. A full account of Whiting’s publications would have to discuss some eleven separate books or editions, some 100 articles and notes, and about thirty reviews. His subject matter includes English and American literature, Medieval French, New England history, and folklore; for many years he annually published light-hearted reviews of the year’s crop of historical novels. Whiting’s interest in speechways, especially proverbs, proverbial sayings, and sententiae, began at least as early as his senior honors thesis, and his Ph.D. dissertation spun off two theoretical articles on the "Origin" and the "Nature" of the proverb in 1931 and ’32 that are still fundamental in what has come in recent years to be a field in its own right, paremiology. Whiting, who was amused by the self-conscious cultivation of special terminology, is regarded as one of its founders, and in turn the self-consciousness of the modern field lends a focused afterlife to Whiting’s life’s work. The decades of the ’30s and ’40s may be said to constitute the first period of Whiting’s proverb scholarship. During this time he published books that are still definitive on Chaucer’s use of proverbs and proverbs in medieval drama, as well as similar treatments of romances, ballads, and other medieval literary corpora such as Middle Scots writings, the Reynard material, and a variety of French writers. In the second period, roughly the ’50s, Whiting increasingly moves away from individualizing treatments by author, genre, or proverb toward comprehensive dictionaries – paremiography rather than -ology in the newer terminology. A large collection of North Carolina proverb material led the way in 1958 to his first lexicon of American proverbs, covering writings 1820-1880 and co-authored by his friend Archer Taylor. The next stages of Whiting’s proverb work, each roughly a decade in length, are all punctuated by completion of a massive dictionary. In 1968 came the medieval volume, based on reading that began in the ’30s; but in its innovative lexicographical techniques it perfected Whiting’s methods and set the standard for the developing field. For this great compendium, Whiting read and excerpted virtually all medieval English literature. The next decade culminates (in 1977) in the magnificent dictionary of early American proverbs. The final decade, during which Whiting’s eye-sight and health progressively failed, ended with the publication in 1989 of a third American volume, on the "modern" period – an enterprise helped along by several friends. These four great lexica, together with the earlier articles and books, secure Whiting’s place, not merely as a major part of the history of proverb study, but as an essential reference point for serious proverb study for the future. At Harvard, however, he will also be remembered as the downeast wit, the last medieval philologist in succession from Francis James Child, whose bronze profile we see behind the chair of the President here in the Faculty Room, and especially from Whiting’s own teacher, George Lyman Kittredge, whose portrait in his white suit hangs on the north wall above us and whom Whiting described among his faculty colleagues in this room as "an egret in a flock of cowbirds."
September 17, 1957
Ruth Alice Emma Frankenberg (17 September 1957 in Cardiff, Wales—22 April 2007 in Bangalore, India) was a British–American sociologist and feminist, known for her pioneering work in the field of whiteness studies. Ruth Frankenberg was the daughter of Ronald Frankenberg (1929–2015), who was also an anthropologist and Alison Sherratt. Her partner Lata Mani is also an anthropologist. She is the author of White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Born in Wales, she was educated in Cambridge and at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
September 18, 1903
Jorge Carrera Andrade was an Ecuadorian poet, historian, author, and diplomat during the 20th century. He was born in Quito, Ecuador in 1902. He died in 1978. During his life and after his death he has been recognized with Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz and Cesar Vallejo as one of the most important Latin American poets of the twentieth century.
September 18, 1830
Jose Tomas de Cuellar (1830-1894) was a Mexican writer noted for his sharp sense of humor and gift for caricature.
September 18, 1922
Luciano Erba (September 18, 1922, Milan, Italy - August 3, 2010, Milan, Italy) was born in Milan in 1922 and is the author of numerous books of poetry and a short-story collection. Peter Robinson is a renowned British poet, translator, and critic whose books include 'Twentieth Century Poetry: Selves and Situations' and a forthcoming collection of interviews, 'Talk about Poetry: Conversations on the Art'.
September 18, 1894
Ermilo Abreu Gómez (September 18, 1894, Mérida, Yucatán - July 14, 1971, Mexico City) was a writer, journalist and lecturer born in Mérida, Yucatán, México. He was a member of the Mexican Academy of the Language from 1963. He was also a professor in several Universities in the USA. He died in the Mexico City in 1971. His literary work was varied, over a long period of time - La Xtabay (1919) ; El Corcovado (1924) ; Clásicos. Románticos. Modernos (1934); Canek (1940); Héroes Mayas (1942); Un Loro y tres Golondrinas (1946); Quetzalcóatl, sueño y vigilia (1947); Naufragio de indios (1951); La conjura de Xinúm (1958); Cuentos para contar al fuego (1959); Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, bibliografía y biblioteca (1934); Diálogo del buen decir (1961). . . The interest that Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz woke up in him became the passion of his life and it also led him to become her main critic. His most well-known work is Canek (1940), a story about the old Mayan people. As a curiosity the commentary of the author on the book ‘Canek’: ‘And Nymph lost the best pages!’. (Nymph was his wife who typed the original).
September 18, 1933
Olle Högstrand (September 18, 1933, Sweden - March 16, 1994, Stockholm, Sweden) was a reporter for the National Swedish News Agency, for which he has traveled widely in North America and Europe. He was also employed as a social worker and male nurse, and served for several years in the Swedish UN Force, in the Gaza Strip and the Congo. He lived in a suburb of Stockholm.
September 18, 1709
Samuel Johnson (18 September 1709 – 13 December 1784), often referred to as Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. Johnson was a devout Anglican and committed Tory, and has been described as ‘arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history.’ He is also the subject of ‘the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature’: James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson. Born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, Johnson attended Pembroke College, Oxford for just over a year, before his lack of funds forced him to leave. After working as a teacher he moved to London, where he began to write for The Gentleman's Magazine. His early works include the biography The Life of Richard Savage, the poems ‘London‘ and ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes‘, and the play Irene. After nine years of work, Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755. It had a far-reaching effect on Modern English and has been described as ‘one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship.’ This work brought Johnson popularity and success. Until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary 150 years later, Johnson's was viewed as the pre-eminent British dictionary. His later works included essays, an influential annotated edition of William Shakespeare's plays, and the widely read tale Rasselas. In 1763, he befriended James Boswell, with whom he later travelled to Scotland; Johnson described their travels in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Towards the end of his life, he produced the massive and influential Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, a collection of biographies and evaluations of 17th- and 18th-century poets. Johnson was a tall and robust man. His odd gestures and nervous tics were disconcerting to some on first meeting him. Boswell's Life, along with other biographies, documented Johnson's behaviour and mannerisms in such detail that they have informed the posthumous diagnosis of Tourette syndrome, a condition not defined or diagnosed in the 18th century. After a series of illnesses, he died on the evening of 13 December 1784, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. In the years following his death, Johnson began to be recognised as having had a lasting effect on literary criticism, and he was claimed by some to be the only truly great critic of English literature.
September 18, 1941
John Stanley Melville Keay FRGS, widely known as John Keay, (pronounced 'Kay') is a British historian, journalist, radio presenter and lecturer specialising in popular histories of India, the Far East and China, often with a particular focus on their colonisation and exploration by Europeans. In particular, he is widely seen as a pre-eminent historian of British India. He is known both for stylistic flair and meticulous research into archival primary sources, including centuries-old unpublished sources. The author of over some twenty-five books, he also writes regularly for a number of prominent publications in Britain and Asia. He began his career with The Economist. He has received several major honours including the Sir Percy Sykes Memorial Medal. The Economist has called him "a gifted non-academic historian", the Yorkshire Post has called him "one of our most outstanding historians", The Independent has called his writing "exquisite" and The Guardian has described his historical analysis as "forensic" and his writing as "restrained yet powerful". He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Keay lives in Argyll in the West Highlands of Scotland and travels widely
September 18, 1952
Alberto Álvaro Ríos (born 1952, Nogales, Arizona) is an American author of nine books and chapbooks of poetry, three collections of short stories, and a memoir. He is a Regents' professor of English at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. His work is regularly taught and translated, and has been adapted to dance to both classical and popular music.
September 18, 1945
Ken Robbins was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1945. He graduated from Cornell University in 1967. He worked as a book editor at Doubleday before becoming a children's book author and photographer. He wrote and illustrated more than 20 children's books including Pumpkins, Apples, and Earth. He primarily took photographs of scenery and still lifes. His photographs were reproduced on book jackets, record album covers, and in magazines including the cover of Time. They were also collected in books including The Hamptons Suite. He died on March 9, 2017 at the age of 71.
September 18, 1895
Lyubov Evgenievna Belozerskaya (September 18, 1895, Poland - January 27, 1987, Moscow, Russia) was the second wife of Mikhail Bulgakov the Russian writer whose most famous work is The Master and Margarita. During their marriage, Bulgakov's work was suppressed because he would not conform to the Stalinist party line.
September 18, 1908
Harold Courlander, who is a specialist in African and Afro-American folklore, folk music, and related fields, has written HAITI SINGING and a novel set in the West Indies, THE CABALLERO. He has done much anthropological research and writing, some of it for the United Nations.
September 18, 1937
Jean-Pierre Chrétien (born September 18, 1937, Lille, France) is Directeur de Recherches at the Centre Nationale de Recherches Scientifique and affiliated with the Centre de Recherches Africaines at the University of Paris.
September 18, 1933
Mark di Suvero received both the Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award from the International Sculpture Center and the Heinz Award for the Arts and Humanities. François Barré has held top cultural positions in France. .
September 18, 1933
Loup Durand (alias Louis André Durand, 18 September 1933 - 18 April 1995), was a French writer.
September 18, 1954
Steven Arthur "Steve" Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-born American cognitive scientist, psychologist, linguist, and popular science author. He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. Pinker's academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, and the psychology of cooperation and communication, including euphemism, innuendo, emotional expression, and common knowledge. He has written two technical books that proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In particular, his work with Alan Prince published in 1989 critiqued the connectionist model of how children acquire the past tense of English verbs, arguing instead that children use default rules such as adding "-ed" to make regular forms, sometimes in error, but are obliged to learn irregular forms one by one. In his popular books, he has argued that the human faculty for language is an instinct, an innate behavior shaped by natural selection and adapted to our communication needs. He is the author of seven books for a general audience. Five of these, namely The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), and The Stuff of Thought (2007) describe aspects of the field of psycholinguistics and cognitive science, and include accounts of his own research. The sixth book, The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), makes the case that violence in human societies has, in general, steadily declined with time, and identifies six major causes of this decline. His seventh book, The Sense of Style (2014), is intended as a general style guide that is informed by modern science and psychology, offering advice on how to produce more comprehensible and unambiguous writing in nonfiction contexts and explaining why so much of today's academic and popular writing is difficult for readers to understand. Pinker has been named as one of the world's most influential intellectuals by various magazines. He has won awards from the American Psychological Association, the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society and the American Humanist Association. He delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 2013. He has served on the editorial boards of a variety of journals, and on the advisory boards of several institutions. He has frequently participated in public debates on science and society and is a regular contributor to the online science and culture digest 3 Quarks Daily.
September 19, 1947
Alfred Henry Bromell (September 19, 1947 – March 18, 2013) was an American author, screenwriter, and director. Bromell joined the crew of NBC police drama Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994. He served as a writer and co-executive producer for the show's third season. He contributed to writing seven episodes for the season. He was promoted to executive producer for the fourth season and wrote a further 17 episodes. He scaled back his involvement with the fifth season and became a consulting producer. He wrote a further two episodes before leaving the crew at the end of the season in 1997. He contributed to a total of 26 episodes as a writer over three seasons with the series. He returned as a co-writer and co-executive producer for the feature-length follow-up Homicide: The Movie in 2000. He wrote and produced for many television series, including Chicago Hope, Northern Exposure, Homicide: Life on the Street, Brotherhood, Carnivàle, and Rubicon. He was a consulting producer, and later Executive Producer on the Showtime series Homeland at the time of his death and wrote four episodes: ‘The Good Soldier‘, ‘Representative Brody‘, ‘Q&A‘, and ‘Broken Hearts‘. He was awarded a Writers Guild of America Award for ‘The Good Soldier’, and he was posthumously awarded a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series for ‘Q&A’. He shared the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series and the Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series – Drama with the other producers of Homeland in 2012. He was nominated in the same category at the Emmys for his work on the 1993 TV series I'll Fly Away, for which he was awarded a Writers Guild of America Award for the episode titled ‘Amazing Grace’. Bromell wrote and directed the feature film Panic (2000), which was nominated for the top prize at the Deauville Film Festival, and tele-movie Last Call (aka Fitzgerald), with Jeremy Irons playing writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Bromell attended Eaglebrook School (1963) and the United World College of the Atlantic (1964–1966). He graduated from Amherst College in 1970. He won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Award for his first novel, The Slightest Distance. His collection of short stories, I Know Your Heart, Marco Polo, was published by Knopf. Bromell's work has appeared in two O. Henry Award collections. Bromell's first wife was the screenwriter and director Caroline Thompson. He then married writer Trish Soodik, who died of cancer in January 2009; they had a son, William. Bromell died March 18, 2013, at UCLA Santa Monica hospital at age 65. He is survived by his wife, Sarah, and sons, William and Jake.
September 19, 1921
Paulo Reglus Neves Freire, Ph.D (September 19, 1921 – May 2, 1997) was a Brazilian educator and philosopher who was a leading advocate of critical pedagogy. He is best known for his influential work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which is considered one of the foundational texts of the critical pedagogy movement.
September 19, 1938
Keorapetse William Kgositsile, also known as "Bra Willie" (born 19 September 1938), is a South African poet and political activist. An influential member of the African National Congress in the 1960s and 1970s, he was inaugurated as South Africa's National Poet Laureate in 2006. Kgositsile lived in exile in the United States from 1962 until 1975, the peak of his literary career. He made an extensive study of African-American literature and culture, becoming particularly interested in jazz. During the 1970s he was a central figure among African-American poets, encouraging interest in Africa as well as the practice of poetry as a performance art; he was well known for his readings in New York City jazz clubs. Keorapetse was one of the first to bridge the gap between African poetry and Black poetry in the United States. He is the father of hip-hop recording artist Earl Sweatshirt, from the prominent American hip-hop group Odd Future.
September 19, 1948
Gerhard Kopf is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Duisberg.
September 19, 1964
Yvonne Vera (September 19, 1964 - April 7, 2005) was an award-winning author from Zimbabwe. Her novels are known for their poetic prose, difficult subject-matter, and their strong women characters, and are firmly rooted in Zimbabwe's difficult past. For these reasons, she has been widely studied and appreciated by those studying postcolonial African literature. Vera was born in Bulawayo, in what was then Southern Rhodesia, to Jerry Vera and Ericah Gwetai. At the age of eight, she worked as a cotton-picker near Hartley. She attended Mzilikazi High School and then taught English literature at Njube High School, both in Bulawayo. In 1987 she travelled to Canada and she married John Jose, a Canadian whom she had met while he was teaching at Njube. At York University, Toronto, she completed an undergraduate degree, a master's and a PhD, and taught literature. In 1995, Vera returned to Zimbabwe and in 1997 became director of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo, a gallery that showcases local talent ranging from that of professional artists to school children. In 2004 she went back to Canada, where she died on April 7, 2005, of AIDS-related meningitis. While at university, Vera submitted a story to a Toronto magazine: the publisher asked for more, so she sat down to write them. Her collection of short stories, Why Don't You Carve Other Animals, was published in 1992. It was followed by five completed novels: Nehanda (1993), short-listed for Commonwealth Writers' Prize; Without a Name (1994), awarded Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Africa and Zimbabwe Publishers' Literary Award; Under the Tongue (1997); Butterfly Burning (2000), awarded a German literary prize, LiBeraturpreis, in 2002; The Stone Virgins (2002), awarded Macmillan Writers' Prize for Africa. At the time of her death she was working on a new novel, Obedience. Her works have been published in Zimbabwe, Canada and several other countries, including translations into Spanish, Italian and Swedish. Vera wrote obsessively, often for 10 hours a day, and described time when she was not writing as 'a period of fasting.' Her work was passionate and lyrical. She took on themes such as rape, incest and infanticide, and gender inequality in Zimbabwe before and after the country's war of independence with sensitivity and courage. She said, 'I would love to be remembered as a writer who had no fear for words and who had an intense love for her nation.' In 2004 she was awarded the Swedish PEN Tucholsky Prize 'for a corpus of works dealing with taboo subjects'. Vera also edited several anthologies by Zimbabwean women writers.
September 19, 1902
Henry Cecil Leon (19 September 1902 – 23 May 1976), who wrote under the pen-names Henry Cecil and Clifford Maxwell, was a judge and a writer of fiction about the British legal system. He was born near London in 1902 and was called to the Bar in 1923. Later in 1949 he was appointed a County Court Judge, a position he held until 1967. He used these experiences as inspiration for his work. His books typically feature educated and genteel fraudsters and blackmailers who lay ludicrously ingenious plots exploiting loopholes in the legal system.
September 19, 1957
Gregory Clark is chair of the economics department at the University of California, Davis. He has written widely about economic history.
September 19, 1947
Viktor Vladimirovich Yerofeyev (also transliterated as Erofeyev; born September 19, 1947 in Moscow) is a Russian writer. As son of a high-ranking Soviet diplomat Vladimir Yerofeyev, he spent some of his childhood in Paris, which accounts for why much of his work has been translated from Russian into French, while comparatively little has been translated into English. His father, who was the interpreter for Molotov in the 1940s, wrote a book of memories; his brother is a curator at the Tretyakov Gallery.
September 19, 1954
Wil Haygood (born September 19, 1954 in Columbus, Ohio) is an American journalist and author who is known for his 2008 Washington Post article "A Butler Well Served By This Election", about Eugene Allen, which served as the basis for the 2013 movie The Butler. Since then, Haygood has written a book about Allen, The Butler: A Witness to History. While being interviewed on the radio program Conversations with Allan Wolper on WBGO 88.3FM, Haygood revealed that he had tracked down another White House butler. At the last minute, this butler, who had served three presidents, refused to be interviewed; the family apparently did not want his story out against the parallel story of the election of President Barack Obama. Haygood is a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and a professor at Miami University.
September 19, 1933
Ingrid Jonker (19 September 1933 – 19 July 1965) (OIS), was a South African poet. While she wrote in Afrikaans, her poems have been widely translated into other languages. Jonker has reached iconic status in South Africa and is often called the South African Sylvia Plath, owing to the intensity of her work and the tragic course of her turbulent life.
September 19, 1945
Nancy Pickard (born September 19, 1945 in Kansas City, Missouri) is a US crime novelist. She has won five Macavity Awards, four Agatha Awards, an Anthony Award, and a Shamus Award. She is the only author to win all four awards. She also served on the board of directors of the Mystery Writers of America. She received a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri and began writing when she was 35 years old. She is frequently a panelist at the Great Manhattan Mystery Conclave, a convention for mystery writers and fans in Manhattan, Kansas.
September 19, 1867
Arthur Rackham (19 September 1867 – 6 September 1939) was an English book illustrator. Rackham was born in Lewisham, then still part of Kent as one of 12 children. In 1884, at the age of 17, he was sent on an ocean voyage to Australia to improve his fragile health, accompanied by two aunts. At the age of 18, he worked as a clerk at the Westminster Fire Office and began studying part-time at the Lambeth School of Art. In 1892, he left his job and started working for the Westminster Budget as a reporter and illustrator. His first book illustrations were published in 1893 in To the Other Side by Thomas Rhodes, but his first serious commission was in 1894 for The Dolly Dialogues, the collected sketches of Anthony Hope, who later went on to write The Prisoner of Zenda. Book illustrating then became Rackham's career for the rest of his life. By the turn of the century Rackham had developed a reputation for pen and ink fantasy illustration with richly illustrated gift books such as The Ingoldsby Legends (1898), Gulliver's Travels and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (both 1900). This was developed further through the austere years of the Boer War with regular contributions to children's periodicals such as Little Folks and Cassell's Magazine. In 1901 he moved to Wychcombe Studios near Haverstock Hill, and in 1903 married his neighbour Edyth Starkie. Edith suffered a miscarriage in 1904, but the couple had one daughter, Barbara, in 1908. Although acknowledged as an accomplished black-and-white book illustrator for some years, it was the publication of his full colour plates to Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle by Heinemann in 1905 that particularly brought him into public attention, his reputation being confirmed the following year with J.M.Barrie's Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, published by Hodder & Stoughton. Income from the books was greatly augmented by annual exhibitions of the artwork at the Leicester Galleries. Rackham won a gold medal at the Milan International Exhibition in 1906 and another one at the Barcelona International Exposition in 1912. His works were included in numerous exhibitions, including one at the Louvre in Paris in 1914. From 1906 the family lived in Chalcot Gardens, near Haverstock Hill, until moving from London to Houghton, West Sussex in 1920. In 1929 the family settled into a newly built property in Limpsfield, Surrey. Arthur Rackham died in 1939 of cancer at his home.
September 19, 1964
Simon Lehna Singh (born 19 September 1964) is a British popular science author, theoretical and particle physicist whose works largely contain a strong mathematical element. His written works include Fermat's Last Theorem (in the United States titled Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem), The Code Book (about cryptography and its history), Big Bang (about the Big Bang theory and the origins of the universe), Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial (about complementary and alternative medicine, co-written by Edzard Ernst) and The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets (about mathematical ideas and theorems hidden in episodes of The Simpsons and Futurama). In 2012 Singh founded the Good Thinking Society. Singh has also produced documentaries and works for television to accompany his books, is a trustee of NESTA and the National Museum of Science and Industry, a patron of Humanists UK, founder of the Good Thinking Society, and co-founder of the Undergraduate Ambassadors Scheme.
September 19, 1959
Giusto Traina is professor of Greek history at the University of Rouen. He is the author of several previous books on Roman and Greek history.
September 20, 1878
Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968), was an American author who wrote nearly 100 books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906). It exposed conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the free press in the United States. Four years after publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created. Time magazine called him 'a man with every gift except humor and silence.' In 1943, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Sinclair was an outspoken socialist and ran unsuccessfully for Congress from the Socialist Party. He was also the Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California in 1934, but his campaign was defeated decisively.
September 20, 1951
Richard M. Berrong is an assistant professor of French at Kent State University. He is the author of EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF: SOCIAL ORDER AND ITS DISSOLUTION IN RABELAIS (1985).
September 20, 1928
Olympe Bhêly-Quénum (born 20 September 1928) is a Beninese writer, journalist and magazine editor. Born in Ouidah, Benin (formerly Dahomey), Bhêly-Quénum had his primary education in Benin from 1938 to 1944, after which he traveled throughout his native country, Nigeria, his maternal grandmother's country, and Ghana, where he learned English. In 1948 he went to France and undertook his secondary studies at the College Littré, in Avranches, Normandy (Manche). He worked as a teacher and trained as a diplomat, before turning to journalism. He was Editor-in-Chief and then Director of an African magazine entitled La Vie Africaine until 1964. He subsequently joined UNESCO in Paris. He is the author of several works of fiction published in French. He won the Grand prix littéraire d'Afrique noire for Le Chant du lac in 1966. His first novel Un Piège Sans Fin (1960) was translated into English as Snares Without End (Longman, 1981) and has been called ‘an un-put-downable tragedy’.
September 20, 1951
Javier Marías is an award-winning Spanish novelist. He is also a translator and columnist, as well as the current king of Redonda. He was born in Madrid in 1951 and published his first novel at the age of nineteen. He has held academic posts in Spain, the US (he was a visiting professor at Wellesley College) and Britain, as a lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University. He has been translated into 34 languages, and more than six million copies of his books have been sold worldwide. In 1997 he won the Nelly Sachs Award; the Comunidad de Madrid award in 1998; in 2000 the Grinzane Cavour Award, the Alberto Moravia Prize, and the Dublin IMPAC Award. He also won the Spanish National Translation Award in 1979 for his translation of TRISTRAM SHANDY in 1979. He was a professor at Oxford University and the Complutense of Madrid. He currently lives in Madrid. Margaret Jull Costa won both the 2008 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize and the 2008 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for Eca de Queiros’s THE MAIAS. She is also the translator of the work of Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago, António Lobo Antunes, and Javier Marías.
September 20, 1928
Carlos Alberto Portugal Correia de Lacerda (September 20, 1928 – August 27, 2007) was a Portuguese poet and BBC Radio Presenter. Alberto de Lacerda was born in Mozambique in 1928. In 1946, Lacerda moved to Lisbon. In 1951, he began work at the BBC as a radio presenter and settled in London. He travelled in Brazil between 1959 and 1960 at the invitation of the Brazilian Modernist Manuel Bandeira. He returned to London and worked as a freelance journalist and broadcaster. He taught European and Comparative literature at the Universities of Austin, Texas and Boston, Massachusetts from where he retired in 1996 as a Professor Emeritus of Poetics. He published in Portugal, Britain and the US and contributed to many literary publications in various countries. Lacerda died on the 27th of August 2007 in London aged 78. His body was found by the English art critic John McEwen, with whom he had a lunch planned.
September 20, 1928
Donald Hall (born September 20, 1928) is considered one of the major American poets of his generation. His poetry explores the longing for a more bucolic past and reflects the poet’s abiding reverence for nature. Although Hall gained early success with his first collection, Exiles and Marriages (1955), his more recent poetry is generally regarded as the best of his career. Often compared favorably with such writers as James Dickey, Robert Bly, and James Wright, Hall uses simple, direct language to evoke surrealistic imagery. In addition to his poetry, Hall has built a respected body of prose that includes essays, short fiction, plays, and children’s books. Hall, who lives on the New Hampshire farm he visited in summers as a boy, is also noted for the anthologies he has edited and is a popular teacher, speaker, and reader of his own poems. Born in 1928, Hall grew up in Hamden, Connecticut. The Hall household was marked by a volatile father and a mother who was steadier, maybe with more access to depths because there was less continual surface, as Hall explained in an essay for Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series (CAAS). To her I owe my fires, to my father my tears. I owe them both for their reading. By age twelve, Hall had discovered the poet and short story writer Edgar Allan Poe: I read Poe and my life changed, he remarked in CAAS. Another strong influence in Hall’s early years was his maternal great-grandfather’s farm in New Hampshire, where he spent many summers. Decades later, he bought the same farm and settled there as a full-time writer and poet. Hall attended Philips Exeter Academy and had his first poem published at age sixteen. He was a participant at the prestigious Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, where he met Robert Frost, that same year. From Exeter, Hall went to Harvard University, attending class alongside Adrienne Rich, Robert Bly, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery; he also studied for a year with Archibald MacLeish. Hall earned a BLitt from Oxford University and won the Newdigate contest for his poem Exile, one of the few Americans ever to win the prize. Returning to the United States, Hall spent a year at Stanford, studying under the poet-critic Yvor Winters, before returning to Harvard. At Harvard, Hall assembled Exiles and Marriages, a tightly-structured collection crafted in rigid rhyme and meter. In 1953, Hall also became the poetry editor of the Paris Review, a position he held until 1961. In1957 he took a position as assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan, where he remained until 1975. While at Michigan, Hall met the young Jane Kenyon. They later married and, when Hall’s grandmother, who owned Eagle Pond Farm, passed away, bought the farm, left teaching, and moved there together. The collections Kicking the Leaves (1978) and The Happy Man (1986) reflect Hall’s happiness at his return to the family farm, a place rich with memories and links to his past. Many of the poems explore and celebrate the continuity between generations. The Happy Man won the Lenore Marshall/Nation Prize. Hall’s next book, The One Day (1988), won the National Book Critics Circle Award. A long poem that meditates on the on-set of old age, The One Day, like much of Hall’s early work, takes shape under formal pressure: composed of 110 stanzas, split over three sections, its final sections are written in blank verse. The critic Frederick Pollack praised the book as possibly the last masterpiece of American Modernism. Any poet who seeks to surpass this genre should study it; any reader who has lost interest in contemporary poetry should read it. Old and New Poems (1990) contains several traditional poems from earlier collections, as well as more innovative verses not previously published. Baseball, included in The Museum of Clear Ideas (1993), is the poet’s ode to the great American pastime and is structured around the sequence of a baseball game, with nine stanzas of nine lines each. It remains one of Hall’s best-known poems. In 1989, Hall was diagnosed with colon cancer. Though his chances for survival were slim, he eventually went into remission. In 1994, Kenyon was diagnosed with leukemia and died fifteen months later. Kenyon’s death had a profound effect on Hall and he has struggled to document his loss in both his poetry and prose. The poems in Without: Poems (1998) were written as Kenyon underwent chemotherapy and assembled her final volume, Otherwise: New and Selected Poems (1997). They bluntly address the facts of Kenyon’s death, detailing her physical deterioration and Hall’s own rage and grief. In The Painted Bed (2002), Hall continues to grieve Kenyon. The New York Times reviewer J.T. Barabese found the book filled with raw sexual disclosures, rowdy anger and a self-blasting mockery. The Best Day The Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon, a memoir about their marriage, was published in 2005. Opening with his account of Kenyon’s death, Hall describes their first meeting in 1969 at the University of Michigan. At the time, Kenyon was a student and Hall a professor of literature. The couple, married for twenty-three years, lived and wrote side by side on their farm, pausing from their work to take walks and tend to their garden—the story of their harmonious life, as a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews referred to it, is also a history of the treatments his wife had to undergo for leukemia. White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006 (2006) was published the same year Hall was named the 14th U.S. poet laureate. David Hamilton, writing for the Iowa Review, noted that Hall is a poet of fierce appetite and is fierce as a poet of appetite . . . Hall says what he thinks in these poems. Hall served as poet laureate for one year. In addition to his accomplishments as a poet, Hall is respected as an academic who, through writing, teaching, and lecturing, has made significant contributions to the study and craft of writing. As Liam Rector has explained, Hall has lived deeply within the New England ethos of plain living and high thinking, and he has done so with a sense of humor and eros. His books on the craft of writing include Writing Well—in its ninth edition by 1997—and Death to the Death of Poetry (1994). Hall is also a noted anthologist and helped assemble the influential New Poets of England and America (1957) with Louis Simpson and Robert Pack. He also edited Contemporary American Poetry (1962; revised 1972). Life Work (1993) is Hall’s memoir of the writing life and his tenure at Eagle Pond Farm. His early children’s book, Ox-Cart Man (1979), is one among several works that have established him in the field of children’s literature. A fable on the cyclical nature of life, Ox-Cart Man expresses for readers the sense that work defines us all, connects us with our world, and we are all rewarded . . . in measure of our effort, according to Kristi L. Thomas in School Library Journal. Hall continues to live and work on his New Hampshire farm, a site that serves as both his home and an inspiration for much of his work. In addition to the poet laureate position, Hall has been awarded many honors, including two Guggenheim fellowships, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
September 20, 1918
George Lachmann Mosse (September 20, 1918 – January 22, 1999) was an emigre from Nazi Germany first to Great Britain and then to the United States who taught history as a professor at the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Hebrew University.
September 20, 1933
Emmanuel Obiechina (Born 20 September 1933, Nkpo, Igboland) is the pioneering and distinguished scholar of the historic Onicha (Oshimiri Delta) market literature genre and versatile literary critic and author
September 20, 1950
Detlev Peukert (September 20, 1950 in Gütersloh – May 17, 1990 in Hamburg) was a German historian, noted for his studies of the relationship between what he called the "spirit of science" and the Holocaust and in social history and the Weimar Republic. Peukert taught modern history at the University of Essen and served as director of the Research Institute for the History of the Nazi Period. Peukert was a member of the German Communist Party until 1978, when he joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany. A politically engaged historian, Peukert was known for his unconventional take on modern German history, and in an obituary, the British historian Richard Bessel wrote that it was a major loss that Peukert had died at the age of 39 as a result of AIDS.
September 20, 1878
Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968), was an American author who wrote nearly 100 books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906). It exposed conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the free press in the United States. Four years after publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created. Time magazine called him 'a man with every gift except humor and silence.' In 1943, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Sinclair was an outspoken socialist and ran unsuccessfully for Congress from the Socialist Party. He was also the Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California in 1934, but his campaign was defeated decisively.
September 20, 1959
Michael Ray Taylor is a veteran caver and author of the critically acclaimed Cave Passages. He contributes to Sports Illustrated, Audubon and Outside.
September 20, 1902
Florence Margaret Smith, known as Stevie Smith (20 September 1902 – 7 March 1971) was an English poet and novelist.
September 20, 1931
Sanford Sternlicht (September 20, 1931) is professor emeritus of English at Syracuse University. He has published thirty-two books, including two poetry volumes and books on dramatic literature, literary biography, and military history. A former actor, he also directed many plays.
September 21, 1929
Iosif Efimovich Aleshkovsky (born September 21, 1929), is a modern Russian writer, poet, playwright and performer of his own songs.
September 21, 1918
Juan José Arreola Zúñiga (September 21, 1918 – December 3, 2001) was a Mexican writer and academic. He is considered Mexico's premier experimental short story writer of the twentieth century. Arreola is recognized as one of the first Latin American writers to abandon realism; he uses elements of fantasy to underscore existentialist and absurdist ideas in his work. Although he is little known outside his native country, Arreola has served as the literary inspiration for a legion of Mexican writers who have sought to transform their country's realistic literary tradition by introducing elements of magical realism, satire, and allegory. Alongside Jorge Luis Borges, he is considered one of the masters of the hybrid subgenre of the essay-story. He published only one novel, La feria (The Fair; 1963). Arreola was born in Ciudad Guzmán, in the state of Jalisco. He was the fourth son out of fourteen of Felipe Arreola and Victoria Zúñiga. In 1930, he began working as a bookbinder, which led to a series of other jobs. In 1937, he relocated to Mexico City, where he entered the Theatrical School of Fine Arts (Escuela Teatral de Bellas Artes).He later was found to be related to JOSE ALFREDO ZUNIGA. In 1941, while working as a professor, he published his first work, Sueño de Navidad (‘Christmas Dream’). In 1942 he also wrote a short story called ‘Un Pacto con el Diablo’ (‘A Pact with the Devil’). In 1943, while working as a journalist, he published his second work, Hizo el bien mientras vivió (‘He did well as long as he lived’). In 1945, he collaborated with Juan Rulfo and Antonio Alatorre to publish the literary journal Pan. Shortly afterward, he traveled to Paris at the invitation of Louis Jouvet. During this time, he became acquainted with Jean-Louis Barrault and Pierre Renoir. A year later he returned to Mexico. In 1948, he worked as an editor for the journal Fondo de Cultura Económica, and obtained a grant from El Colegio de México. His first collection of short stories, Varia invención, was published in 1949. Around 1950, he began collaborating on the anthology Los Presentes, and received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1952, Arreola published Confabulario, widely considered to be his first great work. It was awarded the Jalisco Literary Prize in 1953. The following year, Arreola published La hora de todos. The year after that, he published a revised Confabulario and won the Premio del Festival Dramático from the National Institute of Fine Arts. In 1958, he published Punta de plata, and in 1962, Confabulario total. In 1962, he published The Switchman (El Guardagujas). In 1959 he was the founding director of the Casa del Lago, the first off-campus Cultural Center of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, now called the Casa del Lago Juan José Arreola. In 1963, he received the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize. The same year, he published La feria, a work dense with references to his native Zapotlán, which would be remembered as one of his finest literary accomplishments. The following year, he edited the anthologies Los Presentes and El Unicornio, and became a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In 1967, he appeared in the controversial Alejandro Jodorowsky film Fando y Lis, which was eventually banned in Mexico. In 1969, Arreola was recognized by the José Clemente Orozco Cultural Group of Ciudad Guzmán. In 1971, Confabulario, Palindroma, La feria, and Varia invención were republished as part of a series of his greatest works, Obras de Juan José Arreola. Around 1972, he published Bestiario, a follow-up to 1958's Punta de plata. The following year, he published La palabra educación, and in 1976, Inventario. In 1979, he received the National Prize in Letters (Premio Nacional en Letras) in Mexico City. In 1989, he was awarded the Jalisco Prize in Letters and in 1992 the Literatura Latinoamericana y del Caribe Juan Rulfo Prize. In 1997, he received the Alfonso Reyes Prize; and in 1998, the Ramón López Velarde Prize. In 1999, on his eightieth birthday, he was named favorite son of Guadalajara.
September 21, 1928
Édouard Glissant (21 September 1928 – 3 February 2011) was a Martinican writer, poet and literary critic. He is widely recognised as one of the most influential figures in Caribbean thought and cultural commentary.
September 21, 1920
One of the greatest poets of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Paul Laraque united a beautiful and surrealist lyric poetry with political consciousness to ‘changer la vie.’ For him poetry could be a ‘fighting weapon’ on behalf of people struggling against class exploitation, foreign domination and cultural alienation, in the tradition of Jacques Roumain, Massillon Coicou, Louis Aragon, Nicolás Guillén, and Pablo Neruda. Paul was one of the poets who welcomed Alisa and André Breton at Port-au-Prince airport during the Surrealist guru's first visit to Haiti in December 1945. He left Haiti in 1961 for New York City, USA, where his wife Marcelle rejoined him the following year. Paul was deprived of his Haitian citizenship from 1964 to 1986 for opposition to the Duvaliers' dictatorship. He received Cuba's Casa de las Americas Poetry Prize in 1979 for his work Les armes quotidiennes / Poésie quotidienne (‘Everyday Weapons / Everyday Poetry’). His published works include, among others, Ce qui demeure (‘What has remained’), Festibal (‘Slingshot’), Camourade, Sòlda mawon (‘Maroon Soldier’) and the anthology Oeuvres incomplètes (‘Incomplete Works’). He was co-editor (with Jack Hirschman) and one of the authors of Open Gate: An Anthology of Haitian Creole Poetry, Curbstone Press, 2001. With his brother Franck, he recently published the critical memoir, Haiti: entre la lutte et l'espoir (‘Haiti: Between Struggle and Hope’), Edition Cidihca, 2004. Besides his impressive and skillful handling of the French and Creole languages in his poems, we will retain from Paul Laraque an indomitable commitment to social justice and political liberation in ways that transcend specific historical conjunctures. He experienced political heartbreaks, including the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the unraveling of the Haitian popular movement, following the hopeful winds of 1986 and 1991, but he never showed signs of discouragement or despair. Until the very end he remained a champion of Haiti's independence and the cause of political equality and human liberation in general. Until the very end he believed that Haiti will one day be beautiful and nurturing to its people again, liberated from foreign domination, and its people free from class exploitation. Paul Laraque died on March 8, 2007, at 5 AM, in New York; he was 86 years old.
September 21, 1909
Kwame Nkrumah, P.C. (21 September 1909 – 27 April 1972) was the leader of Ghana and its predecessor state, the Gold Coast, from 1951 to 1966. He became the first Prime Minister of the Gold Coast in 1951, and led it to independence as Ghana in 1957, becoming the new country's first Prime Minister. After Ghana became a republic in 1960, Nkrumah became President. An influential 20th-century advocate of Pan-Africanism, he was a founding member of the Organisation of African Unity and was the winner of the Lenin Peace Prize in 1963. He saw himself as an African Lenin.
September 21, 1917
Herberto Sales (September 21, 1917, Andaraí - August 13, 1999, Rio de Janeiro), journalist and writer, was born in Brazil in 1917, was one of his country’s best known novelists. He was director of the National Institute for Books and was a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. His novels include Cascalho and O Fruto do Vosso Ventre.
September 21, 1866
Herbert George ‘H. G.’ Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English writer, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing textbooks and rules for war games. Wells is sometimes called ‘The Father of Science Fiction’, as are Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback. His most notable science fiction works include The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Moreau. Wells's earliest specialised training was in biology, and his thinking on ethical matters took place in a specifically and fundamentally Darwinian context. He was also from an early date an outspoken socialist, often (but not always, as at the beginning of the First World War) sympathising with pacifist views. His later works became increasingly political and didactic, and he sometimes indicated on official documents that his profession was that of ‘Journalist.’ Most of his later novels were not science fiction. Some described lower-middle class life (Kipps; The History of Mr Polly), leading him to be touted as a worthy successor to Charles Dickens, but Wells described a range of social strata and even attempted, in Tono-Bungay (1909), a diagnosis of English society as a whole.
September 21, 1929
Bernard Williams (1929-2003) was one of the most distinguished British philosophers of the twentieth century, White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University, and Monroe Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.
September 21, 1951
Sven Birkerts (born September 21, 1951) attended Cranbrook School and the University of Michigan. After receiving his B.A. in 1973, he worked for many years as a bookseller in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. His essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Nation, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, and other publications. He is a regular contributor to The New Republic. Sven Birkerts lives in Cambridge and teaches at Harvard University. .
September 21, 1902
Luis Cernuda (born Luis Cernuda Bidón September 21, 1902 – November 5, 1963), was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27. During the Spanish Civil War, in early 1938, he went to the UK to deliver some lectures and this became the start of an exile that lasted till the end of his life. He taught in the universities of Glasgow and Cambridge before moving in 1947 to the US. In the 1950s he moved to Mexico. While he continued to write poetry, he also published wide-ranging books of critical essays, covering French, English and German as well as Spanish literature. He was frank about his homosexuality at a time when this was problematic and became something of a role model for this in Spain. His collected poems were published under the title La realidad y el deseo.
September 21, 1953
Lars Saabye Christensen, born 21 September 1953 in Oslo, is a Norwegian author. Saabye Christensen was raised in the Skillebekk neighbourhood of Oslo, but lived for many years in Sortland in northern Norway; both places play a major role in his work. He currently lives in Blindern, the university district of Oslo. He is half Danish and holds Danish rather than Norwegian citizenship.
September 21, 1947
Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author of horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, science fiction and fantasy. His books have sold more than 350 million copies, many of which have been adapted into feature films, miniseries, television series, and comic books. King has published 58 novels, including seven under the pen name Richard Bachman, and six non-fiction books. He has written around 200 short stories, most of which have been published in book collections. King has received Bram Stoker Awards, World Fantasy Awards, and British Fantasy Society Awards. In 2003, the National Book Foundation awarded him the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He has also received awards for his contribution to literature for his entire oeuvre, such as the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement (2004), and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America (2007). In 2015, King was awarded with a National Medal of Arts from the United States National Endowment for the Arts for his contributions to literature. He has been described as the "King of Horror"
September 21, 1885
Harold Tucker Webster (September 21, 1885 – September 22, 1952) was an American cartoonist known for The Timid Soul, Bridge, Life's Darkest Moments and others in his syndicated series which ran from the 1920s into the 1950s. Because he disliked his given name, his readers knew him as H. T. Webster, and his signature was simply Webster. His friends, however, called him Webby. Because of the humor and human interest in his cartoons, he was sometimes compared to Mark Twain, and his art style was quite similar to the work of Clare Briggs. During his lifetime, Webster drew more than 16,000 single-panel cartoons. Darrek D. Orwig is the Executive Director of Main Street of Menomonie, Inc., Americans under British Command, 1918 By Mitchell A. Yockelson a non-profit charitable organization based in Menomonie, Wisconsin. He is the author of Story City.
August 24, 1899
Juan García Ponce (September 22, 1932—December 27, 2003) was a Mexican novelist, short-story writer, essayist, translator and critic of Mexican art. He was born in Mérida, state of Yucatán, Mexico. Notable works include La aparición de lo invisible (1968) and Las huellas de la voz (1982). In his novels Figura de paja (1964), La casa en la playa (1966), La presencia lejana (1968), La cabaña (1969), La invitación (1972), El nombre olvidado (1970), El libro (1978), Crónica de la intervención (1982), Inmaculada o los placeres de la Inocencia (1989) he intertwines the erotic with philosophic rigor and the aesthetic, illuminating the secret, demonic side of reality, accepting all of its risks.
September 22, 1694
Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield PC KG (22 September 1694 – 24 March 1773) was a British statesman, and man of letters, and wit. He was born in London, and known as Lord Stanhope until the death of his father, in 1726. After being educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, he went on the Grand Tour of the Continent, to complete his education as a nobleman, by exposure to the cultural legacies of Classical antiquity and the Renaissance, and to become acquainted with his aristocraticcounterparts and the polite society of Continental Europe. In the course of his post-graduate tour of Europe, the death of Queen Anne (r. 1702–1707) and the accession of King George I (r. 1714–1727) opened a political career for Lord Stanhope, and he returned to England. In the British political spectrum, Lord Stanhope was a Whig, and entered government service, as a courtier to the King, by the mentorship of his relative, James Stanhope, 1st Earl Stanhope, the King's favourite minister, who procured his appointment as Lord of the Bedchamber to the Prince of Wales.
September 22, 1953
Julianne Marie Malveaux (born September 22, 1953, in San Francisco, California) is an African-American economist, author, social and political commentator, and businesswoman. After five years as the 15th president of Bennett College, she resigned effective May 6, 2012.
September 22, 1924
Simon Karlinsky (September 22, 1924 - died 2009) was born in Harbin, Manchuria, which was then a Russian outpost. He immigrated to the United States in 1938 and settled in Los Angeles, where he attended Belmont High School and Los Angeles City College. In 1943, he joined the U.S. Army, and he served as an interpreter in Germany for various agencies through the early 1950s. He resumed his education at UC Berkeley, where he earned a bachelor's degree in Slavic languages and literature in 1960. He received a master's degree from Harvard in 1961 and a doctorate from Berkeley in 1964. During his service in Germany in late 1945, Karlinsky met two gay Soviet performers while interpreting for a troupe of Red Army entertainers. Over several hours they told him about the persecution of homosexuals in Stalinist Russia, and he shared his experiences as a gay U.S. serviceman. Decades later, during an interview with the Advocate, Karlinsky recalled the encounter as "the most unforgettable conversation of my entire life." In the mid-1970s, after he was well established in his academic career, he began to write about the history of homosexuality in Russia. As noted in the reference book Gay and Lesbian Literature, his scholarship often cut against the grain, arguing, for instance, that Tchaikovsky, the 19th century composer, died of cholera, not of suicide resulting from anti-homosexual bias.is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the editor of "The Sexual Labyrinth of Nicolai Gogol "(1992) and "Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought "(1997).
August 24, 1899
Juan García Ponce (September 22, 1932—December 27, 2003) was a Mexican novelist, short-story writer, essayist, translator and critic of Mexican art. He was born in Mérida, state of Yucatán, Mexico. Notable works include La aparición de lo invisible (1968) and Las huellas de la voz (1982). In his novels Figura de paja (1964), La casa en la playa (1966), La presencia lejana (1968), La cabaña (1969), La invitación (1972), El nombre olvidado (1970), El libro (1978), Crónica de la intervención (1982), Inmaculada o los placeres de la Inocencia (1989) he intertwines the erotic with philosophic rigor and the aesthetic, illuminating the secret, demonic side of reality, accepting all of its risks.
September 22, 1931
Ashokamitran (September 22, 1931 – March 23, 2017) was the pen name of Jagadisa Thyagarajan, an Indian writer regarded one of the most influential figures in post-independent Tamil literature. He began his prolific literary career with the prize winning play "Anbin Parisu" and went on to author more than two hundred short stories, and a dozen novellas and novels. A distinguished essayist and critic, he was the editor of the literary journal "Kanaiyaazhi". He has written over 200 short stories, eight novels, some 15 novellas besides other prose writings. Most of his works have also been translated into English and other Indian languages, including Hindi, Malayalam, and Telugu.
September 22, 1941
Murray Bail (born 22 September 1941) is an Australian writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction. In 1980 he shared the Age Book of the Year award for his novel Homesickness. He was born in Adelaide, South Australia. He has lived most of his life in Australia except for sojourns in India (1968–70) and England and Europe (1970–74). He currently lives in Sydney. He was trustee of the National Gallery of Australia from 1976 to 1981 and wrote a book on Australian artist Ian Fairweather. A portrait of Bail by the artist Fred Williams is hung in the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. The portrait was done while both Williams and Bail were Council members of the National Gallery of Australia.
September 22, 1907
Maurice Blanchot (22 September 1907 – 20 February 2003) was a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work had a strong influence on post-structuralist philosophers such as Jacques Derrida.
September 22, 1909
David Riesman (September 22, 1909 – May 10, 2002) was a sociologist, educator, and best-selling commentator on American society. Born to a wealthy German Jewish family, he attended Harvard College, where he graduated in 1931 with a degree in biochemistry. He attended Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Harvard Law Review. Riesman clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis between 1935 and 1936. He also taught at the University of Buffalo Law School and at the University of Chicago. He worked for Sperry Gyroscope company during the war. After a fellowship at Yale to write the Lonely Crowd, he returned to Chicago. In 1958, he became a university professor at Harvard. Intellectually he was influenced most by Erich Fromm, as well as Carl Friedrich, Hannah Arendt, Leo Löwenthal, Robert K. Merton, Paul Lazarsfeld, Paul Goodman, Martha Wolfenstein, and Nathan Leites. He read widely in Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Horowitz says The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, in 1950 quickly became the nation’s most influential and widely read mid-century work of social and cultural criticism. It catapulted its author to the cover of Time magazine in 1954, making Riesman the first social scientist so honored.... Riesman offered a nuanced and complicated portrait of the nation’s middle and upper-middle classes.... Riesman pictured a nation in the midst of a shift from a society based on production to one fundamentally shaped by the market orientation of a consumer culture. He explored how people used consumer goods to communicate with one another. The book is largely a study of modern conformity, which postulates the existence of the "inner-directed" and "other-directed" personalities. Riesman argued that the character of post-World War II American society impels individuals to "other-directedness," the preeminent example being modern suburbia, where individuals seek their neighbors' approval and fear being outcast from their community. That lifestyle has a coercive effect, which compels people to abandon "inner-direction" of their lives, and it induces them to take on the goals, ideology, likes, and dislikes of their community. This creates a tightly grouped crowd of people that is yet incapable of fulfilling each other's desire for sexual pleasure. The book is considered a landmark study of American character. Riesman was a major public intellectual as well as a sociologist and represented an early example of what sociologists now call "public sociology". In addition to his many other publications, Riesman was also a noted commentator on American higher education, publishing, with his seminal work, The Academic Revolution, which was co-written with Christopher Jencks. In it, Riesman sums up his position by stating, "If this book has any single message it is that the academic profession increasingly determines the character of undergraduate education in America." Riesman highlights the effects of the "logic of the research university," which focuses upon strict disciplinary research. That both sets the goals of the research university and produces its future professors. Riesman noted that the logic isolated any patterns of resistance that might challenge the university's primary purpose as disciplinary research, dashing their chances of success.
September 22, 1931
Fay Weldon (born 22 September 1931) is an English author, essayist and playwright, whose work has been associated with feminism. In her fiction, Weldon typically portrays contemporary women who find themselves trapped in oppressive situations caused by the patriarchal structure of western, and in particular British, society. Weldon was born Franklin Birkinshaw in Alvechurch, Worcestershire, England to a literary family, with both her maternal grandfather, Edgar Jepson (1863–1938), and her mother Margaret writing novels. Weldon spent her early years in Auckland, New Zealand, where her father worked as a doctor. At the age of 14, after her parents' divorce, she returned to England with her mother and her sister Jane – never to see her father again. While in England she attended South Hampstead High School. She studied psychology and economics at St Andrews, Scotland but returned to London after giving birth to a son. Soon afterwards she married her first husband, Ronald Bateman, who was a headmaster 25 years her senior and not the natural father of her child, and moved to Acton, London. She left him after two years, and the marriage ended. In order to support herself and her son, and provide for his education, Weldon started working in the advertising industry. She once coined the slogan ‘Vodka gets you drunker quicker’. At 29 she met Ron Weldon, a jazz musician and antiques dealer. They married and had three sons, the first of whom was born in 1963. In 2006 Weldon was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University in West London. During her marriage to Ron Weldon, the couple visited therapists regularly. They divorced in 1994, after he left her for his astrological therapist who had told him that the couple's astrological signs were incompatible. She subsequently married Nick Fox, a poet who is also her manager, with whom she currently lives in Dorset.
September 22, 1951
David Talbot is the author of the New York Times bestseller Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years and the acclaimed national bestseller Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love. He is the founder and former editor in chief of Salon, and was a senior editor at Mother Jones and the features editor at the San Francisco Examiner. He has written for The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Time, The Guardian, and other major publications. Talbot lives in San Francisco, California.
September 22, 1828
Theodore Winthrop (September 22, 1828 – June 10, 1861) was a writer, lawyer, and world traveller. He was one of the first Union officers killed in the American Civil War. Winthrop was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He was descended through his father from Governor John Winthrop and through his mother from Jonathan Edwards. An 1848 graduate of Yale University, he travelled for a year in Great Britain and Europe and then through the United States. After contributing to periodicals, short sketches, and stories, which attracted little attention, Winthrop enlisted in the 7th Regiment, New York State Militia, an early volunteer unit of the Federal Army that answered President Abraham Lincoln's call for troops in 1861. He wrote a popular essay about the experience titled "Our March to Washington." He was appointed Major and soon became an aide-de-camp to Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler, commander of the Department of Virginia headquartered at Fort Monroe. At the Battle of Big Bethel on June 10, 1861, he volunteered for General Ebenezer W. Peirce's staff and drew up a crude plan of battle. After a Federal attack to the enemy right flank was foiled, Winthrop led an ill-fated assault on the Confederate left held by four companies of the 1st Regiment North Carolina Infantry, under the command of Colonel (later Lieutenant General) Daniel Harvey Hill. In the heat of battle, Major Winthrop leapt onto the trunk of a fallen tree and reportedly yelled, "One more charge boys, and the day is ours." Soon thereafter, he was killed by a musket ball to the heart and became the first casualty of rank for the Northern side in what history regards as the first pitched land battle of the Civil War. Ironically, ardent abolitionist Winthrop may have been shot by the African-American slave of a Confederate officer in the 1st North Carolina Infantry. (Three different soldiers, as well as this slave, referred to in the records only as "Sam," claimed to have killed him.) Winthrop's novels, for which he had failed to find a publisher during his lifetime, appeared posthumously. They include John Brent, founded on his experiences in the far West, and Edwin Brothertoft, a story of the American Revolution. Cecil Dreeme, his most important work, was a semi-autobiographical novel dealing with social mores and gender roles set at New York University, where Winthrop had once been a lodger. Other works include The Canoe and the Saddle and Life in the Open Air. His sister, Laura Winthrop Johnson, assembled a collection of his poems and prose organized by the time period of his life Life and Poems of Theodore Winthrop. Christopher Looby is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States.
September 23, 1933
Hiber Conteris (born September 23, 1933 in Paysandú, Uruguay) is a Uruguayan writer, dramatist, and essayist.
September 23, 1934
Per Olov Enquist, better known as P. O. Enquist, (born 23 September 1934 in Hjoggböle, Skellefteå, Västerbotten) is a Swedish author. He has worked as a journalist, playwright and novelist. In the nineties, he gained international recognition with his novel The Visit of the Royal Physician. After a degree in history of literature at Uppsala University he worked as a newspaper columnist and TV debate moderator from 1965 to 1976. Because of his work he soon became an influential figure on the Swedish literary scene. From 1970 to 1971 Enquist lived in Berlin on a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service and in 1973 he was a visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has been working as an independent writer since 1977. Enquist's works are characterized by a chronic pessimistic view of the world. They always describe the restrictions imposed by the pietistical way of living, especially in March of the Musicians (1978) and Lewi's Journey (2001). He gained international recognition with his novel The Visit of the Royal Physician (1999) where he tells the story of Johann Friedrich Struensee, the personal physician of the Danish King Christian VII. Some of Enquist's works have been translated into English by Tiina Nunnally. He was awarded the Nordic Council's Literature Prize in 1968 with a recounting of Sweden's deportation of Baltic-country soldiers at the end of the second world war. His recognition went on to include the Selma Lagerlöf Prize in 1977, the Dobloug Prize in 1988, and the Italian the Flaiano Prize in 2002. He also received the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize as well as the Nelly Sachs Prize in 2003 for Livläkarens Besök (titled in English translation as ‘The Visit of the Royal Physician’). In 2010, Enquist was awarded The Austrian State Prize for European Literature for his great storytelling. In 2010, he was awarded the Swedish Academy's Nordic Prize, known as the 'little Nobel'.
September 23, 1800
William Holmes McGuffey (September 23, 1800 – May 4, 1873) was a college professor president who is best known for writing the McGuffey Readers, the first widely used series of elementary school-level textbooks.
September 23, 1901
Jaroslav Seifert (23 September 1901 – 10 January 1986) was a Nobel Prize–winning Czechoslovak writer, poet and journalist. Born in Žižkov, a suburb of Prague in what was then part of Austria-Hungary, his first collection of poems was published in 1921. He was a member of the Communist Party, the editor of a number of communist newspapers and magazines – Rovnost, Sršatec, and Reflektor – and the employee of a communist publishing house. During the 1920s he was considered a leading representative of the Czechoslovakian artistic avant-garde. He was one of the founders of the journal Dev?tsil. In March 1929, he and six other important communist writers left the Communist Party for signing a manifesto protesting against Bolshevik tendencies in the new leadership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. He subsequently worked as a journalist in the social-democratic and trade union press during the 1930s and 1940s. In 1949 Seifert left journalism and began to devote himself exclusively to literature. His poetry was awarded important state prizes in 1936, 1955, and 1968, and in 1967 he was designated National Artist. Seifert was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1984. Due to bad health, he was not present at the award ceremony, and so his daughter received the Nobel Prize in his name. Even though it was a matter of great importance, there was only a brief remark of the award in the state-controlled media. He died in 1986, aged 84, and was buried at the municipal cemetery in Kralupy nad Vltavou (where his maternal grandparents originated from).
September 23, 1865
Baroness Emma Magdolna Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála 'Emmuska' Orczy de Orci (23 September 1865 – 12 November 1947) was a Hungarian-born British novelist, playwright and artist of noble origin. She is most known for her series of novels featuring the Scarlet Pimpernel.
September 23, 1943
György Dalos (born September 23, 1943) is a Hungarian Jewish writer and historian. He is best known for his novel 1985, and The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin. Dalos was born in Budapest and spent his childhood with his grandparents, as his father had died in 1945 in a work camp, where he had been sent to as a Jew during World War II. From 1962 to 1967, he studied history at the Lomonossov University in Moscow. He then returned to his native town Budapest to work as a museologist. In 1968, Dalos was accused of 'Maoist activities' and was handed seven months prison on probation and a Berufsverbot (professional disqualification) and a publication ban; due to that, he worked as a translator. In 1977, he was among the founders of the opposition movement against the Communist regime of Hungary. In 1988/89 he was co-editor of the East German underground opposition paper 'Ostkreuz'. From 1995 to 1999, Dalos was head of the Institute for Hungarian Culture in Berlin. Since 2009 he is member of the International Council of Austrian Service Abroad. Dalos lived in Vienna from 1987 to 1995. Since 1995, he has lived in Berlin as a freelance publisher and editor.
September 23, 1923
Mohamed Hassanein Heikal (23 September 1923 – 17 February 2016) was an Egyptian journalist. For 17 years (1957–1974), he was editor-in-chief of the Cairo newspaper Al-Ahram and has been a commentator on Arab affairs for more than 50 years. Heikal articulated the thoughts of President Gamal Abdel Nasser earlier in his career. He worked as a ghostwriter for the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and represented the ideology of pan-Arabism. Heikal has been a member of the Central Committee of the Arab Socialist Union. He was appointed minister of information in 1970 but resigned from government in 1974 over differences with Anwar Sadat. In September 2003, upon reaching the age of 80, Heikal wrote an article in the monthly magazine Weghat Nazar (where he had been writing for some time) that the time has come for an "old warrior" to put down his pen and take to the sidelines. Heikal stressed that his decision to stop writing did not mean that he would disappear, but rather take to the sidelines to observe more thoroughly. In the article he also recounted a lot of the events that occurred in his life and formed his experience including his first mission as a reporter in the Second Battle of El Alamein in 1942, his friendship with Nasser and his relationship with Sadat. In addition he opened his financial records stating the salaries he has received in all the jobs and posts he has been assigned to. In a 2007 audience with British journalist Robert Fisk, Heikal spoke about the situation in Egypt and criticized Egyptian president Mubarak, saying that Mubarak lives in a "world of fantasy" in Sharm al Sheikh. These comments stirred an uproar within Egyptian society, both for and against Heikal. Heikal did not comment on this criticism except later on Al Jazeera, where he said that he stands by what he has said earlier, adding that Mubarak had not entered political life until very late, which means he lacks necessary experience.
September 23, 1941
George Lester Jackson (September 23, 1941 – August 21, 1971) was an African-American left-wing activist, Marxist, author, a member of the Black Panther Party, and co-founder of the Black Guerrilla Family while incarcerated. Jackson achieved fame as one of the Soledad Brothers and was later shot to death by guards in San Quentin Prison during an alleged escape attempt. Born in Chicago, Illinois, Jackson was the second of Lester and Georgia Bea Jackson's five children. He spent time in the California Youth Authority Corrections facility in Paso Robles because of several juvenile convictions including armed robbery, assault, and burglary. In 1961 he was convicted of armed robbery, for robbing $70 from a gas station at gunpoint and at age 18 was sentenced to serve one year to life in prison. During his first years at San Quentin State Prison, Jackson became involved in revolutionary activity, as well as assaults on guards and fellow inmates. Such behavior, in turn, was used to justify his continued incarceration on an indeterminate sentence. He was described by prison officials as egocentric and anti-social. In 1966, Jackson met and befriended W.L. Nolen who introduced him to Marxist and Maoist ideology. The two founded the Black Guerrilla Family in 1966 based on Marxist and Maoist political thought. In speaking of his ideological transformation, Jackson remarked ‘I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels, and Mao when I entered prison and they redeemed me.’ As Jackson's disciplinary infractions grew he spent more time in solitary confinement, where he studied political economy and radical theory. He also wrote many letters to friends and supporters which would later be edited and compiled into the books ‘Soledad Brother’ and ‘Blood in My Eye,’ bestsellers that brought him a great deal of attention from leftist organizers and intellectuals in the U.S. and Western Europe. Jackson's political transformation was seen as insincere by prison officials, with San Quentin associate warden commenting that Jackson ‘was a sociopath, a very personable hoodlum’ who ‘didn’t give a shit about the revolution.’ He did, however, amass a following of inmates including whites and Hispanics although with less enthusiasm than his fellow black inmates. According to David Horowitz, Jackson joined the Black Panther Party after meeting Huey P. Newton in jail. In January 1969, Jackson and Nolen were transferred from San Quentin to Soledad prison. On January 13, 1970, Nolen and two other black inmates were shot to death by guard Opie G. Miller during a yard riot with members of the Aryan Brotherhood. Following the death of Nolen, Jackson became increasingly confrontational with corrections officials and spoke often about the need to protect fellow inmates and take revenge on guards for Nolen’s death in what Jackson referred to as ‘selective retaliatory violence.’ On January 17, 1970, Jackson was charged along with Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette for murdering guard John V. Mills, who was beaten and thrown from the third floor of Soledad’s Y wing. This was a capital offense and a successful conviction could put Jackson in the gas chamber. Mills, an inexperienced rookie, was murdered, supposedly in retaliation for the shooting deaths of Nolen and the other two black inmates by officer Miller the year prior. Miller was not convicted of any crime, a grand jury ruling his actions to be justifiable homicide. On August 7, 1970, George Jackson's 17-year-old brother Jonathan Jackson burst into a Marin County courtroom with an automatic weapon, freed prisoners James McClain, William A. Christmas and Ruchell Magee, and took Judge Harold Haley, Deputy District Attorney Gary Thomas, and three jurors hostage to demand the release of the ‘Soledad Brothers.’ Haley, Jackson, Christmas and McClain were killed as they attempted to drive away from the courthouse. Eyewitness testimony suggests Haley was hit by fire discharged from a sawed-off shotgun that had been fastened to his neck with adhesive tape by the abductors. Thomas, Magee and one of the jurors were wounded. The case made national headlines. Angela Davis, accused of buying the weapons, was later acquitted of conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder. A possible explanation for the gun connection is that Jonathan Jackson was her bodyguard. Magee, the sole survivor among the attackers, eventually pleaded guilty to aggravated kidnapping and was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1975. Magee is currently imprisoned in Corcoran State Prison and has lost numerous bids for parole. On August 21, 1971, Jackson met with attorney Stephen Bingham on a civil lawsuit Jackson had filed against the California Department of Corrections. After the meeting, Jackson was escorted by officer Urbano Rubico back to his cell when Rubico noticed a metallic object in Jackson’s hair, later revealed to be a wig, and ordered him to remove it. Jackson then pulled a Spanish Astra 9 mm pistol from beneath the wig and said ‘Gentlemen, the dragon has come’—a reference to Ho Chi Minh. It isn't clear how Jackson attained the gun as authorities continually changed their story about the caliber of the gun and its origins. Jackson then ordered Rubico to open all the cells and along with several other inmates they overpowered the remaining guards and took them, along with two inmates hostage. Six of the hostages were killed and found in Jackson’s cell, including guards Jere Graham, Frank DeLeon and Paul Krasnes and two white prisoners. Guards Kenneth McCray, Charles Breckenridge and Urbano Rubico had been shot and stabbed as well, but survived. After finding the keys for the Adjustment Center’s exit, Jackson along with fellow inmate and close friend Johnny Spain escaped to the yard where Jackson was shot dead and Spain surrendered. Jackson was killed just three days prior to the start of his murder trial for the 1970 slaying of guard John Mills. Three inmates were acquitted and three were convicted for the murders: David Johnson, Johnny Spain and Hugo Pinell. They became known as the San Quentin Six. Supporters of Jackson believe that his death was the result of a setup in which Jackson was provided with the gun by Rubico so prison officials would have an excuse to kill him. Intellectuals such as Michel Foucault and Jean Genet argued that Jackson's death was a ‘political assassination.’ In his autobiography Revolutionary Suicide, Newton claimed that Jackson was ‘attempting to save [fellow inmates] from being massacred by guards’. James Baldwin wrote: ‘No Black person will ever believe that George Jackson died the way they tell us he did.’ There is some evidence, however, that Jackson and his supporters on the outside had planned the escape for several weeks. Also, many Black Guerrilla Family members became bitter and upset with Newton, believing Newton used his contacts within Soledad to hamper Jackson’s release as he did not want a potential rival for power to be freed. Jackson's funeral was held at St. Augustine's Episcopal Church in Oakland, California on August 28, 1971.
September 23, 1906
Valery Yakovlevich Tarsis (Born 23 September 1906, Kiev, Ukraine - 3 March 1983, Bern, Switzerland) was a Ukrainian writer, literary critic, and translator. He was highly critical of the communist regime. Valery was born in Kiev in 1906 and graduated from the Rostov-on-Don State University in 1929. He translated thirty four books into Russian. During World War II Tarsis was twice severely wounded. As a young man Tarsis joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union but became disillusioned in the 1930s and finally broke with the party in 1960. In 1966, he said his key purpose in writing "is to struggle against Communism." He smuggled his compositions out of Russia so that they could escape Soviet censorship. The publication abroad of his scathing 1962 novel The Bluebottle earned him an eight-month stay in a Soviet mental hospital, an experience he described in his autobiographical novel Ward 7: "All around him were faces exposed by sleep or distorted by nightmares ... it is always hard to be the only one awake, and it is almost unbearable to stand the third watch of the world in a madhouse..." Tarsis' Ward No. 7 is a personal account of the use of psychiatry to stifle dissidence. The book was one of the first literary works to deal with political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union. Tarsis based the book upon his own experiences in 1963–1964 when he was detained in the Moscow Kashchenko psychiatric hospital for political reasons. In a parallel with the story Ward No. 6 by Anton Chekhov, Tarsis implies that it is the doctors who are mad, whereas the patients are completely sane, although unsuited to a life of slavery. In ward No. 7 individuals are not cured, but persistently maimed; the hospital is a jail and the doctors are gaolers and police spies. Most doctors know nothing about psychiatry, but make diagnoses arbitrarily and give all patients the same medication — the anti-psychotic drug aminozin or an algogenic injection. Tarsis denounces Soviet psychiatry as pseudo-science and charlatanism. Among all the victims of Soviet psychiatry, Tarsis was the sole exception in the sense that he did not emphasised the 'injustice' of confining 'sane dissidents' to psychiatric hospitals and did not thereby imply that the psychiatric confinement of 'insane patients' was proper and just. In 1966, Tarsis was permitted to emigrate to the West, and was soon deprived of his Soviet citizenship. He lectured at the Leicester University and Gettysburg College. In his words, he had invitations to lecture at the Sorbonne and at universities of Geneva, Oslo and Naples. The KGB had plans to compromise the literary career of Tarsis abroad through labelling him as a mentally ill person. As the 1966 memorandum to the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union reported, "KGB continues arrangements for further compromising Tarsis abroad as a mentally ill person." He settled in Bern, Switzerland where he died after a heart attack on 3 March 1983 at the age of 76.
September 24, 1961
Anita Rau Badami (born 24 September 1961) is a writer of South Asian Diaspora living in Canada with a strong voice of the modern Indian Diaspora. Born in Rourkela, Odisha, India, she was educated at the University of Madras and Sophia College in Bombay. She emigrated to Canada in 1991, and earned an M.A. at the University of Calgary. Her novels deal with the complexities of Indian family life and with the cultural gap that emerges when Indians move to the west. Badami's third novel, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call explores the Golden Temple Massacre and the Air India Bombing.
September 24, 1920
Jan Rynveld Carew (born 24 September 1920 in Agricola, Guyana) is a novelist, playwright, poet and educator. Born 24 September, 1920 at Agricola, a village in Guyana also called Rome, Carew was educated at the Berbice High School. At age 17, he left Guyana for the United States where he studied at Howard University and Western Reserve University (1944-8). He also went to Charles University in Prague (1948-50) and the Sorbonne in Paris. He has taught at London University, Princeton, Rutgers, Illinois Wesleyan, Hampshire College, Northwestern and Lincoln Universities. Jan Carew has lived in Holland, Mexico, England, France, Spain, Ghana, Canada and the United States. In England, he acted with Sir Laurence Olivier and edited the Kensington Post. Some of the noted figures he has been connected to are W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, Shirley Graham DuBois, Maurice Bishop, Cheikh Anta Diop, Edward Scobie, John Henrik Clarke, Tsegaye Medhin Gabre, Sterling D. Plumpp and Ivan Van Sertima. He is the author of GREEN WINTER, GRENADA: THE HOUR WILL STRIKE AGAIN, BLACK MIDAS, THE WILD COAST, FULCRUMS OF CHANGE, GHOSTS IN OUR BLOOD: WITH MALCOLM X IN AFRICA, ENGLAND AND THE CARIBBEAN, THE LAST BARBARIAN, and THE GUYANESE WANDERER. His essays include: ‘The Caribbean writer in exile’, ‘Columbus and the origin of racism in the Americas’, ‘The fusion of African and Amerindian folk myths’, ‘United we stand’,’Culture and Rebellion’,’Black America: the street and the campus’, ‘Jonestown revisited’,’The Ivory trade: The cruelest trade of all, white gold’,’The Synergen project’,’The Amarnth project’, ‘Estevanico: The African Explorer,’ ‘Rape of Paradise: Columbus and the Origin of Racism in the Americas,’ and ‘Moorish Culture-Bringers: Bearers of Englightment’.
baptised September 24, 1709
John Cleland (baptised 24 September 1709 – 23 January 1789) was an English novelist best known as the author of Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
September 24, 1944
Eavan Boland (born 24 September 1944 in Dublin) is an Irish poet. Boland's father, Frederick Boland, was a career diplomat and her mother, Frances Kelly, was a noted post-expressionist painter. She was born in Dublin in 1944. At the age of six, Boland's father was appointed Irish Ambassador to the United Kingdom; the family followed him to London, where Boland had her first experiences of anti-Irish sentiment. Her dealing with this hostility strengthened Boland's identification with her Irish heritage. She spoke of this time in her poem ‘An Irish Childhood in England: 1951.’ At 14, she returned to Dublin to attend Holy Child School in Killiney. She published a pamphlet of poetry (23 Poems) in her first year at Trinity, in 1962. Boland earned a BA with First Class Honors in English Literature and Language from Trinity College, Dublin in 1966. Since then she has held numerous teaching positions and published poetry, prose criticism and essays. Boland married the novelist Kevin Casey in 1969 and has two daughters. Her experiences as a wife and mother have influenced her to write about the centrality of the ordinary, as well as providing a frame for more political and historical themes. She has taught at Trinity College, Dublin, University College, Dublin, and Bowdoin College, and was a member of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She was also writer in residence at Trinity College, Dublin, and at the National Maternity Hospital. In the late 70s and 80s, she taught at the School of Irish Studies in Dublin. Since 1996 she has been a tenured Professor of English at Stanford University where she is currently Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor in the Humanities and Melvin and Bill Lane Professor for Director of the Creative Writing program. She divides her time between Palo Alto and her home in Dublin.
September 24, 1896
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigmatic writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the ‘Lost Generation‘ of the 1920s. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby (his most famous), and Tender Is the Night. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with age and despair. Fitzgerald's work has been adapted into films many times. Tender is the Night was filmed in 1962, and made into a television miniseries in 1985. The Beautiful and Damned was filmed in 1922 and 2010. The Great Gatsby has been the basis for numerous films of the same name, spanning nearly 90 years; 1926, 1949, 1974, 2000, and 2013 adaptations. In addition, Fitzgerald's own life from 1937 to 1940 was dramatized in 1958 in Beloved Infidel.
September 24, 1943
Antonio Tabucchi (September 24, 1943 – March 25, 2012) was an Italian writer and academic who taught Portuguese language and literature at the University of Siena, Italy. Deeply in love with Portugal, he was an expert, critic and translator of the works of Fernando Pessoa from whom he drew the conceptions of saudade, of fiction and of the heteronyms. Tabucchi was first introduced to Pessoa's works in the 1960s when attending the Sorbonne. He was so charmed that, back in Italy, he attended a course of Portuguese language for a better comprehension of the poet. His books and essays have been translated in 18 countries, including Japan. Together with his wife, María José de Lancastre, he translated many works by Pessoa into Italian and has written a book of essays and a comedy about the writer. Tabucchi was awarded the French prize 'Médicis étranger' for Indian Nocturne (Notturno indiano) and the premio Campiello, and the Aristeion Prize for Sostiene Pereira. In later life he was mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, a feat he never achieved.
September 24, 1912
Robert Lewis Taylor (September 24, 1912 – September 30, 1998) was an American author and winner of the 1959 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
September 24, 1935
Robert Kelly (born September 24, 1935) is an American poet associated with the deep image group. Kelly was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Samuel Jason and Margaret Rose Kelly née Kane, in 1935. He did his undergraduate studies at the City College of the City University of New York, graduating in 1955. He then spent three years at Columbia University. Kelly has worked as a translator and teacher, most notably at Bard College, where he has worked since 1961. Kelly's other teaching positions have included Wagner College (1960–61), the University at Buffalo (1964), and the Tufts University Visiting Professor of Modern Poetry (1966–67). In addition, he has served as Poet in Residence at the California Institute of Technology (1971–72), Yale University (Calhoun College), University of Kansas, Dickinson College, and the University of Southern California. Kelly, on his influences: want to say the names of the great teachers from whom I learned what I could, and still am learning. Coleridge. Baudelaire. Pound. Apollinaire. Virgil. Aeschylus. Dante. Chaucer. Shakespeare. Dryden. Lorca. Rilke. Hölderlin. Stevens. Stein. Duncan. Olson. Williams. Blackburn. I mention only the dead, the dead are always different, and always changing. I mention them more or less in the order of when they came along in my life to teach me.? Kelly has published more than fifty books of poetry and prose, including Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960-1993 (1995) and a collection of short fictions, A Transparent Tree (1985). Many were published by the Black Sparrow Press. He also edited the anthology A Controversy of Poets (1965). Kelly was of great help to the Hungryalist group of poets of India during the trial of Malay Roy Choudhury, with whom he had correspondence, now archived at Kolkata. Kelly received the Los Angeles Times First Annual Book Award (1980) for Kill the Messenger Who Brings Bad News and the American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation (1991) for In Time. He also serves on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions. He is married to the translator Charlotte Mandell.
September 24, 1894
E Franklin Frazier was an Influential sociologist and academic who publishes expansively on subject of race and human rights in the United States, research institute at Howard University named after him.
September 24, 1923
Ladislav Fuks (September 24, 1923, Prague – August 19, 1994, Prague) was a Czech novelist. He focused mainly on psychological novels, portraying the despair and suffering of people under German occupation of Czechoslovakia. He was born in Prague as the son of a police officer. He studied the Gymnasium in Truhlá?šká ulice, where he also first witnessed Nazi persecution of his Jewish friends. In 1942 he was forced to be a caretaker in Hodonín, as a part of the Arbeitseinsatz. Later he studied philosophy, psychology and art history at the Philosophical faculty of Charles University in Prague, where, in 1949, he received a doctorate. After his studies, he was a member of the National heritage administration and after 1959 he worked in the national gallery. He became a professional writer in the 1960s. He attracted much attention with his debut work, Pan Theodor Mundstock (Mr. Theodore Mundstock), published in 1963, and a year later with his short story collection Mí ?ernovlasí brat?i (My dark-haired brothers). In the socialist period, he, according to his own words ‘preferred to choose conciliatoriness and toleration, against headless resistance and courage to fall in the resistance’ (‘rad?ji volil smí?livost a toleranci p?ed bezhlavým vzdorem a odvahou padnout v odporu’). Some of his work from the 70s is strongly linked to the era in which they were created (for example, Návrat z žitného pole (The return from the rye field) is a novel targeted against emigration after the 1948 communist coup). He was also a member of the socialistic Svaz ?eských spisovatel? (Union of Czech Writers). Although he had obtained some international recognition, in the last years of his life he was left alone and friendless. He died in 1994 in his Prague apartment in Dejvice, in the street Národní obrany no. 15.
September 24, 1825
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (September 24, 1825 – February 22, 1911) was an African-American abolitionist, poet and author. She was also active in other types of social reform and was a member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, which advocated the federal government taking a role in progressive reform. Born free in Baltimore, Maryland, she had a long and prolific career, publishing her first book of poetry at age 20 and her first novel, the widely praised Iola Leroy, at age 67. In 1850, she became the first woman to teach sewing at the Union Seminary. In 1851, alongside William Still, chairman of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, she helped escaped slaves along the Underground Railroad on their way to Canada. She began her career as a public speaker and political activist after joining the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1853. Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854) became her biggest commercial success. Her short story 'Two Offers' was published in the Anglo-African in 1859. She published Sketches of Southern Life in 1872. It detailed her experience touring the South and meeting newly freed blacks. In these poems she described the harsh living conditions of many. After the Civil War she continued to fight for the rights of women, African Americans, and many other social causes. She helped or held high office in several national progressive organizations. In 1873 Harper became superintendent of the Colored Section of the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Women's Christian Temperance Union. In 1894 she helped found the National Association of Colored Women and served as its vice president. Harper died February 22, 1911, nine years before women gained the right to vote. Her funeral service was held at the Unitarian Church on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. She was buried in Eden Cemetery, next to her daughter, who had died two years before.
September 24, 1920
Leopold Samuel "Leo" Marks (24 September 1920 – 15 January 2001) was an English writer, screenwriter, and cryptographer. During the Second World War he headed the codes office supporting resistance agents in occupied Europe for the secret Special Operations Executive organisation. After the war, Marks became a playwright and screenwriter, writing scripts that frequently utilised his war-time cryptographic experiences. He wrote the script for Peeping Tom, the controversial film directed by Michael Powell which had a disastrous effect on Powell's career, but was later described by Martin Scorsese as a masterpiece.
September 24, 1935
Clare Bud V. McKanna, Jr., (September 24, 1935, - March 25, 2012) is on the faculty of the Department of History at San Diego State University. He has been a contributor to numerous books and journals and was editor of Great Plains Research at the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
September 24, 1821
Cyprian Norwid (September 24, 1821, G?uchy, Poland - May 23, 1883, Paris, France), poet, playwright, novelist, thinker, and visual artist, was virtually unknown during his lifetime. His poetry, filled with aphorisms and multi-layered metaphor, is largely free of the melodic tone typical of Romantic poetry. When the occupying powers censored all writing in the Polish language, Norwid went into exile, moving through Europe and America. He died in a hostel in Ivry. Following a career in psychiatry, Danuta Borchardt began translating the novels of Witold Gombrowicz. Her Ferdydurke received the National Translation Award in 2001, her Cosmos was awarded a NEA fellowship, and her Pornografia won the prestigious Found-in-Translation Award in 2010. Borchardt's short fiction has regularly appeared in Exquisite Corpse.
September 25, 1913
Norman Oliver Brown (September 25, 1913 – October 2, 2002) was an American scholar, writer, and social philosopher. Beginning as a classical scholar, his later work branched into wide-ranging, erudite, and intellectually sophisticated considerations of history, literature, psychology, culture, and other topics. Brown advanced some novel theses and in his time achieved some general notability.
September 25, 1930
Francine du Plessix Gray is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer and literary critic. She was born on September 25, 1930, in Warsaw, Poland, where her father, Vicomte Bertrand Jochaud du Plessix, was a French diplomat - the commercial attaché. She spent her early years in Paris, where a milieu of mixed cultures and a multilingual family (French father and Russian mother) influenced her. Her father, then a sub-lieutenant in the Free French Air Force died in 1940, shot down near Gibraltar. Her mother, Tatiana Iacovleff du Plessix, (1906–1991) had come to France as a refugee from Bolshevik Russia, and ended an engagement to Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1928, before marrying du Plessix. During her widowhood, she once again became a refugee, escaping occupied France via Lisbon to New York in 1940 or 1941 with Francine and Alexander Liberman (1912–1999). In 1942, she married Liberman, another White Russian émigré, whom she had known in Paris as a child. (During his love affair with Liberman's mother, her uncle, Alexandre Yacovleff, had recruited Tatiana to keep the boy occupied.) He was a noted artist and later a longtime editorial director of Vogue magazine and then of Condé Nast Publications. The Libermans were socially prominent in media, art and fashion circles. For the first six months in the United States, young Francine lived with her mother's father (whom she had never met) in Rochester, New York, while her mother settled in. She grew up in New York City and was naturalized a U.S. citizen in 1952. She was a scholarship student at Spence School, where she fainted in the library from malnutrition. Her mother learned that she had not been eating the meals the housekeeper prepared for her. She attended Bryn Mawr College for two years, and earned a B.A. in philosophy at Barnard College in 1952. On 23 April 1957, she married the painter Cleve Gray (1918–2004) and until his death they lived together in Connecticut. They had two sons.
September 25, 1897
William Cuthbert Faulkner (born Falkner, September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962), also known as Will Faulkner, was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of written media, including novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays. He is primarily known and acclaimed for his novels and short stories, many of which are set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, a setting Faulkner created based on Lafayette County, where he spent most of his life, and Holly Springs/Marshall County. Faulkner is one of the most important writers in both American literature generally and Southern literature specifically. Though his work was published as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century; also on the list were As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932). Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is often included on similar lists.
September 25, 1952
bell hooks is the author of over fifteen books, including KILLING RAGE, AIN’T I A WOMAN: BLACK WOMEN AND FEMINISM, and BONE BLACK: MEMORIES OF GIRLHOOD. A Distinguished Professor of English at City College in New York, she lives in Greenwich Village.
September 25, 1890
José Rubén Romero, (born September 25, 1890, Cotija de la Paz, Mex.—died July 4, 1952, Mexico City), Mexican novelist and short-story writer whose vivid depiction of the people and customs of his native state of Michoacán brought him critical acclaim as an outstanding modern costumbrista, or novelist of manners. His character Pito Pérez, a lovable rascal, won the hearts of a wide audience. In his youth Romero participated in the rebellion (1910–11) led by Francisco Madero, and his later diplomatic career included service as ambassador to Brazil (1937) and to Cuba (1939). Romero began his literary career as a poet with Fantasías (1908; Fantasies) and La musa heroica (1912; The Heroic Muse). Soon, however, he turned almost exclusively to prose. With broad humour that often masked an underlying bitterness, Romero depicted the post-revolutionary milieu in such novels as Desbandada (1934; Disbandment) and Anticipación a la muerte (1939; Anticipation of Death). He achieved his greatest popularity, however, with La vida inútil de Pito Pérez (1938; The Useless Life of Pito Pérez), a picaresque novel chronicling the comic adventures of Pito Pérez, who reappeared in Algunas cosillas de Pito Pérez (1945; Some Little Things About Pito Pérez).
September 25, 1920
Akimitsu Takagi (25 September 1920–9 September 1995), was the pen-name of a popular Japanese crime fiction writer active during the Showa period of Japan. His real name was Takagi Seiichi. Takagi was born in Aomori City in Aomori Prefecture in northern Japan. He graduated from the Daiichi High School (which was often abbreviated to Ichi-ko) and Kyoto Imperial University, where he studied metallurgy. He was employed by the Nakajima Aircraft Company, but lost his job with the prohibition on military industries in Japan after World War II. On the recommendation of a fortune-teller, he decided to become a writer. He sent the second draft of his first detective story, The Tattoo Murder Case, to the great mystery writer Edogawa Ranpo, who recognized his skill and who recommended it to a publisher. It was published in 1948. He received the Tantei sakka club sho (Mystery Writers Club Award) for his second novel, the Noh Mask Murder Case in 1950.
September 25, 1911
Eric E. Williams (born 25 September 1911, Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago) was one of the most outstanding African Caribbean intellectuals of all time, author of Capitalism and Slavery (1944), classic on African enslavement in the Americas by the pan-European World – from his 1938 Oxford University doctoral thesis, and first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, 31 August 1962, after centuries of the British/European World conquest, enslaving and occupation
September 25, 1923
Robert Laxalt (September 25, 1923 – March 23, 2001) was a Basque-American writer from Nevada.
September 25, 1943
Aram Saroyan is an internationally known poet, novelist, biographer, memoirist and playwright. He is the recipient of two NEA awards, and his Complete Minimal Poems received the 2008 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America.
September 25, 1934
James P. Comer (born James Pierpont Comer, September 25, 1934 in East Chicago, Indiana) is currently the Maurice Falk Professor of Child Psychiatry at the Yale Child Study Center and has been since 1976. He is also an associate dean at the Yale School of Medicine. As one of the world's leading child psychiatrists, he is best known for his efforts to improve the scholastic performance of children from lower-income and minority backgrounds which led to the founding of the Comer School Development Program in 1968. His program has been used in more than 600 schools in eighty-two school districts. He is the author of ten books, including the autobiographical Maggie’s American Dream: The Life and Times of a Black Family, 1988; Leave No Child Behind: Preparing Today's Youth for Tomorrow's World, 2004; and his most recent book, What I Learned in School: Reflections on Race, Child Development, and School Reform, 2009. He has also written more than 150 articles for Parents (magazine) and more than 300 articles on children's health and development and race relations. Dr. Comer has also served as a consultant to the Children's Television Workshop (Sesame Workshop) which produces Sesame Street and The Electric Company (1971 TV series). He is a co-founder and past president of the Black Psychiatrists of America and has served on the board of several universities, foundations, and corporations. He has also lectured and consulted widely not only across the United States at different universities, medical schools, and scientific associations, but also around the world in places such as London, Paris, Tokyo, Dakar, Senegal and Sydney, Australia. For his work and scholarship, Dr. Comer has been awarded 47 honorary degrees and has been recognized by numerous organizations
September 25, 1944
MARIO DE CARVALHO practices law in Lisbon, though writing has become his primary vocation. He has published numerous novels, story collections, and plays. Um deus passeando pela brisa da tarde was awarded the 1995 Portuguese Writers' Association Grand Prize for Fiction.
September 25, 1928
John Langston Gwaltney (September 25, 1928 – August 29, 1998) was an African-American writer and anthropologist focused on African-American culture, best known for his book Drylongso: A Self Portrait of Black America. Gwaltney lost his eyesight soon after birth and was the first blind student to attend his local high school in Newark, NJ. Gwaltney earned a BA from Upsala College in 1952, an MA from the New School for Social Research in 1957, and in 1967 a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University, where he won the Ansley Dissertation Award and studied under Margaret Mead, who called him a most remarkable man…[who] manages his life and work with extraordinary skill and bravery". His dissertation on river blindness among the Chinantec-speaking people in Oaxaca, Mexico, eventually became his 1970 book Thrice Shy: Cultural Accommodation to Blindness and Other Disasters in a Mexican Community. He was a professor of anthropology at the University of Syracuse in New York.
September 25, 1930
Dušan Hamšík (September 25, 1930, Tren?ín - November 22, 1985 , Prague ) was a Czech journalist, writer and screenwriter.
September 25, 1881
Lu Xun (Lu Hsün (Wade-Giles), was the pen name of Zhou Shuren (September 25, 1881 – October 19, 1936), a leading figure of modern Chinese literature. Writing in Vernacular Chinese as well as Classical Chinese, Lu Xun was a novelist, editor, translator, literary critic, essayist, and poet. In the 1930s he became the titular head of the League of Left-Wing Writers in Shanghai. Lu Xun's works exerted a substantial influence after the May Fourth Movement that began around 1916. He was highly acclaimed by the Communist regime after 1949, and Mao Zedong himself was a lifelong admirer of Lu Xun's works. Though sympathetic to communist ideas, Lu Xun never actually joined the Chinese Communist Party. Like many leaders of the May Fourth Movement, he was primarily a leftist and liberal.
September 25, 1963
Andrea Davis Pinkney (born September 25, 1963) is a children's author and Coretta Scott King Award winner who writes about African-American culture. She is the author of more than 20 books and founder of the "first African American children's book imprint at a major publishing company": Jump at the Sun at Hyperion Books for Children, the Disney Book Group (now Disney Publishing Worldwide). She is also vice president and editor-at-large for Scholastic Trade Books.
September 25, 1940
Tim Severin (born 25 September 1940) is a British explorer, historian and writer. Severin is noted for his work in retracing the legendary journeys of historical figures. Severin was awarded both the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society and the Livingstone Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. He received the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for his 1982 book The Sindbad Voyage.
September 25, 1960
ANDRZEJ STASIUK (born September 25, 1960) deserted from the Polish army under Communism, was sent to prison, and there began his writing career. He is the author of thirteen books - short stories, plays, poetry and novels - and in 2005 he won the NIKE Award, Poland's most important literary prize. He lives in the Carpathian Mountains.
September 25, 1940
Eva Švankmajerová (September 25, 1940 – October 20, 2005) was a Czech surrealist artist. She was born Eva Dvo?áková. A native of the Czech town of Kostelec nad ?ernými lesy, she moved to Prague in 1958 to study at the Prague School of Interior Design and later the Academy of Performing Arts (Theater Department). From 1970, she was an active member of the Czech and Slovak Surrealist Group. She was a painter and ceramicist, and her poetry and prose regularly appeared in the journal Analogon. Most recently, her work has appeared in English in Surrealist Women: an International Anthology (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998) and Baradla Cave (Twisted Spoon Press, 2001). Švankmajerová was married to the Surrealist filmmaker Jan Švankmajer, with whom she collaborated on such films as Alice, Faust, and Conspirators of Pleasure. They had two children, Veronika and Václav, and lived in Prague until her death in 2005.
September 25, 1952
Cherríe Moraga (born September 25, 1952) is a Chicana writer, feminist activist, poet, essayist, and playwright. She is part of the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of English. Moraga is also a founding member of the social justice activist group La Red Xicana Indígena which is an organization of Xicanas fighting for education, culture rights, and Indigenous Rights.
September 25, 1906
Madeleine Bourdouxhe (September 25, 1906 in Liège, Belgium – April 16, 1996 in Brussels, Belgium) was a Belgian author. Madeleine Bourdouxhe moved to Paris in 1914 with her parents, where she lived for the duration of World War I. After returning to Brussels, she studied philosophy. In 1927 she married a mathematics teacher, Jacques Muller. The marriage lasted until his death in 1974. Her daughter was born the day the Germans invaded Belgium in May 1940. She fled with her husband to a small village near Bordeaux, but was forced by the government in exile to return to Brussels, and remained there, active in the Belgian Resistance. After the war, she lived regularly in Paris and had contact with writers such as Simone de Beauvoir Raymond Queneau and Jean-Paul Sartre, and also with painters such as René Magritte and Paul Delvaux. Her last novel, A la Recherche de Marie, was published in 1943. In the mid-1980s, however, Madeleine Bourdouxhe was rediscovered by the feminists, resulting in new editions and translations.
September 25, 1935 Maj Sjöwall and August 5, 1926 Per Wahlöö
Together with Maj Sjowall, he has written several Martin Beck books, including ROSEANNA and THE MAN ON THE BALCONY, which were each acclaimed the best mystery of the year upon being published in the United States. Born in 1926, Mr. Wahloo was a reporter for several Swedish newspapers and magazines and has written numerous radio, television and film scripts, novels and short stories. He and his wife and co-author, the poet Maj Sjowall, also edited Peripeo, a magazine of literature and poetry.
September 26, 1918
Fernando Alegría (Santiago de Chile, 26 September, 1918 - Walnut Creek, California, October 29, 2005) was a Chilean poet, writer, literary critic and scholar. Alegría grew up in the Independencia barrio of the city. Poets from this barrio include Pablo Neruda, Violeta Parra and Volodia Teitelboim. He received an M.A. from Bowling Green State University in 1941 and a Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley, in 1947. From 1964-1967, Alegría was a professor at the University of California in Berkeley. From 1967 to 1998 he was a professor at Stanford University and for many years he was Chair of the Spanish and Portuguese Language Departments there. He sat on the Board of Trustees at the Western Institute for Social Research (WISR) for about twenty years beginning with its inception in 1975. Alegría served as cultural attaché from the government of Salvador Allende to the United States from 1970 to 1973. He was the representative of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language in the United States for many years. Among the many awards he received is the Latin American Prize of Literature. A documentary film about the life of Chile’s revolutionary poet Alegría, ¡Viva Chile Mierda!, was produced in 2004. The documentary is a humanistic portrayal of one of the most influential figures from Chile and a key figure in the advancement of Latino culture in the United States of America. Alegría’s ‘Viva Chile Mierda’, the most recited poem of the Allende era, was written in the 1960s.
September 26, 1921
Cyprian Ekwensi (September 26, 1921–November 4, 2007) was a Nigerian short story writer and author of children's books. Ekwensi, a native of Nkwelle-Ezunaka in today's Oyi local government of Anambra State, was born in Minna, Niger State. His father was David Anadumaka, a story-teller and elephant hunter. Ekwensi attended Government College in Ibadan, Oyo State, Achimota College in Ghana, and the School of Forestry, Ibadan, after which he worked for two years as a forestry officer. He also studied pharmacy at Yaba Technical Institute, Lagos School of Pharmacy, and the Chelsea School of Pharmacy of the University of London. He taught at Igbobi College. Ekwensi has nine children. His oldest son George is a well known New Jersey accountant. Ekwensi was employed as Head of Features at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) and by the Ministry of Information during the First Republic; he eventually became Director of the latter. He resigned his position in 1966, before the Civil War, and moved to Enugu with his family. He later served as chair of the Bureau for External Publicity of Biafra, prior to its reabsorption by Nigeria. Ekwensi wrote hundreds of short stories, radio and television scripts, and several dozen novels, including children's books. His 1954 PEOPLE OF THE CITY was the first book by a Nigerian to garner international attention. His novel DRUMMER BOY (1960), based on the life of Benjamin 'Kokoro' Aderounmu was a perceptive and powerful description of the wandering, homeless and poverty-stricken life of a street artist. His most successful novel was JAGUA NANA (1961), about a Pidgin-speaking Nigerian woman who leaves her husband to work as a prostitute in a city and falls in love with a teacher. He also wrote a sequel to this, JAGUA NANA'S DAUGHTER. In 1968, he received the Dag Hammarskjöld International Prize in Literature. In 2006, he became a fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters. Ekwensi died on 4 November 2007 at the Niger Foundation in Enugu, where he underwent an operation for an undisclosed ailment. The Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), having intended to present him with an award on November 16, 2007, converted the honor to a posthumous award.
September 26, 1888
Thomas Stearns Eliot (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965) was a publisher, playwright, literary and social critic and ‘arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century’. Although he was born an American, he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at age 25) and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39. The poem that made his name, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock—started in 1910 and published in Chicago in 1915—is seen as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement, and was followed by some of the best-known poems in the English language, including Gerontion (1920), The Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930), and Four Quartets (1945). He is also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.
September 26, 1954
Cecil Foster was born in Barbados and moved to Canada in 1978. His first novel, NO MAN IN THE HOUSE, was published to critical acclaim in the United States and Canada. Since leaving his position of senior editor at the Financial Post, Foster has worked for CBC radio and television and has written for several leading magazines.
September 26, 1949
JANE SMILEY is the author of many novels, including A THOUSAND ACRES, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and HORSE HEAVEN. She lives in Northern California. In 2001, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
September 26, 1956
Brian Kiteley is an American novelist, and writing teacher. He grew up in Northampton, Massachusetts. He has had residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Millay, Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Work Center. He has taught at the American University in Cairo, Ohio University. He teaches at the University of Denver.
September 26, 1913
Stephan Körner, FBA (26 September 1913 – 17 August 2000 ) was a British philosopher, who specialised in the work of Kant, the study of concepts, and in the philosophy of mathematics. Born to a Jewish family in Czechoslovakia, he left the country to avoid certain death at the hands of the Nazis after the German occupation in 1939, and came to the United Kingdom as a refugee, where he began his study of philosophy; by 1952 he was a professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol, taking up a second professorship at Yale in 1970. He was married to Edith Körner, and was the father of the mathematician Thomas Körner and the biochemist, writer and translator (née) Ann M. Körner.
September 26, 1936
Luís Fernando Veríssimo (born September 26, 1936 in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) is a Brazilian writer. Verissimo is the son of Brazilian writer Erico Verissimo and lived with his father in the United States during his childhood. Best known for his chronicles and texts of humor, more precisely satire of manners, published daily in several Brazilian newspapers, Verissimo is also a cartoonist, translator, and television writer, playwright and novelist. He has also been advertising and newspaper copy desk. He is also a musician, having played saxophone in a few sets. With over 60 published titles, is one of the most popular contemporary Brazilian writers. Verissimo is a great fan of jazz, and plays saxophone in a band called Jazz 6. Like many Brazilian intellectuals, he enjoys the culture of Rio de Janeiro[citation needed]. Verissimo is a critic of right-wing politicians, especially the former president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Verissimo is fond of football, and a famous Sport Club Internacional supporter. He has already written many texts about his passion for football. Verissimo was married to Lúcia Helena Massa in 1964, and the couple has three children: Fernanda, a journalist, Mariana, a writer, and Pedro, a musician. He lives with his wife in Porto Alegre. Born and raised in Porto Alegre, Luis Fernando lived most of his childhood and adolescence in the United States with his family, due to professional commitments undertaken by his father - a professor at UC Berkeley (1943–1945) and cultural director at the Organization of American States in Washington (1953–1956). As a result, he attended primary part of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and completed high school at Roosevelt High School in Washington. When he was 14 he produced with his sister, Clarissa, and a cousin, a local periodical with news of family, which was hung in the bathroom of the house and was called 'The Patentino' ('patente' is the way toilet are known in Rio Grande do Sul). When he lived in Washington, Verissimo developed his passion for jazz, and started studying saxophone and took frequent trips to New York, attending performances of the greatest musicians of the era, including Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Back in Porto Alegre in 1956, he began working in the art department of Editora Globo. Since 1960, he joined the musical group Renato and his Sextet, which featured dances professionally in the state capital, and was known as 'the world's largest sextet,' because it had nine members. Between 1962 and 1966, lived in Rio de Janeiro, where he worked as a translator and copywriter, and where he met and married (1963) with the Rio Lucia Helena Massa, his partner today, and mother of his three children (Fernanda, 1964, Mariana, 1967, and Peter, 1970). In 1967, again in his hometown, he began working in the newspaper Zero Hora, first as a copy editor (copy desk). In 1969, after covering the holidays of columnist Sergio Jockymann and to showcase the quality and speed of the text, he went on to sign his own daily column in the newspaper. His first columns were about football, addressing the foundation of the Beira-Rio stadium and the games of the Internacional, his club. The same year he became editor of the advertising agency MPM Propaganda. In 1970 he moved to the newspaper Folha da Manhã, where he held his daily column until 1975, writing about sport, cinema, literature, music, food, politics and behavior, always with irony and personal ideas, and short stories of humor which illustrated their views. Created in 1971 with a group of friends in the press and publicity in Porto Alegre, the alternative weekly O Pato Macho, with texts of humor, cartoons, stories and interviews, and circulated throughout the year in the city.
September 26, 1932
Vladimir Nikolayevich Voinovich, also spelled Voynovich (26 September 1932 – 27 July 2018) was a Russian writer and former Soviet dissident. Among his most well-known works are the satirical epic The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin and the dystopian Moscow 2042. He was forced into exile and stripped of his citizenship by Soviet authorities in 1980 but later rehabilitated and moved back to Moscow in 1990. After the fall of the Soviet Union, he continued to be an outspoken critic of Russian politics under the rule of Vladimir Putin.
September 26, 1962
Tyler Anbinder (born September 26, 1962) is an American historian known for his influential work on the antebellum period in U.S. history.
September 26, 1954
Robert Buderi (born September 26, 1954, Berkeley, CA) is an American journalist, author, and editor. Buderi also served as technology editor of BusinessWeek from 1990–1992 and editor-in-chief of MIT's Technology Review from 2002-2004. He was a Research Fellow in MIT's Center for International Studies from 2005-2007. In June 2007, he launched Xconomy, a business and technology blog in Cambridge, MA. Another notable accomplishment of Robert Buderi is his book; The Invention That Changed The World: How A Small Group of Radar Pioneers Won the Second World War and Launched A Technological Revolution. Published in 1996 by Simon and Schuster This book encompasses the technology of radar, or RAdio Detection And Ranging, and argues how it determined the outcome of some very infamous WWII battles. Some of the most prominent battles included in the book include the Battle of Britain, Battle of the Atlantic, and the Battle of Midway. Buderi also argues that radar innovations eventually led to Allied victory in the war. The book also includes information about how radar technology led to major innovations in space exploration during the Cold War era. Buderi demonstrates his masterful knowledge of the topic and solidifies his position as a prominent radar historian. This techno-thriller touches on important historical events, while also establishing connections to the process, and benefits of innovation to mankind.
September 26, 1948
Patrick J. Geary is an American medieval historian and Professor of Western Medieval History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He also holds the title of Distinguished Professor of Medieval History Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles.
September 26, 1918
OLAFUR JOHANN SIGIJRDSSON (September 26, 1918 - July 30, 1988, Reykjavik, Iceland) was born on Iceland’s Alftanes Peninsula and raised on a small farm not far from Thingvellir. Apart from brief stays in Copenhagen and New York, he spent most of his adult life in Reykjavik, where he worked at a variety of jobs until he became established as a writer.
September 26, 1954
Mary Brave Bird, also known as Mary Brave Woman Olguin, Mary Crow Dog (September 26, 1954 – February 14, 2013) was a Sicangu Lakota writer and activist who was a member of the American Indian Movement during the 1970s and participated in some of their most publicized events, including the Wounded Knee Incident when she was 18 years old. Brave Bird lived with her youngest children on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, South Dakota. She died in 2013.
September 26, 1965
Bernice L. McFadden (born September 26, 1965) is an American novelist. She has also written romance novels as Geneva Holliday.
September 26, 1912
Donato Francisco Rico II (September 26, 1912 – March 27, 1985) was an American paperback novelist, screenwriter, and comic book writer-artist, who co-created the Marvel Comics characters Jann of the Jungle with artist Arthur Peddy, Leopard Girl with artist Al Hartley, and Lorna the Jungle Girl with an artist generally considered to be Werner Roth. His pen names include Dan Rico, Donella St. Michaels, Donna Richards, Joseph Milton, and N. Korok. Don Rico was born in Rochester, New York, the eldest of nine children. His parents were emigrants from Italy: Father Alessandro was a shoe designer from Celano, Abruzzi, and mother Josephine was from the Basilicata region. At age 12, Rico received a scholarship to study drawing at the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester. The following year, his family moved to The Bronx, New York City. At 16, under artist H. J. Glintenkamp, Rico learned to make wood engravings. Prints of his engravings of Depression-era life for the W.P.A. Federal Art Project in the mid-to-late 1930s, under the supervision of Lynd Ward would eventually become part of the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and elsewhere. He began his comics career in 1939, during the period fans and historians call the Golden Age of Comic Books, beginning at Victor A. Fox's Fox Publications. There he penciled and inked the six-page "Flick Falcon" feature in Fantastic Comics #1 (Dec. 1939). He continued on that feature through issue #8 (July 1940 ), by which time the hero's name and the feature's title had been changed to "Flip Falcon". He drew the features "Blast Bennett" and "Sorceress of Zoom" for Fox's Weird Comics, and did stories for Fiction House's Planet Comics and Fight Comics. Beginning with Silver Streak Comics #11 (June 1941), he worked on some of the earliest stories of Lev Gleason Publications' 1940s superhero Daredevil (unrelated to Marvel Comics' Daredevil), helping lay the foundation for a character that would go on to a celebrated run in his own title under Charles Biro. Leopard Girl, created by Rico and artist Al Hartley, for Atlas Comics, the 1950s forerunner of Marvel Comics. Cover detail, Jungle Action #2 (Dec. 1954), art by Joe Maneely. His first story for Timely Comics, a forerunner of Marvel Comics, was an eight-page backup feature starring a hero called the Secret Stamp in Captain America Comics #13 (April 1942); another, uncredited adventure of the Secret Stamp was published in U.S.A. Comics #7 (Feb. 1943). Other early work for the company included a story of the superhero the Terror and co-creating, with an unknown writer, the obscure Jekyll-and-Hyde-like feature "Gary Gaunt", both in Mystic Comics #9 (May 1942). After inking Al Avison on a Captain America story in All Winners Comics #5 (Summer 1942), Rico soon became one of the regular pencilers for that cornerstone hero of the publisher's, starting with the 16-page "The Mikado's Super Shell" in Captain America Comics #18 (Sept. 1942). By the following year, Rico was variously writing/drawing stories featuring such characters as the Human Torch, the Whizzer, the Destroyer, the Blonde Phantom, Venus, and the Young Allies. Timely artist Allen Bellman recalled in 2005, "Don and some of the other artists didn't bother with [artist] Syd Shores, who was the unofficial bullpen director. Rico was the ringleader of this 'ignore Shores' group. He was always causing small problems in the office and publisher [Martin] Goodman knew this, and hence the name 'Rat Rico' he referred to Don with." Artist Gil Kane recalled that, "Timely was my second job after MLJ. ... Stan [Lee] was the editor at 19 years old but all the day-to-day managing of the work was done by Don Rico, who also did most of the hiring and firing." Other credits during the 1940s include Fawcett Publications' America's Greatest Comics and Bulletman; MLJ's Black Hood Comics and the dual-hero Shield-Wizard Comics; Lev Gleason's Captain Battle and Captain Battle Junior; Quality Comics' National Comics, and Smash Comics; and Et-Es-Go Magazines' Terrific Comics. From 1946 to 1948, he worked primarily for Novelty Press, on that publisher's Blue Bolt Comics and Target Comics. In 1949, Rico began working again for Timely Comics as a writer-editor as the company was transitioning to become Marvel's 1950s predecessor, Atlas Comics. Around this time, he became one of at least five staff writers (officially titled editors) there under editor-in-chief Stan Lee, along with Hank Chapman, Ernie Hart, Paul S. Newman, Carl Wessler, and, doing teen-humor comics, future Mad cartoonist Al Jaffee. Among the Atlas titles for which Rico wrote are the horror comics series Adventures into Terror, Astonishing, Marvel Tales, Suspense and Strange Tales. He co-created Jann of the Jungle with artist Jay Scott Pike in Jungle Tales #1 (Sept. 1954), and co-created Leopard Girl with artist Al Hartley in Jungle Action #1 (Oct. 1954), and wrote virtually every story and feature in those two titles. Marvel Comics reprinted several of his jungle stories in the 1970s. Rico briefly returned to comic art as an illustrator on the Atlas series Bible Tales for Young Folk. His last published story for Atlas was the four-page anthological Western tale "The Bushwhacker", with artist Angelo Torres, in Rawhide Kid #16 (Sept. 1957). In 1958, Rico moved to Los Angeles, where he began writing for film and television. Splash page, Tales of Suspense #53 (Jan. 1964), scripted by Rico as "N. Korok". In California, Rico began writing paperback novels, eventually penning more than 60 for a variety of publishers including Lancer Books and Paperback Library. His pseudonyms included Donna Richards, Joseph Milton, and Donella St. Michaels. Rico wrote only thrice for Marvel during the Silver Age of Comics in the 1960s, with a Doctor Strange story in Strange Tales #129 (Feb. 1965), and scripting two Iron Man plots by Stan Lee in Tales of Suspense #52–53 (April–May 1964), the former introducing the Black Widow. On both, he used the pseudonym N. Korok, later explaining he hadn't wanted his paperback-book publisher to know he was taking on lower-paying comic-book work. Rico co-wrote, with Don Henderson, the story basis for the bisexual-vampiress horror movie Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary (U.S.-Mexico, 1975), by director Juan Lopez Moctezuma and scripter Malcolm Marmorstein. He also drew movie and television production illustrations, including two years at Hanna-Barbera Productions drawing storyboards for TV shows. In 1977, Rico, Sergio Aragones, and television and comic-book writer Mark Evanier co-founded the Comic Art Professional Society (CAPS). Rico also worked with Aragones as scripter for the artist-plotter's female-detective strip "T.C. Mars" in Joe Kubert's magazine Sojourn. Also in 1977, Rico drew a six-page chapter starring Captain America in the World War II-superhero flashback series The Invaders Annual #1. In 1979, Rico drew the cover and wrote an introduction for a 128-page anthology of black-and-white reprints, The Magnificent Superheroes of Comics [sic] Golden Age #1 (Vintage Features). During the mid-1970, Rico taught a college course on comic books at UCLA, titled "The Theory, History and Technique of Comic Books". In the early 1980s, he taught drawing at Cal State Northridge. Rico lived in Los Angeles at the time of his death in 1985. He was survived by his second wife, Michele Hart-Rico; his son, Donato "Buz" Rico III; and his daughter, Dianne Marie Rico Tran (1933–2007).
September 26, 1916
Donald Robert Paul Roche (26 September 1916 – 30 October 2007) was a British poet, novelist, and professor of English, a critically acclaimed translator of Greek and Latin classics, notably the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Sappho, and Plautus.
September 26, 1926
Alberto Ronchey (26 September 1926 – 5 March 2010) was an Italian journalist, essayist and politician. He was author of the term "K factor" to indicate the inability of the Western communist parties to win the elections by democratic means. He was the Italian Minister of Cultural Heritage and Activities from 1992 to 1994 in Giuliano Amato's cabinet and subsequently Carlo Azeglio Ciampi's cabinet. He was president of RCS MediaGroup from 1994 to 1998.
September 26, 1961
Will Self. William Woodard Self (born 26 September 1961) is an English novelist, journalist, political commentator and television personality. Self is the author of eleven novels, five collections of shorter fiction, three novellas, and five collections of non-fiction writing.
September 27, 1906
Sir William Empson (27 September 1906 – 15 April 1984) was an English literary critic and poet, widely influential for his practice of closely reading literary works, a practice fundamental to New Criticism. His best-known work is his first, Seven Types of Ambiguity, published in 1930. Jonathan Bate has written that the three greatest English literary critics of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries are Johnson, Hazlitt and Empson, 'not least because they are the funniest'.
September 27, 1904
Edvard Kocbek (27 September 1904 – 3 November 1981) was a Slovenian poet, writer, essayist, translator, member of Christian Socialists in the Liberation Front of the Slovene Nation and Slovene Partisans. He is considered as one of the best authors who have written in Slovene, and one of the best Slovene poets after Prešeren. His political role during and after World War II made him one of the most controversial figures in Slovenia in the 20th century.
September 27, 1940
Fatema Mernissi (27 September 1940 – 30 November 2015) was a Moroccan feminist writer and sociologist.
September 27, 1924
Josef Škvorecký (September 27, 1924 – January 3, 2012) was a Czech-Canadian writer and publisher who spent much of his life in Canada. SKVORECKY was born in Bohemia, emigrated to Canada in 1968, and was for many years a professor of English at Erindale College, University of Toronto. He and his wife, the novelist Zdena Salivarova, ran a Czech-language publishing house, Sixty-Eight Publishers, in Toronto, and were long-time supporters of Czech dissident writers before the fall of communism in that country. Skvorecky’s novels include THE COWARDS, MISS SILVER’S PAST, THE BASS SAXOPHONE, THE ENGINEER OF HUMAN SOULS, and DVORAK IN LOVE. He was the winner of the 1980 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1984 Governor General’s Award for fiction in Canada. Škvorecký's fiction deals with several themes: the horrors of totalitarianism and repression, the expatriate experience, and the miracle of jazz.
September 27, 1906
James Myers Thompson (September 27, 1906 – April 7, 1977) was an American author and screenwriter, known for his pulp crime fiction. Thompson wrote more than thirty novels, the majority of which were original paperback publications by pulp fiction houses, from the late-1940s through mid-1950s. Despite some positive critical notice, notably by Anthony Boucher in The New York Times, he was little-recognized in his lifetime. Only after death did Thompson's literary stature grow, when in the late 1980s, several novels were re-published in the Black Lizard series of re-discovered crime fiction. Thompson's writing culminated in a few of his best-regarded works: The Killer Inside Me, Savage Night, A Hell of a Woman and Pop. 1280. A number of Thompson's books became popular films, including The Getaway and The Grifters. The writer R.V. Cassill has suggested that of all pulp fiction, Thompson's was the rawest and most harrowing; that neither Dashiell Hammett nor Raymond Chandler nor even Horace McCoy, author of the bleak They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, ever ‘wrote a book within miles of Thompson’. Similarly, in the introduction to Now and on Earth, Stephen King says he most admires Thompson's work because ‘The guy was over the top. The guy was absolutely over the top. Big Jim didn't know the meaning of the word stop. There are three brave lets inherent in the forgoing: he let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it.’ Thompson admired Fyodor Dostoyevsky and was nicknamed ‘Dimestore Dostoevsky’ by writer Geoffrey O'Brien. Film director Stephen Frears, who directed an adaptation of Thompson's The Grifters as 1990's The Grifters, also identified elements of Greek tragedy in his themes.
September 27, 1958
David Davidar (born 27 September 1958) is an Indian novelist and publisher. He is the author of three published novels, The House of Blue Mangoes (2002), The Solitude of Emperors (2007) and Ithaca (2011). In parallel to his writing career, Davidar has been a publisher for a quarter century. He is the co-founder of Aleph Book Company, a literary publishing firm based in New Delhi.
September 27, 1871
Grazia Deledda (September 27, 1871, Nuoro, Italy - August 15, 1936, Rome, Italy) was born in Nuoro, Sardinia, which forms the setting for most of her fiction. In 1900 she moved to Rome with her husband, where she was commissioned to codify the folklore on her native island. Her subsequent work is informed and inspired by this research and by a keen understanding of the conflicts produced by the convergence of Christianity, strict social mores, and pagan superstition. In 1926 she became the second woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded in recognition of the enduring power of her work and its consistent impact on a global audience. Remarkably, her work is little known to English-speaking audiences.
September 27, 1933
Paul Goble (27 September 1933 – 5 January 2017) was an English writer and illustrator of children's books, especially Native American stories. His book The Girl Who Loved Wild Horses won a Caldecott Medal in 1979.
September 27, 1981
Anand Giridharadas (born September 27, 1981) is an American writer. He is a former columnist for The New York Times. He is the author of three books, India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking (2011), The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (2014), and Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018). Much of his writing has focused on India and its people. Giridharadas was raised in Shaker Heights, Ohio, Maryland, and Paris, France by his father and mother, Radhashyam and Nandini Giridharadas (née, Lall). His childhood visits to extended family members in India sparked an interest in that country that influenced his later writing. He studied politics and history at the University of Michigan. After graduating from college, he moved to Mumbai in 2003 as a consultant for the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, where he directly followed the path of his father who was also a director at McKinsey & Company. In 2005, he became a journalist, covering India for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times. In 2009, after returning to the United States, he began to write the "Currents" column for those newspapers. He also writes longer magazine pieces. As of 2010, Giridharadas was a doctoral candidate at Harvard University. He is a Henry Crown fellow of the Aspen Institute, and is an MSNBC commentator. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. In 2011, Giridharadas published his first book, India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking. In the book, he discusses the increasing opportunities provided by the Indian economy. He also delves into class issues, and has said that "in India, you're eternally a master and eternally a servant." In The Plain Dealer, Jo Gibson characterizes the work as a "readable, intriguing book" and calls Giridharadas "a marvelous journalist – intrepid, easy to like, curious." In a review for The New York Times, Gaiutra Bahadur writes that "'India Calling' has what Hanif Kureishi once described as 'the sex of a syllogism.' Full-figured ideas animate every turn. So, simultaneously, does Giridharadas’s eye for contradiction. The combination both pleases us and makes us wary — distrustful of shapely ideas, including the author’s own." In 2014, W. W. Norton and Company published his book The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas. The book centers on executed murderer Mark Stroman and a survivor of one of his shootings, Rais Bhuiyan. The work explores Bhuiyan's forgiveness of Stroman and his campaign to save the death row inmate from capital punishment. At the time of the shootings, Stroman had thought that he was exacting revenge for the September 11, 2001 attacks, but his victims were immigrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Eboo Patel reviewed the book for The Washington Post. Patel wrote that the book "zooms out and illuminates the broader social context of the lives at the center." However, he noted that "while plumbing the depths of Bhuiyan’s Muslim heart, (Giridharadas) misses a wide-open opportunity to get to the heart of Islam." In The Wall Street Journal, Stephen Harrigan wrote that Giridharadas is "an enterprising and clear-eyed reporter and a generally smooth writer, though every 20 pages or so there appears a glistening chunk of linguistic gristle... But occasional maladroit phrases do no serious harm to his commanding narrative." In 2018, Giridharadas published Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World in which he argues that members of the global elite, though sometimes engaged in philanthropy, use their wealth and influence to preserve systems that concentrate wealth at the top at the expense of societal progress. Writing for The New York Times, economist Joseph Stiglitz praised the book, writing that Giridharadas "writes on two levels — seemingly tactful and subtle — but ultimately he presents a devastating portrait of a whole class, one easier to satirize than to reform." He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Priya B. Parker.
September 28, 1924
James Berry (28 September 1924 – 20 June 2017) was a Jamaican poet who settled in England in the 1940s. His poetry is notable for using a mixture of standard English and Jamaican Patois. Berry's writing often ‘explores the relationship between black and white communities and in particular, the excitement and tensions in the evolving relationship of the Caribbean immigrants with Britain and British society from the 1940s onwards’. As the editor of two seminal anthologies, Bluefoot Traveller (1976) and News for Babylon (1984), he was in the forefront of championing West Indian/British writing.
September 28, 1938
Dr. Rosario Ferré (born September 28, 1938) is a Puerto Rican writer, poet, and essayist. Her father, Luis A. Ferré, was the third elected Governor of Puerto Rico and the founding father of the New Progressive Party of Puerto Rico. When her mother, Lorenza Ramírez de Arellano, died in 1970 during her father's term as Governor, Rosario fulfilled the duties of First Lady until 1972. She was the recipient of the ‘Liberatur Prix’ award from the Frankfurt Book Fair for ‘Kristallzucker’, the German translation of ‘Maldito Amor’.
September 28, 1803
Prosper Mérimée (September 28, 1803 – September 23, 1870) was a French dramatist, historian, archaeologist, and short story writer. He is perhaps best known for his novella Carmen, which became the basis of Bizet's opera Carmen.
September 28, 1913
Edith Mary Pargeter, OBE, BEM (28 September 1913 – 14 October 1995), also known by her nom de plume Ellis Peters, was a British author of works in many categories, especially history and historical fiction, and was also honoured for her translations of Czech classics; she is probably best known for her murder mysteries, both historical and modern. Pargeter was born in the village of Horsehay (Shropshire, England). Her father was a clerk at a local ironworks. She was educated at Dawley Church of England School and the old Coalbrookdale High School for Girls. She had Welsh ancestry, and many of her short stories and books (both fictional and non-fictional) are set in Wales and its borderlands, and/or have Welsh protagonists. During World War II, she worked in an administrative role in the Women's Royal Naval Service (the ‘Wrens’)—and reached the rank of petty officer by 1 January 1944 when she was awarded the British Empire Medal (BEM) in the New Year Honours. In 1947 Pargeter visited Czechoslovakia and became fascinated by the Czech language and culture. She became fluent in Czech and published award-winning translations of Czech poetry and prose into English. She devoted the rest of her life to writing, both nonfiction and well-researched fiction. She never attended college but became a self-taught scholar in areas that interested her, especially Shropshire and Wales. Birmingham University gave her an honorary master's degree. Pargeter wrote under a number of pseudonyms; it was under the name Ellis Peters that she wrote crime stories, especially the highly popular series of Brother Cadfael medieval mysteries, many of which were made into films for television. The Brother Cadfael Chronicles drew international attention to Shrewsbury and its history, and greatly increased tourism to the town. She died at her home in Madeley, Shropshire in 1995 at the age of 82. She had recently returned home from hospital following a stroke. In 1997 a new stained glass window depicting St Benedict was installed in Shrewsbury Abbey and was dedicated to the memory of Edith Pargeter. The Mystery Writers of America gave Pargeter their Edgar Award in 1963 for Death and the Joyful Woman. In 1993 she won the Cartier Diamond Dagger, an annual award given by the Crime Writers' Association of Great Britain to authors who have made an outstanding lifetime's contribution to the field of crime and mystery writing. Pargeter was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) ‘for services to Literature’ in the 1994 New Year Honours. To commemorate Pargeter's life and work, in 1999 the British Crime Writers' Association established their Ellis Peters Historical Dagger award (later called the Ellis Peters Historical Award) for the best historical crime novel of the year. Pargeter's Cadfael Chronicles are often credited for popularizing what would later become known as the historical mystery.
September 28, 1950
John Thomas Sayles (born September 28, 1950) is an American independent film director, screenwriter, editor, actor and author. He has twice been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Passion Fish (1992) and Lone Star (1996).
September 28, 1967
Moon Unit Zappa (born September 28, 1967) is an American actress and author. Moon Zappa was born in New York City, the eldest child of Gail (née Sloatman) and musician Frank Zappa. She has three younger siblings, Dweezil, Ahmet, and Diva. Zappa's father was of Sicilian, Greek-Arab, and French ancestry, and her mother is of French, Irish, and mostly Danish ancestry. Zappa attended Oakwood School in North Hollywood, California. She married Paul Doucette, former drummer and current rhythm guitarist for American pop group Matchbox Twenty, in June 2002. They have one child, Mathilda Plum Doucette, born December 21, 2004 (the same day and month as grandfather Frank). Zappa filed for divorce in January 2012. The divorce was finalized in early 2014. Zappa briefly dated comedian and podcast host Marc Maron. Following the death of Zappa's mother, Gail, in October 2015, it was revealed that her siblings Ahmet and Diva were given control of the Zappa family trust with shares of 30% each, while Moon and her brother Dweezil were given smaller shares of 20% each. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times in 2016, Zappa called it the "most hideous shock of [her] life." As beneficiaries only, Moon and Dweezil will not see any money from the trust until it is profitable—in 2016, it was "millions of dollars in debt" —and must seek permission from Ahmet, the trustee, to make money off of their father's music or merchandise bearing his name. Zappa first came to public attention in 1982 at the age of 14, appearing on her father's hit single, "Valley Girl." The song featured Moon's monologue in "valleyspeak," slang terms popular with teenage girls in the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles. In the mid-1980s, Zappa and her brother Dweezil were frequent guest VJs on MTV. "Valley Girl" was Frank Zappa's biggest hit in the United States, and popularized phrases from the lyric such as "grody to the max" and "gag me with a spoon." The song appeared on her father's 1982 album Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch. She also sang on Dweezil's songs "My Mother Is a Space Cadet," b/w "Crunchy Water" in 1982 and "Let's Talk About It" from the album "Havin' a Bad Day" in 1986. As a teenager, Zappa acted in the television series CHiPs, The Facts of Life, and the film Nightmares. As an adult, she has worked as a stand-up comic, magazine writer, and actress, appearing in the films National Lampoon's European Vacation and Spirit of '76, the television sitcom Normal Life, and The Super Mario Bros. Super Show. Zappa appeared as a niqab-clad Muslim woman in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, as Ted Mosby's cousin Stacy in an episode of How I Met Your Mother, and on an episode ("Pampered to a Pulp") of Roseanne. Most recently, Zappa was the voice of Mrs. Lamber on FOX Broadcasting's Animation Domination High-Def series High School USA!. In 2000, Zappa appeared as guest vocalist on Kip Winger's third solo album "Songs from the Ocean Floor." She is the author of the novel America, the Beautiful, published in 2001. She has also written for The New York Times. In a 2016 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Zappa said she was working on a book about growing up in her "crazy house."
September 28, 1952
Christopher Buckley is professor emeritus of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. He has published 20 books of poetry and several chapbooks and limited editions. Buckley is the author of the memoirs Cruising State, Sleep Walk, and Holy Days of Obligation. He is the editor of six anthologies of contemporary poetry as well as critical books on Philip Levine, Larry Levis, and Luis Omar Salinas. Buckley is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, two National Endowment for the Arts Grants, a Fulbright Award, four Pushcart prizes, and two awards from the Poetry Society of America among other awards.
September 28, 1941
Edward Buscombe has written about Stagecoach and The Searchers in the BFI Film Classics series. He is the author of Cinema Today.
September 28, 1955
David Garrioch is Associate Professor of History at Monash University, Australia, and author of The Formation of the Parisian Bourgeoisie, 1690-1830 (1996) and Neighborhood and Community in Paris, 1740-1790 (1986).
September 28, 1941
Leanne Hinton is an emerita professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. She specializes in American Indian languages, sociolinguistics, and language revitalization.
September 28, 1950
Erich Hoyt (born 28 September 1950) is a whale and dolphin (cetacean) researcher, conservationist, lecturer and author of 22 books and more than 600 reports, articles and papers.
September 28, 1935
Pierre Ryckmans (28 September 1935 – 11 August 2014), who also used the pen-name Simon Leys, was a Roman Catholic Belgian-Australian writer, essayist and literary critic, translator, art historian, sinologist, and university professor. His work particularly focused on the politics and traditional culture of China, calligraphy, French and English literature, the commercialization of universities, and the sea in literary works. Through the publication of his trilogy Les Habits neufs du président Mao (1971), Ombres chinoises (1974) and Images brisées (1976), he was one of the first intellectuals to denounce the Cultural Revolution in China and the idolizing of Mao in the West.
September 28, 1897
William Montgomery McGovern (September 28, 1897 – December 12, 1964) was an American adventurer, Northwestern University professor, anthropologist and journalist. He was possibly an inspiration for the character of Indiana Jones. McGovern's life may be more incredible than the fictional character he spawned. By age 30, he had already explored the Amazon and braved uncharted regions of the Himalayas, survived revolution in Mexico, studied at Oxford and the Sorbonne and become a Buddhist priest in a Japanese monastery. He became a beloved lecturer, war correspondent and military strategist. McGovern was born in Manhattan, New York, on September 28, 1897, the son of Janet Blair (née Montgomery) and Felix Daniel McGovern, an army officer. Time reported that he began to travel at the age of six weeks, once visiting Mexico with his mother "just to see a revolution." His formative years were spent in Asia. McGovern graduated with the degree of soro, or Doctor of Divinity, from the Buddhist monastery of Nishi Honganji in Kyoto, Japan at age 20 before going on to study at the Sorbonne and University of Berlin. He received his D.Phil. from Christ Church College, Oxford in 1922—working his way through school by teaching Chinese at the University of London. Shortly after graduation he began his first great expedition, to the remote mountain kingdom of Tibet. In his book To Lhasa in Disguise, McGovern claims he had to sneak into the country disguised as a local porter. As Time reported in 1938: With a few Tibetan servants, he climbed through the wild, snowy passes of the Himalayas. There, in the bitter cold, he stood naked while a companion covered his body with brown stain, squirted lemon juice into his blue eyes to darken them. Thus disguised as a coolie, he arrived in the Forbidden City without being detected, but disclosed himself to the civilian officials. A fanatical mob led by Buddhist monks stoned his house. Bill McGovern slipped out through a back door and joined the mob in throwing stones. The civil government took him into protective custody, finally sent him back to India with an escort. Another expedition to Peru and the Amazon would follow a few years later, resulting in another book, Jungle Paths and Inca Ruins. In 1937, McGovern was named Far East correspondent by the Chicago Times, arriving in Tokyo with his wife as war began with China. The couple set off for Manchukuo to cover the invasion, only to see Margaret thrown into jail for taking photos in the streets. They went on to spend long stints on the front. When the United States joined what had become World War II, McGovern joined the United States Naval Reserve, serving from 1941 to 1945. At Guadalcanal, he operated behind enemy lines, using his knowledge of Japanese to taunt enemy soldiers and interrogate captives. In the closing days of the war he served in the European Theatre, crossing the Rhine with General Patton. His most important job was not martial in nature however. Throughout the war he would rise at 5:30 AM to prepare a top-secret newspaper on enemy capabilities and intentions. This paper was considered required breakfast reading for President Roosevelt and the Joint Chiefs. At age 30, McGovern became assistant curator of the anthropology department at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. Two years later, was appointed a professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, a position he would hold for the rest of his life. As Professor of Far Eastern Studies his classes were perpetually oversubscribed, given his eminence and popularity. His lectures were never dull and frequently peppered with anecdotes from his time in the far east, particularly in Tibet and Japan. He insisted that his pupils learn at least one or two kanji characters a week as he carefully illustrated them on a large chalkboard at the front of the lecture hall and explained their meanings as he drew them. His students considered themselves fortunate to have landed a spot in one of his classes. His son, William M. McGovern jr., followed him into academia teaching law at Northwestern University School of Law in the early 1960s. Between his time as a war correspondent during the Sino-Japanese War and the entry of the United States into World War II, McGovern lectured on government at Harvard University. In 1941, he published a well publicized history of fascist political ideologies. During the post-War years, McGovern lectured on military intelligence and strategy at the Naval, Air and Army War Colleges. Reputed to speak 12 languages and deaf in one ear, McGovern was an academic celebrity known for outlandish foreign dress and holding court in Northwestern's University Club. McGovern married his second cousin, Margaret Montgomery, and fathered four children—three daughters and a son. His granddaughter is actress Elizabeth McGovern. McGovern died after a long illness in Evanston at age 67.
September 28, 1912
Tomie Ohara (September 28, 1912, K?chi Prefecture, Japan - January 27, 2000) was born and brought up in a small mountainous village on Shikoku Island in Western Japan. She was the author of a number of books and a board member of Japan’s Association and Taiko Hirabayashi Literary Society. Her experience of recovering from tuberculosis for ten years has made her particularly sympathetic to En’s confinement.
September 28, 1956
Carl Nicholas Reeves, FSA (born 28 September 1956), an English Egyptologist, with the Egyptian Expedition, University of Arizona.
September 28, 1856
Kate Douglas Wiggin (September 28, 1856 – August 24, 1923) was an American educator and author of children's stories, most notably the classic children's novel Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. She started the first free kindergarten in San Francisco in 1878 (the Silver Street Free Kindergarten).
September 28, 1939
Stuart A. Kauffman was educated in Philosophy, Psychology and Physiology at Dartmouth and Oxford, obtained his medical degree from UCSF in 1968 and has devoted himself to often seminal work in biology and areas of physics and economics since.
September 28, 1796
David Walker (September 28, 1796 – August 6, 1830) was an American abolitionist, writer, and anti-slavery activist. Though his father was enslaved, his mother was free; therefore, he was free as well (partus sequitur ventrem). In 1829, while living in Boston, Massachusetts, with the assistance of the African Grand Lodge (later named Prince Hall Grand Lodge, Jurisdiction of Massachusetts), he published An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a call for black unity and a fight against slavery. The appeal brought attention to the abuses and inequities of slavery and the responsibility of individuals to act according to religious and political principles. At the time, some people were aghast and fearful of the reaction that the pamphlet would provoke. Southern citizens were particularly upset with Walker's viewpoints and as a result there were laws banning circulation of "seditious publications" and North Carolina "legislature enacted the most repressive measures ever passed in North Carolina to control slaves and free blacks." Historians and liberation theologians cite the Appeal as an influential political and social document of the 19th century. Walker exerted a radicalizing influence on the abolitionist movements of his day and inspired future black leaders and activists. His son, Edward G. Walker, was an attorney and in 1866 was one of the first two black men elected to the Massachusetts State Legislature. Peter P. Hinks teaches history and African American Studies at Yale University. He is the author of To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (Penn State, 1997), which was named a Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book for 1998.
September 29, 1946
Nestor Capoeira (born September 29, 1946, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil) was initiated by Mestre Leopoldina, a living legend. Later he joined the Senzala Group and in 1969 received the coveted "red-rope," Senzala's highest graduation. In 1990 he left Senzala and started to teach his personal approach to the Game at his own school. He has been a pioneer at teaching capoeira in Europe, and his books have been published in France, Denmark, Germany, and the United States. He has worked in film, theater, and television and currently teaches at the Planetario de Gavea in Rio de Janeiro.
September 29, 1864
Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (29 September 1864, Bilbao, Biscay, Basque Country, Spain – 31 December 1936, Salamanca, Salamanca, Castile and León, Spain) was a Spanish essayist, novelist, poet, playwright and philosopher. His major philosophical essay was The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), and his most famous novel was Abel Sánchez: The History of a Passion (1917), a modern exploration of the Cain and Abel story.
September 29, 1952
Peter Murray Hautman (born September 29, 1952) is an American author of novels for young adults. One of them, Godless, won the 2004 National Book Award for Young People's Literature. The National Book Foundation summary is, 'A teenage boy decides to invent a new religion with a new god - the town's water tower.' Under the name Peter Murray, Hautman has written more than 50 short books for the schools market beginning in 1992 with the titles Beavers, Black widows, Dogs, Rhinos, Snakes, and Spiders.
September 29, 1945
Annette Frieda Kuhn, FBA (born 29 September 1945) is a British author, educator, editor and feminist. She is best known for her work in screen studies, visual culture, film history and cultural memory.
September 29, 1942
A native of Peru, Professor Julio Ortega is an accomplished scholar, poet, playwright, and novelist, with 15 books as well as several critical editions to his credit. After six years of teaching at the University of Texas at Austin, and two years as professor and chairperson at Brandeis University, Professor Ortega joined Brown's Department of Hispanic Studies in 1989. He has also been a visiting professor at numerous universities both in the United States and abroad.
September 29, 1817
Aleksandr Vasilyevich Sukhovo-Kobylin (September 29 1817, Moscow - September 24 1903, Beaulieu-sur-Mer, France), was a Russian nobleman, chiefly known for the works he authored as an amateur playwright. His sister Evgenia Tur was a popular novelist, critic and journalist and his sister Sofia was a painter of some note. A rich aristocrat who often travelled, Sukhovo-Kobylin was arrested, prosecuted and tried for seven years in Russia for the murder of his French mistress Louise-Simone Dimanche, a crime of which he is nowadays generally believed to have been innocent. He only managed to achieve acquittal by means of giving enormous bribes to court officials and by using all of his contacts in the Russian elite. According to his own version as well as the generally accepted view today, he was targeted precisely because he had the financial capabilities to give such bribes. Based on his personal experiences, Sukhovo-Kobylin wrote a trilogy of satirical plays about the prevalence of bribery and other corrupt practices in the Russian judicial system of the time – "Krechinsky's Wedding" (1850–1854, begun in prison), "The Trial" (alternatively titled The Case) (1861), and "Tarelkin's Death" (alternatively titled "Rasplyuyev's merry days"), (1869). The first work had immediate success and became one of Russia's most frequently performed plays. It is also considered Sukhovo-Kobylin's best. The trilogy in its entirety was published in 1869 under the title "Scenes from the Past" . Attempts to stage the last two plays ran into difficulties with censorship; in particular, "Tarelkin's Death" was only staged in 1899. While popular, the two sequels failed to achieve the same success as the first play.
September 29, 1547
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was born in Spain in 1547. He read the classics of Latin, Italian, and Spanish literature; knew mythology well; and was a clever poet. Before his literary career, from 1571 to 1575, Cervantes fought with the Spanish fleet and served in garrisons in Italy. He was captured by the Turks on his way back home and was held for ransom in Algiers for five years. Upon his return to Spain, he held various government posts but faced constant financial hardships and served two terms in prison. His fame was secured with the publication of Don Quixote in 1605 and its sequel ten years later.
September 29, 1950
Merle Collins (born 29 September 1950 in Aruba) is a distinguished Grenadian poet and short story writer. Collins' parents are from Grenada, where they returned from Aruba shortly after her birth. Her primary education was in St George's, Grenada. She later studied at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, earning degrees in English and Spanish in 1972. She then taught history and Spanish in Grenada for two years and subsequently in St Lucia. In 1980, she graduated from Georgetown University, Washington, DC, with a master's degree in Latin American Studies. She graduated from the London School of Economics with a Ph.D. in Government. Collins was deeply involved in the Grenadian Revolution and served as a government coordinator for research on Latin America and the Caribbean. She left Grenada for England in 1983. From 1984 to 1995, Collins taught at the University of North London. She is currently a Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of Maryland. Her critical works include "Themes and Trends in Caribbean Writing Today" in From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and Women's Writing in the Postmodern World (ed. Helen Carr, Pandora Press, 1989), and "To be Free is Very Sweet" in Slavery and Abolition (Vol. 15, issue 3, 1994, pp. 96–103). Her first collection of poetry, Because the Dawn Breaks, was published in 1985, at which time she was a member of African Dawn, a performance group combining poetry, mime, and African music. In England, she began her first novel, Angel. In 1987, she published Angel, which follows the lives of Grenadians as they struggled for independence. Specifically, Angel is about a young woman going through the political turbulence in Grenada. Her collection of short stories, Rain Darling, was produced in 1990, and a second collection of poetry, Rotten Pomerack, in 1992. Her second novel, The Colour of Forgetting, was published in 1995. A review of her 2003 poetry collection, Lady in a Boat, states, "Ranging from poems reveling in the nation language of her island to poems that capture the beauty of its flora, Collins presents her island and people going about the business of living. They attempt to come to terms with the past and construct a future emerging out of the crucible of violence. Lady in a Boat is a poignant retelling of a period in history when, for a brief moment, Caribbean ascendancy seemed possible. Merle Collins shows how the death of this moment continues to haunt the Caribbean imagination." Her most recent collection of stories, The Ladies Are Upstairs, was published in 2011.
September 29, 1948
Thomas W. Christensen (born September 29, 1948) is an American author, translator, and publisher. He is known for his publications on literature, history, and art; his literary translations from French and Spanish; and his work as an editor and publisher. Born in Myrtle Point, Oregon, Christensen received advanced degrees in comparative literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After travels in Latin America he relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area and worked as an editor and publishing executive at the independent trade book publishing companies North Point Press and Mercury House. Married to translator Carol Christensen, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Christensen joined North Point Press in 1980, shortly after the press's founding, and worked there until 1989 as a senior editor. Among the authors he worked closely with were Gina Berriault, Wendell Berry, Kay Boyle, Evan S. Connell, and Gary Snyder. He joined Mercury House in 1990 as executive director and editor-in-chief, serving in that capacity until 1999. At Mercury House he published such authors as Harold Brodkey, Leonard Michaels, Alison Deming, and Lucille Eichengreen. Under his direction Mercury House was short-listed for a Carey Thomas Award for creative publishing from Publishers Weekly. He subsequently directed the publishing program of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. He is currently a contributing editor of Catamaran Literary Reader in Santa Cruz, California, where he has edited such authors as Douglas Brinkley, Jonathan Franzen, Jane Vandenburgh, and Lawrence Weschler. Christensen's best-known book-length translation is Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel. Other notable authors he has translated include Carlos Fuentes, Laura Esquivel, Alejo Carpentier, Louis Ferdinand Céline, and Jose Angel Valente. He often collaborates with his wife, Carol Christensen. In 2000, he received an award for dedication to translation from the American Literary Translators Association and was short-listed for a PEN USA West Literary Award for Translation.
September 29, 1954
Dr. David Morehouse is the author of Psychic Warrior the story of his life as a former CIA "psychic spy". He lectures and educates across the spectrum of human interests. His students include (but are not limited to) medical doctors, researchers in science, medicine and technology, engineers, homemakers, physicists, students, artists, and alternative practitioners.
September 29, 1927
Barbara Louise Mertz (September 29, 1927 – August 8, 2013) was an American author who wrote under her own name as well as under the pseudonyms Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Michaels. In 1952, she received a PhD in Egyptology from the University of Chicago. While she was best known for her mystery and suspense novels, in the 1960s she authored two books on ancient Egypt, both of which have remained in print ever since.
September 29, 1842
Louis J. Weichmann (September 29, 1842, Baltimore, MD - June 5, 1902, Anderson, IN) was one of the chief witnesses for the prosecution in the trial of the alleged conspirators involved in the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Previously, he had been also a suspect in the conspiracy because of his association with Mary Surratt's family.
September 29, 1883
John Anson Ford (September 29, 1883 – November 3, 1983) was an American journalist, advertising executive and Democratic Party politician. He was a long-serving member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Ford was born in Waukegan, Illinois. He attended Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin, taught history and economics, then moved to Chicago, where he worked on the Chicago Tribune. He was on the editorial board of Popular Mechanics. In 1920 he came to Los Angeles and entered the advertising and publicity business. Ford represented District 3 on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors from 1934 to 1958. He was active in Democratic Party politics, serving on the state Central Committee, as chair of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party, as delegate to Democratic National Conventions from California, Democratic candidate for U.S. Senator from California, 1940, and as chairman of the Southern California Citizens for Kennedy Committee. On his motion, in 1944, the Board of Supervisors established the Joint Committee for Interracial Progress that later became the Human Relations Commission.
September 29, 1969
Robert Kurzban is associate professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD from the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and did postdoctoral work in economics and anthropology. In 2008, he won the inaugural Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution from the Human Behavior and Evolution Society.
September 29, 1947
Richard J. Evans (born 29 September 1947) is a British academic and historian, best known for his research on the history of Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly the Third Reich. He was Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge until 2014, where he is currently President of Wolfson College. He is also Provost of Gresham College in London. Among his books are the landmark studies Death in Hamburg and Rituals of Retribution.
September 30, 1937
Born in Poland in 1937, Jurek Becker spent most of his early years in the Lodz ghetto and in concentration camps. Subsequently he became a resident of East Berlin, where he wrote for film, television, and cabaret. Jacob the Liar, the novel that made him internationally known, was originally written as a screenplay. The film was produced after the novel's publication and submitted as the East German entry to the 25th Berlin Film Festival in West Berlin, where it won the coveted Silber Bar Award. When Becker submitted SLEEPLESS DAYS to his publisher in East Germany, he was asked by the censors to make substantial changes. Unable to acquiesce without destroying the very core of his argument, he moved - as he says, temporarily - to the West and published his book there. In 1978, he was guest lecturer and resident writer at Oberlin College in Ohio.
September 30, 1924
Truman Streckfus Persons (September 30, 1924 – August 25, 1984), known as Truman Capote, was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and the true crime novel In Cold Blood (1966), which he labeled a ‘nonfiction novel.’ At least 20 films and television dramas have been produced from Capote novels, stories and screenplays. Capote rose above a childhood troubled by divorce, a long absence from his mother, and multiple migrations. He had discovered his calling as a writer by the age of 11, and for the rest of his childhood he honed his writing ability. Capote began his professional career writing short stories. The critical success of one story, ‘Miriam‘ (1945), attracted the attention of Random House publisher Bennett Cerf, and resulted in a contract to write the novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). Capote earned the most fame with In Cold Blood, a journalistic work about the murder of a Kansas farm family in their home, a book Capote spent four years writing, with much help from Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). A milestone in popular culture, In Cold Blood was the peak of Capote's literary career; it was to be his final fully published book. In the 1970s, he maintained his celebrity status by appearing on television talk shows.
September 30, 1950
Laura Esquivel (born September 30, 1950) is a Mexican novelist, screenwriter and a politician who serves in the Chamber of Deputies (2012-2018) for the Morena Party. Her first novel Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate) became a bestseller in Mexico and the United States, and was later developed into an award-winning film.
September 30, 1879
Johan Falkberget, born Johan Petter Lillebakken, (September 30, 1879 – April 5, 1967) was a Norwegian author. Johan Falkberget was born on the Falkberget farm in the Rugldal valley in the Norwegian copper mining municipality of Røros. In 1891, he began to write his Christianus Sextus trilogy, though it was not published until later. He formally changed his surname for writing purposes in 1893, from Lillebakken to Falkberget—the name of the farm he then lived on (this was a normal practice in those days). His first work was published in 1902. In 1906 he quit his job as a miner and found a job as editor of the newspaper «Nybrott» in Ålesund. In 1908 he traveled to Fredrikstad and edited «Smaalenes Socialdemokrat». He then received a government-sponsored scholarship and traveled to Kirkenes. From 1909 till 1922 his primary residence and workplace was in Kristiania (now Oslo). In 1922 he returned to Røros and lived on the Ratvolden farm, less than 1 km from the Falkberget farm. His Ratvolden house is now a museum. While living there, he represented the Norwegian Labour Party (Arbeiderpartiet) for Sør-Trøndelag in the Storting from 1931 to 1933. Since he grew up in a mining area and began his career as a miner, his works drew extensively on his experiences with the people, the country culture and mining. His breakthrough work in 1923 was a novel titled «Den fjerde nattevakt» or ‘The Fourth Night Watch’, a historic novel set in the first half of the 19th century in and around the mines. This was followed by his «Christianus Sextus» trilogy, set in the 1720s, in which the mining culture is also a central theme. After a long and productive life, he died on April 15, 1967 and is buried in the family plot in the upper churchyard at Røros. ‘The miners' toil and rhythm of life became the fulcrum of Falkberget's literature’, according to Sturle Kojen (a biographer).
September 30, 1928
Piri Thomas (September 30, 1928 – October 17, 2011) was a Puerto Rican-Cuban writer and poet whose memoir Down These Mean Streets became a best-seller. Thomas (birth name: Juan Pedro Tomas) was born to a Puerto Rican mother and Cuban father. His childhood neighborhood in the Spanish Harlem section of New York City was riddled with crime and violence. According to Thomas, children were expected to be gang members at a young age, and Thomas was no exception. Thomas was also exposed to racial discrimination because of his Afro-Latino heritage. He identified as Black because of his Afro-Puerto Rican heritage. Thomas was involved with drugs, gang warfare and crime. While spending seven years in prison, Thomas reflected on the teachings of his mother and father, and realized that a person is not born a criminal. Consequently, he decided to use his street and prison know-how to reach at-risk youth, and to help them avoid a life of crime. In 1967, Thomas received funds from the Rabinowitz Foundation to write and publish his best-selling autobiography Down These Mean Streets. The book describes his struggle for survival as a Puerto Rican/Cuban born and raised in the barrios of New York. The book, which has been in print for 52 years, was banned in some places but also required reading, depending on the time and place. He narrated the rampant racism of the pre-Civil Rights Act of 1964. Movement His other works include Savior, Savior Hold My Hand; Seven Long Times; and Stories from El Barrio. Thomas was influential precursor to the Nuyorican Movement which included poets Pedro Pietri, Miguel Algarín, and Giannina Braschi, who wrote of life in New York City using a mix of English and Spanish. Thomas worked on a book titled A Matter of Dignity and on an educational film entitled Dialogue with Society. Thomas traveled around the U.S., Central America and Europe, giving lectures and conducting workshops in colleges and universities. He was the subject of the film Every Child is Born a Poet: The Life and Work of Piri Thomas, by Jonathan Robinson, which featured a soundtrack by Kip Hanrahan. On October 17, 2011, Thomas died from pneumonia at his home in El Cerrito, California. He was survived by his wife Suzie Dod Thomas, six children, and three stepchildren.
September 30, 1975
Ta-Nehisi Coates (born September 30, 1975) is an American writer, journalist, and educator. Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic, where he writes about cultural, social and political issues, particularly as they regard African-Americans. Coates has worked for The Village Voice, Washington City Paper, and Time. He has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, O, and other publications. In 2008 he published a memoir, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood. His second book, Between the World and Me, was released in July 2015. It won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction. He was the recipient of a "Genius Grant" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 2015.
September 30, 1910
Edward Hyams (September 30, 1910, Stamford Hill, London, United Kingdom - 1975, Besançon, France) was born in London in 1910. Having been at school in England and on the Continent he began, he said, his education, acquiring in France a taste for French satire which has been carefully fostered. He was an operative in a cigarette factory, wrote advertising copy, drove a lorry, worked as a gardener, worked as a business executive, all to finance his writing until he had enough success to live on it. He wrote novels, stories, filmscripts, radio and TV plays, social history, biography and histories of his favourite art, the making of gardens, one which he also practised. He undertook dozens of translations and was the first winner of the Scott Moncrieff Prize for the best translation of the year. During the war he served first in the RAF and, on being grounded, in the RN as a rating and the RNVR as an officer.
September 30, 1906
Professor John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (30 September 1906 – 12 November 1994) was a Scottish novelist and academic. He is equally well known for the works of literary criticism and contemporary novels published under his real name and for the crime fiction published under the pseudonym of Michael Innes. Many devotees of the Innes books were unaware of his other "identity", and vice versa. Stewart was born in Edinburgh, the son of Elizabeth (Eliza) Jane (née Clark) and John Stewart of Nairn. His father was a lawyer and later the Director of Education for the City of Edinburgh. Stewart was educated at Edinburgh Academy from 1913 to 1924 and then studied English literature at Oriel College, Oxford, graduating BA in 1928. At Oxford he was presented with the Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize and was named a Bishop Frazer's scholar. Using this, in 1929 he went to Vienna to study psychoanalysis. He was lecturer in English at the University of Leeds from 1930 to 1935 and then became Jury Professor of English in the University of Adelaide, South Australia. In 1932 he married Margaret Hardwick (d.1979). He returned to the United Kingdom to become Lecturer in English at the Queen's University of Belfast from 1946 to 1948. In 1949 he became a Student (equivalent of Fellow in other Oxford colleges) of Christ Church, Oxford. By the time of his retirement in 1973, he was a professor of the university. In 1990 he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He died at Coulsdon in south London on 12 November 1994. Between 1936 and 1986, Stewart, writing under the pseudonym of Michael Innes, published nearly fifty crime novels and short story collections, which he later described as "entertainments". These abound in literary allusions and in what critics have variously described as "mischievous wit", "exuberant fancy" and a "tongue-in-cheek propensity" for intriguing turns of phrase. Julian Symons identified Innes as one of the "farceurs"—crime writers for whom the detective story was "an over-civilized joke with a frivolity which makes it a literary conversation piece with detection taking place on the side"—and described Innes's writing as being "rather in the manner of Peacock strained through or distorted by Aldous Huxley". His mysteries have also been described as combining "the elliptical introspection ... [of] a Jamesian character's speech, the intellectual precision of a Conradian description, and the amazing coincidences that mark any one of Hardy's plots". The best-known of Innes's detective creations is Sir John Appleby, who is introduced in Death at the President's Lodging, in which he is a Detective Inspector at Scotland Yard. Appleby features in many of the later novels and short stories, in the course of which he rises to become Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Other novels feature portrait painter and Royal Academician, Charles Honeybath, an amateur but nonetheless effective sleuth. The two detectives meet in Appleby and Honeybath. Some of the later stories feature Appleby's son Bobby as sleuth.
September 30, 1941
John Lewis Romer (born 30 September 1941, Surrey, UK) is a British Egyptologist, historian and archaeologist, who has created and appeared in many TV archaeology series, including Romer's Egypt, Ancient Lives, Testament, The Seven Wonders of the World, Byzantium: The Lost Empire and Great Excavations: The Story of Archaeology. Romer is probably — along with Michael Wood — the best known television presenter of ancient history. His trademark style combines gentle humour, expressive hand gestures, expertise and respect for ancient peoples.
September 30, 1932
Theodore Ziolkowski (born September 30, 1932, Birmingham, Alabama), is a scholar in the fields of German studies and comparative literature. He received an A.B. from Duke University in 1951, an A.M. from Duke in 1952 and, following studies at the University of Innsbruck, his Ph.D from Yale University in 1957. Following appointments at Yale and Columbia, he was called to Princeton University as professor of German in 1964. In 1969 he was appointed Class of 1900 Professor of German and Comparative Literature and, from 1979-92, Dean of the Graduate School. Since 2001 he has been Professor Emeritus. A past president of the Modern Language Association (1985) and visiting professor at several universities (Yale, CUNY, Rutgers, Bristol, Munich, Lueneburg), he has received many awards for his books and honors in the United States and abroad, including the Goethe-Medaille of the Goethe-Institut, the Jacob-und-Wilhelm Grimm Preis (DAAD), the Forschungspreis of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Bundesverdienstkreuz (1. Klasse) of the Federal Republic of Germany, and the D.Phil.h.c. from the University of Greifswald. A member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences he is also a corresponding member of the Austrian Akademie der Wissenschaften, the Göttingen Akademie der Wissenschaften, and the Deutsche Akademie fur Sprache und Dichtung.
September 30, 1947
Leta E. Miller is Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
October 1, 1914
Hilda Roderick Ellis Davidson (born Hilda Roderick Ellis, 1 October 1914 – January 2006) was an English antiquarian and academic, writing in particular on Germanic paganism and Celtic paganism. Davidson used literary, historical and archaeological evidence to discuss the stories and customs of Northern Europe. Gods and Myths of Northern Europe (Penguin Books, 1964) is considered one of the most thorough and reputable sources on Germanic mythology. Like many of her publications, it was credited under the name H. R. Ellis Davidson. Davidson was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and was president of the Council of the Folklore Society from 1974 to 1976, and served on the council from 1956 to 1986. Davidson has been cited as having 'contributed greatly' to the study of Norse mythology.
October 1, 1946
William Timothy 'Tim' O'Brien (born October 1, 1946) is an American novelist best known for his work of fiction, The Things They Carried, a critically acclaimed collection of semi-autobiographical, inter-related short-stories inspired by O'Brien's experiences in the Vietnam War. In addition, he is known for his work, Going After Cacciato, also written about wartime Vietnam. O'Brien has held the endowed chair at the MFA program of Texas State University–San Marcos every other year since the 2003-2004 year (i.e. 2003-2004, 2005-2006, 2007-2008, 2009–2010, and 2011-2012). O'Brien was born in Austin, Minnesota. When O'Brien was seven, his family, including a younger sister and brother, moved to Worthington, Minnesota, a city that once billed itself as 'the turkey capital of the world.' Worthington had a large influence on O’Brien’s imagination and early development as an author. The town is located on Lake Okabena in the western portion of the state and serves as the setting for some of his stories, especially those in the novel The Things They Carried. He earned his BA in Political Science from Macalester College, where he was student body president, in 1968. That same year he was drafted into the United States Army and was sent to Vietnam, where he served from 1969 to 1970 in 3rd Platoon, Company A, 5th Battalion, 46th Infantry Regiment. He served in the division that contained a unit involved in the infamous My Lai Massacre. O'Brien has said that when his unit got to the area around My Lai (referred to as 'Pinkville' by the U.S. forces), 'we all wondered why the place was so hostile. We did not know there had been a massacre there a year earlier. The news about that only came out later, while we were there, and then we knew.' Upon completing his tour of duty, O'Brien went on to graduate school at Harvard University and received an internship at the Washington Post. His writing career was launched in 1973 with the release of If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, about his war experiences. In this memoir, O'Brien writes: 'Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.' While O'Brien insists it is not his job or his place to discuss the politics of the Vietnam War, he does occasionally pass some basic commentary. Speaking years later about his upbringing and the war, O'Brien called his hometown 'a town that congratulates itself, day after day, on its own ignorance of the world: a town that got us into Vietnam. Uh, the people in that town sent me to that war, you know, couldn't spell the word 'Hanoi' if you spotted them three vowels.' Contrasting the continuing American search for U.S. MIA/POWs in Vietnam with the reality of the Vietnamese war dead, he calls the American perspective 'A perverse and outrageous double standard. What if things were reversed? What if the Vietnamese were to ask us, or to require us, to locate and identify each of their own MIAs? Numbers alone make it impossible: 100,000 is a conservative estimate. Maybe double that. Maybe triple. From my own sliver of experience — one year at war, one set of eyes — I can testify to the lasting anonymity of a great many Vietnamese dead.' One attribute in O'Brien's work is the blur between fiction and reality; labeled 'Verisimilitude,' his work contains actual details of the situations he experienced. Although this is a common literary technique, his conscious, explicit, and metafictional approach to the distinction between fact and fiction is a unique component of his writing style. In the chapter 'Good Form' in The Things They Carried, O'Brien casts a distinction between 'story-truth' (the truth of fiction) and 'happening-truth' (the truth of fact or occurrence), writing that 'story-truth is sometimes truer than happening-truth.' Story truth is emotional truth; thus the feeling created by a fictional story is sometimes truer than what results from reading the facts. O'Brien's papers are housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. O’Brien writes and lives in central Texas, where he raises his young sons and teaches full-time every other year at Texas State University–San Marcos. In alternate years, he teaches several workshops to MFA students in the creative writing program. O'Brien won the 1979 National Book Award for Going After Cacciato. His novel In the Lake of the Woods won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction in 1995. In August 2012, O'Brien received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation's Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. In June 2013, O'Brien was awarded the $100,000 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award.
October 1, 1942
Carol Ruth Berkin (born 1 October 1942) is an American historian and author specializing in women's role in American colonial history.
October 1, 1964
Amy Binder received her BA in Anthropology from Stanford University and her MA and PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University. Her principal research interests are in the areas of education, politics, cultural sociology, and organizations.
October 1, 1933
Jean Heffer is well known in France as an interpreter of U.S. history.
October 1, 1948
Mimi A. R. Koehl is an American marine biologist and Professor at University of California, Berkeley, and head of the Koehl Lab.
October 1, 1914
Donald Allen Wollheim (October 1, 1914 – November 2, 1990) was an American science fiction editor, publisher, writer, and fan. As an author, he published under his own name as well as under pseudonyms, including David Grinnell. A founding member of the Futurians, he was a leading influence on science fiction development and fandom in the 20th century United States. Ursula K. Le Guin called Wollheim "the tough, reliable editor of Ace Books, in the Late Pulpalignean Era, 1966 and ’67, " which is when he published her first two novels, in an Ace Double.
October 1, 1956
Paul Yee (born 1 October 1956) is a Chinese-Canadian historian and writer. He is the author of many books for children, including Teach Me to Fly, Skyfighter, The Curses of Third Uncle, Dead Man's Gold, and Ghost Train — winner of the 1996 Governor General's Award for English language children's literature. In 2012, the Writers' Trust of Canada awarded Paul Yee the Vicky Metcalf Award for Literature for Young People in recognition of having "contributed uniquely and powerfully to our literary landscape over a writing career that spans almost 30 years".
October 2, 1947
Ward LeRoy Churchill (born October 2, 1947) is an American author and political activist. He was a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder from 1990 to 2007. The primary focus of his work is on the historical treatment of political dissenters and Native Americans by the United States government. His work features controversial and provocative views, written in a direct, often confrontational style.
October 2, 1905
Fumiko Enchi (2 October 1905 – 12 November 1986) was the pen-name of Fumi Ueda, one of the most prominent Japanese women writers in the Sh?wa period of Japan.
October 2, 1904
Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH (2 October 1904 – 3 April 1991) was an English novelist and author regarded as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene had acquired a reputation early in his own lifetime as a great writer, both of serious Catholic novels and of thrillers (or 'entertainments ' as he termed them); however, even though shortlisted in 1967, he was never awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Through 67 years of writings which included over 25 novels, he explored the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world through a Catholic perspective. Although Greene objected strongly to being described as a Roman Catholic novelist rather than as a novelist who happened to be Catholic, Catholic religious themes are at the root of much of his writing, especially the four major Catholic novels: Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair; which are regarded as 'the gold standard' of the Catholic novel. Several works such as The Confidential Agent, The Third Man, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana and The Human Factor also show an avid interest in the workings of international politics and espionage. Greene was born into a large, influential family that included the owners of the Greene King Brewery. He was born in and boarded at Berkhamsted School in Hertfordshire, England, where his father taught and became head master. He was unhappy at the school, and attempted suicide several times. He went up to Balliol College, Oxford to study history, where while an undergraduate he published his first work in 1925, a poorly received volume of poetry, Babbling April. After graduating Greene worked for a period of time as a private tutor and then turned to journalism – first on the Nottingham Journal, and then as a sub-editor on The Times. He converted to Catholicism in 1926, after meeting his future wife, Vivien Dayrell-Browning. He published his first novel, The Man Within, in 1929; favourable reception enabled him to work full-time as a novelist. He supplemented his novelist's income with freelance journalism, book and film reviews. His 1937 film review of Wee Willie Winkie, for the British journal Night and Day, which commented on the nine-year-old star, Shirley Temple's sexuality, provoked Twentieth Century Fox to sue, which prompted Greene to live in Mexico until after the trial was over. While in Mexico, Greene developed the ideas for the novel considered his masterpiece, The Power and the Glory. Greene originally divided his fiction into two genres: thrillers such as The Ministry of Fear, which he described as entertainments, often with notable philosophic edges; and literary works, such as The Power and the Glory, which he described as novels, on which he thought his literary reputation was to be based. Greene suffered from bipolar disorder, which had a profound effect on his writing and personal life. In a letter to his wife Vivien, he told her that he had 'a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life,' and that 'unfortunately, the disease is also one's material.' William Golding described Greene as 'the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety.' He died in 1991 at age 86 of leukaemia and was buried in Corseaux cemetery.
October 2, 1926
Jan Morris (born 2 October 1926, Clevedon, Somerset, England) is a Welsh nationalist, historian, author and travel writer. She is known particularly for the PAX BRITANNICA trilogy, a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, notably Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong, and New York City. Assigned male at birth, Morris began medical transition in 1964. In 1972, Morris traveled to Morocco to undergo sex reassignment surgery, performed by surgeon Georges Burou, because doctors in Britain refused to allow the procedure unless Morris and Tuckniss divorced, something Morris was not prepared to do at the time. They divorced later, but remained together and on 14 May 2008 were legally reunited when they formally entered into a Civil Partnership. Morris lives mostly in Wales, the land of her father.
October 2, 1879
Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and he spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955. Some of his best-known poems include 'Anecdote of the Jar,' 'Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock,' 'The Emperor of Ice-Cream,' 'The Idea of Order at Key West,' 'Sunday Morning,' 'The Snow Man,' and 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.'
October 2, 1923
Peter H. Wyden (October 2, 1923 – June 27, 1998) was an American journalist and writer. Wyden was born Peter Weidenreich, in Berlin to a Jewish family. His mother, Helen (née Silberstein), was a concert singer, and his father, Erich Weidenreich, was a businessman. Franz Weidenreich, German anatomist and physical anthropologist, was one of his uncles. Wyden attended the Goldschmidt School until he left Nazi Germany for the United States in 1937. After studying at City University of New York, he served with the U.S. Army's Psychological Warfare Division in Europe during World War II. After the war, Wyden began a career in journalism, during which he worked as a reporter for The Wichita Eagle, a feature writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Washington correspondent for Newsweek magazine, a contributing editor for The Saturday Evening Post in Chicago and San Francisco, articles editor for McCall's, and executive editor for Ladies' Home Journal. Wyden authored or coauthored nine books, and numerous articles that appeared in major magazines. In 1969, he co-authored a book on homosexuality with his wife; the book summed up research on the topic, which suggested homosexuality could be prevented with a close paternal relationship in childhood. His last book, published in 1998, was about schizophrenia; it was based on his personal experience as his son Jeff suffered from the mental disorder. In 1970, Wyden became a book publisher in New York City and Ridgefield, Connecticut. Wyden was married three times. He had two sons, including Ron Wyden, who became a United States senator. He died on June 27, 1998 in Danbury, Connecticut.
October 2, 1949
Heather Eyles is best known for her children's books, including 'Well I Never' and 'The Trouble With Herbert'. 'ME I AM', her new memoir, will be followed by a second volume next year. Her novel for adults 'Windows', was published in 2015. She has also written plays, poetry and short stories and started an innovative theatre company, 'Singing Brink', which produced performance pieces and ran workshops for self empowerment. She runs, writes and cooks with a passion every day and her family and friends make her very happy. Much of that happiness she owes to her grandchildren and to her fellow-author husband, John.
October 2, 1911
Walter Braden "Jack" Finney (born John Finney, October 2, 1911 – November 14, 1995) was an American author. His best-known works are science fiction and thrillers, including The Body Snatchers and Time and Again. The former was the basis for the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers and its remakes.
October 2, 1869
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948) also known as Bapu was the preeminent leader of Indian independence movement in British-ruled India. Employing nonviolent civil disobedience, Gandhi led India to independence and inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. The honorific Mahatma (Sanskrit: 'high-souled', 'venerable')—applied to him first in 1914 in South Africa,—is now used worldwide. He is also called Bapu (Gujarati: endearment for 'father', 'papa') in India. Born and raised in a Hindu merchant caste family in coastal Gujarat, western India, and trained in law at the Inner Temple, London, Gandhi first employed nonviolent civil disobedience as an expatriate lawyer in South Africa, in the resident Indian community's struggle for civil rights. After his return to India in 1915, he set about organising peasants, farmers, and urban labourers to protest against excessive land-tax and discrimination. Assuming leadership of the Indian National Congress in 1921, Gandhi led nationwide campaigns for easing poverty, expanding women's rights, building religious and ethnic amity, ending untouchability, but above all for achieving Swaraj or self-rule. Gandhi famously led Indians in challenging the British-imposed salt tax with the 400 km (250 mi) Dandi Salt March in 1930, and later in calling for the British to Quit India in 1942. He was imprisoned for many years, upon many occasions, in both South Africa and India. Gandhi attempted to practise nonviolence and truth in all situations, and advocated that others do the same. He lived modestly in a self-sufficient residential community and wore the traditional Indian dhoti and shawl, woven with yarn hand spun on a charkha. He ate simple vegetarian food, and also undertook long fasts as the means to both self-purification and social protest. Gandhi's vision of a free India based on religious pluralism, however, was challenged in the early 1940s by a new Muslim nationalism which was demanding a separate Muslim homeland carved out of India. Eventually, in August 1947, Britain granted independence, but the British Indian Empire was partitioned into two dominions, a Hindu-majority India and Muslim Pakistan. As many displaced Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs made their way to their new lands, religious violence broke out, especially in the Punjab and Bengal. Eschewing the official celebration of independence in Delhi, Gandhi visited the affected areas, attempting to provide solace. In the months following, he undertook several fasts unto death to promote religious harmony. The last of these, undertaken on 12 January 1948 at age 78, also had the indirect goal of pressuring India to pay out some cash assets owed to Pakistan. Some Indians thought Gandhi was too accommodating. Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist, assassinated Gandhi on 30 January 1948 by firing three bullets into his chest at point-blank range. Indians widely describe Gandhi as the father of the nation. His birthday, 2 October, is commemorated as Gandhi Jayanti, a national holiday, and world-wide as the International Day of Nonviolence.
October 2, 1935
Paul Goma (born October 2, 1935) is a Romanian writer, also known for his activities as a dissident and leading opponent of the communist regime before 1989. Forced into exile by the communist authorities, he became a political refugee and currently resides in France as a stateless person. After 2000, Goma has expressed opinions on World War II, the Holocaust in Romania and the Jews, claims which have led to widespread criticism for antisemitism.
October 2, 1952
Kathryn Kramer is the author of two previous novels, A Handbook for Visitors from Outer Space and Rattlesnake Farming. She teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont.
October 2, 1962
Patricia Melo is a screenwriter, playwright as well as a novelist. Her last novel, THE KILLER, won the French Pris Deux Oceans in 1996 and the German Deutscher Krimi Preis in 1998. She lives in Sao Paulo.
October 2, 1925
José Cardoso Pires (October 2, 1925, Vila de Rei, Portugal - October 26, 1998, Lisbon, Portugal) was a Portuguese author of short stories, novels, plays, and political satire. Born in the village of São João do Peso, municipality of Vila de Rei, Castelo Branco district. Many of the memories Cardoso Pires recounts are interesting in regard of the themes of his writing and his style as a novelist. Although he was born in the interior, Cardoso Pires was very much a man of Lisbon, the speech patterns and urban spaces of which can be felt in both his novels and short stories. His father was in the merchant navy and his mother was a homemaker. Some of his paternal family had emigrated to Massachusetts, and this vague American connection seems to have been one of the early reasons for Cardoso Pires' receptiveness to American literary styles at a time when Portugal looked to France (and to extent Brazilian regionalism of the North East) for its narrative models. In a documentary produced for Portuguese television, Cardoso Pires describes seeking refuge in cinemas as a youth, and the effect that had on his notion of story-telling. He explains how, after seeing a film, he would have to recount it to his peers at school - a common practice at the time. He also mentions the formative role of cinceclubes, or film societies. The generally left-leaning associations, in Cardoso Pires's words, "contributed to the political and social education of many people" Cardoso Pires studied mathematics at the University of Lisbon, where he published his first short narratives, but left school to join the merchant marine, from which he was discharged for disciplinary problems. After his short stint in the Portuguese Navy, Cardoso Pires started working as a journalist and devoted himself to writing. As an author, he has been perceived as being able to reconcile popularity with critical acclaim. This can be partly explained by his adoption of some of the narrative formulae of detective fiction and his controlled use of the Portuguese language, which Cardoso Pires described as "pared down to the bone, written with the edge of a knife". Cardoso Pires's fiction has often been described as cinematic. This is often a nebulous term, but in Cardoso Pires's case it has been justified by Luso-Brazilian critic Maria Lúcia Lepecki as an attempt to allow the reader to see and hear through words. He taught Portuguese and Brazilian literature at King's College, London.
October 2, 1970
Benjamin Radford is a writer, investigator, and columnist for Discovery News. He is the author of eight books, most recently Mysterious New Mexico: Miracles, Magic, and Monsters in the Land of Enchantment and Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore, both published by the University of New Mexico Press. Radford lives in Corrales, New Mexico.
October 2, 1952
Colin Cotterill (born 2 October 1952) is a London-born teacher, crime writer and cartoonist. Cotterill has dual English and Australian citizenship; however, he currently lives in Southeast Asia, where he writes the award-winning Dr. Siri mystery series set in the People's Democratic Republic of Laos, and the Jimm Juree crime novels set in southern Thailand.
October 3, 1886
Alain-Fournier was the pseudonym of Henri Alban-Fournier (October 3, 1886 – September 22, 1914), a French author and soldier. He was the author of a single novel, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913), which has been twice filmed and is considered a classic of French literature.
October 3, 1939
Göran Sonnevi has published more than a dozen books of his own poems and has translated Pound, Celan, Mandelstam, and other poets. Enormously popular in Sweden, where hi s works are available in mass-market editions, Sonnevi’s poems has also been translated into more than twenty languages. Rika Lesser’s translations from A CHILD IS NOT A KNIFE have brought her the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award and the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Translation Prize, An award-winning poet, she has also received the Academy of American Poets’ Landon Poem Translation Prize tor Gunnar Ekelof’s GUIDE TO THE UNDERWORLD. Her selection of Rilke, RILKE: BETWEEN ROOTS, was published in the Lockert Series.
October 3, 1925
Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (born Eugene Louis Vidal, October 3, 1925 – July 31, 2012) was an American writer known for his essays, novels, screenplays, and Broadway plays. He was also known for his patrician manner, Transatlantic accent, and witty aphorisms. Vidal came from a distinguished political lineage; his grandfather was the U.S. Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma. Vidal was a lifelong Democrat; he ran for political office twice and was a longtime political commentator. As well known for his essays as his novels, Vidal wrote for The Nation, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and Esquire. Through his essays and media appearances, Vidal was a longtime critic of American foreign policy. In addition to this, he characterised the United States as a decaying empire from the 1980s onwards. He was also known for his well-publicized spats with such figures as Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Truman Capote. His most widely regarded social novel was Myra Breckinridge; his best known historical novels included Julian, Burr, and Lincoln. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), outraged conservative critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality. Vidal always rejected the terms of ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ as inherently false, claiming that the vast majority of individuals had the potential to be pansexual. His screenwriting credits included the epic historical drama Ben-Hur (1959), into which he claimed he had written a ‘gay subplot.’ Ben-Hur won the Academy Award for Best Picture. At the time of his death he was the last of a generation of American writers who had served during World War II, including J. D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, and Joseph Heller. Perhaps best remembered for his caustic wit, he referred to himself as a ‘gentleman bitch’ and has been described as the 20th century's answer to Oscar Wilde.
October 3, 1900
Thomas Clayton Wolfe (October 3, 1900 – September 15, 1938) was an American novelist of the early twentieth century. Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels, plus many short stories, dramatic works, and novellas. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing.
October 3, 1972
Samantha Barbas (born October 3, 1972) is Professor of Law at University at Buffalo Law School. She is the author of three books: Movie Crazy: Fans, Stars, and the Cult of Celebrity (2001), The First Lady of Hollywood: A Biography of Louella Parsons (2005), and Laws of Image (Stanford, 2015). She has provided legal commentary for The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Washington Post.
October 3, 1916
Sheila Bishop (born Dorothy Sheila Kinsman, 3 October 1916 – 30 May 2009) was an English novelist. She had 27 books published. Her early work alternated between plots set in the Tudor period and the contemporary 1960s, some with flashbacks to the 1930s and 1940s. In later years she concentrated on Regency romance novels, and these formed by far the greater part of her output.
October 3, 1925
Victor Rangel-Ribeiro (born October 3, 1925 in Goa) is a writer. His is most noted as the author of Tivolem (1998), whose writing was funded by a New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction Fellowship (awarded 1991), and which was awarded the Milkweed National Fiction Prize and shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award. Born in Goa, counting Konkani, Portuguese, and English as his three mother tongues, he moved to Mumbai in 1939 and took his BA from St. Xavier's College, Mumbai in 1945. After a short spell teaching at high school, he moved into journalism. The 1940s already saw a number of his English-language short stories appearing in British Indian publications. After independence, he became assistant editor and music critic of the National Standard, Sunday editor for the Calcutta edition of the Times of India (1953), and a literary editor for the Illustrated Weekly. In 1956 emigrated to the United States, along with his wife, Lea, and worked part-time as a music critic for the New York Times and as the first Indian copy chief for the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson. From 1964-73 he ran a music antiquariat, became director of the New York Beethoven Society (overseeing its entry into the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts). In 1983 he took an MA from Teachers College, Columbia University, taught for a time in private and public schools, and then became involved in co-ordinating adult literacy teaching.
October 3, 1871
Stijn Streuvels (3 October 1871, Heule, Kortrijk - 15 August 1969, Ingooigem, Anzegem), born Franciscus (Frank) Petrus Maria Lateur, was a Belgian writer. He started writing at a very young age. He was inspired by his uncle (another famous writer) Guido Gezelle. Until 1905 he worked as a baker at Avelghem, a village near Kortrijk. Initially his work was published in an insignificant magazine, De jonge Vlaming (The young Fleming). Soon he was discovered by the editors of a new magazine, Van Nu en Straks (From Now and Soon). After their first encounter, Emmanuel de Bom became his mentor and advised him to publish his work in book form. In 1905 he married Alida Staelens. They had 4 children: Paula (1906), Paul (1909), Dina (1916) and Isa (1922). In 1980 their house became a museum dedicated to Streuvels. Streuvels work usually deals with the rural life of poor farmers in Flanders. De teleurgang van de waterhoek was made into a film titled Mira. Also De vlaschaard (twice) and De blijde dag were filmed. In 1937 and 1938 Streuvels garnered the majority of the Nobel Committee votes for his receiving the literature Nobel Prize, but each time the Academy awarded the prize to someone else: in 1937 he had to give way to Roger Martin du Gard and in 1938 to a new discovery, Pearl Buck. He became doctor honoris causa at the University of Leuven, the University of Münster and the University of Pretoria.
October 3, 1967
Whitney Terrell is an American writer and educator from Kansas City, Missouri. Terrell has published two novels and his writing has appeared in Harper's Magazine, Slate, The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine, and others.
October 3, 1949
Haunani-Kay Trask (born October 3, 1949) is a Hawaiian nationalist, educator, political scientist and writer whose genealogy connects her to the Pi?ilani line on her maternal side and the Kahakumakaliua line on her paternal line. She grew up on O?ahu and continues to reside there. Trask worked as a professor of Hawaiian Studies with the Kamakak?okalani Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawai?i at M?noa until her retirement and has represented Native Hawaiians in the United Nations and various other global forums. She is the author of several books of poetry and nonfiction.
October 4, 1941
Anne Rice (born Howard Allen Frances O'Brien; October 4, 1941) is an American author of gothic fiction, Christian literature, and erotica. She is perhaps best known for her popular and influential series of novels, The Vampire Chronicles, revolving around the central character of Lestat.
October 4, 1931
Richard Rorty (1931-2007) was a prolific philosopher and public intellectual who, throughout his illustrious career, taught at Princeton, the University of Virginia, and, until his death, Stanford University.
October 4, 1919
René Marques (October 4, 1919, Arecibo, Puerto Rico - March 22, 1979, San Juan, Puerto Rico) is perhaps best known as a dramatist and short story writer. His plays have been produced in Puerto Rico, New York, Mexico, and Spain. and he has been instrumental in the formation of a national theater in Puerto Rico, both as playwright and director. His short stories appear in numerous anthologies and several have been translated into English. His novel. La Vispea del Hombre, received the Faulkner Foundation Prize in 1962. The Docile Puerto Rican places René Marques in a long tradition of Puerto Rican essayists concerned with national aspirations.
October 4, 1949
Lee Knowlton Blessing (born October 4, 1949) is an American playwright best known for his 1988 work, A Walk in the Woods. A lifelong Midwesterner, Blessing continued to work in regional theaters in and around his hometown of Minneapolis through his 40s before relocating to New York City. Blessing was born in Minneapolis Minnesota and graduated from Minnetonka High School in 1967. He began his college education at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, but later transferred to Reed College in Oregon where he earned a B.A. in English in 1971. After Blessing earned his degree, his parents offered the young graduate the choice between a used car or a trip to Russia. Blessing chose Russia where he found inspiration to write his best-known work, the award-winning A Walk in the Woods. According to interviews with Blessing, the play, which depicts the developing relationship between a Russian and an American arms limitation negotiator is based on fact. Apparently, during the 1982 talks in Geneva, Switzerland, Soviet Yuli Kvitsinsky and American Paul Nitze left the formal discussions to literally take a walk in the woods. Following its premiere in Waterford, Connecticut, A Walk in the Woods was nominated for both a Tony award and a Pulitzer Prize. Though the production won neither award, it was reprised produced in Moscow in 1989 and later adapted for television. Upon returning from his tenure abroad, Blessing went on to study playwriting at the University of Iowa where he received MFA degrees in English and Speech and Theater. He would later return to teach at the Iowa's Playwrights Workshop and the Iowa Writers' Workshop in addition to his time as an instructor at the Playwright's Center in Minneapolis. He currently serves as Head of the graduate playwriting program at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Blessing's most recent plays include A Body of Water, Whores, The Scottish Play, Black Sheep, Fortinbras, and many others. He has also written one act plays including The Roads That Lead Here and Eleemosynary. Eight of his plays have been staged at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut during the prestigious National Playwrights Conference. Several of his most recent works produced in New York City including Thief River, Cobb and Chesapeake, received Drama Desk nominations and an award, plus nominations from the Outer Critics Circle. Blessing married his first wife, Jeanne Blake, in 1986. He is currently married to fellow playwright and screenwriter, Melanie Marnich.
October 4, 1915
SILVINA BULLRICH (October 4, 1915 – July 2, 1990) was born in 1915, into a wealthy and cultured Buenos Aires family. In a time and place where marriage was the designated vocation for proper young women, Bullrich’s formal education ended at the sixth-grade level. Frustrated by her lack of opportunity, she began writing as an adolescent, eventually becoming a successful novelist, short-story writer and essayist, well known to Argentine and European readers. Tomorrow I’ll Say, Enough, originally published in 1968, is the first of her full-length works to be translated into English. JULIA SHIREK SMITH has degrees in French and Spanish. A former teacher and librarian, she lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She is regarded as a gifted translator of short fiction.
October 4, 1564
John Gerard (4 October 1564 – 27 July 1637) was an English Jesuit priest, operating covertly in England during the Elizabethan era in which the Catholic Church was subject to persecution. He was the second son of Sir Thomas Gerard of Bryn, in Ashton-in-Makerfield, Lancashire. Gerard is noted not only for successfully hiding from the English authorities for eight years before his capture, but for enduring extensive torture, escaping from the Tower of London and, after recovering, continuing with his covert mission. After his escape to the continent, he was later instructed by his Jesuit superiors to write a book about his life (in Latin). An English translation, published in 1951, is a rare first-hand account of the dangerous world of a Catholic priest in Elizabethan England.
October 4, 1937
Eli Maor teaches the history of mathematics at Loyola University in Chicago. He is the author of Venus in Transit, Trigonometric Delights, e: The Story of a Number, and To Infinity and Beyond: A Cultural History of the Infinite (all Princeton).
October 4, 1787
François Pierre Guillaume Guizot (1787–1874) was a French historian, orator, and statesman. Guizot was a dominant figure in French politics prior to the Revolution of 1848, a conservative liberal who opposed the attempt by King Charles X to usurp legislative power, and worked to sustain a constitutional monarchy following the July Revolution of 1830. He then served the ‘citizen king’ Louis Philippe, as Minister of Education, 1832–37, ambassador to London, Foreign Minister 1840–1847, and finally Prime Minister of France from 19 September 1847 to 23 February 1848. Guizot's influence was critical in expanding public education, which under his ministry saw the creation of primary schools in every French commune. But as a leader of the ‘Doctrinaires’, committed to supporting the policies of Louis Phillipe and limitations on further expansion of the political franchise, he earned the hatred of more left-leaning liberals and republicans through his unswerving support for restricting suffrage to propertied men, advising those who wanted the vote to ‘enrich yourselves’ (enrichissez-vous) through hard work and thrift. As Prime Minister, it was Guizot's ban on the political meetings (called the Paris Banquets, which celebrated the birthday of George Washington) of an increasingly vigorous opposition in January 1848 that catalyzed the revolution that toppled Louis Philippe in February and saw the establishment of the French Second Republic. Guizot is famous as the originator of the quote ‘Not to be a republican at 20 is proof of want of heart; to be one at 30 is proof of want of head’. This quote has been reworked many times, especially in reference to socialism and liberalism. It has been borrowed by or attributed to many notable figures who lived after Guizot, including Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, Benjamin Disraeli, Georges Clemenceau, Otto von Bismarck, Aristide Briand, Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, Wendell Willkie, William J. Casey, and others.
October 4, 1956
James Tobin won the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography for Ernie Pyle’s War and the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight. Educated at the University of Michigan, where he earned a PhD in history, he teaches narrative nonfiction in the Department of Media, Journalism, and Film at Miami University in Oxford, OH.
October 4, 1933
John Noble Wilford (born October 4, 1933) is an author and science journalist for The New York Times. Wilford was born October 4, 1933, in Murray, Kentucky, and attended Grove High School across the border in nearby Paris, Tennessee. After graduating from high school, he attended Lambuth College for a year before transferring to University of Tennessee in the fall of 1952. He received a B.S. in journalism from UT in 1955 and an M.A. in political science from Syracuse University in 1956. After completing his master's degree, Wilford spent two years with the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps in West Germany. Wilford's professional career began at The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was a summer reporter in 1954 and 1955. He briefly served as a general assignment reporter at The Wall Street Journal in 1956. Following his military service, he was a medical reporter at the Journal from 1959 to 1961. In 1962, he held an Advanced International Reporting Fellowship at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. That year, he also joined Time as a contributing editor specializing in science before moving in 1965 to The New York Times to be a science reporter (1965-1973) and science correspondent (1979-2008). While at the NYT he also worked as assistant national news editor (1973–1975) and director of science news (1975–1979). In 1969, he wrote the newspaper's front-page article about the Apollo 11 landing. His was the only byline on the front page, beneath the headline "Men Walk On Moon" and under the subheading "A Powdery Surface is Closely Explored."
October 4, 1797
JEREMIAS GOTTHELF, the pen name of Albert Bitzius (October 4, 1797 – October 22, 1854), was a Swiss pastor and the author of novels, novellas, short stories, and nonfiction, who used his writing to communicate his reformist concerns in the field of education and with regard to the plight of the poor. After the success of his first novel, Der Bauernspiegel oder Lebensgeschichte des Jeremias Gotthelf: Von ihm selbst beschrieben (The Peasants' Mirror; or, The Life History of Jeremias Gotthelf: Described by Himself; 1836) the author adopted the name of the story's protagonist. Among his major works to have appeared in English translation are The Black Spider; Ulric, the Farm Servant; and The Story of an Alpine Valley. SUSAN BERNOFSKY is the translator of six books by Robert Walser as well as works by Jenny Erpenbeck, Yoko Tawada, Hermann Hesse, Gregor von Rezzori, and others. The current chair of the PEN Translation Committee, she teaches at the Writing Program at Columbia University, where she is director of the Graduate Translation Program, and is at work on a biography of Walser.
October 4, 1862
Johanna Gezina "Jo" van Gogh-Bonger (4 October 1862 – 2 September 1925) was the wife of Theo van Gogh, art dealer, and the sister-in-law of the painter Vincent van Gogh and key player in the growth of Vincent's fame.
October 5, 1949
Peter Ackroyd CBE, FRSL (born 5 October 1949) is an English biographer, novelist, and critic with a particular interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot and Sir Thomas More he won the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards. He is noted for the volume of work he has produced, the range of styles therein, his skill at assuming different voices and the depth of his research. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society for Literature in 1984 and created a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2003.
October 5, 1952
Clive Barker (born 5 October 1952) is an English writer, film director, and visual artist best known for his work in both fantasy and horror fiction. Barker came to prominence in the mid-1980s with a series of short stories known as the Books of Blood which established him as a leading young horror writer. He has since written many novels and other works, and his fiction has been adapted into films, notably the Hellraiser and Candyman series. He was the Executive Producer of the film Gods and Monsters, which won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Barker's paintings and illustrations have been featured in galleries in the United States, as well as within his own books. He has also created original characters and series for comic books, and some of his more popular horror stories have been adapted to the medium. His archives have been a source of material for biographies and non-fiction books containing his personal essays, discussions of his fringe theater work, interviews, and other content.
October 5, 1939
Marie-Claire Blais was born in Quebec City in 1939. Blais’ first novel, MAD SHADOWS (1959), amounted to a literary revolution in Quebec. The book ushered in a new era in Quebec fiction with its nightmarish depiction of the obsessions and evils of society. Her writings, which have won international acclaim, have been translated into 13 languages.
October 5, 1889
Teresa de la Parra (October 5, 1889 – April 23, 1936) was a Venezuelan novelist. She was born Ana Teresa Parra Sanojo in Paris, the daughter of Rafael Parra Hernáiz, Venezuelan Ambassador in Berlin, and Isabel Sanojo de Parra. As a member of a wealthy family, Ana Teresa spent part of her childhood at her father's hacienda, Tazón. After the death of her father, Ana Teresa and her sisters were taken by their mother to study at the Sacred Heart School, in Godella, Spain. Under fervent religious precepts, they received a solid education, suitable for upper-class young ladies. Ana Teresa returned to Caracas at the age of 19. After she settling in Paris, de la Parra travelled and had an intense social life. She began to research a biography of Simón Bolívar, perhaps inspired by the centenary of his death. However, her idea was interrupted when she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Teresa de la Parra wandered in several European sanatoriums, mainly in Switzerland and Spain, but did not find a cure. She reflected about her philosophical and literary ideas, and studied her own work and life evolution through the years. The longest and most beautiful letters ever written to her family and friends, and her intimate diaries, come from this time and must be considered as part of her literature. Teresa de la Parra died in Madrid. Her remains were exhumed and brought to Caracas in 1947. She rebelled against the limited expectations for women of her class by long hours of reading and writing. Her fantastic stories were published in the newspaper El Universal, and her Diary of a Caraqueña in the Far East was published in the magazine Actualidades. De la Parra's story Mama X earned first prize in a contest held in a provincial Venezuelan city. This story, as well as her Diary of a young lady who writes because she is bored (which was published in the magazine La Lectura Semanal) was the beginning of her first major work. De la Parra's novel Iphigenia: Diary of a young lady who wrote because she was bored, published in 1924, marked a change in Venezuelan literature. Teresa de la Parra wrote most of the novel in 1921 and 1922 during the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez. Some of the characters in the novel were maliciously close to caricatures of people who were then well known in Caracas society. The characters Abuelita, Tía Clara and César Leal represent strict adherence to morality. Ambitious and politically corrupt characters like Gabriel Olmedo and Tío Pancho also reflect moral freedom given to men, in contrast against the passive role assigned to women. The protagonist of Iphigenia, María Eugenia Alonso, a well-educated and intelligent young woman, is partly a self-portrait of the author. María Eugenia struggles against being confined in a marriage that threatens to stifle her intellectual development. She strives to determine whether it is possible for an intelligent and educated woman to evade marriage without losing her respectability in a society where women are expected to become wives and mothers. The tone, thematic nature and social-historic context of Iphigenia made it controversial among some social and literary circles in Venezuela and Colombia. Juan Vicente Gómez's government would not give Venezuelan publishers money to publish Iphigenia. Teresa de la Parra travelled to Paris, where she had friends such as Simón Barceló, Alberto Zérega Fombona, Ventura García Calderón and Gonzalo Zaldumbide. Winner of the annual award given by Casa Editora Franco-Ibero-Americana in Paris in 1924, Teresa de la Parra finally had her work published and received a prize of 10,000 French francs. Iphigenia became a categorical success among Parisian intellectuals and readers. It was soon translated into French. Two years after multiple trips and works — which included lectures in Nations Society and exquisite answers to critics — the writer began her second major work. Souvenirs of Mama Blanca, published in 1929, was a nostalgia-filled fictionalized memoir of De la Parra's childhood. The spirit of the four sisters living on the hacienda Tazón is reflected in the six sisters living on the hacienda Piedra Azul. The moral ‘correctness’ of Souvenirs of Mama Blanca received favorable attention from those who had criticized Iphigenia. In her letters, de la Parra wrote that there was no Iphigenia scent in Souvenirs of Mama Blanca, which had no protest speech, revolutionary ideas or social criticism. De la Parra became a sought-after lecturer. Her more important speeches took place in Havana and Bogotá; this last one was very meaningful about her personal ideas of women's roles in Latin American society from colonial times to the 20th century.
October 5, 1713
Denis Diderot (October 5, 1713 – July 31, 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent person during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the Encyclopédie along with Jean le Rond d'Alembert. Diderot also contributed to literature, notably with Jacques le fataliste et son maître (Jacques the Fatalist and his Master), which emulated Laurence Sterne in challenging conventions regarding novels and their structure and content, while also examining philosophical ideas about free will. Diderot is also known as the author of the dialogue, Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau's Nephew), upon which many articles and sermons about consumer desire have been based.
October 5, 1924
José Donoso Yáñez (October 5, 1924–December 7, 1996) was a Chilean writer. He lived most of his life in Chile, although he spent many years in self-imposed exile in Mexico, the United States (Iowa) and mainly Spain. Although he had left his country in the sixties for personal reasons, after 1973 he said his exile was also a form of protest against the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. He returned to Chile in 1981 and lived there until his death. Donoso is the author of a number of remarkable stories and novels, which contributed greatly to the Latin American literary boom. The term 'Boom' was coined in his 1972 essay Historia personal del ‘boom’. His best known works include the novels Coronación, El lugar sin límites (The Place Without Limits) and El obsceno pájaro de la noche (The Obscene Bird of Night). His works deal with a number of themes, including sexuality, the duplicity of identity, psychology, and a sense of dark humor. After his death, his personal papers at the University of Iowa revealed his homosexuality; a revelation that caused a certain controversy in Chile.
October 5, 1936
Václav Havel (5 October 1936 – 18 December 2011) was a Czech writer, philosopher, dissident, and statesman. From 1989 to 1993, he served as the first democratically elected president of Czechoslovakia in 41 years. He then served as the first president of the Czech Republic (1993–2003) after the Czech-Slovak split. Within Czech literature, he is known for his plays, essays, and memoirs. His educational opportunities limited by his bourgeois background, Havel first rose to prominence within the Prague theater world as a playwright. Havel used the absurdist style in works such as The Garden Party and The Memorandum to critique communism. After participating in Prague Spring and being blacklisted after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, he became more politically active and helped found several dissident initiatives such as Charter 77 and the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted. His political activities brought him under the surveillance of the secret police and he spent multiple stints in prison, the longest being nearly four years, between 1979 and 1983. Havel's Civic Forum party played a major role in the Velvet Revolution that toppled communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989. He assumed the presidency shortly thereafter, and was reelected in a landslide the following year and after Slovak independence in 1993. Havel was instrumental in dismantling the Warsaw Pact and expanding NATO membership eastward. Many of his stances and policies, such as his opposition to Slovak independence, condemnation of the Czechoslovak treatment of Sudeten Germans after World War II, and granting of general amnesty to all those imprisoned under communism, were very controversial domestically. As such, he continually enjoyed greater popularity abroad than at home. Havel continued his life as a public intellectual after his presidency, launching several initiatives including the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, the VIZE 97 Foundation, and the Forum 2000 annual conference. Havel's political philosophy was one of anti-consumerism, humanitarianism, environmentalism, civil activism, and direct democracy. He supported the Czech Green Party from 2004 until his death. He received numerous accolades during his lifetime including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Gandhi Peace Prize, the Philadelphia Liberty Medal, the Order of Canada, the Four Freedoms Award, the Ambassador of Conscience Award and the Hanno R. Ellenbogen Citizenship Award. The 2012–2013 academic year at the College of Europe was named in his honour. He is considered by some to be one of the most important intellectuals of the 20th century.
October 5, 1942
Adam Hochschild was born in New York City in 1942. His first book, HALF THE WAY HOME: A MEMOIR OF FATHER AND SON, was published in 1986. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called it ‘an extraordinarily moving portrait of the complexities and confusions of familial love. firmly grounded in the specifics of a particular time and place, conjuring them up with Proustian detail and affection.’ It was followed by THE MIRROR AT MIDNIGHT: A SOUTH AFRICAN JOURNEY, and THE UNQUIET GHOST: RUSSIANS REMEMBER STALIN. His 1997 collection, FINDING THE TRAPDOOR: ESSAYS, PORTRAITS, TRAVELS, won the PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay. KING LEOPOLD'S GHOST: A STORY OF GREED, TERROR AND HEROISM IN COLONIAL AFRICA was a finalist for the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award. It also won a J. Anthony Lukas award in the United States, and the Duff Cooper Prize in England. His books have been translated into twelve languages and four of them have been named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. His BURY THE CHAINS: PROPHETS AND REBELS IN THE FIGHT TO FREE AN EMPIRE’S SLAVES, was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award in Nonfiction and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History. His last two books have also each won Canada’s Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book on international affairs and the Gold Medal of the California Book Awards. In 2005, he received a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. Hochschild has written for The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, Granta, The New York Times Magazine, and many other newspapers and magazines. His articles have won prizes from the Overseas Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists and elsewhere. He was a co-founder of Mother Jones magazine and has been a commentator on National Public Radio's ‘All Things Considered.’ Hochschild teaches narrative writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, and spent half a year as a Fulbright Lecturer in India. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, sociologist and author Arlie Russell Hochschild. They have two sons and two granddaughters.
October 5, 1950
Edward P. Jones was born and raised in Washington, D.C., where he attended public schools. He graduated from Holy Cross College and did graduate work in fiction writing at the University of Virginia under a Henry Hoyns Fellowship. He also received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1986. LOST IN THE CITY is his first book.
October 5, 1925
ROBERTO JUARROZ (October 5, 1925, Coronel Dorrego, Argentina - March 31, 1995, Temperley, Argentina) was born in Buenos Aires. His first book of VERTICAL POETRY was published in 1958; eight further volumes have since followed. He has been translated and published in German, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Danish, Dutch, Rumanian, Hindi, Arabic, and several other languages. The recipient of numerous prestigious awards and the subject of many critical essays, Mr. Juarroz was a full professor at the University of Buenos Aires.
October 5, 1911
Brian O’Nolan, who wrote under the names of Flann O’Brien and Myles na Gopaleen, was born in Tyrone in 1911, and died in Dublin in 1966. After a brilliant career as a student at University College, Dublin (where he edited a magazine called Blather), he became a civil servant, though he eventually resigned. For many years he wrote the famous Myles na Gopaleen column in the Irish Times.
October 5, 1973
Brian Blanchfield is the author of two books of poetry, Not Even Then and A Several World, which received the 2014 James Laughlin Award and was a longlist finalist for the National Book Award. He lives in Tucson.
October 5, 1890
Johannes Brøndsted, (born 5 October 1890 - 16 November 1965) was a Danish archaeologist and prehistorian. Brøndsted was born in Grundfør, Jutland. In 1920, he received his doctorate for his work on the relations between Anglo-Saxon and Nordic art in Viking times. In 1922 and 1922, he worked in the field with E. Dyggve, and excavated early Christian monuments in Dalmatia. His account of this excavation was published as Recherches à Salone (1928). From 1941 through 1951, Brøndsted was a professor of Nordic archeology and European prehistory at the University of Copenhagen. He left this position to become the director of the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, a position he held from 1951 through 1960.
October 5, 1947
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing and lives in New Mexico. She is the author of nine volumes of poetry, including Nest, The Four Year Old Girl, and Empathy.
October 5, 1923
Stig Dagerman (5 October 1923 – 4 November 1954) was a Swedish journalist and writer. He was one of the most prominent Swedish authors of the 1940s. Stig Dagerman was born in Älvkarleby, Uppsala County. In the course of five years, 1945-49, he enjoyed phenomenal success with four novels, a collection of short stories, a book about postwar Germany, five plays, hundreds of poems and satirical verses, several essays of note and a large amount of journalism. Then, with apparent suddenness, he fell silent. In the fall of 1954, Sweden was stunned to learn that Stig Dagerman, the epitome of his generation of writers, had been found dead in his car: he had closed the doors of the garage and run the engine. Dagerman's works deal with universal problems of morality and conscience, of sexuality and social philosophy, of love, compassion and justice. He plunges into the painful realities of human existence, dissecting feelings of fear, guilt and loneliness. Despite the somber content, he also displays a wry sense of humor that occasionally turns his writing into burlesque or satire. The British writer Graham Greene said this about him: ‘Dagerman wrote with beautiful objectivity. Instead of emotive phrases, he uses a choice of facts, like bricks, to construct an emotion.’
October 5, 1953
Dido Davies was born in London. After attending eight different schools she read Philosophy at University College, London, and took a Ph.D. at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. She is now a Research Fellow in English Literature at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. Her interest in zoology and animal behaviour has led her to travel widely in Asia, and she occasionally lectures on rats and serpents. ‘Gerhardie was a novelist of great talent who mysteriously became lost to view and has now been rediscovered by Dido Davies for a new generation of readers. Though a deeply committed and affectionate biographer, she never lets herself be dazzled, or misled, but places Gerhardie’s work in it unusual context with shrewdness and insight. Her narrative is informative, exhilarating, sometimes endearing, often wildly funny. Gerhardie has finally met his match’ - Michael Holroyd
October 5, 1906
CYRO VERSIANI DOS ANJOS (October 5, 1906 – August 4, 1994) was born in 1906, in Montes Claros, in the northern reaches of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. He evidenced journalistic inclinations early in life, writing for an adult newspaper while still a teenager. He studied law in Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais, and supported himself by writing for newspapers and working for the state. After graduation dos Anjos became editor in chief of the state press and president of the state advisory board. He moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1946, where he continued working with the government. In the sixties he moved, with the seat of government, to Brasilia, where he worked and taught until his retirement. He is currently living in Rio with his wife, Zelita, and is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. He teaches writing at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. . ARTHUR BRAKEL has a Ph.D. in Portuguese language and literature from the University of Wisconsin. He has taught courses in literature, language, and theoretical linguistics at three American universities - Kent State, the State University of New York at Albany, and the University of Michigan - as well as at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, in Brazil. He has written articles and book reviews for European, American, and South American academic journals and newspapers and has published one book, Phonological Markedness and Distinctive Features. Having recently returned from a stint as a Fulbright Scholar/Lecturer in Brazil, he is currently working as a translator/consultant, free-lance writer, Spanish teacher, and writer of fiction.
October 5, 1703
Jonathan Edwards (October 5, 1703 – March 22, 1758) was a Christian preacher, philosopher, and theologian. Edwards 'is widely acknowledged to be America's most important and original philosophical theologian,' and one of America's greatest intellectuals.
October 5, 1959
Maya Ying Lin (born October 5, 1959) is an American designer and artist who is known for her work in sculpture and landscape art. She first came to fame at the age of 21 as the designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
October 5, 1949
David Macey (5 October 1949 – 7 October 2011) was an English translator and intellectual historian of the French left. He translated around sixty books from French to English, and wrote biographical studies of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon. David Macey was born in Sunderland and grew up in Houghton-le-Spring. His father was a miner who had been sent down the pit aged fourteen, and his mother a woman whose family had been unable to afford for her to take up a grammar school place. He was educated at Durham Johnston Grammar School and went on to read French at University College London, where he wrote a PhD on Paul Nizan. Interested in trying to link Marxism and psychoanalysis, Macey became a prolific contributor to Radical Philosophy. From 1974 he taught part-time at North London Polytechnic, UCL and City University London. In 1975 he was a founding member of the British Campaign for an Independent East Timor. After his partner Margaret Atack took a permanent post at Leeds University in 1981, Macey left academia to become a full-time writer and translator. Later, in 1995, he was appointed research associate in the French department of Leeds University; in 2010 he became special professor in translation at the University of Nottingham. Macey married Margaret Atack in 1988, and they adopted three children.
October 5, 1932
John Arthur Mogale Maimane (5 October 1932 – 28 June 2005), better known as Arthur Maimane, was a South African journalist and novelist. Maimane was born in Pretoria, growing up in the black township of Lady Selborne. He was educated at St Peter's College, Johannesburg, also known as the "Black Eton" of South Africa (Oliver Tambo was his mathematics teacher before becoming a lawyer and president of the African National Congress). Maimane was originally intending to study medicine, when a young priest, Trevor Huddleston (who was involved in the Sophiatown forced removals), persuaded him to take a vacation job at Drum magazine. As a result, Maimane choose journalism as his life career. He was a versatile journalist for Drum, covering a wide spectrum of subjects, including writing sports reports, thriller and interviews with beauty queens and other celebrities. Joining Drum in the early 1950s, he was mentored by Henry Nxumalo. The photograph of Maimane in Anthony Sampson's 1956 book Drum: A Venture into the New Africa, "trilby on back of head, cigarette dangling", is an amusing take-off of the Hollywood "newshound" image, but conceals his innate seriousness as a reporter and analyst of the world around him. Under the pseudonym Arthur Mogale, he wrote a regular series for Drum entitled "The Chief", in which he described gangster incidents he had heard about in the shebeens. Don Mattera, a leading Sophiatown gangster, took exception to this: "The gangsters were pissed off with him and there was a word out that we should wipe this guy off." Maimane moved to Golden City Post, Drum magazine's sister daily paper, as the news editor but did not stay long. In 1958, the year after his friend Nxumalo was murdered by unknown assailants, Maimane moved to Ghana to work on the West African edition of Drum. In 1961, he moved to London. The young editor accepted a position at Reuters and was posted to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania as its East African correspondent. There he met his second wife, Jenny, and, when he was deported from Tanzania after refusing the founding editorship of TANU's new daily and for critically reporting political events, they both returned to London, England. He worked for the BBC African Service at Bush House for a while, and then moved to ITN. In 1976 his novel Victims was published in London by Allison and Busby but was banned in South Africa, although the English Academy of South Africa awarded Maimane its Pringle Award for Creative Writing in 1978. After the 1994 elections in South Africa, he returned and was appointed Features editor of the liberal Weekly Mail. After a brief return to England, he was appointed editor of the Star, South Africa’s biggest daily (1994–97). In 2001, Maimane and his wife returned to London. His novel Victims was republished in 2000 as Hate No More. His post-apartheid play, Hang On In There, Nelson, was performed at the Windybrow Theatre in Johannesburg and at the State Theatre in Pretoria, in 1996. Maimane died in 2005 in London, aged 72.
October 5, 1949
Malika Mokeddem (Kenadsa, Algeria; October 5, 1949) is an Algerian Tuareg writer. Malika Mokeddem was born on October 5, 1949 in Kenadsa, a small mining town on the limit of the western desert of Algeria. She is the daughter of an illiterate nomad family who became sedentary. She grew up listening to the stories told by her grandmother, Zohra, and was the only girl in her family and town to finish secondary studies. She enrolled to study medicine in Oran and finished her studies in Paris. She specialized in Nephrology and later established in Montpellier in 1979. She practiced till 1985 when she decided to dedicate her time to literature.
October 5, 1911
Brian O'Nolan (October 5, 1911, Strabane - April 1, 1966, Dublin, Republic of Ireland) was an Irish novelist, playwright and satirist, considered a major figure in twentieth century Irish literature. Born in Strabane, County Tyrone, he is regarded as a key figure in postmodern literature.
October 5, 1961
Daniel Lord Smail is Professor of History at Harvard University. He is the author of Imaginary Cartographies (1999), which won the American Historical Association’s Herbert Baxter Adams Prize and the Social Science History Association’s President’s Award; The Consumption of Justice (2003), which won the Law and Society Association’s James Willard Hurst Prize; and co-editor of Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe (2003).
October 5, 1972
Inga Abele is a novelist, poet, and playwright. Her novel High Tide received the 2008 Latvian Literature Award, and the 2009 Baltic Assembly Award in Literature. Her work has appeared in such anthologies as New European Poets and Best European Fiction 2010. Kaija Straumanis is a graduate of the MA program in Literary Translation at the University of Rochester, and is the editorial director of Open Letter Books. She translates from both German and Latvian.
October 5, 1958
Neil deGrasse Tyson (born October 5, 1958, Manhattan, New York City, NY) is an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History, director of its world-famous Hayden Planetarium, host of the hit radio and TV show StarTalk, and an award-winning author. He lives in New York City.
October 5, 1931
Rex Beckham (October 5, 1931-March 30, 2012) was the son of Reagan Beckham and Aurilla Maynard Beckham, Rex was born on the family farm in Van Zandt County, Texas. His mother died when he was twelve. His father Reagan joined the Merchant Marine, and Rex and his brother Paul lived with relatives until the end of the Second World War. Rex's father left the Merchant Marine, settled in San Diego and reunited with his two sons. Upon graduation from high school Rex attended UC Berkeley. He graduated in 1951, married Marie Page, a fellow student, and was drafted into the Army where he served two years. The Korean War was going on, but Rex did not see combat duty. Rex attended Library School at Cal after his discharge. After receiving his MLS, he interned with the University Librarian Donald Coney. Following that, he founded the Anthropology Library at Berkeley. His career as a librarian took him to the University of Nebraska Library, Ohio State University Library and finally to UCSC Santa Cruz McHenry Library. He retired in 1987. Rex is survived by his wife Marie Beckham, daughters Emily Morris and Hannah Beckham, son Hugh Beckham, grandson Jamey Collins, sons-in-law Rick Morris and Corey Collins, and uncle LW Maynard of Fort Worth, Texas. No services are planned. Gifts in Rex's memory may be sent to the Alzheimer's Association, 1777 Capitola Rd., Santa Cruz, CA 95062; Hospice of Santa Cruz County, 940 Disc Dr., Scotts Valley, CA 95066; George and Mary Foster Anthropology Library, 131 Doe Library, UC-Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720; or a charity of your choice.
October 5, 1957
Bernard Jeffrey McCullough (October 5, 1957 – August 9, 2008), better known by his stage name Bernie Mac, was an American stand-up comedian, actor, and voice actor. Born and raised on Chicago's south side, Mac gained popularity as a stand-up comedian.
October 6, 1918
Joseph Frank (1919-2013) was professor emeritus of Slavic and comparative literature at Stanford and Princeton. The five volumes of his Dostoevsky biography, published between 1976 and 2002, won a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Los Angeles Times book prize, two James Russell Lowell Prizes, two Christian Gauss Awards, and other honors. In 2008, the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies awarded Frank its highest honor.
October 6, 1887
Martín Luis Guzmán Franco (October 6, 1887 – December 22, 1976) was a Mexican novelist and journalist.
October 6, 1923
Ya?ar Kemal (born Kemal Sad?k Gökçeli; 6 October 1923 – 28 February 2015) was a Turkish writer and human rights activist. He was one of Turkey's leading writers. He received 38 awards during his lifetime and had been a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature on the strength of Memed, My Hawk. An outspoken intellectual, he often did not hesitate to speak about sensitive issues, especially those concerning the problems of the Kurdish people. He was tried in 1995 under anti-terror laws for an article he wrote for German magazine Der Spiegel accusing the Turkish army of destroying Kurdish villages. He was released but later received a suspended 20-month jail sentence for an article he wrote criticising racism against minorities in Turkey, especially the Kurds.
October 6, 1930
Daniel Moyano, writer and teacher, born Buenos Aires 6 October 1930, married 1959 Irma Capellino (one son, two daughters), died Madrid 1 July 1992. DANIEL MOYANO is one of the lesser known of the best of Latin American writers. The endorsement for his entry into the group of the greats could not have been better - in 1967 his novel El Oscuro won the literary prize instituted by Primera Plana magazine, which under Jacobo Timerman had revolutionised journalism in Latin America. The award judges were Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His first book, a collection of short stories, Artista de variedades ('Variety Artists') had been published in 1960 when he was 30. His second collection had appeared in 1964, with an introduction by the Paraguayan writer Augusto Roa Bastos, who found in the stories elements of the writings of Franz Kafka and Cesare Pavese. His work in English is limited to the novel The Devil's Trill (1974), carefully translated by Giovanni Pontiero and published in 1988, and more recently a short story, included in Norman di Giovanni's anthology Hand-in-Hand Alongside the Tracks. The Devil's Trill is a witty but compassionate defence of fantasy and artistic licence as political turmoil seized Argentina and Moyano's life. He was an immensely warm and humorous man. Born in Buenos Aires, his documents said he was born in Cordoba, central Argentina. His mother had refused to register his birth and, when he was 17, in need of a birth certificate, a sympathetic judge had roped in two witnesses off the street and redelivered Moyano in Cordoba. His grandparents were Italians, and one was a Brazilian Indian, which, he said, gave him his dark and wiry looks. His mother died in 1937 when he was nine, and his father walked out on the family. His adolescent years were a constant move from one aunt's house to another. Moyano's early teachers were English and Welsh pastors working in the Cordoba hills, and his schoolmates included Ernesto 'Che' Guevara and Manuel de Falla. Julio Cortazar had urged him to write down this early life. Moyano said that was too much like writing his memoirs. But many of his best passages include reminiscences and fantasy of that troubled childhood. He trained as a builder and plumber - a job he was to take up when forced into exile. From Cordoba, Moyano moved to the Andean province of La Rioja, which became his home, and where he worked on the local newspaper, El Independiente, founded by the Paoletti family. When he met his wife, Irma, they eloped because her father, of Montenegrin immigrant stock, said a suitor had to own cattle or land or was not suitable. Years later when their first child, Ricardo (today an accomplished guitarist), was born, there was reconciliation with the in-laws. Irma's father, inspecting some brick flooring laid by Moyano, informed all about that Daniel was 'not just a writer, but a good writer. You can tell by the brick-laying.' The Cordoba priests had also taught Moyano music and he was an accomplished violist, playing in a quartet in La Rioja and teaching at the provincial conservatory.
October 6, 1938
Alberts Bels, pseudonym for J?nis C?rulis (born on October 6, 1938, Ropaži Municipality, Latvia) is a Latvian writer. Alberts Bels studied electrical engineering during the 1950s and also attended the Moscow Circus Art School. Since 1963 he has been active as a full-time writer. His first novel was published in 1967. His work has been described as psychologically rich fiction and several of his books have been adapted as films. He has also been politically active and one of his novels was censored by the Soviet authorities during the 1960s. He was a member of the Supreme Council of the Republic of Latvia and has been awarded the Commemorative Medal for Participants of the Barricades of 1991, an award given to those who participated in the confrontation with Soviet forces in 1991 known as The Barricades. He is an honorary member of the Latvian Academy of Sciences and has been awarded the Order of the Three Stars (3rd class).
October 6, 1934
Odd Sverre Lovoll (born October 6, 1934) is an American author, historian and educator. Odd Sverre Lovoll was born in Sande, in Møre og Romsdal, Norway. He immigrated to the United States in 1946 and is a naturalized United States citizen. Lovoll received his education both in Norway and in the United States, passing university exams at the University of Bergen in 1961 and at the University of Oslo in 1966 and 1967. Lovoll graduated from the University of North Dakota (M.A. 1969) and from the University of Minnesota (Ph.D. 1973). He served on the faculty of the University of Minnesota from 1967 to 1970. For thirty years, Lovoll served on the faculty of St. Olaf College. He retired from the King Olav V Chair in Scandinavian-American Studies at St. Olaf College in 2000. Lovoll continues a part-time appointment in History at the University of Oslo. From 1980 until 2001 he served as publication editor for The Norwegian-American Historical Association. In that capacity he edited and supervised publication articles mainly on Norwegian-American and Scandinavian-American immigration. He has been published in both Norway and the United States. In 1958 Lovoll married Else Navekvien. They have two children: Audrey born 1960 and Ronald born 1963. Audrey has two children, and Ronald has three, all of which are mentioned in dedication pages in a number of his written works. Lovoll was decorated with the Knight's Cross First Class of the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit in 1986 by Olav V of Norway. In 1989 he was inducted into membership in The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He was induced into the Scandinavian Hall of Fame at the 2001 Norsk Høstfest.
October 7, 1966
Sherman Alexie is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian from Wellpinit, Washington-a town on the Spokane Indian reservation. He currently resides in Seattle, WA.
October 7, 1916
John Horne Burns (7 October 1916 – 11 August 1953) was a United States author. He is best known as the author of the 1947 story-cycle THE GALLERY, which depicts life in Allied-occupied Naples, Italy, in 1944 from the perspective of several different characters. In this work he explores the themes of material and class inequality, alcoholism, relations between the sexes, and sexuality in general, including homosexuality, with the encounter between American and Neapolitan culture as a general thematic backdrop.
October 7, 1967
MICHELLE ALEXANDER is an associate professor of law at Ohio State University and holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Formerly the director of the ACLU Racial Justice. Project in Northern California, Alexander served as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun. CORNEL WEST is the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton University.
October 7, 1934
Amiri Baraka (born Everett LeRoi Jones; October 7, 1934 – January 9, 2014), previously known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka, was an African-American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays and music criticism. He was the author of numerous books of poetry and taught at several universities, including the State University of New York at Buffalo and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He received the PEN Open Book Award, previously known as the Beyond Margins Award, in 2008 for Tales of the Out and the Gone. Baraka's career spanned nearly 50 years, and his themes range from black liberation to white racism. Some poems that are always associated with him are "The Music: Reflection on Jazz and Blues", "The Book of Monk", and "New Music, New Poetry", works that draw on topics from the worlds of society, music, and literature. Baraka's poetry and writing have attracted both high praise and condemnation. In the African-American community, some compare Baraka to James Baldwin and recognize him as one of the most respected and most widely published black writers of his generation. Others have said his work is an expression of violence, misogyny, and homophobia. Regardless of viewpoint, Baraka's plays, poetry, and essays have been defining texts for African-American culture. Baraka's brief tenure as Poet Laureate of New Jersey (2002–2003) involved controversy over a public reading of his poem "Somebody Blew Up America?", which resulted in accusations of anti-semitism and negative attention from critics and politicians.
October 7, 1927
Juan Benet (October 7, 1927 – January 5, 1993) was a Spanish writer. Benet was born in Madrid. At the start of the Spanish Civil War, his father died, and he left for San Sebastian with his family to find refuge. They stayed there until 1939, when they returned to the capital. In 1944, he completed his high school education and in 1948 he entered into the School of Civil Engineering in Madrid. He frequented the discussion group at Café Gijón, in Madrid, where he met the man who would become his best friend, Luis Martín Santos, among other authors of that time. In 1953, still a student, he started an engineering internship in Finland and published his first play, Max, in which one can see the beginnings of a singular literary style that distances itself from the popular themes of Spanish literature of that era. Theatrical director Carlos Nuevo said that Max is ‘a dream, a nightmare. It is the projection of all the fears, contradictions, conditionings, meannesses, nobilities of all those of that in one way we aspire to realize in a work of art.’ In 1954, Benet finished his engineering degree, and in the following year he married. After completing several works in Switzerland, he moved to Ponferrada in Léon, and after to Oviedo, for work-related reasons. In 1961, Benet published You Will Never Amount to Anything (Nunca llegarás a nada), his first novel. In 1966, he returned to Madrid, and in 1968 he published Return to Región (Volverás a Región), at the same time that he built the reservoir of Porma. There were already those qualifying the work of Benet as ‘incorrect literature,’ and only a few contemporary authors, such as Pere Gimferrer, who realized that one of the great authors of the Spanish narrative had been born. In 1967, Benet obtained the Biblioteca Breve Prize for his work, A meditation (Una meditación). He wrote Inspiration and style (La inspiración y el estilo), an essay where he expounded his strong beliefs on art and literature, an art that is fundamentally about style more than about telling stories or making arguments. His literary output increased between 1970 and 1973, as he published A meditation, A Winter Journey (Un viaje de invierno, completing the trilogy that began with Return to Región), Puerta de tierra, Teatro, and Una tumba, La otra casa de Mazón and Sub rosa. In 1974, his wife, Nuria Jordana, died, causing an involuntary break in Benet's works and in his personal relationships. More introverted than ever, Benet didn't publish another work until 1976's What Was the Civil War (Qué fue la guerra civil). Until the 1980s he would travel extensively, including trips to China and to various conferences in the United States. In 1980, he published one of his greatest works, Saul Before Samuel (Saúl ante Samuel), a complex work that critics called brilliant. He was a finalist for the Planeta Prize in 1980 with his work El aire de un crimen, losing to Volaverunt by Antonio Larreta. Three years after, the first volume of Rusty lances (Herrumbrosas lanzas), which he continued in 1985 and 1986. While he was building his own engineering firm, he published the novel In the Penumbra (En la penumbra) in 1989. In 1990 and 1991, he published his final two works, the essay The Construction of the Tower of Babel (La construcción de la torre de Babel) and The Knight of Saxony (El caballero de Sajonia). He left the fourth volume of Rusty Lances unfinished at his death on January 5, 1993.
October 7, 1901
Ramón Beteta Quintana (7 October 1901 – 5 October 1965) was an influential politician in Mexico. Ramón Beteta Quintanaa was born in Mexico City, Federal District on 7 October 1901 into a landowning family. He was the son of Enrique Beteta Méndez and Sara Quintana, brother of Major General Ignacio M. Beteta, and uncle of Mario Ramón Beteta. He studied at the University of Texas at Austin between 1920 and 1923, graduating with a degree in Economics. He then attended the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), obtaining a degree in law in 1926, and then becoming the first student to obtain a Ph.D. in Social Sciences at that school in 1934. Beteta was one of the founders of the National School of Economics at the UNAM, where he taught from 1924 to 1942. He also taught the law school, taught at the National Preparatory School (1925-1928), and taught in secondary schools in Mexico City. He became a member of the League of professionals and intellectuals in the PRM in 1939. He managed the 1945 election campaign for president Miguel Alemán Valdés. Beteta held various positions in three presidential administrations: Director General of the Department of National Statistics of the Department of Industry and Trade from 1933 to 1935; Deputy Foreign Minister from 1936 to 1940; and Secretary of Finance from 1946 to 1952. Later he was the Ambassador of Mexico in Italy (1952-1955) and Greece (1955-1958). Towards the end of his life he became involved in journalism as Director General of the Novedades and the Diario de la Tarde between 1958 and 1964. He died on 5 October 1965.
October 7, 1938
Yvonne Brewster (born October 7, 1938) is a Jamaican-born stage director, teacher and writer. She also co-founded the theatre companies Talawa in the UK and The Barn in Jamaica. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Yvonne Brewster went to the UK to study drama in the mid-1950s at the Rose Bruford College - where she was the UK's first Black woman drama student - and at the Royal Academy of Music, where she received a distinction in Drama and Mime.She returned to Jamaica to teach Drama and in 1965 she also jointly founded (with Trevor Rhone) The Barn in Kingston, Jamaica's first professional theatre company. Upon her return to England she worked extensively in radio, television, and directing for Stage Productions. Between 1982 and 1984, she was Drama Officer at the Arts Council of Great Britain. In 1985 she co-founded Talawa Theatre Company with Mona Hammond, Carmen Munroe and Inigo Espejel, using funding from the Greater London Council (then led by Ken Livingstone). Brewster was Talawa's artistic director until 2003. She is a patron of the Clive Barker Centre for Theatrical Innovation. In 1993, she was awarded an Order of the British Empire for Services to the Arts in the Queen’s New Years Honours list; and in 2001 she was granted an honorary Doctorate from the Open University. In 2005, the University of London's Central School of Speech and Drama conferred an honorary fellowship on Brewster in acknowledgment of her involvement in the development of British theatre. In 2004, Brewster published her memoirs, entitled The Undertaker’s Daughter: The Colourful Life of a Theatre Director (Arcadia Books). She has also edited five collections of plays, including Barry Reckord's For the Reckord (Oberon Books, 2010) and Mixed Company: Three Early Jamaican Plays, published by Oberon Books in 2012.
October 7, 1913
George Johnston was born in Hamilton, Ontario, on October 7, 1913. Johnston knew early on that he wanted to be a writer, and published early poems (often comic-satiric), as well as newspaper columns, film reviews and plays, during his years at the University of Toronto's Victoria College, where he studied philosophy and English. When war was declared, he joined the RCAF and served four and a half years, including thirteen months as a reconnaissance pilot in West Africa. He returned to Canada in 1944, married Jeanne McRae, and completed his MA at the University of Toronto. In between, he taught two years (1947-49) at Mount Allison University, and in 1950, having found teaching to his liking, accepted a post at Ottawa's Carleton University where, for twenty-nine years, he was a charismatic and much-loved professor of Old and Middle English and Old Norse. His first book of poems, The Cruising Auk, written during the war, was not published until 1959, when he was forty-six. Sabbatical years were decisive in Johnston's life. During his first, 1956-57 at Dorking in Surrey, he met Peter Foote of the University of London, who taught him Old Norse, and began translating The Saga of Gisli in collaboration with him. A second sabbatical, in 1967-68, was spent in Denmark and included the discovery of modern Faroese poetry and the first of four visits the Johnstons made to the Faroe Islands. A last sabbatical, 1974-75, spent mostly in Gloucester, England, included a three-week visit to Iceland. After The Cruising Auk, Johnston published four more poetry collections before the appearance of Endeared by Dark, his Collected Poems, in 1990. A man whose diverse interests included calligraphy, bell-ringing, wine-making and beekeeping, who kept up a wide correspondence and enjoyed reading the classics aloud with his wife, Johnston retired from Carleton in 1979. He died in August of 2004.
October 7, 1919
Georges Duby (7 October 1919 – 3 December 1996) was a French historian who specialised in the social and economic history of the Middle Ages. He ranks among the most influential medieval historians of the twentieth century and was one of France's most prominent public intellectuals from the 1970s to his death. Born to a family of Provençal craftsmen living in Paris, Duby was initially educated in the field of historical geography before he moved into history. He earned an undergraduate degree at Lyon in 1942 and completed his graduate thesis at the Sorbonne under Charles-Edmond Perrin in 1952. He taught first at Besançon and then at the University of Aix-en-Provence before he was appointed in 1970 to the Chair of the History of Medieval Society in the Collège de France. He remained attached to the Collège until his retirement in 1991. He was elected to the Académie française in 1987.
October 7, 1943
Dennis L. Gilbert (born October 7, 1943 in Bremerton, Washington) is a professor and chair of sociology at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. He holds a Doctor of Philosophy degree from Cornell University and has taught at the Universidad Catlica in Lima, Peru, Cornell University, and joined Hamilton college in 1976. He has published a variety of sociology books, mainly dealing with socio-economic stratification. He may be best known for his series of books entitled, The American Class Structure. The class models featured in the series are used by other sociologists such as James Henslin, Brian K. Williams and Carl M. Wahlstrom. His main areas of expertise are Latin America, social stratification, polling, and more specifically the American class structure.
October 7, 1927
FRANK LONDON BROWN (October 7, 1927, Kansas City, MO - March 12, 1962) was born in Kansas City, but moved to Chicago at age twelve. Educated at Roosevelt University and the University of Chicago, Brown worked numerous jobs to support his literary ambitions. Most significant of these was his work as an organizer and program officer for the United Packing-house Workers of America and other labor unions. Brown was profoundly impacted by the musical culture of African American Chicago, most significantly jazz, but also gospel and blues. A devotee of bebop, Brown published a seminal interview with Thelonious Monk in Downbeat and pioneered in the reading of fiction to jazz accompaniment. Many critics have also noted the importance of a trip Brown made as a journalist to cover the Emmett Till murder case. At the time of his death, he was an accomplished writer on the Chicago scene and a regular contributor to Negro Digest and various literary magazines. He was also a candidate for a PhD from the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought and was director of the Union Research Center. His reputation is largely based upon his 1959 novel, Trumbull Park, an account of the struggles facing African American families attempting to integrate a Chicago housing development. However, his short fiction and especially his 1969 posthumous novel, The Myth Maker, deserve greater attention. Trumbull Park was typical of social realist fiction in the style of Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair, while The Myth Maker demonstrates an interest in Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the existentialist novel. Both texts are clearly influenced by the work of Richard Wright. Their great accomplishment is the detailed description of the everyday of urban African American experience, excellent attention to vernacular speech and dialect, and a philosophically sophisticated account of the rise of despair in the ghetto and the continuing deprecatory impact of institutionalized racism. Both novels are occasionally limited by deficient character and plot development. Trumbull Park has received a moderate amount of critical attention and The Myth Maker none. Brown's occasional short stories also reveal attention to language and a strong commitment to realism as a mode of expression and investigation. His most popular story, McDougal (Abraham Chapman, Black Voices, 1968) is noteworthy for its sympathetic treatment of a white trumpet player attempting to succeed as a jazz musician within the very environment of Chicago's 58th Street that Brown had long chronicled. In addition to the accomplishment of his two novels, Brown's reputation should also be enhanced by his exploration of the possibility of an artistic life irreducibly connected to a life of social action. His participation in leftist political activity and counter-cultural artistic movements at the height of McCarthyism and the Cold War is suggestive of a courageous intellect. His succumbing to leukemia in March of 1962 just prior to the dawning of the Black Arts movement in Chicago is one of the major tragedies of contemporary African American literature.
October 7, 1939
Vitaly Alexandrovich Shentalinsky (7 October 1939 – 27 July 2018) was a Russian writer and journalist. He became internationally known for his books on the fates of Russian writers during the Great Purge under the rule of Joseph Stalin. He also wrote several volumes of poetry. During the Perestroika under Mikhail Gorbachev he was elected to head a commission of the Union of Soviet Writers to investigate the fate of writers persecuted by Stalin‘s secret police NKVD. He then got permission to work in the KGB archives. On the basis of his research, three volumes of documentation were published with extensive commentary. Chapters are devoted to Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Bulgakov, Pavel Florensky, Maxim Gorky, Nikolai Klyuev, Ossip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Boris Pilnyak and Marina Tsvetaeva. They contain longer extracts from snitch reports and interrogation protocols. He published materials on the NKVD officer Yakov Agranov, who led many of the repressive measures against writers. Shentalinsky's books on the repression of writers were also published in English, French, German, Polish, Serbian and Spanish. Based on his work, several television documentaries were produced. His publications were praised by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Yevgeny Yevtushenko. In the Tatar community of Yuldus (district Chistopol), where he grew up, the "Shentalinsky Readings" have been taking place since 2013.
October 8, 1964
Jakob Arjouni (born 8 October 1964 in Frankfurt am Main) is a German author. He received the 1992 German Crime Fiction Prize for One Man, One Murder. Jakob Arjouni ended his university studies and published his first novel Happy Birthday, Türke! at the age of 22. Later he wrote his first play Die Garagen. He became famous after publishing his criminal novel Kayankaya, which was then translated into 10 different languages.
October 8, 1925
Born in Hanover, New Hampshire, on October 8, 1925, Philip Booth spent much of his childhood in Castine, Maine, in a house that had been in his mother's family for generations. This biographical detail proves strikingly relevant to Booth's poetry, which constructs the consciousness and day-to-day life of New Englanders. Moreover, the landscape of New England, particularly the coast of Maine, often occupies a place of primary importance in Booth's poems—serving as a metaphor for the poet's emotional or psychological state. After returning from Air Force service in World War II, Booth studied with Robert Frost as a freshman at Dartmouth College and, upon obtaining his M.A. in English from Columbia University, returned to Dartmouth to teach English. After a year at Dartmouth, Booth left his hometown to join the faculty at Wellesley College and, eventually, left New England for Syracuse University, where he was one of the founders of the graduate program in creative writing. His first book of poems, LETTERS FROM A DISTANT LAND (1957), was the 1956 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets, judged by Louise Bogan, John Holmes, Rolfe Humphries, May Sarton, and Richard Wilbur ‘for the discovery and encouragement of new poetic genius.’ Over the course of his career, he published nine other collections of poetry, including LIFELINES: SELECTED POEMS, 1950-1999 (Viking Press, 1999), which received the 2001 Poets' Prize, Pairs (1994), Relations: Selected Poems 1950-1985 (1986), AVAILABLE LIGHT (1976), and WEATHERS AND EDGES (1966). About his work, the poet Stephen Dunn has said, ‘While other poets of his generation have been struggling not to duplicate themselves, Philip Booth has managed to extend and deepen the subject matter that always compelled him: how one lives and finds oneself among others, and otherness.’ A former student of Booth's at Syracuse University, Dunn wrote in an e-mail message after the death of his teacher, ‘Booth's quest was to deepen as opposed to range widely, and in that sense he was a poet of consciousness, even when his subject seemed to be the dailiness of Castine or the vagaries of sailing.’ Booth's honors include Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and the Theodore Roethke Prize. In 1983 he was elected a Fellow of The Academy of American Poets. Philip Booth died in Hanover, New Hampshire, on July 2, 2007 from complications of Alzheimer's disease.
October 8, 1948
Benjamin Hale Cheever (born October 8, 1948) is an American writer and editor. He is the son of Mary (Winternitz) and writer John Cheever and brother of Susan Cheever.
October 8, 1945
Earl Ofari Hutchinson (born October 8, 1945) is an American author and media critic.
October 8, 1930
Faith Ringgold (born October 8, 1930, in Harlem, New York City) is an African-American artist, best known for her painted story quilts. Her birth name was Faith Willi Jones and she was raised in Harlem and educated at the City College of New York, where she studied with Robert Gwathmey and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. After receiving a Bachelor's Degree, she taught in the public school system in New York. She received an M.A. from the college in 1959. In 1970, Ringgold began teaching college level courses. She is the professor emeritus in the University of California, San Diego visual art department. She was greatly influenced by the fabric she worked with at home with her mother, Willi Posey, who was a fashion designer, and Ringgold has used fabric in many of her artworks. She is especially well known for her painted story quilts, which blur the line between 'high art' and 'craft' by combining painting, quilted fabric, and storytelling. During the 1960s, Ringgold painted flat, figural compositions that focused on the racial conflicts; depicting everything from riots to cocktail parties, which resulted in her 'American People' series, showing the female view of the Civil Rights Movement. The 1970s mark her move into the sculptural figures that depicted fictional slave stories as well as contemporary ones. Ringgold began quilted artworks in 1980; her first quilt being 'Echoes of Harlem.' She quilted her stories in order to be heard, since at the time no one would publish her autobiography. 'Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima?' (1983) is a quilt showing the story of Aunt Jemima as a matriarch restaurateur. Ringgold modeled her 'story quilts' on the Buddhist Thangkas, lovely pictures painted on fabric and quilted or brocaded, which could then be easily rolled up and transported. She has influenced numerous modern artists, including Linda Freeman, and known some of the greatest African-American artists personally, including Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and Betye Saar. Ringgold's work is in the permanent collection of many museums including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and other museums, mostly in New York City. In addition, she has written and illustrated seventeen children's books. Her first was Tar Beach, published by Crown in 1991, based on her quilt story of the same name. For that work she won the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award and the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration. She was also the runner-up for the Caldecott Medal, the premier American Library Association award for picture book illustration. Ringgold has been an activist since the 1970s, participating in several feminist, anti-racist organizations. In 1970, Ringgold, fellow artist Poppy Johnson, and art critic Lucy Lippard, founded the Ad Hoc Women's Art Committee and protested the Whitney Annual, a major art exhibition held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Members of the committee demanded that women artists account for fifty percent of the exhibitors and created disturbances at the museum by leaving raw eggs and sanitary napkins on its grounds and by gathering to sing, blow whistles, and chant about their exclusion. Ringgold and Lippard also worked together during their participation in the group Women Artists in Revolution (WAR). That same year, Ringgold and her daughter, the writer Michele Wallace, founded Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (WSABAL). Around 1974, Ringgold and Wallace were founding members of the National Black Feminist Organization. Ringgold was also a founding member of the 'Where We At' Black Women Artists, a New York-based women art collective associated with the Black Arts Movement.Ringgold was also the plaintiff in a significant copyright case, Ringgold v. Black Entertainment Television. Black Entertainment Television (BET) had aired several episodes of the television series Roc in which a Ringgold poster was shown on nine different occasions for a total of 26.75 seconds. Ringgold sued for copyright infringement. The court found BET liable for copyright infringement, rejecting the de minimis defense raised by BET, which had argued that the use of Ringgold's copyrighted work was so minimal that it did not constitute an infringement.
October 8, 1964
Priscilla Marie Winans Love, known professionally as CeCe Winans, /?wa?nænz/ (born October 8, 1964) is an American gospel singer, who has sold over 12 million records worldwide and won 12 Grammy Awards. She is the best-selling female gospel artist of all time, as of 2015.
October 8, 1892
Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (8 October 1892 – 31 August 1941) was a Russian and Soviet poet. Her work is considered among some of the greatest in twentieth century Russian literature. She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed it. In an attempt to save her daughter Irina from starvation, she placed her in a state orphanage in 1919, where she died of hunger. Tsvetaeva left Russia in 1922 and lived with her family in increasing poverty in Paris, Berlin and Prague before returning to Moscow in 1939. Her husband Sergei Efron and her daughter Ariadna Efron (Alya) were arrested on espionage charges in 1941; and her husband was executed. Tsvetaeva committed suicide in 1941. As a lyrical poet, her passion and daring linguistic experimentation mark her as a striking chronicler of her times and the depths of the human condition.
October 8, 1937
Anthony Richard Birley (born 8 October 1937) was the Professor of Ancient History at University of Manchester (1974–1990) and at University of Düsseldorf (1990–2002). He is the son of the archaeologist Eric Birley, who bought the house next to Vindolanda where Anthony and his brother Robin began to excavate the site. They have both taken part in many of the excavations there, and Robin now runs them. He was educated at Clifton College, 1950–1955; Magdalen College, Oxford, 1956–1963 (Classics, Litt. Humaniores): BA, 1st cl. Hons., 1960;
October 8, 1930
Faith Ringgold (born October 8, 1930, in Harlem, New York City) is an African-American artist, best known for her painted story quilts. Her birth name was Faith Willi Jones and she was raised in Harlem and educated at the City College of New York, where she studied with Robert Gwathmey and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. After receiving a Bachelor's Degree, she taught in the public school system in New York. She received an M.A. from the college in 1959. In 1970, Ringgold began teaching college level courses. She is the professor emeritus in the University of California, San Diego visual art department. She was greatly influenced by the fabric she worked with at home with her mother, Willi Posey, who was a fashion designer, and Ringgold has used fabric in many of her artworks. She is especially well known for her painted story quilts, which blur the line between 'high art' and 'craft' by combining painting, quilted fabric, and storytelling. During the 1960s, Ringgold painted flat, figural compositions that focused on the racial conflicts; depicting everything from riots to cocktail parties, which resulted in her 'American People' series, showing the female view of the Civil Rights Movement. The 1970s mark her move into the sculptural figures that depicted fictional slave stories as well as contemporary ones. Ringgold began quilted artworks in 1980; her first quilt being 'Echoes of Harlem.' She quilted her stories in order to be heard, since at the time no one would publish her autobiography. 'Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima?' (1983) is a quilt showing the story of Aunt Jemima as a matriarch restaurateur. Ringgold modeled her 'story quilts' on the Buddhist Thangkas, lovely pictures painted on fabric and quilted or brocaded, which could then be easily rolled up and transported. She has influenced numerous modern artists, including Linda Freeman, and known some of the greatest African-American artists personally, including Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and Betye Saar. Ringgold's work is in the permanent collection of many museums including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and other museums, mostly in New York City. In addition, she has written and illustrated seventeen children's books. Her first was Tar Beach, published by Crown in 1991, based on her quilt story of the same name. For that work she won the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award and the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration. She was also the runner-up for the Caldecott Medal, the premier American Library Association award for picture book illustration. Ringgold has been an activist since the 1970s, participating in several feminist, anti-racist organizations. In 1970, Ringgold, fellow artist Poppy Johnson, and art critic Lucy Lippard, founded the Ad Hoc Women's Art Committee and protested the Whitney Annual, a major art exhibition held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Members of the committee demanded that women artists account for fifty percent of the exhibitors and created disturbances at the museum by leaving raw eggs and sanitary napkins on its grounds and by gathering to sing, blow whistles, and chant about their exclusion. Ringgold and Lippard also worked together during their participation in the group Women Artists in Revolution (WAR). That same year, Ringgold and her daughter, the writer Michele Wallace, founded Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (WSABAL). Around 1974, Ringgold and Wallace were founding members of the National Black Feminist Organization. Ringgold was also a founding member of the 'Where We At' Black Women Artists, a New York-based women art collective associated with the Black Arts Movement.Ringgold was also the plaintiff in a significant copyright case, Ringgold v. Black Entertainment Television. Black Entertainment Television (BET) had aired several episodes of the television series Roc in which a Ringgold poster was shown on nine different occasions for a total of 26.75 seconds. Ringgold sued for copyright infringement. The court found BET liable for copyright infringement, rejecting the de minimis defense raised by BET, which had argued that the use of Ringgold's copyrighted work was so minimal that it did not constitute an infringement.
October 8, 1933
Michael Korda (born 8 October 1933) is an English-born writer and novelist who was editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster in New York City.
October 8, 1954
William "Bill" Lee (born October 8, 1954) is an American writer. He is the author of three books. He is a former member of the San Francisco Chinatown gang that was responsible for the 1977 Golden Dragon massacre.
October 8, 1922
Adam David Miller (born October 8, 1922) is an African-American poet, writer, publisher, and radio programmer and producer. Born in Saint George, South Carolina, Miller published one of the first collections of modern African-American poetry, as well as four books of poetry and a memoir, Ticket to Exile about his life growing up in the Jim Crow South. Miller served in the United States Navy from 1942 -1946. He attended university on the G.I. Bill, earning a Masters Degree in English (1953) from the University of California at Berkeley where he also completed post-degree work in drama and helped found the university’s Graduate Student Journal. Throughout his career, Miller has promoted and published other writers. In Dices, Or Black Bones, (1970), he showcased the early poems of Al Young, California’s poet laureate (2005–2008), Ishmael Reed, Clarence Major, Lucille Clifton, Etheridge Knight and Victor Hernandez Cruz. Miller’s own first book of poetry was Neighborhood and Other Poems (1992), followed by Forever Afternoon (1994) published by Michigan State University Press; next came Apocalypse Is My Garden (1997) and Land Between (2000). Ticket to Exile, A Memoir (2007) published by Heyday Books. Miller taught English for 21 years at Laney College in Oakland, California where he helped create Good News, a faculty and community journal of art and culture. He continued to teach at UC Berkeley until 1991 and has twice been an Invited Fellow with the Bay Area Writing Project (1978 and 1994). For six years, Miller served on the Berkeley Arts Commission and helped inaugurate the downtown Poetry Walk. In the 1960s, Miller helped launch Aldridge Players West, a Black drama group in San Francisco. He also created Mina Press which brought out Japanese American Women: Three Generations by Mei T. Nakano in 1990, as well as other works. He has worked with San Francisco Bay Area public television and radio for over 30 years, creating programs on Norwegian culture and arts, the writings of Nisei (Japanese-Americans), women’s history and labor history. He has been a regularly featured poet on listener-sponsored KPFA, 99.4 FM radio in Northern California. Miller is married to Elise Peeples, philosopher and author of The Emperor Has a Body, and founder of Art Between Us, a collaborative art and healing organization. They make their home in Berkeley, California.
October 8, 1910
Rosalie Moore, Gertrude Elizabeth Moore (born October 8, 1910 Oakland, California – 2000) was an American poet. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley magna cum laude with a B.A. in 1932; with an MA in 1934. From 1935 to 1937 she worked for KLX, and then the Census Bureau. In 1937, she attended the poetry-writing classes of Lawrence Hart. She joined the group of poets known as the Activists. She married William L. Brown in 1942; they have three daughters and three grandchildren living in Marin County. From 1965 to 1976, she taught at the College of Marin. Kay Ryan was her student. Her work has been published in Accent, Furioso, The New Yorker, and Saturday Review. Her papers are held at University of Oregon library.
October 8, 1945
Earl Ofari Hutchinson (born October 8, 1945) is an American author and media critic. His father, Earl Hutchinson Sr., is the lead author of A Colored Man's Journey Through 20th Century Segregated America published by Middle Passage Press. His daughter Sikivu Hutchinson is a nationally acclaimed author and speaker. His son Fanon Hutchinson is a recognized documentary videographer and producer. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, and attended Catholic elementary schools and Mt. Carmel High School. He relocated to Los Angeles in 1961, attended Dorsey High School. He graduated from California State University, Los Angeles with a BA in Sociology.[citation needed] He earned an MA in Humanities from California State University, Dominguez Hills. A nationally acclaimed author and social issues commentator, Hutchinson is the author of more than 10 books on politics and racial issues in America. He is a contributor to a variety of news outlets and websites on varying topics concerning politics and race, and is often interviewed for various print and broadcast outlets. He hosts the live call-in program The Hutchinson Report on Pacifica Radio outlet KPFK-FM radio in Los Angeles featuring his commentary and the voices of listener-callers, and KTYM-Radio in Los Angeles. He has appeared frequently as a guest commentator on several U.S. network television programs since the 1990s, offering his often well-reasoned and arguably moderate takes on topical, breaking and controversial news stories. Hutchinson's 1996 book Betrayed: The Presidential Failure to Protect Black Lives shed light on the 1964 murders of two African-American teenagers by Ku Klux Klansman. His book From King to Obama: Witness to a Turbulent History is a personal look at the major events and personalities of the half-century from the 1960s through the first decades of the 21st century. His three most recent books are: How Obama Won; The Ethnic Presidency: How Race decides the Race to the White House; The Latino Challenge to Black America. Hutchinson has written extensively on race and politics in the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Tribune, and Baltimore Sun. His featured interviews and comments on race and politics have appeared in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, ABC's World News Tonight. He is a frequent guest analyst on Fox News John Gibson Show, O'Reilly Show, Hannity & Colmes, Glenn Beck Show, PBS Lehrer Report, NPR's Talk of the Nation, various CNN news shows, New Nation MSNBC. He is the National Political Writer for New America Media and a regular contributor to The Huffington Post, the grio-MSNBC, and Examiner.com. He hosts two syndicated public affairs and issues radio talk shows on KTYM Radio and KPFK Pacifica Network Radio Los Angeles, and the Hutchinson Report, Newsmaker Network. The network syndicates the Hutchinson Report in more than fifty cities and Washington DC nationally. Hutchinson is the founder of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable (LAUPR), which sponsors community forums and provides grant funding to nonprofit grassroots organizations. The LAUPR's Impact Micro Awards are made to support organizations and individuals that have a proven track record of commitment to building community sustainability projects, activities, and service. Grantees have included the Harmony Project (formerly the Inner City Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles), Eso Won Books in Los Angeles's Leimert Park district, the Korean American Historical Society and Centro Latino for Literacy. Hutchinson has addressed, among many other "sensitive" issues, the controversy about Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust, accusing the former pontiff of being complicit in the crimes of the Nazis and opposing his sainthood.
October 8, 1886
Pedro Prado (8 October 1886 – 31 January 1952) was a Chilean writer. He won the Chilean National Prize for Literature in 1949. He was the son of Absalón Prado Marín and Laura Calvo and was born October 8, 1886. His mom died when he was two years old, and his dad passed in 1905. In 1895, he was admitted to the Instituto Nacional General José Miguel Carrera where he studied the humanities until 1903. He also took elective courses in German, accounting, painting, and music. He finished the last two years of his college education at the University of Chile, in the School of Engineering. He then studied at the School of Architecture at the University of Chile for three years without earning a degree. He began exploring his interest in painting at that time, receiving lessons from Pedro Lira, a prominent Chilean artist during the 19th century. It was around this time that he traveled to northern Chile, then southern Argentina, where he married Adriana Jaramillo Bruce on January 1, 1910. That year he was elected President of the Federation of Students in Chile (FECH) and attended The Congress of Students in Buenos Aires as a delegate. He helped found the Chilean literary group Los Diez in 1914 during one of the most important Chilean intellectual movements of the twentieth century. In 1949 he was awarded the National Prize for Literature. He began writing poetry with Flores de cardo, a book published in 1908, which broke the mold of metric rhyme and marked the introduction of free verse in his country. In 1912, La casa abandonada introduced prose poetry, breaking the tradition of versified poetry and founding poetic prose. In 1913, he published El llamado del mundo, which was followed in 1915 by the prose poem Los diez, el claustro, la barca. That same year, Los Pájaros Errantes emerged, which is reputedly his most accomplished lyrical work, utilizing Parnassianism and symbolism. His poetic creations continued with Las Copas in 1921, Karez y Roshan in 1921, and the dramatic poem Androvar in 1925. He was a deeply philosophical novelist and his work infused creative and poetic imagery with the features of the novels popular within the region at the time. In this genre, he debuted in 1914 with La reina de Rapa Nui, an exotic novel where, in the guise of a simple love story, elements of Easter Island folklore are presented. In 1920, he produced his most important and well-known work: Alsino, a story with a mythical and philosophically relevant plot, written in prose and full of poetic and symbolic language. It tells the story of a small peasant boy who dreams of emulating Icarus; he lept from a tree, and as a result of the rough landing, he grew a hump on his back from which wings extended, allowing him to fly just as he desired. The author called it a romantic poem. In 1924, he published Un juez rural, a realistic-folkloric novel that was, to some extent, autobiographical. It reflected the authors beliefs as to the meaning of justice, the dilemmas of those who manage it, and the extent of its consequences. As an essay writer in 1916, he wrote Ensayo Sobre Arquitectura y Poesía, a book in which he elaborates his architectural thought. Later, his relationship with architecture is described in A los Estudiantes de Arquitectura, published in 1919 in Juventud Nº 3 magazine, as well as Del Sacrificio y la Salvación de la Belleza, published in the 16th edition of the same magazine, and El arte obrero, la tradición y el porvenir, published in Diario La Nación on July 2, 1922. In 1924, after being asked by Arturo Alessandri, he wrote the essay Bases para un nuevo Gobierno y un Nuevo Parlamento, without any previous political experience. The military then wanted to declare themselves as co-authors, but was denied by Prado. In 1934, his book of sonnets was published, a genre some say he mastered. In 1935, he received the Premio Academia de Roma, granted by the Italian embassy. That year, he also received the Premio Municipal de Santiago. In 1949, he was given the Premio Nacional de Literatura. He was a member of the Academia Chilena de la Lengua in 1950, replacing Arturo Alessandri. However, he was not able to be inaugurated, since he died on January 31, 1952, due to a cerebral hemorrhage in his summer home in Vina del Mar. As a painter, having taken lessons with Pedro Lira, Prado devoted himself to the painting of Chilean landscapes and illustrated various publications of the time, including some of his own. In 1917 he received the Third Place Medal in Painting award at the Annual Exhibition of Fine Arts in Santiago. In 1918 he became a founding member of the National Society of Fine Arts created by Juan Francisco González. He held a showing at the Official Exhibition of Santiago in 1921, and that same year was named director of the Chilean National Museum of Fine Arts, a position which he held until 1923. In 1922 he held a showing at the Winter Exposition of the Artists’ Society of Chile in Santiago. As an architect he stressed his concern for the urban landscape, becoming a staunch critic of the planning of Santiago. While serving as director of the National Museum of Fine Arts, he directed repairs to the building and criticized the precarious conditions of its construction, which left it unfinished and with evident structural flaws only a decade after its opening. Within the museum, the Palacio Bruna stands out, an embassy and consulate of the United States. Prado represented Chile as a diplomat two times, first in 1925 for the celebration of the centennial of the Bolivian Declaration of Independence, and again in 1927 when he was appointed the Plenipotentiary Minister of Chile by Emiliano Figueroa in Colombia. He held this position until December 1928, and was awarded by Colombia with the Order of Boyaca, commander’s grade.
October 8, 1935
Hans Joachim Schädlich was born in 1935 in Reichenbach, and worked at the German Academy of Sciences in East Berlin before resettling in West Germany in 1977. Schädlich now lives in Berlin once again. He has received many accolades for his work, including the Heinrich Böll Prize, the Hans Sahl Prize, the Kleist Prize the Schiller Memorial Prize, the Lessing Prize, the Bremen Literary Award and the Joseph Breitbach Prize.
October 8, 1925
Andrei Donatovich Sinyavsky (8 October 1925, Moscow - 25 February 1997, Paris) was a Russian writer, dissident, gulag survivor, emigrant, Professor of Sorbonne University, magazine founder and publisher. He frequently wrote under the pseudonym (Abram Tertz). During a time of extreme censorship in the Soviet Union, Sinyavsky published his novels in the West under a pseudonym. The historical Abram Tertz was a Jewish gangster from Russia's past, Sinyavsky himself was not Jewish; his father, Donat Sinyavsky, was a Russian nobleman from Syzran, who turned Social Revolutionary and was arrested (after the revolution) several times as an ‘enemy of the people’. During his last stay in jail Donat Sinyavsky became ill, and, after his release, developed mental illness. Andrei Sinyavsky described his father's experiences in the novel ‘Goodnight!’ A protege of Boris Pasternak, Sinyavsky described the realities of Soviet life in short fiction stories. In 1965, he was arrested, along with fellow-writer and friend Yuli Daniel, and tried in the infamous Sinyavsky-Daniel show trial. On 14 February 1966, Sinyavsky was sentenced to seven years on charges of ‘anti-Soviet activity‘ for the opinions of his fictional characters. The affair was accompanied by harsh propaganda campaign in the Soviet media and was perceived as a sign of demise of the Khrushchev Thaw. As historian Fred Coleman writes, ‘Historians now have no difficulty pinpointing the birth of the modern Soviet dissident movement. It began in February 1966 with the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, two Russian writers who ridiculed the Communist regime in satires smuggled abroad and published under pen names. .Little did they realize at the time that they were starting a movement that would help end Communist rule.’ Sinyavsky was released in 1971 and allowed to emigrate in 1973 to France, where he was one of co-founders, together with his wife Maria Rozanova of the Russian-language almanac Sintaksis. He actively contributed to Radio Liberty. He died in 1997 in Fontenay-aux-Roses, near Paris. Sinyavsky was the catalyst for the formation of an important Russian-English translation team: Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear, who have translated a number of works by Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevski, Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, and Mikhail Bulgakov. Volokhonsky, who was born and raised in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), first visited the United States in the early 1970s and happened across Pevear's Hudson Review article about Sinyavsky. At the time, Pevear believed Sinyavsky was still in a Russian prison; Volokhonsky had just helped him immigrate to Paris. Pevear was surprised and pleased to be mistaken: ‘Larissa had just helped Sinyavsky leave Russia,’ Pevear recalled. ‘And she let me know that, while I'd said he was still in prison, he was actually in Paris. I was glad to know it.’.
October 8, 1938
Eduard Vladimirovich Topol (born 8 October 1938) is a Russian novelist. Born in Baku, Topol spent his teenage years finishing local school in Baku and graduated from Azerbaijan State Economic University. He also did his military service in Estonia. He worked as journalist for newspapers such as Bakinskiy Rabochiy and Komsomolskaya Pravda and wrote the screenplays for seven movies, of which two were banned due to censorship under the Soviet government. In 1978 he emigrated to USA, New York City, and lived for short periods in Boston, Toronto and Miami. He was a contributor to the "White book" of the "Anti-Zionist committee of the Soviet society", the propaganda periodical published in the USSR in the late 1970s - mid 1980s.
October 9, 1898
Tawfiq al-Hakim or Tawfik el-Hakim (October 9, 1898 – July 26, 1987) was a prominent Egyptian writer. He is one of the pioneers of the Arabic novel and drama. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, the son of an Egyptian wealthy judge and a Turkish mother. The triumphs and failures that are represented by the reception of his enormous output of plays are emblematic of the issues that have confronted the Egyptian drama genre as it has endeavored to adapt its complex modes of communication to Egyptian society.
October 9, 1893
Mário Raul de Morais Andrade (October 9, 1893 – February 25, 1945) was a Brazilian poet, novelist, musicologist, art historian and critic, and photographer. One of the founders of Brazilian modernism, he virtually created modern Brazilian poetry with the publication of his Paulicéia Desvairada (Hallucinated City) in 1922. He has had an enormous influence on modern Brazilian literature, and as a scholar and essayist—he was a pioneer of the field of ethnomusicology—his influence has reached far beyond Brazil. Andrade was the central figure in the avant-garde movement of São Paulo for twenty years. Trained as a musician and best known as a poet and novelist, Andrade was personally involved in virtually every discipline that was connected with São Paulo modernism, and became Brazil's national polymath. His photography and essays on a wide variety of subjects, from history to literature and music, were widely published. He was the driving force behind the Week of Modern Art, the 1922 event that reshaped both literature and the visual arts in Brazil, and a member of the avant-garde ‘Group of Five.’ The ideas behind the Week were further explored in the preface to his poetry collection Pauliceia Desvairada, and in the poems themselves. After working as a music professor and newspaper columnist he published his great novel, Macunaíma, in 1928. Work on Brazilian folk music, poetry, and other concerns followed unevenly, often interrupted by Andrade's shifting relationship with the Brazilian government. At the end of his life, he became the founding director of São Paulo's Department of Culture, formalizing a role he had long held as the catalyst of the city's—and the nation's—entry into artistic modernity.
October 9, 1892
Ivo Andric (October 9, 1892 – March 13, 1975) was a novelist, short story writer, and the 1961 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature from Yugoslavia (he was born in Bosnia and Herzegovina, that in the time of his biggest popularity was a part of Yugoslavia). His novels The Bridge on the Drina and Chronicles of Travnik / The Days of the Consuls dealt with life in Bosnia under the Ottoman Empire. Andric was born on October 9, 1892 of Croat parentage in the village of Dolac near Travnik, Bosnia and Herzegovina, then part of the Ottoman Empire, under occupation by Austria-Hungary. Originally named Ivan, he became known by the diminutive Ivo. When Andric was two years old, his father died. Because his mother was too poor to support him, he was raised by his mother’s family in the eastern Bosnian town of Višegrad on the river Drina. There he saw the Ottoman Bridge, later made famous in the novel The Bridge on the Drina. Andric attended the Jesuit gymnasium in Travnik, followed by Sarajevo’s gymnasium and later the universities in Zagreb, Vienna, Krakow and Graz. Because of his political activities, Andric was imprisoned by the Austrian government during World War I (first in Maribor and later in the Doboj detention camp) alongside civilian Serbs and pro-Yugoslavs. Under the newly-formed Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later the Kingdom of Yugoslavia) Andric became a civil servant, first in the Ministry of Faiths and then the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he pursued a successful diplomatic career, as Deputy Foreign Minister and later Ambassador to Germany. Ivo greatly opposed the movement of Stjepan Radic, the president of the Croatian Peasant Party, at occasions calling the people that support him as fools that follow the footsteps of a blind dog. His ambassadorship ended in 1941 after the German invasion of Yugoslavia. During World War II, Andric lived quietly in Belgrade, completing the three of his most famous novels which were published in 1945, including The Bridge on the Drina. After the war, Andric held a number of ceremonial posts in the new Communist government of Yugoslavia, including that of the member of the presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1961, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature ‘for the epic force with which he has traced themes and depicted human destinies drawn from the history of his country.’ He donated all the prize money for the improvement of libraries in Bosnia & Herzegovina. Following the death of his wife in 1968, he began reducing his public activities. As time went by, he became increasingly ill and eventually died on March 13, 1975, in Belgrade (then Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and today Serbia).
October 9, 1949
Ángeles Mastretta (born October 9, 1949, in Puebla) is a Mexican author and journalist. She is well known for creating inspirational female characters and fictional pieces that reflect the social and political realities of Mexico in her life. Mastretta began writing as a journalist for a Mexican magazine, Siete and an afternoon newspaper, Ovaciones. She claims that her father – a journalist in her youth – inspired her to be a writer. In 1974, she received a scholarship from the Mexican Writers' Center. She attended the center and was able to work on her writing abilities along with other authors such as Juan Rulfo, Salvador Elizondo, and Francisco Monterde. After a year of working at the Mexican Writers' Center, a collection of Mastretta's poetry entitled La pájara pinta (The Colorful Bird) was published. Mastretta really wanted to focus on a novel that she had been thinking about for years. She finally got her chance to work on this novel when an editor offered to sponsor Mastretta on a six-month leave of absence, allowing her to focus solely on writing. She took the offer and ended up embarking on a sabbatical to complete Arráncame la vida (Tear This Heart Out). The novel (published in 1985) was an immediate success, and earned her the Mazatlán Prize for Literature for Best Book of the Year. Arráncame la vida was a critical and popular success in Mexico and abroad. As a result, Mastretta was able to focus more on her fiction-writing passion. The film of the same name and based upon the novel was released in September 2008. Mastretta won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for her 1996 novel, Mal de Amores (Lovesick). When her infant daughter unexpectedly fell ill, Mastretta sat next to her child in the hospital and began to tell stories of interesting and different women in her family who were important to her in critical moments of her life. These stories of women who 'decided their own destinies' became the inspiration for Mujeres de ojos grandes (Women with Big Eyes). The publication — autobiographical narratives based on each of the women – was intended to preserve the stories for posterity.
October 9, 1939
James Howe McClure (October 9, 1939, Johannesburg, South Africa - June 17, 2006, Oxford, England) was a British author and journalist best known for his Kramer and Zondi mysteries set in South Africa.
October 9, 1921
Tadeusz Rózewicz (born 9 October 1921) is a Polish poet, dramatist and writer. Rózewicz belongs to the first generation of Polish writers born after Poland regained its independence in 1918 following the century of foreign partitions. He was born in Radomsko near Lódz. His first poems were published in 1938. During the Second World War, like his brother Janusz (also a poet), he was a soldier of the Polish underground Home Army. His brother was executed by Gestapo in 1944. Tadeusz survived the war, finished high-school and enrolled at the Jagiellonian University of Krakow, but in late 1940s moved to Wroclaw where he lived for the next thirty years. By the time of his literary debut as highly innovative playwright in 1960 with The Card Index (Kartoteka), he was already the author of fifteen acclaimed volumes of poetry published since 1944. He had written over a dozen plays and several screenplays. The eruption of dramaturgical energy was also accompanied by major volumes of poetry and prose. Rózewicz is considered one of Poland's best postwar poets and most innovative playwrights. Some of his best known plays other than The Card Index include, The Interrupted Act (Akt przerywany, 1970), Birth Certificate (Swiadectwo urodzenia, screenplay to an award-winning film by the same tite, 1961), Left Home (Wyszedl z domu, 1965), and The White Wedding (Biale malzenstwo, 1975). His New Poems collection was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2008.
October 9, 1906
Leopold Sedar Senghor was born in 1906 in Joal, a small village of the Sine-Saloum region on the Atlantic coast, and was educated in France. From 1960 to 1981 he was president of the Republic of Senegal, and in 1983 he became the first African and the only black intellectual elected to the French Academy. MELVIN DIXON is Professor of English at the Graduate Center and Queens College, City University of New York. He is the author of VANISHING ROOMS, TROUBLE THE WATER, CHANGE OF TERRITORY, and RIDE OUT THE WILDERNESS: GEOGRAPHY AND IDENTITY IN AFRO-AMERICAN LITERATURE. In 1985-86 Dixon served as Fulbright Professor of American Civilization at the University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar, Senegal.
October 9, 1948
Lynne Withey has taught history at the University of Iowa, Boston University, and the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of "Dearest Friend: A Life of Abigail Adams.
October 9, 1920
Jens Ingvald Bjørneboe (9 October 1920 – 9 May 1976) was a Norwegian writer whose work spanned a number of literary formats. He was also a painter and a Waldorf school teacher. Bjørneboe was a harsh and eloquent critic of Norwegian society and Western civilization on the whole. He led a turbulent life and his uncompromising opinions cost him both an obscenity conviction as well as long periods of heavy drinking and bouts of depression, which in the end led to his suicide. Jens Bjørneboe's first published work was Poems (Dikt) in 1951. He is widely considered to be one of Norway's most important post-war authors. Bjørneboe identified himself, among other self-definitions, as an anarcho-nihilist. During the Norwegian language struggle, Bjørneboe was a notable proponent of the Riksmål language, together with his equally famous cousin André Bjerke.
October 9, 1876
SOL T. PLAATJE, (October 9, 1876, Boshof, Free State, South Africa - June 19, 1932, Soweto, South Africa) born in 1876, was both writer and politician. He was a founder of the South African Native National Congress and wrote much including NATIVE LIFE IN SOUTH AFRICA, a slashing attack on the Natives Land Act. His Boer War Diary about the siege of Mafeking has been recently published. He spent some time in the United States, Canada and Britain making contact with black leaders. He died in 1932.
October 9, 1888
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (9 October 1888 – 15 March 1938) was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary, Soviet politician and prolific author on revolutionary theory. As a young man, he spent six years in exile, working closely with fellow exiles Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. After the revolution of February 1917, he returned to Moscow, where his Bolshevik credentials earned him a high rank in the party, and after the October Revolution, he became editor of the party newspaper Pravda. Within the Bolshevik Party, Bukharin was initially a Left Communist, but his gradual move from the left to the right from 1921, as a strong supporter and defender of the New Economic Policy (NEP), eventually saw him lead the Right Opposition. By late 1924, this had positioned Bukharin favourably as Joseph Stalin's chief ally, with Bukharin soon elaborating Stalin's new theory and policy of Socialism in One Country. Together, Bukharin and Stalin ousted Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev from the party at the XVth Communist Party Congress in December 1927. From 1926 to 1929, Bukharin enjoyed great power as General Secretary of Comintern's executive committee. But Stalin’s decision to proceed with collectivisation drove the two men apart, and Bukharin was expelled from the Politburo in 1929. When the Great Purge began in 1936, Stalin looked for any pretext to liquidate his former allies and rivals for power, and some of Bukharin's letters, conversations and tapped phone calls indicated disloyalty. Arrested in February 1937, he was charged with conspiring to overthrow the Soviet state and executed in March 1938, after a show trial that alienated many Western communist sympathisers.
October 9, 1948
CIARAN CARSON was born in Belfast in 1948, where he is Professor of Poetry at Queen's University. He is the author of nine collections of poems, including FIRST LANGUAGE, which won the T S. Eliot Prize. He has written four prose books, including SHAMROCK TEA, a novel, which was long-listed for the 2001 Booker Prize. His translation of Dante's INFERNO was awarded the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. In 2003, he was made an honorary member of the Irish Translators' and Interpreters' Association. He lives in Belfast.
October 9, 1935
Celia Correas de Zapata (born 9 October 1935 in Mendoza, Argentina) is an academic, poet, and author, and a leading scholar of the history of Latin American women writers. She is a professor of literature at San Jose State University, and was director of the 1976 Conference of Inter-American Women Writers, one of the earliest U.S. conferences in this field. Born in Argentina, she now resides in California. She edited the anthology Short Stories by Latin America Women: The Magic and the Real with introduction by Isabel Allende.
October 9, 1933
Martin Gottfried (October 9, 1933 – March 6, 2014) was an American critic, columnist and author. He was born in Brooklyn, New York.
October 9, 1918
Everette Howard Hunt Jr. (October 9, 1918, Hamburg, NY - January 23, 2007, Miami, FL), better known as E. Howard Hunt, was an American intelligence officer and published author of 73 books. From 1949 to 1970, Hunt served as an officer in the Central Intelligence Agency.
October 9, 1887
llés Kaczér was a Hungarian author and journalist noted for writing on a range of Jewish themes from biblical times to religious family conflict. Kaczér (born October 9, 1887; died March 21, 1980) was born Ignatius Stephen Stern, in the town of Szatmár, Hungary. He began his career in provincial journalism before starting to write for Budapest newspapers. Later, into his carerer, he made his name as a novelist and playwright, and his dramas enjoyed considerable success in Hungary during the 1920s. By the 1920's, however, as a result of the revolution of 1918–19, he left the country and went to live first in Vienna and later in Berlin, Romania and Czechoslovakia. In 1938 he moved to London but in 1959, at which time he was already established as a contributor of stories and essays to the Hungarian-language newspaper Uj Kelet, Kaczer made his home in Israel. Kac?er was noted for his powerful treatment of Jewish themes, ranging from biblical times to the era of social and religious family conflict in the 19th and 20th centuries. His works include the novel Khafrit, az egyiptomi asszony (1916); the play Megjött a Messiás (1921); Ikongo nem hal meg (1936); Fear Not, My Servant Jacob (1947); and The Siege of Jericho (1949), originally published in London as The Siege, 2 vols; and Három a csillag (1956).
October 9, 1920
Yusef Abdul Lateef (born William Emanuel Huddleston; October 9, 1920 – December 23, 2013) was an American jazz multi-instrumentalist, composer and prominent figure among the Ahmadiyya Community in America, in 1950. Although Lateef's main instruments were the tenor saxophone and flute, he also played oboe and bassoon, both rare in jazz, and also used a number of non-western instruments such as the bamboo flute, shanai, shofar, xun, arghul and koto. He is known for having been an innovator in the blending of jazz with "Eastern" music. Peter Keepnews, in his New York Times obituary of Lateef, wrote that the musician "played world music before world music had a name." Lateef wrote and published a number of books including two novellas entitled A Night in the Garden of Love and Another Avenue, the short story collections Spheres and Rain Shapes, also his autobiography, The Gentle Giant, written in collaboration with Herb Boyd. Along with his record label YAL Records, Lateef owned Fana Music, a music publishing company. Lateef published his own work through Fana, which includes Yusef Lateef's Flute Book of the Blues and many of his own orchestral compositions.
October 9, 1951
VICTOR MONTEJO, a Jakaltek Maya born in 1952 in rural Guatemala, was educated in Maryknoll schools in Guatemala and taught primary school in Jakaltenango. His brother was killed by soldiers in 1981, and he himself was forced to flee in 1982 when his name appeared on a death squad list. He is widely recognized in Guatemala as a poet and folklorist. Currently he is a professor of Anthropology teaching in the U.S.
October 9, 1951
María Negroni was born in Rosario, Argentina. She has published eleven books of poetry, three collections of essays, and two novels, as well as works in translation from French and English
October 9, 1946
Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá (born October 9, 1946) is a Puerto Rican essayist and novelist. Rodríguez Juliá was born in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico. In 1974, he published the first of his eight novels, La renuncia del héroe Baltasar. In 1986 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Literature. Since 1999 he has been a member of the Academia Puertorriqueña de la Lengua Española. In June 2011, he lectured at the University of Guadalajara's "Julio Cortázar" Center for the Study of American Literature. In April 2012 he gave the Raimundo Lira Lecture at Harvard University.
October 9, 1870
Thomas W. Talley (October 9, 1870, Shelbyville, TN - July 14, 1952) collected these tales during the 1920s from childhood memories of stories told during the post—Civil War era by friends and family in rural Middle Tennessee. A chemistry professor at Fisk University in Nashville, Talley was a twentieth-century pioneer in African-American folklore who used his keen insight and imagination to confront the complex and little-known wellsprings of his own cultural background. The result is a dynamic representation of an African-American tradition. The Editors: Charles K. Wolfe and Laura C. Jarmon are both professors of English at Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro.
October 9, 1912
Teodoro Andal Agoncillo (October 9, 1912 – January 14, 1985) was a 20th-century Filipino historian. He and his contemporary Renato Constantino were among the first Filipino historians renowned for promoting a distinctly nationalist point of view of Filipino history (nationalist historiography). He was also an essayist and a poet. He was named National Scientist of the Philippines in 1985 for his distinguished contributions in the field of history. Agoncillo was also among the few academics who held the rank of University Professor, an academic rank given to outstanding faculty members with specialization in more than one of the traditional academic domains (Science & Technology; Social Sciences; and Arts & Humanities), at the University of the Philippines Diliman. Born in Lemery, Batangas to Pedro Agoncillo and Feliza Andal, Agoncillo obtained a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of the Philippines in 1934 and a master's degree in the arts from the same university the following year. He earned his living as a linguistic assistant at the Institute of National Language and as an instructor at the Far Eastern University and the Manuel L. Quezon University. In 1956, he published his seminal work, Revolt of the Masses: The Story of Bonifacio and the Katipunan, a history of the 1896 Katipunan-led revolt against Spanish rule and its leader, Andres Bonifacio. He garnered acclaim for this book, as well as criticisms from more conservative historians discomfited by the work's nationalist bent. In 1958, Agoncillo was invited to join the faculty of the Department of History of his alma mater, the University of the Philippines. He remained with the university until his retirement in 1977, chairing the Department of History from 1963 to 1969. Philippine President Diosdado Macapagal named Agoncillo as a member of the National Historical Institute in 1963. He served in this capacity until his death in 1985. Agoncillo's History of the Filipino People, first published in 1960, remains a popular standard textbook in many Filipino universities, as are many of Agoncillo's other works. This is despite Agoncillo's controversial tone and for his perceived leftist bent. Gregorio Zaide, Teodoro Agoncillo, Reynaldo Ileto and Renato Constantino stand as the most prominent 20th-century Filipino historians to emerge during the post-war period. Agoncillo is related to Don Felipe Agoncillo, the Filipino diplomat who represented the Philippines in the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Paris 1898, Dona Marcela Agoncillo, the principal seamstress of the Philippine flag and to Rodolfo Perucho Andal, former Government Service Insurance System General Manager and Social Security System Chairman. Agoncillo was chair of the Department of History of the University of the Philippines Diliman at the same time that his cousin, humanitarian lawyer, General Abelardo Perucho Andal, was chair of the Department of Military Science and Tactics.
October 10, 1943
Fredrick Barthelme (born October 10, 1943) is an American novelist and short story author, well known as one of the seminal writers of minimalist fiction. Alongside his personal publishing history, his position as Director of The Center For Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi and Editor of the nationally prominent literary journal Mississippi Review (1977 - 2010) have placed him at the forefront of the contemporary American literary scene. He is currently the editor of New World Writing (formerly Blip Magazine).
October 10, 1763
Xavier de Maistre (10 October 1763 – 12 June 1852) of Savoy (then part of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia), lived largely as a military man, but is known as a French writer. The younger brother of noted philosopher and counter-revolutionary Joseph de Maistre, Xavier was born to an aristocratic family at Chambéry in October 1763. He served when young in the army of Piedmont-Sardinia, and in 1790 wrote his fantasy, Voyage autour de ma chambre (‘Voyage Around My Room,’ published 1794) when he was under arrest in Turin as the consequence of a duel. Xavier shared the political sympathies of his brother Joseph, and after a French revolutionary army annexed Savoy to France in 1792, he left the service, and eventually took a commission in the Russian army. He served under Alexander Suvorov in his victorious Austro-Russian campaign and accompanied the marshal to Russia in 1796. By then, Suvorov's patron Catherine II of Russia had died, and the new monarch Paul I dismissed the victorious general (partly on account of the massacre of 20,000 Poles after he conquered Warsaw). Xavier de Maistre shared the disgrace of his general, and supported himself for some time in St. Petersburg by miniature painting, particularly landscapes. In 1803, Joseph de Maistre was appointed as Piedmont-Sardinia's ambassador to the court of Alexander I, Tsar of Russia. On his brother's arrival in St. Petersburg, Xavier de Maistre was introduced to the Minister of the Navy, and was appointed to several posts including director of the Library, and of the Museum of Admiralty. He also joined active service, and was wounded in the Caucasus, attaining the rank of major-general. In 1812 he married a Russian lady, related to the Tsars, Mrs. Zagriatsky. He remained in Russia even after the overthrow of Napoleon and the consequent restoration of the Piedmontese dynasty. His Voyage autour de ma chambre (1794), a parody set in the tradition of the grand travel narrative, is an autobiographical account of how a young official, imprisoned in his room for six weeks, looks at the furniture, engravings, etc., as if they were scenes from a voyage in a strange land. He praises this voyage because it does not cost anything, for this reason it is strongly recommended to the poor, the infirm, and the lazy. His room is a long square, and the perimeter is thirty-six paces. ‘When I travel through my room,’ he writes, ‘I rarely follow a straight line: I go from the table towards a picture hanging in a corner; from there, I set out obliquely towards the door; but even though, when I begin, it really is my intention to go there, if I happen to meet my armchair en route, I don’t think twice about it, and settle down in it without further ado.’ Later, proceeding North, he encounters his bed, and in this way he lightheartedly continues his ‘Voyage’. This work is remarkable for its play with the reader's imagination, along the lines of Laurence Sterne, whom Xavier admired. Xavier did not think much of Voyage, but his brother Joseph had it published. Most of his other works are of modest dimensions; these include - Le Lépreux de la Cité d'Aoste (‘The Leper from Aoste,’ 1811), a touching humane story in a simple style, involving a dialogue between a leper who reminisces with a soldier about his lost youth and his sequestered life in a tower with a view of the Alps; Les Prisonniers du Caucase, (‘The Prisoners of the Caucasus,’ 1825) a powerful sketch of Russian character; La Jeune Sibérienne, (‘The Young Siberian,’ 1825); and Expédition Nocturne Autour de ma Chambre (‘Night Voyage Around My Room,’ 1825), a sequel to Voyage Autour de ma Chambre. In 1839, after the publication of a French edition of La Jeune Siebérienne (1825) Maistre went on a long journey to Paris and Savoy. He was surprised to find himself well known in literary circles. Alphonse de Lamartine dedicated a poem to him (Retour, 1826) praising his genius: ‘the future sons will say [...] it is your heart, which through your mellifluous writings you have passed to us’. He met Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who has left some pleasant reminiscences of him. For a time, he lived at Naples, but eventually he returned to St. Petersburg and died there in 1852.
October 10, 1942
James Edward Marshall (October 10, 1942 – October 13, 1992) was an American illustrator and writer of children's books, probably best known for the George and Martha series of picture books (1972–1988). He illustrated books exclusively as James Marshall; when he created both text and illustrations he sometimes wrote as Edward Marshall. In 2007 the U.S. professional librarians posthumously awarded him the biennial Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal for ‘substantial and lasting contribution’ to American children's literature. Marshall was born in San Antonio, Texas, where he grew up on his family's farm. His father worked on the railroad and was a band member in the 1930s. His mother sang in the local church choir. The family later moved to Beaumont, Texas. Marshall said: ‘Beaumont is deep south and swampy and I hated it. I knew I would die if I stayed there so I diligently studied the viola, and eventually won a scholarship to the New England Conservatory in Boston.’ He entered the New England Conservatory of Music but injured his hand, ending his music career. He returned to Texas, where he attended San Antonio College, and later transferred to Southern Connecticut State University where he received degrees in French and history. He lived between an apartment in the Chelsea district of New York City and a home in Mansfield Hollow, Connecticut. It is said that he discovered his vocation on a 1971 summer afternoon, lying in a hammock and drawing. His mother was watching Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and the main characters, George and Martha, ultimately became characters in one of his children's books (as two hippopotami). Marshall continued creating books for children until his untimely death in 1992 of a brain tumor. In 1998, George and Martha became the stars of an eponymous eponymous animated TV show. Marshall was a friend of Maurice Sendak, who called him the ‘last in the line’ of children's writers for whom children's books were a cottage industry. Sendak said that Marshall was ‘uncommercial to a fault’ and, as a consequence, was little recognized by the awards committees. (As illustrator of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Marshall was a runner-up for the Caldecott Medal in 1989; the ‘Caldecott Honor Books’ may display silver rather than gold seals. He won a University of Mississippi Silver Medallion in 1992.) Sendak said that in Marshall you got ‘the whole man’, who ‘scolded, gossiped, bitterly reproached, but always loved and forgave’ and ‘made me laugh until I cried.’ In introduction to the collected George and Martha, Sendak called him the ‘last of a long line of masters’ including Randolph Caldecott, Jean de Brunhoff, Edward Ardizzone, and Tomi Ungerer. Beside the lovable hippopotami George and Martha, James Marshall created dozens of other uniquely appealing characters. He is well known for his Fox series (which he wrote as ‘Edward Marshall’), as well as the Miss Nelson books (or Miss Viola Swamp, written by Harry Allard), The Stupids (written by Allard), the Cut-ups, and many more. James Marshall had the uncanny ability to elicit wild delight from readers with relatively little text and simple drawings. With only two minute dots for eyes, his illustrated characters are able to express a wide range of emotion, and produce howls of laughter from both children and adults.
October 10, 1906
R. K. Narayan (10 October 1906 – 13 May 2001), full name Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami, was an Indian writer, best known for his works set in the fictional South Indian town of Malgudi. He is one of three leading figures of early Indian literature in English (alongside Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao), and is credited with bringing the genre to the rest of the world. Narayan broke through with the help of his mentor and friend, Graham Greene, who was instrumental in getting publishers for Narayan’s first four books, including the semi-autobiographical trilogy of Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts and The English Teacher. Narayan’s works also include The Financial Expert, hailed as one of the most original works of 1951, and Sahitya Akademi Award winner The Guide, which was adapted for film and for Broadway. The setting for most of Narayan's stories is the fictional town of Malgudi, first introduced in Swami and Friends. His narratives highlight social context and provide a feel for his characters through everyday life. He has been compared to William Faulkner, who also created a fictional town that stood for reality, brought out the humour and energy of ordinary life, and displayed compassionate humanism in his writing. Narayan's short story writing style has been compared to that of Guy de Maupassant, as they both have an ability to compress the narrative without losing out on elements of the story. Narayan has also come in for criticism for being too simple in his prose and diction. In a writing career that spanned over sixty years, Narayan received many awards and honours. These include the AC Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature and the Padma Vibhushan, India's second-highest civilian award. He was also nominated to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of India's parliament. Novelist Graham Greene said of Narayan, ‘Since the death of Evelyn Waugh, Narayan is the novelist I most admire in the English language.’
October 10, 1908
Mercè Rodoreda i Gurguí (October 10, 1908 – April 13, 1983) was a Catalan novelist in Catalan language. She is considered by many to be the most important Catalan novelist of the postwar period. Her novel La plaça del diamant ('The diamond square', translated as 'The Time of the Doves', 1962) has become the most acclaimed Catalan novel of all time and since the year it was published for the first time, it has been translated into over 30 languages. It is also considered by many to be one of the best novels published in Spain after the Spanish Civil War. She was born at 340 carrer de Balmes, Barcelona, in 1908. Her parents were Andreu Rodoreda, from Terrassa and Montserrat Gurguí, from Maresme. In 1928, just 20 years old, she married her uncle Joan Gurguí, 14 years her senior, and in 1929 she had her only child, Jordi. She began her writing career with short stories in magazines, as an escape from her unhappy marriage. She then wrote psychological novels, including Aloma which won the Crexells Prize, but even with the success this novel enjoyed, Rodoreda decided to remake and republish it some years later since she was not fully satisfied with this period of her life and her works at that time. At the start of the Spanish Civil War, she worked for the autonomous Government of Catalonia. She was exiled in France and later Switzerland, where in 1957 she broke her silence with the publication of her book Twenty-Two short stories, which earned her the Víctor Català Prize. With Camelia Street (El Carrer de les Camèlies) (1966) she won several prizes. In the 1970s, she returned to Romanyà de la Selva in Catalonia and finished the novel Mirall trencat (Broken Mirror) in 1974. Amongst other works came Viatges i flors (Travels and flowers) and Quanta, quanta guerra (How much War) in 1980, which was also the year in which she won the Premi d'Honor de les Lletres Catalanes. During the last period of her lifetime, her works developed from her usual psychologic style to become more akin to symbolism in its more cryptic form. In 1998 a literature prize was instituted in her name: the Mercè Rodoreda prize for short stories and narratives. She was made a Member of Honour of the Association of Writers in Catalan Language (Associació d'Escriptors en Llengua Catalana). The library in Platja d'Aro is named in her honor. She died in Girona of liver cancer, and was interred in the cemetery of Romanyà.
October 10, 1913
Claude Simon (10 October 1913 – 6 July 2005) was a French novelist born in Tananarive (now Antananarivo), Madagascar. Captured by the Nazis while fighting in World War II, he escaped to join the French Resistance. He completed his first novel during the war. His works, mixing narration and stream of consciousness in densely constructed prose, are representative of the nouveau roman (‘new novel’), or French antinovel, that emerged in the 1950s. Perhaps most important is the cycle comprising The Grass (1958), The Flanders Road (1960), The Palace (1962), and History (1967), with its recurring characters and events. His other novels include The Wind (1957), Triptych (1973), The Acacia (1989), and The Trolley (2001). He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1985.
October 10, 1904
Andrea Giovene (1904 - 1995 ) was an Italian writer. He was born in Naples in 1904, part of the family of the dukes of Girasole, one of the most noble and ancient Neapolitan dynasties. He left his home while still very young and traveled the world, working as a shop assistant, then a dance teacher in Milan, a cavalry officer to Ferrara, and a bleacher in Paris. Giovene later pursued his interest as a painter, poet, translator, journalist, and literary man. He founded and directed the magazine Vesuvio (1928-29). He published two works of fiction: Viaggio (Ricciardi, 1936) and Incanto (Ricciardi, 1940). During the Second World War he was a cavalry captain in Greece, before becoming a prisoner in a concentration camp in Poland and Germany (1941-45), where he witnessed the fall of Berlin. After the war, he worked in the post-war studies commission of the Ministry (1946), later becoming deputy editor of the newspaper Il Mattino d'Italia from 1950 to 1952. He financed the archaeological excavations of the Greek necropolis of Palinuro, was editor-in-chief of the Neapolitan section of Tempo, an antique dealer, an expert in underwater fishing, and a bibliophile. He lived the last few years of his life in London with his son Lorenzo, a lawyer, and also partly in Italy and Germany. He died in 1995 in Sant'Agata de 'Goti.
October 10, 1910
BLYDEN JACKSON, professor emeritus of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of THE WAITING YEARS: ESSAYS ON AMERICAN NEGRO LITERATURE (LSU Press). He is also one of the senior editors of THE HISTORY OF SOUTHERN LITERATURE (LSU Press).
October 10, 1930
Akiyuki Nosaka (born October 10, 1930) is a Japanese novelist, singer, lyricist, and former member of the House of Councillors. As a broadcasting writer he uses the name Yukio Aki and his alias as a chanson singer is Claude Nosaka. His novel, The Pornographers, was translated into English by Michael Gallagher and published in 1968. It was also filmed as The Pornographers by Shohei Imamura.
October 10, 1892
Samuel Putnam (October 10, 1892, Rossville, IL - January 15, 1950, Lambertville, NJ) was born in Rossville, Illinois in 1892. Educated at the University of Chicago and the Sorbonne, he spent the 1920's in Paris, where he edited and contributed to various magazines. Among the fruits of this period of expatriation were biographies of Rabelais and Marguerite of Navarre, his EUROPEAN CARAVAN, and — published in 1947 — PARIS WAS OUR MISTRESS. Returning to the United States, Mr. Putnam began his extraordinary career as a translator: in the last two decades he has published nearly thirty book and play translations from the French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. Among the European writers he has rendered into English are Aretino, Rabelais, Pirandello, Cocteau, Mauriac, Duhamel, Delteil, and Silone. It was in Europe that he first became particularly interested in the Portuguese language and culture. Since the early 1930's he has made a specialty of Brazilian literature. Since 1935 he has been editor of the Brazilian Literature section of the HANDBOOK OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, a position that requires him to read each year everything of literary importance published in Brazil. He has translated ‘the two most difficult books in the Portuguese language’: Euclides da Cunha's OS SERTOES (REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS) and Gilberto Freyre's CASA-GRANDE & SENZALA (THE MASTERS AND THE SLAVES), as well as Jorge Amado's remarkable novel, TERRAS DO SEM FIM (THE VIOLENT LAND). In 1946 the Cultural Relations Division of the a State Department sent Mr. Putnam to Brazil as an exchange professor. His journey was something of a triumphal tour, and as a result of it he was made a corresponding member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. Shortly after his return to the United States he was awarded the Pandia Calogeras Prize for Literature. In 1947, too, the Brazilian government made him an officer of the Order of the Southern Cross.
October 10, 1941
Kenule 'Ken' Beeson Saro Wiwa (10 October 1941 – 10 November 1995) was a Nigerian writer, television producer, environmental activist, and winner of the Right Livelihood Award and the Goldman Environmental Prize. Saro-Wiwa was a member of the Ogoni people, an ethnic minority in Nigeria whose homeland, Ogoniland, in the Niger Delta has been targeted for crude oil extraction since the 1950s and which has suffered extreme environmental damage from decades of indiscriminate petroleum waste dumping. Initially as spokesperson, and then as president, of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), Saro-Wiwa led a nonviolent campaign against environmental degradation of the land and waters of Ogoniland by the operations of the multinational petroleum industry, especially the Royal Dutch Shell company. He was also an outspoken critic of the Nigerian government, which he viewed as reluctant to enforce environmental regulations on the foreign petroleum companies operating in the area. At the peak of his non-violent campaign, he was tried by a special military tribunal for allegedly masterminding the gruesome murder of Ogoni chiefs at a pro-government meeting, and hanged in 1995 by the military dictatorship of General Sani Abacha. His execution provoked international outrage and resulted in Nigeria's suspension from the Commonwealth of Nations for over three years.
October 10, 1938
Lily Tuck is the author of four novels, including The NEWS FROM PARAGUAY, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, and Siam, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, as well as a collection of stories. She divides her time among New York, an island in Maine, and Paris.
October 10, 1921
Andrea Zanzotto (10 October 1921 – 18 October 2011) is widely considered Italy’s most influential of his age. Zanzotto is the author of more than twenty books of poems and collections of prose. Ruth Feldman lives in Cambridge; her poetry has been published in many leading literary magazines. Brian Swann is Assistant Professor in the Humanities Division of The Cooper Union in New York City and has published poetry, stories, and criticism in many journals. Together, they edited and translated The Collected Poems of Lucio Piccolo.
October 10, 1968
MARK BOULD teaches film and literature at the University of the West of England. He is the author of Film Noir: From Berlin to Sin City (2005) and The Cinema of John Sayles (2008), and coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (2009). CHINA MIÉVILLE is an independent researcher and novelist. He won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Perdido Street Station (2000) and Iron Council (2004), the British Fantasy Award for The Scar (2002), and the Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book for Un Lun Dun (2007).
October 11, 1925
Elmore Leonard has written more than forty books during his highly successful writing career, including the bestsellers ROAD DOGS, UP IN HONEY'S ROOM, THE HOT KID, MR. PARADISE, and TISHOMINGO BLUEs, and the critically acclaimed collection of short stories WHEN THE WOMEN COME OUT TO DANCE. Many of his books have been made into movies, including GET SHORTY, OUT OF SIGHT, and BE COOL. Justified, the new hit series from FX, is based on Leonard's character Raylan Givens, who appears in RIDING THE RAP, PRONTO, and the story ‘Fire in the Hole.’ Leonard is the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN USA and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He lives with his wife, Christine, in Bloomfield Village, Michigan.
October 11, 1925
Florida writer Gil Brewer (1922-1983) was the author of dozens of wonderfully sleazy sex/crime adventure novels of the 1950's and 60's, including Backwoods Teaser and Nude on Thin Ice; some of them starring private eye Lee Baron (Wild) or the brothers Sam and Tate Morgan (The Bitch). Gil Brewer, who had not previously published any novels, began to write for Gold Medal Paperbacks in 1950-51. Brewer wrote some 30 novels between 1951 and the late 60s – very often involving an ordinary man who becomes involved with, and is often corrupted and destroyed by, an evil or designing woman. His style is simple and direct, with sharp dialogue, often achieving considerable intensity. Brewer was one of the many writers who ghost wrote under the Ellery Queen byline as well. Brewer also was known as Eric Fitzgerald, Bailey Morgan, and Elaine Evans.
October 11, 1949
Anthony Malcolm Daniels (born 11 October 1949), who generally uses the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, is an English writer and retired prison doctor and psychiatrist. He worked in a number of Sub-Saharan African countries as well as in the east end of London. Before his retirement in 2005, he worked in City Hospital, Birmingham and Winson Green Prison in inner-city Birmingham, England. Daniels is a contributing editor to City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow. In addition to City Journal, his work has appeared in The British Medical Journal, The Times, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Salisbury Review, National Review, and Axess magasin. He is the author of a number of books, including Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, Our Culture, What's Left of It, and Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality. In his writing, Daniels frequently argues that the socially liberal and progressive views prevalent within Western intellectual circles minimise the responsibility of individuals for their own actions and undermine traditional mores, contributing to the formation within prosperous countries of an underclass afflicted by endemic violence, criminality, sexually transmitted diseases, welfare dependency, and drug abuse. Much of Dalrymple's writing is based on his experience of working with criminals and the mentally ill. Daniels has been described as a pessimist. In 2010, Daniel Hannan wrote that Dalrymple's work "takes pessimism about human nature to a new level. Yet its tone is never patronising, shrill or hectoring. Once you get past the initial shock of reading about battered wives, petty crooks and junkies from a non-Left perspective, you find humanity and pathos". In 2011, Dalrymple received the 2011 Freedom Prize from the Flemish think tank Libera!.
October 11, 1885
François Charles Mauriac (11 October 1885 – 1 September 1970) was a French author, member of the Académie française (from 1933), and laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1952). He was awarded the Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur in 1958.
October 11, 1782
Steen Steensen Blicher (11 October 1782, Vium – 26 March 1848 in Spentrup) was an author and poet born in Vium near Viborg, Denmark. Blicher grew up in close contact to nature and peasant life in the moor areas of Jutland. After trying his hand as a teacher and a tenant farmer, he at last became a parson like his father and from 1825-1847 served in the parish at Spentrup. As a clergyman he is said to have been less than inspired. His main interests were hunting and writing. In 1842 he was accused of alcoholism and abandoned from a Cooperation of Danish writers. Many struggles with his superiors the following years led to his dismissal shortly before his death. He had ten children, (seven sons and three daughters), with his wife Ernestine Juliane Berg whom he married on 11 June 1810. From the 1820s until his death he wrote several tales that were published in local periodicals (mostly dealing with his home region), as well as historical and amateur scientific sketches. Much of this work is entertainment but as many as twenty or thirty pieces have been called masterpieces. In these works he describes human fate in his home region in Jutland, He is often called a tragic and melancholic writer, but he is not without wit and humour. He is one of the first novelists to make significant use of the unreliable narrator — theme in literature. Four notable specimens are: The Diary of a Parish Clerk, his break-through story, tells of a poor peasant boy’s troubled life with unhappy love, war and exile. Years after the main plot occurred, he discovers that the woman he was in love with for years, ended up as a poor, pathetic alcoholic. He spent his old age in resignation and distrust. His sombre story The Hosier and his Daughter (twice filmed) that describes the mental breakdown of a girl because of unhappy love is a classic prose tragedy. The Parson of Veilbye, written in the first person, is the first Danish crime novel. The narrator makes fatal wrong conclusions resulting in a wrongful conviction. It too has been filmed. Tardy Awakening, a tragedy of adultery and suicide, is perhaps influenced by the fact, that he in 1828 found out that his wife had a love affair. He had additional talents, too: E Bindstouw is a mixture of tales and poetry on the model of the Decameron, written in the Jutlandic dialect. Here he turns loose his humorous side. Earlier reviews noted that Blicher’s literary skill lies in his descriptions of scenery, especially the Jutlandic moor landscape and its inhabitants: the long-suffering peasantry and free moor gypsies. Later some biographies pointed out his skills in describing tragedy and psychology. Stylistically he alternates between his own detailed intellectual narrative style and the colloquial speech of peasants, squires and robbers. Blicher wrote poetry from the years of the Napoleonic Wars until his death. Among his most important poems are the melancholic Til Glæden (To Joy) from 1814, his interesting local patriotic song Kærest du Fødeland (Dear are You, Fatherland) that shows his love for his home region, and his impressive winter poem Det er hvidt herude ("It is white out here"). The bluff and cheerful dialect poem Jyden han æ stærk å sej ("The Jutlander he is strong and tough") is from 1841. More uncharacteristic is his collection Trækfuglene ("Birds of Passage") inspired by a serious illness. In this poem various symbolic birds express his personal situation. Political and social themes[edit] Blicher was a man of far-ranging interests. Beginning as a conservative he developed into an eager critic of society, uniting the role of the enlightened citizen of the 18th century with modern liberalism. He tried to arrange national feasts in Jutland and proposed numerous laws and reforms, but he was never really accepted by the established liberal politicians. Also something of an Anglophile, he translated British poetry, including Macpherson’s Ossian and novels such as Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield – once he even tried to write poetry in English.Though being a member of the first Romanticist generation of Danish writers, Blicher is in many ways unique. He is more of a realist, dealing with broken dreams and with Time as man’s superior opponent. His religion is the old rationalist one. He is a belated Danish pupil of the 18th century English epistolary style while, in his interest for dialect and peasants, he anticipates the regional writers who emerged around 1900, such as Johannes Vilhelm Jensen. Present-day appreciation[edit] Today he is regarded as the pioneer of the Danish short story and regional writing. Many of his verses have been set to music and his best novels have been reprinted many times. He has never enjoyed international interest on the scale of Hans Christian Andersen or Karen Blixen but in Denmark he is almost as well known. In 2006 his novel Præsten i Vejlbye was adapted in the Danish Kulturkanon, which means, officially one of the 10 Order of Merit novels in Danish literature. In Denmark Blicher enjoyed fame and recognition in his own lifetime, and have be appraised for his contributions to Danish culture ever since. In 1951 literary scholars initiated the Danish Blicher Society to 'further and deepen the interest for Blichers life and writings', through various activities. They have awarded the Blicherprisen ('the Blicher prize') annually since 1955 and the society is still active as of 2013.
October 11, 1920
Gustav Jahoda (October 11, 1920 - December 12, 2016) was an Austrian psychologist and writer. He was educated in Vienna, then subsequently in Paris and London. He studied sociology and psychology at London University before obtaining a lectureship in social psychology at the University of Manchester. In 1952 he took up a post at the University College of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) in the Department of Sociology, where he carried out pioneering research into cross-cultural psychology. In 1963, Gustav Jahoda was invited to set up a new psychology department in the University of Strathclyde, although he continued to make field trips to West Africa. He retired in 1985 but he still retains the post of Emeritus Professor. He has published works on cross-cultural psychology, socio-cognitive development and history of the social sciences. He has also published more than 200 articles. Jahoda was elected fellow of the British Academy in 1988 and fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1993.
October 11, 1894
Boris Vogau, best known by the pseudonym Boris Pilnyak (October 11, 1894, Mozhaysk, Russia - April 21, 1938, Moscow, Russia), was born in 1894 in Mozhaysk, small town near Moscow. The son of educated middle-class parents, he graduated from the Academy of Modern Languages and the University of Kolomma and the Moscow Institute of Commerce. His stories first attracted attention in l9l5, and he achieved further literary recognition with the publication of the novel THE NAKED YEAR in 1922. In 1926 Pilnyak came under criticism for ‘The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon.’ Severely attacked for the novel MAHOGANY, published in Russian in Berlin in 1929, he was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union. After writing THE VOLGA FLOWS INTO THE CAPIAN SEA in 1930, he traveled extensively in Europe and Asia, and visited the United States in 1931. Pilnyak’s last published work appeared in 1937, after which his name virtually disappeared from the annals of Soviet literature. He is said to have been arrested and shot. In recent years there has been talk of rehabilitation, but as yet none of his work has been published. Beatrice Scott is an Englishwoman with many translations from the Russian to her credit, including works by Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Paustovsky. In collaboration with Robert Payne she has translated THE PROSE WORKS OF BORIS PASTERNAK. THE RUSSIAN LIBRARY presents masterpieces of singular spiritual energy and freshly penetrating style characteristic of the renaissance of Russian literature during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The series includes the works of both the giants and their most noted contemporaries, all in new and definitive translations - prime materials for the understanding of Russia, its culture, and its people.
October 11, 1904
Theodore Silverstein (October 11, 1904 - September 1, 2001) was born in England, and immigrated to Boston as a child, graduating from Harvard. His teaching career began at the private University of Kansas, which is now a part of the University of Missouri. He was professor at the University of Chicago from 1947 until 1973, Silverstein had a colorful history as a World War II Army Air Force intelligence officer. Only recently declassified, his assignments took him to North Africa and Italy to question captured German pilots and then he roamed Europe to intercept communications among German pilots. He once took over the Eiffel Tower for the interception project.
October 11, 1932
Michael Theunissen (October 11, 1932, Berlin, Germany - April 18, 2015, Berlin, Germany) was Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author of many books, including Vorentwürfe von Moderne: Antike Melancholie und die Acedia des Mitterlalter and Negative Theologie der Zeit.
October 12, 1844
George Washington Cable (October 12, 1844 – January 31, 1925) was an American novelist notable for the realism of his portrayals of Creole life in his native New Orleans, Louisiana. He has been called ‘the most important southern artist working in the late 19th century, as well as the first modern southern writer.’ In his treatment of racism, mixed-race families and miscegenation, his fiction has been thought to anticipate that of William Faulkner.
October 12, 1929
Martin Robert Coles (born October 12, 1929) is an American author, child psychiatrist, and professor at Harvard University.
October 12, 1939
James Arthur Crumley (October 12, 1939 – September 17, 2008) was the author of violent hardboiled crime novels and several volumes of short stories and essays, as well as published and unpublished screenplays. He has been described as ‘one of modern crime writing's best practitioners’, who was ‘a patron saint of the post-Vietnam private eye novel’ and a cross between Raymond Chandler and Hunter S. Thompson. His book The Last Good Kiss has been described as ‘the most influential crime novel of the last 50 years.’ Crumley had a cult following, and his work is said to have inspired a generation of crime writers in both the U.S. and the U.K, including Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane and Craig McDonald, as well as writers from other genres such as Neal Stephenson, but he never achieved mainstream success. ‘Don't know why that is,’ Crumley said in an interview in 2001, ‘Other writers like me a lot. But up until about 10 to 12 years ago, I made more money in France and Japan than in America. I guess I just don't fit in anyplace’ in the genre book marketplace. Crumley's first published novel, 1969's One to Count Cadence, which was set in the Philippines and Vietnam, began as the thesis for his master's degree in creative writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1966. His novels The Last Good Kiss, The Mexican Tree Duck and The Right Madness feature the character C.W. Sughrue, an alcoholic ex-army officer turned private investigator. The Wrong Case, Dancing Bear and The Final Country feature another p.i., Milo Milodragovitch. In the novel Bordersnakes, Crumley brought both characters together. Crumley said of his two private detectives: ‘Milo's first impulse is to help you; Sughrue's is to shoot you in the foot.’
October 12, 1932
Richard Claxton 'Dick' Gregory (born October 12, 1932) is an American comedian, civil rights activist, social critic, conspiracy theorist, writer and entrepreneur. Gregory is an influential American comedian who has used his performance skills to convey to both white and black audiences his political message on civil rights.
October 12, 1896
Eugenio Montale (October 12, 1896 – September 12, 1981) was an Italian poet, prose writer, editor and translator, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975. He is widely considered the greatest Italian lyric poet since Giacomo Leopardi. Montale was born in Genoa. His family were chemical products traders (his father furnished Italo Svevo's firm). The poet's niece, Bianca Montale, in her Cronaca famigliare (‘Family Chronicle’) of 1986 portrays the family's common characteristics as ‘nervous fragility, shyness, concision in speaking, a tendency to see the worst in every event, a certain sense of humour’. Montale was the youngest of six sons. He recalled: ‘We had a large family. My brothers went to the scagno [‘office’ in Genoese]. My only sister had a university education, but I had not such a possibility. In many families the unspoken arrangement existed that the youngest was released from the task to keep up the family's name.’ In 1915 Montale worked as an accountant, but was left free to follow his literary passion, frequenting the city's libraries and attending his sister Marianna's private philosophy lessons. He also studied opera singing with the baritone Ernesto Sivori. Montale was therefore a self-taught man. Growing up, his imagination was caught by several writers, including Dante Alighieri, and by studies of foreign languages (especially English), as well as the landscapes of the Levante (‘Eastern’) Liguria, where he spent holidays with his family. During World War I, as a member of the Military Academy of Parma, Montale asked to be sent to the front. After a brief war experience as an infantry officer in Vallarsa and the Puster Valley, in 1920 he came back home. Montale wrote more that ten anthologies of short lyrics, a journal of poetry translation, plus several books of prose translations, two books of literary criticism, and one of fantasy prose. Alongside his imaginative work he was a constant contributor to Italy's most important newspaper, the Corriere della Sera, for which he wrote a huge amount of articles on literature, music, and art. He also did write a foreword for Dante's ‘The Divine Comedy’ or ‘La Comedia Divina’. In his foreword he mentions the credibility of Dante, and his insight and unbiased imagination. Montale's work, especially in his first poetry collection Ossi di seppia (‘Cuttlefish Bones’), which appeared in 1925: as an antifascist, he felt detached from contemporary life and found solace and refuge in the solitude of nature. The Mediterranean landscape of Montale's native Liguria was a strong presence in these early poems: they gave him a sort of ‘personal reclusion’ in face of the depressing events around him. These poems emphasise his personal solitude and empathy with the ‘little’ and ‘insignificant’ things around him, or with its horizon, the sea. According to Montale, nature is ‘rough, scanty, dazzling’. In a world filled with defeat and despair, nature alone seemed to possess dignity, the same that the reader experiences in reading his poems. Montale moved to Florence in 1927 to work as editor for the publisher Bemporad. Florence was the cradle of the Italian poetry of that age, with works like the Canti orfici by Dino Campana (1914) and the first lyrics by Ungaretti for the review Lacerba. Other poets like Umberto Saba and Vincenzo Cardarelli had been highly praised by the Florentine publishers. In 1929 Montale was asked to be chairman of the Gabinetto Vieusseux Library, a post from which he was expelled in 1938 by the fascist government. In the meantime he collaborated to the magazine Solaria, and (starting in 1927) frequented the literary café Le Giubbe Rosse (‘Red Jackets’) on the Piazza Vittoria (now Piazza della Repubblica). Visiting often several times a day, he became a central figure among a group of writers there, including Carlo Emilio Gadda, Arturo Loria and Elio Vittorini (all founders of the magazine). He wrote for almost all the important literary magazines of the time. Though hindered by financial problems and the literary and social conformism imposed by the authorities, Montale published in Florence his finest anthology, Le occasioni (‘Occasions’, 1939). From 1933 to 1938 he had a deep relationship with Irma Brandeis, a Jewish-American scholar of Dante who occasionally visited Italy in short stints before returning to the United States. After falling in love with Brandeis, Montale represented her as a mediatrix figure like Dante's Beatrice. Le occasioni contains numerous allusions to Brandeis, here called Clizia (a senhal). Franco Fortini judged Montale's Ossi di seppia and Le occasioni the highest point of 20th century Italian poetry. T.S. Eliot, who shared Montale's admiration for Dante, was an important influence on his poetry at this time; in fact, the new poems of Eliot were shown to Montale by Mario Praz, then teaching in Liverpool. The concept of the objective correlative used by Montale in his poetry, was probably influenced by T. S. Eliot. In 1948, for Eliot's sixtieth birthday, Montale contributed a celebratory essay entitled ‘Eliot and Ourselves’ to a biblio-symposium published to mark the occasion. From 1948 to his death, Montale lived in Milan. As a contributor to the Corriere della Sera he was music editor and reported from abroad, including Palestine, where he went as a reporter to follow Pope Paul VI's voyage there. His works as a journalist are collected in Fuori di casa (‘Out of Home’, 1969). La bufera e altro (‘The Storm and Other Things’) was published in 1956 and marks the end of Montale's most acclaimed poetry. Here his figure Clizia is joined by La Volpe (‘the Fox’), based on the young poetess Maria Luisa Spaziani with whom Montale had an affair during the 1950s. However, this volume also features Clizia, treated in a variety of poems, as a kind of bird-goddess who defies Hitler. They are some of his greatest works. His later works are Xenia (1966), Satura (1971) and Diario del '71 e del '72 (1973). Montale's later poetry is wry and ironic, musing on the critical reaction to his earlier works and on the constantly changing world around him. Satura contains a poignant elegy to his wife Drusilla Tanzi. He also wrote a series of poignant poems about Clizia shortly before his death. Montale's fame at that point had extended throughout the world. He had received honorary degrees by the Universities of Milan (1961), Cambridge (1967), Rome (1974), and had been named Senator-for-Life in the Italian Senate. In 1975 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in Milan in 1981. In 1996, a work appeared called Posthumous Diary (Diario postumo) that purported to have been 'constructed' by Montale before his death with the help of the young poet Annalisa Cima; the critic Dante Isella thinks that this work is not authentic. Joseph Brodsky dedicated his essay ‘In the Shadow of Dante’ to Eugenio Montale's lyric poetry.
October 12, 1916
Bai Tamia Johnson Moore (October 12, 1916 – January 10, 1988), commonly known by his pen name Bai T. Moore, was a Liberian poet, novelist, folklorist and essayist. He held various cultural, educational and tourism posts both for the Liberian government and for UNESCO. He was the founder of Liberia's National Cultural Center. He is best known for his novella Murder in the Cassava Patch (1968), the tale of a crime passionnel in a traditional Liberian setting. It became such a classic in Liberian literature that it is still taught in high schools.
October 12, 1908
Ann Petry (born October 12, 1908, died April 28, 1997) was an African American author. Ann Lane was born as the younger of the two daughters to Peter and Bertha Clark in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Her parents belonged to the Black minority of the small town. Her father was a pharmacist and her mother was a shop owner, chiropodist, and hairdresser. The family belonged to the middle-class, and never had to suffer any financial struggles similar to those of many Harlem inhabitants. The Lane girls were raised sheltered from most of the disadvantages other black people in the United States had to experience due to the color of their skin. Only once did Ann experience racial discrimination when she went to school two years early at the age of 4 with her older sister Helen. On their way home, the two sisters were attacked by some white juveniles with stones. After the girls’ uncles took care of this by threatening the wrongdoers the Lane girls were never bothered again. The strong family bonding was a big support for Ann’s self-esteem. Her well-traveled uncles, who had many stories to tell their nieces when coming home, her ambitious father who overcame racial obstacles when opening his pharmacy in the small town as well as her mother and aunts, set a great example to Ann and Helen to become strong themselves. Petry interviewed by the Washington Post in 1992 says about her tough female family members that ‘it never occurred to them that there were things they couldn’t do because they were women.’ The wish to become a professional writer was raised in Ann for the first time in high school when her English teacher read her essay to the class commenting on it with the words: ‘I honestly believe that you could be a writer if you wanted to.’ However, Petry decided on a rather stable education and followed the family tradition after finishing high school. She enrolled in college and graduated with a Ph.G. degree from Connecticut College of Pharmacy in New Haven in 1931 and worked in the family business for several years. On February 24, 1938 she married George D. Petry of New Iberia, Louisiana. This new commitment brought Petry to New York and eventually back to writing. She did not only write articles for newspapers like Amsterdam News, or People’s Voice, and published short stories in the Crisis, but was also engaged at an elementary school in Harlem. It was during this period of her life that she had realized and personally experienced what the black population of the United States had to go through in their everyday life. Traversing the littered streets of Harlem, living for the first time among large numbers of poor black people, seeing neglected children up close – Petry’s early years in New York inevitably made painful impressions on her. Deeply impacted by her Harlem experiences, Ann Petry was in the possession of the necessary creative writing skills to bring it to paper. Her daughter Liz explains to the Washington Post that ‘her way of dealing with the problem was to write this book, which maybe was something that people who had grown up in Harlem couldn’t do.’ She wrote her most popular novel The Street in 1946 and won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. Back in Old Saybrook in 1947, the writer worked on Country Place (1947), The Narrows (1953), and some other stories but they have never achieved the same success as her first book. Until her death Petry lived in a representative 18th century house in her hometown, Old Saybrook. Ann Lane Petry died at the age of 88 on 28th April 1997. She was outlived by her only daughter, Liz Petry.
October 12, 1909
Franz Baermann Steiner (born 12 October 1909 in the town of Karlín ,the later suburb of Karolinethal, just outside Prague, Bohemia, died 27 November 1952, in Oxford) was an ethnologist, polymath, essayist, aphorist, and poet. He was familiar, apart from German, Yiddish, Czech, Greek and Latin, with both classical and modern Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Armenian, Persian, Malay, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, six other Slavic languages, Scandinavian languages and Dutch. He taught at the University of Oxford from 1950 until his death two years later. His most widely known work, Taboo, is composed of his lectures on the subject and was posthumously published in 1956. The extensive influence his thinking exercised on British anthropologists of his generation is only now becoming apparent, with the publication of his collected writings. The Holocaust claimed his parents, in Treblinka in 1942, together with most of his kin.
October 12, 1912
Alice Childress (October 12, 1912 – August 14, 1994) was an American playwright, actor, and author. Childress was born in Charleston, South Carolina, but at the age of nine, after her parents separated, she moved to Harlem where she lived with her grandmother on 118th Street, between Lenox Avenue and Fifth Avenue. Though her grandmother had no formal education, she encouraged Alice to pursue her talents in reading and writing. Alice attended public school in New York for her middle school and attended the Wadleigh High School for her high school education, but had to drop out once her grandmother died. She became involved in theater immediately after her high school and she did not attend college. She took odd jobs to pay for herself, including domestic worker, photo retoucher, assistant machinist, saleslady, and insurance agent. In 1939, she studied Drama in the American Negro Theatre (ANT), and performed there for 11 years. She acted in Abram Hill and John Silvera's On Strivers Row (1940), Theodore Brown's Natural Man (1941), and Philip Yordan's Anna Lucasta (1944). There she won acclaim as an actress in numerous other productions, and moved to Broadway with the transfer of ANT's hit comedy Anna Lucasta, which became the longest-running all-black play in Broadway history. Alice also became involved in social causes. She formed an off-broadway union for actors. Her first play, Florence, was produced off-Broadway in 1950. Her next play, Just a Little Simple (1950), was adapted from the Langston Hughes' novel Simple Speaks His Mind. It was produced in Harlem at the Club Baron Theatre. Her next play, Gold Through the Trees (1952), gave her the distinction of being one of the first African-American women to have work professionally produced on the New York stage. Her next work, Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White, was completed in 1962. The setting of the show is South Carolina during World War I and deals with a forbidden interracial love affair. Due to the scandalous nature of the show and the stark realism it presented, it was impossible for Childress to get any theatre in New York to put it up. The show premiered at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and later in Chicago. It was not until 1972 that it played in New York at the New York Shakespeare Festival. It was later filmed and shown on TV, but many stations refused to play it. In 1965, she was featured in the BBC presentation The Negro in the American Theatre. From 1966 to 1968, she was awarded as a scholar-in-residence by Harvard University at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Alice Childress is also known for her literary works. Among these are Those Other People (1989) and A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich (1973). Also, she wrote a screenplay for the 1978 film based on A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich. Her 1979 novel A Short Walk was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Childress described her writing as trying to portray the have-nots in a have society. In conjunction with her composer husband, Nathan Woodard, she wrote a number of musical plays, including Sea Island Song and Young Martin Luther King.
October 12, 1953
Mike D'Orso (born October 12, 1953) is an American journalist based in Norfolk, Virginia. D'Orso authored the books Like Judgment Day: The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood (1996), Plundering Paradise (2002), and Eagle Blue: A Team, A Tribe and a High School Basketball Season in Arctic Alaska (2006) — and co-authored Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (1998), written with U.S. Congressman and former civil rights leader John Lewis, Body For Life (1999), written with fitness expert Bill Phillips, and Oceana: Our Endangered Oceans and What We Can Do to Save Them (2011), written with actor/activist Ted Danson.
October 12, 1880
Peter B. Kyne (October 12, 1880 – November 25, 1957) was an American novelist who published between 1904 and 1940. He was born and died in San Francisco, California. Many of his works were adapted into screenplays starting during the silent film era, particularly his first novel, The Three Godfathers, which was published in 1913 and proved to be a huge success. More than 100 films were adapted from his works between 1914 and 1952, many of the earliest without consent or compensation. Kyne also created the character of Cappy Ricks in a series of novels. Kyne's "The Widow's Mite", the first story in his "Tib Tinker" series, was cover-featured on the November 1916 issue of Blue Book. The son of cattle rancher John Kyne and Mary Cresham, young Kyne worked on his father's ranch then attended a business college where he decided to become a writer. When still younger than 18 years old, he lied about his age and enlisted with Company L, 14th U.S. Infantry nicknamed "the Golden Dragons", which served in the Philippines from 1898 to 1899. The Spanish–American War and the following insurrection of General Emilio Aguinaldo provided background for many of Kyne's later stories. During World War I, he served as a captain of Battery A of the California National Guard 144th Field Artillery Regiment, known as the "California Grizzlies".
October 12, 1943
Daphne Patai (born 1943) is an American scholar and author. She is a professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her PhD is in Brazilian literature, but her early work also focused on utopian and dystopian fiction.[citation needed] She is the daughter of the anthropologist Raphael Patai, and the author of THE ORWELL MYSTIQUE: A STUDY IN MALE IDEOLOGY AND MYTH and IDEOLOGY IN CONTEMPORARY BRAZILIAN FICTION.
October 12, 1949
Richard Price (born October 12, 1949) is an American novelist and screenwriter, known for the books The Wanderers (1974), Clockers (1992) and Lush Life (2008). Price's novels explore late-20th century urban America in a gritty, realistic manner that has brought him considerable literary acclaim. Several of his novels are set in a fictional northern New Jersey city called Dempsy. In addition to writing literature, he writes for television, including The Wire and The Night Of.
October 12, 1923
Fernando Tavares Sabino (October 12, 1923 – October 11, 2004) was a Brazilian writer and journalist. Sabino was born in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, the son of Dominic Sabino, and D. Odette Tavares Sabino, where he lived until he was twenty, when he moved to Rio de Janeiro. Sabino was the author of 50 books, as well as many short stories and essays. His first book was published in 1941, when he was just 18 years old. Sabino vaulted to national and international fame in 1956 with the novel A Time to Meet, the tale of three friends in the inland city of Belo Horizonte. The book was inspired by Sabino's life history. Sabino also enjoyed commercial success with The Great Insane and The Naked Man, which were made into films. Sabino considered friendship to be one of the most important things in life. His circle of friends included Hélio Pellegrino, Otto Lara Resende, Paulo Mendes Campos, Rubem Braga, Clarice Lispector, Vinicius de Moraes, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Mário de Andrade, and Manuel Bandeira. In the last ten years of his life, Sabino was distant from the media. Many of his close friends died before him. Two years before his death, Sabino was diagnosed with cancer. Following a prolonged illness, he died one day before his 81st birthday in his Rio de Janeiro home.
October 12, 1951
Lawrence Sutin (born October 12, 1951) is the author of two memoirs, two biographies, a novel and a work of history. Sutin's debut book was the first full-length biographical study of a famed science-fiction writer, Philip K. Dick--Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick; he subsequently edited two volumes of Dick's works, In Search of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis and The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings. He then served as editor, interviewer and author for the memoir of his parents' lives in Jewish partisan units in Poland during World War Two--Jack and Rochelle: A Holocaust Story of Love and Resistance. Sutin's second biography was on a controversial twentieth-century Western esotericist, Aleister Crowley--Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley. That same year, he published a lyric memoir with a structure of interlocking short pieces each faced by a vintage postcard-image from the author's personal collection--A Postcard Memoir. His next work was All Is Change: The Two-Thousand Year Journey of Buddhism to the West. Most recently, Sutin published a novel, When To Go Into the Water.
October 12, 1917
Zden?k Urbánek (October 12, 1917 , Prague - June 12, 2008 , Prague) was a Czech writer , translator , academic teacher and dissident signatory of Charter 77.
October 13, 1938
Dalene Matthee (13 October 1938 – 20 February 2005) was a South African author best known for her four Forest Novels, written in and around the Knysna Forest. Her books have been translated into fourteen languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew and Icelandic, and over a million copies have been sold worldwide. She was born Dalene Scott in Riversdale in the then Cape Province in 1938. After matriculating from the local high school in 1957, she studied music at a conservatory in Oudtshoorn as well as at the Holy Cross Covent in Graaff-Reinet. Her first book was a children's story, Die Twaalfuurstokkie (The Twelve-o'-clock Stick), published in 1970. In 1982 a collection of short stories called Die Judasbok (The Judas Goat) was also published. Before gaining fame and wide acclaim for her first "forest novel", she also wrote stories for magazines as well as two popular novels - ’n Huis vir Nadia (A House for Nadia) (1982) and Petronella van Aarde, Burgemeester (Petronella van Aarde, Mayor) (1983). Kringe in ’n Bos (Circles in a Forest) (1984), a novel about the extermination of the elephants and the exploitation of the woodcutters of the Knysna Forest, was an international success. Two other highly successful "forest novels" followed: Fiela se Kind (Fiela's Child) in 1985 and Moerbeibos (The Mulberry Forest) in 1987. Brug van die Esels (Bridge of the Mules) was published in 1993, followed by Susters van Eva (Sisters of Eve) in 1995, Pieternella van die Kaap (Pieternella from the Cape) in 2000 and the fourth "forest novel" Toorbos (Dream Forest) in 2003. She won numerous literary prizes for her works, and Fiela's Child and Circles in a Forest were made into films. After a short sickbed caused by heart failure, she died in Mossel Bay, South Africa, survived by her three daughters. Her husband, Larius, died in 2003.
October 13, 1967
Biyi Bandele-Thomas (born October 13, 1967, Kafanchan, Nigeria) is a Nigerian novelist and playwright generally known as Biyi Bandele. Bandele is one of the most versatile and prolific of the U.K.-based Nigerian writers, having turned his hand to theater, journalism, television, film, and radio, as well as the fiction with which he made his name. Acclaimed as both a prolific playwright and a versatile novelist, his 1997 adaptation of fellow Nigerian Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart for the British stage confirmed his place as an important voice on the post-colonial stage. He currently resides in London. Biyi Bandele was born to Yoruba parents in Kafanchan, northern Nigeria, in 1967. His father was a veteran of the Burma Campaign while Nigeria was still part of the British Empire. Bandele spent the first eighteen years of his life in the northern part of the country being most at home in the Hausa cultural tradition. Later on, he moved to Lagos then studied drama at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, and finally left for London in 1990. A precocious and intuitive playwright, his talent was recognised early on and he won the International Student Playscript competition of 1989 with an unpublished play, before claiming the 1990 British Council Lagos Award for an unpublished collection of poems. As a playwright, Bandele has worked with the Royal Court Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as writing radio drama and screenplays for television. His plays are: Rain; Marching for Fausa (1993); Resurrections in the Season of the Longest Drought (1994); Two Horsemen (1994), selected as Best New Play at the 1994 London New Plays Festival; Death Catches the Hunter and Me and the Boys (published in one volume, 1995); and Oroonoko, an adaptation of Aphra Behn's seventeenth-century novel of the same name. Brixton Stories, Bandele's stage adaptation of his own novel The Street (1999), premiered in 2001 and was published in one volume with his play, Happy Birthday Mister Deka, which premiered in 1999. He was the Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, in 2000-2001. He also acted as Royal Literary Fund Resident Playwright at the Bush Theatre from 2002 to 2003. Biyi Bandele's novels, which include The Man Who Came in from the Back of Beyond (1991) and The Street (1999), are rewarding reading, capable of wild surrealism and wit as well as political engagement. His 2007 novel, Burma Boy, has been described as ‘a fine achievement’ and is lauded for providing a voice for previously unheard Africans.
October 13, 1945
Gerald Andrews Hausman (born October 13, 1945) is a storyteller and award-winning author of books about Native America, animals, mythology, and West Indian culture. Hausman comes from a long line of storytellers and educators, and has published over seventy books for both children and adults.
October 13, 1862
Mary Henrietta Kingsley (13 October 1862 – 3 June 1900) was an English ethnographer, scientific writer, and explorer whose travels throughout West Africa and resulting work helped shape European perceptions of African cultures and British imperialism.
October 13, 1903
Takiji Kobayashi (October 13, 1903 – February 20, 1933) was a Japanese author of proletarian literature. He is best known for his short novel Kanik?sen, or Crab Cannery Ship, a short novel published in 1929. It tells the story of several different people and the beginning of organization into unions of fishing workers. The young writer died due to violent torture after arrest by the Tokk? police two years later, at the age of 29.
October 13, 1917
Hugo Lindo Olivares was born on October 13, 1917, in La Union, El Salvador, to a family of educators, within modest means managed gave him a firm foundation. He attended secondary school at Colegio Garcia Flamenco, in San Salvador, later he studied law and social sciences at the University of El Salvador. He took time away to travel to Chile, which significantly expanded his horizons, an advancement in his personal and spiritual growth. He later obtained his PhD. His dissertation [on 'Divorce in El Salvador'] was subsequently published and won a gold medal.
October 13, 1945
Roland McHugh has been studying Finnegans Wake since 1965. In 1973 he moved to Dublin with a view to understanding the book more completely and has lived there ever since. His book, The Sigla of "Finnegans Wake," was described by Clive Hart as "the best book on Finnegans Wake yet written.
October 13, 1906
Professor and author J. Saunders Redding was a pioneering critic in the field of African American literature. During his long academic career, he published ten books, ranging from literary criticism to fiction to memoir, as well as numerous essays. His best-known works include To Make a Poet Black (1939), a critical literary survey; No Day of Triumph (1942), an autobiographical book about the lives of African Americans in the South; and Stranger and Alone (1950), a novel. Redding is believed to be the first African American faculty member to teach at an Ivy League university—Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He also taught at several colleges and universities in the South and the Northeast, where he helped to establish African American studies programs. Both as an educator and as a writer, Redding has been an integral part of the two American worlds—the black and the white, Arthur P. Davis wrote in From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900-1960. Pancho Savery, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, described Redding as Afro-American literature’s primary literary historian as well as its first great scholar-critic. According to Savery, Redding is not solely a pioneer in the field; decades after his initial critical statements were made, his work is still the standard by which others are measured. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, Redding came under fire by younger, more radical African American literary critics. He had approached the work of African American writers in the same way that he criticized literature from the Western tradition. Later critics advocated a black aesthetic, a special set of criteria to evaluate African American writing. One such critic, Amiri Baraka, was quoted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as saying that Redding’s views were basically supportive of the oppression of the Afro-American nation and white chauvinism in general."
October 13, 1934
Kwame Montsho Ajamu Somburu (born Paul Benjamin Boutelle; October 13, 1934 – May 3, 2016) was the Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Vice President in 1968. He and presidential candidate Fred Halstead were on the ballot in 19 states. Boutelle toured throughout the United States during that campaign and appeared on numerous radio and television shows, including William F. Buckley, Jr.'s Firing Line, and in interviews with Joey Bishop and Dick Cavett. He spoke at numerous community meetings, universities, forums, conferences, and other venues. Boutelle also toured internationally during the campaign to Canada, England, Scotland, and France. His national tour of France was cancelled because of the nationwide worker and student strikes and protests during the spring of 1968. His sponsoring organization was one of 22 banned by the French government. Boutelle also campaigned as a socialist candidate for Mayor of New York City, Mayor of Oakland, California, United States Congress three times, New York State Attorney General in 1966, and Borough President of Manhattan. Boutelle was also active in the Freedom Now Party (an all-Black party that existed from 1963 to 1965) and was its candidate for the New York State Senate in Harlem, New York City in 1964. In 1979, he changed his name to Kwame Montsho Ajamu Somburu.
October 13, 1867
Guy Newell Boothby (13 October 1867 – 26 February 1905) was a prolific Australian novelist and writer, noted for sensational fiction in variety magazines around the end of the nineteenth century. He lived mainly in England. He is best known for such works as the Dr Nikola series, about an occultist criminal mastermind who is a Victorian forerunner to Fu Manchu, and Pharos, the Egyptian, a tale of Gothic Egypt, mummies' curses and supernatural revenge. Rudyard Kipling was his friend and mentor, and his books were remembered with affection by George Orwell. Gary Hoppenstand is a professor in the Department of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University. He has researched and published widely in the areas of popular culture and popular fiction studies, and he edited the Penguin Classics editions of Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda/Rupert of Hentzau and A.E.W. Mason's The Four Feathers. He is the past president of the Popular Culture Association, and the current editor of The Journal of Popular Culture.
October 14, 1906
Johanna ‘Hannah’ Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 4, 1975) was a German American political theorist. She often has been described as a philosopher, although she rejected that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with ‘man in the singular’ and instead, she described herself as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact that ‘men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.’ Arendt's work deals with the nature of power, and the subjects of politics, authority, and totalitarianism.
October 14, 1894
Edward Estlin Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962), popularly known as E. E. Cummings, with the abbreviated form of his name often written by others in lowercase letters as e.e. cummings, was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. His body of work encompasses approximately 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays and several essays, as well as numerous drawings and paintings. He is remembered as an eminent voice of 20th century poetry.
October 14, 1880
Vilhelm Ekelund (October 14, 1880 – September 3, 1949) was a Swedish poet. The works of Ekelund were influenced by Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Emanuel Swedenborg. His early career was lyrical, and though not widely recognized at the time, his poetic work, almost wholly produced in the first decade of the century, became a formative influence on many later Swedish poets. His grasp of rhythmic and musical qualities in verse and his concentrated imagery propelled his poetry into increasingly ambitious forms, soon moving from bound to free verse, and making it a vital model for later writers such as Karin Boye, Erik Lindegren, Gunnar Björling and others. From 1907, after a passionate love affair with Amelie Posse and an increasing conviction that poetry was an unsatisfactory, vain medium, he turned away from poems and devoted himself to essays and aphoristic prose in a highly personal and sometimes near impenetrable style.
October 14, 1927
Enrique Lafourcade Valdenegro is a Chilean writer, critic and journalist who was born in Santiago, Chile, on October 14, 1927. Representative of the so-called ‘Generation of the 50s’, a term suggested by Lafourcade himself in 1954 to describe authors born between 1920 and 1934 who began to flourish in the 1950s and broke apart in content and style from the previous regional style known as ‘Criollismo‘; and more widely within the ‘boom generation’ in Latin America, also known as Latin American Boom, a generation of writers who produced an explosion of works in the mid 20th century and decades that followed, which included four Nobel Prize winners Miguel Ángel Asturias (Guatemala) in 1967, Pablo Neruda (Chile) in 1971, Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia) in 1982, and Octavio Paz (Mexico) in 1990, and several other influential intellectual authors such as Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar in Argentina and Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru. As a writer, Lafourcade has published at least 24 novels (over 30 by some accounts) and over a dozen anthologies and collections of short stories and essays. His novel Palomita Blanca (1971) sold over a million copies, making it one of the all time best sellers in Chile. This novel was translated to several languages and brought to the screen by Chilean-French director Raúl Ruiz. Lafourcade's latest novel, El Inesperado (2004), imagines the life of French poet Arthur Rimbaud in Africa, and though a work of fiction, it is inspired by the letters of the poet and three years of additional research. The novel was launched on October 20, 2004, matching the 150th anniversary of the birth the poet. Other titles include (not an exhaustive list): Pena de Muerte (1952), Para Subir al Cielo (1959), la Fiesta del Rey Acab (1959), El principe y las Ovejas (1961), Invencion a Dos Voces (1963), Novela de Navidad (1965), Pronombres Personales (1967), Frecuencia Modulada (1968), En el Fondo (1973), Salvador Allende (1973), Variaciones sobre el tema de Nastasia Filippovna y el Principe Mishkin (1974), Tres Terroristas (1977), Buddha y los Chocolates Envenenados (1977), Adios al Führer (1982), El Gran Taimado (1984), Los Hijos del Arco Iris (1985), Las Senales van Hacia el Sur (1988), Pepita de Oro (1989), Hoy Esta Solo mi Corazon (1990), Mano Bendita (1993), Cristianas Viejas y Limpias (1997). Lafourcade has been the recipient of various literary awards in his country, such as the prestigious Municipal Prize, the Gabriela Mistral Prize and the Maria Luisa Bombal Prize, awarded to the best novel of the year. Self-described as ‘a sentimental anarchist and catholic in a state of wilderness’, it is as a journalist and critic that Lafourcade is best known. For years he has written an editorial for the newspaper El Mercurio (the largest in the country), focusing on literature but with incursions into politics, cultural issues and subjects of impact upon the nation. Some of his most critical articles, written in an often mordant style, have produced the ire of dictators and politicians in Chile and other Latin American countries and occasionally generated diplomatic apologies. He has appeared in numerous television programs, both as guest and as part of recurring panels of cultural critics. His ironic and often sarcastic style as well as his impudent way of offering opinions on just about everything and everybody has more than once produced a commotion in the country, making ‘Lafourcade’ a household name in Chile. Numerous anecdotes surround his name, including engaging in a fist fight with another journalist during a live television program. For some time he wrote a gastronomic review under the name of ‘Conde de Lafourchette’ (‘fourchette’ meaning ‘fork’ in French) in the journal El Mercurio, where he gave his uncensored opinion about restaurants and their food, reason for which he is feared by restaurant owners across the country. Allegedly, waiters are instructed to call upon the owner or general manager as soon as they see Lafourcade walking in. In 1997 he published the book ‘La cocina erótica del conde Lafourchette (The Erotic Cuisine of Count Lafourchette)’. He has publicly declared himself an ‘unrelenting enemy of ignorance and incompetence.’ He is believed to have just as many enemies as he has friends, to the point that for years rumors circulated of a group of people gathering signatures to ‘expel Lafourcade from Chile’. According to public records, Enrique Lafourcade was married three times: with Chilean-born Canadian artist Maria Luisa Segnoret; with Chilean writer and journalist Marcela Godoy Divin; and recently with Chilean painter Rossana Pizarro Garcia, with whom allegedly has lived for nearly 20 years now. He also had a long relationship with Chilean writer and journalist Marta Blanco, with whom he lived together for seven years and were assumed to be married. He is the father of three children, Dominique, Octavio and Nicole.
October 14, 1942
Péter Nádas, born in Budapest in 1942, began writing in the 1960s and was first published in the 1970s. Author of the novels A Book of Memories (FSG, 1997), The End of a Family Story (FSG, 1998), and Love (FSG, 2000), he lives in Gombosszeg, in western Hungary.
October 14, 1942
A renowned analyst of East Africa, the Horn, Sudan, and the Great Lakes of Africa, Gérard Prunier is a Research Professor at the University of Paris and author of THE RWANDA CRISIS: HISTORY OF A GENOCIDE and FROM GENOCIDE TO CONTINENTAL WAR: THE CONGOLESE CONFLICT AND THE CRISIS OF CONTEMPORARY AFRICA.
October 14, 1951
MARCUS REDIKER is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University Of Pittsburgh. His most recent hook, THE SLAVE SHIP: A HUMAN HISTORY won the George Washington Book Prize and will appear in eight languages. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
October 14, 1958
Charlotte Watson Sherman (born 1958) was raised in the Pacific Northwest. A librarian, she is also the author of One Dark Body and Eli and the Swamp Man. She is the editor of Sisterfire: Black Womanist Fiction and Poetry.
October 14, 1891
Dorothy Stevens McIlwraith (October 14, 1891 – August 23, 1976) was the third editor of Weird Tales, the pioneering pulp magazine that specialized in horror fiction and fantasy fiction. She also edited Short Stories magazine. McIlwraith graduated from McGill University in 1914 and became a reader and editor for Doubleday, Page and Company. She worked as an assistant to Harry E. Maule (1886-1971), the editor of Doubleday's Short Stories magazine. In 1936, she became the editor of the magazine. In 1937, Short Stories Inc purchased the magazine and McIlwrith continued as the editor. In 1938, Short Stories Inc purchased Weird Tales magazine. The magazine's editor, Farnsworth Wright was in poor health and resigned as editor in 1940. McIlwraith took over as full editor at this point and would remain editor until the magazine ceased publication in 1954. Under her editorship authors and artists such as Ray Bradbury and Hannes Bok first appeared in the magazine.
October 14, 1971
Christophe Bataille, born 1971, is a French writer.
October 14, 1942
James Richard Hougan is an American author, investigative reporter and documentary film producer. A best-selling novelist in both the United States and Europe, his books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
October 14, 1961
Thomas Kelly worked in construction, graduated from Fordham & Harvard, then served as Mayor David N. Dinkins' liaison the labor unions. A Teamster, he writes for "Esquire" & the "Daily News". His first novel, "Payback", has been adapted by David Mamet for a feature film.
October 14, 1953
Rosalyn McMillan is the sister of Terry McMillan, a best-selling writer whose success has led publishing houses to actively recruit new black women writers. Terry McMillan’s success may often times seem to overshadow her younger sister’s success, but if it does, the younger McMillan does not appear to feel daunted by the comparisons. Certainly, the degree of her sister’s influence or guidance is an issue that Rosalyn McMillan faces often. Many of the reviews of her books mention that she is the younger sister of a best-selling author, and initially, at least, it was difficult for McMillan to focus attention on her writing and away from her sister’s. In an interview with Sonya A. Clark, for the Southern Women Writers website, McMillan stated that her sister has not critiqued any of her work, nor do they have any plans to co-author a novel together. Although she has worked at a number of other jobs while searching for a creative voice, eventually this author of five novels has found success as a romance novelist without relying upon her older sister’s help. Rosalyn McMillan was born in Port Huron, Michigan, on October 14, 1953, one of five children born to Edward McMillan and Madeline Washington Tillman. Although Port Huron is only located an hour north of Detroit, it is a world away from Detroit’s image of urban crime and industry. With Port Huron’s emphasis on lakes, beaches, and parks, the city promotes itself as a camping and recreation destination. Growing up as the child of working-class parents, McMillan knew that money was in short supply and that she was expected to help make ends meet. When he was able to, Edward McMillan worked as a sanitation worker, but he was also an alcoholic and a diabetic who often was unable to work. After her father’s death in 1968, money became even more of a struggle. In between factory jobs, McMillan’s mother would be forced to accept welfare, and McMillan and her siblings would find jobs to help support the family. Although McMillan and her siblings quickly found jobs raking leaves, babysitting, and clerking to help out, it was McMillan’s mother who encouraged her daughter to develop her skills as a typist. McMillan hoped to find a job as an executive secretary, but some excellent sewing skills, instead, led to a job as a seamstress at Ford Motor Company. Because she was very fast at her job, McMillan could earn good money at Ford, but the job was also without challenge.
October 14, 1945
Gary Y. Okihiro is Professor of International and Public Affairs and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. His most recent books are Common Ground: Reimagining American History and Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment, with Linda Gordon.
October 14, 1864
Stefan Zeromski, (born October 14, 1864, Strawczyn, Poland, Russian Empire [now in Poland]—died November 20, 1925, Warsaw, Poland), Polish novelist admired for the deep compassion about social problems that he expressed in naturalistic, yet lyrical, novels. Belonging to a family of impoverished gentry, Zeromski was born in the aftermath of the tragic 1863 January Insurrection against Russian rule, and that fact coloured his work in the years to come. Unable to get a high-school diploma, he entered the only accessible university in Warsaw, one devoted to veterinary medicine. Subsequently he worked first as a resident tutor in country houses and then as an assistant librarian in Switzerland and at the Zamoyski Library in Warsaw (1897–1904). From 1905, while living at Naleczów, Zeromski furthered the cause of education for the masses and was arrested by the Russian authorities in 1908 for these activities. He subsequently lived in Paris (1909–12) and in Warsaw. Zeromski’s first two collections of short stories, reflecting on the echoes in Polish society of the 1863 January Insurrection, were published in 1895. That theme returned in his masterpiece of the short-story genre, ‘Echa lesne’ (1905; ‘Forest Echoes,’ Eng. trans. in Adam Gillon and Ludwik Krzyzanowski [eds.], Introduction to Modern Polish Literature), and again in the lyrical novel Wierna rzeka (1912; The Faithful River, filmed 1983). In both the short story and the novel the theme is elaborated by indelible images and by sad, compassionate comments on that national tragedy. Zeromski’s first novel, Syzyfowe prace (1897; ‘Sisyphean Labours’), depicts the resistance of Polish schoolchildren to forced Russification, while Uroda zycia (1913; ‘The Prime of Life’) focuses on the results of such a policy in a story about a Polish-born Russian officer who returns to Poland. In the novel Ludzie bezdomni (1900; ‘Homeless People’) Zeromski depicted the trials and tribulations of the Polish intelligentsia. The ambitious novel Popioly, 3 vol. (1904; Ashes, filmed 1965), a broad panorama of the Napoleonic Wars, firmly established his reputation. His last novel, Przedwiosnie (1925; ‘Early Spring’), portrays social and political problems facing independent Poland after World War I. Zeromski also wrote theatrical dramas, with Uciekla mi przepióreczka (1924; ‘A Quail Has Escaped Me’) becoming a standard feature of the Polish repertoire.’ - Jerzy R. Krzyzanowski, Professor emeritus, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. Author of Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont and many other volumes.
October 15, 1923
Italo Calvino (October 15, 1923 - September 19, 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979). Italo Calvino was born in Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba, to botanists Mario Calvino and Evelina Mameli. (His brother was Floriano Calvino, a famous geologist.) The family soon moved to its homeland Italy, where Italo lived most of his life. They moved to Sanremo, on the Italian Riviera, where his father had come from (his mother came from Sardinia). The young Italo became a member of the Avanguardisti (a fascist youth organization in which membership was practically compulsory) with whom he took part in the occupation of the French Riviera. He suffered some religious troubles, as his relatives were openly atheist in a largely Catholic country. He was sent to attend a Waldensian private school. Calvino met Eugenio Scalfari (later a politician and the founder of the major Italian newspaper La Repubblica), with whom he would remain a close friend. In 1941 Calvino moved to Turin, after a long hesitation over living there or in Milan. He often humorously described this choice, and used to describe Turin as ‘a city that is serious but sad.’ In 1943 he joined the Partisans in the Italian Resistance, in the Garibaldi brigade, with the battlename of Santiago. With Scalfari he created the MUL (liberal universitarian movement). Calvino then entered the (still clandestine) Italian Communist Party. Calvino graduated from the University of Turin in 1947 with a thesis on Joseph Conrad and started working with the official Communist paper L’Unità. He also had a short relationship with the Einaudi publishing house, which put him in contact with Norberto Bobbio, Natalia Ginzburg, Cesare Pavese and Elio Vittorini. With Vittorini he wrote for the weekly Il Politecnico (a cultural magazine associated with the university). Calvino then left Einaudi to work mainly with L’Unità and the newborn communist weekly political magazine Rinascita. He worked again for the Einaudi house from 1950, responsible for the literary volumes. The following year, presumably to advance in the communist party, he visited the Soviet Union. The reports and correspondence he produced from this visit were later collected and earned him literary prizes. In 1952 Calvino wrote with Giorgio Bassani for Botteghe Oscure, a magazine named after the popular name of the party’s head-offices. He also worked for Il Contemporaneo, a Marxist weekly. From 1955 to 1958 Calvino had an affair with the actress Elsa de’ Giorgi, an older and married woman. Calvino wrote hundreds of love letters to her. Excerpts were published by Corriere della Sera in 2004, causing some controversy. In 1957, disillusioned by the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, Calvino left the Italian Communist party. His letter of resignation was published in L’Unità and soon became famous. He found new outlets for his periodic writings in the magazines Passato e Presente and Italia Domani. Together with Vittorini he became a co-editor of Il Menabò di letteratura, a position which Calvino held for many years. Despite severe restrictions in the US against foreigners holding communist views, Calvino was allowed to visit the United States, where he stayed six months from 1959 to 1960 (four of which he spent in New York), after an invitation by the Ford Foundation. Calvino was particularly impressed by the ‘New World’: ‘Naturally I visited the South and also California, but I always felt a New Yorker. My city is New York.’ The letters he wrote to Einaudi describing this visit to the United States, were first published as ‘American Diary 1959-1960’ in the book Hermit in Paris in 2003. In 1962 Calvino met the Argentinian translator Esther Judith Singer (Chichita) and married her in 1964 in Havana, during a trip in which he visited his birthplace and met Ernesto Che Guevara. This encounter later led him to contribute an article on the 15th of October 1967, a few days after the death of Guevara, describing the lasting impression Guevara made on him. Back in Italy, and once again working for Einaudi, Calvino started publishing some of his cosmicomics in Il Caffè, a literary magazine. Vittorini’s death in 1966 influenced Calvino greatly. He went through what he called an ‘intellectual depression’, which the writer himself described as an important passage in his life: ‘. I ceased to be young. Perhaps it’s a metabolic process, something that comes with age, I’d been young for a long time, perhaps too long, suddenly I felt that I had to begin my old age, yes, old age, perhaps with the hope of prolonging it by beginning it early’. He then started to frequent Paris, where he was nicknamed L’ironique amusé. Here he soon joined some important circles like the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) and met Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, in the fermenting atmosphere that was going to evolve into 1968’s cultural revolution (the French May). During his French experience, he also became fond of Raymond Queneau’s works, which would influence his later production. Calvino had more intense contacts with the academic world, with notable experiences at the Sorbonne (with Barthes) and at Urbino’s university. His interests included classical studies: Honoré de Balzac, Ludovico Ariosto, Dante, Ignacio de Loyola, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Cyrano de Bergérac, and Giacomo Leopardi. At the same time, not without surprising Italian intellectual circles, Calvino wrote novels for Playboy’s Italian edition (1973). He became a regular contributor to the important Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. In 1975 Calvino was made Honorary Member of the American Academy, and the following year he was awarded the Austrian State Literary Prize for European literature. He visited Japan and Mexico and gave lectures in several American towns. In 1981 he was awarded the prestigious French Légion d’Honneur. During the summer of 1985, Calvino prepared some notes for a series of lectures to be delivered at Harvard University in the fall. However, on 6 September, he was admitted to the ancient hospital of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, where he died during the night between the 18 and 19 September of a cerebral hemorrhage. His lecture notes were published posthumously as Six Memos for the Next Millennium in 1988. His style is not easily classified; much of his writing has an air of the fantastic reminiscent of fairy tales (Our Ancestors, Cosmicomics), although sometimes his writing is more ‘realistic’ and in the scenic mode of observation (Difficult Loves, for example). Some of his writing has been called ‘postmodern’, reflecting on literature and the act of reading, while some has been labeled ‘magical realist’, others fables, others simply ‘modern’. Twelve years before his death, he was invited to and joined the Oulipo group of experimental writers. He wrote: ‘My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.’.
October 15, 1926
Michel Foucault (born Paul-Michel Foucault) (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, philologist and literary critic. His theories addressed the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Born in Poitiers, France to an upper-middle-class family, Foucault was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV and then the École Normale Supérieure, where he developed an interest in philosophy and came under the influence of his tutors Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser. After several years as a cultural diplomat abroad, he returned to France and published his first major book, The History of Madness. After obtaining work between 1960 and 1966 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, he produced two more significant publications, The Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things, which displayed his increasing involvement with structuralism, a theoretical movement in social anthropology from which he later distanced himself. These first three histories were examples of a historiographical technique Foucault was developing he called archaeology which he would later give a comprehensive account of in The Archaeology of Knowledge. From 1966 to 1968, Foucault lectured at the University of Tunis, Tunisia before returning to France, where he became head of the philosophy department at the new experimental university of Paris VIII. In 1970 he was admitted to the Collège de France, membership of which he retained till his death. He also became active in a number of left-wing groups involved in anti-racist campaigns, anti-human rights abuses movements, and the struggle for penal reform. He went on to publish The Archaeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality, his so-called genealogies which emphasized the role power plays in the evolution of discourse in society. Foucault died in Paris of neurological problems compounded by HIV/AIDS; he was the first public figure in France to have died from the disease, with his partner Daniel Defert founding the AIDES charity in his memory. Foucault rejected the post-structuralist and postmodernist labels later attributed to him, preferring to classify his thought as a critical history of modernity. His thought has been highly influential for both academic and activist groups.
October 15, 1908
John Kenneth ‘Ken’ Galbraith, OC (15 October 1908 – 29 April 2006) was a Canadian and later, U.S., economist, public official and diplomat, and a leading proponent of 20th-century American liberalism. His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s, during which time Galbraith fulfilled the role of public intellectual. In macro-economical terms he was a Keynesian and an institutionalist. Galbraith was a long-time Harvard faculty member and as a professor of economics stayed with Harvard University for half a century. He was a prolific author and wrote four dozen books, including several novels, and published over a thousand articles and essays on various subjects. Among his most famous works was a popular trilogy on economics, American Capitalism (1952), The Affluent Society (1958), and The New Industrial State (1967). Galbraith was active in Democratic Party politics, serving in the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson; he served as United States Ambassador to India under the Kennedy administration. His prodigious literary output and outspokenness made him arguably ‘the best-known economist in the world’ during his lifetime. Galbraith was one of few recipients both of the Medal of Freedom (1946) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2000) for his public service and contribution to science. The government of France made him a Commandeur de la Légion d'honneur.
October 15, 1952
Kent Harrington is a fourth generation San Franciscan. He is a graduate of San Francisco State University. He has recently returned from an extended trip to Central America and is currently working on a novel about Guatemala. He lives in Northern California with his wife.
October 15, 1888
S. S. Van Dine was the pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright (October 15, 1888 – April 11, 1939), an American art critic and detective novelist. He was an important figure in avant-garde cultural circles in pre-WW I New York, and he created the once immensely popular fictional detective Philo Vance, a sleuth and aesthete who first appeared in books in the 1920s, then in movies and on the radio.
October 15, 1814
Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov (October 15, 1814 – July 27, 1841), a Russian Romantic writer, poet and painter, the most important Russian poet after Alexander Pushkin's death in 1837 and the greatest figure in Russian Romanticism. His influence on later Russian literature is still felt in modern times, not only through his poetry, but also through his prose, which founded the tradition of the Russian psychological novel.
October 15, 1926
Ed McBain (October 15, 1926 – July 6, 2005) was an American author and screenwriter. Born Salvatore Albert Lombino, he legally adopted the name Evan Hunter in 1952. While successful and well known as Evan Hunter, he was even better known as Ed McBain, a name he used for most of his crime fiction, beginning in 1956.
October 15, 1958
Eddie Muller is a writer based in San Francisco and is a second-generation San Franciscan per his website. He is known for writing books about movies, particularly film noir. Founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation, and co-programmer of the San Francisco Noir City film festival, Muller is considered a noir expert and is called on to write and talk about the film genre, notably on wry commentary tracks for Fox's film noir series of DVDs. Novelist James Ellroy has dubbed him 'The Czar of Noir'. Muller studied with filmmaker George Kuchar at the San Francisco Art Institute in the late 1970s. Muller is the son of a famed San Francisco boxing writer of the same name, whom he used as the basis for the character of Billy Nichols in his period crime novel The Distance, which was named the Best First Novel of 2002 by the Private Eye Writers of America. Billy Nichols returned in the 2003 novel Shadow Boxer.
October 15, 1957
Mira Nair (born 15 October 1957) is an Indian film maker and actress based in New York. Her production company, Mirabai Films, specializes in films for international audiences that act as 'native informers' on Indian society, whether in the economic, social or cultural spheres. Among her best known films are Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding, and The Namesake. Mira Nair was born on 15 October 1957 in Rourkela, Odisha, and grew up with her two brothers in Bhubaneshwar, Odisha. She was enamored of the world of films and glamour, and deeply discontented in the small-town environment of Bhubaneshwar. In 1975, she completed school and moved to Delhi, to study literature at Miranda House. However, theatre and networking took up nearly all of the one year she spent in Delhi before moving in 1976 to Harvard, to attend a one-year course in documentary film-making techniques. This short-term course was to be the only formal post-high-school education she was ever to receive. During her year in Harvard, Nair met and married the photographer Mitch Epstein, and remained in the USA, a country she had idealized from childhood. She also did not pursue a career for nearly a decade, making a couple of forgettable short films as a hobby. In 1979, she produced a short film, 'Jama Masjid Street Journal,' based on video footage of a single walkabout and casual on-camera chats she had with local people on the street leading to the Jama Masjid mosque in old Delhi. In 1983, she made a short documentary on Indians living abroad, composed of interviews with family members and personal friends living outside India. These years of relative idleness, and of interaction with her husband's family and other Americans, gave Nair deep insights into the American perception of India, and what kind of film would make a splash in that society. Ironically, just as her marriage was breaking down in the mid-1980s, these insights came together in her debut film, Salaam Bombay!, released after delays in 1988. The film, about utter squalor, grinding poverty, brave persistence and spunky hope among people living in the slums of Mumbai, was exactly calculated to appeal to western film award juries. The story, a cacophonous medley of endemic street violence, daylight banditry, forced prostitution, drug pushing, kidnapping for forced labor and finally murder, purported to represent the life of a young boy growing up on the mean streets of Bombay. Although it provided a rich affirmation of every western stereotype regarding India, the film found only a limited release, after much delay, and did not do well at the box office, perhaps because its darkness was relentless until almost the end of the film. It was however received as gospel and revelation by film-award juries. It won the Golden Camera award at the Cannes Film Festival and was a nominee for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. She lives in New York City, near Columbia University, where she is an adjunct professor in the Film Division of the School of Arts, and where her second husband, Professor Mahmood Mamdani, also teaches. Nair and her husband first met in 1988, when she went to Uganda for the first time to research for the film Mississippi Masala. Nair has been an enthusiastic yoga practitioner for decades; when making a film, she has the cast and crew start the day with a yoga session. Nair and Mamdani have one son named Zohran. In 2001 she released Monsoon Wedding (2001), a film about a chaotic Punjabi Indian wedding, with a screenplay by Sabrina Dhawan. It was awarded the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival, making Nair the first female recipient of the award. After the success of Monsoon Wedding, Nair collaborated with writer Julian Fellowes on her 2004 adaptation of Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair, starring Reese Witherspoon. The same year she also founded Maisha Film Lab to help East Africans and South Asians learn to make films. Maisha is headquartered in Nair's adopted home of Kampala, Uganda. Later that year she rejected an offer to direct Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix saying, '... I would prefer someone else make it. I am better suited to emotions, human beings, and less interested in special effects.'. Her next film, The Namesake, premiered in fall 2006 at Dartmouth College, where Nair was presented with the Dartmouth Film Award. Another premiere was held in fall 2006 with the Indo-American Arts Council in New York. The Namesake, adapted by Sooni Taraporevala from the novel by Pulitzer Prize–winner Jhumpa Lahiri, was released in March 2007 and the same year she was honoured with the Pride of India award at the 9th Bollywood Movie Awards for her contributions to the film industry. She directed a short film in New York, I Love You, a romantic-drama anthology of love stories set in New York and a 12-minute movie on AIDS awareness (funded by The Gates Foundation) called Migration. Her biographical film Amelia was released in October 2009 to predominantly negative reviews. For several years, Nair was attached to a big-budget adaptation of the novel Shantaram, but the production was shelved in 2009. Nair has also purchased the rights to Mohsin Hamid's 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Mira Nair has recently slated Govinda to play the lead in her upcoming film 'The Bengali Detective'. She has won a number of awards, including a National Film Award and various international film festival awards, and was a nominee at the Academy Awards, Golden Globes, BAFTA Awards and Filmfare Awards. She was also awarded the India Abroad Person of the Year-2007. In 2012 she was awarded India's third highest civilian award the Padma Bhushan by President of India, Pratibha Patil. Her most recent films include Vanity Fair with Reese Witherspoon, The Namesake and Amelia. In July 2013, Nair declined an invitation to the Haifa International Film Festival as a 'guest of honor' to protest Israel's policies toward Palestine. In postings on her Twitter account, Nair stated 'I will go to Israel when the walls come down. I will go to Israel when occupation is gone...I will go to Israel when the state does not privilege one religion over another. I will go to Israel when Apartheid is over. I will go to Israel, soon. I stand w/ Palestine for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) & the larger Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Mov’t.' Nair was subsequently praised by PACBI, which stated that her decision to boycott Israel 'helps to highlight the struggle against colonialism and apartheid.' She subsequently tweeted 'I will go to Israel, soon.'
October 15, 1844
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philologist, philosopher, cultural critic, poet and composer. He wrote several critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism. Nietzsche's key ideas include perspectivism, the Will to Power, the 'death of God', the Übermensch and eternal recurrence. One of the key tenets of his philosophy is the concept of 'life-affirmation,' which embraces the realities of the world in which we live over the idea of a world beyond. It further champions the creative powers of the individual to strive beyond social, cultural, and moral contexts. Nietzsche's attitude towards religion and morality was marked with atheism, psychologism and historism; he considered them to be human creations loaded with the error of confusing cause and effect. His radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth has been the focus of extensive commentary, and his influence remains substantial, particularly in the continental philosophical schools of existentialism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism. His ideas of individual overcoming and transcendence beyond structure and context have had a profound impact on late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century thinkers, who have used these concepts as points of departure in the development of their philosophies. Most recently, Nietzsche's reflections have been received in various philosophical approaches that move beyond humanism, e.g., transhumanism. Nietzsche began his career as a classical philologist—a scholar of Greek and Roman textual criticism—before turning to philosophy. In 1869, at age twenty-four, he was appointed to the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, the youngest individual to have held this position. He resigned in the summer of 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life. In 1889, at age forty-four, he suffered a collapse and a complete loss of his mental faculties. The breakdown was later ascribed to atypical general paresis due to tertiary syphilis, but this diagnosis has come into question. Re-examination of Nietzsche's medical evaluation papers show that he almost certainly died of brain cancer. Nietzsche lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897, after which he fell under the care of his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche until his death in 1900. As his caretaker, his sister assumed the roles of curator and editor of Nietzsche's manuscripts. Förster-Nietzsche was married to a prominent German nationalist and antisemite, Bernhard Förster, and reworked Nietzsche's unpublished writings to fit her own ideology, often in ways contrary to Nietzsche's stated opinions, which were strongly and explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism (see Nietzsche's criticism of antisemitism and nationalism). Through Förster-Nietzsche's editions, Nietzsche's name became associated with German militarism and Nazism, although later twentieth-century scholars have counteracted this conception of his ideas.
October 15, 1929
Milorad Pavi? (15 October 1929 – 30 November 2009) was a Serbian novelist, poet, short story writer, and literary historian. Born in Belgrade in 1929, he published many poems, short stories and novels during his lifetime, the most famous of which was the Dictionary of the Khazars (1984). Upon its release, it was hailed as 'the first novel of the 21st century.' Pavi?'s works have been translated into more than thirty languages. He was vastly popular in Europe and in South America, and was deemed 'one of the most intriguing writers from the beginning of the 21st century.' He won numerous prizes in Serbia and in the former Yugoslavia, and was mentioned several times as a potential candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in Belgrade in 2009.
October 15, 1944
Gerald Petievich has made a career in criminal investigation. He served first as a Special Agent in the U.S. Army Intelligence Corps, and, as a Special Agent of the U.S. Secret Service of the Treasury Department, he spent some time in the Paris office where he worked with Interpol, chasing counterfeiters of U.S. currency all over Europe, Africa and the Middle East. He comes from a family of cops - his father and brother are both officers in the Los Angeles Police Department, and he has been working as Secret Service Representative to the Los Angeles Federal Strike Force Against Organised Crime and Racketeering. Gerald Petievich is as intensely committed to his job - and as free from illusions about it - as is his protagonist, Charles Carr. The authors' experiences intensify the reality of his numerous, and critically acclaimed works. His best selling novel, 'To Live and Die in L.A.,' was made into a major motion picture. Some of his other titles are 'To Die in Beverly Hills,' 'Paramour,' 'Earth Angels,' 'Money Men,' 'Shakedown,' and 'The Quality of the Informant.'.
October 15, 1954
Daniel K. Richter (born October 15, 1954 , Erie, PA) is the Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University, and his research and teaching focus on colonial North America and on Native American history before 1800. Prior to joining the Penn faculty, he taught at Dickinson College and the University of East Anglia, and he has been a visiting professor at Columbia University. He served as acting chair of Penn's History Department in 2013-2014. Professor Richter is currently researching English colonization during the Restoration era, for a book tentatively titled The Lords Proprietors: Feudal Dreams in English America, 1660-1689, under contract with Harvard University Press. His most recent book is Trade, Land, Power: The Struggle for Eastern North America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). He is also author of Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts (Harvard University Press, 2011), which was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the ten best non-fiction books of 2011; Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Harvard University Press, 2001), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History and won the Louis Gottschalk Prize in Eighteenth-Century History; and The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (University of North Carolina Press, 1992), which received both the Frederick Jackson Turner Award and the Ray Allen Billington Prize from the Organization of American Historians.
October 15, 1881
Wodehouse, P. G.. (Born October 15, 1881 ). Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, (15 October 1881 – 14 February 1975) was an English humorist whose body of work includes novels, short stories, plays, poems, song lyrics and numerous pieces of journalism. He enjoyed enormous popular success during a career that lasted more than seventy years, and his many writings continue to be widely read. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse's main canvas remained that of a pre– and post–World War I English upper class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career. An acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by recent writers such as Christopher Hitchens, Stephen Fry, Douglas Adams, J. K. Rowling, and John Le Carré. Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of 15 plays and of 250 lyrics for some 30 musical comedies, many of them produced in collaboration with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934), wrote the lyrics for the hit song ‘Bill‘ in Kern's Show Boat (1927), wrote lyrics to Sigmund Romberg's music for the Gershwin – Romberg musical Rosalie (1928) and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928). He is in the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Wodehouse spent the last decades of his life in the United States, becoming an American citizen in 1955, because of controversy that arose after he made five radio broadcasts from Germany during World War II, where he had been interned by the Germans for a year. Speculation after the broadcasts led to allegations of collaboration and treason. Some libraries banned his books. Although an MI5 investigation later cleared him of any such crimes, he never returned to England.
October 15, 1960
Michael Monroe Lewis (born October 15, 1960) is an American non-fiction author and financial journalist. His bestselling books include Liar's Poker (1989), The New New Thing (2000), Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2003), The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game (2006), Panic (2008), Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood (2009), The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (2010), and Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World (2011). He has also been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 2009. His most recent book, Flash Boys, which looked at the high-frequency trading sector of Wall Street, was released in 2014
October 15, 1947
JUAN GONZALEZ (born October 15, 1947), a columnist with New York’s Daily News, and the winner of a 1998 George Polk journalism award, was named one of the nation’s one hundred most influential Hispanics by Hispanic Business, and has received a lifetime achievement award from the Hispanic Academy of Media Arts and Sciences.
October 15, 1895
Alfred Neumann (15 October 1895, Lautenburg, Germany (Poland) – 3 October 1952, Lugano, Switzerland) was a German writer of novels, stories, poems, plays, and films, as well as a translator into German. He was a recipient of the Kleist Prize in 1926 and his writings were banned during the Third Reich. He became a US citizen after moving to Los Angeles in 1941 where he stayed until 1949. His work as a screenwriter included Conflict, None Shall Escape, and The Return of Monte Cristo. Other films, like the French La Tragédie impériale (1938), were based on his novels and stories. Neumann produced the first successful stage adaptation of War and Peace in 1942.
October 15, 1944
Dr. John Milton Hoberman is a Professor of Germanic languages within the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of numerous books and articles on sports, specifically on their cultural impact, their relationship with race, and the issue of doping. He is a European cultural and intellectual historian, who has interests in Sportwissenschaft and the history of racial ideas. He has published nearly one hundred sports articles and books in American newspapers and magazines and in Der Spiegel. As he is fluent in Scandinavian languages as well as German, he was co-editor for the North American sport historians of their special issue on 'German sports history. He is a Fellow of the European committee for sports history.
October 15, 1830
Helen Maria Hunt Jackson, born Helen Fiske (pen name, H.H.; October 15, 1830 – August 12, 1885), was an American poet and writer who became an activist on behalf of improved treatment of Native Americans by the United States government.
October 15, 1930
C. Everard Palmer (October 15, 1930, Kendal, Jamaica - June 16, 2013, Mississauga, Canada) was born in Kendal in the Jamaican parish of Hanover. He had his early education in the rural community after which he attended Mico Teachers' College in Kingston. He worked as a journalist with the Gleaner Company before starting a career as an author. All his stories have been inspired by the memories of his childhood, and though the people and incidents are imagined they could easily have been real.
October 15, 1934
Gladys Swan is both a writer and a visual artist. She has published two novels, Carnival for the Gods in the Vintage Contemporaries Series, and Ghost Dance: A Play of Voices, nominated by LSU Press for the PEN Faulkner and PEN West awards. News from the Volcano, a novella and stories, set mostly in New Mexico, was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. The Tiger’s Eye: New & Selected Stories is the most recent of her seven collections of short fiction. Her stories have been selected for various anthologies, including Best of the West. Her fiction has appeared in the Sewanee Review, Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Chelsea, Shenandoah, Ohio Review, New Letters, Southwest Review, Prairie Schooner, Hunger Mountain, Hotel Amerika, and others. Her paintings have been used for the covers of three of her books and for those of other writers as well as for several literary magazines. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, the Fundacion Valpariso in Spain, the Chateau de Lavigny in Switzerland, the Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center, where she has also been a Guest Writer. She has received a Lilly Endowment Open Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship to Yugoslavia, as well as a Lawrence Foundation Award for fiction and a Tate Prize for poetry.
October 15, 70 BC
Publius Vergilius Maro (October 15, 70 BC – September 21, 19 BC), usually called Virgil or Vergil in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues (or Bucolics), the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid.
October 15, 1958
Hasan Ali Topta? (born 15 October 1958) is a prominent Turkish novelist and short story writer. His first short story book Bir Gülü?ün Kimli?i (The Identity of A Laughter) was published in 1987. An important Turkish scholar, Y?ld?z Ecevit nicknames him "a postmodern modernist" and calls him "a Kafka in Turkish literature", in her work Türk Roman?nda Postmodernist Aç?l?mlar (The Postmodernist Expansion in Turkish Literature). In fact, Hasan Ali Topta?'s 1999 Cevdet Kudret Literature Award winner Bin Hüzünlü Haz is, on the one hand, a postmodern novella in terms of pluralism, metafiction and intertextuality. On the other hand, it contains a lot of kafkaesque elements in terms of depicting an absurd, surreal and paradoxically mundane reality.
October 16, 1906
Dino Buzzati-Traverso (16 October 1906 – 28 January 1972) was an Italian novelist, short story writer, painter and poet, as well as a journalist for Corriere della Sera. His worldwide fame is mostly due to his novel Il deserto dei Tartari, translated into English as The Tartar Steppe.
October 16, 1907
Ralph Anthony Charles de Boissière (16 October 1907 – 16 February 2008) was an Trinidad-born Australian social realist novelist. Ralph de Boissière was born in Port of Spain, the son of Armand de Boissière, a solicitor, and Maude Harper, an English woman who died three weeks later. He attended Queen's Royal College and during this time discovered the Russian authors, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gorky, Chekhov, Pushkin and Gogol, who were to remain a lasting influence. Initially he wished to become a concert pianist but on leaving school took a job as a salesman, which enlightened him to the living and working conditions of ordinary Trinidadians. He then became involved in left-wing and trade union politics and also wrote for Trinidad's first literary magazine, The Beacon which he helped establish and where he met among others the writer C. L. R. James. In 1935 he married Ivy Alcantara (died 1984) and they had two daughters. But in 1947, having lost his job and unable to find another one because of his political activities, he and his family left the country for Chicago, afterwards moving to the Australian city of Melbourne in 1948. He found work in Australia as salesman and a factory-hand. Aged 42, de Boissière settled into a clerical job from which he retired in 1980. In Australia he joined the Communist Party and had his first novel, Crown Jewel published in 1952 by the leftist Australasian Book Society. Like all his work this depicts the struggles of the working class with realistic sympathy, culminating with a portrayal of a 1937 strike in Trinidad brutally put down by police shooting. Since then he has written four more novels and been translated into Polish, German, Russian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Czech and Chinese. His work has been described by one critic as ‘combin[ing] social realism and political commitment with a concern for the culture of the feeling within the individual in a way that is unique not only among West Indian writers but among writers with a social conscience anywhere in the world.’ In 2007, his centenary year, Ralph de Boissière married his longtime companion, Dr. Annie Greet, his fourth novel, Call of the Rainbow, was published in Melbourne, and in November, he received an honorary Doctor of Literature from the University of Trinidad and Tobago. His autobiography, Life on the Edge, was posthumously published (edited by Kenneth Ramchand) in 2010. De Boissière died in Melbourne on 16 February 2008.
October 16, 1927
Günter Wilhelm Grass (born 16 October 1927) is a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is widely regarded as Germany's most famous living writer. Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland). In 1945, he came to West Germany as a homeless refugee, though in his fiction he frequently returns to the Danzig of his childhood. Grass is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), a key text in European magic realism, and the first part of his Danzig Trilogy, which also includes Cat and Mouse and Dog Years. His works are frequently considered to have a left-wing political dimension and Grass has been an active supporter of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). The Tin Drum was adapted into a film, which won both the 1979 Palme d'Or and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The Swedish Academy, upon awarding him the Nobel Prize in Literature, noted him as a writer ‘whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history’.
October 16, 1888
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953) was an Irish American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into American drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg. His plays were among the first to include speeches in American vernacular and involve characters on the fringes of society, where they struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations, but ultimately slide into disillusionment and despair. O'Neill wrote only one well-known comedy (Ah, Wilderness!). Nearly all of his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism.
October 16, 1854
Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. He graduated from Oxford University in 1878 with a reputation as a brilliant scholar and quickly dazzled London society with his wit and his flamboyant dress.
October 16, 1935
Charles Affron (born October 16, 1935) is a professor of French at New York University. He is the author of "Sets in Motion", "Cinema & Sentiment", "Divine Garbo", & "Star Acting: Gish, Garbo, Davis". He lives in New York City.
October 16, 1942
Joseph Bruchac, an Abenaki writer, poet, and storyteller, has written more than 130 A Novel By Dawn Karima Pettigrew books during his distinguished career. His best-selling Keepers of the Earth: Native American Stories and Environmental Activities for Children is used in classrooms across the country.
October 16, 1949
Frank Mkalawile Chipasula (born 16 October 1949) is a Malawian writer, editor and university professor, "easily one of the best of the known writers in the discourse of Malawian letters". Born in Luanshya, Zambia, Frank Chipasula attended St. Peter's Primary School on Likoma Island, Soche Hill Day Secondary School, Malosa Secondary School, Chancellor College, University of Malawi, and, finally, the Great East Road Campus of the University of Zambia, Lusaka, where he graduated B.A., in exile, in 1976. Before leaving Malawi, Chipasula had worked as a freelance broadcaster for the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation while studying English and French at the university. In Lusaka, he served as English Editor for the National Education Company of Zambia, his first publishers, following his graduation from the University of Zambia. In 1978 Chipasula went into exile in the United States as a result of the Hastings Banda government, studying for his M.A. in Creative Writing at Brown University, a second M.A. in African American Studies at Yale University and gaining a Ph.D in English literature from Brown University in 1987. Previously a professor of Black Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and Howard University, Chipasula has also worked as the education attache at the Malawian embassy in Washington, D.C. His first book,Visions and Reflections (1972), is also the first published poetry volume in English by a Malawian writer. As well as poetry, which has been widely anthologised, he has written radio plays and fiction. Since January 10, 1976, Chipasula has been married to Stella, a former school teacher, whom he met in Mulanje, Malawi, in 1972. They have two grown children, James Masauko Mgeni Akuzike and Helen Chipo.
October 16, 1955
Denis Feeney is Giger Professor of Latin at Princeton University and was the 2004 Sather Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Literature and Religion at Rome: Cultures, Contexts, and Beliefs (1998) and The Gods in Epic: Poets and Critics of the Classical Tradition (1991).
October 16, 1942
Judith Herrin is professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium and The Formation of Christendom (both Princeton).
October 16, 1929
Nicholas von Hoffman (born October 16, 1929 in New York City) is an American journalist and author. He worked as a community organizer for Saul Alinsky in Chicago for ten years from 1953 to 1963. He wrote for the Washington Post. Later, TV audiences knew him as a 'Point-Counterpoint' commentator for CBS's 60 Minutes, from which Don Hewitt fired him in 1974.
October 16, 1927
T. Carmi (December 31, 1925 – November 20, 1994) was the literary pseudonym of Carmi Charney, an American-born Israeli poet. Carmi Charney was born in New York City. His father, Rabbi Bernard (Baruch) Charney, was the principal of Yeshiva of Central Queens, a Jewish day school. The family spoke Hebrew at home. Charney studied at Yeshiva University and Columbia University. In 1946, he worked with orphan children in France whose parents were murdered in the Holocaust. He moved to Israel in 1948, just before the outbreak of the Israeli War of Independence. He died in 1994. The first initial T is the English equivalent of the Hebrew letter tet, which Carmi adopted as it is the first letter of his original family name as written in Hebrew. Carmi's books translated into English include Blemish and Dream (1951), There are no black Flowers (1953), The Brass Serpent (1961), Somebody Like You(1971), and At The Stone Of Losses (1983). He was also translator of Shakespeare to Hebrew. His translations include Midsummer Night's Dream, Measure For Measure, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing and Othello. He co-edited The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself, together with Stanley Burnshaw and Ezra Spicehandler. His major critical work was as editor and translator of The Penguin book of Hebrew Verse, a chronological anthology that spans 3,000 years of written Hebrew poetry. He wrote the preface to a collection of Gabriel Preil's poems, Sunset Possibilities and Other Poems (1985). T. Carmi was also the pseudonymous co-author jointly with Shoshana Heyman, "Kush" (short for the acronym of Carmi ve(and) Shoshana - in hebr.) of the classic Israeli children's book "Shmulikipod." A sick boy laments that he has no one for company but the donkeys on his pajamas. Relief comes in the form of a visit from a somewhat short-tempered hedgehog (Hebr. "kipod") named Shmulik. Dan Pagis (October 16, 1930 – July 29, 1986) was an Israeli poet, lecturer and Holocaust survivor. He was born in R?d?u?i, Bukovina in Romania and imprisoned as a child in a concentration camp in Ukraine. He escaped in 1944 and in 1946 arrived safely in Israel where he became a schoolteacher in a kibbutz. He earned his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he later taught Medieval Hebrew literature. His first published book of poetry was Sheon ha-Tsel ("The Shadow Clock") in 1959. In 1970 he published a major work entitled Gilgul – which may be translated as "Revolution, cycle, transformation, metamorphosis, metempsychosis," etc. Other poems include: "Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car," "Testimony, "Europe, Late," "Autobiography," and "Draft of a Reparations Agreement." Pagis knew many languages, and translated multiple works of literature. He died of cancer in Israel on July 29, 1986. Pagis's most widely cited poem is "Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car".
October 17, 1928
Lerone Bennett, Jr. (born 17 October 1928) is an African-American scholar, author and social historian, known for his revisionist analysis of race relations in the United States. His best-known works include BEFORE THE MAYFLOWER and FORCED INTO GLORY.
October 17, 1920
Miguel Delibes Setién (17 October 1920 – 12 March 2010) was a Spanish novelist, journalist and newspaper editor associated with the Generation of '36 movement. From 1975 until his death, he was a member of the Royal Spanish Academy, where he occupied chair ‘e’. He studied commerce and law and began his career as a columnist and later journalist at the El Norte de Castilla. He would later head this newspaper before gradually devoting himself exclusively to the novel. As a connoisseur of the fauna and flora of his geographical region and someone passionate about hunting and the rural world, he could give form in his works to all matters relating to Castile and hunting from the perspective of an urban person who had not lost touch with that world. He was one of the leading figures of post-Civil War Spanish literature, for which he was recognized through many awards. However, his influence extends even further, since several of his works have been adapted for the theater or have been made into movies, which won awards at competitions such as the Cannes Film Festival, and television shows. He was marked deeply by the death of his wife in 1974. In 1998 he was diagnosed with colon cancer, an illness from which he would never fully recover. As a result his literary career came almost entirely to a halt. He fell into apathy and became virtually isolated until his death in 2010.
October 17, 1951
CHRISTOPHER TOWNE LELAND (October 17, 1951 – July 23, 2012) taught fiction in the Department of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University, where he was Briggs-Copeland Assistant Professor. He is the author of the novels, MEAN TIME (1982) and MRS. RANDALL. He received his doctorate in comparative literature from the University of California, San Diego.
October 17, 1897
Dr. Arturo Torres-Rioseco (1897–1971) was a Chilean poet, scholar, translator, historian, and diplomat who taught extensively in the United States and Latin America. He was full professor of Spanish American Literature at UC Berkeley (1936–1969), professor of summer sessions at Columbia University, University of Mexico, University of Guatemala, Stanford University, Duke University, and Mills College. Dr. Torres-Rioseco worked closely with Mills College’s Casa Panamericana Program and its School of International Relations in the 1940’s. In 1961, he was appointed by John F. Kennedy as a member of the Advisory Committee on Latin American Relations. He also wrote several books of poetry, translated the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and wrote a book on Gabriela Mistral. After Dr. Torres-Rioseco’s death his wife, Rosalie Godt Torres-Rioseco, began to donate books and manuscripts, including letters, non-fiction, poetry, novels, and journals from Arturo Torres-Rioseco’s private collection to the Special Collections Department of the F.W. Olin Library, Mills College. This department now houses the Arturo Torres-Rioseco Collection, consisting of over 400 volumes of literature of major 20th century Latin American poets and writers, as well as correspondence from political and literary figures.
October 17, 1903
Nathanael West, born Nathan Weinstein (October 17, 1903 – December 22, 1940), was an American author, screenwriter and satirist. Nathanael West was born Nathan Weinstein in New York City, the first child of Ashkenazi Jewish parents, Anna (née Wallenstein, 1878—1935) and Max (Morduch) Weinstein (1878—1932), from Kovno, Russia (now in Lithuania), who maintained an upper middle class household in a Jewish neighborhood on the Upper West Side. West displayed little ambition in academics, dropping out of high school and only gaining admission into Tufts College by forging his high school transcript. After being expelled from Tufts, West got into Brown University by appropriating the transcript of a fellow Tufts student who was also named Nathan Weinstein. Although West did little schoolwork at Brown, he read extensively. He ignored the realist fiction of his American contemporaries in favor of French surrealists and British and Irish poets of the 1890s, in particular Oscar Wilde. West's interests focused on unusual literary style as well as unusual content. He became interested in Christianity and mysticism, as experienced or expressed through literature and art. West's classmates at Brown ironically nicknamed him 'Pep' after a school trip where after only a few minutes of walking he quickly ran out of breath. West himself acknowledged and made fun of his lack of physical prowess in recounting the story of a baseball game where he cost his team the game. Wells Root, a close friend of West, remembers hearing this tale half a dozen times, recalling that everyone had placed bets on the game, which came down to the final inning with the score tied and the enemy at bat with two outs. At that point the batter hit a long fly towards West: 'He put his hands up to catch it and for some inexplicable reason didn’t hold them close together. The ball tore through, hit him in the forehead, and bounced into some brush. There was a roar from the crowd and [West] took one look and turned tail. To a man, the crowd had risen, gathered bats, sticks, stones, and anything they could lay hands on and were in hot pursuit. He vanished into some woods and didn’t emerge until nightfall. In telling the story he was convinced that if they had caught him they would have killed him.' It is unclear whether this ever actually happened, but West later re-imagined this in his short story 'Western Union Boy'. Since Jewish students were not allowed to join most fraternities, his main friend was his future brother-in-law S. J. Perelman, who was to become one of America's most erudite comic writers. (Perelman married West's sister Laura.) West barely finished at Brown with a degree. He then went to Paris for three months, and it was at this point that he changed his name to Nathanael West. West's family, who had supported him thus far, ran into financial difficulties in the late 1920s. West returned home and worked sporadically in construction for his father, eventually finding a job as the night manager of the Hotel Kenmore Hall on East 23rd Street in Manhattan. One of West's real-life experiences at the hotel inspired the incident between Romola Martin and Homer Simpson that would later appear in The Day of the Locust (1939). Although West had been working on his writing since college, it was not until his quiet night job at the hotel that he found the time to put his novel together. It was at this time that West wrote what would eventually become Miss Lonelyhearts (1933). Maxim Lieber served as his literary agent in 1933. In 1931, however, two years before he completed Miss Lonelyhearts, West published The Dream Life of Balso Snell, a novel he had conceived of in college. By this time, West was within a group of writers working in and around New York that included William Carlos Williams and Dashiell Hammett. In 1933, West bought a farm in eastern Pennsylvania but soon got a job as a contract scriptwriter for Columbia Pictures and moved to Hollywood. He published a third novel, A Cool Million, in 1934. None of West's three works sold well, however, so he spent the mid-1930s in financial difficulty, sporadically collaborating on screenplays. Many of the films he worked on were B-movies, such as Five Came Back (1939). It was at this time that West wrote The Day of the Locust. West took many of the settings and minor characters of his novel directly from his experience living in a hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. In November 1939, West was hired as a screenwriter by RKO Radio Pictures, where he collaborated with Boris Ingster on a film adaptation of the novel Before the Fact (1932) by Francis Iles. West and Ingster wrote the screenplay in seven weeks, with West focusing on characterization and dialogue and Ingster focusing on the narrative structure. RKO assigned the film, eventually released as Suspicion (1941), to Alfred Hitchcock; but Hitchcock already had his own, substantially different, screenplay. Hitchcock's screenplay was written by Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison (Hitchcock's secretary), and Alma Reville (Hitchcock's wife). West and Ingster's screenplay was abandoned, but the text can be found in the Library of America's edition of West's collected works. On December 22, 1940, West and his wife Eileen McKenney were returning to Los Angeles from a hunting trip in Mexico. West ran a stop sign in El Centro, California, resulting in a collision in which he and McKenney were both killed. McKenney had been the inspiration for the title character in the Broadway play My Sister Eileen, and she and West had been scheduled to fly to New York City for the Broadway opening on December 26. West was buried in Mount Zion Cemetery in Queens, New York, with his wife's ashes placed in his coffin. Although West was not widely known during his life, his reputation grew after his death, especially with the publication of his collected novels by New Directions in 1957. Miss Lonelyhearts is widely regarded as West's masterpiece. Day of the Locust was made into a film which came out in 1975 starring Donald Sutherland and Karen Black. Likewise Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) saw production in film (1933, 1958, 1983), stage (1957), and operatic (2006) versions; and the character 'Miss Lonelyhearts' in Hitchcock's film Rear Window has parallels to West's work.
October 17, 1946
Adam Michnik was a leader of the dissident movement in Poland. He is editor in chief of Poland’s largest newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, and is the author of Letters from Prison and Letters from Freedom.
October 17, 1937
Renato Prada Oropeza (born October 17, 1937, Potosí, Bolivia- September 9, 2011, Puebla, Mexico) was a Bolivian and Mexican scientist-literary researcher and writer, author of novels, short stories and poetry books, hermeneutics, semiotics and literary theory. Many of his literary works have been translated into several languages. He is one of the most distinguished semioticians in Mexico and Latin America. He was born in Bolivia in 1937. In 1976, due to the dictatorship in Bolivia, he moved to Mexico, where in 1983 he became a citizen. Since 1976, Prada has been a professor at the Autonomous University in Xalapa, Mexico and at the Autonomous University of Puebla. He is also an Academician of the National Council for Science and Technology of Mexico (an analog of the Academy of Sciences in other countries). He was married to the Mexican art historian Elda Rojas Aldunate. Their children are Ixchel Vanessa that is a designer and theatrical designer; Ingmar, a researcher and professor of Physics and Fabrizio Prada is a Mexican film director. Died in Puebla, Mexico on September 9, 2011 because of kidney cancer. He held the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from the Sapienza University of Rome and a Doctor of Linguistics from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. He was the head of the scientific school of semiotics in the Autonomous University of Puebla and editor of some Mexican academic journals on literary theory and linguistics and semiotics. He directed doctoral researches, and his disciples work in Mexico, the United States, Italy, Russia, Guatemala, Spain and other countries. Some novels and short stories by Renato Prada have been translated into English and other languages. In addition to his literary and scientific work, he wrote the screenplays of some Mexican feature films, such as Tiempo Real and Chiles Xalapeños, and several short films. His novel Los fundadores del alba, winner of Prize Casa de las Américas in 1969, is onsidered one of the most significant works of Bolivian literature.
October 17, 1937
Mustapha Tlili (born 17 October 1937) is a Tunisian novelist and intellectual based in the United States. Born to an Andalusian family in Fériana, Tunisia, Mustapha Tlili was educated at the Sorbonne and in the United States. He worked at the United Nations from 1967 to 1982. He is the founder-director of the Center for Dialogues: Islamic World-US/The West based at New York University. His novel Lion Mountain, dealing with Tunisian corruption, has been banned in Tunisia.
October 17, 1898
Simon Vestdijk was born in 1898 in Friesland. He studied medicine but practiced only briefly before devoting himself completely to literature. In the thirty years which have passed since the publication of his first novel, Vestdijk has written and had published so great a number of novels, poems, essays and short stories that Ter Braak, an eminent Dutch critic of the thirties, called him a witchdoctor.
October 18, 1934
Kir Bulychov or Bulychev (October 18, 1934 – September 5, 2003) was a pen name of Igor Vsevolodovich Mozheiko, a Soviet Russian science fiction writer and historian. His magnum opus is a children's science fiction series Alisa Selezneva, although most of his books are adult-oriented.
October 18, 1946
Barry Gifford (born October 18, 1946) is an American author, poet, and screenwriter known for his distinctive mix of American landscapes and film noir- and Beat Generation-influenced literary madness. Gifford is best known for his series of novels about Sailor and Lula, two sex-driven, star-crossed protagonists on the road. The first of the series, Wild at Heart, was adapted by director David Lynch for the 1990 film of the same title. Gifford went on to write the screenplay for Lost Highway with Lynch. Perdita Durango was adapted into film by Alex de la Iglesia. Gifford also writes non-fiction
October 18, 1777
Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist (18 October 1777 – 21 November 1811) was a German poet, dramatist, novelist and short story writer. The Kleist Prize, a prestigious prize for German literature, is named after him. Kleist was born into the von Kleist family in Frankfurt an der Oder in the Margraviate of Brandenburg. After a scanty education, he entered the Prussian Army in 1792, served in the Rhine campaign of 1796, and retired from the service in 1799 with the rank of lieutenant. He studied law and philosophy at the Viadrina University and in 1800 received a subordinate post in the Ministry of Finance at Berlin. In the following year, Kleist's roving, restless spirit got the better of him, and procuring a lengthened leave of absence he visited Paris and then settled in Switzerland. Here he found congenial friends in Heinrich Zschokke and Ludwig Friedrich August Wieland (d. 1819), son of the poet Christoph Martin Wieland; and to them he read his first drama, a gloomy tragedy, The Schroffenstein Family (1803, originally entitled The Ghonorez Family). In the autumn of 1802, Kleist returned to Germany; he visited Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland in Weimar, stayed for a while in Leipzig and Dresden, again proceeded to Paris, and returning in 1804 to his post in Berlin was transferred to the Domänenkammer (department for the administration of crown lands) at Königsberg. On a journey to Dresden in 1807, Kleist was arrested by the French as a spy; he remained a close prisoner of France in the Fort de Joux. On regaining his liberty, he proceeded to Dresden, where, in conjunction with Adam Heinrich Müller (1779–1829), he published the journal Phöbus in 1808. In 1809 Kleist went to Prague, and ultimately settled in Berlin, where he edited (1810/1811) the Berliner Abendblätter. Captivated by the intellectual and musical accomplishments of the terminally ill Henriette Vogel, Kleist, who was himself more disheartened and embittered than ever, agreed to do her bidding and die with her, carrying out this resolution by first shooting Vogel and then himself on the shore of the Kleiner Wannsee (Little Wannsee) near Potsdam, on 21 November 1811. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, ‘Kleist's whole life was filled by a restless striving after ideal and illusory happiness, and this is largely reflected in his work. He was by far the most important North German dramatist of the Romantic movement, and no other of the Romanticists approaches him in the energy with which he expresses patriotic indignation.’ In the spring of 1799, the 21-year-old Kleist wrote a letter to his half-sister Ulrike in which he found it ‘incomprehensible how a human being can live without a plan for his life’ (Lebensplan). In effect, Kleist sought and discovered an overwhelming sense of security by looking to the future with a definitive plan for his life. It brought him happiness and assured him of confidence, especially knowing that life without a plan only saw despair and discomfort. The irony of his later suicide has been the fodder of his critics. His first tragedy was The Schroffenstein Family (Die Familie Schroffenstein). The material for the second, Penthesilea (1808), queen of the Amazons, is taken from a Greek source and presents a picture of wild passion. In comedy, Kleist made a name with The Broken Jug (Der zerbrochne Krug) (1808), while Amphitryon (1808), an adaptation of Molière's comedy, received critical acclaim long after his death. Of Kleist's other dramas, Die Hermannsschlacht (1809) is a dramatic work of anti-Napoleonic propaganda, written as Austria and France went to war. It has been described by Carl Schmitt as the ‘greatest partisan work of all time’. In it he gives vent to his hatred of his country's oppressors. This, together with the drama The Prince of Homburg (Prinz Friedrich von Homburg oder die Schlacht bei Fehrbellin), which is among his best works, was first published by Ludwig Tieck in Kleist's Hinterlassene Schriften (1821). Robert Guiskard, a drama conceived on a grand plan, was left a fragment. Kleist was also a master in the art of narrative, and of his Gesammelte Erzählungen (Collected Short Stories) (1810–1811), Michael Kohlhaas, in which the famous Brandenburg horse dealer in Martin Luther's day is immortalized, is one of the best German stories of its time. The Earthquake in Chile (Das Erdbeben in Chili) and St. Cecilia, or the Power of Music (Die heilige Cäcilie oder die Gewalt der Musik) are also fine examples of Kleist's story telling as is The Marquise of O (Die Marquise von O.). His short narratives influenced those of Kafka. He also wrote patriotic lyrics in the context of the Napoleonic Wars. A Romantic by context, predilection, and temperament, Kleist subverted clichéd ideas of Romantic longing and themes of nature and innocence and irony, instead taking up subjective emotion and contextual paradox to show individuals in moments of crises and doubt, with both tragic and comic outcomes, but as often as not his dramatic and narrative situations end without resolution. Seen as a precursor to Henrik Ibsen and modern drama because of his attention to the real and detailed causes of characters’ emotional crises, he was also understood as a nationalist poet in the German context of the early twentieth century, and was appropriated by Nazi scholars and critics as a kind of proto-Nazi author. To this day, many scholars see his play Die Hermannsschlacht (‘The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest‘, 1808) as prefiguring the subordination of the individual to the service of the Volk (nation) that became a principle of fascist ideology in the twentieth century. Kleist criticism of the last generation has repudiated nationalist criticism and concentrated instead mainly on psychological, structural and post-structural, philosophical, and narratological modes of reading. Kleist's The Broken Jug is one of the most staged plays of the German canon (1803–05). In the play, a provincial judge gradually and inadvertently shows himself to have committed the crime under investigation. In the enigmatic drama The Prince of Homburg (1811), a young officer struggles with conflicting impulses of romantic self-actualization and obedience to military discipline. Prince Friedrich, who had expected to be executed for his successful but unauthorized initiative in battle, is surprised to receive a laurel wreath from Princess Natalie. To his question, whether this is a dream, the regimental commander Kottwitz replies, ‘A dream, what else?’ Kleist wrote his eight novellas later in his life and they show his radically original prose style, which is at the same time careful and detailed, almost bureaucratic, but also full of grotesque, ironic illusions and various sexual, political, and philosophical references. His prose often concentrates on minute details that then serve to subvert the narrative and the narrator, and throw the whole process of narration into question. In Betrothal in St. Domingo (Die Verlobung in Santo Domingo) (1811) Kleist examines the themes of ethics, loyalty, and love in the context of the colonial rebellion in Haiti of 1803, driving the story with the expected forbidden love affair between a young white man and a black rebel woman, though the reader's expectations are confounded in typically Kleistian fashion, since the man is not really French and the woman is not really black. Here for the first time in German literature Kleist addresses the politics of a race-based colonial order and shows, through a careful exploration of a kind of politics of color (black, white, and intermediate shades), the self-deception and ultimate impossibility of existence in a world of absolutes. Kleist is also famous for his essays on subjects of aesthetics and psychology which, to the closer look, show a keen insight into the metaphysical questions discussed by philosophers of his time, such as Kant, Fichte and Schelling. In the first of his larger essays, ‘On the gradual development of thoughts in the process of speaking‘, Kleist shows the conflict of thought and feeling in the soul of man, leading to unforeseeable results through incidents which in their turn provoke the inner forces of the soul to express themselves in a spontaneous flow of ideas and words, both stimulating one another to further development. Kleist's view of the hidden forces in the human soul and the quite unstable and endangered position of the mind in their struggle can be compared to Freud's psychoanalytic model of the soul, especially to his notion of the ‘unconscious’ and its hidden influences on the ego. Kleist claims that most people are advised to speak only about what they already understand. Instead of talking about what you already know, Kleist admonishes his readers to speak to others with ‘the sensible intention of instructing yourself.’ Fostering a dialogue through the art of ‘skillful questioning’ is the key behind achieving a rational or enlightened state of mind. And yet, Kleist employs the example of the French Revolution as the climactic event of the Enlightenment era whereby man broke free from his dark and feudal chains in favor of liberty, equality, fraternity. It is not that easy though for Kleist. Man cannot simply guide himself into the future with a rational mind as his primary tool. Therefore, Kleist strongly advocates for the usefulness of reflection ex post facto or after the fact. In doing so, man will be able to mold his collective consciousness in a manner conducive to the principles of free will. By reflecting after the fact, man will avoid the seemingly detestable inhibitions offered in rational thought. In other words, the will to power has ‘its splendid source in the feelings,’ and thus, man must overcome his ‘struggle with Fate‘ with a balanced mixture of wisdom and passion. The metaphysical theory in and behind Kleist's first essay is that consciousness, man's ability to reflect, is the expression of a fall out of nature's harmony, which may either lead to dysfunction, when the flow of feelings is interrupted or blocked by thought, or to the stimulation of ideas, when the flow of feelings is cooperating or struggling with thought. A state of total harmony, however, cannot be reached. Only in total harmony of thought and feeling life and consciousness would come to be identical through the total insight of the mind, an idea elaborated and ironically presented in Kleist's second essay ‘The Puppet Theatre’ or ‘On the Marionette Theater’ (Über das Marionettentheater). This essay also shows Fichte's influence on Kleist. Similar to Kleist, Fichte had emphasised man's ability and necessity to develop his mind in infinity, without ever being able to reach identity with the absolute, because the individual's existence just hangs on the difference. Without Kleist saying this expressedly, works of art, such as his own, may offer an artificial image of this ideal, though this is in itself wrenched out from the same sinful state of insufficiency and rupture that it wants to transcend. Kleist's philosophy is the ironic rebuff of all theories of human perfection, whether this perfection is projected in a golden age at the beginníng (Hölderlin, Novalis), in the present (Hegel), or in the future (as the philosophers of the enlightenment and still Marx would have seen it). His essays show man, like the literary works, torn apart by conflicting forces and held together on the surface only by illusions, like that of real love (if this was not the worst of all illusions). Jeronimo, for example, in Kleist's The Earthquake in Chile, is presented as emotionally and socially repressed and incapable of self-control, but still clinging to religious ideas and hopes. At the end of a process marked by chance, luck and coincidence, and driven by greed, hatred and the lust for power, embodied in a repressive social order, the human being that at the beginning had been standing between execution and suicide, is murdered by a mob of brutalized maniacs who mistake their hatred for religious feelings. The ending of this novella could be used to describe Kleist's concept of life as well as his philosophy and aesthetics, expressed in the ironic style which fits the content: ‘And sometimes ... it almost seemed to him, that he ought to be happy.’
October 18, 1741
Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos (18 October 1741 – 5 September 1803) was a French novelist, official and army general, best known for writing the epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons). A unique case in French literature, he was for a long time considered to be as scandalous a writer as the Marquis de Sade or Nicolas-Edme Rétif. He was a military officer and an amateur writer with a cynical outlook on human relations. However, he aspired to ‘write a work which departed from the ordinary, which made a noise, and which would remain on earth after his death’; he surely attained his goals with the lasting fame of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which is now widely acknowledged as one of the masterpieces of literature of the 18th century. Les Liaisons Dangereuses has inspired a number of critical and analytic commentaries, plays, and films.
October 18, 1974
Jeremy Scahill (born October 18, 1974) is a founding editor of the online news publication The Intercept and author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, which won the George Polk Book Award. His book Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield was published by Nation Books on April 23, 2013. On June 8, 2013, the documentary film of the same name, produced, narrated and co-written by Scahill, was released. It premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Scahill is a Fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill learned journalism and started his career on the independently syndicated daily news show Democracy Now!. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
October 18, 1951
TERRY MCMILLAN has been a fellow at both Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. She has received grants from the PEN American Center, the Authors League, the Carnegie Fund, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
October 18, 1948
Ntozake Shange (born October 18, 1948) is an American playwright, and poet. As a self-proclaimed black feminist, she addresses issues relating to race and feminism in much of her work. Shange is best known for the Obie Award-winning play for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. She has also written several novels including Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, Liliane, and Betsey Brown, a novel about an African-American girl who runs away from home. Among her honors and awards are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund, and a Pushcart Prize. Shange lives in Brooklyn, New York.
October 18, 1949
Carol Snow is Codirector of the Blue Bear School of American Music in San Francisco. She is the author of Artist and Model (1990), which received the 1990 Book Award from the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, and For (California, 2000).
October 18, 1942
Mike Weiss is a writer at the San Francisco Chronicle, and his work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Esquire, The Guardian, and many other publications. He is the author of the acclaimed Ben Henry mystery series and the Edgar Award-winning DOUBLE PLAY.
October 18, 1960
Mark Mathabane (born Johannes Mathabane, 18 October 1960) is a South African author, lecturer, and a former collegiate tennis player and college professor.
October 18, 1765
Fray Servando Teresa de Mier (in full, José Servando Teresa de Mier Noriega y Guerra) (October 18, 1765 in Monterrey, Nuevo León, New Spain – December 3, 1827 in Mexico City) was a Roman Catholic priest, preacher, and politician in New Spain. He was a descendant of the Dukes of Granada and conquistadors of Nuevo León. Susana Rotker is a Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Rutgers University and an internationally awarded specialist on 19th Century Spanish-American Literature. Helen Lane's many award winning translations include Tomas Eloy Martinez's bestseller Santa Evita, Mario Vargas Llosa's memoirs, and several volumes of Octavio Paz's essays.
October 18, 1952
Hoàng ?u Ph??ng, pen name B?o Ninh (born 18 October 1952 in Ngh? An) is a Vietnamese novelist, essayist and writer of short stories, best known for his first novel, published in English as The Sorrow of War. During the Vietnam War, he served in the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade. Of the five hundred who went to war with the brigade in 1969, he is one of ten who survived. In 1987, B?o Ninh published Tr?i b?y chú lùn (Camp of Seven Dwarves), a collection of short stories. He has also written a second novel, Steppe, but is said to be reluctant to publish it. A short story by B?o Ninh, "A Marker on the Side of the Boat" (Kh?c d?u m?n thuy?n), translated by Linh Dinh, is included in the anthology Night, Again. B?o Ninh is also a successful essayist. He is interviewed in Ken Burns's series The Vietnam War.
October 18, 1894
Yury Tynyanov (1894-1943) was one of that rare breed - a great scholar, a brilliant and original critic, and a great and profound artist. An eminent member of the Russian Formalist school of the 1920s, he was an extraordinary stylist, who combined wry, often hilarious satire with subtle psychological insight and an essentially dark view of man and history. His powerful novels, which examine the lives and destinies of three nineteenth-century poets - Pushkin, Griboyedov, and Kyukhelbeker - are widely recognized as twentieth-century classics. His novellas continue to delight his Russian readers - and will, hopefully, delight his readers in their English incarnation as well. Mirra Ginsburg is the acclaimed translator of some of the greatest Russian writers of this century. Her translations include Yevgeny Zamyatin's WE, Andrey Platonov's The Foundation Pit, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Heart of a Dog, and The Life of Monsieur de Moliére. She has edited and translated Zamyatin's The Dragon (stories) and A Soviet Heretic (essays), as well as The Fatal Eggs and Other Soviet Satire (the title story by Bulgakov). She has also published many collections of folk tales from Russia, and has translated, written, and adapted over twenty-five children's books. She lives in New York.
October 18, 1894
Tibor Déry (Budapest, 18 October 1894 - Budapest, 18 August 1977) was a Hungarian writer. In his early years he was a supporter of communism, but after being excluded from the ranks of the Hungarian Communist Party in 1953 he started writing satire on the communist regime in Hungary. Georg Lukács praised Dery as being 'the greatest depicter of human beings of our time'. In 1919, Déry became an active party member in the liberal republic under Mihály Károlyi. Less than a year later however, Béla Kun and his Communist Party rose to power, proclaiming the Hungarian Soviet Republic and exiling Déry. He only returned to Hungary in 1935, having lived in Austria, France and Germany in the meantime. Nevertheless, during the right wing Horthy regime he was imprisoned several times, once because he translated André Gide's Retour de L'U.R.S.S.. In this period, he wrote his greatest novel, The Unfinished Sentence, a 1200-page epic story about the life of the young aristocrat Lorinc Parcen-Nagy who gets into contact with the working classes in Budapest during a period of strike. In 1953, Déry was expelled from the Communist Party during a 'cleansing' of Hungarian literature. In 1956 he was a spokesman during the Uprising, alongside Georg Lukács and Gyula Háy. In the same year, he wrote Niki: The Story of a Dog, a fable about the arbitrary restrictions on human life in Stalinist Hungary. Because of his part in the uprising, he was sentenced to prison for 9 years, but released in 1960. He died in 1977.
October 18, 1870
Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki (October 18, 1870, Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan - July 12, 1966, Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan) was a Japanese author of books and essays on Buddhism, Zen and Shin that were instrumental in spreading interest in both Zen and Shin to the West.
October 19, 1938
Renata Adler (born October 19, 1938) is an American author, journalist and film critic.
October 19, 1899
Miguel Ángel Asturias Rosales (October 19, 1899 - June 9, 1974) was a Guatemalan writer and diplomat. He was awarded the 1967 Nobel Prize in literature ‘for his vivid literary achievement, deep-rooted in the national traits and traditions of Indian peoples of Latin America.’ Asturias was born in Guatemala City and died in Madrid, Spain. In 1904 his family moved from the capital to Salamá, Baja Verapaz, where they remained until 1908. In 1917, while studying law at the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala (after a brief one-year flirtation with medicine), Asturias participated in the 1920 uprising against dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera. He graduated in 1923 and went to Paris, France, to further his education at the Sorbonne. While living in Paris, he was influenced by the gathering of writers and artists in Montparnasse, and began writing poetry and fiction. Asturias returned to Guatemala in 1933 where he worked as a journalist before serving in his country’s diplomatic corps. When the government of President Jacobo Arbenz fell in 1954, he was banned from the country by Carlos Castillo Armas. While living in exile he became a well known author with the release of his novel, Mulata de Tal. Eventually, in 1966, democratically elected President Julio César Méndez Montenegro appointed him the ambassador to France, the same year he won the Lenin Peace Prize. Asturias spent his final years in Madrid, where he died in 1974. He is buried in the Cimetière du Père Lachaise in Paris. His son Rodrigo Asturias, under the nom de guerre Gaspar Ilom, was head of the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca, a unified rebel group during the Civil War in the 1980s, and after the peace accords 1996 became the group’s presidential candidate. In 1991, the Guatemalan writer Luis Cardoza y Aragón published ‘Miguel Angel Asturias, Casi Novela’ about their time together during the 1920s and 1930s in Paris.
October 19, 1947
Bárbara Jacobs (born 19 October 1947) is a Mexican writer, poet, essayist and translator. Born in Mexico City in 1947, Jacobs grew up in a home where five languages were spoken. Her grandparents were Lebanese Jewish Maronites. After attending school in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, she returned to Mexico and received a degree in psychology from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. From 1974 to 1977, Jacobs taught and conducted research at the College of Mexico. Beginning in 1970, Jacobs has published stories and essays in literary magazines and supplements. Her novel, Las hojas muertas (Dead leaves; 1987), received the Xavier Villaurrutia Award, and has been translated into English, Italian and Portuguese. It was also a selection of the Secretariat of Public Education. Some of Jacobs' works have been published in collective anthologies in Castilian, English, French, Italian and German. Her books have been published in Mexico, US, Spain, Portugal, Argentina and Italy. Jacobs was married to the writer Augusto Monterroso (died, 2003), who was the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature laureate in 2000. She donated his work to the University of Oviedo.
October 19, 1922
Elsa Joubert (OIS), born Elsabé Antoinette Murray, is a Sestigers Afrikaans-language writer. She rose to prominence with her novel Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena, which was translated into 13 languages and also staged as a drama. Elsa Joubert grew up in Paarl and matriculated from the all-girls school La Rochelle in Paarl in 1939. She then studied at the University of Stellenbosch from which she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1942 and an SED (Secondary Education Diploma) in 1943. She continued her studies at the University of Cape Town which she left with a Master's degree in Dutch-Afrikaans literature in 1945. After graduating, Joubert taught at the Hoër Meisieskool, an all-girls high school in Cradock, then worked as the editor of the women’s pages of Huisgenoot, a well-known Afrikaans family magazine, from 1946 to 1948. She then started writing full-time and travelled extensively in Africa, from the springs of the Nile in Uganda, through the Sudan, to Cairo, as well as to Mozambique, Mauritius, Réunion, Madagascar, and Angola. She also visited Indonesia. In 1950 Joubert married Klaas Steytler, a journalist and later publisher and author, who died in 1998. She has three children, two daughters and one son, and lives in Oranjezicht, Cape Town.
October 19, 1931
David John Moore Cornwell (born 19 October 1931), pen name John le Carré, is a British author of espionage novels. During the 1950s and the 1960s, Cornwell worked for the British intelligence services MI5 and MI6, and began writing novels under a pen name. His third novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) became an international best-seller, and it remains one of his best-known works. Following the success of this novel, he left MI6 to become a full-time author. Le Carré has established himself as a writer of espionage fiction. In 2008, The Times ranked le Carré 22nd on its list of ‘The 50 greatest British writers since 1945’. In 2011, he won the Goethe Medal, a yearly prize given by the Goethe Institute.
October 19, 1913
Vasco Pratolini (19 October 1913 – 12 January 1991) was an Italian writer of the 20th century. Born in Florence, Pratolini worked at various jobs before entering the literary world thanks to his acquaintance with Elio Vittorini. In 1938 he founded, together with Alfonso Gatto, the magazine Campo di Marte. His work is based on firm political principles and much of it is rooted in the ordinary life and sentiments of ordinary, modest working-class people in Florence. During World War II he fought with the Italian partisans against the German occupation. After the war he also worked in the cinema, collaborating as screenwriter to films such as Luchino Visconti's Rocco e i suoi fratelli , Roberto Rossellini's Paisà and Nanni Loy's Le quattro giornate di Napoli. In 1954 and 1961 Valerio Zurlini turned two of his novels, Le ragazze di San Frediano and Cronaca familiare, into films. His most important literary works are the novels Cronaca familiare (1947), Cronache di poveri amanti (1947) and Metello (1955). He died in Rome in 1991.
October 19, 1947
Gunnar Staalesen was born in Bergen In 1947 and was educated at the University of Bergen. For the past ten years he has worked as information secretary at Bergen’s only theatre, The National Stage. Since 1975 he has published eight crime novels, of which AT NIGHT ALL WOLVES ARE GREY is the most recent. The earliest of Staalesen’s books were police mysteries; his later books are about Varg Veum, a Norwegian private detective. The critic Nils Nordberg wrote of the second Varg Veum novel, TILL DEATH DO US PART (1979), that it was ‘one of the finest, most serious, most ambitious books in post-war Norwegian crime writing.’. David McDuff is a translator and literary critic at present living in Greenwich, London. His published works include the SELECTED POEMS OF OSIP MANDELSTAM (Writers & Readers, 1983) and the COMPLETE POEMS OF EDITH SODERGRAN (Bloodaxe Books, 1984). He has translated several volumes of 19th- century Russian prose fiction for the Penguin Classics series.
October 19, 1942
Andrew Henry Vachss (born October 19, 1942) is an American crime fiction author, child protection consultant, and attorney exclusively representing children and youths. He is also a founder and national advisory board member of PROTECT. Vachss' last name rhymes with 'tax'. He is a native New Yorker.
October 19, 1957
Timothy Watts was born October 19, 1957, in Philadelphia, PA, the son of Harvey (a doctor) and Metta (a musician and teacher). He attended the University of South Carolina. He is the author of a number of crime novels including Cons, (1993), The Money Lovers (1994), Feeling Minnesota: A Novel (1996), Steal Away (1996), Grand Theft (2003). Watts is also an author of screenplays. He is one of the most arresting voices in crime fiction.
October 19, 1950
David Carle worked as a California State Park ranger for 27 years. He is author of Water and the California Dream: Choices for the New Millennium (2003) and Burning Questions: America’s Fight With Nature’s Fire (2002), among other books.
October 19, 1922
Alfredo de Freitas Dias Gomes (Salvador, October 19, 1922 - São Paulo, May 18, 1999) was a playwright and author of Brazilian telenovelas. One of the themes that he frequently developed in his works was that of a "leftist" vision of opposition to popular religion, considered as an instrument of the elites to pacify and subjugate the poor masses of the country in favor of the interests of the powerful as the large landowners, politicians and "coronéis" of Northeast Brazil, as well as the religious themselves who benefited from their dark interests. He had already gained notoriety as a theater writer and national projection due to the success of his piece O Pagador de Promessas. He debuted as a soap opera author in 1969, when he wrote A Ponte dos Suspiros . In Saramandaia , seven years later, he created fantastic realism in the Brazilian soap opera. This idea would also be used in later novels by other authors, such as Aguinaldo Silva. His wife was Janete Clair, famous soap opera author on TV Globo. Alfredo de Freitas Dias Gomes died in a traffic accident, when he was thrown out of a taxi that collided by the irregular maneuver of a motorist, who survived.
October 19, 1891
George Habib Antonius (October 19, 1891 – May 21, 1942) was a Lebanese-Egyptian author and diplomat, settled in Jerusalem, one of the first historians of Arab nationalism. Born in Deir al Qamar in a Lebanese Eastern Orthodox Christian family, he served as a civil servant in the British Mandate of Palestine. His 1938 book The Arab Awakening generated an ongoing debate over such issues as the origins of Arab nationalism, the significance of the Arab Revolt of 1916, and the machinations behind the post-World War I political settlement in the Middle East.
October 19, 1949
Richard Currey is the author of Crossing Over: A Vietnam Journal, which went on to vast acclaim and a Pulitzer Prize nomination; Fatal Light; and Lost Highway. He lives in Washington, DC.
October 19, 1964
GEOFFREY BROCK is the author of WEIGHING LIGHT and the translator of numerous volumes from the Italian, including Cesare Pavese’s DISAFFECTIONS: COMPLETE POEMS, 1930-1950. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. He teaches in the MFA program in creative writing and translation at the University of Arkansas.
October 19, 1885
Fannie Hurst (October 19, 1885, Hamilton, OH - February 23, 1968, New York City, NY) was an American novelist and short-story writer whose works were highly popular during the post-World War I era. Her work combined sentimental, romantic themes with social issues of the day, such as women's rights and race relations.
October 19, 1948
James Howard Kunstler is an American author, social critic, public speaker, and blogger. He is best known for his books The Geography of Nowhere, a history of American suburbia and urban development, The Long Emergency, and most recently, Too Much Magic.
October 19, 1945
John Arthur Lithgow is an American actor, musician, comedian, poet, author, and singer. He has received two Tony Awards, six Emmy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, three Screen Actors Guild Awards, an American Comedy Award, four Drama Desk Awards, and has been nominated for two Academy Awards and four Grammy Awards.
October 19, 1927
Frank MacShane (October 19, 1927, Pittsburgh, PA - November 15, 1999, Gloucester, MA) grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of a journalist who became the publisher of the New York Journal-American, flagship of the Hearst newspaper chain. He graduated from Harvard in 1949, received a master's degree at Yale, and was awarded a DPhil at Oxford in 1955. He taught at McGill University in Montreal for two years, was a visiting lecturer in English at Vassar College in 1958-59, and then was appointed an associate professor at the University of California at Berkeley. By that time MacShane had begun his Ford biography. Though he interviewed many people who had known Ford, his is essentially a story told from published sources. Though warmly received, subsequent biographies of Ford have a stronger claim on our attention. "If you want to know what California is like, read Raymond Chandler." MacShane received this advice not long after he moved to Berkeley. When his Chandler biography appeared in 1976, the novelist had begun to receive enthusiastic critical attention. MacShane presented him as a major writer who "rose from the blank anonymity of America". Overcoming a "tortured and lonely life," Chandler became a writer whose vision of America has grown in persuasive power. The Life Of Raymond Chandler was MacShane's book most likely to endure. His plea to take the life and perceptions of O'Hara seriously was a harder sell. By praising O'Hara's precinct cop who picks up a phone and asks "Wukkan I do fya?" MacShane put his finger on what was least authentic in the writer's documentation of American life. MacShane taught at Williams College from 1965-67, then went to Columbia University. There he founded the graduate writing division and taught creative writing. He published translations of Miguel Serrano, co-edited Borges On Writing, and edited two volumes of American travel writing. He remained an enthusiastic and dedicated teacher until Alzheimer's disease ended his academic career in 1992.
October 19, 1895
Lewis Mumford (October 19, 1895 – January 26, 1990) was an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a writer. Mumford was influenced by the work of Scottish theorist Sir Patrick Geddes and worked closely with his associate the British sociologist Victor Branford. Mumford was also a contemporary and friend of Frank Lloyd Wright, Clarence Stein, Frederic Osborn, Edmund N. Bacon, and Vannevar Bush.
October 19, 1954
Noenoe K. Silva is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa.
October 19, 1946
Albert L. Hurtado is Travis Chair in Modern American History at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of John Sutter: A Life on the North American Frontier, winner of the Caughey Prize from the Western Historical Association, among other books.
October 20, 1930
Reginald John ‘R. J.’ Hollingdale (20 October 1930 – 28 September 2001) was best known as a biographer and a translator of German philosophy and literature, especially the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Goethe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, G. C. Lichtenberg, and Schopenhauer. Hollingdale was also elected president of The Friedrich Nietzsche Society in 1989. Along with Walter Kaufmann, he was responsible for rehabilitating Nietzsche's reputation in the English-speaking world after World War II. Hollingdale was an atheist. ‘Reg’ Hollingdale dropped out of Bec Grammar School, Tooting at the age of 16 in order become a journalist, working in a junior position for a Croydon newspaper. He was called up to the Royal Air Force at a young age in the late 1940s, as part of his National Service, for two years before returning to journalism. After paying his way through private German lessons, and immersing himself in German literature and philosophy, Hollingdale earned the respect of readers and academics with his translations and studies of German cultural figures. Despite not possessing a degree, Hollingdale was elected president of a scholarly society, and was a visiting scholar at the University of Melbourne in 1991–1992. He also worked as a sub-editor at The Guardian and as a critic for The Times Literary Supplement.
October 20, 1946
Elfriede Jelinek (born 20 October 1946) is an Austrian playwright and novelist. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004 for her ‘musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power.’
October 20, 1854
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud (20 October 1854 – 10 November 1891) was a French poet born in Charleville, Ardennes. He influenced modern literature and arts, inspired various musicians, and prefigured surrealism. He started writing poems at a very young age, while still in primary school, and stopped completely before he turned 21. He was mostly creative in his teens (17–20). His 'genius, its flowering, explosion and sudden extinction, still astonishes'. Rimbaud was known to have been a libertine and for being a restless soul. He traveled extensively on three continents before his death from cancer just after his thirty-seventh birthday.
October 20, 1955
Magdalena Tulli (born 20 October 1955 in Warsaw, Poland) is a Polish novelist and translator, one of Poland's leading writers. She is a member of the Polish Writers' Association. Her works have been translated into many languages. In 2012, she won the Gdynia Literary Prize for her book W?oskie szpilki ("Italian High Heels"). She received five nominations for the Nike Award - Poland's most prominent literary prize. She translated a number of books including Marcel Proust's La Fugitive, Italo Calvino's The Watcher and Fleur Jaeggy's La paura del cielo. Bill Johnston is Director of the Polish Studies Center at Indiana University. His translations include Gustaw Herling’s The Noonday Cemetery and Other Stories (New Directions, 2003), Jerzy Pilch’s His Current Woman (Grove, 2002), and Stefan Zeromski’s The Faithful River (Northwestern, 1999). In 1999 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship for Translation. .
October 20, 1740
Isabelle de Charrière (20 October 1740 – 27 December 1805), known as Belle van Zuylen in the Netherlands and Madame de Charrière elsewhere, was a Dutch writer of the Enlightenment who lived the latter half of her life in Switzerland. She is now best known for her letters although she also wrote novels, pamphlets, music and plays. She took a keen interest in the society and politics of her age, and her work around the time of the French Revolution is regarded as being of particular interest.
October 20, 1951
Best known as the author of the Harlem-based Devil Barnett series of detective novels, Teddy Hayes is a talented force in a number of creative fields. His experiences range from working as a scriptwriter for Melvin Van Peebles and directing music videos to writing and producing plays and musical shows. An accomplished singer and composer, Hayes has written music inspired by the Devil Barnett books and is the creative force behind a touring stage tribute to the work of Marvin Gaye. Theodore Hayes was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 20, 1951, the only child of Ernest and Evelyn Hayes. His parents divorced when he was five, and Hayes grew up living with his mother, stepfather, and five younger siblings. He attended several elementary and junior high schools, including Anton Gridina, where Arsenio Hall was a classmate, and graduated from John F. Kennedy High School in 1971. Hayes was interested in music from an early age and began performing with vocal groups in his early teens, despite his lack of formal musical training. I was in the band; supposed to be playing clarinet, but I was the worst player ever, Hayes said in an interview with Contemporary Black Biography (CBB), citing his problems learning to read music. It was later, as an adult, that Hayes learned to read music and play the piano, driven by his desire to compose songs.
October 20, 1902
Felisberto Hernandez (October 20, 1902-January 13, 1964) was an Uruguayan writer. Hernández was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. His father was from Tenerife (Canary Island). He was a talented self-taught pianist who earned a living playing in the silent-screen theaters and cafés of Uruguay. What is interesting in Hernández’s fiction is the magic by-product of his anonymous first-person tales whose obsessive and deranged narrators have knocked down the wall between their minds and the empirical world and injected their obsessions into everyday life. He often used the events surrounding him as fodder for his fiction. His fiction often attempts to exploit the secret vitality contained in inanimate objects. Some of his most famous stories are: 'The Balcony,' 'My First Concert,' and 'Daisy Dolls.' ESTHER ALLEN has translated works by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Javier Marias, Rosario Castellanos, Blaise Cendrars, and Marie Darrieussecq.
October 20, 1913
Attia Hosain (October 20, 1913 - January 25, 1998) was a writer and broadcaster who hailed from Undivided India and worked for many years in the UK. She wrote two acclaimed books, being the semi-autobiographical Sunlight on a broken column and a collection of short stories named Phoenix fled.
October 20, 1822
Thomas Hughes (20 October 1822 – 22 March 1896) was an English lawyer, judge and author. He is most famous for his novel Tom Brown's School Days (1857), a semi-autobiographical work set at Rugby School, which Hughes had attended.
October 20, 1940
Robert Pinsky (born October 20, 1940) is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Pinsky is the author of nineteen books, most of which are collections of his own poetry. His published work also includes critically acclaimed translations, including The Inferno of Dante Alighieri and The Separate Notebooks by Czes?aw Mi?osz. He teaches at Boston University.
October 20, 1923
Otfried Preussler (20 October 1923 – 18 February 2013) was a German children's books author. More than 50 million copies of his books have been sold worldwide and they have been translated into 55 languages. His best-known works are The Robber Hotzenplotz and The Satanic Mill (Krabat). He was born in what was then Reichenberg, Bohemia (now Liberec, Czech Republic). His parents were teachers. After he graduated school in 1942, in the midst of World War II, he was drafted into the German Army. Although he survived the military action on the Eastern Front, he was taken prisoner as a 21-year-old lieutenant in 1944. He spent the next five years in various POW camps in the Tatar Republic. After his release in June 1949, he found his displaced relatives and his fiancée, Annelies Kind in the Bavarian town of Rosenheim. They married that same year. Between 1953 and 1970, he was initially a primary school teacher, then a school principal in Rosenheim. There his talents as a storyteller and illustrator were put to good use, and often the stories he told the children would later be written down and published. He won the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis in 1972 for Krabat. Preussler resided in Haidholzen, near Rosenheim. Over 15.2 million copies of his books have been sold in the German language, and his works have been translated into over 55 other languages. Having essentially retired from writing stories, which had become his main occupation, he undertook the relation of his experiences as a prisoner in the POW camps; those memoirs are to be published after his death.
October 20, 1905
Kurban Said is the pseudonym of the author of Ali and Nino, a novel originally published in 1937 in the German language by the Austrian publisher E.P. Tal. The true identity of the author is in dispute, but a leading contender is Lev Nussimbaum. Nussimbaum was born in Kiev in October 1905. His father Abraam Leybusovich Nussimbaum, was an oil baron in Baku. His mother was Basya Davidovna Nussimbaum, a Belorussian Jewess who committed suicide when Lev was a small child. In 1918, Lev’s father fled Baku from the Bolsheviks, taking him on a caravan of refugees through Turkestan, Persia and the Caucasus. The Nussimbaums relocated to Paris and finally Germany, where Lev finally converted to Islam and enrolled at university using the name Essad Bey Nousimbaoum. Nussimbaum assumed the identity of Essad Bey [purportedly related to to Erir of Bokara] and during this period allegedly wrote what has become Azerbaijan’s most famous novel Ali and Nino.
October 20, 1948
Burt Solomon is a contributing editor for National Journal, where he has covered the White House and many other aspects of Washington life. In 1991 he won the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency. He is also the author of the acclaimed Where They Ain't, a history of baseball in the 1890s. He lives with his wife and children inside the Beltway.
October 20, 1937
Emma Christina Tennant (20 October 1937 – 21 January 2017) was a British novelist and editor. She was known for a postmodern approach to her fiction, which is often imbued with fantasy or magic. She also published work under the name Catherine Aydy.
October 20, 1932
Michael McClure is an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. His books of poetry include Mysteriosos and Other Poems. Leslie scalapino is a poet whose most recent publication is Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows.
October 20, 1967
Monica Ali (born 20 October 1967) is a Bangladeshi-born British writer and novelist. In 2003 she was selected as one of the ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ by Granta magazine based on her unpublished manuscript; her debut novel, Brick Lane, was published later that year. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name
October 20, 1952
Gaylyn Studlar is David May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities and director of the program in film and media studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Among her many books are John Ford Made Westerns: Filming the Legend in the Sound Era, co-edited with Matthew Bernstein, and This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age.
October 21, 1947
Florence Anthony (October 21, 1947 – March 20, 2010) was an American poet and educator who legally changed her name to Ai Ogawa (Japanese: literally: ‘Love Stream’). She won the 1999 National Book Award for Poetry for Vice: New and Selected Poems.
October 21, 1943
Tariq Ali (born 21 October 1943) is a British Pakistani writer, journalist, and filmmaker. He is a member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review and Sin Permiso, and regularly contributes to The Guardian, CounterPunch, and the London Review of Books.
October 21, 1772
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (October 21, 1772, Ottery St Mary, United Kingdom - July 25, 1834, Highgate, United Kingdom) was an English poet, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets.
October 21, 1940
Zee Edgell grew up in Belize in the early 1950s. Her first job was as a reporter on the Daily Gleaner in Kingston, Jamaica. From 1966—8 she taught at St Catherine Academy in Belize, during which period she was also editor of a small newspaper in Belize City. After travelling widely - apart from Jamaica, Zee Edgell has lived in Britain, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and the USA - she has returned to Belize to teach at St Catherine Academy. She has recently been appointed Director of the Womens’ Bureau in Belize.
October 21, 1946
Suzanne Jill Levine (born October 21, 1946 in New York, New York) is an American poet, translator, translation scholar and critic. She earned a BA at Vassar College in 1967, an MA at Columbia University in 1969, and a PhD at New York University in 1976. She specializes in Latin American literature. Some of her most best known translations include works by Jorge Luis Borges, Manuel Puig, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante. She wrote the biography Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions (2001), published by the University of Wisconsin Press. Levine is an honorary member of IAPTI.
October 21, 1933
Zdena Salivarová is a writer, publisher, translator, singer, and actress. She is a former member of the MAGIC LANTERN THEATRE and the PARAVAN THEATRE. In addition Zdena Salivarova is a founder and manager of the SIXTY-EIGHT PUBLISHERS Corp. in Toronto, ON, Canada (1971-1994) which published Czech books from original manuscripts banned by the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. For this she was awarded the Order of the White Lion in 1991 by Václav Havel, President of the Czechoslovak Republic.
October 21, 1919
Claire Sterling (née Neikind; October 21, 1919 – June 17, 1995) was an American author and journalist whose work focused on crime, political assassination, and terrorism. Her theories on Soviet bloc involvement in international terrorism and the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II, presented in The Terror Network and The Time of the Assassins, respectively, were politically influential and controversial. Sterling was born in Queens, New York. She earned a bachelor's degree in economics at Brooklyn College, worked as a union organizer, and was briefly a member of the Young Communist League. After receiving a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1945, she became the Rome correspondent of "a fly-by-night American news agency." When it folded, she joined The Reporter, which she wrote for until it ceased publication in 1968. Sterling began writing her second book after losing her job at The Reporter; it was published in 1969. She also wrote for various newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, Washington Post and Reader's Digest. She married Thomas Sterling, a novelist, in 1951. After spending their honeymoon in Italy the two moved there, living in Rome for several decades. They had two children. She died of cancer at age 75, in a hospital in Arezzo. Her first book, titled Our Goal was Palestine, was published by Victor Gollancz under her maiden name Claire Neikind in 1946, it is described as 'an American journalist writes of her experiences in a refugee ship.' She was at this time reportedly 'the Rome correspondent of the Overseas News Agency', which was a covert British propaganda operation run by British Security Co-ordination, set up in New York City by the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) upon the authorisation of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Sterling's second book revisited the 1948 death of Jan Masaryk, the Czechoslovak foreign minister, which she blamed on Soviet or Czechoslovak Stalinists. More controversial were her books The Terror Network (1981) and The Time of the Assassins (1984). In the former book, which was translated into 22 languages, she claimed that Soviet Union was a major source of backing behind terrorist groupings around the world. The book was read and appreciated by Alexander Haig and William Casey, but its arguments were dismissed by the CIA's Soviet analysts. Sterling was the first to claim (in a September 1982 article in Reader's Digest) that the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John II had been ordered by the Bulgarian Secret Service, a theory that became known as the "Bulgarian Connection" She was one of three journalists responsible for fabricating and divulging the details of the theory - the others were Paul Bernard Henze (1924-2011), a propaganda expert and CIA station chief in Turkey, and Michael Leeden, associated with the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, a right-wing think tank. Leeden had strong connections with a faction of the Italian secret service (SISMI) linked to the Propaganda Due secret masonic lodge, which first revealed the fraudulent proposed attack on the Pope by the Soviet Minister of Defence Dmitry Ustinov. The three journalists wrote articles and appeared on television and her and Henze's books, were enthusiastically reviewed. Individually, or as a team, the two were repeatedly invited as guests on to the three principal American networks and programmes on British television. They insisted that no expert who supported a contrasting view be interviewed with them on the same programme and, in most cases, the producers obliged. The Sterling-Henze duo was almost able to monopolise coverage of the story. In the American media, for a certain time, it became almost impossible to express a different view and anyone who did was considered unpatriotic at best. The "Bulgarian Connection" theory has also been, in detail, refuted and attributed to bias by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent. The Time of the Assassins dealt with the assassination attempt and advanced this now-discredited theory. Her last two books dealt with the Sicilian Mafia and post-Communist globalized organized crime, respectively.
October 21, 1929
HECTOR TIZÓN (October 21, 1929, Rosario de la Frontera, Argentina - July 30, 2012, San Salvador de Jujuy, Argentina) was born in 1929 in jujuy, northwest Argentina, and grew up in the village of Yala. He obtained a law degree and served in the diplomatic service as cultural attaché, travelling extensively in the United States, Europe and North Africa. During the years of the military régime in Argentina (1976-82) he went into exile and lived in Madrid. He has since returned to Yala, where he lives with his wife and children, and runs a legal practice in San Salvador de jujuy. He has written five novels and four volumes of short stories - some of which have appeared in the Guardian and Index on Censorship. The Man Who Came to a Village is his first novel to be translated into English. . Miriam Frank was born in Spain and grew up in France, Mexico and New Zealand. She graduated in medicine and is a senior lecturer at a London teaching hospital. The author of numerous scientific articles, Miriam Frank discovered the work of Hector Tizón during a lecture tour of Argentina.
October 21, 1960
Miles Harvey began reporting on Gilbert Bland in 1996 for Outside magazine. He has worked for UPI and In These Times, and he was the book-review columnist for Outside. A graduate of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and the University of Michigan, he has had a lifelong fascination with maps.
October 21, 1929
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (October 21, 1929 – January 22, 2018) was an American novelist. She worked mainly in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. She also authored children's books, short stories, poetry, and essays. Her writing was first published in the 1960s and often depicted futuristic or imaginary alternative worlds in politics, the natural environment, gender, religion, sexuality, and ethnography. In 2016, The New York Times described her as "America's greatest living science fiction writer", although she said that she would prefer to be known as an "American novelist". She influenced Booker Prize winners and other writers, such as Salman Rushdie and David Mitchell, and science fiction and fantasy writers including Neil Gaiman and Iain Banks. She won the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Locus Award, and World Fantasy Award, each more than once. In 2014, she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In 2003, she was made a Grandmaster of Science Fiction, one of a few women writers to take the top honor in the genre.
October 21, 1897
Alexander Lernet-Holenia (21 October 1897 Vienna, Austria–Hungary, Died 3 July 1976 - aged 78 - Vienna, Austriawas an Austrian poet, novelist, dramaturgist and writer of screenplays and historical studies who produced a heterogeneous literary opus that included poesy, psychological novels describing the intrusion of otherworldly or unreal experiences into reality, and recreational films.
October 21, 1928
arjorie Phyllis Oludhe Macgoye (21 October 1928 – 1 December 2015) was an English-born Kenyan novelist, essayist and poet. Born Marjorie King in 1928 in Southampton, England, Marjorie travelled to Kenya to work as a missionary in 1954. She worked at the S.J. Moore Bookshop on Government Road, now Moi Avenue in Nairobi, for some years. There she organised readings that were attended by, among others, Okot P'Bitek, author of Song of Lawino, and Jonathan Kariara, a Kenyan poet. She met Macgoye, a medical doctor, and the two were married in 1960. In 1971, an anthology entitled Poems from East Africa included the acclaimed poem "A Freedom Song".Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye died on 1 December 2015, at her home in Nairobi.
October 21, 1947
Dr. Mary Pipher is a clinical psychologist and the author of nine books, including Reviving Ophelia, Her area of interest is how American culture influences the mental health of its people.
October 21, 1931
Hugh Swynnerton Thomas, Baron Thomas of Swynnerton (21 October 1931 – 7 May 2017) was an English historian, writer and life peer in the House of Lords.
October 21, 1947
Mary Schmidt Campbell is President of Spelman College and Dean Emerita of the Tisch School of the Arts. She served as the vice chair of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities under former President Barack Obama.
October 22, 1941
Max Apple, in full Max Isaac Apple (born October 22, 1941, Grand Rapids, Mich., U.S.), American writer known for the comic intelligence of his stories, which chronicle pop culture and other aspects of American life. Apple’s first language was Yiddish. Educated at the University of Michigan (B.A., 1963; Ph.D., 1970), Apple taught at Reed College, Portland, Ore., from 1970 to 1971 and at Rice University, Houston, Texas, from 1972. Apple’s satire is distinguished by its gentle spoofing. His cast of characters often includes a mix of historical figures and fictional creations, as in The Oranging of America (1976), with its stories about materialism that feature such historical figures as cereal manufacturer C.W. Post, restaurant and motor-lodge entrepreneur Howard Johnson, and novelist Norman Mailer. In Zip: A Novel of the Left and the Right (1978), a Jewish man from Detroit manages the career of a middleweight Puerto Rican boxer named Jesus Goldstein, and brief appearances are made by J. Edgar Hoover, Fidel Castro, and Jane Fonda. His subsequent works include the collection of short stories Free Agents (1984) and The Propheteers (1987), a colourful satire of the entrepreneurs who shaped American fast-food culture. Apple’s later novels Roommates: My Grandfather’s Story (1994) and I Love Gootie: My Grandmother’s Story (1998) are highly autobiographical narratives about growing up in the United States with first-generation Jewish grandparents. The Jew of Home Depot, and Other Stories (2007) is a collection of eclectic stories whose characters range from a disabled little girl who bonds with the mute characters of Disneyland to a teenage girl with a passion for shot put.
October 22, 1933
David Mansfield Bromige (October 22, 1933 – June 3, 2009) is a Canadian poet who resided in northern California from 1962 onward. Bromige published thirty books, each one so different from the others as to seem to be the work of a different author. He departs from language poetry in the thematic unity of many of his poems, in the uses to which he puts found materials, with the romantic aspect of his lyricism, and with the sheer variety of his approaches to the poem.
October 22, 1870
Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin (22 October 1870 – 8 November 1953) was the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was noted for the strict artistry with which he carried on the classical Russian traditions in the writing of prose and poetry. The texture of his poems and stories, sometimes referred to as ‘Bunin brocade’, is considered to be one of the richest in the language. Best known for his short novels The Village (1910) and Dry Valley (1912), his autobiographical novel The Life of Arseniev (1933, 1939), the book of short stories Dark Avenues (1946) and his 1917–1918 diary (Cursed Days, 1926), Bunin was a revered figure among anti-communist White emigres, European critics, and many of his fellow writers, who viewed him as a true heir to the tradition of realism in Russian literature established by Tolstoy and Chekhov.
October 22, 1965
Alison Louise "A. L." Kennedy (born 22 October 1965) is a Scottish writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction, academic and stand-up comedian. She is known for her characteristically dark tone, a blending of realism and fantasy, and for her serious approach to her work. She contributes columns and reviews to European newspapers.
October 22, 1919
Doris May Lessing (née Tayler; 22 October 1919 – 17 November 2013) was a British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer. Her novels include The Grass is Singing (1950), the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence (1952–69), The Golden Notebook (1962), The Good Terrorist (1985), and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–1983). Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. In awarding the prize, the Swedish Academy described her as ‘that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny’. Lessing was the eleventh woman and the oldest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of ‘The 50 greatest British writers since 1945’.
October 22, 1887
John Reed (Portland, Oregon, October 22, 1887 – Moscow, October 17, 1920) was an American journalist, poet, and communist activist, best remembered for his first-hand account of the Bolshevik Revolution, TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD. He was married to writer and feminist Louise Bryant.
October 22, 1952
Julie Dash (born October 22, 1952) is an American filmmaker, author and member of the L.A. Rebellion. Her Daughters of the Dust (1992) was the first full-length film by an African-American woman with general theatrical release in the United States. Dash is the film's producer, screenwriter and director. In 2004, Daughters of the Dust was included in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. One of a generation of African and African-American filmmakers from the UCLA Film School who have created an alternative to Hollywood films, Dash has also made numerous music videos and television movies, the latter including Funny Valentines (1999), Incognito (1999), Love Song (2000), and The Rosa Parks Story (2002). Her Brothers of the Borderland (2004) was commissioned by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. Dash's book Daughters of the Dust: A Novel (1997) is a sequel to the film, set 20 years later in Harlem and the Sea Islands.
October 22, 1882
Edmund Dulac (born Edmond Dulac; October 22, 1882 – May 25, 1953) was a French-born, British naturalised magazine illustrator, book illustrator and stamp designer. Born in Toulouse he studied law but later turned to the study of art the École des Beaux-Arts. He moved to London early in the 20th century and in 1905 received his first commission to illustrate the novels of the Brontë Sisters. During World War I, Dulac produced relief books and when after the war the deluxe children's book market shrank he turned to magazine illustrations among other ventures. He designed banknotes during World War II and postage stamps, most notably those that heralded the beginning of Queen Elizabeth II's reign.
October 22, 1866
Edward Phillips Oppenheim (22 October 1866 – 3 February 1946) was an English novelist, in his lifetime a major and successful writer of genre fiction including thrillers. Edward Phillips Oppenheim was born 22 October 1866 in Leicester, the son of Henrietta Susannah Temperley Budd and Edward John Oppenheim, a leather merchant. He worked in his father's business for almost twenty years. He went to Wyggeston Grammar School. Oppenheim's literary success enabled him to buy a villa in France and a yacht, then a house in Guernsey, though he lost access to this during the Second World War. Afterwards he regained the house, le Vanquiédor in St. Peter Port, and he died there on 3 February 1946. In 1892 Oppenheim married Elise Clara Hopkins. They lived in Evington, Leicestershire until the First World War, and had one daughter. During the war he worked for the Ministry of Information.
October 22, 1936
Robert George "Bobby" Seale (born October 22, 1936) is an American political activist. He and fellow activist Huey P. Newton co-founded the Black Panther Party.
October 22, 1955
Cole Swensen is the author of twelve previous books of poetry, including the acclaimed Ours (UC Press). She is also coeditor of American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry and teaches in the Literary Arts Program at Brown University.
October 22, 1963
Kavita Singh is a professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
October 23, 1958
Michael Eric Dyson has been Director of the Institute of African American Research, and Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, as well as an ordained Baptist minister. He is the author of the widely acclaimed REFLECTING 8LACK: AFRICAN-AMERICAN CULTURAL CRITICISM, and his work has appeared in The New York Times. The Washington Post, Emerge Magazine, The Nation, Vibe, and Rolling Stone.
October 23, 1918
Helen Nielsen (October 23, 1918, Roseville, IL - June 22, 2002, Prescott, AZ) was an author of mysteries and television scripts for such television dramas as Perry Mason and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. She was born in Roseville, Illinois, and studied journalism, art and aeronautical drafting at various schools, including the Chicago Art Institute. Before her writing career, she worked as a draftsman during World War II and contributed to the designs of B-36 and P-80 aircraft. Her stories were often set in Laguna Beach and Oceanside, California where she lived for 60 years. Some of her novels were reprinted by Black Lizard, including Detour and Sing Me a Murder.
October 23, 1734
Nicolas-Edme Rétif or Nicolas-Edme Restif (23 October 1734 – 3 February 1806), also known as Rétif de la Bretonne, was a French novelist. The term retifism for shoe fetishism was named after him. Born at Sacy, he was educated by the Jansenists at Bicêtre, and on the expulsion of the Jansenists was received by one of his brothers, who was a curé. Owing to a scandal in which he was involved, he was apprenticed to a printer at Auxerre, and, having served his time, went to Paris. Here he worked as a journeyman printer, and in 1760 he married Anne or Agnès Lebègue, a relation of his former master at Auxerre. It was not until five or six years after his marriage that Rétif appeared as an author, and from that time to his death he produced a bewildering multitude of books, amounting to something like two hundred volumes, many of them printed with his own hand, on almost every conceivable subject. Rétif suffered at one time or another the extremes of poverty. He drew on the episodes of his own life for his books, which, 'in spite of their faded sentiment, contain truthful pictures of French society on the eve of the Revolution'. He has been described as both a social realist and a sexual fantasist in his writings. The original editions of these, and indeed of all his books, have long been bibliographical curiosities owing to their rarity, the beautiful and curious illustrations which many of them contain, and the quaint typographic system in which most are composed. The fall of the assignats during the Revolution forced him to make his living by writing, profiting on the new freedom of the press. In 1795 he received a gratuity of 2000 francs from the Thermidor Convention. In spite of his declarations for the new power, his aristocratic acquaintances and his reputation made him fall in disgrace. Just before his death Napoleon gave him a place in the ministry of police: he however died at Paris, before taking up the position. He and the Marquis de Sade maintained a mutual hate, while he was appreciated by Benjamin Constant and Friedrich von Schiller and appeared at the table of Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de La Reynière, whom he met in 1782. Jean François de La Harpe nicknamed him 'the Voltaire of the chambermaids'. He was rediscovered by the Surrealists in the early 20th century. He is also noted for his advocacy of communism, indeed the term first made its modern appearance (1785) in his book review of Joseph-Alexandre-Victor Hupay de Fuveau who described himself as 'communist' with his Project for a Philosophical Community. The author Mario Vargas Llosa has a chapter on Rétif in his novel The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto.
October 23, 1805
Adalbert Stifter (23 October 1805 – 28 January 1868) was an Austrian writer, poet, painter, and pedagogue. He was especially notable for the vivid natural landscapes depicted in his writing, and has long been popular in the German-speaking world, while almost entirely unknown to English readers.
October 23, 1883
Gustavo Adolfo Martínez Zuviría (October 23, 1883 – March 28, 1962), best known under his pseudonym Hugo Wast, was a renowned Argentine novelist and script writer. Born Gustavo Martínez Zuviría in Córdoba, Argentina, his family relocated to Santa Fe, and he enrolled at the University of Santa Fe, receiving a law degree in 1907. Martínez Zuviría first used the pen name "Hugo Wast" for his 1911 novel, Flor de Durazno (Peach Blossom) - his first commercial success. He was elected to the Argentine Chamber of Deputies in 1916 as a Conservative and received the National Literary Prize for his realist novel, Desierto de piedra (Stone Desert), but he was also known for his anti-semitism - established with his inflammatory Oro (Gold) - and his ideological association with French "integrisme," a Catholic nationalist doctrine associated with the National Front. He was appointed director of the National Library of Argentina in 1931, and in 1943, as Minister of Public Instruction for the newly installed military government of General Pedro Ramírez, he reinstated religious education in public schools, thus breaking from a sixty-year secular tradition in Argentine education. A souring of relations with the Catholic Church on the part of President Juan Perón led to Wast's dismissal as National Library Director in 1955. The writer died in Buenos Aires in 1962.
October 23, 1948
Lindsley Cameron is the author of The Music of Light: The Extraordinary Story of Hikari and Kenzaburo Oe (Free Press, 1998) and the collection of stories The Prospect of Detachment (St. Martin’s, 1988). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Yale Review.
October 23, 1932
Kenjo Jumbam (October 23, 1932 - December 12, 2005) was a celebrated Cameroonian writer and the first Anglophone Cameroon writer to publish with Heinemann's African Writers Series.
October 23, 1941
Mary Sybilla Lovell is a British writer. She was an accountant and company director until she began writing in 1980 following a serious riding accident which left her temporarily disabled. She has written biographies of Beryl Markham, Amelia Earhart, Jane Digby, Richard Francis Burton, Amy Elizabeth Thorpe, the Mitford Girls, Bess of Hardwick and The Churchills. Her book on Markham, Straight on Till Morning, researched and written in under a year, after weeks of interviews with the subject in Nairobi, became an immediate international bestseller when it was published in 1987 and was twelve weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list.
October 23, 1927
Surrealist poet Philip Lamantia (October 23, 1927, San Francisco, CA - March 7, 2005, North Beach, San Francisco, CA) was born in San Francisco in 1927, the son of Sicilian immigrants. Largely self-taught, he started writing in elementary school and became interested in surrealism after seeing the work of Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí at the San Francisco Museum of Art. He dropped out of high school and moved to New York City, where he eventually became assistant editor at View magazine. Interested in poetry and jazz, Lamantia was a member of a jazz and poetry group with Jack Kerouac, Howard Hart, and David Antrim in the 1950s. In his later years, he returned to the Catholicism of his youth, writing poetry that reflected his rediscovered faith. Lamantia lectured at San Francisco State University and the San Francisco Art Institute and was married to Nancy Peters, his editor at City Lights Books. He died in 2005.
October 24, 1917
Theodore Edward le Bouthillier Allbeury (24 October 1917-4 December 2005) was a British author of espionage fiction. Between 1965 and 1967 he had been the managing director of the fort-based pirate radio station Radio 390, later moving to the ship-based Radio 355 until its closure in August of 1967. During World War II, Allbeury served in Britain's Special Operations Executive. His first novel, A Choice of Enemies, was published in 1972. Allbeury went on to publish over 40 novels, under his own name as well as Patrick Kelly and Richard Butler.
October 24, 1939
Paula Gunn Allen (October 24, 1939 – May 29, 2008) was a Native American poet, literary critic, lesbian activist, and novelist. Of mixed-race European-American and Native American descent, she identified with the Laguna Pueblo of her childhood years, the culture in which she'd grown up. She drew from its oral traditions for her fiction and poetry, and also wrote numerous essays on its themes. She edited four collections of Native American traditional stories and contemporary works, and wrote two biographies of Native American women.
October 24, 1945
Katherine Karen Dunn (October 24, 1945 – May 11, 2016) was an American best-selling novelist, journalist, voice artist, radio personality, book reviewer, and poet from Portland, Oregon. She is best known for the novel Geek Love (1989). She was also a prolific writer on boxing.
October 24, 1938
Venedikt Vasilyevich Yerofeyev, also Benedict Erofeev or Erofeyev (24 October 1938 in Niva-3 settlement, suburb of Kandalaksha – 11 May 1990 in Moscow) was a Russian writer and Soviet dissident.
October 24, 1923
Denise Levertov was born in Ilford, Essex, England, on October 24, 1923. Her father, raised a Hasidic Jew, had converted to Christianity while attending university in Germany. By the time Levertov was born, he had settled in England and become an Anglican parson. Her mother, who was Welsh, read authors such as Willa Cather, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, and Leo Tolstoy aloud to the family. Levertov was educated entirely at home and claimed to have decided to become a writer at the age of five. When she was twelve, she sent some of her poetry to T. S. Eliot, who responded with two pages of excellent advice and encouragement to continue writing. At age seventeen she had her first poem published, in Poetry Quarterly. During World War II, Levertov became a civilian nurse serving in London throughout the bombings. She wrote her first book, The Double Image, while she was between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one. The book, released in 1946, brought her recognition as one of a group of poets dubbed the New Romantics. In 1947 Levertov married Mitchell Goodman, an American writer, and a year later they moved to America. They settled in New York City, spending summers in Maine. Their son Nickolai was born in 1949. She became a naturalized U. S. citizen in 1956. After her move to the U. S., Levertov was introduced to the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, the formal experimentation of Ezra Pound, and, in particular, the work of William Carlos Willams. Through her husband’s friendship with poet Robert Creeley, she became associated with the Black Mountain group of poets, particularly Creeley, Charles Olson, and Robert Duncan, who had formed a short-lived but groundbreaking school in 1933 in North Carolina. Some of her work was published in the 1950s in the Black Mountain Review. Levertov acknowledged these influences but disclaimed membership in any poetic school. She moved away from the fixed forms of English practice, developing an open, experimental style. With the publication of her first American book, Here and Now (1956), she became an important voice in the American avant-garde. Her poems of the fifties and sixties won her immediate and excited recognition, not just from peers like Creeley and Duncan, but also from the avant-garde poets of an earlier generation, such as Kenneth Rexroth and William Carlos Williams. Her next book, With Eyes at the Back of our Heads (1959), established her as one of the great American poets, and her British origins were soon forgotten. She was poetry editor of The Nation magazine in 1961 and from 1963 to 1965. During the 1960s, activism and feminism became prominent in her poetry. During this period she produced one of her most memorable works of rage and sadness, The Sorrow Dance (1967), which encompassed her feelings toward the war and the death of her older sister. She received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1969. From 1975 to 1978, she was poetry editor of Mother Jones magazine. Levertov went on to publish more than twenty volumes of poetry, including The Freeing of the Dust (1975), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. She was also the author of four books of prose, most recently Tesserae (1995), and translator of three volumes of poetry, among them Jean Joubert’s Black Iris (1989). From 1982 to 1993, she taught at Stanford University. She spent the last decade of her life in Seattle, during which time she published Poems 1968-1972 (1987), Breathing the Water (1987), A Door in the Hive (1989), Evening Train (1992), and The Sands of the Well (1996). On December 20, 1997, Levertov died from complications of lymphoma. She was seventy-four. New Directions published This Great Unknowing: Last Poems in 1999 and The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov in 2013.
October 24, 1933
Norman Rush (born October 24, 1933 in Oakland, California) is an American novelist whose introspective novels and short stories are set in Botswana in the 1980s. He is the son of Roger and Leslie (Chesse) Rush. He was the recipient of the 1991 National Book Award and the 1992 Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize for his novel MATING. Rush was born in San Francisco and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1956. After working for fifteen years as a book dealer, he changed careers to become a teacher and found he had more time to write. He submitted a short story about his teaching experiences to The New Yorker, and it was published in 1978. Rush and his wife, Elsa, worked as co-workers for the Peace Corps in Botswana from 1978 to 1983, which provided material for a collection of short stories he published as WHITES in 1986, and for which he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His Botswana experience was also used in his first novel, MATING, which won a National Book Award for fiction in 1991, and in his second novel, MORTALS.
October 24, 1949
Lee Stringer (born October 24, 1949) is the author of the acclaimed GRAND CENTRAL WINTER: STORIES FROM THE STREET (Seven Stories Press, 1998), which has been translated into eighteen languages, and, with Kurt Vonnegut, LIKE SHAKING HANDS WITH GOD: A CONVERSATION ON WRITING (Seven Stories Press, 1999). Stringer has contributed recent writing to EMPIRE CITY: NEW YORK THROUGH THE CENTURIES (2002), UNHOLY GHOSTS: WRITERS ON DEPRESSION (2001), TIME OUT BOOK OF NEW YORK WALKS (2000), THE WAY HOME: ENDING HOMELESSNESS IN AMERICA (1999), and THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM: FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY CRITICAL EDITION (Seven Stories Press, 1999). He lives in Mamaroneck, New York.
October 24, 1941
Sebastiano Vassalli (24 October 1941 – 26 July 2015) was an Italian author. He wrote the 2007 novel The Italian (L'italiano). Vassalli was born in Genoa, Italy in 1941. His mother are from Tuscany and father were from Lombardy. At a very young age, he was abandoned to relatives in Novara for some flour and oil. He went on to complete his Bachelor of arts degree in Milan. Soon after, Vassalli partnered with Casare Musatti and wrote a book on Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Art which ultimately began his career as a notable author. Vassalli devoted himself to teaching and researching artistic Neoavanguardia and was also involved with the group 63. He was a very dedicated man especially when it came to writing. He wrote for La Repubblica, La Stampa and Corriere della Sera. Vassalli's works are established based on historical research relating to the evolution of religion, politics, and gender differences. His novels are normally set in a certain historical context (Italy in the sixties, the middle ages, and times of counter-fascism). He devotes his works around realistic representations of characters. Vassalli's works are known for their ability to represent the extremely simple yet effective nature of the characters of the novels in a sort of fictional manner. This aspect, together with historical accuracy gives Vassalli’s works valuable qualities in terms of teaching them.
October 24, 1942
Frank Delaney (24 October 1942 – 21 February 2017), a journalist and writer, was born in Tipperary, and lived in Dublin from 1961-1968. He was Literary Director of the Edinburgh Festival in 1980. Jorge Lewinski, who was born in Poland and came to Britain during World War II, was Senior Lecturer in Photography and the History of Art at the London College of Printing.
October 24, 1820
Eugène Fromentin (October 24, 1820 – August 27, 1876) was a French painter and writer, now better remembered for his writings. He was born in La Rochelle. After leaving school he studied for some years under Louis Cabat, the landscape painter. Fromentin was one of the earliest pictorial interpreters of Algeria, having been able, while quite young, to visit the land and people that suggested the subjects of most of his works, and to store his memory as well as his portfolio with the picturesque and characteristic details of North African life. In 1849, he was awarded a medal of the second class. In 1852, he paid a second visit to Algeria, accompanying an archaeological mission, and then completed that minute study of the scenery of the country and of the habits of its people which enabled him to give to his after-work the realistic accuracy that comes from intimate knowledge. His books include Les Maîtres d'autrefois ("The Masters of Past Time", 1876), an influential appreciation of Early Netherlandish painting and the Northern Baroque of the Old Masters of Belgium and Holland, Dominique and A Summer in the Sahara. In Les Maîtres d'autrefois he deals with the complexity of paintings by Rubens, Rembrandt and others, their style and the artists' emotions at the time of creating their masterpieces. He is also one of the first "art critics" to approach the subject of The Old Masters from a personal point of view - being a painter himself. He also puts the work in a social, political and economic context, as the Dutch Golden Age painting develops shortly after Holland won its independence. The book developed from articles for journals. Meyer Schapiro has written an essay on Fromentin, "Eugene Fromentin as Critic".
October 24, 1923
Vít?zslav Gardavský (October 24, 1923 in Záb?eh near Ostrava - March 7, 1978 in Prosetín ) was a writer , playwright, poet, soldier, teacher, chalet, driver, warehouse, worker ... and especially philosopher.
October 24, 1925
Edwin McClellan (October 24, 1925 – April 27, 2009) was a British Japanologist. He was an academic—a scholar, teacher, writer, translator and interpreter of Japanese literature and culture.
October 24, 1948
Kweisi Mfume (born Frizzell Gerald Gray; October 24, 1948) is an American politician and the former President/CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as a five-term Democratic Congressman from Maryland's 7th congressional district, serving in the 100th through 104th Congress. On September 12, 2006, he lost a primary campaign for the United States Senate seat that was being vacated by Maryland U.S. Senator Paul Sarbanes.
October 24, 1957
Manuel Rivas (born in A Coruña, Spain on 24 October 1957) is a Galician writer, poet and journalist. He began his career in some Spanish newspapers like El Ideal Gallego, La Voz de Galicia, El País, and was the sub-editor of Diario 16 in Galicia. Rivas has written well known poems, novels, articles and literature essays. Rivas is considered a revolutionary in contemporary Galician literature. He was a founding member of Greenpeace Spain, and played an important role during the Prestige oil spill near the Galician coast. Some of his work has been adapted to cinema, such as A lingua das bolboretas and O Lápis do Carpinteiro. Rivas's book Qué me quieres, amor? (1996), a series of sixteen short stories, was adapted by director José Luis Cuerda for his film A lingua das bolboretas ('Butterfly'). O lápis do carpinteiro ('The Carpenter's Pencil') has been published in nine countries and is the most widely translated work in the history of Galician literature.
October 24, 1952
Fatima Shaik, is an American writer of children’s and adult literature, and former daily journalist. Her literature explores the human spirit and the intersection of cultures, notably themes of family, community, and justice. Publishers Weekly described her as knowledgeable and perceptive.
October 24, 1942
Born in Medellin, Colombia in 1942, Fernando Vallejo has directed three films, written several screenplays and eight books, including several novels. He is regarded as the first Latin American novelist to have broken with the tradition of 'magical realism'. This is the first translation of his work into English.
October 24, 1942
Robert Whiting (born October 24, 1942) is a best-selling author and journalist who has written several successful books on contemporary Japanese culture - which include topics such as baseball and American gangsters operating in Japan. He was born in New Jersey, grew up in Eureka, California and graduated from Sophia University in Tokyo. He has lived in Japan for a total of more than three decades since he first arrived there in 1962, while serving in the U.S. Air Force. He currently divides his time between homes in Tokyo and California.
October 24, 1953
Mindy Newell is an American comic book artist and editor, best known for her work with DC Comics.
October 24, 1914
Andrew F. Tully Jr. (October 24, 1914 - September 27, 1993) was an American war reporter, writer and columnist. He wrote some 18 fiction and non-fiction books, translated in multiple languages. As a war reporter for the Boston Traveler, he was one of the few American journalists to enter Berlin with the Russians in April 1945. He wrote the column Capital Fare from 1961 until 1987.
October 25, 1914
John Allyn Berryman (October 25, 1914 – January 7, 1972) was an American poet and scholar, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and was considered a key figure in the Confessional school of poetry. His best-known work is The Dream Songs.
October 25, 1930
Harold Brodkey, born Aaron Roy Weintraub (October 25, 1930 born in Staunton, Illinois – January 26, 1996 Manhattan) was an American writer, and novelist.
October 25, 1944
Chester James Carville, Jr. (born October 25, 1944) is an American political commentator and media personality who is a prominent figure in the Democratic Party. Carville gained national attention for his work as the lead strategist of the successful presidential campaign of then-Arkansas governor Bill Clinton. Carville was a co-host of CNN's Crossfire until its final broadcast in June 2005. Since its cancellation, he has appeared on CNN's news program The Situation Room. As of 2009, he hosts a weekly program on XM Radio titled 60/20 Sports with Luke Russert, son of Tim Russert who hosted NBC's Meet The Press. He is married to Republican political consultant Mary Matalin. In 2009, he began teaching political science at Tulane University. In 2014, Carville joined Fox News Channel as a contributor.
October 25, 1767
Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque (25 October 1767 – 8 December 1830), or simply Benjamin Constant, was a Swiss-French politician and writer on politics and religion. He was the author of a partly biographical psychological novel, Adolphe. He was a fervent liberal of the early 19th century who influenced the Trienio Liberal movement in Spain, the Liberal Revolution of 1820 in Portugal, the Greek War of Independence, the November Uprising in Poland, the Belgian Revolution, and Liberalism in Brazil and Mexico.
October 25, 1901
Oliver Cromwell Cox (25 October 1901 – 4 September 1974) was a Trinidadian-American sociologist noted for his early Marxist viewpoint on Fascism. He is a member of the Chicago school of sociology. Cox was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago emigrated to the United States and earned a bachelor of science degree from Northwestern University in 1928. He soon developed Poliomyelitis (Polio), causing both his legs to be permanently crippled. He then attended the University of Chicago Economics department and graduated with a Master's degree in 1932. From there, he continued at Chicago in the Sociology department where he graduated from with a Ph.D in 1938. Cox lectured at Lincoln University of Missouri from 1949 - 1970 where he then moved onto a position at Wayne State University until his death in 1974. Cox was a Marxist who criticized capitalism and race in Foundations of Capitalism (1959), Capitalism and American Leadership (1962), Capitalism as a System (1964) and his last, Jewish Self-Interest and Black Pluralism (1974). Perhaps Cox's most profound and influential if also ‘understudied’ book was his first, Caste, Class and Race, published in the same year E. Franklin Frazier became the first black president of the American Sociological Association, 1948. In a scathing ‘Introduction’ to The Black Anglo Saxons by Nathan Hare, Cox ridiculed what he regarded as a misguided approach to the study of race relations he called ‘The Black Bourgeoisie School’ headed by E. Franklin Frazier.
October 25, 1971
Elif Safak (or Shafak, born 25 October 1971, Strasbourg, France) is an outspoken Turkish author, columnist, speaker and academic. ‘As Turkey's bestselling female writer, Shafak is a brave champion of cosmopolitanism, a sophisticated feminist, and an ambitious novelist who infuses her magical-realist fiction with big, important ideas...’.Critics have named her as ‘one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Turkish and world literature’. Her books have been published in more than 40 countries, and she was awarded the honorary distinction of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2010. Shafak has published thirteen books, nine of which are novels. She writes fiction in both Turkish and English. Shafak blends Western and Eastern traditions of storytelling, bringing out the myriad stories of women, minorities, immigrants, subcultures, youth and global souls. Her writing draws on diverse cultures and literary traditions, reflecting a deep interest in history, philosophy, Sufism, oral culture, and cultural politics. Shafak also has a keen eye for black humour, with ‘a particular genius for depicting backstreet Istanbul.’
October 25, 1975
Zadie Smith (born on 25 October 1975) is an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. As of 2012, she has published four novels, all of which have received substantial critical praise. In 2003, she was included on Granta's list of 20 best young authors, and was also included in the 2013 list. She joined New York University's Creative Writing Program as a tenured professor on 1 September 2010. Smith has won the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Anisfield- Wolf Book Awards in 2006 and her novel White Teeth was included in Time magazine's TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005 list.
October 25, 1953
DAVID LASKIN is the author of THE CHILDREN’S BLIZZARD, the story of six families who endured the great Midwestern blizzard of 1888; the book won the 2006 Midwest Booksellers’ Choice Award for nonfiction and the Washington State Book Award. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Smithsonian magazine. He lives in Seattle, Washington.
October 25, 1884
Eduardo Barrios, (born October 25, 1884, Valparaíso, Chile—died September 13, 1963, Santiago), Chilean writer best known for his psychological novels. Barrios was educated in Lima and at the Chilean Military Academy in Santiago. After working as a merchant, a rubber agent, and a prospector in several Latin American countries, he settled (1913) in Santiago, where he served as minister of public education and director of the National Library. Barrios began his literary career under the influence of Émile Zola, with a collection of naturalistic stories, Del natural (1907; In the Naturalistic Style). His later novels, which established his reputation, include El niño que enloqueció de amor (1915; The Love-Crazed Boy), a fictionalized diary of a boy obsessed with love for one of his mother’s friends; Un perdido (1918; A Down-and-Outer), the story of a young boy with a deep inferiority complex; and El hermano asno (1922; Brother Asno, 1969), an unusual episode in the life of a mentally disturbed monk who attacks a girl in order to be despised by those who consider him a living saint. Barrios’s most successful work was Gran señor y rajadiablos (1948; Grand Gentleman and Big Rascal), a best-seller in which the novelist portrayed life on a typical Chilean farm. Barrios’s personal experiences played an important part in all these novels, as well as in his other works: Páginas de un pobre diablo (1923; Pages from a Poor Devil), a series of autobiographical sketches; Tamarugal (1944), a novel about life in the northern mining region of Chile; and Los hombres del hombre (1950; Men Within Man), a novelistic study in human psychology.
October 25, 1926
Bo Carpelan (1926-2011) was a prolific Finnish poet, novelist, dramatist, literary critic, and translator, whose career spanned over six decades. Bo Carpelan wrote in Swedish. He won the prestigious Finlandia Prize twice – in 1993 for Urwind (Alkutuuli), about the memories and mysterious visions of an antiquarian bookseller, and in 2005 for the novel Berg (Kesän varjot). However, Carpelan always considered poetry to be his ‘true homeland’.
October 25, 1964
Bruce Feiler (born October 25, 1964) is an American writer and television personality. He is the author of 12 books, including six consecutive New York Times nonfiction best-sellers. He writes the "This Life" column in the Sunday New York Times and is also the writer/presenter of the PBS miniseries Walking the Bible and Sacred Journeys with Bruce Feiler (2014). Feiler is credited with formulating the Feiler Faster Thesis: the increasing pace of society and journalists' ability to report it is matched by the public's desire for more information. He has written for numerous publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Gourmet magazine, where he won three James Beard Awards. He is also a frequent contributor to National Public Radio, CNN, and Fox News. A native of Savannah, Georgia, where he attended the Savannah Country Day School, Feiler lives in New York with his wife, Linda Rottenberg, and their twin daughters. Rottenberg, who frequently appears in his books, is co-founder and CEO of Endeavor, a nonprofit that supports High-Impact Entrepreneurs. Feiler completed his undergraduate degree at Yale University where he was a member of Ezra Stiles College, before spending time teaching English in Japan as part of the JET Program. This experience led to his first book, Learning to Bow: Inside the Heart of Japan, a popular portrait of life in a small Japanese town. Upon his return he earned a master's degree in international relations from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, which he chronicled in his book Looking for Class.
October 25, 1883
Stuart Gilbert (25 October 1883 – 5 January 1969) was an English literary scholar and translator. Among his translations into English are works by Alexis de Tocqueville, Édouard Dujardin, André Malraux, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Georges Simenon, Jean Cocteau, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre. He also assisted in the translation of James Joyce's Ulysses into French. He was born at Kelvedon Hatch, Essex, on 25 October 1883, the only son of a retired army officer, Arthur Stronge Gilbert, and Melvina (daughter of the Raja of Kapurthala). He attended Cheltenham and Hertford College, Oxford, taking a first in Classical Moderations. He joined the Indian Civil Service in 1907 and, after military service in the First World War, served as a judge in Burma until 1925. He then retired, settling in France with his French-born wife Moune (née Marie Douin). He remained there for the rest of his life, except for some time spent in Wales during the Second World War. Gilbert was one of the first Joycean scholars. He first read Ulysses while he was in Burma and admired it greatly. According to his wife, she and Gilbert were taking a walk in the Latin Quarter of Paris when they passed Shakespeare and Company, and saw some typescript pages of a French translation of Ulysses by Auguste Morel and Valery Larbaud displayed in the window. Gilbert noted several serious errors in the French rendering and introduced himself to Sylvia Beach, who was impressed by his criticisms of the translation. She took his name and telephone number, and suggested that Joyce, who was assisting in the translation, would contact him. This began many years of friendship between Joyce and Gilbert. He published James Joyce's Ulysses: A Study in 1930 (revised edition 1950) and published a collection of Joyce's letters in 1957. One of Gilbert's major projects was the translation from French of Roger Martin du Gard's novel sequence Les Thibault. Running to nearly 1,900 pages in translation, it was published by the Viking Press in the United States in two volumes, The Thibaults (1939) and Summer 1914 (1941).
October 25, 1945
MAUREEN HONEY is a professor of English and women's and gender studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the author or editor of numerous works including Shadowed Dreams: Women's Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance and Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology (both by Rutgers University Press).
October 25, 1806
Johann Kaspar Schmidt (October 25, 1806 – June 26, 1856), better known as Max Stirner, was a German philosopher. He is often seen as one of the forerunners of nihilism, existentialism, psychoanalytic theory, postmodernism, and individualist anarchism. Stirner's main work is The Ego and Its Own, also known as The Ego and His Own (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum in German, which translates literally as The Individual and His Property). This work was first published in 1845 in Leipzig, and has since appeared in numerous editions and translations.
October 25, 1886
Karl Paul Polanyi (born October 25, 1886, Vienna, Austro-Hungarian Empire – April 23, 1964, Pickering, Ontario) was a Hungarian-American economic historian, economic anthropologist, political economist, historical sociologist and social philosopher. He is known for his opposition to traditional economic thought and for his book, The Great Transformation. Polanyi is remembered today as the originator of substantivism, a cultural approach to economics, which emphasized the way economies are embedded in society and culture. This view ran counter to mainstream economics but was popular in anthropology, economic history, economic sociology and political science. Polanyi's approach to the ancient economies has been applied to a variety of cases, such as Pre-Columbian America and ancient Mesopotamia, although its utility to the study of ancient societies in general has been questioned. Polanyi's The Great Transformation became a model for historical sociology. His theories eventually became the foundation for the economic democracy movement. His daughter Kari Polanyi Levitt is Emerita Professor of Economics at McGill University, Montreal.
October 26, 1880
Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev (better known by the pen name Andrei Bely - October 26, 1880 – January 8, 1934) was a Russian novelist, poet, theorist, and literary critic. His novel Petersburg was regarded by Vladimir Nabokov as one of the four greatest novels of the 20th century. Boris Bugaev was born in Moscow, into a prominent intellectual family. His father, Nikolai Bugaev, was a leading mathematician who is regarded as a founder of the Moscow school of mathematics. His mother was not only highly intelligent but a famous society beauty, and the focus of considerable gossip. Young Boris was a polymath whose interests included mathematics, music, philosophy, and literature. He would go on to take part in both the Symbolist movement and the Russian school of neo-Kantianism. Nikolai Bugaev was well known for his influential philosophical essays, in which he decried geometry and probability and trumpeted the virtues of hard analysis. Despite—or because of—his father's mathematical tastes, Boris Bugaev was fascinated by probability and particularly by entropy, a notion to which he frequently refers in works such as Kotik Letaev. Bely's creative works notably influenced—and were influenced by—several literary schools, especially symbolism. They feature a striking mysticism and a sort of moody musicality. The far-reaching influence of his literary voice on Russian writers (and even musicians) has frequently been compared to the impact of James Joyce in the English-speaking world. As a young man, Bely was strongly influenced by his acquaintance with the family of philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, especially Vladimir's younger brother Mikhail, described in his long autobiographical poem The First Encounter (1921); the title is a reflection of Vladimir Solovyov's Three Encounters. Bely's symbolist novel Petersburg (1916; 1922) is generally considered to be his masterpiece. The book employs a striking prose method in which sounds often evoke colors. The novel is set in the somewhat hysterical atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Petersburg and the Russian Revolution of 1905. To the extent that the book can be said to possess a plot, this can be summarized as the story of the hapless Nikolai Apollonovich, a ne'er-do-well who is caught up in revolutionary politics and assigned the task of assassinating a certain government official—his own father. At one point, Nikolai is pursued through the Petersburg mists by the ringing hooves of the famous bronze statue of Peter the Great. In his later years Bely was influenced by Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy and became a personal friend of Steiner's. He died, aged 53, in Moscow. The Andrei Bely Prize, one of the most important prizes in Russian literature, was named after him. Bely's essay Rhythm as Dialectic in The Bronze Horseman is cited in Nabokov's novel The Gift, where it is mentioned as ‘monumental research on rhythm’. Fyodor, poet and main character, praises the system Bely created for graphically marking off and calculating the 'half-stresses' in the iambs. Bely found that the diagrams plotted over the compositions of the great poets frequently had the shapes of rectangles and trapeziums. Fyodor, after discovering Bely's work, re-read all his old iambic tetrameters from the new point of view, and was terribly pained to find out that the diagrams for his poems were instead plain and gappy. Nabokov's essay Notes on Prosody follows for the large part Bely's essay Description of the Russian iambic tetrameter (published in the collection of essays Symbolism, Moscow, 1910).
October 26, 1961
Calixthe Beyala was born in Cameroon in 1961. She spent her childhood in Douala with one of her sisters, four years older than herself. Calixthe Beyala left Cameroon aged seventeen and arrived in France where she studied, married, had two children and published numerous novels. In 1996 she was awarded the Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie Française. She now (2011) lives in France.
October 26, 1900
Karin Maria Boye (October 26, 1900 – April 24, 1941) was a Swedish poet and novelist. Boye was born in Gothenburg (Göteborg), Sweden and moved with her family to Stockholm in 1909. She studied at Uppsala University from 1921 to 1926 and debuted in 1922 with a collection of poems, ‘Clouds’ (Swedish: Moln). During her time in Uppsala and until 1930, Boye was a member of the Swedish Clarté League, a socialist group in those days very anti-Fascist. In 1931 Boye, together with Erik Mesterton and Josef Riwkin, founded the poetry magazine Spektrum, introducing T. S. Eliot and the Surrealists to Swedish readers. She translated many of Eliot's works into Swedish; she and Mesterton translated ‘The Waste Land‘. Boye is perhaps most famous for her poems, of which the most well-known ought to be ‘Yes, of course it hurts’ (Swedish: Ja visst gör det ont) and ‘In motion’ (I rörelse) from her collections of poems ‘The Hearths’ (Härdarna), 1927, and ‘For the sake of the tree’ (För trädets skull), 1935. She was also a member of the Swedish literary institution Samfundet De Nio (chair number 6) from 1931 until her death in 1941. Boye's novel ‘Crisis’ (Kris) depicts her religious crisis and lesbianism. In her novels ‘Merit awakens’ (Merit vaknar) and ‘Too little’ (För lite) she explores male and female role-playing. Outside Sweden, her best-known work is probably the novel Kallocain. Inspired by her visit to the Soviet Union in 1928 and her visit to Germany during the rise of Nazism, it was a portrayal of a dystopian society in the vein of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (though written almost a decade before Orwell's magnum opus). In the novel, an idealistic scientist named Leo Kall invents Kallocain, a kind of truth serum. Between 1929 and 1932 Boye was married to another Clarté member, Leif Björck. The marriage was apparently a friendship union. In 1932, after separating from her husband, she had a lesbian relationship with Gunnel Bergström, who left her husband, poet Gunnar Ekelöf, for Boye. During a stay in Berlin 1932-1933 she met Margot Hanel, whom she lived with for the rest of her life, and referred to as ‘her wife’. Boye died in an apparent suicide when swallowing sleeping pills after leaving home on 23 April 1941. She was found, according to the police report at the Regional Archives in Gothenburg, on April 27, curled up at a boulder on a hill with a view just north of Alingsås, near Bolltorpsvägen, by a farmer who was going for a walk. The boulder is now a memorial stone. Margot Hanel committed suicide shortly thereafter. Karin Boye was given two very different epitaphs. The best-known is the poem ‘Dead Amazon’ (Död amazon) by Hjalmar Gullberg, in which she is depicted as ‘Very dark and with large eyes’. Another poem was written by her close friend Ebbe Linde and is entitled ‘Dead friend’ (Död kamrat). Here, she is depicted not as a heroic Amazon but as an ordinary human, small and grey in death, released from battles and pain. A literary association dedicated to her work was created in 1983, keeping her work alive by spreading it among new readers. In 2004, one of the branches of the Uppsala University Library was named in her honour.
October 26, 1950
Alan Duff (born 26 October 1950), is a New Zealand novelist and newspaper columnist. He is most well known as the author of the novel Once Were Warriors (1990), which was made into a film of the same name in 1994.
October 26, 1959
Paul Farmer is Presley Professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School, Chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Founding Director of Partners In Health. Among his books are Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues (California, 1999), The Uses of Haiti (1994), and AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame (California, 1992). Farmer is the winner of a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ award and the Margaret Mead Award for his contributions to public anthropology. Amartya Sen, whose work challenges conventional market-driven economic paradigms, is the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics. He teaches at Trinity College, Cambridge University.
October 26, 1941
Steven Hartwell Kellogg (born October 26, 1941 in Norwalk, Connecticut) is an American author and illustrator who has created more than 90 children's books. And better known as "Steven Kellogg." On November 12, 2011, Kellogg was given an honorary doctor of humane letters from the University of Findlay in Ohio. All of his original illustrations were donated to the Mazza Museum of International Art from Picture Books at Findlay. The donation was made possible in part by a $350,000 gift by close friend, Anthony Edwards. More than 2700 works of art were included.
October 26, 1902
Beryl Markham (26 October 1902 – 3 August 1986) was a British-born Kenyan aviator (one of the first bush pilots), adventurer, racehorse trainer and author. During the pioneer days of aviation, she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. She is now primarily remembered as the author of the memoir West with the Night. She also had an affair with Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester.
October 26, 1952
Sir Andrew Motion (born 26 October 1952) is an English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009.
10/26/1942
Phyllis Rose (born October 26, 1942) is an American literary critic, essayist, biographer, and educator.
October 26, 1925
Jan Hendrik Wolkers (Oegstgeest, 26 October 1925 – Texel, 19 October 2007) was a Dutch author, sculptor and painter. Wolkers is considered one of the "Great Four" writers of post-World War II Dutch literature, alongside Willem Frederik Hermans, Harry Mulisch and Gerard Reve (the latter authors are also known as the "Great Three"). He became noted as an author in the 1960s mainly for his graphic descriptions of sexual acts. His 1969 novel Turks Fruit was translated into ten different languages and published in English as Turkish Delight. It was also made into a highly successful movie, the Paul Verhoeven-directed Turks Fruit (1972) which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and in 1999 won the award for Best Dutch Film of the Century. Wolkers declined several literary awards. In 1982 he refused the Constantijn Huygensprijs, and in 1989 he refused the P.C. Hooftprijs. From 1980 until his death, Wolkers resided on the Dutch island of Texel. He died on 19 October 2007, aged 81, at his Texel home and was cremated in Amsterdam at De Nieuwe Ooster cemetery. A number of his outdoor sculptures in the Netherlands have been subject to vandalism, presumably due to his use of glass as a construction material. Some examples are the Auschwitz monument in Amsterdam and the monument on the dike at Ceres on Texel. In reaction to the destruction of the monument in 2003, Wolkers announced that he would use less glass and more steel for such monuments in future. The Jac. P. Thijsse monument on Texel does contain more steel, but glass is still a substantial part of the artwork.
October 26, 1922
Darcy Ribeiro (October 26, 1922 – February 17, 1997) was a Brazilian anthropologist, author and politician. His ideas of Latin American identity have influenced several later scholars of Latin American studies. As Minister of Education of Brazil he carried out profound reforms which led him to be invited to participate in university reforms in Chile, Peru, Venezuela, Mexico and Uruguay after leaving Brazil due to the 1964 coup d'état. Darcy Ribeiro was born in Montes Claros, MG, the son of Reginaldo Ribeiro dos Santos and of Josefina Augusta da Silveira. He completed his primary and secondary education in his native town, at the Grupo Escolar Gonçalves Chaves and at the Ginásio Episcopal de Montes Claros. He is best known for development work in the areas of education, sociology and anthropology and for being, along with his friend and colleague Anísio Teixeira, one of the founders of the University of Brasília (Universidade de Brasília) in the early 1960s. (See John Dewey). He also served as the first rector of that university. He was the founder of the State University of Norte Fluminense (Universidade Estadual do Norte Fluminense) as well. He wrote numerous books, many of them about the indigenous populations of Brazil. During the first mandate of governor Leonel Brizola in Rio de Janeiro (state) (1983–1987), Darcy Ribeiro created, planned and directed the implementation of the Integrated Centres for Public Instruction (Centros Integrados de Ensino Público), a visionary and revolutionary pedagogical project of assistance for children, including recreational and cultural activities beyond formal instruction – making concrete the projects envisioned decades earlier by Anísio Teixeira. Long before politicians incorporated the importance of education for the development of Brazil into their discourse, Darcy Ribeiro and Leonel Brizola had already developed these ideals. In the elections of 1986, Ribeiro was the Democratic Labour Party PDT candidate for the governorship of Rio de Janeiro (state), running against Fernando Gabeira (at that time affiliated with the Workers’ Party PT), Agnaldo Timóteo of the Social Democratic Party (PDS) and Moreira Franco of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB). Ribeiro was defeated, being unable to overcome the high approval rating of Moreira who was elected due to the popularity of the then-recent currency reform, the Cruzado Plan (Plano Cruzado). Another defeat was in 1994, when he was Brizola's running-mate in presidential election; Darcy Ribeiro was also chief of staff (Ministro-chefe da Casa Civil) in the cabinet of President João Goulart, vice-governor of Rio de Janeiro (state) from 1983 to 1987 and exercised the mandate of senator from Rio de Janeiro from 1991 until his death – which was preceded by a long battle with cancer that emotionally touched all of Brazilian society: Darcy Ribeiro, ever the ardent and controversial defender of his ideas, received during his long illness recognition and admiration not only from friends but also from adversaries. He died in Brasília, aged 74. Darcy Ribeiro's ideas belonged to the evolutionist school of sociology and anthropology. He believed that people went through a 'civilizatory process' beginning as hunter-gatherers. This 'civilizatory process' was according to him marked by technological revolutions, and among these he stress the eight more important as the following: the agricultural revolution; the urban revolution; the irrigation revolution; the metallurgic revolution; the livestock revolution; the mercantile revolution; the industrial revolution; the thermonuclear revolution. Ribeiro proposed also a classification scheme for Latin American countries where he identified 'New Peoples' (Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, Venezuela etc.), that merged from the mix of several cultures; 'Testimony Peoples' (Peru, Mexico, Ecuador, Guatemala and Bolivia), remnants of ancient civilizations; and Argentina and Uruguay, former 'New Peoples' that became 'Transplantated Peoples', essentially European, after massive immigration. Darcy Ribeiro was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters (Academia Brasileira de Letras) on October 8, 1992. His election was to Chair Number 11, which has as its Patron Fagundes Varela. He was formally received into the Academy on April 15, 1993, by author Cândido Mendes.
October 26, 1961
Stacy Madeleine Schiff (born October 26, 1961) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American nonfiction author. She was formerly a guest columnist for The New York Times. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Brad Gooch has called her "perhaps the most seductive writer of nonfiction prose in America in our time." Schiff, born in Adams, Massachusetts, is a graduate of Phillips Academy (Andover) preparatory school, and earned her B.A. degree from Williams College in 1982. She was a senior editor at Simon & Schuster until 1990. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement. Schiff won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for Vera, a biography of Vera Nabokov, wife and muse of Vladimir Nabokov. She was also a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for Saint-Exupéry: A Biography of Antoine de Saint Exupéry. Schiff’s A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (2005) won the George Washington Book Prize. Her fourth book, Cleopatra: A Life, was published to great acclaim in 2010.
October 26, 1939
Karel Schoeman (26 October 1939 in Trompsburg, South Africa – 1 May 2017 in Bloemfontein, South Africa) was a South African novelist, historian, translator and man of letters. He was the author of 19 novels and numerous works of history. He was one of South Africa's most honoured authors. Schoeman wrote primarily in Afrikaans, although several of his non-fiction books were originally written in English. His novels are increasingly being translated into other languages, notably, English, French and Dutch. Born in 1939 in Trompsburg, South Africa, Karel Schoeman matriculated in 1956 from Paarl Boys' High School. In 1959, he obtained a BA degree in languages from the University of the Free State. In 1961, he joined the Franciscan Order in Ireland as a novice for the priesthood, but then returned to Bloemfontein to obtain a Higher Diploma in Library Studies. During the 1970s, he went into voluntary exile, working first as a librarian in Amsterdam and then as a nurse in Glasgow, Scotland. He returned to South Africa in 1983 and worked until his retirement in 1998 as an archivist at the South African National Library in Cape Town. He then returned to his town of birth, Trompsburg, where he lived for more than a decade before moving to Bloemfontein. In September 2008, he moved to the Noorderbloem retirement community, where he died on 1 May 2017. Schoeman is known not only as a novelist, but is equally renowned as an historian and biographer. He has also published translations (especially of drama), several travel books and an autobiography. He won the most prestigious Afrikaans literary award, the Hertzog Prize, three times: in 1971 (for By Fakkellig, ’n Lug vol helder wolke and Spiraal), 1986 (’n Ander land) and in 1995 (Hierdie lewe). The Recht Malan Prize for "excellence in the field of non-fiction books" was awarded to him four times. On the retirement of President Nelson Mandela in 1999, Schoeman was one of only two writers to be awarded the State President Award: Order for Excellent Service. In more recent years, his fiction garnered much praise in France, winning inter alia the prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in 2009. His 1972 novel, Na die Geliefde Land (literally: To the Beloved Country), was made into an award-winning feature film, Promised Land in 2002, with a screenplay by Jason Xenopoulos. Schoeman has produced and published several screenplays, including an adaptation of his first novel, Veldslag, some of which were broadcast on South African national television during the 1980s. Schoeman committed suicide at a retirement center in South Africa at the age of 77, writing about dying with dignity in his suicide statement. A previous attempt failed when he was 75.
October 27, 1916
Kazimierz Brandys (27 October 1916 - 11 March 2000) was a Polish essayist and writer of film scripts. Brandys was born in Lodz. He was the brother of the writer Marian Brandys and husband of the translator Maria Zenowicz. He completed a law degree at the University of Warsaw. He was first published in 1935 as a theatrical critic, in the literary monthly ‘‘Kuznia Mlodych’. Between 1945 and 1950 he was a member of the editorial board of the weekly ‘Kuznica’. In 1946 he joined the Polish United Workers' Party. Beginning in 1956 he was the spokesperson for the party's program of ‘renewal’ and ‘moral cleansing’. Between 1956 and 1960 he was on the editorial board of the weekly ‘Nowa Kultura’. In 1966 he left the communist party as a protest against repressions against Leszek Kolakowski. In 1970 and 1971 he taught Slavistics at the Sorbonne. In 1976 he signed the Letter of 59, a protest against changes to the constitution of the People's Republic of Poland. Between 1977 and 1980 he was on the editorial board of ‘Zapis’. After 1978 he lived outside of Poland. He died in 2000, in Paris.
October 27, 1939
John Marwood Cleese (born 27 October 1939) is an English actor, voice actor, screenwriter, producer, and comedian. He achieved success at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and as a scriptwriter and performer on The Frost Report. In the late 1960s, he co-founded Monty Python, the comedy troupe responsible for the sketch show Monty Python's Flying Circus and the four Monty Python films. Constance "Connie" Booth (born 1944) is an American-born writer, actress, comedienne and psychotherapist based in Britain. She is known for appearances on British television and particularly for her portrayal of Polly Sherman in the popular 1970s television show Fawlty Towers, which she co-wrote with her then-husband John Cleese. For 30 years Booth declined to talk about Fawlty Towers until she agreed to participate in a documentary about the series for the digital channel Gold in 2009.
October 27, 1914
Dylan Marlais Thomas (27 October 1914 – 9 November 1953) was a Welsh poet and writer whose works include the poems 'Do not go gentle into that good night' and 'And death shall have no dominion', the 'Play for Voices', Under Milk Wood, and stories and radio broadcasts such as A Child's Christmas in Wales and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.
October 27, 1931
Nawal El Saadawi (born October 27, 1931) is an Egyptian feminist writer, activist, physician and psychiatrist. She has written many books on the subject of women in Islam, paying particular attention to the practice of female genital cutting in her society. She is founder and president of the Arab Women's Solidarity Association and co-founder of the Arab Association for Human Rights. She has been awarded honorary degrees on three continents. In 2004, she won the North-South prize from the Council of Europe. In 2005, the Inana International Prize in Belgium. Nawal el Saadawi has held positions of Author for the Supreme Council for Arts and Social Sciences, Cairo; Director General of the Health Education Department, Ministry of Health, Cairo, Secretary General of Medical Association, Cairo, Egypt, and Medical Doctor, University Hospital and Ministry of Health. She is the founder of Health Education Association and the Egyptian Women Writer’s Association; she was Chief Editor of Health Magazine in Cairo, Egypt and Editor of Medical Association Magazine.
October 27, 1940
Maxine Hong Kingston is a Chinese American author and Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, where she graduated with a BA in English in 1962. Kingston has written three novels and several works of non-fiction about the experiences of Chinese Americans.
October 27, 1911
Daniel Pratt Mannix IV (October 27, 1911, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – January 29, 1997, Malvern, Pennsylvania) was an American author, journalist, photographer, sideshow performer, stage magician, animal trainer, and filmmaker. His best-known works are the 1958 book Those About to Die, which remained in continuous print for three decades, and the 1967 novel The Fox and the Hound which in 1981 was adapted into an animated film by Walt Disney Productions. The Mannix family had a long history of service in the United States Navy, and Mannix' father, Daniel P. Mannix, III, was an American naval officer. His mother would often join her husband on his postings, and the Mannix children would stay at their grandparents' farm outside Philadelphia. It was there that Mannix began to keep and raise various wild animals. In time, the cost of feeding them led him to write his first book, The Back-Yard Zoo. Following family tradition, Mannix enrolled in the U.S. Naval Academy in 1930, but left the next year, moving to the University of Pennsylvania and earning a degree in journalism instead of zoology. Mannix served as a naval lieutenant with the Photo-Science Laboratory in Washington, D.C. during World War II. His varied career included time spent as a sword swallower and fire eater in a traveling carnival sideshow, where he performed under the stage name The Great Zadma. His magazine articles about these experiences, co-written with his wife Jule Junker Mannix, proved very popular and were reprinted several times in 1944 and 1945, and later expanded into book form in his 1951 account of carnival life Step Right Up, which in turn was reprinted in 1964 as Memoirs of a Sword Swallower. He was also at times a professional hunter, a collector of wildlife for zoos and circuses, and a bird trainer. The latter skill was showcased in the 1956 short film Universal Color Parade: Parrot Jungle, in which he is credited as the writer, actor, director, producer, photographer, and bird trainer. Mannix covered a wide variety of subject matter as an author. His books ranged from fictional animal stories for children, the natural history of animals, and adventurous accounts about hunting big game to sensational adult non-fiction topics such as a biography of the occultist Aleister Crowley, sympathetic accounts of carnival performers and sideshow freaks, and works describing, among other things, the Hellfire Club, the Atlantic slave trade, the history of torture, and the Roman games. In 1983, he edited The Old Navy: The Glorious Heritage of the U.S. Navy, Recounted through the Journals of an American Patriot by Rear Admiral Daniel P. Mannix, 3rd, his father's posthumously-published autobiographical account of his life and naval career from the Spanish–American War of 1898 until his retirement in 1928. In his role as a photo-journalist, Mannix witnessed the death of the famed herpetologist Grace Olive Wiley when she was fatally bitten by a venomous snake. On July 20, 1948, Wiley, then 64 years old, invited Mannix to her home in Cypress, California, to photograph her collection of snakes. She posed for him with a venomous Indian cobra she had recently acquired, and the snake bit her on the finger. At her instruction, Mannix put tourniquets on her arm, but unfortunately, in trying to administer her only vial of cobra antivenom he found the needle was rusty, and he accidentally broke the vial. At her request, he took her to Long Beach Municipal Hospital, but the hospital only had antivenom serums for North American snakes. Wiley was placed in an iron lung to assist her breathing, but to no avail; she was pronounced dead less than two hours after being bitten. Fifteen years later, Mannix wrote an account of the event in his book All Creatures Great and Small, in which he titled Wiley the "Woman Without Fear." Mannix was also a skilled stage magician, magic historian, and collector of illusions and apparatus. In 1957, he was one of the 16 charter members who co-founded the Munchkin Convention of the International Wizard of Oz Club. He contributed numerous articles to The Baum Bugle, including on the subject of the 1902 musical extravaganza, The Wizard of Oz. Mannix and his wife and sometime co-author Jule Junker Mannix travelled around the world and raised exotic animals. Jule Mannix wrote the book Married to Adventure in 1954 as an autobiographical account of her adventurous life with Mannix. The couple had a son, Daniel Pratt Mannix, V, and a daughter, Julie Mannix Von Zerneck. From 1950 onward, Daniel and Jule Mannix lived in the same house in East Whiteland, near Malvern, Pennsylvania. Jule Mannix died May 25, 1977. Mannix died on January 29, 1997, at the age of 85, and was survived by his son and daughter, four grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. According to Martin M Winkler's book, Gladiator: Film and History, Mannix's 1958 non-fiction book Those about to Die (reprinted in 2001 as The Way of the Gladiator) was the inspiration for David Franzoni's screenplay for the 2000 movie Gladiator.
October 27, 1932
Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College at the University of Cambridge, before receiving acclaim as a poet and writer. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956; they lived together in the United States and then England, and had two children, Frieda and Nicholas. Plath suffered from depression for much of her adult life, and in 1963 she committed suicide. Controversy continues to surround the events of her life and death, as well as her writing and legacy. Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her two published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel. In 1982, she won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for The Collected Poems. She also wrote The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death.
October 27, 1892
GRACILIANO RAMOS was born in Quebrangulo. in the northeastern Brazilian state of Alagoas, in 1892. With the exception of short stays In Rio de Janeiro, he has passed most of his life in that northeast, which is the scene of his highly esteemed novels. SAO BERNARDO, AUGUSTIA, and Vidas Sêcas. He has been a small-town merchant, a student leader, a town prefect, and, a journalist. Senhor Ramos began to write poetry at the age of thirteen, but did not publish a book under his own name until he was forty-two. He has been married twice, and has had seven children. He has recently been living in Rio de Janeiro, where his position among Brazil’s leading writers is firmly established.
October 27, 1936
Cornelius Mahoney "Neil" Sheehan is an American journalist. As a reporter for The New York Times in 1971, Sheehan obtained the classified Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg.
October 27, 1939
Albert Wendt, CNZM (born 1939) is a Samoan poet and writer who also lives in New Zealand. Among his works is LEAVES OF THE BANYAN TREE (1979). Albert Wendt was born in Apia, Samoa. Wendt is of German heritage through his great-grandfather from his patrilineal ancestry, which he reflected it in some of his poetry works. He studied at Ardmore Teacher's College and at the Victoria University of Wellington, graduating with an M.A. in History. His Masters' thesis was about the Mau, Samoa's independence movement from colonialism during the early 1900s. The thesis was titled Guardians and Wards: A study of the origins, causes and the first two years of the Mau in Western Samoa. He returned in 1965 to Western Samoa, becoming principal of Samoa College. In 1974 he moved to Fiji, where he taught at the University of the South Pacific. In 1977 Wendt returned home to set up the University of the South Pacific Center in Samoa. He worked closely with the literary journal Mana, and edited in 1975 collections of poems from Fiji, Western Samoa, the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), and the Solomon Islands. Wendt's epic LEAVES OF THE BANYAN TREE (1979), won the 1980 New Zealand Book Awards. He was appointed to the first chair in Pacific literature at University of the South Pacific in Suva. In 1988 he took up a professorship of Pacific studies at the University of Auckland. In 1999 Wendt was visiting Professor of Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Hawaii. In 2001 he was made Companion of the Order of New Zealand for his services to literature.
October 27, 1858
Theodore 'T.R.' Roosevelt Jr. (October 27, 1858 – January 6, 1919) was an American politician, author, naturalist, soldier, explorer, and historian who served as the 26th President of the United States. He was a leader of the Republican Party and founder of the Progressive Party insurgency of 1912.
October 27, 1908
Martín Adán (Lima, 1908 - 1985), pseudonym of Rafael de la Fuente Benavides, was a Peruvian poet whose body of work is notable for its hermeticism and metaphysical depth. From a very young age Adán demonstrated great literary talent (talent he shared with classmates Emilio Adolfo Westphalen and Estuardo Núñez). As time passed, he lived with increasing economic difficulty and suffered from serious alcoholism. A good part of his final years were spent in sanitariums, until his death in 1985.
October 27, 1924
Michael Angelo Avallone (October 27, 1924 – February 26, 1999) was an American author of mystery, secret agent fiction, and novelizations of TV and films. His lifetime output was over 223 works (although he boasted over 1,000), published under his own name and 17 pseudonyms.
October 27, 1466
Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (27 October 1466 – 12 July 1536), known as Erasmus of Rotterdam, or simply Erasmus, was a Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, social critic, teacher, and theologian. Erasmus was a classical scholar who wrote in a pure Latin style. He was a proponent of religious toleration, and enjoyed the sobriquet ‘Prince of the Humanists’; he has been called ‘the crowning glory of the Christian humanists’. Using humanist techniques for working on texts, he prepared important new Latin and Greek editions of the New Testament. These raised questions that would be influential in the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation. He also wrote On Free Will, The Praise of Folly, Handbook of a Christian Knight, On Civility in Children, Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style, Julius Exclusus, and many other works. Erasmus lived against the backdrop of the growing European religious Reformation; but while he was critical of the abuses within the Church and called for reform, he kept his distance from Luther and Melanchthon and continued to recognise the authority of the pope. Erasmus emphasized a middle way, with a deep respect for traditional faith, piety and grace, and rejected Luther's emphasis on faith alone. Erasmus therefore remained a member of the Catholic Church all his life. In relation to clerical abuses in the Church, Erasmus remained committed to reforming the Church from within. He also held to Catholic doctrines such as that of free will, which some Reformers rejected in favour of the doctrine of predestination. His middle road approach disappointed and even angered scholars in both camps. Erasmus died suddenly in Basel in 1536 while preparing to return to Brabant, and was buried in the Basel Minster, the former cathedral of the city. A bronze statue of him was erected in his city of birth in 1622, replacing an earlier work in stone. Erasmus was his baptismal name, given after St. Erasmus of Formiae. Desiderius was a self-adopted additional name, which he used from 1496. The Roterodamus in his scholarly name is the Latinized adjectival form for the city of Rotterdam.
October 27, 1926
Harry Robbins "Bob" Haldeman (October 27, 1926 – November 12, 1993) was an American political aide and businessman, best known for his service as White House Chief of Staff to President Richard Nixon and his consequent involvement in the Watergate Affair.
October 27, 1914
Jan Kott (October 27, 1914 – December 23, 2001) was a Polish political activist, critic and theoretician of the theatre. A leading proponent of Stalinism in Poland for nearly a decade after the Soviet takeover, Kott renounced his Communist Party membership in 1957 following the anti-Stalinist Polish October of 1956. He defected to the United States in 1965. He is regarded as having considerable influence upon Western productions of Shakespeare in the second half of the 20th century. Jan Kott was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1914. In 1964, he co-signed "The Letter of the Thirty-Four" protesting Polish censorship, and in 1969 he was official dismissed from the University of Warsaw where he was Professor of Polish Literature. Leaving Poland, he came to the United States and taught at the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1969 until his death in 2001.
October 27, 1940
Malcolm Margolin is founder and executive director of Heyday, and the author/editor of several books including The East Bay Out and The Way We Lived: California Indian Stories, Songs, and Reminiscences. He has received dozens of awards including lifetime achievement awards from the San Francisco Bay Area Book Reviewers Association and the California Studies Association, a Community Leadership Award from the San Francisco Foundation, and a Cultural Freedom Award from the Lannan Foundation. In 2012 he received the Chairman’s Commendation from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the second person in the United States to be so honored.
October 27, 1913
Joseph Medicine Crow (October 27, 1913 – April 3, 2016) was a war chief, author, and historian of the Crow Nation of Native Americans. His writings on Native American history and reservation culture are considered seminal works, but he is best known for his writings and lectures concerning the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. He received the Bronze Star Medal and the Légion d'honneur for service during World War II, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. He was the last surviving war chief of the Crow Nation and the last living Plains Indian war chief. He was a founding member of the Traditional Circle of Indian Elders and Youth.
October 27, 1951
Robert Polito is a poet, biographer, essayist, critic, educator, curator, and arts administrator. He received the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography in 1995 for Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson. The founding director of the New School Graduate Writing Program in New York City, he was President of the Poetry Foundation from 2013-2015, before returning to the New School as a Professor of Writing. Polito was born in Boston, MA on October 27, 1951. His father was supervisor of the Post Office in the historic South Station railroad station. Polito attended Boston College High School and Boston College, where he was Features Editor of the college newspaper, The Heights. He edited and designed the official Boston College literary journal, Stylus, as well as the alternative campus magazine, Wingwing. Columnist George Frazier, reviewing one of Polito's Stylus issues in the Boston Globe, wrote, "I happen to think it may well be the most sophisticated and subtle undergraduate literary magazine I have ever seen." He received his MA and Ph.D. in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard in 1981, with concentrations in the English Renaissance, Latin poetry, Romantic poetry, and modern poetry and fiction. His thesis, At the Titan's Breakfast: Three Essays on Byron's Poetry, was published in 1987 in the Garland-Routledge series, Harvard Dissertations in English and American Literature. From 1983 to 1988 he wrote about literature and popular music for The Boston Phoenix, including articles about Elizabeth Bishop, Elvis Costello, Lou Reed, Jim Thompson, and the Turbines. Polito taught at Harvard, Wellesley College, and New York University, before joining the faculty of the New School in 1992. He was the Holloway Visiting Poet at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1999. He is married to Kristine Harris, Associate Professor of Chinese History, Asian Studies, and film at SUNY, New Paltz.
October 27, 1931
Nawal El Saadawi (born October 27, 1931) is an Egyptian feminist writer, activist, physician and psychiatrist. She has written many books on the subject of women in Islam, paying particular attention to the practice of female genital mutilation in her society. She is founder and president of the Arab Women's Solidarity Association and co-founder of the Arab Association for Human Rights. She has been awarded honorary degrees on three continents. In 2004, she won the North-South prize from the Council of Europe. In 2005, the Inana International Prize in Belgium. Nawal el Saadawi has held positions of Author for the Supreme Council for Arts and Social Sciences, Cairo; Director General of the Health Education Department, Ministry of Health, Cairo, Secretary General of Medical Association, Cairo, Egypt, and Medical Doctor, University Hospital and Ministry of Health. She is the founder of Health Education Association and the Egyptian Women Writer’s Association; she was Chief Editor of Health Magazine in Cairo, Egypt and Editor of Medical Association Magazine.[
October 27, 1939
Jonathan Yardley (born October 27, 1939) is the book critic and a columnist for The Washington Post. He is the author of four previous books, including Ring: A Biography of Ring Lardner and Our Kind of People: The Story of an American Family, and the editor of My Life as Author and Editor by H. L. Mencken. In 1968-69 he held a Nieman Fellowship in Journalism at Harvard University, and in 1981 was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism. He lives in Baltimore and Cecil County, Maryland, with his wife, Susan Hartt Yardley.
October 27, 1922
Ruby Dee (October 27, 1922 – June 11, 2014) was an American actress, poet, playwright, screenwriter, journalist and civil rights activist. She is perhaps best known for originating the role of "Ruth Younger" in the stage and film versions of A Raisin in the Sun (1961). Her other notable film roles include The Jackie Robinson Story (1950), and Do the Right Thing (1989). For her performance as Mahalee Lucas in American Gangster (2007), she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Female Actor in a Supporting Role. She was a Grammy, Emmy, Obie and Drama Desk winner. She was also a National Medal of Arts, Kennedy Center Honors and Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award recipient. She was married to Ossie Davis, with whom she frequently performed, until his death in 2005.
October 28, 1939
Ayi Kwei Armah (born 1939) is a notable Ghanaian writer. Born to Fante-speaking parents, and descending on his father's side from a royal family in the Ga nation, Armah was born in the port city of Sekondi-Takoradi in Ghana. Having attended Achimota School, he left Ghana in 1959 to attend Groton School in Groton, MA. After graduating he entered Harvard University, receiving a degree in sociology. Armah then moved to Algeria and worked as a translator for the magazine Révolution Africaine. In 1964, Armah returned to Ghana, where he was a scriptwriter for Ghana Television and later taught English at the Navrongo School. Between 1967 and 1968, he was editor of Jeune Afrique magazine in Paris. From 1968-1970, Armah studied at Columbia University, obtaining his MFA in creative writing. In the 1970s, he worked as a teacher in East Africa, at the College of National Education, Chang'ombe, Tanzania, and at the National University of Lesotho. He lived in Dakar, Senegal, in the 1980s and taught at Amherst and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In Fragments (1971), the protagonist, Baako, is a ‘been-to’ - a man who has been to the United States and received his education there. Back in Ghana he is regarded with superstitious awe as a link to the Western life style. Baako's grandmother Naana, a blind-seer, stands in living contact with the ancestors. Under the strain of the unfulfilled expectations Baako finally breaks. As in his first novel, Armah contrasts the two worlds of materialism and moral values, corruption and dreams, two worlds of integrity and social pressure. Why Are We So Blest? (1972) was set largely in an American University, and focused on a student, Modin Dofu, who has dropped out of Harvard. Disillusioned Modin is torn between independence and Western values. He meets a Portuguese black African named Solo, who has already suffered a mental breakdown, and a white American girl, Aimée Reitsch. Solo, the rejected writer, keeps a diary, which is the substance of the novel. Aimée's frigidity and devotion to the revolution leads finally to destruction, when Modin is killed in the desert by O.A.S. revolutionaries. Trans Atlantic and African slave trades are the subject of Armah's Two Thousand Seasons (1973) in which a pluralized communal voice speaks through the history of Africa, its wet and dry seasons, from a period of one thousand years. Arab and European oppressors are portrayed as ‘predators,’ ‘destroyers,’ and ‘zombies’. The novel is written in allegorical tone, and shifts from autobiographical and realistic details to philosophical pondering, prophesying a new age. The Healers (1979) mixed fact and fiction about the fall of the celebrated Ashanti Empire. The healers in question are traditional medicine practitioners who see fragmentation as the lethal disease of Africa. Armah remained silent as a novelist for a long period until 1995 when he published Osiris Rising, depicting a radical educational reform group which reinstates ancient Egypt at the center of its curriculum. As an essayist Armah has dealt with the identity and predicament of Africa. His main concern is for the creation of a pan-African agency that will embrace all the diverse cultures and languages of the continent. Armah has called for the adoption of Kiswahili as the continental language.
October 28, 1866
Ramón María del Valle-Inclán y de la Peña (in the village András, in the comarca of Vilanova de Arousa, Galicia, Spain, 28 October 1866 – Santiago de Compostela, 5 January 1936), Spanish dramatist, novelist and member of the Spanish Generation of 98, is considered perhaps the most noteworthy and certainly the most radical dramatist working to subvert the traditionalism of the Spanish theatrical establishment in the early part of the 20th century. His drama is made all the more important by its influence on later generations of Spanish dramatists. Therefore, on the national theater day, his statue in Madrid receives the homage of the theatrical profession.
October 28, 1903
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh (28 October 1903 – 10 April 1966), known as Evelyn Waugh, was an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books; he was also a prolific journalist and reviewer. His best-known works include the early satires Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934), the novel Brideshead Revisited (1945), and the Second World War trilogy Sword of Honour (1952–61). As a writer, Evelyn Waugh is recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century. The son of a publisher, Waugh was educated at Lancing College and then at Hertford College, Oxford, and briefly worked as a schoolmaster before becoming a full-time writer. As a young man, he acquired many fashionable and aristocratic friends, and developed a taste for country house society that never left him. In the 1930s, he travelled extensively, often as a special newspaper correspondent; thus was he reporting from Abyssinia at the time of the 1935 Italian invasion. He served in the British armed forces throughout the Second World War (1939–45), first in the Royal Marines and then in the Royal Horse Guards. He was a perceptive writer who used the experiences and the wide range of people he encountered in his works of fiction, generally to humorous effect; Waugh's detachment was such that he fictionalised his own mental breakdown, which occurred in the early 1950s. After the failure of his first marriage, Waugh converted to Roman Catholicism in 1930. His traditionalist stance led him to strongly oppose all attempts to reform the Roman Catholic Church; the changes by the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) greatly disturbed his sensibilities, especially the introduction of the vernacular Mass. That blow to his religious traditionalism, his dislike for the welfare state culture of the post–War world, and the decline of his health, darkened his final years; nonetheless, he continued to write. To the public, Waugh displayed a mask of indifference, but he was capable of great kindness to those he considered his friends. After his death in 1966, Evelyn Waugh acquired a following of new readers, because of their exposure to the film and television versions of his works, such as the television serial Brideshead Revisited (1981).
October 28, 1954
Christopher Benfey (born October 28, 1954) is an American literary critic and Emily Dickinson scholar. He is the Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. Benfey was born in Merion, Pennsylvania, but spent most of his childhood in Richmond, Indiana, and attended The Putney School. He began his undergraduate studies at Earlham College, where his father, Otto Theodor Benfey, was a professor in the Chemistry department, and completed his B.A. at Guilford College. Benfey holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Benfey is a specialist in 19th and 20th century American literature. He is also an established essayist and critic who has been published in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement.
October 28, 1945
Simon Brett is the author of the Mrs. Pargeter Mystery series, and the creator of the Charles Paris mysteries. The Body on the Beach is the first novel in the new Fethering Mystery series. A former president of Britain's Crime Writers' Association and Chair of the Society of Authors, he lives in the south of England with his family.
October 28, 1944
Valentine Cunningham is Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University, and Tutor and Senior Fellow in English Literature at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has lectured widely around the world and has been a Visiting Professor in the USA, Australia and Germany (where he was Permanent Visiting Professor at the University of Konstanz for ten years). He reviews widely for various British and American journals and newspapers, and broadcasts regularly for BBC Radio on literary and musicological topics. He has twice been a judge for the Booker Prize (1992 and 1998), and was a Regional Chair for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region) in 1999 and 2000. His most recent books are Victorian Poetry Now: Poets, Poems and Poetics (2011) and The Connell Guide to Shakespeare's King Lear (2012).
October 28, 1938
Richard Gott (born October 28, 1938) is a former Latin America correspondent and features editor for the Guardian. A specialist in Latin American affairs, his books include Cuba: A New History, Guerrilla Movements in Latin America, The Appeasers (with Martin Gilbert), Land Without Evil, Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution, and Britain?s Empire. He is currently an honorary research fellow at the institute for the study of the Americas at the University of London.
October 28, 1962
Mark Haddon is an English novelist, best known for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. He won the Whitbread Award, the Dolly Gray Children's Literature Award, Guardian Prize, and a Commonwealth Writers Prize for his work.
October 28, 1906
Clodomir Vianna Moog (October 28, 1906 - January 15, 1988 ) was a Brazilian lawyer , journalist , novelist and essayist. He was the son of Marcos Moog, a federal civil servant, and Maria da Glória Viana, a public teacher. Moog wanted to pursue a military career but wound up working for some time in commerce, and in 1925 he enrolled in the Faculty of Law. He was appointed an interim caretaker of the Contraband Blockade and assigned to the Fiscal Police of Porto Alegre. He participated in the Revolution of 1932, in opposition to the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas, and was arrested and removed to the Amazon. He returned to Rio Grande do Sul in 1934. Vianna Moog was a Brazilian government representative to the Organization of American States (OAS) and the United Nations (UN). He died at age 81, a victim of cardiac arrest following a surgical intervention
October 28, 1920
Harvey Swados (October 28, 1920 – December 11, 1972) was an American social critic and author of novels, short stories, essays and journalism.
October 28, 1937
Leonard Randolph Wilkens (born October 28, 1937) is an American retired basketball player and coach in the National Basketball Association (NBA). He has been inducted three times into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, first in 1989 as a player, as a coach in 1998, and in 2010 as part of the 1992 United States Olympic "Dream Team", for which he was an assistant coach. He is also a 2006 inductee into the College Basketball Hall of Fame. Wilkens was a combined 13-time NBA All-Star as a player (nine times) and as a head coach (four times), was the 1993 NBA Coach of the Year, won the 1979 NBA Championship as the head coach of the Seattle SuperSonics, and an Olympic gold medal as the head coach of the 1996 U.S. men's basketball team. During the 1994–95 season, Wilkens set the record for most coaching wins in NBA history, a record he held when he retired with 1,332 victories. Wilkens is now second on the list behind Don Nelson, who broke it in 2010. He won the Chuck Daly Lifetime Achievement Award for the 2010–11 NBA season. Wilkens is also the most prolific coach in NBA history, at 2,487 regular season games, 89 more games than Nelson, and over 400 more than any other coach, and has more losses than any other coach in NBA history, at 1,155.
October 28, 1925
Ian Hamilton Finlay (28 October 1925 – 27 March 2006) was a Scottish poet, writer, artist and gardener.
October 29, 1740
James Boswell (1740-1795) was a lawyer, diarist, and author. He is best known as the biographer of Samuel Johnson.
October 29, 1906
Fredric Brown (October 29, 1906 – March 11, 1972) was an American science fiction and mystery writer. He is known for his use of humor and for his mastery of the "short short" form—stories of 1 to 3 pages, often with ingenious plotting devices and surprise endings, such as the masterpiece "Sentry". Humor and a somewhat postmodern outlook carried over into his novels as well. One of his stories, "Arena", is officially credited for an adaptation as an episode of the American television series Star Trek.
October 29, 1924
ZBIGNIEW HERBERT was born in Lwów, Poland in 1924. In his late teens he fought in the underground resistance against the Nazis. Herbert studied law, economics, and philosophy at the universities of Krakow, Torun, and Warsaw. His books include SELECTED POEMS, REPORT FROM THE BESIEGED CITY AND OTHER POEMS, MR COGITO, STIIL LIFE WITH A BRIDLE, THE KING OF THE ANTS, LABYRINTH ON THE SEA, and THE COLLECTED POEMS. He died in 1998.
October 29, 1921
Jaime Sáenz Guzmán (29 October 1921 – 16 August 1986) was a Bolivian poet, novelist, and short story writer. Born in the city of La Paz, he lived his entire life there, and the rough topography and harsh climate of this Andean city had a powerful effect on much of his work. His poetry, though individual to the point of being difficult to classify, bears some similarities with surrealist literature. Throughout his life, Sáenz struggled with alcoholism, a struggle about which he frequently wrote in his poems. Accordingly, he is often viewed as a sort of poète maudit, or 'cursed poet'. Sáenz was openly, 'unashamedly', bisexual. Jaime Sáenz Guzmán was born on 29 October 1921 in La Paz, Bolivia to Lieutenant Genaro Sáenz Rivero and Graciela Guzmán Lazarte. In 1938 he traveled to Germany with some classmates to return in 1939, this trip would be crucial in his life. In 1941 he started to work in the Bolivian Department of Defense, then in the Bolivian Treasury. In 1942 he joined the United States Information Service and worked there until 1952. From this moment, Sáenz devoted his life not only to write, but to drink too. Carlos Alfredo Rivera, one of his best friends, didn't want him to drink anymore so he gave him advice and tried to persuade him. Sáenz, despite this, orders just when he's about to die in a delirium tremens crisis.
October 29, 1922
ALEXANDER ZINOVIEV (October 29, 1922 - May 10, 2006) was internationally recognized as one of the Soviet Union’s leading philosophers, With the publication in the West of his great satirical novel, THE YAWNING HEIGHTS, Alexander Zinoviev was deprived of all his degrees, honors and appointments, and expelled from the Communist Party. Subsequently he was allowed to leave the Soviet Union with his wife and daughter to attend a philosophy seminar at the University of Munich. The following month President Brezhnev signed a decree revoking his Soviet citizenship for ‘behavior damaging to Soviet prestige.’
October 29, 1910
Sir Alfred Ayer was born in 1910 and educated at Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford, where he obtained First Class Honors in Literae Humaniores. He was Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at the University of London from 1946 to 1959, and Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford from 1959 to 1978. Sir Alfred has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 1952. He holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Brussels, East Anglia, London, Trent (Ontario) and Bard College. He is an honorary Fellow of University College, London, and, in Oxford, an honorary Fellow of Wadham College and New College, and an honorary Student of Christ Church. He is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur. He was knighted in 1970. His many published works include LANGUAGE, TRUTH AND LOGIC (1936, REVISED EDITION 1946); THE FOUNDATIONS OF EMPIRICAL KNOWLEDGE (1940); PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS (1954); THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE (1956); THE CONCEPT OF A PERSON AND OTHER ESSAYS (1963); THE ORIGINS OF PRAGMATISM (1968); METAPHYSICS AND COMMON SENSE (1969); RUSSELL AND MOORE: THE ANALYTICAL HERITAGE (1971); PROBABILITY AND EVIDENCE (1972); RUSSELL (1972); THE CENTRAL QUESTION OF PHILOSOPHY (1973); PAN OF MY LIFE (1977); PERCEPTION AND IDENTITY: ESSAYS PRESENTED TO A. J. AYER WITH HIS REPLIES TO THEM (1979); HUME (1980); PHILOSOPHY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (1982); FREEDOM AND MORALITY (1984); and MORE OF MY LIFE (1984); besides articles in philosophical and literary journals.
October 29, 1903
Jose Luis Lanuza was an Argentine poet of Basque origin. He was born in Buenos Aires on October 29, 1903 and died in the Argentine capital on August 21, 1976. Lanuza wrote for the newspapers Renovation, Faces and Masks, Last Hour, Home, La Razón, El Mundo, La Nación and La Prensa. He published a book of poems Mythology for adolescents (1932) and another one of short stories Juanita de Valparaíso (1936), but most of his production was devoted to both historical and literary essays: Cancionero del tiempo de Rosas (1941), Los morena ( 1942), Snapshots of History (1943), Morenada (1946), Little Story of Florida Street (1947). Esteban Echeverría y sus amigos (1951), Coplas y cantares argentinos (1952), Little story of the May Revolution (1957), A cloud called Helena (1958), Painters of old Buenos Aires(1961), Genius and figure of Lucio V. Mansilla (1965), El gaucho (1968) and Las brujas de Cervantes (1973). Jose Luis Lanuza chaired the Argentine Society of Writers and was a professor at the School of Librarians of the National Library. He entered the Academia Argentina de Letras in 1972.
October 29, 1958
Ann-Marie MacDonald is a Canadian playwright, novelist, actress and broadcast host who lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The daughter of a member of Canada's military, she was born at an air force base near Baden-Baden, West Germany. She is of Lebanese descent through her mother.
October 29, 1941
Artur Carlos Maurício Pestana dos Santos (born 1941) is a major Angolan writer of fiction. He writes under the name Pepetela. A white Angolan, Pepetela was born in Benguela, Portuguese Angola, and fought as a member of the MPLA in the long guerrilla war for Angola's independence. Much of his writing deals with Angola's political history in the 20th century. Mayombe, for example, is a novel that portrays the lives of a group of MPLA guerrillas who are involved in the anti-colonial struggle in Cabinda, Yaka follows the lives of members of a white settler family in the coastal town of Benguela, and A Geração da Utopia reveals the disillusionment of young Angolans during the post-independence period. Pepetela has also written about Angola's earlier history in A Gloriosa Família and Lueji, and has expanded into satire with his series of Jaime Bunda novels. His most recent works include Predadores, a scathing critique of Angola's ruling classes, O Quase Fim do Mundo, a post-apocalyptic allegory, and O Planalto e a Estepe, a look at Angola's history and connections with other former communist nations. Pepetela won the Camões Prize, the world's highest honour for Lusophone literature, in 1997. "Pepetela" is a Kimbundu word that means "eyelash," which is a translation of his Portuguese surname, "Pestana". The author received this nom de guerre during his time as an MPLA combatant.
October 29, 1947
Robert John Service (born 29 October 1947) is a British historian, academic, and author who has written extensively on the history of the Soviet Union, particularly the era from the October Revolution to Stalin's death. He was until 2013 a professor of Russian history at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, and a senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is best known for his biographies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky. Service spent his undergraduate years at King's College, Cambridge, where he studied Russian and classical Greek. He went to Essex and Leningrad universities for his postgraduate work, and taught at Keele and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, before joining Oxford University in 1998. Between 1986 and 1995, Service published a three-volume biography of Vladimir Lenin. He wrote several works of general history on 20th-century Russia, including A History of Twentieth-Century Russia. He published a trilogy of biographies on the three most important Bolshevik leaders: Lenin (2000), Stalin (2004) and Trotsky (2009). His biography of Trotsky was strongly criticised by Service's Hoover Institution colleague Bertrand Mark Patenaude in a review for the American Historical Review. Patenaude, reviewing Service's book alongside a rebuttal by the Trotskyist David North (In Defence of Leon Trotsky), charged Service with making dozens of factual errors, misrepresenting evidence, and "fail[ing] to examine in a serious way Trotsky's political ideas". Service responded that the book's factual errors were minor and that Patenaude's own book on Trotsky presented him as a "noble martyr". The book was criticised by the German historian of communism Hermann Weber, who led a campaign to prevent Suhrkamp Verlag from publishing it in Germany. Fourteen historians and sociologists signed a letter to the publishing house. The letter cited 'a host of factual errors,' the 'repugnant connotations' of the passages in which Service deals with Trotsky's Jewish origins, implicitly accusing him of anti-Semitism, and Service's recourse to 'formulas associated with Stalinist propaganda' for the purpose of discrediting Trotsky. Suhrkamp announced in February 2012 that it would publish a German translation of Robert Service's Trotsky in July 2012.
October 29, 1876
David F. Swenson was born in Sweden, October 29, 1876, and came to this country with his parents in 1882. He was educated in the public schools of Minneapolis and entered the University of Minnesota in 1894. Graduating with distinction four years later, he was offered a position as assistant in the department of philosophy by Professor F. J. E. Woodbridge, then head of the department. That was the beginning of his long career as a teacher in the University of Minnesota. Except for occasional absences for graduate work, or on leave, his life was spent at the University, and he was progressively advanced from the rank of instructor to full professor in 1917, and for the last four years he was chair- man of the department of philosophy. His teaching was always motivated by an intense ethical passion. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Dr. Swenson did not find religion incompatible with philosophical thinking, and his early acquaintance with and devotion to the thought of the Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, clarified and confirmed his own religious convictions. For him, as for Kierkegaard, progress was from the esthetic, through the ethical to the religious, which for him meant a transcendent or supernatural, not an immanent, religion. Having discovered in Kierkegaard a thinker whom he ranked second only to Socrates, he early conceived the idea that his life-work lay in making the thought of Kierkegaard known to the English-reading people, rather than in personal creative production, and front that purpose he never deviated.
October 29, 1880
Anzia Yezierska (October 29, 1880, Ma?y P?ock, Poland - November 21, 1970, Ontario, CA) was a Jewish-American novelist born in Ma?y P?ock, Poland, which was then part of the Russian Empire. She emigrated as a child with her parents to the United States, and lived in the immigrant neighborhood of the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
October 29, 1958
David Remnick (born October 29, 1958) is an American journalist, writer, and magazine editor. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his book Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker magazine since 1998. He was named Editor of the Year by Advertising Age in 2000. Before joining The New Yorker, Remnick was a reporter and the Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post. He also has served on the New York Public Library board of trustees. In 2010 he published his sixth book, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama.
October 29, 1910
The late A.J. Ayer was Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University and a Fellow of Wolfson College Oxford and of the British Academy. He was the author of many well-known philosophical works, including Language, Truth and Logic, The Central Questions of Philosophy, and Russell. His autobiographical Part of My Life was published in 1978.
October 30, 1930
Timothy Irving Frederick Findley, OC, O.Ont (October 30, 1930 - June 21, 2002) was a Canadian novelist and playwright. He was also informally known by the nickname Tiff or Tiffy, an acronym of his initials.
October 30, 1895
Maria Kuncewiczowa (Samara, Russian Empire, 30 October 1895 - 15 July 1989, Lublin, Poland) was a Polish writer and novelist. Kuncewiczowa studied music and literature in Kraków, Warsaw and Paris. She had published under pseudonyms for the magazine Le Lierre. In 1938 she was awarded the Gold Laurel (Z?oty Wawrzyn) of the Polish Academy of Literature. After 1939 she lived in France, England and the United States. She spent her last years in Kazimierz nad Wis??. In 1989 the University of Maria Curie-Sklodowska made her its own member honoris causa.
October 30, 1885
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic who was a major figure of the early modernist movement. His contribution to poetry began with his development of Imagism, a movement derived from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, stressing clarity, precision and economy of language. His best-known works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and the unfinished 120-section epic, The Cantos (1917–69). Working in London in the early 20th century as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, Pound helped discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway. He was responsible for the 1915 publication of Eliot's ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock‘ and the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysses. Hemingway wrote of him in 1925: ‘He defends [his friends] when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. ... He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying ... he advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide.’ Outraged by the carnage of World War I, Pound lost faith in England and blamed the war on usury and international capitalism. He moved to Italy in 1924, and throughout the 1930s and 1940s embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, expressed support for Adolf Hitler and wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Oswald Mosley. During World War II he was paid by the Italian government to make hundreds of radio broadcasts criticizing the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Jews, as a result of which he was arrested by American forces in Italy in 1945 on charges of treason. He spent months in detention in a U.S. military camp in Pisa, including three weeks in a six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cage that he said triggered a mental breakdown, ‘when the raft broke and the waters went over me’. Deemed unfit to stand trial, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years. While in custody in Italy, he had begun work on sections of The Cantos that became known as The Pisan Cantos (1948), for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1949 by the Library of Congress, triggering enormous controversy. He was released from St. Elizabeths in 1958, thanks to a campaign by his fellow writers, and returned to live in Italy until his death. His political views ensure that his work remains as controversial now as it was during his lifetime; in 1933 Time magazine called him ‘a cat that walks by himself, tenaciously unhousebroken and very unsafe for children’. Hemingway nevertheless wrote: ‘The best of Pound's writing – and it is in the Cantos – will last as long as there is any literature.’
October 30, 1868
Carlos Reyles was an Uruguayan writer of realistic psychological novels, writing in favor of the accumulation of material wealth, a position rarely found among intellectuals of the period. Reyles, the son of Carlos Reyles and Maria Gutierrez, was born on October 30, 1868, in Montevideo, where he was educated at the Hispano-Uruguayan School (1878-1885). He devoted himself to a literary career while still very young. When Reyles was eighteen years old he had a fortune of a million pesos left him by his father, who was one of the first to devote himself in Uruguay to the improvement of cattle-rearing. To this his son also gave some attention, spending a great part of his life improving and enlarging his ranches, where he specialized in the breeding of horses and cattle. Carlos Reyles founded the political club Vida Nueva, which brought together under its banner the intellectual youth of the Colorado Party. For some time he lived outside his country, making his home in Buenos Aires and pursuing a literary life.
October 30, 1937
Rudolfo Anaya (born October 30, 1937), widely acclaimed as one of the founders of modern Chicano literature, is professor emeritus of English at the University of New Mexico. He is best known for the classic Bless Me Ultima. Amy Cordova of Taos, New Mexico, is an artist, arts educator, and activist, renowned for her highly contextualized depictions of Latino cultures. She has illustrated over seventeen children’s books and has been awarded the prestigious American Library Association Pura Belpre; Award twice, in 2008 and 2010. Enrique R. Lamadrid is a literary folklorist and cultural historian in the University of New Mexico's Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
October 30, 1935
Robert Allan Caro (born October 30, 1935) is an American journalist and author known for his biographies of United States political figures Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson. After working for many years as a reporter, Caro wrote The Power Broker (1974), a biography of New York urban planner Robert Moses, which was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest nonfiction books of the twentieth century. He has since written four of a planned five volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson (1982, 1990, 2002, 2012), a biography of the former president. For his biographies, he has won two Pulitzer Prizes in Biography, two National Book Awards (including one for Lifetime Achievement), the Francis Parkman Prize (awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book that "best exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist"), three National Book Critics Circle Awards, the H.L. Mencken Award, the Carr P. Collins Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, the D.B. Hardeman Prize, and a Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2010 President Barack Obama awarded Caro the National Humanities Medal. Due to Caro's reputation for exhaustive research and detail, he is sometimes invoked by reviewers of other writers who are called "Caro-esque" for their own extensive research.
October 30, 1945
David A. Castronovo (October 30, 1945 - November 19, 2010) was the C. Richard Pace Professor at Pace University in New York City where he taught English literature and composition for more than 30 years. He was the author of a dozen books on literary subjects, including Blokes: The Bad Boys of British Literature (2009). His first book, Edmund Wilson, was named a New York Times Notable Book in 1985. Castronovo was born in Brooklyn and attended Brooklyn College, receiving his Masters and Ph.D. in English from Columbia University. A specialist in Victorian studies, he wrote his dissertation on the English gentleman, a subject that he expanded upon and turned into a book in 1987.
October 30, 1944
Juan Luis Cebrián Echarri (born 30 October 1944) is a Spanish journalist and businessman, the co-founder of El País, and CEO of Prisa, a Spanish media conglomerate. Cebrián was born in Madrid in 1944 and studied Philosophy at the Universidad Complutense and has a bachelor's degree from the Escuela Oficial de Periodismo. Has been editor-in-chief of the Spanish daily newspaper El País since 1976. Cebrián was elected to Seat V of the Real Academia Española on 19 December 1996, he took up his seat on 19 May 1997. Juan Luis Cebrián has been named in the Panama Papers.
October 30, 1924
John Piña Craven (October 30, 1924, Brooklyn, NY - February 12, 2015, Honolulu, HI) was an American scientist who was known for his involvement with Bayesian search theory and the recovery of lost objects at sea. He was Chief Scientist of the Special Projects Office of the United States Navy.
October 30, 1906
Archibald Campbell Mzolisa Jordan (30 October 1906 – 20 October 1968) was a novelist, literary historian and intellectual pioneer of African studies in South Africa. He was born at the Mbokothwane Mission in the Tsolo district, Pondoland (later Transkei), the son of an Anglican church minister. Jordan trained as a teacher at St John's College, Mthatha, completed his junior certificate at Lovedale College, Alice, and then won a scholarship to Fort Hare University College. His literary and linguistic training consisted in a BA Degree (1934), followed by a Master's thesis, submitted to the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 1942, entitled "Some features of the phonetic and grammatical structure of Baca" (Bhaca), which was an important early contribution to the study of non-standard Nguni languages, specifically, of a Tekela Nguni language. This was followed in 1957 by a doctoral degree dissertation "A Phonological and Grammatical Study of Literary Xhosa2. While teaching in Kroonstad (in the then Orange Free State Province) between 1934 and 1944 Jordan mastered Sotho, became president of the African Teachers’ Association, and started his writing career with the publication of poetry in the newspaper Imvo Zabantsundu. He also started work on his classic Xhosa novel, Ingqumbo Yezinyanya (1940), later translated by the author and his wife, Phyllis Ntantala-Jordan, into English as The Wrath of the Ancestors (1980). This novel, considered as one of the masterpieces of Xhosa writing and South African literature, was translated into Afrikaans as Die Toorn van die Voorvaders, published in 1990, and a Dutch translation, De Wraak van het Voorgeslacht, appearing in the classic African Writers Series in the Netherlands in 1999. The novel tells a gripping epic-tragic tale of the conflicting forces of Western education and Xhosa traditional beliefs amongst the School people and the Ochre people of the Mpondomise people. After a brief stint as Senior Lecturer in Bantu Languages at the Fort Hare University College, beginning 1944, Jordan was appointed Senior Lecturer in African Languages at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 1946. He worked in that capacity until September 1961. While at UCT he began a new method of teaching Xhosa to non-mother tongue speakers, which he published as A Practical Course In Xhosa (1966). In 1961 Jordan was offered a Carnegie bursary to do research in the United States, but was refused a passport by the South African government. As a result of political pressure, Jordan was forced to leave South Africa on an exit permit. He settled in America where he was appointed professor in African Languages and Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, and later moved, in similar capacity, to the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 1968, Jordan died in Madison, after a long illness. One eminent South African scholar who studied Xhosa under Jordan’s guidance was the writer and academic, Professor Vernon February. Decades later he still testified to the enormous influence Jordan had on those students, and the inspiring and vital knowledge he imparted about Xhosa culture and language. Similarly, Professor Carol Eastman recounted, in Johannesburg, at the "Sociolinguistics in Africa" conference organised by Prof Bob Herbert, her inspiration for African culture and language instilled by Jordan when he taught her Xhosa at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1960s. She said there was a "quiet sadness" about Jordan, living as he was in exile, very far from home. Jordan's other important publications include a book of short stories entitled Kwezo Mpindo zeTsitsa, published in 1973 as Tales from Southern Africa, and an important pioneering critical study, entitled Towards an African Literature: The Emergence of Literary Form in Xhosa (1972). For his creative works, his pioneering research and his sustained efforts at preserving and recording in his writing the culture and history of the Xhosa people of the Eastern Cape, the University of Port Elizabeth currently known as Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University NMMU posthumously bestowed on Jordan an honorary doctorate in literature, on 24 April 2004.
October 30, 1935
Ágota Kristóf (Hungarian: Kristóf Ágota; October 30, 1935 – July 27, 2011) was a Hungarian writer who lived in Switzerland and wrote in French. Kristof received the European prize for French literature for The Notebook (1986). She won the 2001 Gottfried Keller Award in Switzerland and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 2008. Agota Kristof was born in Csikvánd, Hungary on October 30, 1935. At the age of 21 she had to leave her country when the Hungarian anti-communist revolution was suppressed by the Soviet military. She, her husband (who used to be her history teacher at school) and their 4-month-old daughter escaped to Neuchâtel in Switzerland. After 5 years of loneliness and exile, she quit her work in a factory and left her husband. She started studying French and began to write novels in that language. Kristof's first steps as a writer were in the realm of poetry and theater (John et Joe, Un rat qui passe), aspects of her writing that did not have as great an impact as her trilogy. In 1986 Kristof’s first novel, The Notebook appeared. It was the beginning of a trilogy. The sequel titled The Proof came 2 years later. The third part was published in 1991 under the title The Third Lie. The most important themes of this trilogy are war and destruction, love and loneliness, promiscuous, desperate, and attention-seeking sexual encounters, desire and loss, truth and fiction. She received the European prize for French literature for The Notebook. This novel was translated in more than 40 languages. In 1995 she published a new novel, Yesterday. Kristof also wrote a book called L'analphabète (in English The Illiterate) and published in 2004. This is an autobiographical text. It explores her love of reading as a young child, and we travel with her to boarding school, over the border to Austria and then to Switzerland. Forced to leave her country due to the failure of the anti-communist rebellion, she hopes for a better life in Zurich. She died on 27 July 2011 in her Neuchâtel home.
October 30, 1895
Maria Kuncewiczowa (Samara, Russian Empire, 30 October 1895 - 15 July 1989, Lublin, Poland) was a Polish writer and novelist. Kuncewiczowa studied music and literature in Kraków, Warsaw and Paris. She had published under pseudonyms for the magazine Le Lierre. In 1938 she was awarded the Gold Laurel (Z?oty Wawrzyn) of the Polish Academy of Literature. After 1939 she lived in France, England and the United States. She spent her last years in Kazimierz nad Wis??. In 1989 the University of Maria Curie-Sklodowska made her its own member honoris causa.
October 30, 1899
Nadezhda Yakovlevna Khazina (30 October 1899 – 29 December 1980) was born in Saratov in 1899, but spent all her early life in Kiev, studying art, traveling widely with her family, learning several Western European languages fluently enough to enable her to do extensive translating work at a later period. She met Osip Mandelstam for the first time in 1919, also in Kiev. The life they shared is recounted in this book. For almost thirty years after her husband's death Mrs. Mandelstam traveled the Russian provinces, teaching English for her living. In 1964 she was granted permission to return to Moscow, and there began writing the first volume of this memoir, HOPE AGAINST HOPE, which has now appeared in most major languages. Max Hayward A fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford, Max Hayward is a specialist in Russian literature. His previous translations include Boris Pasternak's DR. ZHIVAGO (with Manya Harari), Alexander Solzhenitsyn's ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH, Isaac Babel's YOU MUST KNOW EVERYTHING, and volume one of Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir, HOPE AGAINST HOPE.
October 30, 1871
Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry (30 October 1871 – 20 July 1945) was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. In addition to his poetry and fiction (drama and dialogues), his interests included aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events. David Paul is an English critic and poet. He has translated two other volumes in the Collected Works: Degas, Manet, Morisot and the Faust plays.
October 30, 1877
Irma Rombauer (October 30, 1877 – October 14, 1962) self-published the first Joy of Cooking in 1931 with the small insurance payout she received after her husband committed suicide during the Great Depression. Suddenly, society wives who used to enjoy a kitchen staff no longer had the money to employ them and began cooking for themselves. The instruction "stand facing the stove" was a bit more pragmatic than we realize. In 1936, the first commercial edition was published by Bobbs-Merrill. Marion Rombauer Becker, Irma's daughter, joined the Joy dynasty and revised and updated each subsequent edition until 1975. That edition was the first after Irma's death and was completely Marion's. Her son, Ethan Becker, has returned the book to the family's voice, revising the 1975 edition for the 75th Anniversary Edition.
October 30, 1948
Rodger Streitmatter is professor of journalism at American University. His books include "Raising Her Voice: African-American Women Journalists, Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America," and "Mightier than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History.
October 31, 1902
CARLOS DRUMMOND DE ANDRADE, born in Itabira in 1902, is recognized as the founder of literary Brazilian Modernism. His ancestry combines Scottish and Latin American strains, and many readers find traits of both cultures in his work. A retired Minister of Education, he is known for his friendship and encouragement of many of Brazil’s younger writers and artist. JOHN NIST, who complied and translated these poems, collected the poetry of modern Brazil for an anthology published in 1962 at Indiana University Press, and widely acclaimed both here and abroad. A poet and novelist in his own right, Professor Nist has had several books published in Brazil and holds the Machado de Assis medal from the Brazilian Academy of Letters and Arts. At the time of this publication he is the chairman of the English Department at Austin College, Sherman, Texas.
October 31, 1920
Richard Stanley Francis (31 October 1920 – 14 February 2010) was a British crime writer, and former steeplechase jockey, whose novels centre on horse racing in England. After wartime service in the RAF, Francis became a full-time jump-jockey, winning over 350 races and becoming champion jockey of the British National Hunt. He came to further prominence in 1956 as jockey to Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, riding her horse Devon Loch. It fell when he was close to winning the Grand National. Francis retired from the turf and became a journalist and novelist. All his novels deal with crime in the horse-racing world, with some of the criminals being outwardly respectable figures. The stories are narrated by one of the key players, often a jockey, but sometimes a trainer, an owner, a bookie, or someone in a different profession, peripherally linked to racing. This person is always facing great obstacles, often including physical injury, from which he must fight back with determination. (The most frequently recurring of Francis' protagonists was former jockey turned one-armed private investigator Sid Halley.) More than forty of these novels became international best-sellers.
October 31, 1945
Gustavo Álvarez Gardeazábal (born 31 October 1945) is a Colombian writer, and politician. He attended the University of Valle and was the runner-up for a Premio Nadal in 1971 for Dabeiba. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984. and was Governor of Valle del Cauca Department from 1998-1999. He also wrote the highly rated telenovela El Bazar de los Idiotas.
October 31, 1948
Matti Yrjänä Joensuu (31 October 1948, Helsinki, Finland – 4 December 2011, Valkeakoski, Finland) was a Finnish writer of crime fiction. He has been awarded the State's Literature Prize (1982), Vuoden johtolanka prize (1985, 1994, 2004), and he has been nominated for two Finlandias. He received the Martin Beck Award in 1987. Joensuu has written several novels about the personal life and work of policeman Timo Harjunpää. He is a very credible and pleasant man, who treats the criminals as humanely as his own family, which consists of Timo, his wife Elisa and three children (Valpuri, Pipsa and Pauliina). Harjunpää has also been shown on TV. Joensuu's work has been translated into English, Bulgarian, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, French, Swedish, German, Slovak, Danish, Hungarian, Russian and Estonian.
October 31, 1962
MARI JUNGSTEDT is the author of Unseen and has worked as a radio and television journalist for fourteen years. This is her second mystery in a series set on the island of Gotland off the coast of Sweden, where the author spends her summers. The rest of the year Mari lives in Stockholm with her family. She is currently at work on her fifth book.
October 31, 1926
Henry Reymond Fitzwalter Keating (born 31 October 1926) is an English crime fiction writer most notable for his series of novels featuring Inspector Ghote of the Bombay CID. Henry Reymond Fitzwalter Keating, known as Harry to his family and friends, was born in St. Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex and typed out his first story at the age of eight. He was educated at Merchant Taylor's School in London and later Trinity College, Dublin. In 1956 he moved to London to work as a journalist on the Daily Telegraph newspaper. He was the crime books reviewer for The Times newspaper for fifteen years. He was Chairman of the Crime Writers' Association (CWA) (1970–71), Chairman of the Society of Authors (1983–84) and President of the Detection Club (1985–2000). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He received the George N. Dove Award in 1995. In 1996 the CWA awarded him the Cartier Diamond Dagger for outstanding services to crime literature. Keating is not only a durably successful crime novelist, but he has also written screenplays, is an accomplished reviewer and wrote a biography of Dame Agatha Christie entitled AGATHA CHRISTIE: FIRST LADY OF CRIME. On his 80th birthday in 2006, members of the Detection Club honored him with an anthology, Verdict of Us All (published by Crippen & Landru in the United States, Allison & Busby in the United Kingdom). He lives in London with his wife, the actress Sheila Mitchell.
October 31, 1795
John Keats was one of the main figures of the second generation of romantic poets along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite his work only having been in publication for four years before his death. Although his poems were not generally well received by critics during his life, his reputation grew after his death, so that by the end of the 19th century he had become one of the most beloved of all English poets. He had a significant influence on a diverse range of later poets and writers. Jorge Luis Borges stated that his first encounter with Keats was the most significant literary experience of his life. The poetry of Keats is characterized by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. Today his poems and letters are some of the most popular and most analyzed in English literature.
October 31, 1955
Susan Orlean is an American journalist and author. She has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992, and has contributed articles to many magazines including Vogue, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Outside.
October 31, 1937
Thomas Richard Paxton (born October 31, 1937) is an American folk singer-songwriter who has had a music career spanning more than fifty years. In 2009, Paxton received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. He is noteworthy as a music educator as well as an advocate for folk singers to combine traditional songs with new compositions. Paxton's songs have been widely covered, including modern standards such as "The Last Thing on My Mind", "Bottle of Wine", "Whose Garden Was This", "The Marvelous Toy", and "Ramblin' Boy". Paxton's songs have been recorded by Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, The Weavers, Judy Collins, Sandy Denny, Joan Baez, Doc Watson, Harry Belafonte, Peter, Paul and Mary, The Seekers, Marianne Faithfull, The Kingston Trio, the Chad Mitchell Trio, John Denver, Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner, Willie Nelson, Flatt & Scruggs, The Move, The Fireballs, and many others.
October 31, 1922
Norodom Sihanouk (31 October 1922 – 15 October 2012) was a Cambodian royal politician and the King of Cambodia.
October 31, 1953
Don Winslow is an American author who has written the screenplays for Savages, Satori and other adaptations of his novels with screenwriter/producer Shane Salerno.
October 31, 1936
Bill Boyarsky is Lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communications, University of Southern California. In his 30 years with theLos Angeles Times,Boyarsky was a political writer, featured columnist, and city editor. He was a member of reporting teams that won three Pulitzer Prizes.
October 31, 1935
David Harvey is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is among the top twenty most cited authors in the humanities and is the world's most cited academic geographer. His books include The Limits to Capital, Social Justice and the City, and The Condition of Postmodernity, among many others.
November 1, 1886
HERMANN BROCH (1886-1951) was born in Vienna. He studied philosophy and mathematics, was active in labor relations, and wrote sociological and literary essays. At the time of his death he was researching mass psychology at Yale University.
November 1, 1937
William Melvin Kelley was born in New York City and attended the Fieldston School and Harvard, where he studied under Archibald MacLeish and John Hawkes. He has taught at the New School and the State University in Geneseo, N. Y., and has had stories and articles published in a number of magazines.
November 1, 1935
Edward Wadie Said (1 November 1935 – 25 September 2003) was a Palestinian American literary theorist and public intellectual who helped found the critical-theory field of postcolonialism. Born a Palestinian in Jerusalem in Mandatory Palestine, he was an American citizen through his father. Said spent his childhood in Jerusalem and Cairo, where he attended elite British and American schools. Subsequently he left for the United States, where he obtained a bachelor's degree from Princeton and a doctorate in English literature from Harvard. Said then joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1963, where he became professor of English and comparative literature in 1991. As a cultural critic, Said is best known for the 1978 book Orientalism. In it, he analyses the cultural representations that are the basis of Orientalism, a term he redefined to refer to the West's patronizing perceptions and depictions of Middle Eastern, Asian and North African societies—’the East‘. He contended that Orientalist scholarship was, and remains, inextricably tied to the imperialist societies that produced it, which makes much of the work inherently political, servile to power, and thus intellectually suspect. Orientalism is based upon Said's knowledge of colonial literature, literary theory, and poststructuralism. Said vigorously discussed and debated the cultural subjects comprised by Orientalism, especially as applied to history and area studies; nonetheless, some mainstream academics disagreed with the theory, most notably Bernard Lewis. As a public intellectual, Said discussed culture, literature, music and contemporary politics. Drawing from his family experiences as Palestinian Christians in the Middle East around the time Israel was established in 1948, Said argued for the establishment of a Palestinian state. Further, he was an advocate for equal political and human rights for Palestinians in Israel, and urged the U.S. to pressure Israel to grant and respect these rights. Said was described by journalist Robert Fisk as the Palestinian people's ‘most powerful political voice’. Nevertheless, he also criticized the Arab and Muslim regimes who acted against the interests of their peoples. Intellectually active until the last months of his life, he died of leukemia in late 2003.
November 1, 1897
Gretchen Schultz is professor of French studies at Brown University. Lewis Seifert is professor of French studies at Brown University.
November 1, 1947
Fergus M. Bordewich (born November 1, 1947) is an American writer, historian, and editor living in San Francisco. He is the author of seven nonfiction books, including a memoir, and an illustrated children's book.
November 1, 1940
William Heyen was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1940, and raised in Suffolk County by German immigrant parents. His graduate degrees are from Ohio University. A former Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature in Germany, he has been honored with NEA, Guggenheim, American Academy of Arts & Letters and other awards. His poetry has appeared in the Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper's, American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, and in hundreds of other magazines and anthologies. His Crazy Horse in Stillness won the Small Press Book Award in 1997; Shoah Train: Poems was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2004. Heyen is Professor of English/Poet in Residence Emeritus at his undergraduate alma mater, SUNY Brockport.
November 1, 1884
James Francis Horrabin (1 November 1884 – 2 March 1962) was an English socialist (sometime communist) radical writer and cartoonist. For two years he was Labour Member of Parliament for Peterborough. He attempted to construct a socialist geography and was an associate of David Low and George Orwell.
November 1, 1886
Sakutar? Hagiwara (1 November 1886 – 11 May 1942) was a Japanese writer of free-style verse, active in the Taish? and early Sh?wa periods of Japan. He liberated Japanese free verse from the grip of traditional rules, and he is considered the father of modern colloquial poetry in Japan. He published many volumes of essays, literary and cultural criticism, and aphorisms over his long career. His unique style of verse expressed his doubts about existence, and his fears, ennui, and anger through the use of dark images and unambiguous wording.
November 1, 1892
William Esuman-Gwira Sekyi, better known as Kobina Sekyi (1 November 1892, Cape Coast – 1956) was a nationalist lawyer, politician and writer in the Gold Coast. Sekyi was the son of John Gladstone Sackey, headmaster of the Wesleyan School in Cape Coast, who was himself the son of Chief Kofi Sekyi, the Chief Regent of Cape Coast and Wilhelmina Pietersen, also known as Amba Paaba, daughter of Willem Essuman Pietersen (c.1844-1914), an Elmina-Cape Coast businessman and one-time President of the Aborigines' Rights Protection Society (ARPS), a later president of which was Sekyi's uncle, Henry van Hien, whose heir Sekyi was. Sekyi was educated at Mfantsipim School and studied philosophy at the University of London, accompanied to Britain by his maternal grandfather. He had originally wanted to become an engineer like his mother's younger brother, J.B. Essuman-Gwira, but because his family controlled the purse strings and they wished him to study law, that was the career he entered. He was called to the Bar from the Inner Temple in 1918. Sekyi became a lawyer in private practice in the Gold Coast. He was president of the Aborigines' Rights Protection Society, an executive member of the National Congress of British West Africa, and member of the Coussey Committee for constitutional change. He married Lilly Anna Cleanand, daughter of John Peter Cleanand and Elizabeth Vroom. Sekyi's comedy The Blinkards (1915) satirised the acceptance by a colonised society of the attitudes of the colonisers. His novel The Anglo-Fante was the first English-language novel written in the Cape Coast.
November 1, 1946
Frank Costigliola is professor of history at the University of Connecticut and former president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He is the author of FRANCE AND THE UNITED STATES AND AWKWARD DOMINION.
November 1, 1897
Naomi Mary Margaret Mitchison, (née Haldane; 1 November 1897 – 11 January 1999) was a Scottish novelist and poet. Often referred to as the doyenne of Scottish literature, she wrote over 90 books covering a wide range of genre including historical, science fiction, travelogue and autobiography. With her husband Gilbert Richard Mitchison becoming a life peer in 1964, she was also entitled to call herself Lady Mitchison, but never used the title herself. She was appointed CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 1981. Following her father John Scott Haldane and elder brother J. B. S. Haldane, Naomi Mitchison initially pursued a scientific career. From 1908 she and her brother started investigating Mendelian genetics. Their publication in 1915 became the first demonstration of genetic linkage in mammals. But while a diploma student at Society of Oxford Home Students (later St Anne's College, Oxford), the First World War broke out that changed her interest to nursing. Her finest novel The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931) is regarded by some as the best historical novel of the 20th century. Naomi Mitchison was a vocal feminist, particularly campaigning for birth control. We Have Been Warned (1935) is regarded as her most controversial work due to explicit sexuality. The book was rejected by leading publishers and ultimately censored. Marina Warner is a writer of fiction and cultural history who has published widely on fairy tales. Her books include From the Beast to the Blonde and Stranger Magic, winner of the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She is professor of literature, film, and theatre studies at the University of Essex and a fellow of All Souls, University of Oxford.
November 1, 1897
Michael Rosen is professor of children’s literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. The author of more than 140 children’s books, he is also known for his work as a broadcaster, political columnist, and scriptwriter, and was Children’s Laureate from 2007 to 2009. His many books for adults include So They Call You Pisher!, Alphabetical, and The Disappearance of Émile Zola. He lives in London.
November 1, 1871
Stephen Crane was born in 1871, in Newark, New Jersey. He attempted college twice, the second time failing a theme-writing course while writing articles for newspapers such as the New York Tribune. In 1892 Crane moved to the poverty of New York City’s Lower East Side—the Bowery so vividly depicted in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. In 1894 the serial publication began of The Red Badge of Courage, his acclaimed and widely popular novel of a young soldier’s coming of age in the Civil War. He died in Germany at the age of twenty-eight, in June of 1900.
November 2, 1936
C. K. Williams won the Pulitzer Prize for REPAIR in 1999. His most recent work is MISGIVINGS (2000), a memoir. He teaches at Princeton University and lives part of the year in Paris, France.
November 2, 1946
Michelle Cliff (born 2 November 1946) is a Jamaican-American author whose notable works include No Telephone to Heaven, Abeng and Free Enterprise. Cliff also has written short stories, prose poems and works of literary criticism. Her works explore the various, complex identity problems that stem from post-colonialism, as well as the difficulty of establishing an authentic, individual identity despite race and gender constructs. Cliff is a lesbian who grew up in Jamaica.
November 2, 1899
Charles Edgar du Perron, more commonly known as E. du Perron, was a famous and influential Dutch poet and author of Indo-European (Eurasian) descent. Best known for his literary acclaimed master piece ‘Land van herkomst’ (Land of origin) of 1935. Together with Menno ter Braak and Maurice Roelants he founded the short-lived, but influential literary magazine Forum in 1932. E. du Perron, born in Meester Cornelis, Batavia, Java, Dutch East Indies on 2 November 1899, and died in Bergen, North Holland, the Netherlands on 14 May 1940, descended from French aristocracy. Most probably his bloodline can be traced back to the legendary Jean Roch du Perron (Born in Bulhon, in Auvergne, France in 1756 – Died in Batavia, Dutch East Indies in 1808).
November 2, 1911
ODYSSEUS ELYTIS was born in Heraklion, Crete, in 1911. He studied law at the University of Athens. His poems began to appear in periodicals in 1935; since the publication of his first book of poems in 1940, ten further volumes of his poetry have appeared. He has also published three collections of essays, and translations from a wide range of modern writers including Rimbaud, Genet, Mayakovsky, Lorca, Ungaretti and Brecht. In 1940-1 he took part in the campaign against the Italian fascists in Albania. During the Nazi occupation he was one of the most prominent poets of the Greek resistance. He lived in Paris from 1948-52; since then his home has been in Athens. The Nobel Prize was awarded to him 'for his poetry which against the background of Greek tradition depicts with sensuous strength and intellectual clearsightedness modern man's struggle for freedom and creativeness.’. EDMUND KEELEY is Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. He has translated several of the leading modem Greek poets, often in collaboration with Philip Sherrard (the complete poems of C. P. Cavafy and George Seferis, a selection of Angelus Sikelianos). His translations of Yannis Ritsos, Ritsos in Parentheses, appeared in 1979. GEORGE SAVIDIS is Professor of Modem Greek at the University of Salonika, and George Seferis Visiting Professor of Modem Greek Studies at Harvard University. He is editor of the Greek texts of Cavafy, Seferis and Sikelianos, among others, and he has also collaborated with Edmund Keeley on translations of Cavafy's poems, Passions and Ancient Days.
November 2, 1882
Leopold Perutz (2 November 1882, Prague – 25 August 1957, Bad Ischl) was an Austrian novelist and mathematician. He was born in Prague (now capital of the Czech Republic) and was thus a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He lived in Vienna until the Nazi Anschluss in 1938, when he emigrated to Palestine. According to the biographical note on the Arcade Publishing editions of the English translations of his novels, Leo was a mathematician who formulated an algebraic equation which is named after him; he worked as a statistician for an insurance company. He was related to the biologist Max Perutz. During the 1950s he returned occasionally to Austria, spending the summer and autumn months in the market town of St. Wolfgang in the Salzkammergut resort region and in Vienna. He died in the Austrian spa town of Bad Ischl in 1957. He wrote his first novel, The Third Bullet, in 1915 while recovering from a wound sustained in the First World War. In all Perutz wrote eleven novels, which gained the admiration of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Ian Fleming, Karl Edward Wagner and Graham Greene. Wagner cited Perutz' novel The Master of the Day of Judgement as one of the thirteen best non-supernatural horror novel.
November 2, 1919
Jorge (Cândido) de Sena (November 2, 1919 - June 4, 1978) was a Portuguese poet, critic, essayist, novelist, dramatist, translator and university professor. Jorge Candido de Sena was the only child of Augusto Raposo de Sena, from Ponta Delgada in the Azores, a merchant marine captain, and Maria da Luz Tellez Grilo de Sena, from Covilhã. Both families belonged to the middle class, the mother's originally well-to-do but nothing much remained of it by time her child was born; the father's family hailed from military and political offices, the mother's from merchants. Jorge was born in Lisbon. He received his degree in civil engineering, but published his first poems at age 18. His interests were wide-ranging, including literature, intellectual history, politics, and other areas of the cultural spectrum. His liberal yet strongly independent convictions regarding Portuguese politics during the Salazar dictatorship led eventually to his exile in Brazil in 1959, and subsequently, after the military coup in Brail in 1964, to the United States, in 1965. He became a professor of literature in Brazil, which also afforded him the opportunity to complete his doctorate, and that was his profession in the U.S. until he died. He died in Santa Barbara, California in 1978. His remains were moved to the Cemitério dos Prazeres in Lisbon on September 11, 2009. Jorge de Sena is undeniably one of the most relevant Portuguese intellectuals of the twentieth century. His output in fiction, drama, essays, and poetry is vast. He considered himself primarily a poet. The autobiographical novel Sinais de Fogo, which was adapted to film in 1995 by Luís Filipe Rocha, who is also the author of a documentary about Jorge de Sena.
November 2, 1922
Antonio di Benedetto (2 November 1922 in Mendoza – 10 October 1986 in Buenos Aires) was an Argentine journalist and writer. Di Benedetto began writing and publishing stories in his teens, inspired by the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Luigi Pirandello. Mundo Animal, appearing in 1952, was his first story collection and won prestigious awards. A revised version came out in 1971, but the Xenos Books translation uses the first edition to catch the youthful flavor. Antonio di Benedetto wrote five novels, the most famous being the existential masterpiece Zama (1956). El Silenciero (The Silencer, 1964) is noteworthy for expressing his intense abhorrence of noise. Critics have compared his works to Alain Robbe-Grillet, Julio Cortázar and Ernesto Sábato. In 1976, during the military dictatorship of General Videla, di Benedetto was imprisoned and tortured. Released a year later, he went into exile in Spain, then returned home in 1984. He travelled widely and won numerous awards, but never acquired the worldwide fame of other Latin American writers, perhaps because his work was not translated to many languages. Esther Allen has translated Javier Marías, Jorge Luis Borges, Felisberto Hernández, Flaubert, Rosario Castellanos, Blaise Cendrars, Marie Darrieussecq, and José Martí. She currently teaches at Baruch College (CUNY) and has directed the work of the PEN Translation Fund since its founding in 2003. Allen has received a Fulbright Grant and two National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships, and in 2006 was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.
November 2, 1903
Hope Hale Davis (November 2, 1903 – October 2, 2004) was a 20th-Century American feminist (or "proto-feminist") and communist, later author and writing teacher. Davis was born Frances Hope Hale on November 2, 1903 in Iowa City, Iowa, the fifth and youngest child of Hal Hale, a school superintendent, and Frances McFarland, a teacher. Her father died young, and her mother remarried to John Overholt. When her stepfather died, too, mother and daughter moved to Washington, D.C. There, young Hope Hale studied at the new Corcoran School of Art and George Washington University, as well as Cincinnati University and the Portland School of Art[disambiguation needed]. She did not obtain a college degree. In 1924, Davis became assistant to the Stuart Walker Repertory Company's art director, for whom she painted scenery and designed costumes. In 1926, she moved to New York City, where she worked in advertising as a secretary at the Frank Presbrey Agency. There, she wrote copy and sold drawings. She left to become a freelance writer, publishing stories in magazines such as Collier's, The New Yorker, and Bookman. In 1929, she became promotion manager for Life magazine. In 1931, she founded and edited Love Mirror, a women's pulp magazine. In February 1933, she moved to Washington, D.C., where she worked on the Consumers' Counsel of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) under Frederic C. Howe. Her third husband, German economist Karl Brunck worked for the National Recovery Administration. She joined the Soviet spy ring called the "Ware Group", as recounted later in her memoir. In 1934, one group meeting included J. Peters, Lee Pressman, Marion Bachrach, and John Abt. Other members included: Harold Ware, Charles Kramer, Alger Hiss, Nathaniel Weyl, Laurence Duggan, Harry Dexter White, Abraham George Silverman, Nathan Witt, Julian Wadleigh, Henry Collins, and Victor Perlo. In 1954, she identified her husband (Robert Gorham Davis) to the FBI as a communist, along with Len De Caux and his wife, Herman Brunce, John and Elizabeth Donovan, Harold Ware, Charles Kramer and his wife, John Abt and his wife Jessica Smith Ware Abt and his sister Marion Bachrach, Donald Hiss, Jacob Golos, Joseph Freeman, and Joe Currant, along with Pressman, Perlo, Silverman, Collins, Witt, and A. Hiss. After Brunck's death, Davis returned to New York City, where she worked as a free-lance writer, crafting short stories with underlying Communist themes. During her years married to Robert Gorham Davis, she edited his work while writing herself for Redbook and Town & Country, and New Leader magazines. In 1983-84 she was a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. In 1985, she received an invitation to remain as a visiting scholar. She taught a class in writing from 1985 until a month before her death. Seminar titles included "How to Keep a Journal" and "Autobiography as Detective Story." Davis briefly married a first husband, vaudeville scenery designer George Patrick Wood. In 1932, Davis married second husband, British journalist (and Communist) Claud Cockburn. They did not live together and divorced in 1934 (and he died in 1981). Their daughter was Claudia Cockburn (died 1998), who married British performer Michael Flanders (died 1975) and had two daughters, journalists Stephanie and Laura Flanders. In 1934, she married German economist and Communist Karl Hermann Brunck, who suffered a breakdown and entered a mental institution for treatment by psychologist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. He committed suicide in 1937. In 1939, she left the Communist Party over the Hitler-Stalin Pact, though she remained a "committed leftist". Over the same international incident, Whittaker Chambers met with New Dealer Adolf A. Berle and named Davis as a member of the Ware Group, although he did not cite her name during subpoenaed testimony before HUAC on August 3, 1948. That same year, she married fellow Communist, professor, and literary critic Robert Gorham Davis (died 1998), whom she met during a congress of the League of American Writers; the couple had two children, Stephen and Lydia. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Davises lived on the Upper West Side of New York City and were friends with Bernard Malamud, Lionel Trilling, and Diana Trilling. In the 1970s, they moved to Connecticut. In 1983, they moved to Boston after she received a fellowship from Radcliffe. Hope Hale Davis died of pneumonia in Boston on October 2, 2004, at age 100.
November 2, 1923
Jan Olof Ekström (2 November 1923 in Falun, Sweden – 17 August 2013 was a Swedish author and adman.Jan Ekström lived in Gislaved but graduated in Växjö. He studied national economy, Slavic languages, English and statistics in Lund, thereafter he studied at the Handelshögskolan in Stockholm. He was in the beginning of the 80's co-owner of the ad firm "Ekström & Lindmark". He also lived in Paris, France. As an author Jan Ekström debuted 1961 with "Döden fyller år" (The Death's Birthday) and the next year he introduced his problem-solver, the red haired and opera loving detective Bertil Durell. For "Träfracken" (The wood tuxedo) he got Expressens Sherlock-award. Jan Ekström is most famous as an author of mystery novels with complicated intrigue, though he has written romans and articles to trade presses. Jan Ekström was also a member of Svenska Deckarakademin (the Swedish Detective Story Academy). The novel Ålkistan (The Eel Chest) is claimed to be one of the few Swedish examples of a successful answer on the locked room mystery. The novels Träfracken and Morianerna also exists in film form.
November 2, 1941
Edward Joseph Gorman Jr. (November 2, 1941 – October 14, 2016) was an American writer and short fiction anthologist who has published in almost every genre, but is best known for his work in the crime, mystery, western, and horror fields. His non-fiction work has appeared such places as The New York Times and Redbook. He has contributed to many magazines and other publications including Xero, Black Lizard, Mystery Scene, Cemetery Dance, and the anthology Tales of Zorro.
November 2, 1902
GYULA ILLYES (November 2, 1902, Fels?rácegres, Pálfa, Hungary - April 15, 1983, Budapest, Hungary) was born in Hungary in 1902. He travelled in Austria and Germany and spent several years in Paris in the early twenties where he came into contact with French surrealist poets. He returned to Hungary and published his first volumes of poetry in 1928-30; these were highly praised by Mihaly Babits, then a leading authority on Hungarian literature. In the thirties Illyes was deeply involved in the populist literary trend in Hungary and he later became editor of two important literary periodicals. He was considered at one time the greatest living Hungarian poet. He has received many prizes and was a Vice-President of the International PEN Club; besides poetry, he has written novels, plays, and essays on literature and travel.
November 2, 1939
Svend Åge Madsen (born November 2, 1939) is a Danish novelist. He studied mathematics before he began writing fiction. His novels are generally philosophical and humorous. Several of his works have been made into films in Denmark. His writings are extensive and has been translated into many languages. Madsen's writing style and philosophy have placed him amongst the most distinguished and widely-read authors in Denmark today. His novels reflect the grave problems faced by the modern civilisation, and a number of them have achieved a cult status in Denmark. The interplay between quasi-realism and complete fantasy in Svend Åge Madsen’s novels leads to contemplation of the indefinable nature of human existence.
November 2, 1967
Phil Henderson, aka Philip Lewis or P. Lewis (born November 2, 1967 in Atlanta, Georgia) is an American novelist, illustrator, essayist, and poet. His literary work is known for its relentless, caustic satire of contemporary American culture.
November 2, 1975
Ófeigur Sigurðsson is an Icelandic poet, novelist and translator. He was born in Reykjavík on November 2. 1975. Ófeigur studied philosophy at the University of Iceland and graduated in 2007, writing a thesis on the work of Georges Bataille. In 2001 he published his first book of poetry, Skál fyrir skammdeginu, with the avant-garde press Nykur. Ófeigur has to this date published seven books of poetry, four novels and several translations. Ófeigur was the first Icelander to be awarded the European Union Prize for Literature in 2011 for the novel Jon. In 2014 he published the novel Öræfi [Oraefi: The Wasteland] to critical acclaim as well as great commercial success, it was the third best selling book of the year with five printings selling out in three months. It went on to receive the Book Merchant´s Prize in 2014 and The Icelandic Literature Prize in 2015. His works have been widely translated and Oraefi: The Wasteland is set to be released in the United States in March 2018. Ófeigur currently lives in Antwerpen, Belgium. Lytton Smith (born 1982) is an Anglo-American poet and translator. His poetry collections include The All-Purpose Magical Tent (Nightboat Books, 2009), which was selected by Terrance Hayes for the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize in 2009, and a previous chapbook, Monster Theory, selected by Kevin Young for the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship in 2008. He has taught at Columbia University, Fordham University, and Plymouth University, and is currently a professor at SUNY-Geneseo. In addition to his work translation Jón Gnarr, he has translated two other novels from Icelandic: The Ambassador, by Bragi Ólafsson (Open Letter 2010) and A Child in Reindoor Woods by Kristín Ómarsdóttir (Open Letter, 2012), and his translation of Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller by Gudbergur Bergsson is forthcoming from Open Letter Books.
November 3, 1500
Benvenuto Cellini (3 November 1500 - 13 February 1571) was an Italian goldsmith, sculptor, painter, soldier and musician, who also wrote a famous autobiography.
November 3, 1913
Albert Cossery (3 November 1913 – 22 June 2008) was an Egyptian-born French writer of Greek Orthodox Syro-Lebanese descent, born in Cairo. Albert Cossery was born to a well-off Levantine-Egyptian family in Cairo, where his parents were wealthy small-property owners. In 1998, he told Abdallah Naaman: ‘We are the ‘Shawams’ (Syro-Lebanese, referring to the Bilad al-Sham) of Egypt. My father is a Greek Orthodox native of the village of al-Qusayr, near Homs, in Syria. Upon arriving in Cairo at the end of the 19th century, our surname's pronunciation was simplified to ‘Cossery’ (from ‘Qusayri’).’ At the age of 17, inspired by reading Honoré de Balzac, emigrated to Paris. He came there to continue his studies which he never did to devote himself to, writing and settled permanently in the French capital in 1945, where he lived until his death in 2008. In 60 years he only wrote eight novels, in accordance with his philosophy of life in which ‘laziness’ is not a vice but a form of contemplation and meditation. In his own words: ‘So much beauty in the world, so few eyes to see it.’ At the age of 27 he published his first book, Les hommes oubliés de Dieu (‘Men God Forgot’). During his literary career he became close friend of other writers and artists such as Lawrence Durrell, Albert Camus, Jean Genet and Giacometti. Cossery died on 22 June 2008, aged 94. His books, which always take place in Egypt or other Arab countries, portray the contrast between poverty and wealth, the powerful and the powerless, in a witty although dramatic way. His writing mocks vanity and the narrowness of materialism and his principal characters are mainly vagrants, thieves or dandies that subvert the order of an unfair society. Often auto-biographical characters, like Teymour, the hero of the novel Un complot de saltimbanques, a young man that forges a diploma of chemical engineer after a life of enjoyment and lust abroad instead of study and gets back to his home town and enters in an unexpected intringue against the authorities with his dandy friends. He is considered by some to be the last genuine ‘anarchist’ or free thinking writer of western culture by his humorous and provocative although lucid and profound view of human relations and society. His writing style does not submit to an academic or experimental approach which makes him a vivid, catchy storyteller, without the boredom nor artificial ambiguity of some classical (which he is) or avantgarde writers. The sageness of his works are monuments to the freedom of being and thought against materialism, the contemporary obsession with consumption and productivity, the arrogance and abuse of authority, the vanity of social formalities and the injustice of the wealthy towards the poor. In 1990 Cossery was awarded the Grand Prix de La Francophonie de l´Académie française and in 2005 the Grand Prix Poncetton de la SGDL. The first of his books translated in English are Men God Forgot (first translated by Harold Edwards of Faruk University, Alexandria, Egypt, not by Henry Miller, whose note on Cossery appeared on a later 1963 City Lights Books edition, and published in the USA in 1946 by George Leite's Circle Editions of Berkeley), The House of Certain Death (New Directions, 1949), The Lazy Ones (New Directions, 1952), and Proud Beggars (Black Sparrow Press, 1981). Three more of Cossery's novels have since been published in English translation: Anna Moschovakis' The Jokers (NYRB Classics) and Alyson Waters' A Splendid Conspiracy and The Colors of Infamy (New Directions). As of 2012, Une ambition dans le désert and Les Fainéants dans la vallée fertile remain untranslated into English.
November 3, 1903
Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans's work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are 'literate, authoritative, transcendent'. Many of his works are in the permanent collections of museums and have been the subject of retrospectives at such institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art or George Eastman House.
November 3, 1921
Peter Rabe aka Peter Rabinowitsch, (November 3, 1921, Halle, Germany - May 20, 1990, Atascadero, CA), was a German American writer who also used the nom de plumes Marco Malaponte and J. T. MacCargo (though not all of the latter's books were by him). Rabe was the author of over 30 books, mostly of crime fiction, published between 1955 and 1975. Rabe wrote almost exclusively crime fiction, the exceptions being three soft core books for Beacon in the early sixties, and a novelization of the war movie Tobruk for Bantam in 1967.
November 3, 1942
Martin Cruz Smith (born November 3, 1942) is an American mystery novelist. Born Martin William Smith in Reading, Pennsylvania, he was educated at the University of Pennsylvania, located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in creative writing in 1964. He is of partly Pueblo, Spanish, Senecu del Sur and Yaqui ancestry. From 1965 to 1969 Smith worked as a journalist and began writing fiction in the early 1970s. Canto for a Gypsy, his third novel overall and the second to feature Roman Grey, a gypsy art dealer in New York City, was nominated for an Edgar Award. Nightwing (1977), also an Edgar nominee, was his breakthrough novel, and he adapted it for a feature film of the same name (1979). Smith is best known for his novels featuring Russian investigator Arkady Renko whom Smith introduced in Gorky Park (1981). The novel, which was called the ‘first thriller of the '80s’ by Time, became a bestseller and won a Gold Dagger Award from the British Crime Writers' Association. Renko has since appeared in seven other novels by Smith. Gorky Park debuted at number one on the ‘New York Times’ bestseller list on April 26, 1981 and hung onto the top spot for another week. It stayed in the number two position for over three months, beaten only by James Clavell's Noble House. It stayed in the top 15 through November of that year. Polar Star also claimed the number one spot for two weeks on August 6, 1989. It subsequently held the number two spot for over two months. During the 1990s, Smith twice won the Dashiell Hammett Award from the North American Branch of the International Association of Crime Writers. The first time was for Rose in 1996; the second time was for Havana Bay in 1999. And on September 5, 2010, he and Arkady Renko returned to the top of the New York Times bestseller list when Three Stations debuted at number seven on the fiction bestsellers list. In the 1970s, Smith wrote two Slocum adult action Western novels under the pen name Jake Logan. Smith has also written a number of other paperback originals, including a series about a character named ‘The Inquisitor’, a James Bond-type agent employed by the Vatican. Smith also wrote two novels in the Nick Carter series. He originally wrote under the name ‘Martin Smith’, only to discover there were other writers with the same name. His agent asked Smith to add a third name and Smith chose Cruz, his paternal grandmother's surname. Smith lives in San Rafael, California, with his family.
November 3, 1908
John Michael Ward Bingham - who became the seventh Lord Clanmorris - was born in Haywards Heath on 3 November 1908. He was educated at Cheltenham College and became an art editor for the 'Sunday Dispatch'. He married Madeleine Mary Ebel on 28 July 1934. During the Second World War he served with the Royal Engineers and was attached to the General Staff. He also worked for MI5 and was supposedly the inspiration for John Le Carre's George Smiley. And over the course of thirty years, he served MI5 in various high-ranking capacities, including undercover agent. He wrote under a pseudonym and published 17 novels in the thriller, detective and spy fields. These included 'My Name is Michael Sibley', his first novel published in 1952, 'A Fragment of Fear', and 'I Love, I Kill'. He succeeded to the title of 7th Baron Clanmorris on 24 June 1960. He died in 1988.
November 3, 1871
Hanns Heinz Ewers (3 November 1871 in Düsseldorf – 12 June 1943 in Berlin) was a German actor, poet, philosopher, and writer of short stories and novels. While he wrote on a wide range of subjects, he is now known mainly for his works of horror, particularly his trilogy of novels about the adventures of Frank Braun, a character modeled on himself. The best known of these is Alraune (1911). Ewers started to write poetry when he was 17 years old. His first noticed poem was an obituary tribute to the German Emperor Frederick III. Ewers earned his Abitur in March 1891. He then volunteered for the military and joined the Kaiser-Alexander-Gardegrenadier-Regiment No. 1, but was dismissed 44 days later because of myopia. Ewers's literary career began with a volume of satiric verse, entitled A Book of Fables, published in 1901. That same year he collaborated with Ernst von Wolzogen in forming a literary vaudeville theatre before forming his own such company, which toured Central and Eastern Europe before the operating expenses and constant interference from censors caused him to abandon the enterprise. A world traveler, Ewers was in South America at the beginning of World War I, and relocated to New York City, where he continued to write and publish. Ewers' reputation as a successful German author and performer made him a natural speaker for the Imperial German cause to keep the United States from joining the war as an ally of Britain. Ewers toured cities with large ethnic German communities and raised funds for the German Red Cross. During this period, he was involved with the ‘Stegler Affair’. American shipping companies sympathetic to the fight against Imperial Germany reportedly aided the British in identifying German-descended passengers traveling to Germany to volunteer for the Kaiser's army. Many were arrested and interned in prison camps by the British Navy; eventually, German volunteers often required false passports to reach Europe unmolested. Ewers was implicated as a German agent by one of these ethnic Germans, Richard Stegler. After the United States joined the war he was arrested in 1918 as an ‘active propagandist,’ as the US government, as well as British and French intelligence agencies asserted that Ewers was a German agent. They evidenced his travels to Spain during 1915 and 1916, both with an alias using a falsified Swiss passport. Later, a travel report in the archives of the German Foreign Office was discovered indicating that he may have been traveling to Mexico, perhaps to encourage Pancho Villa to hamper the U.S. military by an attack on the United States. Ewers is associated with the pro-German George Sylvester Viereck, son of the German immigrant and reported illegitimate Hohenzollern offspring Louis Sylvester Viereck (a Social Democrat famous for sharing a prison cell with August Bebel), who was a member of the same Berlin student corps (fraternity) as Ewers. Ewers' activities as an ‘Enemy Alien’ in New York were documented by J. Christoph Amberger in the German historical journal Einst & Jetzt (1991). Amberger indicates arrival records which demonstrate that Ewers entered the United States in the company of a ‘Grethe Ewers,’ who is identified as his wife. Enemy Alien Office records refer to a recent divorce. The identity of this otherwise undocumented wife has never been established and is missing from most biographies. As a German national he was sent to the internment camp at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia. Ewers was never tried as a German agent in the United States. In 1921, he was released from the internment camp and returned to his native Germany. Ewers's first novel, Der Zauberlehrling (The Sorcerer's Apprentice), was published in 1910, with an English translation published in America in 1927. It introduces the character of Frank Braun, who, like Ewers, is a writer, historian, philosopher, and world traveler with a decidedly Nietzschean morality. The story concerns Braun's attempts to influence a small cult of Evangelical Christians in a small Italian mountain village for his own financial gain, and the horrific results which ensue. This was followed in 1911 by Alraune, a reworking of the Frankenstein myth, in which Braun collaborates in creating a female homunculus or android by impregnating a prostitute with the semen from an executed murderer. The result is a young woman without morals, who commits numerous monstrous acts. Alraune was influenced by the ideas of the eugenics movement, especially the book Degeneration by Max Nordau. Alraune has been generally well received by historians of the horror genre; Mary Ellen Snodgrass describes Alraune as ‘Ewers' decadent masterwork’, Brian Stableford argues Alraune ‘deserves recognition as the most extreme of all ‘femme fatale’ stories’ and E.F. Bleiler states the scenes in Alraune set in the Berlin underworld as among the best parts of the novel. The novel was filmed several times, most recently by Erich von Stroheim in 1952. Bleiler notes ‘Both Alraune and The Sorcerer's Apprentice are remarkable for the emotion the author can arouse’ and that Ewers' writing is, at its best, ‘very effective’. However, Bleiler also argues Ewers' work is marred by ‘annoying pretentiousness, vulgarity, and a very obtrusive and unpleasant author's personality’. The third novel of the sequence, Vampyr, written in 1921, concerns Braun's own eventual transformation into a vampire, drinking the blood of his Jewish mistress. Another novel, Der Geisterseher (The Ghost-Seer), Ewers' completion of the Friedrich Schiller novel, was published in 1922; Ewers' version was received badly. Ewers wrote numerous short stories, those in Nachtmahr (‘Nightmare’) largely concern ‘pornography, blood sport, torture and execution’. Stories translated into English include the often anthologised ‘The Spider’ (1915), a tale of black magic based on the story ‘The Mysterious Sketch’ by Erckmann-Chatrian; ‘Blood’, about knife fights to the death; and ‘The Execution of Damiens’, a story about the execution of the 18th-century French criminal Robert-François Damiens that achieved some notoriety for its violence. Ewers also published several plays, poems, fairy tales, opera librettos, and critical essays. These included Die Ameisen, translated into English as The Ant People, Indien und ich, a travelogue of his time in India, and a 1916 critical essay on Edgar Allan Poe, to whom he has often been compared. Indeed, Ewers is still considered by some as a major author in the evolution of the horror literary genre, cited as an influence by American horror writers such as H. P. Lovecraft and Guy Endore. Students of the occult are also attracted to his works, due to his longtime friendship and correspondence with Aleister Crowley. Ewers also translated several French writers into German, including Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Ewers also edited the eight-volume Galerie der Phantasten anthologies of horror and fantasy literature, featuring work by Poe, E. T. A. Hoffman, Oskar Panizza, Honoré de Balzac, Alfred Kubin, Ewers' friend Karl Hans Strobl, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and Ewers himself. Ewers was one of the first critics to recognize cinema as a legitimate art form, and wrote the scripts for numerous early examples of the medium, most notably The Student of Prague (1913), a reworking of the Faust legend which also included the first portrayal of a double role by an actor on the screen. Nazi martyr Horst Wessel, then a member of the same corps (student fraternity) of which Ewers had been a member, acts as an extra in a 1926 version of the movie, also written by Ewers. Ewers was later commissioned by Adolf Hitler to write a biography of Wessel (Einer von vielen), which also was made into a movie. During the last years of the Weimar Republic, Ewers became involved with the burgeoning Nazi Party, attracted to its Nationalism, its Nietzschean moral philosophy, and its cult worship of Teutonic culture, and he joined the NSDAP in 1931. He did not agree with the party's anti-Semitism (his character Frank Braun has a Jewish mistress, Lotte Levi, who is also a patriotic German) and this plus his homosexual tendencies soon ended his popularity with the party management. In 1934 most of his works were banned in Germany, and his assets and property seized. Alfred Rosenberg was his main adversary in the party, but by writing many petitions Ewers eventually had the ban canceled. His last book Die schönsten Hände der Welt. (e.g. The most beautiul hands in the world) was published by the Zinnen Verlag (Munich, Vienna, Leipzig) in 1943. Ewers died from tuberculosis in the same year. Despite his great influence on 20th century fantasy and horror literature, Ewers remains out of favor in many literary circles (especially in the English-speaking world and Germany) because of his association with the Nazis. As a result, post-World War II editions of his works are often difficult to find, and earlier editions can command a premium price from collectors.
November 3, 1933
Leonard Gardner (born 3 November 1933) is an American novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Esquire, The Southwest Review, and other publications, and he has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.Gardner was born in Stockton, and went to San Francisco State University. He currently lives in Larkspur, California. Gardner's 1969 novel Fat City is an American classic whose stature has increased over the years. His screen adaptation of Fat City was made into an acclaimed 1972 film of the same title, directed by John Huston. The book and movie are set in and around Stockton and concern the struggles of third-rate pro boxers who only dimly comprehend that none of them will ever make the big time. Devoid of the usual "sweet science" cliches, the book roils with dark pessimism as the characters eke out a gritty existence. It is considered an underappreciated classic of early 1970s cinema. In their memoirs, producer Ray Stark and director John Huston both cited it as among their finest achievements. Gardner adapted his short story "Jesus Christ Has Returned to Earth and Appears Here Nightly" into the screenplay for the low-budget 1989 film Valentino Returns. He has a small part in the film, playing a character named Lyle. Gardner has made a couple of other acting appearances, most notably in Francis Ford Coppola's 1988 film Tucker: The Man and His Dream. Gardner appears in a handful of scenes as a character known only as the Gas Station Owner. He has written a number of screenplays for television, including several for NYPD Blue, for which he was a writer and producer for a few seasons.
November 3, 1901
André Malraux (3 November 1901 – 23 November 1976) was a French adventurer, award-winning author, and statesman. Having traveled extensively in Indochina and China, Malraux was noted especially for his novel entitled La Condition Humaine (MAN'S FATE) (1933), which won the Prix Goncourt. He was appointed by General Charles de Gaulle as Minister of Information (1945–1946), then as Minister of State (1958–1959), and the first Minister of Cultural Affairs, serving during De Gaulle's entire presidency (1959–1969).
November 3, 1887
Samuil Yakovlevich Marshak (3 November 1887 – 4 July 1964) was a Russian Jewish and Soviet writer, translator and children's poet. He translated the sonnets and some other of the works of William Shakespeare, English poetry (including poems for children), and poetry from other languages. Maxim Gorky proclaimed Marshak to be "the founder of Russia's (Soviet) children's literature.
November 3, 1904
Caradog Prichard (3 November 1904 – 25 February 1980) was a Welsh poet and novelist writing in Welsh. His daughter, Mari Prichard, was married to the late Humphrey Carpenter. Caradog Prichard was born and grew up in the Gwynedd slate-quarrying town of Bethesda, in north-west Wales. His father died when he was a baby, and his mother suffered from mental illness. Prichard began his career as a journalist with Welsh language newspapers in Caernarfon, Llanrwst and Cardiff, before moving to London, where he spent much of his life. His best-known work is Un Nos Ola Leuad (1961), set in a mythologically subversive version of his native area. The novel was made into a film in 1991 by the Gaucho Company.
November 3, 1957
Martin M. Šimecka (1957) is a Slovak author and journalist, editor of Respekt, a Czech political weekly. He lives in Prague and Bratislava. In 1990 he founded and led an independent publishing house Archa. He later became editor-in-chief of Domino-forum, a Slovak weekly. In 1997 - 2006, he acted as editor-in-chief of SME, the country’s leading daily newspaper. In years 2006-2008 he was editor-in-chief of Respekt, from 2009 he changed his positon to editor and contributor.
November 4, 1909
Ciro Alegría Bazán (November 4, 1909 – February 17, 1967) was a Peruvian journalist, politician, and novelist. Born in Huamachuco District, he exposed the problems of the native Peruvians while learning about their way of life. This understanding of how they were oppressed was the focus for his novels. He attended classes at the University of Trujillo, and worked briefly as a journalist for the newspaper El Norte. In 1930 Alegría joined the Aprista movement, dedicated to social reform as well as improving the welfare of native Peruvians. He was imprisoned several times for his political activities before finally being exiled to Chile in 1934. He remained in exile in both Chile and later the United States up until 1948. Later, he taught at the University of Puerto Rico, and wrote about the Cuban revolution while in Cuba. His most well known novel, Broad and Alien is the World (1941) or El mundo es ancho y ajeno, won the Latin American Novel Prize in 1941, and brought him international attention. It depicts an Andean community, living in the Peruvian highlands. The book was later published in the United States and has been reprinted many times, in multiple languages. Alegría returned to Peru in 1957. He joined President Fernando Belaúnde Terry's party (Acción Popular) and was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1963. He died unexpectedly in Lima, Peru on February 17, 1967. After his death, his widow published many of his essays and reports he had written for various newspapers. He was 58 years old.
November 4, 1901
John Percy Vyvian Dacre Balsdon, FBA (4 November 1901 – 18 September 1977), known as J. P. V. D. Balsdon in his academic work and otherwise as Dacre Balsdon, was an English ancient historian and author. He was a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford from 1927 to 1969, and President of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies from 1968 to 1971. Balsdon was born on 4 November 1901 in Bideford, Devon. He was educated at Exeter School, Exeter. He studied classics at Exeter College, Oxford. In 1922, he was awarded first class honours in Mods, and in 1924 he was also awarded first class honours in Greats. Balsdon began his academic career as a teacher at Sedbergh School, then an all boys public boarding school. His first university post was as a Fellow of Keble College, Oxford. From 1927, he was a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, where he taught Ancient History. His research was primarily in Roman History. In 1940, he was elected Junior Proctor of Oxford University; serving from March 1940 to March 1941. In 1956, he was a candidate for the Rectorship of Exeter College, but lost out to Kenneth Wheare. He served as President of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies from 1968 to 1971. He retired from full-time academia in 1969. The same year he was elected an emeritus Fellow of Exeter College. He also wrote novels using the name Dacre Balsdon; his academic works gave his name as J. P. V. D. Balsdon. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 1967.
November 4, 1912
Pablo Antonio Cuadra (1912–2002) was a Nicaraguan essayist, art and literary critic, playwright, graphic artist and one of the most famous poets of Nicaragua. Cuadra was born on November 4, 1912, in Managua but spent the majority of his life in Granada. Cuadra or PAC was the son of Carlos Cuadra Pasos and Merceditas Cardenal. Cuadra is a first cousin of the writer Ernesto Cardenal. In 1931 Cuadra, along with José Coronel Urtecho, Joaquín Pasos, and other writers, founded the Vanguardia literary movement in Granada. Cuadra's Poemas nicaragüenses was published in 1934. He opposed the American intervention against Augusto César Sandino in the 1930s and broke with the Somoza dynasty in the 1940s. In 1954 he became co-director of La Prensa newspaper alongside his cousin and partner, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal. Chamorro was assassinated by Somoza supporters in 1978. Cuadra was briefly jailed in 1956 for his opposition to the Somoza's régime. In 1961 he became editor of the influential journal El Pez y La Serpiente (The Fish and the Serpent), which was highly influential in Latin America. Cuadra became an outspoken advocate for Nicaragua's poor, embracing liberation theology and other intellectual currents which the Somoza government considered subversive. He later criticized the post-1979 Sandinista National Liberation Front régime for stifling the independence of Nicaragua's culture. For several years thereafter, he lived in self-imposed exile in Costa Rica and Texas. In 1995 Cuadra was Honored with an honorary doctorate degree by Universidad Francisco Marroquín. He died on January 2, 2002 in Managua, following a respiratory illness. Cuadra was buried on January 4 in Granada, where he spent the majority of his life. Cuadra won many literary honors, among them the Gabriela Mistral Inter-American Cultural Prize, awarded by the Organization of American States in 1991.
November 4, 1950
CHARLES FRAZIER was born in Asheville, North Carolina. COLD MOUNTAIN, his first novel, was an international bestseller and won the National Book Award in 1997, as well as the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
November 4, 1958
Rodrigo Rey Rosa (born November 4, 1958) is a Guatemalan writer. Not a lot is known about Rey Rosa's professional life until after he emigrated to New York after finishing his studies in Guatemala. Rey Rosa has based many of his writings and stories on legends and myths that are indigenous to Latin American as well as North Africa. Out of all of his works, there have only been four that have appeared in the English language, which include; The Path Doubles Back, Dust on her Tongue, 'The Pelcari Project,' and The Beggar's Knife. Along with his longer writings, he has also written a number of short stories that have been printed in college-level text books, such as 'Worlds of Fiction, Second edition' By Roberta Rubenstein and Charles R. Larson. A few of these short stories include The Proof, and The Good Cripple. Many of Rey Rosa's works have been translated into seven languages. In the early 1980s, Rey Rosa went to Morocco and became a literary protege of American expatriate writer Paul Bowles, who later translated several of Rey Rosa's works into English. When Bowles died in 1999, Rey Rosa became an executor of his literature works. Along with writing novels and short stories, Rodrigo Rosa has created and directed a number of feature films. His first film was 'What Sebastian Dreamt,' which runs 83 minutes long and was based on his own novel. It premièred at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah in 2004 and has also been shown at the Berlin Film Festival. Because of his works in literature and film, Rosa won Guatemala's National Prize in Literature named after Miguel Asturias who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1967.
November 4, 1946
Alex Shoumatoff (born November 4, 1946 in Mount Kisco, New York), is an American writer known for his literary journalism, nature and environmental writing, and books and magazine pieces about political and environmental situations and world affairs. He was a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine from 1978 to 1987, a founding contributing editor of Outside magazine and Condé Nast Traveler, and is a senior contributing editor to Vanity Fair, his main outlet since 1986. He is known for reporting on some of the most remote corners of the world. Career highlights include an article he wrote about the mountain gorilla advocate Diane Fossey, which eventually became the film Gorillas in the Mist. Shoumatoff may be, arguably, the most widely traveled magazine journalist with the broadest range in subject matter writing in English.
November 4, 1914
Mischa Damjan (November 4, 1914, Skopje - November 29, 1998) was a Yugoslav-Swiss children's book author and publisher under his real name Dimitrije Sidjanski publisher NordSüd Verlag in Switzerland.
November 4, 1933
Jewelle Taylor Gibbs is professor emerita at the School of Social Welfare as well as a clinical psychologist and noted writer. She is the author of Preserving Privilege: California Politics, Propositions, and People of Color (2001), and her research interests include adolescent psychosocial problems, minority mental health, juvenile justice issues, biracial and bicultural identity issues, and urban social policy. After graduating from Berkeley Social Welfare's MSW program in 1970, Dr. Taylor Gibbs served as a clinical social worker at Stanford University before returning to Berkeley to earn her PhD in psychology. She first started teaching at the School in 1979, eventually becoming the Zellerbach Family Fund Professor of Social Policy, Community Change and Practice, making her the first African American professor appointed to an endowed chair in the University of California system.
November 4, 1937
Ralph A. Griffiths is an Emeritus Professor at Swansea University. He was born and brought up in a mining valley between Glamorgan and Monmouthshire. He attended "one of Wales' good grammar schools and was well taught in most subjects". He is a graduate of the University of Bristol and was appointed to a research post, and then promoted to higher academic positions, at Swansea in 1964. Griffiths was a member, and later Chair, of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, sat on the Advisory Council on Public Records, and on the Council of the Royal Historical Society.
November 4, 1941
Manuel Rui Alves Monteiro (born 4 November 1941) is an Angolan writer of poetry, novels, theater plays, and short stories. He has been described as "the chronicler par excellence of postindependence Angola" through fiction that offers "subtle, complex, pointed, and oftentimes humorous portrayals of Angola since the early years of the MPLA euphoria, in which he played a political role." Manuel Rui was born in 1941 in Huambo (then Nova Lisboa), capital of Angola. He received his primary and secondary education in Huambo. He studied at the University of Coimbra, in Portugal, and received a law degree there in 1969. As a student, Rui participated in literary and political events and was jailed for two months in Portugal. He practiced law in Coimbra during the nationalist struggle for independence in Angola. He was on the editorial board of Vértice, the journal of the Center of Literary Studies in Coimbra, where he published his first prose fiction works in the early 1970s. In addition, he was part of the board of Editora Centelha and worked for the Centro de Estudos Literários da Associação Académica de Coimbra. In the aftermath of the Portuguese military coup on April 25, 1974, Rui returned to Angola to serve as the MPLA Minister of Information in the transitional government established by the Alvor Agreement. He then served as Angola's first representative to the Organization of African Unity and the United Nations. He also directed the MPLA's Department of Revolutionary Orientation and Department of Foreign Affairs. He wrote the lyrics of Angola's first national anthem, "Angola Avante!", the Angolan version of "The Internationale". Rui's 1982 book Quem Me Dera Ser Onda has been described as "a classic of Angolan (and Lusophone African) literature". The work satirically addressed the social problems of the time and has been translated into several languages. He frequently wrote for Angolan newspapers and magazines and has published some children's books. Rui has taught at the University of Huambo and is one of the leading Angolan novelists.
November 5, 1938
Jon A. Jackson (born November 5, 1938) grew up in northern Michigan and now lives in the Montana Rockies. He is a devoted jazz fan, an avid angler and a carpenter. His Mulheisen novels have been translated into half a dozen European languages.
November 5, 1955
Rupert Thomson (born in Eastbourne in November 1955) is a British novelist. Following the sudden death of his mother was educated as a boarder at at Christ's Hospital School. At seventeen, he was awarded a scholarship to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he studied Medieval History and Political Thought. He worked for four years as a copywriter in London, before abandoning his job to devote his full-time as a writer. Once described as ‘one of the strangest and most refreshingly un-English voices in contemporary fiction’, and compared to writers as various as Charles Dickens, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mervyn Peake and JG Ballard, he is the author of eight widely-acclaimed novels, the most recent of which, DEATH OF A MURDERER, was shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year. His sixth novel, THE BOOK OF REVELATION, was made into a feature film by the Australian writer/director, Ana Kokkinos. With his 2010 memoir, THIS PARTY'S GOT TO STOP, he has ventured into non-fiction for the first time, and explores events surrounding his father's death, and his complex relationship with his brothers and extended family. He has lived in many cities throughout the world, including Berlin and Barcelona; he currently resides in London.
November 5, 1940
Cedric Robinson (November 5, 1940 – June 5, 2016) was a professor in the Department of Black Studies and the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He headed the Department of Black Studies and the Department of Political Science and served as the Director of the Center for Black Studies Research. Robinson's areas of interest included classical and modern political philosophy, radical social theory in the African diaspora, comparative politics, and the relationships between and among media and politics.
November 5, 1944
Daniel Arasse (November 5, 1944, Oran, Algeria - December 14, 2003, Paris, France) was Professor of Art History at the University of Paris and Visiting Professor at Yale University. He was also on the staff of the French Institute in Florence.
November 5, 1930
Alex Hamilton (5 November 1930 - 2 November 2016) was a novelist, journalist, and former Guardian travel editor. As he struggled to become a writer he had many setbacks which led to a mental breakdown. After a stint in Warneford hospital Hamilton took a succession of jobs ranging from swimming instructor to airport announcer, that left him time to write and gave him raw material. In 1956 he even worked as an offal salesman in Smithfield market, London, cutting up hearts, livers, stomachs, tongues, brains and other elements. Hew continued to write novels and took increasingly to literary journalism, reviewing thousands of books. For several years he contributed a Saturday column to the Times about authors and publishing, under the heading Pooter. Hamilton also conducted scores of interviews with important literary figures, including Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Günter Grass, Chinua Achebe and Jorge Luis Borges.
November 5, 1943
Karal Ann Marling is professor of art history and American studies at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of numerous books on topics including American mural painting of the Depression era, illustration of the 1940s, the architecture of theme parks, and the influence of television on visual culture in the 1950s.
November 5, 1943
Samuel Shepard Rogers III (November 5, 1943 – July 27, 2017), known professionally as Sam Shepard, was an American playwright, actor, author, screenwriter, and director whose body of work spanned half a century. He won 10 Obie Awards for writing and directing, the most given to any writer or director. He wrote 44 plays as well as several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs. Shepard received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff (1983). Shepard received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award as a master American dramatist in 2009. New York magazine described him as "the greatest American playwright of his generation." Shepard's plays are chiefly known for their bleak, poetic, often surrealist elements, black humor, and rootless characters living on the outskirts of American society. His style evolved over the years, from the absurdism of his early Off-Off-Broadway work to the realism of Buried Child and Curse of the Starving Class (both 1978).
November 5, 1946
Patricia Wells is a cookbook author and teacher who divides her time between Paris and Provence. Her book Patricia Wells at Home in Provence won the James Beard Award for Best International Cookbook. Wells is the only American and the only woman to be a restaurant critic for a major French publication, L'Express.
November 5, 1855
Eugene Victor Debs (November 5, 1855 – October 20, 1926) was an American socialist, political activist, trade unionist, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or the Wobblies), and five times the candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States. Through his presidential candidacies, as well as his work with labor movements, Debs eventually became one of the best-known socialists living in the United States. Early in his political career, Debs was a member of the Democratic Party. He was elected as a Democrat to the Indiana General Assembly in 1884. After working with several smaller unions, including the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, Debs was instrumental in the founding of the American Railway Union (ARU), one of the nation's first industrial unions. After workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company organized a wildcat strike over pay cuts in the summer of 1894, Debs signed many into the ARU. He called a boycott of the ARU against handling trains with Pullman cars, in what became the nationwide Pullman Strike, affecting most lines west of Detroit, and more than 250,000 workers in 27 states. Purportedly to keep the mail running, President Grover Cleveland used the United States Army to break the strike. As a leader of the ARU, Debs was convicted of federal charges for defying a court injunction against the strike and served six months in prison. In jail, Debs read various works of socialist theory and emerged six months later as a committed adherent of the international socialist movement. Debs was a founding member of the Social Democracy of America (1897), the Social Democratic Party of America (1898), and the Socialist Party of America (1901). Debs ran as a Socialist candidate for President of the United States five times, including 1900 (earning 0.6% of the popular vote), 1904 (3.0%), 1908 (2.8%), 1912 (6.0%), and 1920 (3.4%), the last time from a prison cell. He was also a candidate for United States Congress from his native state Indiana in 1916. Debs was noted for his oratory, and his speech denouncing American participation in World War I led to his second arrest in 1918. He was convicted under the Sedition Act of 1918 and sentenced to a term of 10 years. President Warren G. Harding commuted his sentence in December 1921. Debs died in 1926, not long after being admitted to a sanatorium due to cardiovascular problems that developed during his time in prison. He has since been cited as the inspiration for numerous politicians.
November 6, 1954
Opal Palmer Adisa (born 1954) is a Jamaica-born award-winning poet, novelist, performance artist and educator. Anthologised in over 100 publications, she has been a regular performer of her work internationally. She was raised ten miles outside Kingston, Jamaica, and attended school in the capital. In 1970 she went to study at Hunter College, New York, and in 1979 moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to pursue an MA in creative writing. As noted by David Katz, ‘Adisa’s work has been greatly informed by her childhood experience of life on a sugar estate in the Jamaican countryside, where her father worked as a chemist and her mother as a bookkeeper. It was in this setting that young Opal was introduced not only to the art of storytelling, but also, after her parents divorced, to the ceaseless oppression faced by women and the ongoing injustices heaped on the poor. Such formative experiences, coupled with her mother’s efforts to improve the lives of those around her, gave Adisa the desire to ‘give voice to the voiceless’ at an early age.’ Since 1993, Opal Palmer Adisa has taught literature and served as Chair of the Ethnic Studies/Cultural Diversity Program at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. Dr. Adisa has two masters degrees from San Francisco State University, and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. She has previously taught undergraduate and graduate courses at California College of the Arts, Stanford University, University of Berkeley, and San Francisco State University. In the spring of 2010, she became a member of the teaching staff at the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI), St Croix Campus, and also served as editor of The Caribbean Writer, UVI’s famous journal of Caribbean literature, for 2 years. An important element of her poetry is the use of nation language, about which she has said: ‘I have to credit [Louise] Bennett for granting me permission, so to speak, to write in Nation Language, because it was her usage that allowed me to see the beauty of our language. Moreover, there are just some things that don’t have the same sense of intimacy or color if not said in Nation language.... I use nation language when it is the only way and the best way to get my point across, to say what I mean from the center of my navel. But I also use it, to interrupt and disrupt standard English as s reminder to myself that I have another tongue, but also to jolt readers to listen and read more carefully, to glean from the language the Caribbean sensibilities that I am always pushing, sometimes subtly, other times more forcefully. Nation language allows me to infuse the poem with all of the smells and colors of home.’
November 6, 1930
Derrick Albert Bell, Jr. (November 6, 1930 – October 5, 2011) was the first tenured African-American Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and is largely credited as one of the originators of critical race theory. He was a Visiting Professor at New York University School of Law from 1991 until his death. He was also a former Dean of the University of Oregon School of Law.
November 6, 1916
Harry Blamires (born 6 November 1916) is an Anglican theologian, literary critic, and novelist. Now retired, Blamires served as head of the English department at King Alfreds College (now Winchester University) in Winchester, England. He started writing in the late 1940s at the encouragement of his friend and mentor C. S. Lewis, who had been his tutor at Oxford University. He turned 100 in November 2016. His best known work is The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think? which has been used as a textbook at hundreds of bible colleges and seminaries around the world. Blamires is also the author of A Short History of English Literature (1974; 2nd edition, 1984), and A History of Literary Criticism (1991).
November 6, 1954
Karin Fossum made her literary debut in Norway in 1974. Her acclaimed Inspector Sejer Mysteries have been published in sixteen languages.
November 6, 1880
Robert Musil (6 November 1880 – 15 April 1942) was an Austrian writer. His unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities (German: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) is generally considered to be one of the most important modernist novels. However, the novel has not been widely read both because of its delayed publication and intricate, lengthy plot.
November 6, 1948
MICHAEL DIRDA is a writer and senior editor for the Washington Post Book World. For three years he was a board member of the National Book Critics Circle. His essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications. In 1993 Dirda received the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism.
November 6, 1969
COLSON WHITEHEAD was born in New York City. His first novel, THE INTUITIONIST, won the QPB New Voices Award and was an Ernest Hemingway/PEN Award finalist. He is also the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
November 6, 1903
The son of German Jewish parents, Carl Rakosi (November 6, 1903 – June 25, 2004) was born in Berlin in 1903, moving soon to Hungary following his parents’ separation in 1904. Immigrating with his father and stepmother to Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 1910, he eventually graduated from the University of Wisconsin (where he edited the literary magazine) and later earned a master’s degree in social work from the University of Pennsylvania. Rakosi’s involvement in the Communist movement during the Great Depression led him to give up writing in favor of social work, a vocation he continued for nearly 30 years. Best known for being included in the Objectivist movement, Rakosi’s poems are characterized by short, humorous, often lyric phrases. Having been influenced by Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, as well as the Modernist movement, his introduction into the world of poetry began with his inclusion in the 1931 Objectivist issue of Poetry edited by Louis Zukofsky. While the group of poets included in the issue were termed the Objectivists, Rakosi insisted that great variations among their styles made it hard to claim they came from the same movement: The term is a bit of a nuisance, because it has to be defined and it can’t be done when you try to use our work as evidence. There’s too much difference among us, for one thing, and one gets lost trying to define Objectivist or Objectivism as a theoretical concept. Zukofsky couldn’t define it either in his introduction to the Objectivist poems. . . . Rakosi’s work seems to be hard to characterize even for himself. He has said, . . . I am a visual poet but I am also satirical at times and often meditative and those three sometimes clash, but that’s just being a human being. In 1967, at the encouragement of English poet Andrew Crozier, Rakosi began writing poems again after a hiatus of over 30 years and produced work steadily from that point, beginning with his book Amulet (New Directions, 1967). He published widely following his return to poetry, including a collected works published in 1986 by the National Poetry Foundation. In 1996 he won a PEN award for his book, Poems 1923-1941 (Sun and Moon Press, 1995).
November 6, 1905
Henri Frédéric Ellenberger (Nalolo in Barotseland, Rhodesia, 6 November 1905 – Quebec, 1 May 1993) was a Canadian psychiatrist, medical historian, and criminologist, sometimes considered the founding historiographer of psychiatry. Ellenberger is chiefly remembered for The Discovery of the Unconscious, an encyclopedic study of the history of dynamic psychiatry published in 1970. Henri F. Ellenberger was born in British Rhodesia to Swiss parents, and spent his childhood in the British colony of Rhodesia. He was later naturalised as a French citizen, and took his baccalaureate degree in Strasbourg, France, in 1924. He studied medicine and psychiatry in Paris. A student of Professor Henri Baruk, he obtained his doctorate in 1934, while working at the famous Hôpital Sainte-Anne alongside such well-known contemporaries as Jacques Lacan (whose flair for self-publicity he early noted). Subsequent to the emergence of the Vichy government, Ellenberger emigrated to Switzerland in 1941. There he went through a training analysis with Oskar Pfister between 1949 and 1952, before becoming a member of the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society (SSP). In 1952, in a major career change, Ellenberger became the head of psychiatric services at the Menninger Clinic in the USA, and later went on to become Professor of Criminology at the Université de Montréal, in Canada. There he was to do pioneering work on victimology, exploring the psychodynamics between offender and victim. Ellenberger is chiefly remembered for The Discovery of the Unconscious, an encyclopedic study of the history of dynamic psychiatry published in 1970. This work traced the origins of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy back to its 18th-century prehistory in the attempts to heal disease through exorcism, as practiced by the Catholic priest Johann Joseph Gassner, and from him through the researchers of hypnotism, Franz Mesmer and the Marquis de Puységur, to the 19th century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and the main figures of 20th century psychotherapy Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler and Carl Jung. Robin Skynner praised the clarity of its presentation of the ideas of the great twentieth-century figures in their socio-historical contexts. Ellenberger's account of Pierre Janet has also been singled out for special mention; while Anthony Stevens has made use of his concept of ‘creative illness’ in his account of Jung. Gay also singled out for mention Ellenberger's 1972 article on Anna O, which Gay considered ‘persuasively corrects Jones's misreading and Freud's misremembering of the case’. It was however only one of the thirty-five or so historical articles Ellenberger published both before and after his great synopsis. The Institut Henri Ellenberger in Paris was named in his honor. During his lifetime he received many awards, including the Gold Medal of the Beccaria Prize in 1970, and the Jason A. Hannah Medal of the Royal Society of Canada. Ellenberger has been characterised as one of the mid-century, interdisciplinary independents in psychiatric thought. His unique career path and independent, if moderate, Freudian revisionism, made him at times an isolated figure, especially with the biological turn in psychiatry at the close of the twentieth century. His own belief in the central importance of the reality of the unconscious never faltered, however, even with the fading of his dream of a synthesis that ‘would do justice to the rigorous demands of experimental psychology and to the psychic realities experienced by the explorers of the unconscious’. Ellenberger has been criticised for modelling his picture of the origins of psychiatry in the Enlightenment clash with Demonology — in the triumph of illuminated reason over the blindness of faith.
November 6, 1942
Spencer Drate is an award-winning creative director, designer, author, curator, and radio personality.He has co-authored 21 pop-culture books with Judith Salavetz.
November 6, 1912
George Lichtheim (1912, Berlin–1973, London) was a German-born intellectual whose works focused on the history and theory of socialism and Marxism. He defined himself as a socialist and stated in a 1964 letter to The New York Review of Books that "I am not a liberal and never have been. I find liberalism almost as boring as communism and have no wish to be drawn into an argument over which of these two antiquated creeds is less likely to advance us any further." His work appeared in the Palestine Post, Commentary, Partisan Review, Dissent, the New Leader, Encounter, the Times Literary Supplement and The New York Review of Books. Additionally, he translated Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. His death was by suicide.
November 6, 1833
Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie (6 November 1833 – 5 July 1908) was a Norwegian novelist, poet, and playwright who, together with Henrik Ibsen, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson and Alexander Kielland, is considered to have been one of the Four Greats of 19th century Norwegian literature. Jonas Lie was born at Hokksund in Øvre Eiker, in the county of Buskerud, Norway. His parents were Mons Lie (1803–81) and Pauline Christine Tiller (1799–1877). Five years after his son's birth, Lie's father was appointed sheriff of Tromsø, which lies within the Arctic Circle, and young Jonas Lie spent six of the most impressionable years of his life at that remote port. He was sent to the naval school at Fredriksværn; but his defective eyesight caused him to give up a life at sea. He transferred to the Bergen Cathedral School (Bergen katedralskole) in Bergen, and in 1851 entered the University of Christiania, where he made the acquaintance of Ibsen and Bjørnson. He graduated in law in 1857, and shortly afterwards began to practice at Kongsvinger, a town located between Lake Mjøsa and the border with Sweden Clients were not numerous at Kongsvinger and Lie found time to write for the newspapers and became a frequent contributor to some of the Christiania journals. His first work was a volume of poems which appeared in 1866 and was not successful. During the four following years he devoted himself almost exclusively to journalism, working hard and without much reward, but acquiring the pen of a ready writer and obtaining command of a style which has proved serviceable in his subsequent career.In 1870 he published Den Fremsynte, a powerful tale of the sea and superstitions centering on Northern Norway. In the following year he revisited Nordland and traveled into Finnmark. Starting from 1874, the Norwegian Parliament had granted him an artist salary. Having obtained this small pension from the Government, he sought the greatest contrast he could find in Europe to the scenes of his childhood and started for Rome. For a time he lived in North Germany, then he moved to Bavaria, spending his winters in Paris. In 1882 he visited Norway for a time, but returned to the continent of Europe. His voluntary exile from his native land ended in the spring of 1893, when he settled at Holskogen, near Kristiansand. His works were numerous after that. In his works, Jonas Lie often sought to reflect in his writings the nature, folk life, and social spirit of the nation of Norway. His writing often dealt with family life in diverse settings, including portraying the social and intellectual restrictions on women of the educated classes. Lie was a versatile writer, liberal and modern, but also strongly tradition bound. Among Lie's finest works must be considered Familien paa Gilje (1883) which was a striking document of the life of an officer's family, and the few options given to the daughters of such families. His two collections of short stories called Trold involve the superstitions of the fishermen and coast commoners of northern Norway. The much anthologized short story Elias and the Draugh was included in a collection originally published by Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, and was reprinted by Roald Dahl in Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories (1983). In 1860, he married his cousin Thomasine Henriette Lie (1833–1907). The couple had five children, of whom two died young. They were the parents of diplomat Michael Strøm Lie (1862–1934) as well as writers Mons Lie (1864–1931) and Erik Røring Møinichen Lie (1869–1943). Jonas Lie died at Fleskum at Sandvika during 1908, less than a year after the death of Thomasine.In 1904, the King of Norway awarded Lie the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Olav. Jonas Lie was the uncle of the author Bernt Lie (1868–1916). Henriette Thomasine Lie was the aunt of Jonas Lie, the Norwegian-born American painter.
November 6, 1941
Valery Tishkov is Professor of History and Anthropology and Director of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology at the Russian Academy of Sciences. He has published many books in Russian and is also the author of Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Conflict in and after the Soviet Union: The Mind Aflame (1997).
November 6, 1940
Christin Lore Weber is a prize winning multi-genre author. Her first novel, Altar Music, (Scribner, 2000) was named an LA Times Best Book of the year 2000, as well as being chosen for Publisher's Weekly's "First Fiction," and the Independent Booksellers "Booksense 76." Gypsy Bones is her second novel. She lives with her husband, author John R. Sack, on Sunshine Hill in the Pacific Northwest.
November 6, 1948
Sidney Stone Blumenthal is an American journalist, activist, writer, and political aide. He is a former aide to President Bill Clinton; a long-time confidant of Hillary Clinton, formerly employed by the Clinton Foundation; and a journalist, especially on American politics and foreign policy.
November 7, 1929
Benny Andersen (born 7 November 1929 in Vangede), is a Danish song-writer, poet, author, composer and pianist. He is the most widely read, most often sung and best loved of modern Danish lyricists, often associated with his collaboration with Povl Dissing; together they released an album with Andersen's poems from the collection Svantes viser, Povl Dissing were singing.
November 7, 1913
Albert Camus was born in Algeria in 1913. The son of a working-class family, he spent the early years of his life in North Africa, where he worked at various jobs to help pay for his courses at the University of Algiers. In occupied France in 1942 he published THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS and THE STRANGER, a philosophical essay and a novel that first brought him to the attention of intellectual circles. THE STRANGER has since gained an international reputation and is one the most widely read novels of this century. Among his other works of fiction are THE PLAGUE, THE FALL, and EXILE AND THE KINGDOM. In 1957 Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. On January 4, 1960, he was killed in a car accident.
November 7, 1940
Antonio Skármeta (born Esteban Antonio Skármeta Vranicic on November 7, 1940) is a Chilean writer descending from Croatian immigrants from the Adriatic island of Bra?, Dalmatia. He was awarded Chile's National Literature Prize in 2014. His 1985 novel and film Ardiente paciencia ('Ardent Patience') inspired the 1994 Academy Award-winning movie, Il Postino (The Postman). Subsequent editions of the book bore the title El cartero de Neruda (Neruda's Postman). His fiction has since received dozens of awards and has been translated into nearly thirty languages worldwide. Skármeta studied philosophy and literature both in Chile and at Columbia University in New York. From 1967 to 1973, the year he left Chile (first to Buenos Aires and later to West Berlin), he taught literature at the University of Chile. In 1987, he was a member of the jury at the 37th Berlin International Film Festival. In 1989, after the end of Pinochet’s military dictatorship, the writer returned to Chile in order 'to create political space for freedom'. He hosted a television program on literature and the arts, which regularly attracted over a million viewers. From 2000 to 2003 he served as the Chilean ambassador in Germany. He teaches classes at Colorado College both in Santiago, and Colorado Springs. In 2011 his novel Los días del arco iris won the prestigious Premio Iberoamericano Planeta-Casa de América de Narrativa, one of the richest literary prizes in the world worth $200,000. His unpublished play El Plebiscito was the basis of Pablo Larraín's successful drama film No.
November 7, 1879
Leon Trotsky (born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein; 7 November [O.S. 26 October] 1879 – 21 August 1940) was a Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army. Trotsky initially supported the Menshevik Internationalists faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He joined the Bolsheviks immediately prior to the 1917 October Revolution, and eventually became a leader within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (bolsheviks). During the early days of the RSFSR and the Soviet Union, he served first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army with the title of People's Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs. He was a major figure in the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War (1918–1923). He also became one of the first members (1919–1926) of the Politburo. After leading a failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and against the increasing role of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was removed from power (October 1927), expelled from the Communist Party (November 1927), and finally deported from the Soviet Union in 1929. As the head of the Fourth International, Trotsky continued in exile in Mexico to oppose the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. An early advocate of Red Army intervention against European fascism, in the late 1930s, Trotsky opposed[citation needed] Stalin's non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler. He was assassinated on Stalin's orders in Mexico, by Ramón Mercader, a Spanish-born Soviet agent in August 1940. Trotsky's ideas formed the basis of Trotskyism, a major school of Marxist thought that opposes the theories of Stalinism. He was one of the few Soviet political figures who were not rehabilitated by the government under Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s. In the late 1980s, his books were released for publication in the Soviet Union.
November 7, 1943
Stephen Jay Greenblatt (born November 7, 1943) is an American Shakespearean, literary historian, and author. He is John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare (2015) and the general editor and a contributor to The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Greenblatt is one of the founders of New Historicism, a set of critical practices that he often refers to as "cultural poetics"; his works have been influential since the early 1980s when he introduced the term. Greenblatt has written and edited numerous books and articles relevant to New Historicism, the study of culture, Renaissance studies and Shakespeare studies and is considered to be an expert in these fields. He is also co-founder of the literary-cultural journal Representations, which often publishes articles by new historicists. His most popular work is Will in the World, a biography of Shakespeare that was on the New York Times Best Seller List for nine weeks. He won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2012 and the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2011 for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.
November 7, 1901
Cecília Benevides de Carvalho Meireles (7 November 1901 – 9 November 1964) was a Brazilian writer and educator, known principally as a poet. She is a canonical name of Brazilian Modernism, one of the great female poets in the Portuguese language, and is widely considered the best female poet from Brazil, though she combatted the word poetess because of gender discrimination. She traveled in the Americas in the 1940s, visiting the United States, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile. In the summer of 1940 she gave lectures at the University of Texas, Austin. She wrote two poems about her time in the capital of Texas, and a long (800 lines) very socially aware poem "USA 1940", which was published posthumously. As a journalist her columns (crônicas, or chronicles) focused most often on education, but also on her trips abroad in the western hemisphere, Portugal, other parts of Europe, Israel, and India (where she received an honorary doctorate). As a poet, her style was mostly neosymbolist and her themes included ephemeral time and the contemplative life. Even though she was not concerned with local color, native vernacular, or experiments in (popular) syntax, she is considered one of the most important poets of the second phase of the Brazilian Modernism, known for nationalistic vanguardism. As a teacher she did much to promote educational reforms and advocated the construction of children's libraries. Between 1935 and 1938 she taught at the short-lived federal-district university in Rio. Meireles was "orphaned at age three and raised by her maternal grandmother" (Tapscott 160). As a poet, she made her debut at the age of eighteen, with Espectros (1919). It has been described as "an airy and vague poetry, languid and fluid, set in an atmosphere of shadows and dreams." The collection of seventeen sonnets dealt with various historical personages. Although her next collections included lyrics in free verse, she still preferred traditional forms and symbolism. Between 1919 and 1927 she contributed to the magazines Árvore Nova and Terra do Sol. She was a key figure in the spiritual and transcendental magazine Festa. The Festa poets supported more traditional expression and universality than the futurists and avant-garde writers of São Paulo, whose Modern Art Week in 1922 caused much controversy. Meireles always retained symbolist traits. Especially Portuguese poetry interested her. She visited Portugal in 1934 and lectured there on Brazilian literature at the universities of Lisbon and Coimbra. After 14 years without publishing a book of poetry, Meireles published one of her major works, Viagem [Voyage] (1939), which marked her poetic maturity. The book had received the annual Poetry Prize from the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1938. The title refers to a spiritual journey where life and poetry join together. Meireles was a devout Catholic, but did not emphasize her religious or social stands. In the 1940s Meireles traveled widely and the sea became for her an important image. Mar Absoluto (1942) was sea poetry with the qualities of so-called pure poetry. In 1953 she participated in a symposium on the work of Gandhi, and India had a great influence on her work. She had taught herself both Hindi and Sanskrit. Romanceiro da Inconfidência (1953) was written in the style of medieval Iberian ballads. The work draws its subject from the first colonial attempt at Brazilian Independence, in Minas Gerais in 1789, and centers on the leader of the uprising, Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, who was hailed as another Jesus Christ. Giroflê, Giroflá (1956) was based on the author's journeys to India and Italy. Meireles was a prolific contributor to Brazilian periodicals, and for a time she served as education editor of Rio's Diario de Noticías. She translated into Brazilian Portuguese such diverse writers as Maeterlinck, Federico García Lorca, Anouilh, Ibsen, Tagore, Rilke, Virginia Woolf, and Pushkin. Her other works include plays and children's books. Cecília Meireles died of cancer in Rio de Janeiro on 9 November 1964, two days after her 63rd birthday. During her career Meireles was affected by many of the literary movements of her time. However, her poetry always remained intensely personal. In October 2009 she was one of the three featured authors at the Primeiro Congresso de Escritoras Brasileiras em Nova Iorque (First Congress of Brazilian Women Writers in New York) at the Centro Cultural Brasil / Brazilian Endowment for the Arts in Midtown Manhattan.
November 7, 1927
JUAN ARCOCHA (November 7, 1927 – May 7, 2010) was born in the Havana he writes about: As a gifted student he won a fellowship to study in Paris where he lived for six years. Then, when Batista fell in 1959, he returned to Havana. There he became staff writer and editorial assistant to Carlos Franqui, one of the early revolutionaries and the editor of the newspaper Revolución. In 1961 he was sent to Moscow as correspondent for Russia and lived there for about a year. A subsequent marriage to a Russian girl failed and was part of his disillusionment with the USSR: there was no confidence even between husband and wife: she lied to him constantly about political matters. He returned to Havana but Fidel Castro assigned him to Paris as cultural attaché for the Cuban government. A year ago he visited Cuba to talk out his problems with Castro. Castro told him to do whatever he wanted to do and said, ‘I ask of you only one thing. Tell the truth.’ Arcocha no longer works for the Cuban government but does work in Paris on a contract basis for UNESCO and other United Nations agencies. A CANDLE IN THE WIND shows Arcocha’s dilemma. Like many of the characters in the book he is a partisan of the Revolution but feels strongly the paradox and doubts which followed the metamorphosis from a middle class to a communist culture. This is his second book but the first published in English. His first novel has been contracted for by Feltrinelli, the original publishers of DR. ZHIVAGO.
November 7, 1900
Nellie Francisca Ernestina Campobello Luna, born María Francisca Moya Luna (born November 7, 1900 – d. July 9, 1986), was a Mexican writer. Like her half-sister Gloria, a well-known ballet dancer, she was also known as an enthusiastic dancer and choreographer. Campobello was born in Ocampo, Durango the third of six children of Rafaela Luna, and her father was her mother's nephew Jesús Felipe Moya Luna, son of her sister Florencia. Probably this was a reason, why she concealed traces of her past. She handled also her year of birth indiscriminately as 1909 or 1913. She spent her childhood in Parral, Chihuahua and her youth in the city of Chihuahua, where she visited the Inglesa de la Colonia Rosales college. After her father was killed in the Battle of Ojinaga in 1914, her mother remarried the physician Stephen Campbell from Boston, whose last name the children assumed, and which was altered to Campobello by Nellie. In 1921, her mother died. During the revolutionary years she came to Mexico City, where she became later director of the national school of dance (Spanish: Escuela Nacional de Danza) of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. In 1985 she suddenly disappeared, as well as her belongings and paintings of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. In 1998, the Commission of Human rights of the Federal District discovered that Nellie died on July 9, 1986, and that she was buried in the Progreso de Obregón Cemetery of Hidalgo. Supposedly she was kidnapped by Claudio Fuentes Figueroa or Claudio Niño Cienfuentes and his spouse Maria Cristina Belmont. Many of her choreographies of indigenous dances were rescued. Her corpse was transferred to Durango in 1999. She was never married, but had several affairs. It is traced, that she had a son (1919–1921) with Alfredo Chávez, the later Governor of Chihuahua. Also Germán List Arzubide told that he felt in love with her. She was one of the few women involved in the center of Mexico's intellectual groups and was also great friends with Federico Garcia Lorca and Langston Hughes who translated her poetry into English. To this day, she is considered the only female Mexican writer to publish narrations (semi-autobiographical) during the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920. This is why she is often referred to ‘La centaura del norte’. ‘Cartucho’ is considered a classic literary work of the Mexican Revolution, showing the Villistas in a favorable light at a time when most of the literature was criminalizing them.
November 7, 1961
Mexican novelist DAVID TOSCANA describes his narrative aesthetics as ‘realismo desquiciado’ (unrestrained realism), breaking with the Latin trend of magic realism through a prose that keeps an eye on the concrete experience of life in all its absurdity and lavish strangeness. In its original Spanish El ultimo lector was awarded the National Colima Prize, the Premio Jose Fuentes Mares, and the Antonin Artaud Prize and was also shortlisted for Latin America's most important literary award, the Romulo Gallegos International Novel Prize. PATRICIA J. DUNCAN lives in San Francisco, California. Most recently, she translated Eduardo Sguiglia’s FORDLANDIA.
November 7, 1936
Nathan Heard (November 7, 1936 – March 16, 2004), sometimes known as Nathan C. Heard, was a best-selling author in the United States, noted for the grim realism of his novels. He is also known as one of the forefathers of street and prison literatures, having written his most famous book, Howard Street (1968), while serving time in the Trenton State Penitentiary for armed robbery. Heard is the son of Blues singer Gladys Heard Johnson (nee' Pruitt) and laborer Nathan E. Heard. He grew up in Newark, New Jersey, spending much of his life there. After the notoriety of Howard Street, Heard turned his life around and went on to become a guest lecturer. Heard was also speech writer to Newark's first African American Mayor Ken Gibson. He also worked as a contributing writer for Essence Magazine and the New York Times. He spent some time teaching creative writing at Fresno State College (now known as California State University, Fresno), where he won a teaching award in 1970. He also taught creative writing at Rutgers University. His other books include A Cold Fire Burning, House of Slammers, To Reach a Dream and When Shadows Fall. His movie credits include Gordon's War (1973). He was the featured narrator of the Ballad of Little Jimmy Scott (PBS). He died of complications from Parkinson's disease.
November 7, 1903
Konrad Zacharias Lorenz (7 November 1903 – 27 February 1989) was an Austrian zoologist, ethologist, and ornithologist. He shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch. He is often regarded as one of the founders of modern ethology, the study of animal behaviour. He developed an approach that began with an earlier generation, including his teacher Oskar Heinroth. Lorenz studied instinctive behavior in animals, especially in greylag geese and jackdaws. Working with geese, he investigated the principle of imprinting, the process by which some nidifugous birds (i.e. birds that leave their nest early) bond instinctively with the first moving object that they see within the first hours of hatching. Although Lorenz did not discover the topic, he became widely known for his descriptions of imprinting as an instinctive bond. In 1936 he met Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, and the two collaborated in developing ethology as a separate sub-discipline of biology. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Lorenz as the 65th most cited scholar of the 20th century in the technical psychology journals, introductory psychology textbooks, and survey responses. Lorenz's work was interrupted by the onset of World War-II and in 1941 he was recruited into the German army as a medic. In 1944 he was sent to the Eastern Front where he was captured and spent four years as a Soviet prisoner of war. After the war he regretted his membership in the Nazi party. Lorenz wrote numerous books, some of which, such as King Solomon's Ring, On Aggression, and Man Meets Dog, became popular reading. His last work "Here I Am – Where Are You?" is a summary of his life's work and focuses on his famous studies of greylag geese.
November 7, 1728
Captain James Cook, FRS, RN (7 November 1728 – 14 February 1779) was a British explorer, navigator, cartographer, and captain in the Royal Navy. Cook made detailed maps of Newfoundland prior to making three voyages to the Pacific Ocean, during which he achieved the first recorded European contact with the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands, and the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand. Cook joined the British merchant navy as a teenager and joined the Royal Navy in 1755. He saw action in the Seven Years' War, and subsequently surveyed and mapped much of the entrance to the Saint Lawrence River during the siege of Quebec. This helped bring Cook to the attention of the Admiralty and Royal Society. This notice came at a crucial moment in both Cook's career and the direction of British overseas exploration, and led to his commission in 1766 as commander of HM Bark Endeavour for the first of three Pacific voyages. In three voyages Cook sailed thousands of miles across largely uncharted areas of the globe. He mapped lands from New Zealand to Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean in greater detail and on a scale not previously achieved. As he progressed on his voyages of discovery he surveyed and named features, and recorded islands and coastlines on European maps for the first time. He displayed a combination of seamanship, superior surveying and cartographic skills, physical courage and an ability to lead men in adverse conditions. Cook was killed in Hawaii in a fight with Hawaiians during his third exploratory voyage in the Pacific in 1779. He left a legacy of scientific and geographical knowledge which was to influence his successors well into the 20th century and numerous memorials worldwide have been dedicated to him.
November 7, 1920
JOAN PERUCHO (November 7, 1920, Barcelona, Spain - October 28, 2003, Barcelona, Spain) was born in Barcelona, in 1920. He is the author of several volumes of poetry, art criticism, gastronomy, stories, and novels. NATURAL HISTORY is the first of his books to be published outside of Spain.
November 7, 1935
Margaret Robison was born and grew up in Cairo, Georgia, a small rural town 13 miles from the Florida border. She wrote her first poems when she was in the 5th grade. It was only after a dream, followed by a psychotic episode in 1971, that she rediscovered herself as a writer. She began to write in earnest in a psychiatric hospital and has never stopped. Robinson led many creative writing workshops over the years, but the workshops that contributed the most to her emotional and spiritual life were those in which she worked with children as Poet-In-Residence in elementary schools in western Massachusetts, especially in the Donahue School in Holyoke. In addition to her work in the schools, Robinson led a writing workshop for women in a minimum-security prison, an on-going workshop in her home, and summers in the annual Writers’ Workshop at the University of Massachusetts. In 1989 she had a stroke that paralyzed her left side and shattered her speech. Margaret Robinson is the mother of Christopher Robinson - now Augusten Burroughs.
November 7, 1925
William Wharton (7 November 1925 – 29 October 2008), the pen name of the artist Albert William Du Aime, was an American-born author best known for his first novel Birdy, which was also successful as a film.
November 7, 1954
Ilan Pappé holds the Chair in History at the University of exeter and is Co-Director of the exeter Centre for ethno-Political Studies. He is the author of many influential books on the Middle east, including A History of Modern Palestine.
November 8, 1898
Katharine Briggs (November 8, 1898, Hampstead, United Kingdom - October 15, 1980, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France) was born in 1898, one of the three daughters of water-colorist Ernest Briggs. She studied English at Oxford, earning her Ph.D. with a thesis on folklore in seventeenth-century literature, and became a D.Litt., Oxon., in 1969. Her writings include THE PERSONNEL OF FAIRYLAND, THE ANATOMY OF PUCK, FOLKTALES OF ENGLAND, THE FAIRIES IN TRADITION AND LITERATURE, and AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FAIRIES, published by Pantheon in January 1977. She has been president of the English Folklore Society, has taught and lectured in American universities, and has made friends in many parts of the world.
November 8, 1908
Martha Ellis Gellhorn (November 8, 1908 – February 15, 1998) was an American novelist, travel writer, and journalist, considered by the London Daily Telegraph, among others, to be one of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th century. She reported on virtually every major world conflict that took place during her 60-year career. Gellhorn was also the third wife of American novelist Ernest Hemingway, from 1940 to 1945. At the age of 89, ill and almost completely blind, she committed suicide. The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism is named after her.
November 8, 1880
Lee M. Hollander (November 8, 1880 – October 19, 1972) was Professor Emeritus of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas at Austin and an authority in Nordic language and literature.
November 8, 1954
Kazuo Ishiguro OBE, FRSA, FRSL (born 8 November 1954) is a British novelist. Born in Nagasaki Japan, his family moved to England in 1960 when he was five. Ishiguro obtained his Bachelor's degree from the University of Kent in 1978 and his Master's from the University of East Anglia's creative-writing course in 1980. Ishiguro is one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors in the English-speaking world, having received four Man Booker Prize nominations, and winning the 1989 award for his novel The Remains of the Day. In 2008, The Times ranked Ishiguro 32nd on their list of 'The 50 greatest British writers since 1945'.
November 8, 1908
Raja Rao (8 November 1908 – 8 July 2006) was an Indian writer of English language novels and short stories, whose works are deeply rooted in Hinduism. The Serpent and the Rope (1960), a semi-autobiographical novel recounting a search for spiritual truth in Europe and India, established him as one of the finest Indian prose stylists and won him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1964. For the entire body of his work, Rao was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1988. Rao's wide ranging body of work, spanning a number of genres, is seen as a varied and significant contribution to Indian English literature, as well as World literature. Raja Rao was born into a very old Brahmin family of Mysore in 1909. He took his degree in English and History at Madras University (Nizam College). He came to Europe at the age of nineteen, researching in literature first at the University of Montpellier and at the Sorbonne under Professor Cazamian. He gave up research for writing and published his first stories in French and English. He spent the war years in India, searching for the spiritual tradition of India, and travelling on his quest from the Himalayas to Cape Cormorin. THE SERPENT AND THE ROPE is the conclusion of this quest. His other books are: KANTHAPURA (1938); COW OF THE BARRICADES and other stories (1947).
November 8, 1950
FRANCISCO REBOLLEDO was born in Mexico City After teaching chemistry for many years, he became a full-time writer. He also serves as literature editor for the Vid Editorial Group of magazine publishers. Rasero is his first novel. HELEN R. LANE has translated works by Octavio Paz, Juan Goytisolo, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Among the prizes she has won are the Guggenheim Foundation Translation Prize, the National Book Award for Translation, and the PEN Translation Prize. She is also the recipient of the Gregory Kolovakos Lifetime Achievement Translation Award.
November 8, 1847
Abraham ‘Bram’ Stoker (8 November 1847 – 20 April 1912) was an Irish author known today for his 1897 Gothic novel, Dracula. During his lifetime, he was better known as personal assistant of actor Henry Irving and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, which Irving owned. Stoker was born on 8 November 1847 at 15 Marino Crescent, Clontarf, on the northside of Dublin, Ireland. Stoker was bedridden with an unknown illness until he started school at the age of seven, when he made a complete recovery. Of this time, Stoker wrote, ‘I was naturally thoughtful, and the leisure of long illness gave opportunity for many thoughts which were fruitful according to their kind in later years.’ After his recovery, he grew up without further major health issues, even excelling as an athlete (he was named University Athlete) at Trinity College, Dublin, which he attended from 1864 to 1870. In 1878 Stoker married Florence Balcombe, daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel James Balcombe of 1 Marino Crescent. She was a celebrated beauty whose former suitor was Oscar Wilde. Stoker had known Wilde from his student days, having proposed him for membership of the university’s Philosophical Society while he was president. Wilde was upset at Florence's decision, but Stoker later resumed the acquaintanceship, and after Wilde's fall visited him on the Continent. The Stokers moved to London, where Stoker became acting manager and then business manager of Irving's Lyceum Theatre, London, a post he held for 27 years. On 31 December 1879, Bram and Florence's only child was born, a son whom they christened Irving Noel Thornley Stoker. The collaboration with Henry Irving was important for Stoker and through him he became involved in London's high society, where he met James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (to whom he was distantly related). Working for Irving, the most famous actor of his time, and managing one of the most successful theatres in London made Stoker a notable if busy man. He was dedicated to Irving and his memoirs show he idolised him. In London Stoker also met Hall Caine, who became one of his closest friends - he dedicated Dracula to him. In the course of Irving's tours, Stoker travelled the world, although he never visited Eastern Europe, a setting for his most famous novel. Stoker enjoyed the United States, where Irving was popular. With Irving he was invited twice to the White House, and knew William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Stoker set two of his novels there, using Americans as characters, the most notable being Quincey Morris. He also met one of his literary idols, Walt Whitman. Stoker visited the English town of Whitby in 1890 and that visit is said to be part of the inspiration of his great novel Dracula. While manager for Henry Irving and secretary and director of London's Lyceum Theatre, he began writing novels, beginning with The Snake's Pass in 1890 and Dracula in 1897. During this period, Stoker was part of the literary staff of the The Daily Telegraph in London, and wrote other fiction, including the horror novels The Lady of the Shroud (1909) and The Lair of the White Worm (1911). In 1906, after Irving's death, he published his life of Irving, which proved successful, and managed productions at the Prince of Wales Theatre. Before writing Dracula, Stoker met Ármin Vámbéry who was a Hungarian writer and traveler. Dracula likely emerged from Vámbéry's dark stories of the Carpathian mountains. Stoker then spent several years researching European folklore and mythological stories of vampires. Dracula is an epistolary novel, written as a collection of realistic, but completely fictional, diary entries, telegrams, letters, ship's logs, and newspaper clippings, all of which added a level of detailed realism to his story, a skill he developed as a newspaper writer. At the time of its publication, Dracula was considered a ‘straightforward horror novel’ based on imaginary creations of supernatural life. ‘It gave form to a universal fantasy . . . and became a part of popular culture.’ The original 541-page manuscript of Dracula, believed to have been lost, was found in a barn in northwestern Pennsylvania in the early 1980s. It included the typed manuscript with many corrections, and handwritten on the title page was ‘THE UN-DEAD.’ The author's name was shown at the bottom as Bram Stoker. Author Robert Latham notes, ‘the most famous horror novel ever published, its title changed at the last minute.’
November 8, 1970
KEVIN YOUNG (born November 8, 1970) has published in Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among other publications and anthologies. He is a graduate of Harvard University, where he received the Academy of American Poets Prize. He has held a Stegner Fellowship in poetry at Stanford University, as well as a MacDowell Colony residency. A member of the Dark Room Collective, he is currently completing an M.F.A. at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
November 8, 1887
René Maran (Fort-de-France, Martinique, 8 November 1887 - 9 May 1960) was a French Guyanese poet and novelist, and the first black writer to win the French Prix Goncourt (in 1921). Born on the boat carrying his parents to Fort-de-France where he lived till the age of seven. After that he went to Gabon, where his father Héménéglide Maran was in the colonial service. After attending boarding school in Bordeaux, France, he joined the French Colonial service in French Equatorial Africa. It was his experience there that was the basis for many of his novels, including Batouala: A True Black Novel, which won the Prix Goncourt. Jean-Paul Sartre alluded to Maran in his preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, mocking the French establishment's complacent self-congratulation that they had ‘on one occasion given the Prix Goncourt to a Negro’.
November 8, 1945
Nancy F. Cott is an American historian and professor who has taught at Yale and Harvard universities, specializing in gender topics in the US in the 19th and 20th centuries. She has testified on same-sex marriage in several US states.
November 8, 1950
Ri?ardas Gavelis was a prose writer and playwright. He published his first book - a collection of short stories entitled THE CELEBRATION THAT HAS NOT BEGUN - in 1976 and went on to write six novels, three collections of stories, and several plays before passing away in 2002. His other novels include SEVEN WAYS TO COMMIT SUICIDE, THE LAST GENERATION OF PEOPLE ON EARTH, and THE LIFE OF SUN-TZU IN THE SACRED CITY OF VILNIUS. This is his first novel to be published in English. Elizabeth Novickas graduated from the University of Illinois-Chicago with a M.A. in Lithuanian Language and Literature. She has worked previously as a bookbinder, newspaper designer, cartographer, and computer system administrator. VILNIUS POKER is her first full-length literary translation.
November 8, 1913
Frederick John Pym Gore (8 November 1913 – 31 August 2009), was a British painter.
November 8, 1891
Régis Jolivet (8 November 1891 – 4 August 1966) was a French philosopher and Roman Catholic priest. In 1932, he founded the school of philosophy at the Catholic University of Lyon, and was made a knight (Chevalier) of the Legion of Honour in 1961.
November 8, 1938
Klaus Kreimeier (born November 8, 1938 in Hannover ) is a German publicist and media scholar.
November 8, 1950
LYDIA MINATOYA was born In Albany, New York in 1950. She recceived her PhD in psychology from the University of Maryland in 1981 and is currently a college professor. She has written about her experiences growing up as an Asian American and her travels of self-discovery in Asia in Talking to Monks in High Snow: An Asian-American Odyssey (1993). She has also published a novel, The Strangeness of Beauty (1999), about several generations of Japanese Americans who return to Japan just before World War II and view the conflict from the perspective of insiders who are also outsiders.
November 8, 1942
Fernando Sorrentino (born November 8, 1942 in Buenos Aires) is an Argentine writer. His works have been translated into English, Portuguese, Italian, German, French, Finnish, Hungarian, Polish, Bulgarian, Chinese, Vietnamese,Tamil, Kannada, and Kabyle. In 2006 Fernando Sorrentino published a collection of short stories entitled: 'Per colpa del dottor Moreau ed altri racconti fantastici'. The collection includes all his short stories translated in Italian and is published by Progetto Babele literary magazine. The same literary magazine published a new collection in 2013: 'Per difendersi dagli scorpioni ed altri racconti insoliti'.
November 9, 1918
Spiro Theodore Agnew (November 9, 1918 – September 17, 1996) was an American politician who served as the 39th Vice President of the United States from 1969 to 1973, serving under President Richard Nixon. Agnew was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and was a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and University of Baltimore School of Law. He was drafted into the United States Army in 1941, serving as an officer during World War II, and was recalled for service during the Korean War in 1950. Agnew worked as an aide for U.S. Representative James Devereux before he was appointed to the Baltimore County Board of Zoning Appeals in 1957. He lost election for the Baltimore City Circuit Court in 1960, but was later elected Baltimore County Executive in 1962. In 1966, Agnew was elected the 55th Governor of Maryland, defeating his perennial Democratic opponent George P. Mahoney. He was the first Greek American to hold the position, serving between 1967 and 1969. At the 1968 Republican National Convention, Agnew, who had earlier been asked to place Richard Nixon's name in nomination of the presidency, was selected in private in the upstairs hotel rooms of Miami by Nixon and his campaign staff. He was then presented to the convention delegates for nomination for Vice President and ran alongside Nixon in the Presidential Election of 1968. Nixon and Agnew defeated the incumbent Vice President, Hubert Humphrey (formerly long-time U. S. Senator from Minnesota) and Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine. In 1972, Nixon and Agnew were reelected for a second term, defeating Senator George McGovern and Ambassador Sargent Shriver. In 1973, Agnew was investigated by the United States Attorney's office for the District of Maryland, on charges of extortion, tax fraud, bribery, and conspiracy. He was charged with having accepted bribes totaling more than $100,000 while holding office as Baltimore County Executive, Governor of Maryland, and Vice President. On October 10 that same year, Agnew was allowed to plead no contest to a single charge that he had failed to report $29,500 of income received in 1967, with the condition that he resign the office of Vice President. Nixon later replaced Agnew by appointing House Minority Leader Gerald Ford to the office of Vice President. When Nixon resigned from the White House due to the Watergate scandal, Ford assumed to the presidency the following year. Agnew was the second Vice President in United States history to resign, the other being John C. Calhoun, and the only one to do so because of criminal charges. Nearly ten years after leaving office, Agnew paid the state of Maryland nearly $270,000 as a result of a civil suit that stemmed from the bribery allegations. Critics have cited him as being one of the worst Vice Presidents in American history. He is the only Greek-American Vice President, making him the highest Greek-American politician to have served in the United States.
November 9, 1892
Erich Auerbach (November 9, 1892 – October 13, 1957) was a philologist and comparative scholar and critic of literature. His best-known work is Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, a history of representation in Western literature from ancient to modern times and frequently cited as a classic in the study of realism in literature. Auerbach, who was Jewish, was born in Berlin. He was trained in the German philological tradition and would eventually become, along with Leo Spitzer, one of its best-known scholars. After participating as combatant in World War I, he earned a doctorate in 1921 at University of Greifswald and in 1929 became a member of the philology faculty at the University of Marburg, publishing a well-received study entitled Dante: Poet of the Secular World. With the rise of National Socialism, however, Auerbach was forced to vacate his position in 1935. Exiled from Nazi Germany, he took up residence in Istanbul, Turkey, where he wrote Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), generally considered his masterwork. He moved to the United States in 1947, teaching at Pennsylvania State University and then working at the Institute for Advanced Study. He was appointed professor of Romance philology at Yale University in 1950, a position he held until his death in 1957 in Wallingford, Connecticut. While at Yale, Auerbach supervised Fredric Jameson's doctoral work.
November 9, 1913
Herschel B. Chipp (November 9, 1913, New Hampton, MO - February 8, 1992) was an art historian and authority on the work of Pablo Picasso. Mr. Chipp, who was professor emeritus of art history at the university, wrote two acclaimed books: "Theories of Modern Art," a best-selling art history text published in 1968, and "Picasso's Guernica: History, Transformations, Meanings," a study of Picasso's famous antiwar painting and public response to it, published in 1988. A Visiting Lecturer. Mr. Chipp was acting director of Berkeley's University Art Gallery from 1960 to 1965. He was also a visiting lecturer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the University of British Columbia and the University of Southern California. In 1989, he was invited to Guernica to participate in the dedication of Eduardo Chillida's monument to peace and liberty. Chipp served as a naval lieutenant in World War II. In Paris not long after the liberation of France, he met Picasso, and decided to devote himself to studying the artist's work. He received a bachelor's degree at Berkeley in 1947 and a master's degree in 1948, and in 1953 received a Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University. That same year, he joined the faculty at Berkeley. In addition to his Picasso studies, he followed the work of contemporary California artists and organized exhibitions in the field.
November 9, 1914
Basil Risbridger Davidson MC (9 November 1914 – 9 July 2010) was a British historian, writer and Africanist, particularly knowledgeable on the subject of Portuguese Africa prior to the 1974 Carnation Revolution. He wrote several books on the current plight of Africa. Colonialism and the rise of African emancipation movements were central themes of his work. He was an Honorary Fellow of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London.
November 9, 1901
Rhys Davies (9 November 1901 – 21 August 1978) (born Vivian Rees Davies) was a Welsh novelist and short story writer, who wrote in the English language.
November 9, 1925
Sir Alistair Allan Horne (November 9, 1925, London, United Kingdom - May 25, 2017, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom) was a British journalist, biographer and historian of Europe, especially of 19th and 20th century France.
November 9, 1905
Erika Julia Hedwig Mann (November 9, 1905 – August 27, 1969) was a German actress and writer. She was the eldest daughter of the novelist Thomas Mann and his wife Katia. In 1924, Erika Mann moved to Berlin where she lived a bohemian lifestyle and became a critic of National Socialism. She acted in, and wrote for, an anti-Nazi cabaret in Berlin and, after Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann moved to Switzerland. In 1935 she married the poet W. H. Auden, purely to ensure she could obtain a British passport and not become stateless when the Nazi regime cancelled her German citizenship. She remained active in liberal causes and continued to attack Nazism in her writings, most notably with her 1938 book School for Barbarians which was a critique of the Nazi education system. During World War Two, Mann worked for the BBC, broadcasting in German from London, before becoming a war correspondent attached to the Allied forces advancing across Europe after D-Day. As a correspondent, she attended the Nuremberg trials before moving to America to support her parents who were living in exile there. From the States, Mann continued to write and lecture, often criticising political developments in Europe and American foreign policy. This led to her being investigated by the American authorities who considered deporting her. After her parents moved to Switzerland in 1952, she also settled there. She wrote a biography of her father and died in Zurich in 1969.
November 9, 1818
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (November 9, 1818 – September 3, 1883) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His first major publication, a short story collection entitled A Sportsman's Sketches (1852), was a milestone of Russian Realism, and his novel Fathers and Sons (1862) is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century fiction.
November 9, 1946
MARINA WARNER was born in Egypt in 1946 and educated in Cairo, Brussels, in a convent in England, and at Oxford, where she was editor of Isis. She was a journalist on the staff of The Daily Telegraph and features editor of Vogue (London). In 1970, she received the Daily Telegraph's Young Writer of the Year award for an essay. She is Professor of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex and a distinguished writer of fiction, criticism, and history. Warner is married to the writer William Shawcross.
November 9, 1850
Alfred Caldecott (9 November 1850 – 8 February 1936) was an English philosopher. Caldecott was born at Challoner House, Crook Street, Chester. His father, John Caldecott, was an accountant, twice married with 13 children. Caldecott was his sixth child by his first wife Mary Dinah (née Brookes). His older brother Randolph was a renowned English artist and illustrator. In 1860 the family moved to 23 Richmond Place at Boughton just outside Chester. He spent the last five years of his schooling at The King's School, Chester. In 1876 Caldecott went to St John's College, Cambridge to read the Moral Sciences Tripos and he took First Class honours in 1880. He was then elected to a Fellowship at St John's. He was one of the founders of the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club and the first meeting took place on 19 October 1878 in his rooms at St John's. After gaining his degree, Caldecott was elected to a Fellowship at St John's. He then took Holy Orders and became rector of North and South Topham in Norfolk from 1895-98. He joined King's College London in 1891 first as Chair of Logic and Mental Philosophy, then later as Chair of Mental and Moral Philosophy. He developed a syllabus with a renewed emphasis on theological issues. He was Dean of King's College from 1913–17; and Prebendary of St Paul's from 1915 to 1935. Caldecott wrote several books on religious subjects including: English Colonialism and the Empire (1891)and The Philosophy of Religion in England and America (1901). He also collaborated with his brother Randolph on one book: Aesop's Fables (1883). The book contained his translation of Aesop from the original Greek. He died on 8 February 1936, aged 85, at Malvern.
November 9, 1961
Jackie Kay (born 9 November 1961) is a Scottish poet and novelist. She is the third modern Makar, the Scottish poet laureate but now lives in England. Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1961, to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father. She was adopted as a baby by a white Scottish couple, Helen and John Kay, and grew up in Bishopbriggs, a suburb of Glasgow. Kay is openly lesbian. In her twenties she gave birth to a son, Matthew (whose father is the writer Fred D'Aguiar) and later she had a 15-year relationship with poet Carol Ann Duffy. During this relationship, Duffy gave birth to a daughter, Ella, whose biological father is fellow poet Peter Benson.
November 9, 1929
Imre Kertész (9 November 1929 – 31 March 2016) was a Hungarian author and recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature, "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history". He was the first Hungarian to win the Nobel in Literature. His works deal with themes of Nazi Holocaust (he was a survivor of a German concentration camp), dictatorship and personal freedom. He died on 31 March 2016, aged 86, at his home in Budapest after suffering from Parkinson's disease for several years.
November 9, 1932
János Nyíri (November 9, 1932 – October 23, 2002) was a theatre director, journalist and writer. He wrote several highly acclaimed plays and novels, including Battlefields and Playgrounds (Macmillan, London, 1990), declared by a critic at The Observer to have been the best Holocaust novel that he had read. János Nyíri was born in Budapest in 1932. His parents were Tibor Nyíri and Julia Spitz, respected Hungarian Jewish writers. His father's most famous work was the novel Katona, Karácsony and the screenplay of the Hungarian film Díszmagyar ("Gala Suit") (Budapest, 1949). Nyíri's parents divorced when he was a small boy, and János went to live on his grandparents' vineyard in rural Tokaj. At the beginning of World War II, he went into hiding from the Nazis and Hungarian anti-Semites, with his mother and his older brother, András Nyíri. While most of his family and classmates were murdered in the Auschwitz and Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camps, Nyiri survived and was liberated by the Red Army in May 1945. After his military service and officer training as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Hungarian Army, Nyíri completed his studies at the Színház- és Filmm?vészeti F?iskola, the Academy of Cinema and Dramatic Art in Budapest in 1954, and rose to fame as a theatre director, in Kecskemét, Szeged, and Budapest. Shortly after the failed Hungarian Uprising against Soviet occupation in 1956, Nyíri decided to escape to Vienna, and later to Paris, instead of staying in Hungary and facing a probable death sentence, which was the fate of many of his fellow revolutionaries. Nyíri was forbidden to return to Hungary until the amnesty of 1973, when he was commissioned by the New Statesman to return to his native country and write an article, which was published under the title A Chilly Spring in Budapest.. During the 1950s, Nyíri settled in Paris and started working in the theatre again, with such respected dramatists as Eugène Ionesco, Jean Anouilh and Jean Genet. Nyíri also taught at the Conservatoire and studied at the Comédie-Française. Having secured a position as assistant director to Jean-Louis Barrault at the Odéon, he met his future wife, Jenny Hippisley, the daughter of British actors Lindisfarne Hamilton and Christopher Quest, and the great–granddaughter (on her mother's side of the family) of Heinrich Simon, the Jewish scientist, social democrat and leader of the Frankfurt revolutionary parliament of 1848. The Nyíris founded their first theatre company together, Le Jeune Théâtre de Marseille, in 1960. For several years, Nyíri directed successful stage productions of classic French and English plays by Molière, Beaumarchais, Jean Racine and Oscar Wilde, and went on to adapt David Copperfield in Marseille and The Imaginary Invalid at the Vaudeville Theatre in London's West End. He also directed The Marriage of Figaro, Phèdre, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and his own works, all over Europe. During this time he and his wife established their family home in southwest London. He and his wife continued to spend time in their homes in England, Ireland and France until his death.
November 9, 1926
Jesús Fernández Santos (November 9, 1926, Madrid - June 2, 1988, Madrid) was a Spanish writer, documentary filmmaker, film director and critic.
November 9, 1955
Juliet Schor is Professor of sociology at Boston College. She has studied trends in working time, consumerism, the relationship between work and family, women's issues and Economic inequality.
November 9, 1923
James Schuyler (1923–1991) was a preeminent figure in the celebrated New York School of poets. He grew up in Washington, D.C., and near Buffalo, New York. After World War II, he made his way to Italy, where he served for a time asW.H. Auden’s secretary. His books include three novels, A Nest of Ninnies (written with John Ashbery), Alfred and Guinevere, and What’s For Dinner, as well as numerous volumes of poetry.
November 9, 1885
Hermann Klaus Hugo Weyl (9 November 1885 – 8 December 1955) was a German mathematician, theoretical physicist and philosopher. Although much of his working life was spent in Zürich, Switzerland and then Princeton, he is associated with the University of Göttingen tradition of mathematics, represented by David Hilbert and Hermann Minkowski. His research has had major significance for theoretical physics as well as purely mathematical disciplines including number theory. He was one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century, and an important member of the Institute for Advanced Study during its early years. Weyl published technical and some general works on space, time, matter, philosophy, logic, symmetry and the history of mathematics. He was one of the first to conceive of combining general relativity with the laws of electromagnetism. While no mathematician of his generation aspired to the 'universalism' of Henri Poincaré or Hilbert, Weyl came as close as anyone. Michael Atiyah, in particular, has commented that whenever he examined a mathematical topic, he found that Weyl had preceded him (The Mathematical Intelligencer (1984), vol.6 no.1).
November 9, 1924
Earlie Endris Thorpe (November 9, 1924 - January 30, 1989), historian and college professor, was born in Durham, the son of Eural Endris and Vina Dean Thorpe. He served in the U.S. Army in the European theater (1944–46) and in 1948 was graduated from North Carolina College, in Durham, from which he received a master's degree the next year. In 1953 he was awarded the Ph.D. degree by Ohio State University; his dissertation was entitled "Negro Historiography in the United States." Thorpe taught at Stowe Teachers College, St. Louis, Mo. (1951–52), Alabama A. and M. College, Normal (1952–55), and Southern University, Baton Rouge, La. (1955–62). In 1962 he returned to his alma mater, by then North Carolina Central University">North Carolina Central University, where he spent the remainder of his career as chairman of the Department of History and Social Science. He was visiting professor of history at Duke University in 1969–70 and of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University in 1971. Thorpe was the author of Negro Historians in the United States (1958), The Desertion of Man: A Critique of Philosophy of History (1958), The Mind of the Negro: An Intellectual History of Afro-Americans (1961), Eros and Freedom in Southern Life and Thought (1967), The Central Theme of Black History (1969), The Old South: A Psychohistory (1972), African Americans and the Sacred: Spirituals, Slave Religion, and Symbolism (1982), Slave Religion, Spirituals, and C. J. Jung (1983), and A Concise History of North Carolina Central University (1984). He also was editor of the ten-booklet series "The Black Experience in America." Thorpe married Martha Vivian Branch, and they had two daughters, Rita Harrington and Gloria Earl.
November 9, 1942
Eliot Wigginton, who started Foxfire magazine with his ninth- and tenth-grade English classes in 1966, is still a high school teacher in the Appalachian Mountains of North Georgia and, with his students, guides the activities of the Foxfire Fund, Inc. Mr. Wigginton was on the board of the Highlander Center for many years, and has donated the royalties from this book to its continuing work. He lives in Rabun Gap, Georgia.
November 9, 1909
assimo Pallottino (9 November 1909 in Rome – 7 February 1995 in Rome) was an Italian archaeologist specializing in Etruscan civilization and art. Pallottino was a student of Giulio Quirino Giglioli and worked early in his career on the Temple of Apollo at Veii. In essence Pallottino created the modern discipline of Etruscology and trained many of its leading practitioners. He published a massive corpus of material during his career and established a research center in Rome, today known as C.N.R. per l'Archeologia etrusco-italica. He was also influential in establishing the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Etruschi e Italici and its journal, Studi Etruschi. His own work covered Etruscan art and culture, civilization, and language. One of his most influential works was the handbook Etruscologia originally published in 1942 in Milan, but today available in numerous languages and still consulted by scholars and students alike.
November 10, 1906
Bhabani Bhattacharya was born in Bihar to Bengali parents. In 1927 he graduated with a degree in English literature from Patna University. In 1928 Bhattacharya moved to England to continue his studies. His initial intention was to continue studying English literature at King’s College, London. However after an acrimonious encounter with one of his professors he decided on a degree in history instead. While studying for his degree at the University of London, Bhattacharya was taught by the political philosopher and author Harold Laski who would be, along with Tagore and Gandhi, a lasting influence on his writing. During his time in London, Bhattacharya became closely associated with Marxist groups and an active member of the League Against Imperialism. While in London, Bhattacharya contributed to a number of journals and newspapers. He published in The Bookman, the Manchester Guardian and the Spectator, which at the time was edited by author of the bestselling Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Francis Yeats-Brown, who would become a close friend. Both he and Tagore urged Bhattacharya to use English as a medium of expression for his fiction, rather than Bengali. In 1930 Bhattacharya translated Tagore’s The Golden Boat to wide acclaim. He graduated from the University of London with a degree in history in 1931, returning for his PhD, which he received in 1934. From 1932 to 1933 he travelled widely through Europe, including Berlin, Budapest, Warsaw, Paris and Vienna. Bhattacharya returned to India in December 1934 and settled in Calcutta. He married Salil Mukherji in 1935. In 1949 he moved to Washington as Press Attaché for the Indian Embassy. In 1947, So Many Hungers was published. Music for Mohini, one of his most acclaimed novels, was published in 1952 and Shadow from Ladakh, which received the Sahitya Akademi Award (India’s highest literary award), in 1966. His novels were translated into twenty-eight languages. In 1969 he left India to become Visiting Professor at the University of Hawai’i. In 1972 he moved permanently to the US. He died of a heart attack in 1988.
November 10, 1931
Joan Cooper (November 10, 1931, Berkeley, California – September 20, 2014, Seattle, Washington), known by her pen name, J. California Cooper, was an American playwright and author. She wrote 17 plays and was named Black Playwright of the Year in 1978 for her play Strangers. It was at the encouragement of Alice Walker that Cooper turned from her claim to fame in the theater and started writing short stories. Her first collection A Piece of Mine was published in 1984 by Wild Trees Press, the publishing company founded by Walker. Two other story collections followed, before the release of her first novel, Family, in 1991. Cooper wrote Funny Valentines, which later was turned into a 1999 TV movie starring Alfre Woodard and Loretta Devine. Awards Cooper won include the American Book Award (for her 1986 short-story collection Homemade Love), a James Baldwin Writing Award and a Literary Lion Award from the American Library Association. She died in Seattle, Washington, in 2014 at the age of 82 from undisclosed causes.
November 10, 1861
Édouard Dujardin (10 November 1861 – 31 October 1949) was a French writer, one of the early users of the stream of consciousness literary technique, exemplified by his 1888 novel Les Lauriers sont coupés. His literary works are extensive and include numerous plays, poems and novels. Dujardin also produced works of literary and social criticism and reminiscence. James Joyce claimed his style of interior monologue owed its influence to works by Dujardin.
November 10, 1938
Jirí Gruša (10 November 1938, in Pardubice – 28 October 2011, in Hannover) was a Czech poet, novelist, translator, diplomat and politician.
November 10, 1759
Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (10 November 1759 – 9 May 1805) was a German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright. During the last seventeen years of his life (1788–1805), Schiller struck up a productive, if complicated, friendship with already famous and influential Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. They frequently discussed issues concerning aesthetics, and Schiller encouraged Goethe to finish works he left as sketches. This relationship and these discussions led to a period now referred to as Weimar Classicism. They also worked together on Xenien, a collection of short satirical poems in which both Schiller and Goethe challenge opponents to their philosophical vision.
November 10, 1878
Patricia Wentworth (born Dora Amy Elles; November 10, 1878 - January 28, 1961) was a British crime fiction writer. She was born in Mussoorie, Uttarakhand, India (then the British Raj). She was educated privately and at Blackheath High School in London. After the death of her first husband, George F. Dillon, in 1906, she settled in Camberley, Surrey. She married George Oliver Turnbull in 1920 and they had one daughter. She wrote a series of 32 crime novels (classic-style whodunits) featuring Miss Silver, the first of which was published in 1928, and the last of which was published in the year of her death. Miss Silver is sometimes compared to Jane Marple, the elderly detective created by Agatha Christie. Miss Silver is a retired governess who becomes a private detective. She works closely with Scotland Yard, especially Inspector Frank Abbott. She is fond of quoting the poet Tennyson. ‘Miss Silver is well known in the better circles of society, and she finds entree to the troubled households of the upper classes with little difficulty. In most of Miss Silver's cases there is a young couple whose romance seems ill fated because of the murder to be solved, but in Miss Silver's competent hands the case is solved, the young couple are exonerated, and all is right in this very traditional world.’ Wentworth also wrote 34 books outside of that series. She won the Melrose prize in 1910 for her first novel A MARRIAGE UNDER THE TERROR, set in the French Revolution.
November 10, 1728
Oliver Goldsmith (10 November 1728 – 4 April 1774) was an Anglo-Irish novelist, playwright and poet, who is best known for his novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), his pastoral poem The Deserted Village (1770), and his plays The Good-Natur'd Man (1768) and She Stoops to Conquer (1771, first performed in 1773). He also wrote An History of the Earth and Animated Nature.
November 10, 1901
José Gorostiza Alcalá (10 November 1901 – 16 March 1973) was a Mexican poet, educator, and diplomat. For his achievements in the poetic arts, he was made a member of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua. José Gorostiza was born in the riverine city of Villahermosa, then known as San Juan Bautista, to Celestino Gorostiza and Elvira Alcalá de Gorostiza. He was a descendant of the Spanish playwright Manuel Eduardo de Gorostiza. His younger brother Celestino would also become an important artist. He moved to Mexico City to attend the National Preparatory School and later the Colegio Francés de Mascarones. After graduating from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, he worked first as a professor at his alma mater and then at the National School of Teachers in 1932. After teaching followed a series of important administrative jobs in the government: head of the Department of Fine Arts at the Secretariat of Public Education (1932-1935) and head of the Department of Publicity at the Secretariat of Foreign Relations (1935-1937). Subsequently, he served in various diplomatic and ambassadorial capacities, including: Director General of Political Affairs at the Secretariat of Foreign Relations, Director General of the Diplomatic Service (Secretariat of Foreign Relations) (1944), Ambassador to Greece (1950-1951), Secretary of Foreign Relations (1964), and head of the National Commission of Nuclear Energy (1965-1970). Between 1928 and 1931, he was part of the influential vanguardist group Los Contemporáneos, to which Jorge Cuesta, Salvador Novo, Gilberto Owen, Carlos Pellicer, Jaime Torres Bodet, and Xavier Villaurrutia also belonged. His literary output, though sparse, was rich in content. His first book of poetry, Canciones para cantar en las barcas (Songs to Sing on Boats), appeared in 1925. After a lull of fourteen years came what is considered his masterpiece, Muerte sin fin (Death without End). In 1964, he published Poesía (Poetry), a collection of his previously published work plus a section dedicated to unfinished pieces called Del poema frustrado (Of the Frustrated Poem). In 1969, he published a book of essays titled Prosa (Prose). On May 14, 1954, he was elected a member of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua, at the occasion of which he read an essay entitled "Notas sobre poesía" ("Notes on Poetry"). On March 22, 1955, he became a numerary member of the same and held seat 25. He died, aged 71, in Mexico City.
November 10, 1834
José Hernández (born José Rafael Hernández y Pueyrredón; November 10, 1834 – October 21, 1886) was an Argentine journalist, poet, and politician best known as the author of the epic poem Martín Fierro. Hernández, whose ancestry was a mix of Spanish, Irish, and French, was born on a farm near San Martín (Buenos Aires Province). His father was a butler or foreman of a series of cattle ranches. His career was to be an alternation between stints on the Federal side in the civil wars of Argentina and Uruguay and life as a newspaperman, a short stint as an employee of a commercial firm, and a period as stenographer to the legislature of the Confederation. Hernández founded the newspaper El Río de la Plata, which advocated local autonomy, abolition of the conscripted "frontier contingents", and election of justices of the peace, military commanders, and school boards. He opposed immigration, because he believed it undermined the pastoral foundation of the region's wealth. He envisioned a federal republic based in pastoralism, but also featuring a strong system of education and a literate population. Although a federalist opposed to the centralizing, modernizing, and Europeanizing tendencies of Argentine president Domingo Sarmiento, Hernández was no apologist for General Juan Manuel de Rosas, whom he characterized as a tyrant and a despot. Hernández is known today almost exclusively for his masterpiece Martín Fierro, the epic poem that stands as the pinnacle of gauchesque literature. The poem was apparently begun during a period of exile in Brazil following the defeat at Ñaembé (1870) and was published in two parts (in 1872 and 1879). Hernández died of heart disease October 21, 1886, in Belgrano, which was at that time a separate suburb, currently a neighborhood of the Buenos Aires city. He was buried in La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires.
November 10, 1958
Mark David Danner (born November 10, 1958) is an American writer, journalist, and educator. He is a former staff writer for The New Yorker and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Danner specializes in U.S. foreign affairs, war and politics, and has written articles on Haiti, Central America, the former Yugoslavia, and the Middle East. In 1999, he was named a MacArthur Fellow. As of 2016, Danner is Chancellor's Professor of Journalism and English at UC Berkeley and James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College. Danner is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the World Affairs Council of Northern California, the Pacific Council on International Policy, and the Century Association, and is a fellow of the Institute of the Humanities at New York University. In 2008 he was named the Marian and Andrew Heiskell Visiting Critic at the American Academy in Rome, a post he took up again in 2010. Danner has had a longtime association with the Telluride Film Festival, where he introduces films and conducts interviews; in 2013, he was named resident curator there.
November 10, 1965
Sean Hughes (November 10, 1965, London, United Kingdom - October 16, 2017, Whittington Hospital, London, United Kingdom) was an English-born Irish stand-up comedian, writer and actor. He starred in his own Channel 4 television show Sean's Show and was one of the regular team captains on the BBC Two musical panel game Never Mind the Buzzcocks.
November 10, 1483
Martin Luther (10 November 1483 – 18 February 1546) was a German professor of theology, composer, priest, monk, and a seminal figure in the Protestant Reformation. Luther came to reject several teachings and practices of the Roman Catholic Church. He strongly disputed the Catholic view on indulgences. Luther proposed an academic discussion of the practice and efficacy of indulgences in his Ninety-five Theses of 1517. His refusal to renounce all of his writings at the demand of Pope Leo X in 1520 and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms in 1521 resulted in his excommunication by the Pope and condemnation as an outlaw by the Holy Roman Emperor. Luther taught that salvation and, consequently, eternal life are not earned by good deeds but are received only as the free gift of God's grace through the believer's faith in Jesus Christ as redeemer from sin. His theology challenged the authority and office of the Pope by teaching that the Bible is the only source of divinely revealed knowledge from God and opposed sacerdotalism by considering all baptized Christians to be a holy priesthood. Those who identify with these, and all of Luther's wider teachings, are called Lutherans, though Luther insisted on Christian or Evangelical (German: evangelisch) as the only acceptable names for individuals who professed Christ. His translation of the Bible into the German vernacular (instead of Latin) made it more accessible to the laity, an event that had a tremendous impact on both the church and German culture. It fostered the development of a standard version of the German language, added several principles to the art of translation, and influenced the writing of an English translation, the Tyndale Bible. His hymns influenced the development of singing in Protestant churches. His marriage to Katharina von Bora, a former nun, set a model for the practice of clerical marriage, allowing Protestant clergy to marry. In two of his later works, Luther expressed antagonistic views towards Jews, writing that Jewish homes and synagogues should be destroyed, their money confiscated, and liberty curtailed. Condemned by virtually every Lutheran denomination, these statements and their influence on antisemitism have contributed to his controversial status. It should be noted, however, that this vicious rhetoric was not alone directed at Jews, but also towards Roman Catholics (whom Protestants labeled "Papists"), Anabaptists, and nontrinitarian Christians.
November 10, 1946
Sandra Markle is an American author of children's books. She has published more than 200 non-fiction books for children. She worked on a project for the National Science Foundation called Kit & Kaboodle which helped students to understand science better. She has won many awards for her books.
November 10, 1934
W. G. Runciman is a fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge. His books include The Social Animal and The Theory of Cultural and Social Selection.
November 10, 1949
Raphael J. Sonenshein is Professor of Political Science at California State University, Fullerton, and the author of Politics in Black and White: Race and Power in Los Angeles (Princeton). Between 1997 and 1999, he served as Executive Director of the City of Los Angeles Charter Reform Commission.
November 10, 1946
David Alan Stockman (born November 10, 1946) is an author, former businessman and U.S. politician who served as a Republican U.S. Representative from the state of Michigan (1977–1981) and as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (1981–1985) under President Ronald Reagan.
November 10, 1966
Carole Martinez (10 November 1966 in Créhange) is a French contemporary novelist. She was at a time tempted by theater and created her troupe at age 20. She is a teacher of French. Her first novel, Le Cœur cousu (fr), released discreetly in February 2007, received thereafter numerous prizes. Her second novel, Du domaine des Murmures (fr), is short listed for the prix Goncourt (the prize eventually went to L'Art français de la guerre by Alexis Jenni with five votes, and three to Carole Martinez). She finally was awarded the prix Goncourt des lycéens.
November 10, 1960
Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman (born Neil Richard Gaiman, 10 November 1960) is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre, and films. His notable works include the comic book series The Sandman and novels Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book. He has won numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker awards, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie medals. He is the first author to win both the Newbery and the Carnegie medals for the same work, The Graveyard Book (2008). In 2013, The Ocean at the End of the Lane was voted Book of the Year in the British National Book Awards.
November 11, 1929
HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER is a German author, poet, translator and editor. His books include LIGHTER THAN AIR MORAL POEMS (2000) and CIVIL WARS: FROM L.A. TO BOSNIA (1994). Enzensberger’s work has been translated into more than 40 languages.
November 11, 1954
Mary Gaitskill (born November 11, 1954) is an American author of essays, short stories and novels. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories (1993 and 2006), and The O. Henry Prize Stories (1998).
November 11, 1931
Winthrop D. Jordan (November 11, 1931, Worcester, MA - February 23, 2007, Oxford, MS) is a native of Massachusetts and received his undergraduate training at Harvard. He holds an M.A. from Clark and a Ph.D. from Brown. From 1961 to 1963 Mr. Jordan was a fellow at the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg Virginia. He has taught at Phillips Exeter Academy, Brown, and Michigan, and was associate professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the editor of a reprinting of Samuel Stanhope Smith’s AN ESSAY ON THE CAUSES OF THE VARIETY OF COMPLEXION AND FIGURE IN HUMAN SPECIES.
November 11, 1948
Susanna Kaysen (born November 11, 1948) is an American author, best known for her memoir Girl, Interrupted. Susanna Kaysen was born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is the daughter of economist Carl Kaysen, a professor at MIT and former advisor to President John F. Kennedy, and his wife Annette Neutra Kaysen. Kaysen has one sister and is divorced. She lived for a time in the Faroe Islands, upon which experience her novel Far Afield is based. Kaysen attended high school at the Commonwealth School in Boston, and the Cambridge School before being sent to McLean Hospital in 1967 to undergo psychiatric treatment for depression. It was there she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. She was released after eighteen months. She later drew on this experience for her 1993 memoir Girl, Interrupted, which was adapted into a film in 1999. She was portrayed by Winona Ryder. Her books include: Asa, As I Knew Him (1987), Far Afield (1990), Girl, Interrupted (1993), The Camera My Mother Gave Me (2001), and Cambridge (2014).
November 11, 1922
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American writer. His works such as Cat's Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973) blend satire, gallows humor, and science fiction. As a citizen he was a lifelong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a critical pacifist intellectual. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association. The New York Times headline at the time of Vonnegut's passing called Vonnegut ‘the counterculture's novelist.’
November 11, 1821
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky 11 November 1821 – 9 February 1881), sometimes transliterated Dostoevsky, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and philosopher. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the context of the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th-century Russia.
November 11, 1937
Alicia Suskin Ostriker is the author of eleven previous poetry collections, including: The Mother/Child Papers; No Heaven; the volcano sequence; and The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998. She has received the Paterson Poetry Prize, the William Carlos Williams Award, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award. Ostirker is Professor Emerita of English at Rutgers University and teaches in the low-residency MFA program of Drew University.
November 11, 1928
Carlos Fuentes Macías (November 11, 1928 – May 15, 2012) was a Mexican novelist and essayist. Among his works are The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Aura (1962), The Old Gringo (1985) and Christopher Unborn (1987). In his obituary, the New York Times described him as ‘one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world’ and an important influence on the Latin American Boom, the ‘explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and '70s’, while The Guardian called him ‘Mexico's most celebrated novelist’. His many literary honors include the Miguel de Cervantes Prize as well as Mexico's highest award, the Belisario Domínguez Medal of Honor. He was often named as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he never won.
November 11, 1948
Martin Chalmers (11 November 1948 – 22 October 2014) was a translator and champion of 20th-century and contemporary German-language writers. A close collaborator with adventurous publishers, Martin was much admired not only for his translations, but also for his advocacy of writers unduly neglected or at the beginning of their careers. Official recognition came in 2004 for his English-language edition of Victor Klemperer’s diaries, I Shall Bear Witness, for the second volume of which, The Lesser Evil 1945-1959, Martin was awarded the Schlegel-Tieck prize. The translation of the diaries was a huge enterprise to which Martin brought all his skills, linguistic and historical. The introductory essays to each of the three volumes are masterpieces of contextualisation and comment that help make sense of the complex intersection of everyday realities and wider historical developments, Nazism, war and the Holocaust, and their aftermath. The commission by Weidenfeld & Nicolson kept Martin fully employed for more than two years. More typically, he worked with smaller publishers, proposing as well as translating books. For Serpent’s Tail, he was responsible for a number of titles from Herta Müller’s The Passport (1989), Hubert Fichte’s The Orphanage (1990) and Detlev’s Imitations (1991), to Erich Fried’s Children and Fools (1992) and Erich Hackl’s The Wedding in Auschwitz (2009). Several appeared in the series Extraordinary Classics, co-edited with Pete Ayrton, which included Robert Walser’s The Walk (1992) – with a foreword by Susan Sontag – and his own anthology of contemporary Austrian fiction, Beneath Black Stars (2002). For some time, he was an adviser to Verso, recommending a number of important books in the fields of history, politics and social theory. More recently, his collaboration with Naveen Kishore of Seagull Books led to many publications, among which was December (2012), with text by Alexander Kluge and photographs by Gerhard Richter. For Martin, Kluge’s writing, with its complex and varied use of the short form (anecdote, incident, item, quotation, illustration), was productively subversive. Martin was born in Bielefeld, in the British-occupied sector of Germany, where his father, David Chalmers, was serving in the army, and met Martin’s mother, Gertrude Post, when she was a waitress in the Naafi. She would later come to Glasgow in the Berlin airlift of 1950. When Martin was five, his German grandmother joined them. He grew up speaking both languages and used to translate the dialogue for his grandmother on their regular trips to the cinema. Together with a linguistic legacy came a family and national past that Martin was to grapple with throughout his life. At university, first in Glasgow and then Birmingham, he studied history and went on to study for a PhD on popular life and politics in a town in the Ruhr after the first world war, until the money ran out. Martin was a translator by necessity in several senses. In his public statements at the Goethe Institute and elsewhere, he always discussed the economics of translation as well as its cultural significance. However, existential reasons underpinned his practice, which encompassed many forms of writing, with a strongly autobiographical slant. In 2007 Martin moved to Berlin, the city he loved and already knew so well, where his mother and grandparents had lived before, during and after the war. He was still writing recollections and chronicles set in the cities of Glasgow and Berlin when he died, just over two years after being diagnosed with cancer. A compulsive and companionable urban walker, Martin loved to share his observations with friends. His daughter, Hanna, recalls how historic cemeteries were a favourite with him. A flavour of this, and of his humour and erudition, can be found in the as yet unpublished collection Wreaths and Pebbles, in which he notes that one day a half-smoked cigar was left on Brecht’s gravestone, just as one might place a pebble on a Jewish grave. Many of his ongoing projects involved writing and translating with Esther Kinsky, who became his second wife in February this year. She survives him, as do Hanna, the daughter of his first marriage to Angela McRobbie, which ended in divorce, and two grandchildren.
November 11, 1901
Francis Van Wyck Mason (November 11, 1901 – August 28, 1978) was an American historian and novelist. He had a long and prolific career as a writer spanning 50 years and including 78 published novels, many of which were best sellers and well received.
November 11, 1928
STEVEN BOLDY is Reader in Latin American Literature at the University of Cambridge.
November 11, 1924
Luis Martín-Santos Ribera (11 November 1924 – 21 January 1964) was a Spanish psychiatrist and author of Tiempo de Silencio (es) (Time of Silence), often cited as one of the most important Spanish novels of the twentieth century. Martín-Santos was born in Larache, Morocco in 1924; son of the military doctor Leandro Martín-Santos. At five years of age his family moved to San Sebastián, where he would ultimately spend most of his life. He studied medicine in Salamanca and received his doctorate in psychiatry in Madrid, where he developed friendships with specialists such as Juan José López Ibor (es), Pedro Laín Entralgo, and Carlos Castilla del Pino (es). At the same time, he became interested in literature and became an habitué of the Café Gijón, where he met many prominent writers of his generation, including Ignacio Aldecoa, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, and Juan Benet. He also spent some time with Alfonso Sastre. In 1951 he became director of the regional psychiatric hospital in San Sebastian and would remain there the rest of his life. He also participated in the so-called "Academia Errante," a debate forum created by restless Spanish intellectuals in the sixties who were searching for new forms of expression. He read Jean-Paul Sartre extensively and became interested in existentialism. He married Rocío Laffón Bayo in 1953, with whom he had three children. In 1955, he wrote a thesis entitled Dilthey, Jaspers y la comprensión del enfermo mental (Dilthey, Jaspers, and Understanding the Mentally Ill), followed in 1964 by Libertad, temporalidad y transferencia en el psicoanálisis existencial (Freedom, Temporality, and Transference in Existential Psychoanalysis). He became a member of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), a clandestine organization, and was thrown into prison on three occasions. Later, he joined the Executive Committee and became friends with the socialist leader Enrique Múgica Herzog. Near the end of 1960 he finished writing the novel Tiempo de silencio, which was published in 1962 with twenty censored pages. An uncensored edition was not published until 1981. In this novel he makes innovative use of interior monologue, second-person narrative, indirect free style, stream of consciousness, and mythification; narrative devices that had been pioneered earlier by James Joyce. His wife Rocío died, possibly a suicide, in 1963. That same year, he began writing Tiempo de destrucción (Time of Destruction), but it was left incomplete when he died in a traffic accident in Vitoria, Spain on 21 January 1964. It was published, as he left it, in 1975. The same publisher had also released a posthumous collection of his short stories, entitled Apólogos, in 1970. Tiempo de silencio was the basis for a movie, directed by Vicente Aranda.
November 11, 1846
Anna Katharine Green (November 11, 1846 – April 11, 1935) was an American poet and novelist. She was one of the first writers of detective fiction in America and distinguished herself by writing well plotted, legally accurate stories. Green has been called 'the mother of the detective novel.'
November 11, 1942
Diane Wolkstein (November 11, 1942 – January 31, 2013) was a folklorist and author of children's books. She also served as New York City's official storyteller from 1968–1971. As New York's official storyteller, Wolkstein visited two of the city's parks each weekday, staging hundreds of one-woman storytelling events. After successfully talking her way into the position, she realized "there was no margin for error," she said in a 1992 interview. "I mean, it was a park. [The children would] just go somewhere else if they didn't like it." She also had a radio show on WNYC, Stories From Many Lands, from 1968 until 1980, and she helped create the Storytelling Center of New York City. Wolkstein authored two dozen books, primarily collections of folk tales and legends she gathered during research trips. She made many visits to China, Haiti and Africa. Wolkstein was born in Newark, New Jersey and grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey. Her father Henry was an accountant and her mother Ruth was a librarian. She received a bachelor's degree from Smith College and a master's degree in education from Bank Street College of Education. While living in Paris, she studied mime under Étienne Decroux. Wolkstein was in Taiwan to research a book of Chinese folk stories when she underwent emergency surgery for a heart condition. She died in the city of Kaohsiung at the age of 70.
November 11, 1950
Mircea Dinescu is one of Romania's leading poets. By the late 1980s he and his work were seen as controversial and confrontational, and his final book before the revolution of 1989 could only be published abroad. In 1989 he was liberated from house arrest by a large crowd in Bucharest who carried him triumphantly to the national television building. There he announced to his country and the world that the dictator had fled. Since then he has avoided compromising himself by writing for a satirical political magazine, has mocked at history by starring in a gastronomic TV show called Politics and Delicatessen, raised goats and set up his own personal winery.
November 11, 1933
Takarabe Toriko was born in 1933 in Niigata prefecture. Two months after her birth, she left with her parents to live in Manchukuo. Following repatriation with her family in 1946, she went on to become one of Japan’s most eminent poets. She is particularly noted for her evocations of her youth and has received numerous prizes for her work over a long career. Phyllis Birnbaum is a novelist, biographer, journalist, and translator. Her translation Confessions of Love, a novel by Uno Chiyo, won the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. Her most recent biography is Manchu Princess, Japanese Spy: The Story of Kawashima Yoshiko, the Cross-Dressing Spy Who Commanded Her Own Army.
November 12, 1945
Hanan al-Shaykh (born November 12, 1945, Beirut) is an acclaimed Lebanese author of contemporary literature. Hanan al-Shaykh's family background is that of a strict Shi'a family. Her father and brother exerted strict social control over her during her childhood and adolescence. She attended the Almillah primary school for Muslim girls where she received a traditional education for Muslim girls, before continuing her education at the Ahliah school. She continued her gender-segregated education at the American College for Girls in Cairo, Egypt, graduating in 1966. She returned to Lebanon to work for the Lebanese newspaper An-Nahar until 1975. She left Beirut again in 1975 at the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War and moved to Saudi Arabia to work and write there. She now lives in London with her family. Al-Shaykh's literature follows in the footsteps of such contemporary Arab women authors as Nawal El Saadawi in that it explicitly challenges the roles of women in the traditional social structures of the Arab Middle East. Her work is heavily influenced by the patriarchal controls that were placed on her not only by her father and brother, but also within the traditional neighborhood in which she was raised. As a result, her work is a manifestation of a social commentary on the status of women in the Arab-Muslim world. She challenges notions of sexuality, obedience, modesty, and familiar relations in her work. Her work often implies or states sexually explicit scenes and sexual situations which go directly against the social mores of conservative Arab society, which has led to her books being banned in the more conservative areas of the region including the Persian Gulf. In other countries, they are difficult to obtain because of censorship laws which prevent the Arabic translations from being easily accessible to the public. Specific examples include The Story of Zahra which includes abortion, divorce, sanity, illegitimacy and sexual promiscuity, and Women of Sand and Myrrh which contains scenes of a lesbian relationship between two of the main protagonists. In addition to her prolific writing on the condition of Arab women and her literary social criticism, she is also part of a group of authors writing about the Lebanese Civil War.
November 12, 1915
Roland Gérard Barthes (12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, social theory, designtheory, anthropology and post-structuralism.
November 12, 1922
Tadeusz Borowski was born in Zytomierz, Poland, in 1922. His early childhood was spent in the Ukraine, but he returned with his family to Warsaw in 1933. He studied Polish literature at Warsaw University and published his first volume of verse, Wherever the Earth, in 1942. The following year he was arrested and sent to a concentration camp, where he remained until 1945. In 1946 he returned to Warsaw, resumed his studies at the University, and also lectured as an assistant professor. A second volume of poetry, The Names of Currents, was published in 1945, and in 1946 the first of three collections of concentration-camp stories appeared in Munich. The other two collections, Farewell to Maria and A World of Stone, were published in Poland in 1948. Mr. Borowski also wrote for Polish literary magazines and was active in youth and social organizations. In July 1951 Tadeusz Borowski took his own life by turning on the gas - a fate he had miraculously escaped in Auschwitz.
November 12, 1651
Sister (Spanish: Sor) Juana Inés de la Cruz, O.S.H. (English: Joan Agnes of the Cross) (12 November 1651 – 17 April 1695), was a self-taught scholar and poet of the Baroque school, and nun of New Spain. Although she lived in a colonial era when Mexico was part of the Spanish Empire, she is considered today a Mexican writer, and stands at the beginning of the history of Mexican literature in the Spanish language.
November 12, 1963
Damon Galgut (born 12 November 1963) is an award-winning South African playwright and novelist. Galgut was born in Pretoria, South Africa in 1963. His family, of European stock, had strong ties to the South African judiciary. When he was six years old, Galgut was diagnosed with cancer, a trauma which he has described as "the central, cataclysmic event of my life". He fell very ill, and spent long stretches of his childhood in hospital. His love of storytelling developed at this time as he lay convalescing in his hospital bed, listening to relatives reading stories to him. Galgut studied drama at the University of Cape Town. He was only 17 when his debut novel, A Sinless Season, was published. His battle with cancer was given fictional form in his next book, a collection of short stories called Small Circle of Beings (1988). The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (1991) won the CNA Prize, South Africa’s leading literary award. The Quarry (1995) was made into a feature film, which went on to win prizes on the international film festival circuit. However, it was not until the publication of The Good Doctor in 2003 that Galgut reached a far wider readership. The story of two contrasting characters in a remote, rural hospital in post-apartheid South Africa, The Good Doctor was enthusiastically received by critics. It was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize in 2003 and also won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book from the Africa Region. Galgut has written a number of plays and has taught drama at the University of Cape Town. He has been a resident of Cape Town since the early 1990s. He is a keen traveller and, in fact, wrote much of The Good Doctor in a hotel in Goa. He describes himself as "obsessed" with yoga, and for some time never owned a car nor a television. His novel, In a Strange Room, was shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for fiction. The Guardian reviewer was impressed stating; "I doubt if any book in 2010 will contain more memorable evocations of place than In a Strange Room." The review continued to describe it as a "beautiful" book that is "strikingly conceived and hauntingly written."
November 12, 1942
JANETTE TURNER HOSPITAL, born in Australia in 1942, is adjunct professor of English at La Trobe University, in Melbourne, but divides her time between Australia, Canada, and the United States. Hospital’s first novel, The Ivory Swing, received Canada’s $50,000 Seal Award.
November 12, 1934
John McGahern (12 November 1934 – 30 March 2006) is regarded as one of the most important Irish writers of the latter half of the twentieth century. Known for the intrinsic and precise dissection of Irish life found in works such as The Barracks, The Dark and Amongst Women, The Observer hailed him as ‘the greatest living Irish novelist’ before his death in 2006. Born in the townland of Knockanroe about half a mile from Ballinamore, County Leitrim, John McGahern was the eldest child of seven. His mother brought up the family on a small farm which she ran with outside help as she was also the local primary school teacher. His father lived some 20 miles away in the police barracks at Cootehall in County Roscommon. He was the Garda sergeant of the village. When John was around nine or ten his mother became ill with cancer and died. The family then moved to Cootehall to live with their father. John completed his primary schooling there, and won a scholarship to the Presentation Brothers secondary school in Carrick-on-Shannon. He travelled there daily and again won the county scholarship in his Leaving Certificate enabling him to continue his education to third level. He was offered a place in teacher-training at St Patrick's College of Education in Drumcondra. He was first published by the London literary and arts review, X magazine, which published an extract from his first – abandoned – novel, The End or Beginning of Love. McGahern's novel The Dark was banned in Ireland for its alleged pornographic content and implied sexual abuse by the protagonist's father. In the controversy over this he was dismissed from his teaching post. He died from cancer in the Mater Hospital in Dublin on 30 March 2006, aged 71.
November 12, 1941
Cristina Peri Rossi (born November 12, 1941) is a Uruguayan novelist, poet, translator, and author of short stories. Considered a leading light of the post-1960s period of prominence of the Latin-American novel, she has written more than 37 works. She was born in Montevideo, Uruguay but was exiled in 1972, and moved to Spain, where she became a citizen in 1975. As of 2005 she lives in Barcelona, where she continues to write fiction and work as a journalist. She studied at the University of the Republic.
November 12, 1941
Cristina Peri Rossi (born November 12, 1941) is a Uruguayan novelist, poet, translator, and author of short stories. Considered a leading light of the post-1960s period of prominence of the Latin-American novel, she has written more than 37 works. She was born in Montevideo, Uruguay but was exiled in 1972, and moved to Spain, where she became a citizen in 1975. As of 2005 she lives in Barcelona, where she continues to write fiction and work as a journalist. She studied at the University of the Republic.
November 12, 1936
Lucia Berlin (November 12, 1936 – November 12, 2004) was an American short story writer..
November 12, 1928
Marjorie Weinman Sharmat (born November 12, 1928) is an American children's writer. She has written more than 130 books for children and teens and her books have been translated into several languages. They have won awards including Book of the Year by the Library of Congress or have become selections by the Literary Guild.
November 12, 1939
Reinhard Urbach (born November 12, 1939 in Weimar, Thuringia ) is an Austrian literary and theater scholar , dramaturge and theater director.
November 13, 1927
Willis Barnstone, born in Lewiston, Maine, and educated at Bowdoin, the Sorbonne, Columbia and Yale, taught in Greece at end of civil war (1949-51), in Buenos Aires during the Dirty War, and in China during Cultural Revolution, where he was later a Fulbright Professor in Beijing(1984-85) Former O'Connor Professor of Greek at Colgate University, he is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Indiana University. A Guggenheim fellow, he has received the NEA, NEH, Emily Dickinson Award of the PSA, Auden Award of NY Council on the Arts, Midland Authors Award, four Book of the Month selections, four Pulitzer nominations, and Lanner Poetry Award for Border of a Dream: The Poems of Antonio Machado (Copper Canyon). His work has appeared in APR, Harper's, NYRB, Paris Review, Poetry, New Yorker, TLS. Author of seventy books, recent volumes are Poetics of Translation (Yale, 1995), The Gnostic Bible (Shambhala, 2003), Life Watch (BOA, 2003), Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (2004), Restored New Testament (Norton, 2009), Stickball on 88th Street (Red Hen Press, 2011), and Dawn Café in Paris (Sheep Meadow, 2011), The Poems of Jesus Christ (Norton, 2012), ABC of Translation (Black Widow Press, 2013), Borges at Eighty (New Directions Press, 2013).
November 13, 1946
Wanda Coleman (November 13, 1946 – November 22, 2013) was an American poet. She was known as "the L.A. Blueswoman" and "the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles". Wanda Evans was born in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, where she grew up during the 1950s and 1960s. She is the eldest of four children. Her parents were George and Lewana (Scott) Evans, who were introduced to one another at church by his aunt. In 1931, her father had relocated to Los Angeles from Little Rock, Arkansas, after the lynching of a young man who was hung from a church steeple. He was an ex-boxer and long-time friend and sparring partner of Light Heavyweight Champion Archie Moore. In Los Angeles, he ran a sign shop during the day and worked the graveyard shift as a janitor at RCA Victor Records. Her mother worked as a seamstress and as a housekeeper for Ronald Reagan, among other celebrities. After graduating from John C. Fremont High School in Los Angeles, Wanda Evans enrolled at Los Angeles Valley College in Van Nuys, California. She transferred to California State University at Los Angeles, but did not complete a degree. Shortly after finishing high school, she married white Southerner Charles Coleman, a troubleshooter for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s. Their union produced two children, Luanda and Anthony. She went on to marry two more times. Her third husband was poet Austin Straus, whom she married in 1981. Coleman received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the California Arts Council (in fiction and in poetry). She was the first C.O.L.A. Literary Fellow (Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, 2003). Her honors included an Emmy in Daytime Drama writing, the 1999 Lenore Marshall Prize (for Bathwater Wine), and a nomination for the 2001 National Book Awards (for Mercurochrome). She was a finalist for California poet laureate (2005). While critically acclaimed for her creative writing, Coleman's brush with notoriety came as a result of an unfavorable review she wrote in the April 14, 2002, issue of the Los Angeles Times Book Review of Maya Angelou's book A Song Flung Up to Heaven. Coleman found the book to be "small and inauthentic, without ideas wisdom or vision". Coleman's review provoked positive and negative responses, including the cancellation of events and the rescinding of invitations. Her account of this incident appears in the September 16, 2002, edition of The Nation.
November 13, 1901
Rosamel del Valle (Curacaví , 13 of November of 1901 - Santiago de Chile , 22 of September of 1965), known primarily as a poet and essayist in Latin America, came to New York from Chile as a United Nations official in 1946. He contributed regularly to Spanish-language periodicals, writing about life in New York, literary landmarks, and American writers, for whom he expressed a near veneration, He married a French-Canadian co-worker, Thérèse Dulac, in 1948 and after his retirement returned with her in 1963 to Santiago, where he died in 1965. Anna Balakian is Professor and former Chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University. Among her many writings are several books on Surrealism, including Surrealism, the Road to the Absolute, and a critical biography of André Breton. Volume 5 in the series Latin American Literature and Culture, edited by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria.
November 13, 1939
George V. Higgins (November 13, 1939 – November 6, 1999) was an American author, lawyer, newspaper columnist, and college professor. He is best known for his bestselling crime novels. His full name was George Vincent Higgins II, after an uncle living in Randolph, but he dropped the numeric (unofficially) in mid life. His books were all published as by George V. Higgins.
November 13, 1906
Torborg Nedreaas (13 November 1906 in Bergen, Norway – 30 June 1987) was a Norwegian author who debuted with the collection of short stories Bak skapet står øksen in 1945. The majority of the stories centered on events and interactions during the Second World War. It was not war literature, but an examination of the occurrences and situations which the war created for people who were not directly involved in the war, but who nonetheless paid a high price because they lived in an occupied country. Her work was recognized with numerous prizes, including both the prestigious Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature (Kritikerprisen) and in 1972 she was nominated for the Nordic Council's Literature Prize (Nordisk Råds litteraturpris).
November 13, 1885
Antonio Porchia (November 13, 1885 – November 9, 1968) was an Argentinian poet. He was born in Conflenti, Italy, but, after the death of his father in 1900, moved to Argentina. He wrote a Spanish book entitled Voces ('Voices'), a book of aphorisms. It has since been translated into Italian and into English (by W.S. Merwin, Copper Canyon Press, 2003), French, and German. A very influential, yet extremely succinct writer, he has been a cult author for a number of renowned figures of contemporary literature and thought such as André Breton, Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Juarroz and Henry Miller, amongst others. Some critics have paralleled his work to Japanese Haiku and found many similarities with a number of Zen schools of thought.
November 13, 1941
Arnold Rampersad (born November 13, 1941) is Professor of English at Rutgers: The State University of New Jersey and author of THE ART AND IMAGINATION OF W. E. B. DUBOIS and numerous essays on American and Afro-American literature.
November 13, 354
Augustine of Hippo (13 November 354 – 28 August 430), also known as Saint Augustine or Saint Austin, was an early Christian theologian and philosopher whose writings influenced the development of Western Christianity and Western philosophy.
November 13, 1850
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1850 and became one of the world’s most popular writers. He was novelist, essayist, and poet - master of a widely acclaimed style. His works include TREASURE ISLAND, KIDNAPPED, DAVID BALFOUR, THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE, and his collection of poems for children, A CHILD’S GARDEN OF VERSES.
November 13, 1936
Dacia Maraini (born November 13, 1936 in Fiesole) is an Italian writer. She is the daughter of Sicilian Princess Topazia Alliata di Salaparuta, an artist and art dealer, and of Fosco Maraini, a Florentine ethnologist and mountaineer of mixed Ticinese, English and Polish background who wrote in particular on Tibet and Japan. Maraini's work focuses on women’s issues, and she has written numerous plays and novels. She has won awards for her work, including the Formentor Prize for L'età del malessere (1963); the Premio Fregene for Isolina (1985); the Premio Campiello and Book of the Year Award for La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrìa (1990); and the Premio Strega for Buio (1999).
November 13, 354
Augustine of Hippo (13 November 354 – 28 August 430), also known as Saint Augustine or Saint Austin, was an early Christian theologian and philosopher whose writings influenced the development of Western Christianity and Western philosophy. He was the bishop of Hippo Regius (modern-day Annaba, Algeria), located in Numidia (Roman province of Africa). He is viewed as one of the most important Church Fathers in the Western Christianity for his writings in the Patristic Era. Among his most important works are City of God and Confessions. According to his contemporary, Jerome, Augustine 'established anew the ancient Faith.' In his early years, he was heavily influenced by Manichaeism and afterward by the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus. After his baptism and conversion to Christianity in 387, Augustine developed his own approach to philosophy and theology, accommodating a variety of methods and perspectives. Believing that the grace of Christ was indispensable to human freedom, he helped formulate the doctrine of original sin and made seminal contributions to the development of just war theory. When the Western Roman Empire began to disintegrate, Augustine developed the concept of the Catholic Church as a spiritual City of God, distinct from the material Earthly City. His thoughts profoundly influenced the medieval worldview. The segment of the Church that adhered to the concept of the Trinity as defined by the Council of Nicaea and the Council of Constantinople closely identified with Augustine's City of God. In the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion, he is a saint, a pre-eminent Doctor of the Church, and the patron of the Augustinians. His memorial is celebrated on 28 August, the day of his death. He is the patron saint of brewers, printers, theologians, the alleviation of sore eyes, and a number of cities and dioceses. Many Protestants, especially Calvinists, consider him to be one of the theological fathers of the Protestant Reformation due to his teachings on salvation and divine grace. In the East, many of his teachings are not accepted. The most important doctrinal controversy surrounding his name is the filioque. Other possibly unacceptable doctrines include his views on original sin, the doctrine of grace, and predestination. Nonetheless, though considered to be mistaken on some points, he is still considered a saint, and his feast day is celebrated on 15 June. He carries the additional title of Blessed as opposed to Saint among the Orthodox Church, due to his teachings controversial with the doctrine.
November 13, 1834
Ignacio Manuel Altamirano Basilio (November 13, 1834 – February 13, 1893) was a Mexican lawyer, writer, journalist, teacher and politician. He was born in Tixtla, Guerrero, into an indigenous family; his father was appointed mayor of Tixtla in 1848, which gave the boy Ignacio Manuel, who was 14 at the time, the opportunity to go to school. He learned to read and write in his hometown. He made his first studies in Toluca, thanks to a scholarship granted by Ignacio Ramírez, of whom he was a disciple. In 1849 he studied at the Literary Institute of Toluca, and later at the Colegio de San Juan de Letrán for law. He belonged to academic and literary associations such as the Mexican Drama Conservatory, the Nezahualcóyotl Society, the Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics, the Liceo Hidalgo and the Álvarez Club. A great defender of liberalism, Altamirano took part in the Ayutla revolution in 1854 against santanismo, and later in the war of the Reformation.. He also fought against the French invasion in 1863. After this period of military conflicts, Altamirano dedicated himself to teaching, working as a teacher in the National Preparatory School, in the School of Commerce and Administration, and in the National School of Teachers. He also worked in the press, where together with Guillermo Prieto and Ignacio Ramírez he founded the Correo de México, and with Gonzalo A. Esteva the literary magazine El Renacimiento. El Renacimiento published writers of all literary, ideological, and political tendencies, its main mission was to provoke the revival of Mexican literature and promote the notion of national unity and identity. Altamirano founded several newspapers and magazines such as: El Correo de México, El Renacimiento, El Federalista, La Tribuna and La República. In 1861, he served as a deputy in the Congress of the Union for three terms, during which he advocated free, secular and compulsory primary education. He was also Attorney General of the Republic, prosecutor, magistrate and president of the Supreme Court, as well as senior officer of the Ministry of Development. He also worked in the Mexican diplomatic service, serving as consul in Barcelona and Paris. Altamirano founded the Liceo de Puebla and the Escuela Normal de Profesores de México and wrote several highly successful books in his time, in which he cultivated different literary styles and genres, cultivating the short story, criticism, history, the essay, chronicles, biography, bibliographic studies, poetry, the novel. His literary works portray the Mexican society of the time. His critical studies were published in literary magazines in Mexico. His speeches have also been published. Altamirano loved the legends, customs, and descriptions of landscapes in Mexico. In 1867 he began to stand out and oriented his literature towards the affirmation of national values, he also worked as a literary historian and critic. He died in Italy in 1893 , on a diplomatic mission. On the centenary of his birth, his remains were deposited in the Rotunda of Illustrious Persons in Mexico City.
June 21, 1935
Deirdre Bair (born June 21, 1935) received her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and worked as a journalist on newspapers and magazines before returning to academic life and taking an M.A. and Ph.D. at Columbia University. She has taught at Trinity College (Connecticut) and Yale University, and teaches now in the English Department of the University of Pennsylvania. She is married, has two children, and lives in Connecticut.
November 13, 1946
Stanis?aw Bara?czak (November 13, 1946 – December 26, 2014) was a poet, literary critic, scholar, editor, translator and lecturer. He is perhaps most well known for his English-to-Polish translations of the dramas of William Shakespeare and of the poetry of E.E. Cummings, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Wystan Hugh Auden, Seamus Heaney, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Stearns Eliot, John Keats, Robert Frost, Edward Lear and others.
November 13, 1956
David Cesarani (13 November 1956 – 25 October 2015) was an English historian who specialised in Jewish history, especially the Holocaust. He also wrote several biographies, including Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (1998).
November 13, 1881
Knut Liestøl (13 November 1881 – 26 June 1952) was a Norwegian folklorist, Nynorsk proponent and politician. He was born in Åseral as a son of farmers Olav Knutson Liestøl (1855–1944) and Sigrid Røynelid (1856–1950). He was a nephew of Lars Liestøl. In July 1913 he married farmers' daughter Signe Høgetveit. Their son Olav became a noted glaciologist. A folklorist by profession, he took the doctor of philosophy degree in 1915 with the thesis Norske trollvisor og norrøne sogor. He was appointed as a docent in Nynorsk at the Royal Frederick University in 1909 and promoted to professor of folkloristics in 1917. He also served in Mowinckel's Third Cabinet as Minister of Education and Church Affairs 1933 to 1935. He was also the chairman of Noregs Mållag from 1925 to 1926. Liestøl was a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters from 1916 and graduated as a Knight, Grand Cross of the Order of the Falcon and the Order of the Three Stars. He resided at Ramstad. He died in June 1952 in Bærum.
November 13, 1911
John Jordan "Buck" O'Neil (November 13, 1911 – October 6, 2006) was a first baseman and manager in the Negro American League, mostly with the Kansas City Monarchs. After his playing days, he worked as a scout, and became the first African American coach in Major League Baseball. In his later years he became a popular and renowned speaker and interview subject, helping to renew widespread interest in the Negro leagues, and played a major role in establishing the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. O'Neil's life was documented in Joe Posnanski's award-winning 2007 book The Soul of Baseball.
November 13, 1782
Esaias Tegnér (13 November 1782, Värmland – 2 November 1846, Växjö, Småland), was a Swedish writer, professor of Greek language, and bishop. He was during the 19th century regarded as the father of modern poetry in Sweden, mainly through the national romantic epos Frithjof's Saga. He has been called Sweden's first modern man. Much is known about him, and he also wrote openly about himself.
November 14, 1935
Ferdinando Camon (born November 14, 1935, Urbana, Italy) is a contemporary Italian writer. He is married to a journalist and has two sons: Alessandro Camon, a film producer/writer who lives in Los Angeles, and Alberto, who teaches criminal procedure and lives in Bologna. He has contributed to a number of Italian and foreign daily newspapers, including La Stampa, l'Unità, Avvenire, Le Monde and La Nación. Perhaps Camon's best known work in English is his trilogy of fictional memoirs consisting of The Fifth Estate (Il Quinto Stato), Life Everlasting (La Vita Eterna), and Memorial (Un altare per la madre).
November 14, 1879
Henry de Monfreid (14 November 1879 in Leucate – 13 December 1974) was a French adventurer and author. Born in Leucate, Aude, France, he was the son of artist painter Georges-Daniel de Monfreid and knew Paul Gauguin as a child. ‘I have lived a rich, restless, magnificent life’, Monfreid declared a few days before dying in 1974 at the age of 95. Monfreid was one of those individuals who only find their true focus in life when they stumble across it on their travels. For Monfreid it was to be the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa coast from Tanzania to Aden, Yemen, the Arabian Peninsula and Suez, treacherous routes that he tirelessly sailed in his various expeditions as adventurer, smuggler and gunrunner (during which he said he more than once escaped the Royal Navy coast-guards cutters).
November 14, 1893
Carlo Emilio Gadda (November 14, 1893 – May 21, 1973) was an Italian writer and poet. He belongs to the tradition of the language innovators, writers that played with the somewhat stiff standard pre-war Italian language, and added elements of dialects, technical jargon and wordplay. Gadda was a practising engineer from Milan, and he both loved and hated his job. Critics have compared him to other writers with a scientific background, such as Primo Levi, Robert Musil and Thomas Pynchon—a similar spirit of exactitude pervades some of Gadda's books. Among Gadda's styles and genres are baroque, expressionism and grotesque. Carlo Emilio Gadda was born in Milan in 1893, and he was always intensely Milanese, although late in his life Florence and Rome also became an influence. Gadda's nickname is Il gran Lombardo, The Great Lombard: a reference to the famous lines 70-3 of Paradiso XVII, which predict the protection Dante would receive from Bartolomeo II della Scala of Verona during his exile from Florence: ‘Lo primo tuo refugio e 'l primo ostello / sarà la cortesia del gran Lombardo/ che 'n su la scala porta il santo uccello’ (‘Your first refuge and inn shall be the courtesy of the great Lombard, who bears on the ladder the sacred bird’). Gadda's father died in 1909, leaving the family in reduced economic conditions; Gadda's mother, however, never tried to adopt a cheaper style of life. The paternal business ineptitude and the maternal obsession for keeping ‘face’ and appearances turn up strongly in La cognizione del dolore. He studied in Milan, and while studying at the Politecnico di Milano (a university specialized in engineering and architecture), he volunteered for World War I. During the war he was a lieutenant of the Alpini corps, and led a machine-gun team. He was taken prisoner with his squad during the battle of Caporetto in October 1917; his brother was killed in a plane—and this tragic event death features prominently in La cognizione del dolore. Gadda, who was a fervent nationalist at that time, was deeply humiliated by the months he had to spend in a German POW camp. After the war, in 1920, Gadda finally graduated. He practised as an engineer until 1935, spending three of these years in Argentina. The country at that time was experiencing a booming economy, and Gadda used the experience for the fictional South American-cum-Brianza setting of La Cognizione del Dolore. After that, in the 1940s, he dedicated himself to literature. These were the years of fascism, that found him a grumbling and embittered pessimist. With age, his bitterness and misanthropy somewhat intensified. In Eros e Priapo (1945) Gadda analyzes the collective phenomena that favoured the rise of Italian Fascism, the Italian fascination with Benito Mussolini. It explains Fascism as an essentially bourgeois movement. Eros e Priapo was refused in 1945 by a magazine for is allegedly obscene content, and will only be published for the first time in 1967 by Garzanti. The 1967 edition however was expurgated from some of what Gadda considered the post heavy satiric strokes. The unexpurgated original 1945 edition will be published in 2013. In 1946, the magazine Letteratura published, in five episodes, the crime novel Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, which was translated into English as That Awful Mess on Via Merulana. It experiments heavily with language, borrowing a great deal from several Italian dialects. It is also notable for not telling whodunnit at the end. There is some debate amongst scholars as regards Gadda's sexual orientation. Certainly, his work demonstrates a strongly subversive attitude towards bourgeois values, expressed above all by a discordant use of language interspersed with dialect, academic and technical jargon and dirty talk. This is particularly interesting as the criticism of the bourgeois life comes, as it were, from the inside, with the former engineer cutting a respectable figure in genteel poverty. Gadda kept writing until his death, in 1973. The most important critic of Gadda was Gianfranco Contini.
November 14, 1915
Edward Digby Baltzell (November 14, 1915 – August 17, 1996) was an American sociologist, academic and author. He became an eminent professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and was credited with popularizing the acronym WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). His work shed new light on the ruling elite of America, changing public perceptions of American society and history.
November 14, 1913
Born on 14th November 1913 into a poor family living in Hull, Dan Billany left school at the age of fourteen, and became an errand boy and later an electrician. He always had an ambition to write and struggled to work while attending evening classes at the local Technical College. He won a scholarship for Hull University,and took an English Honours Degree in 1937 and obtained his teaching certificate. In 1938 Dan Billany joined the staff of Chiltern Street School. One of the biggest influences on Dan was the success of the controversial school, Summerhill run by A.S Neill. Inspired by a visit to the school Dan determined to teach as much as possible with fun, sympathy and understanding. His pupils called him Dan, and he went on to immortalize his class, Standard Three in his book The Magic Door published by Thomas Nelson & Son in 1943. WWII started and Billany joined the East Yorkshire Regiment.By now Dan's first book, The Opera House Murders had caught the attention of T. S. Eliot then working for Faber and Faber. Snapped up and published (in the USA as It Takes a Thief ) it was a best seller, and while on the troopship Mauritania. Dan set about writing a follow-up novel to be called The Whispering. Believed never to have been finished, The Whispering was found and published in 2008. Dan Billany was never to return from WWII. When all hopes of finding Dan were fading, thirteen exercise books arrived at his parents home in Somerset. These books were posted by an Italian farmer, Dino Meletti, with whom Dan had stayed while trying to make his way back to safety behind the Allied Lines. These books contained manuscripts to Dan Billany's books The Trap and The Cage (co written with David Dowie). Both books were subsequently published to great acclaim,but of Dan nothing more was heard. Dan Billany's remarkable story is told in his biography Dan Billany Hull's Lost Hero by Valerie A Reeves and Valerie Showan. Much of Dan Billany's unpublished work has survived, including Poems, Books and Plays.This website is dedicated to Dan Billany and offers views of his previously unseen work. Reports that Dan Billany was killed tackling an informer and buried in Fermo, proved to be untrue. To this day the fates of Dan Billany and David Dowie remain unknown. The map below indicates the journey as far as Capistrello where they were last seen.
November 14, 1951
Cara Black (born November 14, 1951) is a bestselling American mystery writer. She is best known for her Aimée Leduc mystery novels featuring a female Paris-based private investigator. Black is included in the Great Women Mystery Writers by Elizabeth Lindsay 2nd edition. Her first novel Murder in the Marais was nominated for an Anthony Award for best first novel and the third novel in the series, Murder in the Sentier, was Anthony-nominated for Best Novel. Black was born in Chicago, Illinois on November 14, 1951. She was educated at Cañada College in California, Sophia University in Yotsuya, Tokyo in Japan, and finished her schooling at San Francisco State University where she earned a bachelor's and master's degrees in education. She has worked as a preschool teacher and as director of a preschool. Black lives in San Francisco with her husband, a bookseller, and their teenage son.
November 14, 1921
William H. Hooks was born and raised on a farm in North Carolina, where his great-grandmother told him many stories about relatives who had pulled up stakes and headed west in horse-drawn wagons. These stories were part of his inspiration for Pioneer Cat. He has written more than 40 other books for children, including magical picture books such as The Legend of the Christmas Rose and The Mighty Santa Fe. Born in North Carolina, James Ransome is a graduate of the Pratt Institute with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in illustration. While still a student at Pratt, James was one of twelve finalists out of two thousand selected to illustrate the annual Citibank calendar. After graduation, James continued to study painting at the Art Students League where his entry into the Society of Illustrators Annual Student Scholarship Competition received the Jellybean award. Currently a member of the Society of Illustrators, James has illustrated numerous books for children, including Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt and Freedom's Fruit. His illustrations also appear on book jackets, greeting cards, puzzles and shopping bags, as well as in magazines and calendars. One of James's paintings is in the Charlotte (North Carolina) Public Library's permanent children's book art collection.
November 14, 1840
Oscar-Claude Monet (14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was a founder of French Impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein air landscape painting. The term "Impressionism" is derived from the title of his painting Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), which was exhibited in 1874 in the first of the independent exhibitions mounted by Monet and his associates as an alternative to the Salon de Paris. Monet's ambition of documenting the French countryside led him to adopt a method of painting the same scene many times in order to capture the changing of light and the passing of the seasons. From 1883 Monet lived in Giverny, where he purchased a house and property and began a vast landscaping project which included lily ponds that would become the subjects of his best-known works. In 1899 he began painting the water lilies, first in vertical views with a Japanese bridge as a central feature, and later in the series of large-scale paintings that was to occupy him continuously for the next 20 years of his life. Claire Joyes has written several books about Claude Monet, and in this book she has created a richly detailed picture of Monet's private world. She and her husband, Jean-Marie Toulgouat, Madame Monet's great-grandson, live at Giverny and were closely involved in the faithful restoration of the gardens, which are now open to the public.
November 14, 1920
Jan Sebastian Rabie (14 November 1920 - 15 November 2001) was an Afrikaans writer of short stories, novels and other literary works. He was born in George, and was the writer of twenty-one works. He was included under the Sestigers, a group of influential Afrikaans writers of the 1960s.
November 14, 1900
Aaron Copland’s well-known and highly regarded compositions, performed and recorded extensively throughout the world, include the Pulitzer Prize–winning ballet Appalachian Spring, as well as Billy the Kid, Rodeo, Lincoln Portrait, and the film scores of Our Town and The Heiress. On being awarded a Congressional Gold Medal in 1986, Copland was praised for his uniquely American music that reflects the very soul and experience of our people. During his career, Copland taught composition at Harvard and the Berkshire Music Center, lectured all over the United States, and wrote Our New Music and Music and Imagination. He died in 1990.
November 15, 1930
James Graham ‘J. G.’ Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, and prominent member of the New Wave movement in science fiction. His best-known books are Crash (1973), adapted into a film by David Cronenberg, and the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun (1984), made into a film by Steven Spielberg, based on Ballard's boyhood in the Shanghai International Settlement and internment by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War. The literary distinctiveness of his work has given rise to the adjective ‘Ballardian‘, defined by the Collins English Dictionary as ‘resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard’s novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.’ Ballard was diagnosed with prostate cancer in June 2006, from which he died in London in April 2009. In 2008, The Times included Ballard on its list of ‘The 50 greatest British writers since 1945’.
November 15, 1920
Gesualdo Bufalino (Comiso, Italy, 15 November 1920 - 14 June 1996), was an Italian writer. Gesualdo Bufalino was born in Comiso, Sicily. He studied literature and was a high-school professor in his hometown, for most of his life. Immediately after World War II, he had to spend some time in an hospital for tuberculosis; hence he drew the material for the novel Diceria dell'untore (The Plague Sower). The book was written in 1950, but was published only in 1981, thanks to Bufalino's friend and well-known writer Leonardo Sciascia who discovered his talents. In 1988, the novel Le menzogne della notte (Night's Lies) won the Strega Prize. In 1990 he won the Nino Martoglio International Book Award. In his native town the Biblioteca di Bufalino (‘Bufalino's Library’) is now named after him.
November 15,1776
José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (November 15, 1776 – June 21, 1827), Mexican writer and political journalist, best known as the author of El Periquillo Sarniento (1816), translated as The Mangy Parrot in English, reputed to be the first novel written in Latin America. Lizardi, as he is generally known, was born in Mexico City when it was still the capital of the colonial Spanish viceroyalty of New Spain. His father was a physician employed in and around Mexico City, who for a time supplemented the family income by writing. Likewise, his mother came from a family of modest but "decent" means; her own father had been a bookseller in the nearby city of Puebla. The death of Lizardi’s father after a short illness in 1798 forced the young man to leave his studies in the Colegio de San Ildefonso and enter the civil service as a minor magistrate in the Taxco-Acapulco region. He married in Taxco in 1805. The necessity of providing for a growing family led Lizardi to supplement his meager income as his father had, by writing. He began his literary career in 1808 by publishing a poem in honor of Ferdinand VII of Spain. Though Ferdinand VII later became a target of nationalist rage among pro-independence Mexicans because of his tendency toward despotism, his politics were still unknown in 1808, the year of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain. With Napoleon’s brother-in-law usurping the Spanish throne and the legitimate king in exile, raising a public voice in his favor was a patriotic stance for a Mexican intellectual, and in line with Lizardi’s later proto-nationalist views. At the beginning of the Mexican War of Independence in November 1810, Morelos’s insurgent forces fought their way into Taxco where Lizardi was heading the local government as acting Subdelegado (the highest provincial government position in the colonial system). After an initial insurgent victory, Lizardi tried to play both sides: he turned over the city’s armory to the insurgents, but he also informed the vice-royalty of rebel movements. Judged in the context of his later writings, these actions do not appear hypocritical. Lizardi was always supportive of the intellectual aims and reformist politics of the insurgents, but was equally opposed to war and bloodshed. By peacefully capitulating Taxco to the insurgents, he aimed to avoid loss of life in the city then under his command. Following the royalist recapture of Taxco in January 1811, Lizardi was taken prisoner as a rebel sympathizer and sent with the other prisoners of war to Mexico City. There he appealed successfully to the viceroy, arguing that he had acted only to protect Taxco and its citizens from harm. Lizardi was now free and living in Mexico City, but he had lost his job and his possessions. He turned now to full-time writing and publishing to support his family, publishing more than twenty lightly satirical poems in broadsheets and pamphlets in the course of the year. After a limited freedom of the press was declared in Mexico on October 5, 1812 (see Spanish Constitution of 1812), Lizardi quickly organized one of the first non-governmental newspapers in the country. The first issue of his El Pensador Mexicano ("The Mexican Thinker," a title he adopted as his own pseudonym) came out on October 9, just four days after press freedom was allowed. In his journalism, Lizardi turned from the light social criticism of his earlier broadsheets to direct commentary on the political problems of the day, attacking the autocratic tendencies of the viceregal government and supporting the liberal aspirations represented by the Cortes in Spain. His articles show the influence of Enlightenment ideas derived from clandestine readings of forbidden books by Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, a hazardous route to take in those hopeful but uncertain times. In the ninth issue of El Pensador Mexicano (December 1812), Lizardi attacked viceroy Francisco Javier Venegas directly, resulting in his arrest. He continued to issue the paper from his jail cell, but he dismayed pro-independence readers by suppressing his sympathies for the insurgents and muting critiques of the system that had imprisoned him. When a new viceroy, Félix María Calleja, was named in March 1813, Lizardi lavished praise on him; the viceroy responded by freeing Lizardi after seven months of jail. Lizardi continued to write and publish his periodicals after his release, but increased attention from royalist censors and the Inquisition muted his critical tone. When victory over Napoleon in Europe led to the reestablishment of an authoritarian monarchy, the overthrow of the Spanish Cádiz Cortes, and the abrogation of freedom of the press in 1814, Lizardi turned from journalism to literature as a means of expressing his social criticism. This social and political conjuncture led to Lizardi's writing and publication of El Periquillo Sarniento, which is commonly recognized as the first novel by a Mexican and the first Latin American novel. Though it is a novel in form and scope, El Periquillo Sarniento resembled Lizardi’s periodicals in several ways: he printed and sold it in weekly chapter installments throughout 1816; he wove extensive commentary on the political and moral climate of Mexico into the narration; and, like his periodicals, the novel was eventually halted by censorship. The first three volumes slipped past the censor, as Lizardi had hoped they would in their fictionalized guise, but Lizardi’s direct attack on the institution of slavery (in the form called Asiento) in the fourth volume was enough to have the publication stopped. The final sixteen chapters of El Periquillo were only published in 1830 - 1831, after Lizardi’s death and a decade following Mexican independence. Lizardi’s other works of fiction also appeared by installments during the years of renewed royalist repression that lasted until 1820: Fábulas (collection of fables, 1817), Noches tristes (novel, 1818), La Quijotita y su prima (novel, 1818–1819) and Don Catrín de la Fachenda (completed 1820, published 1832). With the re-establishment of the liberal Spanish constitution in 1820, Lizardi returned to journalism, only to be attacked, imprisoned, and censored again by a changing roster of political enemies. Royalists repressed him until the independence of Mexico in 1821; centralists opposed to his federalist leanings attacked him after independence; throughout, he suffered attacks by the Catholic hierarchy, opposed to his Masonic leanings. Lizardi died of tuberculosis in 1827 at the age of 50. Because of his family’s extreme poverty he was buried in an anonymous grave, without the epitaph he had hoped would be engraved on his tombstone: "Here lie the ashes of the Mexican Thinker, who did the best he could for his country." It is unfortunate that today Lizardi is remembered primarily by educators, teachers, university students, and government officials in Latin America, reflecting a possible deterioration of quality education in the region.
November 15, 1959
Tibor Fischer (born 15 November 1959 in Stockport, England) is a British novelist and short story writer.
November 15, 1910
Sir Hugh Carleton Greene (15 November 1910 – 19 February 1987) was a British journalist and television executive. He was Director-General of the BBC from 1960 to 1969, and is generally credited with modernising an organisation that had fallen behind in the wake of the launch of ITV in 1955. He was the brother of Graham Greene, the English novelist.
November 15, 1670
Bernard Mandeville, or Bernard de Mandeville (15 November 1670 – 21 January 1733), was an Anglo-Dutch philosopher, political economist and satirist. Born in Rotterdam, Netherlands, he lived most of his life in England and used English for most of his published works. He became famous for The Fable of the Bees.
November 15, 1941
Daniel Pinkwater is regarded by critics, educators, psychologists, and law enforcement agencies as the world's most influential writer of books for children and young adults. Since 1987, he has been a regular commentator on NPR's All Things Considered and two collections of his essays have been brought out to the delight of listeners who can read. He lives in Hyde Park, New York.
November 15, 1905
Leopold Buczkowski (15 November 1905 in Nakwaszy - 27 April 1989 in Warsaw) was a Polish poet, painter, graphic artist, sculptor.
November 15, 1946
David Carkeet (born November 15, 1946, Sonora, California) is an American novelist and essayist. Three of his novels have been named New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year. Carkeet grew up in the small northern California town where he was born and attended the University of California at Davis and Berkeley, graduating from the Davis campus with a B.A. degree in German in 1968. He received an M.A. in English literature from the University of Wisconsin in 1970 and a Ph.D. in English linguistics from Indiana University in 1973. From 1973 to 2002 he taught writing and linguistics at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. He married Barbara Lubin of Elmira, New York, in 1975, and they raised three daughters, Anne, Laurie, and Molly. He has lived in Middlesex, Vermont, since 2003. Carkeet has written six novels for adults, two novels for young adults, and one memoir. A comic writer in the vein of Kingsley Amis, David Lodge, and Peter De Vries, he is best known for his three novels featuring a linguist named Jeremy Cook as the protagonist.
November 15, 1862
Gerhart Hauptmann (15 November 1862 – 6 June 1946) was a German dramatist and novelist. He is counted among the most important promoters of literary naturalism, though he integrated other styles into his work as well. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1912.
November 15, 1889
Taha Hussein (November 15, 1889 – October 28, 1973) was one of the most influential 20th-century Egyptian writers and intellectuals, and a figurehead for The Egyptian Renaissance and the modernist movement in the Middle East and North Africa. His sobriquet was "The Dean of Arabic Literature". He was nominated for a Nobel prize in literature fourteen times. Taha Hussein was born in Izbet el Kilo, a village in the Minya Governorate in central Upper Egypt. He went to a kuttab, and thereafter was admitted to El Azhar University, where he studied Religion and Arabic literature. From an early age, he was reluctant to take the traditional education to his heart. Hussein was the seventh of thirteen children, born into a lower-middle-class family. He became blind at the age of three, the result of faulty treatment by an unskilled practitioner, a condition which caused him a great deal of anguish throughout his entire life. Hussein met and married Suzanne Bresseau (1895–1989) while attending the University of Montpellier in France. She was referred to as "sweet voice". This name came from her ability to read to him as he was trying to improve his grasp of the French language. Suzanne became his wife, best friend and the mother of his two children and was his mentor throughout his life. Taha Hussein's children, his daughter Amina and her younger brother Moenis, were both important figures in Egypt. Amina, who died at the age of 70, was among the first Egyptian women to graduate from Cairo University. She and her brother, Moenis, translated his Adib (The Intellectual) into French. This was especially important to their father, who was an Egyptian who had moved to France and learned the language. When the secular Cairo University was founded in 1908, he was keen to be admitted, and despite being blind and poor he won a place. In 1914, he became the second graduate to receive a PhD, with a thesis on the sceptic poet and philosopher Abu-Alala' Al-Ma'ari. He went on to become a professor of Arabic literature there. In 1919, he was appointed a professor of history at Cairo University. Additionally, he was the founding Rector of the University of Alexandria. Although he wrote many novels and essays, in the West he is best known for his autobiography, Al-Ayyam (The Days) which was published in English as An Egyptian Childhood (1932) and The Stream of Days (1943). However, it was his book of literary criticism On Pre-Islamic Poetry of 1926 that bought him some fame in the Arab world. In this book, he expressed doubt about the authenticity of much early Arabic poetry, claiming it to have been falsified during ancient times due to tribal pride and rivalry between tribes. He also hinted indirectly that the Qur'an should not be taken as an objective source of history. Consequently, the book aroused the intense anger and hostility of the religious scholars at Al Azhar and many other traditionalists, and he was accused of having insulted Islam. However, the public prosecutor stated that what Taha Hussein had said was the opinion of an academic researcher and no legal action was taken against him, although he lost his post at Cairo University in 1931. His book was banned but was re-published the next year with slight modifications under the title On Pre-Islamic Literature (1927). Taha Hussein was an intellectual of the Egyptian Renaissance and a proponent of the ideology of Egyptian nationalism along with what he called Pharaonism, believing that Egyptian civilization was diametrically opposed to Arab civilization, and that Egypt would only progress by reclaiming its ancient pre-Islamic roots. After Hussein obtained his MA from the University of Montpellier, he continued his studies and received another PhD at the Sorbonne. With this accomplishment, Hussein became the first Egyptian and member of the mission to receive an MA and a doctorate (PhD) from France. For his doctoral dissertation, written in 1917, Hussein wrote on Ibn Khaldun, a Tunisian historian, claimed by some to be the founder of sociology. Two years later, in 1919, Hussein made his way back to Egypt from France with his wife, Suzanne, and was appointed professor of history at Cairo University. In 1950, Hussein was appointed Minister of Education, and was able to put into action his motto: "Education is like the air we breathe and the water we drink." Mr. Farid Shehata was his personal secretary and his eyes and ears during this period. Without Taha Hussein and his passion to promote education, millions of Egyptians would never have become literate. In 1950, he was appointed a Minister of Knowledge (Ministry of Education nowadays) in which capacity he led a call for free education and the right of everyone to be educated. Additionally, he was an advocate against the confinement of education to the rich people only. In that respect, he said, "Education is as water and air, the right of every human being". Consequently, in his hands, education became free and Egyptians started getting free education. He also transformed many of the Quranic schools into primary schools and converted a number of high schools into colleges such as the Graduate Schools of Medicine and Agriculture. He is also credited with establishing a number of new universities. Taha Hussein held the position of chief editor of a number of newspapers and wrote innumerable articles. He was also a member of several scientific academies in Egypt and around the world.
November 15, 1942
Dr. Theodore Kornwiebel, Jr. was born on November 15, 1942. His interest in railroading began as a child when he read every railroad book in the library. He became involved in the civil rights movement in the 1960s. He says that "what really sealed my passion for African-American history was my first teaching job, which was at a still-segregated, all black state college in Texas, Prairie View A&M College (The African-American Railroad Experience, KPBS.org, p. 7 of 19) While studying for his Ph.D. in African American Studies at Yale in the late 1960s, Dr. Kornweibel volunteered as a gandy dancer (track maintenance worker) on the Valley Railroad (an abandoned New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad line) tourist train service in eastern Connecticut. After he received his degree from Yale, Dr. Kornweibel took a job at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania teaching black studies. He became a volunteer track worker on the New Hope & Ivyland Railroad tourist line near Philadelphia. In 1977, he moved to California to teach African American Studies at San Diego State University and started volunteering at the Pacific Southwest Railway Museum in Campo, which he continues to do after 30 years. In 1993, when the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania asked him to recommend an authority on African American railroad history to give a presentation. Dr. Kornweibel offered to prepare a lecture and slide presentation "Box Cars On My Mind: The African American Railroad Heritage," which he brought to other railroad museums, including the California State Railroad Museum in 1994. He began in-depth research into the subject during a sabbatical taken in 1999-2000, which culminated in his book RAILROADS IN THE AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: A PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNEY, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.) Dr. Kornweibel's other publications include: THE DISPUTE OVER THE USE OF COLORED TROOPS AT THE BATTLE OF THE CRATER, JULY 30 1864. MA Thesis/Dissertation, University of Santa Barbara, 1963. The occupation of Santa Catalina Island during the Civil War, CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY QUARTERLY, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Dec. 1967), pp. 345-357. THE MESSENGER MAGAZINE: 1917-1928. Thesis/Dissertation, Yale University, 1972. NO CRYSTAL STAIR: BLACK LIFE AND THE MESSENGER, 1917-1928. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., 1975. Waiting for the war to come: Union camp life in 1861-1862, NIAGARA FRONTIER, Vol. 22 (Winter 1975), pp. 87-97. An economic profile of black life in the twenties, JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES, Vol. 6, No. 4 (June 1976), pp. 307-320. IN SEARCH OF THE PROMISED LAND: ESSAYS IN BLACK URBAN HISTORY. Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1981. Humphrey Bogart’s sabara: Propaganda, cinema, and the American character in World War II, AMERICAN STUDIES, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 1981), pp. 5-19. Apathy and dissent: Black America’s negative responses to World War I, SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY, Vol. 80, No. 3 (Summer 1981), pp. 322-338. Life after Milwaukee? TRAINS MAGAZINE, October 1981, pp. 26-29. FEDERAL SURVEILLANCE OF AFRO-AMERICANS, 1917-1925 THE FIRST WORLD WAR, THE RED SCARE, AND THE GARVEY MOVEMENT, edited by Theodore Kornweibel. Frederick, Maryland: University Publisher of America, 1985. BISHOP C.H. MASON AND THE CHURCH OF GOD IN CHRIST DURING WORLD WAR I: THE PERILS OF CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTION. Natchitoches, Louisiana: Southern Studies Institute of Northwestern State University, 1987. SEEING RED: FEDERAL CAMPAIGNS AGAINST BLACK MILITANCY, 1919-1925. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1998. FEDERAL INJUSTICE: CAMPAIGNS AGAINST BLACK MILITANCY DURING THE FIRST RED SCARE. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1998. INVESTIGATE EVERYTHING: FEDERAL EFFORTS TO COMPEL BLACK LOYALTY DURING WORLD WAR I. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. VOOGD, Race riots and resistance: The red summer of 1919, THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY, Vol. 76, No. 3 (2010), p. 771. Dr. Kornweibel is currently a professor emeritus in African American history at San Diego State University. He and his wife, Catherine have two sons, Daniel and James.
November 15, 1887
Georgia Totto O'Keeffe (November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986) was an American artist. She was best known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. O'Keeffe has been recognized as the "Mother of American modernism". In 1905, O'Keeffe began her serious formal art training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and then the Art Students League of New York, but she felt constrained by her lessons that focused on recreating or copying what was in nature. In 1908, unable to fund further education, she worked for two years as a commercial illustrator, and then spent seven years between 1911 and 1918 teaching in Virginia, Texas, and South Carolina. During that time, she studied art during the summers between 1912 and 1914 and was introduced to the principles and philosophies of Arthur Wesley Dow, who espoused created works of art based upon personal style, design, and interpretation of subjects, rather than trying to copy or represent them. This caused a major change in the way she felt about and approached art, as seen in the beginning stages of her watercolors from her studies at the University of Virginia and more dramatically in the charcoal drawings that she produced in 1915 that led to total abstraction. Alfred Stieglitz, an art dealer and photographer, held an exhibit of her works in 1917. Over the next couple of years, she taught and continued her studies at the Teachers College, Columbia University in 1914 and 1915. She moved to New York in 1918 at Stieglitz's request and began working seriously as an artist. They developed a professional relationship—he promoted and exhibited her works—and a personal relationship that led to their marriage in 1924. O'Keeffe created many forms of abstract art, including close-ups of flowers, such as the Red Canna paintings, that many found to represent women's genitalia,[citation needed] although O'Keeffe consistently denied that intention.[citation needed] The reputation of the portrayal of women's sexuality was also fueled by explicit and sensuous photographs that Stieglitz had taken and exhibited of O'Keeffe. O'Keeffe and Stieglitz lived together in New York until 1929, when O'Keeffe began spending part of the year in the Southwest, which served as inspiration for her paintings of New Mexico landscapes and images of animal skulls, such as Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue and Ram's Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills. After Stieglitz's death, she lived permanently in New Mexico at Georgia O'Keeffe Home and Studio in Abiquiú, until the last years of her life when she lived in Santa Fe. In 2014, O'Keeffe's 1932 painting Jimson Weed sold for $44,405,000, more than three times the previous world auction record for any female artist. After her death, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum was established in Santa Fe.
November 15, 1906
Born Juanita Lorraine Light in Oklahoma on November 15, 1906, Sheridan claimed in a lengthy letter to her editor at the Doubleday, Doran Crime Club that she came by her knack for murder naturally since her maternal grandfather was killed by Pancho Villa in a holdup while her own father may possibly have been poisoned by a political rival. After her father’s death, Sheridan and her mother hit the road, touring the American West. When she was on vacation from boarding school, Sheridan was often put by her mother on a train with a tag around my neck which told my name and destination. I was never afraid, and never lost. That self-reliance came in handy years later when at the height of the Depression (ca. 1930) Sheridan, with an infant son in arms, found herself dropped off at the corner of 7th and Broadway in Los Angeles with only two suitcases and five cents to her name. She used the nickel to telephone a friend, who loaned her five dollars, and went out and got a job as a script girl for $20 a week. Her son Ross went to live with a rich Beverly Hills foster family and at about the age of six was legally adopted by his maternal grandmother. After the adoption, Sheridan, who had by then sold a couple of original screenplays, headed for Hawaii to begin her writing career. Life wasn’t all that easy in Hawaii and once again she hit the pawnshops, although, as usual, the typewriter was the last to go. Sheridan said these tough times taught her that it isn’t the smugly prosperous who offer to help. It’s the poor little guys who know what it’s like; it’s the landlady, worrying over her mortgage, who lets you sleep in her garage when you owe three months’ rent. It’s the tired counter man, seeing you order black coffee and soup when your neck bones look like coat hangers, who says, ‘Why don’t you take the roast beef, kid? It’s on the house.’ It’s the shabby girl behind you in line waiting for a job addressing envelopes at $3.50 per day, who catches you when your knees buckle and says, ‘Here’s a buck, honey. I can spare it. Gotta boy friend.’ No doubt these years of deprivation are why Sheridan filled her books with detailed descriptions of sumptuous surroundings and with characters like Louise in The Chinese Chop, who longed for luxury and admitted that the slogan of a popular ad campaign of the time, because you like nice things, was aimed at her.
November 15, 1935
Gustaf Sobin (1935-2005) was a poet, novelist, and essayist. His books include the novel THE FLY-TRUFFLER and LUMINOUS DEBRIS: REFLECTING ON VESTIGE IN PROVENCE AND LANGUEDOC (UC Press).
November 15, 1906
Hampton Stone was the nom de plume of the American novelist Aaron Marc Stein (1906 – August 29, 1985), who specialized in mystery fiction. Stein also wrote under the name George Bagby Bagby's focus was on police investigators, especially the fictional Inspector Schmidt, Chief of Homicide for the New York Police Department. In the Schmidt novels, mystery-writer Bagby himself appears as 'the Watson to Schmidt's Holmes, following him on cases, and acting as biographer.'
November 15, 1974
Brian Teare is the author of the award-winning The Room Where I Was Born, as well as the forthcoming volume Pleasure and two chapbooks. He has received Stegner, National Endowment for the Arts, and MacDowell Colony poetry fellowships.
November 15, 1947
Norman Arlott is one of the world’s leading bird artists. His books include Birds of the West Indies and the two-volume Birds of Europe, Russia, China, and Japan (all Princeton). Princeton Illustrated Checklists.
November 16, 1930
CHINUA ACHEBE published THINGS FALL APART in 1958. It was followed by NO LONGER AT EASE (AWS 3) and ARROW OF GOD (AWS 16). A MAN OF THE PEOPLE (AWS 31) aroused widespread interest on publication at the time of the January 1966 coup because of its prophetic ending. The effects of his novels, and of his editorship of the African Writers Series has had a dramatic impact on the development of the literature of Africa. Some of the stories in GIRLS AT WAR (AWS 100) and some of the poems in BEWARE SOUL BROTHER (AWS 120) are set in the war. His essays were published in 1975 under the title MORNING YET ON CREATION DAY (Heinemann). He was educated at Government College, Umuahia and University College, Ibadan. By the time he left the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation in 1966 he had become Director of External Broadcasting. Since the war he has been at the Universities of Nigeria, Massachusetts and Connecticut. He has now returned to Nsukka. Among many recent honours has been the award of a Fellowship of the Modern Languages Association of America and of Doctorates at the Universities of Stirling and Southampton. He has recently followed Heinrich Boll, the Nobel prizewinner, as the recipient of the Scottish Arts Council's Neil Gunn Fellowship. Chinua Achebe is best known as a novelist. But the years of the Nigerian crisis and the civil war were not, for both practical and psychological reasons, a time for work on full-length novels. He found poetry a means of expressing his distress, even though few of the poems speak directly of the war. He has added some new poems to this collection which has already been published in Nigeria.
November 16, 1943
Phillip Lopate is the author of many books, including the essay collections GETTING PERSONAL (Basic), AGAINST JOIE DE VIVRE (Simon & Schuster), PORTRAIT OF MY BODY (Doubleday), and BACHELORHOOD (Little, Brown), as well as the anthology, THE ART OF THE PERSONAL ESSAY (Doubleday). Among his other books is Waterfront: A WALK AROUND MANHATTAN (Crown). He teaches writing at Columbia University, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
November 16, 1932
René Philoctète (1932–1995) was born in Jérémie, Haiti. Inspired by Rimbaud, he published ten poetry collections, four plays, and three novels. In the early 1960s, he founded the Literary Haiti group, and then a few years later was cofounder of spiralism—the most marked movement in Haitian poetry of the 20th century. Philoctete’s work is based in Haitian realism, and his writing still has a political urgency to it, always fighting against violence and dictatorships. Some of Philoctete’s most notable poems are Saison des hommes (1960), which was also his first published poem, Les Tambours du Soleil (1962), and Ces Iles qui Marchent (1969). His novel Massacre River was translated into English by Linda Coverdale and published by New Directions in 2005. It is noted for its lucid metaphors and experimental prose and features a preface by Edwidge Danticat and an introduction by Lyonel Trouillot.
November 16, 1922
José de Sousa Saramago (16 November 1922 – 18 June 2010) was a Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature. His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the human factor. Harold Bloom described Saramago as ‘the greatest living novelist’ and considers him to be ‘a permanent part of the Western canon‘, while James Wood praises ‘the distinctive tone to his fiction because he narrates his novels as if he were someone both wise and ignorant.’ More than two million copies of Saramago's books have been sold in Portugal alone and his work has been translated into 25 languages. A proponent of libertarian communism, Saramago was criticized by institutions such as the Catholic Church, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, with whom he disagreed on various issues. An atheist, he defended love as an instrument to improve the human condition. In 1992, the Government of Portugal under Prime Minister Aníbal Cavaco Silva ordered the removal of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ from the Aristeion Prize's shortlist, claiming the work was religiously offensive. Disheartened by this political censorship of his work, Saramago went into exile on the Spanish island of Lanzarote, upon which he resided until his death in 2010. Saramago was a founding member of the National Front for the Defense of Culture in Lisbon in 1992, and co-founder with Orhan Pamuk, of the European Writers' Parliament (EWP).
November 16, 1954
Andrea Barrett (born November 16, 1954) is an American novelist and short story writer. Her collection Ship Fever won the 1996 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction, and she received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001. Her book Servants of the Map was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Archangel was a finalist for the 2013 Story Prize. Barrett was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She earned a B.A. in biology from Union College and briefly attended a Ph.D. program in zoology. Barrett began writing fiction seriously in her thirties, but was relatively unknown until the publication of Ship Fever, a collection of novella and short stories that won the National Book Award in 1996. Barrett's work has been published in A Public Space, The Paris Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, One Story, Triquarterly, Salmagundi, The American Scholar, and The Kenyon Review, among other places. Her fiction and essays have been selected for Best American Short Stories, Best American Science Writing, Best American Essays, the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and other anthologies. Barrett is particularly well known as a writer of historical fiction. Her work reflects her lifelong interest in science, and women in science. Many of her characters are scientists, often 19th-century biologists. As in the work of William Faulkner, some of her characters have appeared in more than one story or novel. In an appendix to her recent novel, The Air We Breathe (2007), Barrett supplied a family tree, making clear the characters' relationships that began in Ship Fever. Although each novel and story is self-contained, the reader comprehends an added dimension when familiar with the characters' previous histories. Barrett teaches at Williams College in Massachusetts and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers in North Carolina. She was a fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in North Adams, Massachusetts. Barrett also teaches at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.
November 16, 1961
Karen Duve (born 16 November 1961 in Hamburg) is a German author. After secondary school, she worked as a proof-reader and taxi driver in Hamburg. Since 1990 she has been a freelance writer.
November 16, 1899
Dr. Lorenzo Johnston Greene was a pioneering African American historian. Greene was born on November 16, 1899 in Ansonia, Connecticut. He received his BA from Howard University in Washington, D.C. in 1924 and his MA in history from Columbia University in 1926. From 1928 to 1933, Greene served as a field representative and research assistant to Carter Woodson, the director of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History, ASALH) in Washington, D.C. This collaboration helped inspire the 1930 publication with Woodson of The Negro Wage Earner. In 1931, Greene published The Employment of Negroes in the District of Columbia, a collaborative effort with Myra C. Callis. Both studies demonstrate Greene’s interest in urban history, social history, and race relations. Although he was inspired by Woodson and saw him as a mentor, Greene made his own lasting contributions to the field of history. His most significant academic work was a pioneering study of blacks in Missouri entitled Missouri’s Black Heritage published in 1980 as a collaborative effort with Antonio F. Holland and Gary Kremer. Lorenzo Greene served as instructor and professor of history at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri from 1933 to 1972. During this period he continued his graduate studies and received his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University in 1942. That same year, he published The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620-1776. His interest in race and labor issues helped to revolutionize labor historiography with a greater emphasis on African Americans and other laborers, both free and unfree. The Negro in Colonial New England is still considered the foundational work on the subject. Professor Greene served on a number of committees and associations and was editor of the Midwest Journal from 1947 to 1956. He was also the President of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History from 1965 to 1966. Greene’s academic interests included urban history, race and labor in Colonial America, Missouri history, the American Midwest, and New England history. Dr. Greene’s interest in racial justice issues led him to serve as the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Education of the Missouri Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights from 1959 to 1961. Greene worked actively on educational issues in Missouri and spearheaded efforts to desegregate Kansas City schools in the early 1970s. Lorenzo Greene married Thomasina Tally in 1942. He died on January 24, 1988 in Jefferson City, Missouri. His Working with Carter G. Woodson, the Father of Black History, a Diary, 1928-1930 was published posthumously. The Lorenzo Johnston Greene Papers are now available at the Library of Congress. Arvarh E. Strickland is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He has numerous books to his credit, including his introduction to and edition of Working with Carter G. Woodson, the Father of Black History: A Diary, 1928-1930 by Lorenzo J. Greene.
November 16, 1948
Bonnie Greer, OBE (born 16 November 1948, Chicago), is an American-British playwright, novelist and critic. She is also the Chancellor of Kingston University in Kingston upon Thames, London.
November 16, 1922
Sidney Wilfred Mintz (November 16, 1922 – December 27, 2015) was an anthropologist best known for his studies of the Caribbean, creolization, and the anthropology of food. Mintz received his PhD at Columbia University in 1951 and conducted his primary fieldwork among sugar-cane workers in Puerto Rico. Later expanding his ethnographic research to Haiti and Jamaica, he produced historical and ethnographic studies of slavery and global capitalism, cultural hybridity, Caribbean peasants, and the political economy of food commodities. He taught for two decades at Yale University before helping to found the Anthropology Department at Johns Hopkins University, where he remained for the duration of his career. Mintz's history of sugar, Sweetness and Power, is considered one of the most influential publications in cultural anthropology and food studies.[
November 16, 1951
Hazel Joan Rowley (16 November 1951 – 1 March 2011) was a British-born Australian author and biographer. Born in London, Rowley emigrated with her parents to Adelaide at the age of eight. She studied at the University of Adelaide, graduating with Honours in French and German. Later she acquired a PhD in French. She taught literary studies at Deakin University in Melbourne, before moving to the United States. Rowley's first published biography, of Australian novelist Christina Stead, was critically acclaimed and won the National Book Council's "Banjo" Award for non-fiction in 1994. Her next biographical work was about the African American writer Richard Wright. Her best-known book, Tête-à-tête (2005), covers the lives of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (de Beauvoir had been the subject of Rowley's PhD thesis). Her last published book is Franklin & Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage, about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt (2011). Rowley suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in New York in February 2011 and died there on 1 March
November 16, 1945
Anne Salmond is Distinguished Professor of Maori Studies and Anthropology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Among her books are Two Worlds: First Meetings between Maori and European 1642-1772 and The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas.
November 17, 1930
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (born 1930 in Fort Thompson, South Dakota) is a Crow Creek Lakota Sioux editor, essayist, poet, novelist, and academic with strong views on Native American politics, particularly tribal sovereignty. Cook-Lynn co-founded Wícazo Ša Review (‘Red Pencil’), an academic journal devoted to the development of Native American studies as an academic discipline. She retired from her long academic career at Eastern Washington University in 1993, returning to her home in Rapid City, South Dakota. She has held several visiting professorships since retirement. In 2009, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas.
November 17, 1831
Manuel Antônio de Almeida (November 17, 1831 — November 28, 1861) was a Brazilian satirical writer, medician and teacher. He is famous for the book Memoirs of a Police Sergeant, written under the pen name Um Brasileiro (English: A Brazilian). He is the patron of the 28th chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. Almeida was born in Rio de Janeiro, to lieutenant Antônio de Almeida and Josefina Maria de Almeida. Few things are known about his years of primary studies — although he entered at the Medicine course in 1849, graduating in 1855. Financial difficulties inspired him to dedicate himself to literature and journalism. His magnum opus, Memoirs of a Police Sergeant, was initially published in feuilleton form during the years 1852-1853, in the journal Correio Mercantil. In 1858, he became the administrator of Tipografia Nacional, where he met Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. Trying to enter in the political career, he would go to the city of Campos dos Goytacazes, embarking in the ship Hermes, in order to start his political research. However, the ship wrecked off near the shores of Macaé, and he died in the disaster.
November 17, 1916
Shelby Dade Foote Jr. (November 17, 1916 – June 27, 2005) was an American historian and novelist who wrote The Civil War: A Narrative, a three-volume history of the American Civil War. With geographic and cultural roots in the Mississippi Delta, Foote's life and writing paralleled the radical shift from the agrarian planter system of the Old South to the Civil Rights era of the New South. Foote was little known to the general public until his appearance in Ken Burns's PBS documentary The Civil War in 1990, where he introduced a generation of Americans to a war that he believed was "central to all our lives." Foote did all his writing by hand with a nib pen, later transcribing the result into a typewritten copy.
November 17, 1970
Paul B. La Farge is an American novelist, essayist and academic. As of 2017, he has published five novels: The Artist of the Missing, Haussmann, or the Distinction, The Facts of Winter, Luminous Airplanes and The Night Ocean, all of which, particularly Haussmann, have earned positive critical attention.
November 17, 1910
Rachel de Queiroz (November 17, 1910-November 4, 2003) was a Brazilian author and journalist. She was born in Ceara, in the northeast of Brazil. Rachel de Queiroz began her career in journalism in 1927 and entered the literary world with the novel O Quinze in 1930. She further established her literary reputation with JOAO MIGUEL, CAMINA DE FEDRAS and AS TRES MARIAS. It was recently made into a film. In 1964 she became Brazil’s representative to the UN and in 1977 became the first woman writer to enter the Academia Brasileira de Letras. De Queiroz won the Camões Prize (1993) and the Prêmio Jabuti. Rachel de Queiroz has also written children’s literature, drama and television scripts. She is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters and lives in Ceara and Rio with her husband. Rachel de Queiroz died of heart disease in her apartment at Rio de Janeiro about two weeks before her 93rd birthday.
November 17, 1936
Dr. Luis Rafael Sánchez a.k.a. ‘Wico’ (born 1936) is considered by many to be the greatest Puerto Rican playwright of modern times. Sánchez was born and raised by his parents in the city of Humacao, Puerto Rico , which is located in the lower eastern part of Puerto Rico. There he received his primary education. His family moved to San Juan where Sánchez continued to receive his secondary and higher education. He enrolled in the University of Puerto Rico in 1955 after graduating from high school, earning a Bachelors of Arts degree. It was during his days as a student at the university that he became interested in acting. His interest in literature led him to enroll at the City University of New York where in 1959 he earned his Masters Degree in dramatic arts. He eventually went to Madrid, Spain and earned his Doctorate in Literature in 1975 from the Complutense University of Madrid. Sánchez’s first play was ‘La Pasión Según Antigona Pérez’ (The Passion According to Antigona Perez) a tragedy acted out in the present day Puerto Rico. The character of ‘Antigona’ was based on the life of Olga Viscal Garriga (1926-1995). Her life was rooted in politics and her 3 children. She was a member of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and an accomplished speaker who spent time in jail for her political beliefs yet, she saw herself as a simple woman with simple needs. ‘La Guaracha del Macho Camacho’ (Macho Camacho’s Beat) was published in 1976. This novel moves to a guaracha, a latin rhythm, with no audible beat. It is left to the imagination of the reader to come up with this beat. IT has been suggested that the song itself is the real protagonist of the tale. The ‘Americanization’ of Puerto Rico is explored in this work. As well as the Puerto Rican political subject and the political situation of the island as a colony; one aspect of this examination can be seen as a critique of the Puerto Rican who would give up his culture to assimilate into the American culture against the Puerto Rican who refuses to let go of his cultural identity. The book was translated into English by Gregory Rabassa. In the ‘La guagua aérea’ or ‘The Flying Bus’, Sánchez explores the concept of a bi-polar culture, the question of assimilation and the opposition to the U.S. anglo culture. He also authored ‘En Cuerpo de Camisa’. Luis Rafael Sánchez is now a professor emeritus at the University of Puerto Rico and the City University of New York. He also travels to Europe and Latin-America where he has been involved in the teachings and works of theater. Among his other works are the following - Los Ángeles se han fatigado (1960); Farsa del amor compradito (1960); La hiel nuestra de cada día (1960); Sol 13, interior (1961); O casi el alma (1965); La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos (1988).
November 17, 1905
Rodolfo Usigli (November 17, 1905 – June 18, 1979) was a Mexican playwright. He was called the "playwright of the Mexican Revolution." Usigli was born to an Italian father and a Polish mother in Mexico City. In his early childhood, he enjoyed many plays that his parents took him to. His father aspired him to go to music school, and Usigli spent a year in the National Conservatory of Music before deciding that his real passion was theater. He studied drama at the Yale School of Drama from 1935-1936 on a Rockefeller scholarship, later becoming a professor and diplomat. It was during his time as a diplomat in 1945 that he met George Bernard Shaw in London. After returning to Mexico from the U.S., he established the Midnight Theater and also became a member of the literary circle that formed around the journal Contemporary. During the 1930s, he directed radio dramas. In 1937, Usigli published his book, The Gesticulating Demagogues. The book's manuscript had been read by Shaw and Slater. The book attacked the social issues ravaging Mexico, such as misuse of power that the bureaucracy had got from the Revolution of 1910. The play was subsequently banned, raising Usigli's reputation. His 1938 play El gesticulador was perhaps the only play ever to be censored by the Mexican government for accusing politicians of libel. In 1942 Usigli published yet another work of scathing quality. In Family Dinner at Home' his intended target were the apex strata of the Mexican social structure. Usigli experimented with crime fiction in the novel, Ensayo de un crimen (Rehearsal for a Crime), which in 1955 was adapted into a film, The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, by Luis Buñuel. Usigli also wrote several essays on history, art and theater. He was also an occasional poet, writing modest but interesting poems The award-winning Usigli believed the objective of theatre was to tell the truth about society. He was known for his strong representation of women in plays. Usigli designed strong female characters in several of his plays. Two of Usigli's protégées, Rosario Castellanos and Luisa Josefina Hernández, became important female voices on the Mexican stage. He was also a strong influence on his pupil Jorge Ibargüengoitia and on Josefina Niggli. The Rodolfo Usigli Archive in the Walter Havighurst Special Collections at Miami University of Ohio is a repository of the papers of Rodolfo Usigli (1905-1979), Mexican playwright, essayist and diplomat. The Archive is the definitive research collection relating to Usigli's life and career, including correspondence, both manuscript and typed drafts of original plays and translations of works by other artists, personal, theatrical, and diplomatic photographs, essays, books, playbills, posters, theses written about Usigli, awards, newspaper and magazine articles, memorabilia, and ephemera.
November 17, 1950
Mark C. Carnes, Professor of History, joined the faculty of Barnard in 1982. His academic specialty is modern American history. His courses include The United States: 1940-1975, and several versions of the Reacting to the Past program which he initiated in 1995. Professor Carnes served as general co-editor (with John Garraty) of the 24-volume American National Biography (1999). He is also Executive Secretary of the Society of American Historians.
November 17, 1897
Gregorio López y Fuentes (November 17, 1897 – December 10, 1966) was a Mexican novelist, poet, and journalist. He was one of the leading chroniclers of the Mexican Revolution. López y Fuentes was born in a ranch called "El Mommy" in the Huasteca region of Veracruz in 1895. He started writing at the age of 15, when the Mexican Revolution began. Many of his books are related to the civil conflict. Later on he became a teacher of literature at a school in Mexico City. In 1921 he began writing for the El Universal often under the Tulio F. Peseenz pseudonym. His stories were seen as exciting, humorous, and symbolic of Mexico. A realist, many of his works concerned the oppression of Native Americans. He was a contemporary of Mariano Azuela and Martín Luis Guzmán. He has written many books including La siringa de cristal (1914), Claros de selva (1921), El vagabundo (1922), El alma del poblacho (1924), Campamento (1931), Tierra (1932), ¡Mi general! (1934), El Indio (1935), Arrieros (1937), Huasteca (1939), Una Carta a Dios (1940) and many more. He was awarded the National Prize of Arts and Sciences in 1935.
November 17, 1931
Pierre Nora is a French historian elected to the Académie française on 7 June 2001. He is known for his work on French identity and memory. His name is associated with the study of new history. He is the brother of the late Simon Nora, former French officer.
November 17, 1960
Gary M. Pomerantz is an American journalist and nonfiction author who lectures in the graduate program in journalism at Stanford University
November 17, 1910
Jean Catherine Potts (November 17, 1910 – November 10, 1999) was an American award winning mystery novelist. Potts was born in St. Paul, Nebraska, graduated from St. Paul High School, studied at the Denver Women’s College, and graduated from Nebraska Wesleyan University. Potts worked as a journalist in St. Paul before moving to New York where she continued her writing. Her stories appeared in various magazines including Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, and Woman's Day. She died in New York in 1999.
November 17, 1937
Helga Schneider (born Steinberg, November 17, 1937) is an Italian writer of German origin. She was the recipient of the Rapallo Carige Prize for II rogo di Berlino in 1996.
November 17, 1906
Mario Soldati (17 November 1906 – 19 June 1999) was an Italian writer and film director. In 1954 he won the Strega Prize for Lettere da Capri. He directed several works adapted from novels, and worked with leading Italian actresses, such as Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida. A native of Turin, Soldati attended the Liceo Sociale, a Jesuit school, and finished secondary school at age 17. He then studied humanities at the University of Turin. At that time, the University was a hotbed of intellectual activity and the young Soldati would meet and befriend the likes of activist and writer Carlo Levi and journalist Giacomo Debenedetti, who were his seniors. He later studied History of Art at the University of Rome. He started publishing novels in 1929. He achieved the widest notice with America primo amore, published in 1935, a memoir of the time he spent teaching at Columbia University. He won literary awards for his work, most notably the Strega Prize for Lettere da Capri in 1954. Also interested in film, Soldati began directing in 1938. His most well-known films are Piccolo mondo antico (1941) and Malombra (1942) with Isa Miranda, both based on novels by Antonio Fogazzaro. These two films belong to the early 1940s movement in Italian cinema known as calligrafismo. Other popular films were Eugenie Grandet, based on Balzac's novel, with Alida Valli; Fuga in Francia (1948); The River Girl (starring Sophia Loren), and La provinciale (starring Gina Lollobrigida). Soldati also regularly published articles in Italian newspapers, including Il Mondo, Il Corriere della Sera, La Stampa, Avanti, L'Unita and Il Giorno. He died at Lerici in 1999.
November 17, 1929
PATRICIA MEYER SPACKS, who is Professor of English Literature at Yale University, holds degrees from Rollins College, Yale, and the University of California at Berkeley. She is also the author of AN ARGUMENT OF IMAGES, a study of Alexander Pope; The Poetry of Vision, a critical study of eighteenth-century poets; THE INSISTENCE OF HORROR: ASPECTS OF THE SUPERNATURAL IN 18TH-CENTURY POETRY; THE ADOLESCENT IDEA: MYTHS OF YOUTH AND THE ADULT IMAGINATION; and THE FEMALE IMAGINATION.
November 17, 1953
EVA GABRIELSSON (born November 17, 1953) is an architect, author, and political activist. Currently her architectural practice includes housing and office construction and heading a European Union initiative to create sustainable architecture in the Dalecarlia region. As an author, in addition to working with Stieg Larsson on his writing projects, she is the coauthor of several books, including a monograph on the subject of cohabitation in Sweden, a Swedish government study on how to create more sustainable housing, and a forthcoming study on the Swedish urban planner Per Olof Hallman. She has also translated into Swedish Philip K. Dick’s THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE. As an activist, she works to stop violence against women. In 2010 she served as a consultant on a Danish adaptation of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO by the Nørrebro Theatre Company. Eva Gabrielsson and Stieg Larsson met in 1972, when they were both eighteen, and lived and wrote together from 1974 until his death in 2004. Their struggle together for social justice was the basis for the books in Larsson’s MILLENNIUM TRILOGY.
November 17, 1878
Hans Zinsser (November 17, 1878 – September 4, 1940) was an American physician, bacteriologist, and prolific author. The author of over 200 books and medical articles, he was also a published poet. Some of his verses were published in The Atlantic Monthly. His 1940 publication, As I Remember Him: the Biography of R.S., won one of the early National Book Awards, the sixth and last annual award for Nonfiction voted by members of the American Booksellers Association. He is remembered especially for his 1935 book, Rats, Lice, and History.
November 17, 1913
Christiane Desroches Noblecourt (17 November 1913 – 23 June 2011) was a French Egyptologist. She was the author of many books on Egyptian art and history and was also known for her role in the preservation of the Nubian temples from flooding caused by the Aswan Dam.
November 17, 1961
David A. Bell is Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Department of History at Princeton. Born in New York and educated at Harvard, Princeton and the Ã?cole Normale Supérieure, he previously taught at Yale and Johns Hopkins, where he also served as Dean of Faculty in the School of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of six books, including The First Total War (2007), which was awarded the Louis Gottschalk Prize.
November 18, 1949
Tina McElroy Ansa (born November 18, 1949) is an African American novelist, filmmaker, teacher, and journalist. Born Tina McElroy to Walter J. and Nellie McElroy in Macon, Georgia, where she grew up in the Pleasant Hill neighborhood. After graduating from Spelman College and working for several years in a variety of positions at the Atlanta Constitution, she has written several novels and has been a frequent contributor to numerous periodicals, including the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She instructs writing workshops at Spelman College, Emory University, and Coastal Georgia Community College. She lives with her filmmaker husband Jonée Ansa on St. Simons Island, Georgia where they collaborate on making movies and are active in community events to promote the arts. Ansa's fiction portrays a variety of Black women in the recent and modern American South, with a blend of the supernatural and traditional superstition. Her first novel, Baby of the Family, was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. Baby of the Family was also on the African-America Best-seller List for Paperback Fiction. In October 2001, Baby of the Family was chosen by the Georgia Center for the Book as one of the ‘Top 25 books Every Georgian Should Read.’ The book was selected for the American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults in 1990, and won the 1989 Georgia Authors Series Award.
November 18, 1939
Margaret Eleanor Atwood (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is among the most-honoured authors of fiction in recent history. She is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias award for Literature, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General's Award seven times, winning twice. She is also a founder of the Writers' Trust of Canada, a non-profit literary organization that seeks to encourage Canada's writing community. While she is best known for her work as a novelist, she is also a poet, having published fifteen books of poetry to date. Many of her poems have been inspired by myths and fairy tales, which have been interests of hers from an early age. Atwood has published short stories in Tamarack Review, Alphabet, Harper's, CBC Anthology, Ms., Saturday Night, and many other magazines. She has also published four collections of stories and three collections of unclassifiable short prose works.
November 18, 1906
Sait Faik Abasiyanik (18 November 1906 – 11 May 1954) was one of the greatest Turkish writers of short stories and poetry. Born in Adapazari, he was educated at the Bursa Erkek Lisesi. He enrolled in the Turcology Department of Istanbul University in 1928, but under pressure from his father went to Switzerland to study economics in 1930. He left school and lived for three years in Grenoble, France - an experience which made a deep impact on his art and character. After returning to Turkey he taught Turkish in Halicioglu Armenian School for Orphans, and tried to follow his father's wishes and go into business but was unsuccessful. He devoted his life to writing after 1934. He created a brand new language and brought new life to Turkish short story writing with his harsh but humanistic portrayals of labourers, fishermen, children, the unemployed, the poor. A major theme was always the sea and he spent most of his time in Burgazada (one of the Princes' Islands in the Marmara Sea). He was an honorary member of the International Mark Twain Society of St. Louis, Missouri. Sait Faik mostly published under the name Sait Faik, other pen names being Adali (‘Island dweller’), Sait Faik Adali, and S. F.
November 18, 1935
Rodney Hall OAM (born 18 November 1935) is an Australian writer. Born in Solihull, Warwickshire, England, Hall came to Australia as a child after World War II and studied at the University of Queensland (1971). In the 1960s Hall began working as a freelance writer, and a book and film reviewer. He also worked as an actor, and was often engaged by the Australian Broadcasting Commission in Brisbane. Between 1967 and 1978 he was the Poetry Editor of The Australian. He began publishing poetry in the 1970s and has since published thirteen novels, including Just Relations and The Island in the Mind. He lived in Shanghai for a period in the late 1980s. From 1991-1994, he served as chair of the Australia Council. Hall lives in Victoria. In addition to a number of literary awards, he has received an Membership of Order of Australia. Rodney's memoir ‘Popeye Never Told You’ was launched in May 2010 and was published by Pier 9.
November 18, 1882
Percy Wyndham Lewis (18 November 1882 – 7 March 1957) was an English painter and author (he dropped the name 'Percy', which he disliked). He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST.
November 18, 1906
KLAUS MANN, the second child of Thomas Mann, was born in Munich in 1906. He began writing short stories and articles in 1924, and within a year was a theatrical critic for a Berlin newspaper. In 1925 both a volume of short stories and his first novel, THE PIOUS DANCE, were published. His sister, Erika, to whom he was very close, was in the cast of his first play, ANJA AND ESTHER. Mann left Germany in 1933 and lived in Amsterdam until 1936, during which time he became a Czechoslovakian citizen, having been deprived of his German citizenship by the Nazis. He moved to America in 1936, living in Princeton, New Jersey, and New York City. He became a U.S. citizen in 1943. He died at the age of forty-two in Cannes, France. Robin Smyth is the European correspondent for the London Observer.
November 18, 1934
Vassilis Vassilikos (born November 18, 1934) is a Greek writer, and a diplomat. A native of the northern Greek island of Thasos, Vassilikos grew up in Thessaloniki, graduating from law school there before moving to Athens to work as a journalist. Because of his political activities he was forced into exile following the 1967 military coup, where he spent the next seven years. Between 1981 and 1984 Vassilikos served as general manager of the Greek state television channel ET1. Since 1996, he has served as Greece's ambassador to UNESCO. As an author, Vassilikos has been highly prolific and widely-translated. He has published more than 100 books, including novels, plays and poetry. His best known work is the political novel Z (1967) (English language ISBN 0-394-72990-0 or ISBN 0-941423-50-6), which has been translated into thirty-two languages and was the basis of the award-winning film Z directed by Costa-Gavras (with music by Mikis Theodorakis).
November 18, 1940
James Welch was born November 18, 1940 in Browning, Montana. He is an American Indian; Blackfeet on his father’s side and Gros Ventre on his mother’s. He attended schools on the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap reservations in Montana before graduating from high school in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He attended the University of Minnesota for one year and Northern Montana College for two, and then received his B.A. from the University of Montana. In 1974 he was appointed to the Literature Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts. His poetry has been published extensively in literary journals and magazines both here and abroad. He is also tile author of a widely acclaimed novel, WINTER IN THE BLOOD, published by Harper & Row in 1974.
November 18, 1897
Alfred Hubert Mendes (18 November 1897-1991), novelist and short-story writer, was a leading member of the 1930s ‘Beacon group’ of writers (named after the literary magazine The Beacon) in Trinidad that included Albert Gomes, C. L. R. James and Ralph de Boissière. Mendes is best known as the author of two novels - PITCH LAKE (1934) and BLACK FAUNS (1935) - and for his short stories written during the 1920s and 1930s. He was ‘one of the first West Indian writers to set the pattern of emigration in the face of the lack of publishing houses and the small reading public in the West Indies.’ Born in Trinidad the eldest of six children in a Portuguese Creole family, Mendes was educated in Port of Spain until 1912, then at the age of 15 went to continue his studies in the United Kingdom. His hopes of going on to university there were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. After briefly returning to Trinidad in 1915, against his father’s wishes he joined the Merchants' Contingents of Trinidad - whose purpose was to enroll and transport to England young men who wished to serve in the war ‘for King and Country’ - and sailed back to Britain. He served in the 1st Rifle Brigade, and fought for two years in Flanders, along the Belgian Front, and was awarded a Military Medal for distinguishing himself on the battlefield. Towards the end of the war, he accidentally inhaled the poisonous gas used as a weapon by the German army, and was sent back to Britain to recover. Mendes returned to Trinidad in 1919, and worked in his wealthy father's provisions business, while spending his spare time writing poetry and fiction, and in establishing contact with other writers, artists and scholars. In 1933 he went to New York, remaining there until 1940. While in the USA he joined literary salons and associated with writers including Richard Wright, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, William Saroyan, Benjamin Appel, Tom Wolfe, Malcolm Lowry and Ford Madox Ford. He went back to Trinidad again in 1940. Together with C. L. R. James, Mendes produced two issues of a pioneering literary magazine called Trinidad (Christmas 1929 and Easter 1930). Several of his stories appeared in The Beacon, the journal edited by Albert Gomes from March 1931 until November 1933. Mendes was quoted as saying in 1972: ‘James and I departed from the convention in the selection of our material, in the choice of a strange way of life, in the use of a new dialect. And these departures are still with our Caribbean successors.’ In all Mendes published about 60 short stories in magazines and journals in Trinidad, New York, London and Paris. His first novel Pitch Lake appeared in 1934, with an introduction by Aldous Huxley, and was followed by BLACK FAUNS in 1935. Both novels are significant in the history of literature from the Caribbean region and are landmarks in the establishment of social realism in the West Indian novel. In 1940, Mendes abandoned writing and worked in Trinidad's civil service, becoming General Manager of the Port Services Department. He was one of the foundering members of the United Front, a party with socialist leanings that participated in the 1946 general elections. After his retirement in 1972, he lived in Mallorca and Gran Canaria and ultimately settled in Barbados. In 1972 he was awarded an honorary D. Litt. by the University of the West Indies for his contribution to the development of West Indian literature. He began writing his autobiography in 1975 and his unfinished drafts were edited by Michèle Levy and published in 2002 by the University of the West Indies Press as THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALFRED H. MENDES 1897-1991. Mendes and his wife Ellen both died in 1991 in Barbados and are buried together there in Christ Church Cemetery. Mendes married in October 1919, and had a son, Alfred John, the following year. His first wife, Jessie Rodriguez, died of pneumonia after only two years of marriage. A second marriage, a year later, ended in divorce in 1938. His third wife was Ellen Perachini, mother of his last two sons, Peter and Stephen. He is the grandfather of film director Sam Mendes. Michèle Levy is an independent researcher and academic writer. She has taught at secondary and tertiary levels, and has tutored and lectured in the Department of Literatures in English, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. She is the editor of The Autobiography of Alfred H. Mendes, 1897–1991 and of two collections of Mendes’s short stories: Pablo’s Fandango and Other Stories and The Man Who Ran Away and Other Stories of Trinidad in the 1920s and 1930s.
November 18, 1946
Dr. Sally Dennison has a B.S. in Journalism, an M.A. in Rhetoric and Writing, and a Ph.D. in Modern Letters from the University of Tulsa. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous small-press magazines and literary journals, and she has received several awards for her writing at the University of Indiana Writers Conference. As a result of Alternative Literary Publishing and her lifelong interest in this field, Dr. Dennison has formed her own alternative trade publishing house, Council Oak Books, Ltd.
November 18, 1971
Born in Columbia, South Carolina, poet Terrance Hayes earned a BA at Coker College and an MFA at the University of Pittsburgh. In his poems, in which he occasionally invents formal constraints, Hayes considers themes of popular culture, race, music, and masculinity. Hayes’s fourth book puts invincibly restless wordplay at the service of strong emotions: a son’s frustration, a husband’s love, a citizen’s righteous anger and a friend’s erotic jealousy animate these technically astute, even puzzlelike, lines, observed Stephen Burt in a 2010 review of Lighthead for the New York Times. In a 2013 interview with Lauren Russell for Hot Metal Bridge, Hayes stated, I’m chasing a kind of language that can be unburdened by people’s expectations. I think music is the primary model—how close can you get this language to be like music and communicate feeling at the base level in the same way a composition with no words communicates meaning? It might be impossible. Language is always burdened by thought. I’m just trying to get it so it can be like feeling. Hayes’s poetry collections include How to Be Drawn (2015), finalist for the National Book Award and the National Books Critics Circle Award; Lighthead (2010), which won the National Book Award, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and was nominated for a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Wind in a Box (2006); Hip Logic (2002), chosen for the National Poetry Series and also a finalist for an LA Times Book Award and an Academy of American Poets James Laughlin Award; and Muscular Music (1999), which won a Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His poems have also been featured in several editions of Best American Poetry and have won multiple Pushcart Prizes. Hayes’s additional honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has taught at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Alabama, and the University of Pittsburgh. Hayes lives in Pittsburgh.
November 18, 1882
Percy Wyndham Lewis (18 November 1882 – 7 March 1957) was an English painter and author (he dropped the name 'Percy', which he disliked). He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST. His novels include his pre-World War I-era novel Tarr (set in Paris), and The Human Age, a trilogy comprising The Childermass (1928), Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta (both 1955), set in the afterworld. A fourth volume of The Human Age, The Trial of Man, was begun by Lewis but left in a fragmentary state at the time of his death. He also wrote two autobiographical volumes, Blasting and Bombardiering (1937) and Rude Assignment: A Narrative of my Career Up-to-Date (1950).
November 18, 1934
George Woodyard (November 18, 1934 - November 7, 2010) was born in Charleston, Illinois, as the youngest of nine children. Woodyard received his bachelor's degree in education from Eastern Illinois University in 1954 and his master's degree in Spanish from New Mexico State University the following year. He received a Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of Illinois in 1966. Woodyard was a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Kansas from 1966 to 2005 and became the first dean of international studies in 1989. He founded an academic journal called the Latin American Theatre Review in 1967 and was its editor for more than 40 years. He won numerous awards, including the Ollantay Prize for Theatre in Venezuela and the Miami Teatro Avante lifetime achievement award.
November 18, 1961
Edward B. Westermann is Professor of History at Texas A&M University–San Antonio. He is the author of Hitler’s Police Battalions: Enforcing Racial War in the East.
November 19, 1911
William Attaway (1911–1986) was born in Mississippi, the son of a physician who moved his family to Chicago to escape the segregated South. Attaway was an indifferent student in high school, but after hearing a Langston Hughes poem read in class and discovering that Hughes was black, he was inspired with an urgent ambition to write. Rebelling against his middle-class origins, Attaway dropped out of the University of Illinois and spent some time as a hobo before returning to complete his college degree in 1936. He then worked variously as a seaman, a salesman, a union organizer, and as part of the Federal Writers’ Project, where he made friends with Richard Wright. Attaway moved to New York, published his first novel, Let Me Breathe Thunder (1939), the story of two white vagrants traveling with a young Mexican boy, and quickly followed it with Blood on the Forge (1941), about the fate of three African-American brothers in the Great Migration to the North. Attaway never produced another novel, but went on to prosper as a writer of radio and television scripts, screenplays, and numerous songs, including the ‘Banana Boat Song (Day-O),’ which was a hit for his friend Harry Belafonte. A resident for many years of Barbados, Attaway returned to the United States toward the end of his life. He died in Los Angeles while working on a script.
November 19, 1942
Though best known to the public for his series of best-selling books on dogs, Stanley Coren is also well respected scientist and Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Pennsylvania and completed his doctorate Psychology at Stanford. In the scientific area he has has published many research related books, a widely used textbook on sensation and perception, and over 300 research reports in professional journals. Stanley Coren was born in 1942 in Philiadelphia. He has an undergraduate degree in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and his doctorate in Psychology is from Stanford University. After teaching at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, in New York City, he moved to the University of British Columbia, which is located in the city of Vancouver in Canada. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Psychology, and is also the Director of the Human Neuropsychology and Perception Laboratory there. His research has covered many areas of in psychology, including human vision and hearing, neuropsychology, brain, laterality, handedness, birth stress, sleep, behavior genetics and cognitive processing. He is a prolific researcher and has published over 300 items, including research reports in well respected scientific journals including: Science, Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, American Journal of Public Health, British Journal of Medicine, Psychological Review and others. He has also published 14 books and monographs for professionals and students. One of these books is the textbook 'Sensation and Perception' which is into its fifth edition and has consistently been the most used college text in North American courses on sensory and perceptual processes. Coren has won a number of awards for his research, and the quality of his contribution to science has been recognized by a number of major scientific organizations, including the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, the Canadian Psychological Association, the American Association of Applied and Preventative Psychology, and others, which have conferred upon him the title of Fellow. In addition his ability to communicate with people has been recognized by his winning of the Robert E. Knox Master Teacher Award and by his service on the American Psychological Association's, Public Information Committee. In addition to being a psychologist and researcher, Coren's life is filled with dog-related activities. He currently lives with an old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, named Banshee, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, named Dancer, a young Beagle named Darby and an orange cat (which really belongs to his wife Joan) named Loki. In addition to studying dog behavior and writing books about dogs, Coren is also an instructor with the Vancouver Dog Obedience Training Club. This is a non-profit organization which supports beginners dog training in the community (for the general public) as well as advanced dog training for dog handlers who wish to compete in dog obedience competitions at local and national levels. He has also participated in numerous dog obedience trials and competitions under the auspices of the Canadian Kennel Club and several of his dogs have gone on to become the top ranked dog of their breed in Canadian dog obedience competition. He and his dogs have also been members of numerous award winning Precision Dog Obedience Teams and he participated in, and created the choreography for, teams entered in the first two years of Musical Freestyle Dog Obedience Competition in Canada. He is a supporter of the SPCA, and has been called upon to participate in numerous functions and fund raising activities aimed at providing shelter and finding homes for dogs.
November 19, 1934
Oscar Ronald Dathorne (November 19, 1934 – December 18, 2007) was a Guyanese educator, novelist, poet and critic and the eldest brother of the Canadian writer Lynette Dathorne. Born in Georgetown, Guyana he attended Queen’s College prior to his parents moving the family to England in 1953. He attended the University of Sheffield obtaining his BA, English in 1958 later completing his MA in 1960 and PhD, English, in 1966. However, having completed his studies he found that few English universities were willing to offer him anything other than junior positions. He therefore sought job opportunities abroad and successfully applied for a teaching post at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. He remained in West Africa for six years completing his stay whilst holding a full professorship at the University of Sierra Leone as head of the English department. With his use of African literature as a basis for many English classes and the increased recognition that African literature be defined as written by Africans rather than about Africans; in 1969 he was invited to the United States as a guest lecturer at Yale University. With the continuing changes in the black American psyche, African culture and heritage were viewed as a past in which to take great pride. As a result, universities throughout the US were becoming interested in forming African and African-American study departments. Having specialist knowledge within this area, Dathorne became professor of African studies at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He was a pioneer of Black Studies in the United States teaching African American studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and then spent 15 years working at Ohio State and the University of Miami, establishing and directing African, Caribbean, and African-American study programs. In 1987 he left the University of Miami to take up a post as a professor in the English department at the University of Kentucky.
November 19, 1958
ANNETTE GORDON-REED (born November 19, 1958), a graduate of Harvard Law School, is an Associate Professor of Law at New York Law School.
November 19, 1941
Leila Sebbar is one of the French-speaking world’s most important writers. Her novels include SHERAZADE, MARGUERITE, LAJEUNEFILLE AU BALCON, and SOLDATS. She was born in Algeria and lives in Paris, France. Mildred Mortimer is Professor of French at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She has translated Leila Sebbar’s LE SILENCE DES RIVES/SILENCE ON THE SHORES and written several works on North African literature, including JOURNEYS THROUGH THE FRENCH AFRICAN NOVEL; WRITING FROM THE HEARTH: PUBLIC, DOMESTIC, AND IMAGINATIVE SPACE IN FRANCOPHONE WOMEN’S FICTION OF AFRICA AND THE CARIBBEAN; and an edited work, MAGHREBIAN MOSAIC: A LITERATURE IN TRANSITION.
November 19, 1944
Richard Wiley is an American novelist and short story writer whose first novel, Soldiers in Hiding won the 1987 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He has published five other novels and a number of short stories.
November 19, 1964
Catherine Jurca is Professor of English at California Institute of Technology.
November 19, 1934
One of the major poets of the Beat Generation, Joanne Kyger was born in 1934. In 1960, she traveled to Japan to be with her then-husband Gary Snyder. In 1962 they traveled to India, where, along with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, they met the Dalai Lama. She returned to California in 1964 and settled in Bolinas in 1969, where she resides today. She has published over 30 books of poetry and prose, including On Time and As Ever: Selected Poems.
November 19, 1964
Victoria Finlay is a writer and journalist, known for her books on colour and jewels. Her most famous book is Colour: Travels Through The Paint Box.
November 20, 1936
Don DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American essayist, novelist, playwright, and short story writer. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language, performance art, the Cold War, mathematics, the advent of the digital age, and global terrorism. Initially a well-regarded cult writer, the publication in 1985 of White Noise brought him widespread recognition, and is considered to be his breakthrough work. DeLillo has twice been a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist for Mao II and Underworld (1992 and 1998, respectively), won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II in 1992 (receiving a further PEN/Faulkner Award nomination for The Angel Esmeralda in 2012), and was granted the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010. DeLillo has described his fiction as being influenced by ‘[...] the fact that we're living in dangerous times. If I could put it in a sentence, in fact, my work is about just that: living in dangerous times’, and in a 2005 interview declared, ‘Writers must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments [...] I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us.’
November 20, 1923
Nadine Gordimer (20 November 1923 – 13 July 2014) was a South African writer, political activist and recipient of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature. She was recognized as a woman "who through her magnificent epic writing has – in the words of Alfred Nobel – been of very great benefit to humanity". Gordimer's writing dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa. Under that regime, works such as Burger's Daughter and July's People were banned. She was active in the anti-apartheid movement, joining the African National Congress during the days when the organization was banned, and gave Nelson Mandela advice on his famous 1964 defence speech at the trial which led to his conviction for life. She was also active in HIV/AIDS causes.
November 20, 1858
Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf (20 November 1858 – 16 March 1940) was a Swedish author. She was the first female writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and most widely known for her children's book Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (The Wonderful Adventures of Nils).
November 20, 1950
Eugene Ethelbert Miller, best known as E. Ethelbert Miller (born November 20, 1950) is an African-American poet and teacher. He was born in the Bronx, New York. He received his B.A. from Howard University. He is the author of nine books of poetry, two memoirs and is the editor of three poetry anthologies. His work has appeared in numerous publications including Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Poet Lore, and Sojourners. Miller was the founder and director of the Ascension Poetry Reading Series, one of the oldest literary series in the Washington area. Since 1974 he has been director of Howard University's African-American Resource Center. Miller has taught at various schools, including American University, Emory & Henry College, George Mason University, Harpeth Hall School and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He was also a core faculty member of the writing seminars at Bennington College. He worked with Operation Homecoming for the NEH. A sign on the north entrance to the Dupont Circle Metro station in Washington, D.C. An excerpt from 'The Wound-Dresser', by Walt Whitman, is inscribed into the granite wall around the entrance escalators. An excerpt from 'We Embrace', by E. Ethelbert Miller, is inscribed into the sidewalk surrounding a nearby circular bench. He currently serves as board chairperson of the Institute for Policy Studies. He is also on the boards of Split This Rock and the Writer's Center, and is co-editor of Poet Lore magazine. He is former chair of the Humanities Council of Washington, D. C. and has served on the boards of the AWP, the Edmund Burke School, PEN American Center, PEN/Faulkner Foundation, and the Washington Area Lawyer for the Arts (WALA). He lives in Washington, D. C. In 1979, Marion Barry, the mayor of Washington, DC, proclaimed September 28, 1979, as 'E. Ethelbert Miller Day.' His papers are held at Emory & Henry College and The George Washington University.
November 20, 1945
Rachid Mimouni (November 20, 1945 – February 12, 1995) was an Algerian writer, teacher and human rights activist. Rachid Mimouni was born into a family of peasants in Boudouaou (Alma), thirty kilometers east of Algiers. Mimouni studied science at the University of Algiers before becoming a teacher at the École supérieure du commerce (business school) in Algiers. He was president of the Kateb Yacine foundation and he also held the position of vice-president at Amnesty International. He fled Algeria for France in 1993 to escape the civil war and the assassinations of intellectuals. He died in Paris in 1995 of hepatitis. Mimouni wrote novels describing Algerian society in a realist style. His first two novels established him not only as Algeria’s leading writer, but as an important literary figure of the Arab world at large (and, to some extent, of French-speaking people). He writes of the pain of decolonization with eloquence and courage, revealing to Westerners some of the raw feeling that is behind the ongoing upheavals in Islamic lands. Jacket design by Russell Gordon.
November 20, 1940
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (born November 20, 1940) is an American Indologist whose professional career has spanned five decades. A scholar of Sanskrit and Indian textual traditions, her major works include, Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva; Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook; The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology; Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts; and The Rig Veda: An Anthology, 108 Hymns Translated from the Sanskrit. Doniger is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of History of Religions at the University of Chicago, and has taught there since 1978.
November 20, 1914
José Revueltas Sánchez (November 20, 1914, Canatlán, Durango – April 14, 1976) was a Mexican writer, essayist, and political activist. He was part of an important artistic family that included his siblings Silvestre (composer), Fermín (painter) and Rosaura (actress). He was often imprisoned for his political activism, almost from the time he was a boy (from the age of 14–15 years) and was still a minor when he was sent for the first time to the maximum-security jail of those days: the Islas Marías. He participated in the Railwaymen’s Movement in 1958, for which they imprisoned him again. In 1968 he was accused of being the 'intellectual author' of the Mexican student movement that culminated in the Tlatelolco massacre, so he was arrested and sent to the jail of Palacio de Lecumberri (aka The Black Palace), where he wrote one of his more popular books: El apando (The Punishment Cell) (A. Revueltas 1998; Valle, Alvárez Garín, and J. Revueltas 1970). José Revueltas was a revolutionary from the start, because he practiced that which soon would become his most important pedagogical proposal: Academic Self-intervention, a product of his own form of studying reality by means of theoretical knowledge that supplies the reading. For this reason he left secondary school because they went very slowly and he dedicated himself, from then on, to visiting libraries and acquiring books. He was a complete man with many facets, bound to the necessities of the proletariat, of the people, he was dedicated on all the fronts in which he participated to the task of socializing and of politicizing society, the latter task a revolutionary one. He used literature, cinematographic scripts, the academy, partisan participation and the street to promote his project. He joined the Mexican Communist Party in 1928, but was expelled in 1943 for his criticisms of the organisation’s bureaucratic practices and for one of the best analyses of the left in Mexico: Ensayo de un proletariado sin cabeza (Essay on a Proletariat without a Head). He founded the Liga Espartaquista (Spartacist League) and the Partido Popular Socialista (Popular Socialist Party, or PPS), from which he also was expelled for questioning and criticizing the errors of the left.
November 20, 1902
Benjamín Subercaseaux Zañartu (November 20, 1902, Santiago, Chile - March 11, 1973, Tacna, Peru) was a Chilean writer and researcher. He won the Chilean National Prize for Literature in 1963.
November 20, 1933
Per Erik Wästberg (born 20 November 1933) is a Swedish writer and a member of the Swedish Academy since 1997. Wästberg was born in Stockholm, son of Erik Wästberg and his wife Greta née Hirsch, and holds a degree in literature from Uppsala University. He was editor-in-chief of Sweden's largest daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter 1976–1982, and has been a contributor since 1953. He is an older brother of Olle Wästberg. Wästberg has campaigned extensively for human rights. He was President of the PEN International from 1979 until 1986 and founder of the Swedish section of Amnesty International (1963). In connection with this, he was involved in the anti-colonial movement. He was especially active in the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, where he became a close friend of Nadine Gordimer. He was expelled by the government in Rhodesia in 1959, and after publication of his anti-Apartheid book På Svarta Listan (On the Black List) in 1960, he was banned from entering both Rhodesia and South Africa. He returned to South Africa only in 1990, after the release from jail of Nelson Mandela.
November 20, 1944
Molly Gloss (born November 20, 1944) is an American writer currently best known for historical fiction and science fiction.
November 20, 1940
HAYDEN HERRERA is a New York critic specializing in twentieth-century American and Latin American art. She spent much of her childhood in Mexico, then attended Radcliffe College. After marrying and having two children, she graduated from Barnard College. She received her doctorate in art history from the City University of New York and has contributed numerous articles to scholarly and popular publications. This is her first book.
November 20, 1933
Robert L. Tignor (born November 20, 1933) is Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University. He teaches courses on modern African history and world history and publishes on the same subjects. .
November 20, 1862
Edvard Alexander Westermarck (20 November 1862 – 3 September 1939) was a Finnish philosopher and sociologist. Among other subjects, he studied exogamy and the incest taboo. The phenomenon of reverse sexual imprinting (when two people live in close domestic proximity during the first few years in the life of either one, both are desensitized to sexual attraction), now known as the Westermarck effect, was first formally described by him in his book The History of Human Marriage (1891). He has been described as "first Darwinian sociologist" or "the first sociobiologist". He helped found academic sociology in the United Kingdom, becoming the first professor of sociology (with Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse) in 1907 in the University of London.
November 20, 1940
Wendy Doniger is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago and the author of over 30 books, including On Hinduism and The Hindus: An Alternative History.
November 21, 1932
Dame Beryl Margaret Bainbridge (21 November 1932 – 2 July 2010) was an English writer from Liverpool. She was primarily known for her works of psychological fiction, often set among the English working classes. Bainbridge won the Whitbread Awards prize for best novel in 1977 and 1996; she was nominated five times for the Booker Prize. She was described in 2007 as 'a national treasure'. In 2008, The Times newspaper named Bainbridge among their list of 'The 50 greatest British writers since 1945'.
November 21, 1897
The Viennese playwright, novelist, and short-story writer Veza Canetti (November 21, 1897, Vienna, Austria - May 1, 1963, London, United Kingdom) was born in 1897 into a mixed Sephardic-Ashkenazi Jewish family and died in 1963 in London. Part of the avant garde in 1920s Vienna (where she met her future husband and Nobel Prize winner, Elias Canetti), from 1932 she wrote radical short stories drawn from everyday life for the Vienna Arbeiter-Zeitung. After censorship under the so-called Corporate State reduced her opportunities for publication, she disguised her critique in irony and humor, but from then on published little. Until 1990, when her first novel, Yellow Street, was finally published, Veza was known only as her husband's muse and literary assistant. As more of her writings appeared, critics became convinced that it was he who was responsible for her decline into obscurity, notwithstanding his protestations of support and admiration. This biography tells a more nuanced story, presenting Veza's literary career against the background of her troubled times, drawing on Elias's unpublished papers to assess their literary partnership, showing how their early writings constituted a private dialogue on topics as diverse as feminism and Jewish identity and how several key themes in his work are anticipated in hers.
November 21, 1889
Hugh Kingsmill Lunn (21 November 1889 – 15 May 1949), who dropped his last name for professional purposes, was a versatile British writer and journalist. Writers Arnold Lunn and Brian Lunn were his brothers. Hugh Kingsmill Lunn was born in London and educated at Harrow School and the University of Oxford. After graduating he worked for a brief period for Frank Harris, who edited the publication Hearth and Home in 1911/2, alongside Enid Bagnold; Kingsmill later wrote a debunking biography of Harris, after the spell had worn off. He began fighting in the British Army in World War I in 1916, and was captured in France the next year. After the war, he began to write, initially both science fiction and crime fiction. In the 1930s he was a contributor to the English Review; later he wrote a good deal of non-fiction for this periodical's successor, the English Review Magazine. His large output includes criticism, essays and biographies, parodies and humour, as well as novels, and edited a number of anthologies. He is remembered for saying 'friends are God's apology for relations', with a notable flavour of Ambrose Bierce. The dictum was subsequently used by Richard Ingrams for the title of his memoir of Kingsmill's friendships with Hesketh Pearson and Malcolm Muggeridge, two intimate friends whom he influenced greatly.Muggeridge drew a darker attitude from Kingsmill's sardonic wit. Dawnist was Kingsmill's word for those infected with unrealistic or utopian idealism — the enemy as far as he was concerned. Kingmill’s works include: The Will To Love (1919) novel, The Dawn's Delay (1924) stories, Blondel (1927), Matthew Arnold (1928) biography, After Puritanism, 1850-1900 (1929), An Anthology Of Invective And Abuse (1929), The Return of William Shakespeare (1929) novel, Behind Both Lines (1930) autobiographical, More Invective (1930) anthology, The Worst of Love (1931) anthology, After Puritanism (1931), Frank Harris (1932) biography, The Table Of Truth (1933), Samuel Johnson (1933) biography, The Sentimental Journey (1934) biography of Charles Dickens, The Casanova Fable: A Satirical Revaluation (1934) with William Gerhardi, What They Said At The Time (1935) anthology, Parents and Children (1936) anthology; Brave Old World (1936) humour, with Malcolm Muggeridge, A Pre-View Of Next Year's News (1937) humour, with Malcolm Muggeridge, Skye High: The Record Of A Tour Through Scotland In The Wake Of The Samuel Johnson And James Boswell.(1937) travel, with Hesketh Pearson, Made On Earth (1937) anthology on marriage, The English Genius: a survey of the English achievement and character (1938) editor, essays by W. R. Inge, Hilaire Belloc, Hesketh Pearson, William Gerhardi, E .S. P. Haynes, Douglas Woodruff, Charles Petrie, J. F. C. Fuller, Alfred Noyes, Rose Macaulay, Brian Lunn, Rebecca West, K. Hare, T. W. Earp, D. H. Lawrence (1938) biography, Next Year's News (1938) humour, with Malcolm Muggeridge, Courage (1939) anthology, Johnson Without Boswell: A Contemporary Portrait of Samuel Johnson (1940) editor, The Fall (1940), This Blessed Plot (1942) travel, with Hesketh Pearson, The Poisoned Crown (1944) essays on genealogies, Talking Of Dick Whittington (1947) travel, with Hesketh Pearson), The Progress Of A Biographer (1949), The High Hill of the Muses (1955) anthology, The Best of Hugh Kingsmill: Selections from his Writings (1970) edited by Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, His Life and Personality.
November 21, 1948
Martin Limón retired from military service after twenty years in the US Army, including ten years in Korea. He is the author of six previous books in the Sergeant George Sueño series: JADE LADY BURNING, SLICKY BOYS, BUDDHA'S MONEY, THE DOOR TO BITTERNESS, THE WANDERING GHOST, and GI BONES. He lives in Seattle.
November 21, 1902
Isaac Bashevis Singer (November 21, 1902 – July 24, 1991) was a Polish-born Jewish-American author. The Polish form of his birth name was Izaak Zynger and he used his mother's first name in an initial pseudonym, Izaak Baszewis, which he later expanded to the form under which he is now known. He was a leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement, writing and publishing only in Yiddish, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. He also was awarded two U.S. National Book Awards, one in Children's Literature for his memoir A Day Of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw (1970) and one in Fiction for his collection, A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories (1974).
November 21, 1694
François-Marie Arouet (21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778), known by his nom de plume Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and separation of church and state.
November 21, 1947
Jared Angira (born 21 November 1947) is a Kenyan poet. He has been called 'the country's first truly significant poet,' Jared Angira studied commerce at the University of Nairobi from 1968 until 1971. He was editor of Busara which is published by the literature department. He is Africa's representative on the International Executive Committee of the World University Service. is first collection of poems, Juices (EAPH) was published in 1970. He was a founder and is treasurer of the Writers' Association of Kenya. He turned down a scholarship to go to Canada and now works for the East African Harbours Corporation in Dar es Salaam.
November 21, 1908
José Bianco, (born November 21, 1908, Buenos Aires, Argentina—died April 24, 1986, Buenos Aires), novelist and editor for 23 years of the influential Buenos Aires magazine Sur, published by a group of important Argentine writers that included Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Silvina and Victoria Ocampo. Launched in 1931, Sur carried translations of European and American authors and became one of the most important literary journals in the history of Latin America. Bianco, who was a modest and unassuming man, published a collection of short stories, La pequeña Gyaros (‘Little Gyaros’), in 1932, but his reputation was established with two novellas, Sombras suele vestir (1941) and Las ratas (1943), published in English as Shadow Play, The Rats: Two Novellas by José Bianco. The Rats is a psychological novel, with a complicated but flawlessly constructed plot that leads to the poisoning of the protagonist. Bianco’s narrator has a complicated psychological makeup that is elegantly drawn, and the plot develops inexorably yet unexpectedly to the surprising ending. Shadow Play is a fantastic tale in the manner of Borges and Bioy Casares, written in a classic, unobtrusive style that allows for the unsettling of reality to occur almost unnoticed by the reader. The novella was included in the Antología de la literatura fantástica (1977; ‘Anthology of Fantastic Literature,’ translated as The Book of Fantasy), published by Borges, Silvina Ocampo, and Bioy Casares. Bianco also published criticism, memoirs, and the long novel La pérdida del reino (1978; ‘Loss of the Kingdom’), but his fame rests on the two novellas and his association with Sur and the writers surrounding it.
November 21, 1876
Olav Duun (November 21, 1876 – September 13, 1939) was a noteworthy author of Norwegian fiction. He is generally recognized to be one of the more outstanding writers in Norwegian literature. He once lacked only one vote to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was nominated twenty-four times, in fourteen years. Duun was born in the traditional district Ytre Namdal, on Jøa an island in the Namsen Fjord in Fosnes municipality, Nord-Trøndelag county, Norway. His parents were Johannes Antonius Duun and Ellen (Fossum) Duun. Olav Duun was born Ole Johannesen Raaby. Duun was the oldest in a family of eight siblings. During his years as a boy his family lived at several farms on the island, the last one being Duun. He adopted the last name Duun when he left the island to start his training as a teacher. He attended the state school at Trøndelag. In 1901, Duun took a position as a school teacher at Levanger in Nord-Trøndelag county, Norway. He completed the graduate teacher examination in 1904. In 1908, he was hired by the Ramberg school at Botne in Vestfold, where he combined teaching profession with writing poetry. He worked as a teacher in Holmestrand until 1927. At the age of fifty, he retired in order to devote his time to writing. Duun wrote in Landsmål, an amalgam of peasant dialects that developed into Nynorsk, one of the official languages of Norway. In the period 1907-38 he published 25 novels, four short story collections ("sagas" was his own genre term) and two children's books. Many of his books incorporate the dialects of his subjects: peasants, fishermen and farmers. His novels analyze the psychological and spiritual characteristics of rural, peasant life. Contact with family traditions is a strength for the heroes in his historical novels, and awareness of those who have lived before, and the strength of their actions can help modern people through crises. The most notable works are his six volume, The People of Juvik, which deals with four generations of a family of peasant landowners. This work was translated into English and published as: The Trough of the Waves (1930), The Blind Man (1931), The Big Wedding (1932), Odin in Fairyland (1932), Odin Grows Up (1934) and Storm (1935).
November 21, 1889
William Alexander Gerhardie (1895-1977) was a British (Anglo-Russian) novelist and playwright. Gerhardie (or Gerhardi: he added the ‘e’ in later years as an affectation) was one of the most critically acclaimed English novelists of the 1920s (Evelyn Waugh told him ‘I have talent, but you have genius’). H.G Wells was a ferocious champion of his work. His first novel Futility, was written while he was at Cambridge and drew on his experiences in Russia fighting (or attempting to fight) the Bolsheviks, along with his childhood experiences visiting pre-revolutionary Russia. Some say that it was the first work in English to fully explore the theme of ‘waiting’ later made famous by Samuel Beckett in WAITING FOR GODOT, but it is probably more apt to recognize a common comic nihilism between those two figures. His next novel, THE POLYGLOTS is probably his masterpiece (although some argue for DOOM). Again it deals with Russia (Gerhardie was strongly influenced by the tragi-comic style of Russian writers such as Chekhov who he wrote a study of while in College). He collaborated with Hugh Kingsmill on the biography ‘The Casanova Fable’, his friendship with Hugh being both a source of conflict over women and a great intellectual stimulus. After World War II Gerhardie’s star waned, and he became unfashionable, and although he continued to write, he had nothing published after 1939. After a period of poverty-stricken oblivion, he lived to see two ‘definitive collected works’ published by Macdonald (in 1947-49 and then revised again in 1970-74). More recently, both Prion and New Directions Press have been reissuing his works. Asked how to say his name, he told The Literary Digest ‘Pronounced jer (as Ger in Gerald) hardy, with the accent on the a: jer-har’dy. This is the way I and my relatives pronounce it, tho I am told it is incorrect. Philologists are of the opinion that it should be pronounced with the g as in Gertrude. I believe they are right. I, however, cling to the family habit of mispronouncing it. But I do so without obstinacy. If the world made it worth my while I would side with the multitude.’ (Charles Earle Funk, What’s the Name, Please?, Funk & Wagnalls, 1936).
November 21, 1914
Michael Grant (21 November 1914 – 4 October 2004) was an English classicist, numismatist, and author of numerous popular books on ancient history. His 1956 translation of Tacitus's Annals of Imperial Rome remains a standard of the work. Having studied and held a number of academic posts in the United Kingdom and the Middle East, he retired early to devote himself fully to writing. He once described himself as "one of the very few freelancers in the field of ancient history: a rare phenomenon". As a populariser, his hallmarks were his prolific output and his unwillingness to oversimplify or talk down to his readership. He published over 70 works.
November 21, 1940
Malcolm John Rebennack (born November 21, 1940), better known by his stage name Dr. John, is an American singer, songwriter, actor, pianist and guitarist, whose music combines blues, pop, jazz, boogie woogie and rock and roll. Active as a session musician since the late 1950s, he gained a cult following in the late 1960s following the release of his album Gris-Gris and his appearance at the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music. He performed a wildly theatrical stage show inspired by medicine shows, Mardi Gras costumes and voodoo ceremonies. Rebennack has recorded more than 20 albums and in 1973 scored a top-10 hit with "Right Place, Wrong Time". The winner of six Grammy Awards, Rebennack was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by singer John Legend on March 14, 2011. In May 2013, Rebennack was the recipient of an honorary doctorate of fine arts from Tulane University.
November 21, 1886
Sir Harold George Nicolson KCVO CMG (21 November 1886 – 1 May 1968) was a British diplomat, author, diarist and politician. He was the husband of writer Vita Sackville-West.
November 22, 1819
Mary Anne (alternatively Mary Ann or Marian) Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880), better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of them set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight. She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure her works would be taken seriously. Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot's life, but she wanted to escape the stereotype of women only writing lighthearted romances. An additional factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals attending her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived for over 20 years. Her 1872 work, Middlemarch, has been described as the greatest novel in the English language by Martin Amis and by Julian Barnes.
November 22, 1869
André Paul Guillaume Gide (22 November 1869 – 19 February 1951) was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947 'for his comprehensive and artistically significant writings, in which human problems and conditions have been presented with a fearless love of truth and keen psychological insight'. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars. Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide exposes to public view the conflict and eventual reconciliation of the two sides of his personality, split apart by a straitlaced education and a narrow social moralism. Gide's work can be seen as an investigation of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritanical constraints, and centres on his continuous effort to achieve intellectual honesty. His self-exploratory texts reflect his search of how to be fully oneself, even to the point of owning one's sexual nature, without at the same time betraying one's values. His political activity is informed by the same ethos, as suggested by his repudiation of communism after his 1936 voyage to the USSR.
November 22, 1857
George Robert Gissing (22 November 1857 – 28 December 1903) was an English novelist who published 23 novels between 1880 and 1903. Gissing also worked as a teacher and tutor throughout his life. He published his first novel, Workers in the Dawn, in 1880. His best known novels, which are published in modern editions, include The Nether World (1889), New Grub Street (1891), and The Odd Women (1893).
November 22, 1962
Victor Olegovich Pelevin (born 22 November 1962) is a Russian fiction writer, the author of novels 'Omon Ra', 'Chapayev and Void' and 'Generation P'. He is a laureate of multiple literary awards including the Russian Little Booker Prize (1993) and the Russian National Bestseller (2004). His books are multi-layered postmodernist texts fusing elements of pop culture and esoteric philosophies while carrying conventions of the science fiction genre. Some critics relate his prose to the New Sincerity literary movement.
November 22, 1948
Dr. Harriet Braiker (November 22, 1948, Los Angeles, CA - 2004, Pasadena, CA) was a social and clinical Ph.D. psychologist, best-selling author, and internationally-renowned expert in women’s issues. She was the first to publicly identify that women experience more and different types of stress than men. Her pioneering book, The Type E Woman: How to Overcome the Stress of Being Everything to Everybody, made mainstream and medical news around the world when it was first published in the late 1980s. In that book, she observed that the Type-A stress that men experience pales in comparison to what women experience. She coined the term "Type-E stress" – the E being Everything to Everybody – to help women better understand that in trying to be Everything to Everybody, they subjected themselves to a completely different and more debilitating type of stress than men experience.
November 22, 1842
José-Maria de Heredia (22 November 1842 – 3 October 1905) was a Cuban-born French Parnassian poet. He was the fifteenth member elected for seat 4 of the Académie française in 1894. Heredia was born at Fortuna Cafeyere, near Santiago de Cuba, to Domingo de Heredia Mieses Pimentel Guridi native of Santo Domingo and his second wife, French Louise Girard d'Houville. At the age of eight he went from the West Indies to France, returning then to Havana at age seventeen, and finally making France his home not long afterwards. He received his classical education with the priests of Saint Vincent at Senlis, and after his visit to Havana he studied at the Ecole des Chartes at Paris. During the later 1860s, with François Edouard Joachim Coppée, René François Armand Sully-Prudhomme, Paul Verlaine and others less distinguished, he was one of the poets who associated with Charles Leconte de Lisle, and were given the name of "Parnassiens". To this new school, form – the technical part of their art – was of supreme importance, and, as a reaction against the influence of Alfred de Musset, they repressed in their work the expression of personal feeling and emotion. "True poetry," said M. de Heredia in his discourse on entering the Academy, "dwells in nature and in humanity, which are eternal, and not in the heart of the creature of a day, however great." De Heredia wrote very little, and published even less, but his sonnets were circulated in manuscript form, and gave him a reputation before they were published in 1893, together with a few longer poems, as a volume, with the title Les Trophées. In the original work, he called to his great friend, the artist Ernest Jean-Marie Millard de Bois Durand, to illustrate his book of original watercolors. He was granted French nationality in 1893 and was subsequently elected to the Académie française on 22 February 1894, in the place of Charles de Mazade the publicist. Few purely literary men can have entered the Academy with so few credentials. A small volume of verse; a translation, with introduction, of Diaz del Castillo's History of the Conquest of New Spain (1878–1881); a translation of the life of the nun Alferez (1894), Thomas de Quincey's "Spanish Military Nun"; one or two short pieces of occasional verse; and an introduction or so – this is but small literary output. But the sonnets are of their kind among the most skilled of modern literature. "A Légende des siècles in sonnets" M. François Coppée termed them. In 1901 de Heredia became librarian of the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal at Paris. He died at the Château de Bourdonné in Seine-et-Oise on 3 October 1905, having completed his critical edition of André Chénier's works.
November 22, 1954
Anne Billson (born November 22, 1954) is a film critic and author of several books, including Suckers, a novel about vampires. She lives in Paris, France.
November 22, 1969
Marjane Satrapi was born November 22, 1969 in Rasht, Iran, and currently lives in Paris. She has written several children’s books and her commentary and comics appear in newspapers and magazines around the world, including The New York Times and The New Yorker. She is also the author of the internationally best-selling and award-winning comic book autobiography in two parts, PERSEPOLIS and PERSEPOLIS 2.
November 22, 1921
Rodney Dangerfield (born Jacob Cohen, November 22, 1921 – October 5, 2004) was an American stand-up comedian, actor, producer and screenwriter known for the catchphrase "I don't get no respect!" and his monologues on that theme. He is also remembered for his 1980s film roles, especially in Easy Money, Caddyshack, and Back to School.
November 22, 1929
Staughton Craig Lynd (born November 22, 1929) is an American conscientious objector, Quaker, peace activist and civil rights activist, tax resister, historian, professor, author and lawyer. His involvement in social justice causes has brought him into contact with some of the nation's most influential activists, including Howard Zinn, Tom Hayden and Daniel Berrigan. Lynd's contribution to the cause of social justice and the peace movement is chronicled in Carl Mirra's biography, The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945-1970, published in 2010 by Kent State University Press.
November 22, 1904
Fumio Niwa (November 22, 1904 Japan, died April 20, 2005 in Musashino, Tokyo) was a Japanese novelist with a long list of works, the most famous in the West being his novel The Buddha Tree (Japanese Bodaiju, "The Linden", or "The Bodhi Tree", 1956). After the war Niwa became an extremely prolific author of more than 80 novels, 100 volumes of short stories, and 10 volumes of essays. His most celebrated short story was The Hateful Age (Japanese Iyagarase no Nenrei, 1947, literally "The Age of Disgust"), about a family terrorised by a senile grandmother, which enjoyed such popularity that the title became a phrase in the language, for a time. The novel The Buddha Tree uses his unhappy childhood at S?gen-ji as a backdrop. When he was eight years old his mother eloped with an actor from a Kansai Kabuki company; an event that greatly traumatised him. In this novel the story is elaborated fictionally. Later works include, from 1969, a five-volume biography of Shinran (1173-1262), the founder of the Pure Land sect, and in 1983 an eight-volume work on Rennyo, a 15th-century monk who died on a pilgrimage to India. In 1965 Niwa was elected a member of the Japan Art Academy, and the following year he was elected as Chairman of the Japanese Writers' Association, a position he held for many years. Niwa encouraged fellow members to play golf, organised health insurance, and bought land for a writers' cemetery. He won the 19th Yomiuri Prize and was awarded the Order of Culture in 1977. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1986 and died of pneumonia in 2005.
November 22, 1943
Roger Lichtenberg Simon (born November 22, 1943) is an American novelist and Academy Award-nominated screenwriter. He was formerly CEO of PJ Media (formerly known as Pajamas Media) and is now its CEO Emeritus. He is the author of ten novels, including the Moses Wine detective series, seven produced screenplays and two non-fiction books. He has served as president of the West Coast branch of PEN, a member of the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild of America, and was on the faculty of the American Film Institute and the Sundance Institute. His many journalistic articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Commentary, and City Journal, among others
November 22, 1966
Jason Starr (born 1966) is an American author, comic book writer, and screenwriter from New York City. Starr has written numerous crime fiction novels and thrillers. Starr's Tough Luck, a novel published in 2003, was a Barry Award Winner for Best Paperback Original and was a nominee at the 2004 Anthony Awards for Best Paperback Original. Twisted City won the award for Best Paperback Original at the 2005 Anthony Awards. Furthermore, in 2011, The Chill won the first ever Anthony Award for Best Graphic Novel. Starr is part of a literary circle that includes Ken Bruen, Daniel Woodrell, Wallace Stroby, Alan Glynn, Ed Brubaker, Lee Child, Bret Easton Ellis, Megan Abbott, Brian Azzarello, and Alison Gaylin.
November 22, 1947
Valerie Wilson Wesley (born November 22, 1947) is an African-American author of mysteries, adult-theme novels, and children's books, and a former executive editor of Essence magazine. She is the author of the Tamara Hayle mystery series. Her writings, both fiction and non-fiction, have also appeared in numerous publications, including Essence, Family Circle, TV Guide, Ms., The New York Times, and the Swiss weekly magazine Die Weltwoche. Wesley grew up in Ashford, Connecticut. She graduated from Howard University and earned master's degrees from the Bank Street College of Education and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. A former resident of East Orange, New Jersey she now lives in Montclair, New Jersey with her two daughters and playwright husband Richard Wesley.
November 22, 1896
Raoul Falconia Whitfield (November 22, 1896, New York City, NY - January 24, 1945, Los Angeles, CA) was an American writer of hardboiled crime fiction. Whitfield was born in New York in 1896. He spent part of his childhood in the Philippines with his father, the civil servant William H. Whitfield. In 1916, Whitfield fell ill and was returned to the U.S. for treatment. After recovering, Whitfield travelled to Hollywood and worked as a silent-film actor. Later, he joined the U.S. Air Force and served in the Flying Cadets in the last months of World War One. Whitfield began writing for pulp magazines in 1924, and first appeared in Black Mask in 1926. Black Mask would become Whitfield's main market; the magazine's editor Joseph Shaw described Whitfield as a ‘hard, patient, determined worker’ Whitfield became best known in the magazine for his stories about Jo Gar, a Filipino detective. Whitfield befriended Dashiell Hammett during his tenure on the magazine. In addition to Black Mask, Whitfield also wrote fiction for Adventure, Air Trails, War Stories, Battle Stories, Blue Book, Everybody's Magazine, Boys' Life and Breezy Stories. Whitfield's debut novel, Green Ice, was published in 1930. In the New York Evening Post, Hammett praised Green Ice: ‘Here are 280 pages of naked action pounded into tough compactness by staccato, hammerlike writing’. Whitfield ceased writing fiction and moved to Hollywood in the late 1930s. Although he was fairly wealthy, by the 1940s he had lost most of his money. Later, Whitfield contracted tuberculosis and had to be hospitalized. He died from the disease in January 1945.
November 22, 1964
Olivier Truc was born in France November 22, 1964. He has worked as a journalist since 1986, and is based in Stockholm since 1994, where he is currently the Nordic and Baltic correspondent for Le Monde and Le Point. As a reporter, Olivier Truc covers subjects from politics and economics to social issues like immigration and minorities. He has also produced TV documentaries, including one that portrays a group of Norwegian policemen in Lapland ('The Reindeer Police,' 2008). He has previously published two non-fiction books. Forty Days Without Shadow is his first novel, and will be published in the original French by Éditions Métailié in September 2012.
November 22, 1849
Fritz Mauthner (22 November 1849 – 29 June 1923) was an Austro-Hungarian novelist, theatre critic, satirist, and exponent of philosophical skepticism derived from a critique of human knowledge. Mauthner was born on 22 November 1849 into an assimilated, well-to-do Jewish family from Horschitz (Ho?ice; also Horschitz) in Bohemia. His father owned a small weaving factory in Horschitz and at the age of six the family moved to Prague to provide a better education for the children. Mauthner's (1918) Erinnerungen provides a fascinating account of his early upbringing in Prague, portraying the situation of the family as Jews in relation to German and Czech cultures and languages and within the national conflict in Bohemia. As Gershon Weiler (1970) observes in Mauthner's Critique of Language, it is not by chance that Mauthner's early attention was directed to the problems of language as he found himself growing up in a linguistic crossfield where German, Czech and Hebrew were all part of the cultural mix and deeply intertwined with questions of identity and belonging - ‘I cannot understand how a Jew born in a Slavonic land of the Austrian empire could not be drawn to the study of language.’ Mauthner's agnosticism was also influenced by his early experiences. His parents were assimilated Jews but he did receive some religious grounding while at school. This smattering of knowledge eventually led him to develop a strong antipathy to religion which he came to associate with the empty rituals he had been forced to undertake as a youth in Bohemia. Mauthner was frustrated by his educational experiences and after being held back for three years only earned his Matura at the age of twenty from Kleinseiter-Gymnasium in Prague. In accordance with his father's wishes, between 1869 and 1873 Mauthner studied law at the University of Prague, the Karolinum. In reality he regarded his legal training with little more than contempt and busied himself with miscellaneous subjects ranging from poetry to philosophy and the history of art. It was at the University of Prague that he attended the public lectures of the physicist Ernst Mach and he acknowledged that ‘Mach's epistemological positivism was alive in [his] subconscious’ when he later developed his critique of language. He passed only the first state examination in jurisprudence and upon his father's death promptly left the university after which he was occupied for a short time in a lawyer's office in Prague. While there he published a collection of sonnets, under the title ’Die Grosse Revolution’ (1871), which almost brought him an indictment for treason. This was followed by ’Anna’ and several minor comedies, which were successfully produced. He then devoted himself exclusively to literature. After writing for a time for Prague publications, his fascination with Wilhelmine Germany led him to move, in 1876, to Berlin-Grunewald, where he wrote critical articles for various journals. Though his novels and popular parodies of German classical poems brought him moderate literary fame, he spent most of the time between 1876 and 1905 as a theatre critic for Berliner Tageblatt, where he became editor in 1895. As Vierhufe (1970) noted, analysis of his early works reveals that even at this stage he was a notable critic with insight into the age he lived in, the prevailing cultural climate, and above all linguistic style. It is thus possible to regard his early literary work as a precursor of his later epistemologically oriented critique of language and language usage. Mauthner was largely an interloper in philosophy and in the climate of language-critical philosophy which emphasized teamwork and collaboration he was ostracized, reduced to drawing inspiration from the great outsiders of the discipline such as Spinoza and Schopenhauer. In the intellectual circles of the time he was regarded as a little more than a meddling journalist who concerned himself with affairs about which he knew nothing. He regarded academics with commensurate contempt and made endless fun of Philosophie professoren. Mauthner's polemical style did little to endear him to other philosophers and the second edition of Beitrage he lashed out against Friedrich Max Mullerand described Ludwig Noiré's monism as ‘wörterglaubig’ or caught in verbal superstitions. He did however have a long friendship with Gustav Landauer whom he met while serving on the board of the Freie Bühne and the two collaborated in his later years before ultimately falling out over their political differences. Landauer introduced Mauthner to his friend Martin Buber who was impressed by his mysticism and asked him to contribute to a series of social-psychological studies he edited, Die Gesellschaft. Buber encouraged Mauthner to make a contribution by saying ‘It needs you, you more than anyone else’. Mauthner also had a lifelong friendship with Clara Levysohn to whom he covertly dedicated the Beitrage and it is apparent from their letters that a close relationship existed between the two. Clara's husband intervened in 1895 and from this time on Clara and Fritz agreed to communicate by correspondence only, with an occasional short meeting. Mauthner subsequently moved to Freiberg where he met Harriet Straub, a doctor in 1907. They married and moved to Meersburg in 1911 where Mauthner lived until his death at Lake Constance. He edited the Bibliothek der Philosophen for a time but retired from public life entirely just before World War I to pursue the philosophy and politics of language. Following Friedrich Nietzsche and Ernst Mach, Mauthner launches an offensive against metaphysics and argues for the substitution of an ahistorical notion of truth with a more cautious conception of veracity. He is best known for his Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (Contributions to a Critique of Language), which took nine years to write. The Beitrage was published in three parts in 1901 and 1902 and saw Mauthner expand his work on philosophical ideas and subject more than 200 philosophical concepts to critical examination. Mauthner's work should be seen in the context of the post-Hegelian crisis in philosophy and his ideas reflect a fin-de-siecle pessimism in Austria that arose from the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy and a distrust of positivist epistemology. Mauthner was influenced by David Hume's empiricism and Otto Ludwig's (1901) Shakespeare-Studien, and he admired Otto Von Bismarck for combining a life of action with a contempt for words and ideologies. He believed that Kant had grasped the immensely important idea that reason is something in need of criticism but had failed to acknowledge that reason is but language. His own work carries the work of Kant and the British empiricists to its logical conclusion in a critique of language. Today, Mauthner is known for his major language-critical works and there has been a revival of interest in him over the last few years. However in his early days Mauthner lost hope and burned his first manuscript in despair at his ignorance of language philosophy. He spent the next twenty years labouring on the preliminaries of his critique. His philosophical endeavour deals with the psychology and science of language as well as the role of grammar and logic. It is a response to the perceived misuse of language and is preoccupied with the implications of language. He believed that words have pragmatic social value, but, because they are applied subjectively and are ever changing, they represent sense experience only (and that imperfectly). The word as such is a metaphor, a transposition of definite terms on indefinite impressions, and that it is enclosed within an image that can only refer to other images. Words cannot adequately express concepts, and they necessarily misrepresent reality by encouraging philosophers to anthropomorphise events through their use of language. He argues that philosophical endeavour is redundant as language cannot be used to create an overarching concept that is abstracted from a collection of distinct entities. In philosophy, doctrines are built out of abstract ideas that can often lead to nonsense if removed from their context. According to Mauthner, thinking never allows access to reality but is always mediated by language. Language sanctions universal meanings, ideas whose validity seems to be due to a cause, to something real. In fact, it lends its protection to a metaphysics given over to what Mauthner calls ‘superstition’ or ‘word fetishism’ (Mauthner, 1901–1902). For the fact is that our vocabulary gives an illusion of a supernatural, ideal world. For example, he denigrates the metaphysical concept of being as ‘merely a word, a word without content’ (Worterbuch der Philosophie, Vol. III p. 171) and extolls that ‘being is not a genuine concept as genuine concepts must be reducible to something representable’ (Worterbuch der Philosophie, Vol. III p. 176). Mauthner advises epistemological caution when dealing with scientific concepts as words and the logic that orders them ultimately sustain a web of fiction – a ‘mythology’ (Mauthner, 1901–1902) – which is managed by a specific interpretation of reality. The key to it is the rudimentary voluntarism andanimism with which the human being faces the world in order to make it intelligible. Consequently, man's Weltanschauung is irremediably anthropomorphic or ‘hoministic’, as Mauthner says (Mauthner, 1901–1902)and in an exercise of ‘nihilistic scepticism’ Mauthner ends by condemning language as a ‘useless device for knowledge’. Our dictionary cannot have any scientific utility, he claims though it can have a ‘high artistic value’. Such considerations led Mauthner to philosophical skepticism and the postulation of a criterion of truth based on personal experiences shaped by cultural influences. Mauthner applied linguistic analysis in both his major works: Wörterbuch der Philosophie, 2 vol. (1910; ‘Dictionary of Philosophy’), and Der Atheismus und seine Geschichte im Abendlande, 4 vol. (1921–23; ‘Atheism and Its History in the West’). His skepticism was not new, but his approach to epistemology through language was unique. He was emphatically committed to studying everyday language as opposed to logically-minded philosophers' search for idealised structures and formalised languages which correlate discourse and reality. According to Bedreck (1992), Mauthner was one of the few philosophers and poets who still concerned himself with language origin at the turn of the century when linguists had abandoned the issue. Mauthner focuses on the scientific treatment of language origin to address the shortcomings in its treatment. He rejects what he calls the ‘alphabetism’ of linguistics (Beitrage 2: 446) and suggests movement away from the historical-comparative approach of philology towards psychology. Mauthner suggests his own theory of a metaphorical beginning for language but only succeeds in redefining the problem and relates the problem of language origin to epistemological questions that are central to his critique of language. As a militant agnostic, Mauthner was denied academic appointments because of his anti-religious stance and political views and this no doubt further contributed to his obscurity. He asserted polemically ‘in religion the power of language tyrannises us as the power of dead words’ (Die Sprache, p. 19). He radicalized his skepticism in his last literary work, Der letzte Tod des Gautama Buddha (1913), preaching an areligious, skeptical mysticism without God. In his last encyclopedic, philosophical work, Der Atheismus und seine Geschichte im Abendlande (4 vols. 1920–23), Mauthner claimed that all dogmas – religious or scientific – were mere human inventions with the basis of their origin, flourishing, and decline lying in history. Mauthner sought to show how the West had begun to shake off the once dominant concept of God. His work was thus intended to trace the disintegration of this concept, an ‘anthropomorphic illusion’ that had held peoples spellbound for several millennia. According to Mauthner, critique of language cannot transcend the limits of language but can only point to them. This leads to a secular mysticism by revealing a transcendent reality that has no limits. Mauthner rejects conventional mystical preoccupations with occultism and theosophy as ludicrous and unscientific and argued that mystics should not put forward theories positing privileged knowledge about the world. Mauthner regards Meister Eckhart and Goethe as true mystics. He interpreted Goethe's dictum ‘Man never knows how anthropomorphic he is’ as meaning we can never really grasp the extent of anthropomorphism in language as we can never detach the concept of man from language. Mauthner had a particular affinity with Meister Eckhart's claims that God and his nature could not be understood in any way. He concludes that any attempt to express the feelings of the artist, the mystic, the philosopher destroys what only the silent ego feels - ‘nothing more can be said’ (Die drei Bilder der Welt, Vol. III, p. 170). Mauthner's work acts as an important precursor of early twentieth century movements such as the Vienna Circle although his influence was not acknowledged by eminent thinkers such as Bertrand Russell. Mauthner might be entirely relegated to obscurity but for the notable exception of Ludwig Wittgenstein who took several of his ideas from Mauthner,[3] although he pointedly rejects his views in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922). Hans Sluga (2006) argues that Wittgenstein moved closer to Mauthner's views in his later work and Mauthner’s neo-Pyrrhonian view of language may thus be ‘responsible for the linguistic turn in Wittgenstein’s thinking and thereby indirectly for the whole linguistic turn in 20th-century analytic philosophy’. In Gescheiterte Sprachkritik: Fritz Mauthner's Leben und Werk, Joachim Kühn (1979) connects the work of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett to the ‘skeptical school’ of German writing that has, Kühn argues, its origin in the work of philosophers such as Fritz Mauthner. Jennie Skerl (1974) argues that in his novel, Watt, Beckett makes significant use of Mauthner's critique of language which he originally read either in 1929 (as Ben-Zvi argues) or (more likely) in 1938 while undertaking research for Joyce for Finnegans Wake (as Dirk van Hulle, Julian A. Garforth, and others suggest). Linda Ben-Zvi (1980) notes the similarities between the style in the Beiträge and Beckett's writing while James Knowlson and John Pilling (1979) noted ‘It would be difficult to overestimate the relevance of [Mauthner's ideas on language] for students of Beckett. The premises are the same: the conclusions are the same: only the realm of discourse...is different...Mauthner in fact provided Beckett with the ammunition to destroy all systems of thought whatever, even irrationalism’ (Frescoes of the Skull, p. 128). The author Jorge Luis Borges was also fascinated by the work of Mauthner whose influence on stories such as Emma Zunz and Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote has been explored by Sylvia Dapia (1993).
November 23, 1936
Robert Barnard (November 23, 1936 - September 19, 2013) was an English crime writer, critic and lecturer. Born in Essex, Barnard was educated at the Colchester Royal Grammar School and at Balliol College in Oxford. His first crime novel, A Little Local Murder, was published in 1976. The novel was written while he was a lecturer at University of Tromsø in Norway. He has gone on to write more than 40 other books and numerous short stories. Barnard has said that his favourite crime writer is Agatha Christie. In 1980 he published a critique of her work titled A Talent to Deceive: An Appreciation of Agatha Christie. Barnard was awarded the Cartier Diamond Dagger in 2003 by the Crime Writers Association for a lifetime of achievement. Under the pseudonym Bernard Bastable,
November 23, 1920
Paul Celan (November 23, 1920 – approximately April 20, 1970) was the most frequently used pseudonym of Paul Antschel, one of the major poets of the post-World War II era. Celan was born in 1920 into a German-speaking Jewish family in Cernauti, Bukovina, then part of Romania (now part of Ukraine). His father, Leo Antschel, was a Zionist who advocated his son’s education in Hebrew at Safah Ivriah, an institution previously convinced of the wisdom of assimilation into Austrian culture, and one which favourably received Chaim Weizmann of the World Zionist Organization in 1927. His mother, Fritzi, was an avid reader of German literature who insisted German be the language of the house. After his Bar Mitzvah in 1933, Celan abandoned Zionism (at least to some extent) and terminated his formal Hebrew education, instead becoming active in Jewish Socialist organizations and fostering support for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. His earliest known poem, titled Mother’s Day 1938 was an earnest, if sentimental, profession of love. In 1938, Celan travelled to Tours, France to study medicine (the newly-imposed Jewish quota in Romanian universities and the Anschluss precluded Bucharest and Vienna), but returned to Cernauti in 1939 to study literature and Romance languages. His journey to France took him through Berlin as the events of Kristallnacht unfolded, and also introduced him to his uncle, Bruno Schrager, who later was among the French detainees who died at Birkenau. The Soviet occupation in June 1940 deprived Celan of any lingering illusions about Stalinism and Soviet Communism stemming from his earlier socialist engagements; the Soviets quickly imposed bureaucratic reforms on the university where he was studying Romance philology, and the Red Army brought deportations to Siberia, just as Nazi Germany and Romania brought ghettos, internment, and forced labour a year later. On arrival in July 1941 the German SS Einsatzkommando and their Romanian allies burned down the city’s six-hundred-year-old Great Synagogue. In October, the Romanians deported a large number of Jews after forcing them into a ghetto, where Celan translated William Shakespeare’s Sonnets and continued to write his own poetry, all the while being exposed to traditional Yiddish songs and culture. Before the ghetto was dissolved in the fall of that year, Celan was pressed into labor, first clearing the debris of a demolished post office, and then gathering and destroying Russian books. The local mayor strove to mitigate the harsh circumstances until the governor of Bukovina had the Jews rounded up and deported, starting on a Saturday night in June 1942. Accounts of his whereabouts on that evening vary, but it is certain that Celan was not with his parents when they were taken from their home on June 21 and sent by train to an internment camp in Transnistria, where two-thirds of the deportees perished. Celan’s parents were taken across the Southern Bug and handed over to the Germans, where his father likely perished of typhus and his mother was shot dead after being exhausted by forced labour. Later on, after having himself been taken to the labour camps in the Old Kingdom, Celan would receive reports of his parents’ deaths earlier that year. Celan remained in these labour camps until February 1944, when the Red Army’s advance forced the Romanians to abandon them, whereupon he returned to Cernauti shortly before the Soviets returned to reassert their control. There, he worked briefly as a nurse in the mental hospital. Early versions of Todesfuge were circulated at this time, a poem that clearly relied on accounts coming from the now-liberated camps in Poland. Friends from this period recall expression of immense guilt over his separation from his parents, whom he had tried to convince to go into hiding prior to the deportations, shortly before their death. Considering emigration to Palestine and wary of widespread Soviet antisemitism, Celan left Soviet-occupied territory in 1945 for Bucharest, where he remained until 1947. He was active in the Jewish literary community as both a translator of Russian literature into Romanian, and as a poet, publishing his work under a variety of pseudonyms. The literary scene of the time was richly populated with surrealists — Gellu Naum, Ilarie Voronca, Gherasim Luca, Paul Paun, and Dolfi Trost —, and it was in this period that Celan developed pseudonyms both for himself and his friends, including the one he took as his pen name. A version of Todesfuge appeared as Tangoul Mortii (‘Death Tango‘) in a Romanian translation of May 1947. The surrealist ferment of the time was such that additional remarks had to be published explaining that the dancing and musical performances of the poem were realities of the extermination camp life. Night and Fog, another poem from that era, includes a description of the Auschwitz Orchestra, an institution organized by the SS to assemble and play selections of German dances and popular songs. (The SS man interviewed by Claude Lanzmann for his film Shoah, who rehearsed the songs prisoners were made to sing in the death camp, remarked that no Jews taught the song survived. As Romanian autonomy became increasingly tenuous in the course of that year, Celan fled Romania for Vienna, Austria. It was there that he befriended Ingeborg Bachmann, who had just completed a dissertation on Martin Heidegger. Facing a city divided between occupying powers and with little resemblance to the mythic city it once was, which had harboured the then-shattered Austro-Hungarian Jewish community, he moved to Paris in 1948, where he found a publisher for his first poetry collection, Der Sand aus den Urnen (‘Sand from the Urns’). His first few years in Paris were marked by intense feelings of loneliness and isolation, as expressed in letters to his colleagues, including his longtime friend from Cernauti, Petre Solomon. It was also during this time that he exchanged many letters with Diet Kloos, a Dutch chanteuse. She visited him twice in Paris between 1949 and 1951. In a published edition of these letters, near the end of the exchange, Celan seems to be entertaining an amorous interest in her. In 1952 Celan received an invitation to the semiannual meetings of Group 47. At a 1953 meeting he read his poem Todesfuge (‘Death Fugue’), a depiction of concentration camp life. His reading style, which was based on Hungarian folk poems, was off-putting to the German audience. His poetry was sharply criticized. When Ingeborg Bachmann, with whom Celan had an affair, won the Group’s prize for her collection Die gestundete Zeit (The Extended Hours), Celan (whose work had received only six votes) said ‘After the meeting, only six people remembered my name’. He was not invited again. In November 1951, he met the graphic artist Gisèle Lestrange, in Paris. He would send her many wonderful love letters, influenced by Franz Kafka’s correspondence with Milena Jesenska and Felice Bauer. They married on December 21, 1952 despite the opposition of her aristocratic family, and during the following 18 years they wrote over 700 letters, including a very active exchange with Siegfried Lenz and his wife, Hanna. He made his living as a translator and lecturer in German at the École Normale Supérieure. He was also a pen friend of Nelly Sachs, who later won the Nobel Prize for literature. Celan became a French citizen in 1955 and lived in Paris. Celan’s sense of persecution increased after the widow of his friend the French-German poet Yvan Goll accused him of plagiarising her husband’s work. Celan committed suicide by drowning in the Seine river in late April 1970.
November 23, 1897
Nirad C. Chaudhuri (23 November 1897 – 1 August 1999) was a Bengali?English writer and cultural commentator. He was born in 1897 in Kishoreganj, which today is part of Bangladesh but at that time was part of Bengal, a region of British India. He is known for his hostility to Islam and Hindu extremist ideology. His 1965 work The Continent of Circe earned him the Duff Cooper Memorial Award, becoming the first and only Indian to be selected for the prize.
November 23, 1933
Daniel Chavarria (born 1933) is a Uruguayan revolutionary and writer, living in Cuba. Daniel Chavarria is known to have lived an adventurous life. He worked as a miner in Essen, a model in Cologne, a museum guide at the Prado Museum in Madrid, a dishwasher in Paris and many other countless occupations. He has even disguised himself as a monk. In 1964 while living in Brazil there was a military coup and he fled to work amongst the gold seekers in the Amazon. Later on, he chartered a small plane to Cuba. There he began working as a Latin and Greek translator and teacher. Subsequently he began his career as a writer. Daniel Chavarria defines himself an Uruguayan citizen and a Cuban writer. Chavarria’s style of writing is within the Latin-American tradition of political writers, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez - but with a more optimistic and fresh point of view, similar to Luis Sepulveda and Paco Ignacio Taibo II. He mentions as a child, reading Jules Verne, Emilio Salgari and Alexandre Dumas, and their influence can be clearly seen in his writing. For example, in Tango for a Torturer, the influence of The Count of Monte Cristo is clear. Chavarria’s books are strongly critical of the violence in Fascism. Chavarria’s life and writings clearly show his communist and revolutionary background. He is a well known supporter of the Cuban Revolution. In 2010, Chavarria won the National Prize for Literature, Cuba's national prize for literature and more important award of its type in Cuba.
November 23, 1927
Guy Mattison Davenport (November 23, 1927 – January 4, 2005) was an American writer, translator, illustrator, painter, intellectual, and teacher.
November 23, 1949
Gayl Jones was born in Kentucky in 1949. She attended Connecticut College and Brown University, and has taught a Wellesley College and the University of Michigan. Her other books include THE HEALING (1998 National Book Award Finalist and New York Times Notable Book of the Year) and many others.
November 23, 1883
José Clemente Orozco (November 23, 1883 – September 7, 1949) was a Mexican painter, who specialized in bold murals that established the Mexican Mural Renaissance together with murals by Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and others. Orozco was the most complex of the Mexican muralists, fond of the theme of human suffering, but less realistic and more fascinated by machines than Rivera. Mostly influenced by Symbolism, he was also a genre painter and lithographer. Between 1922 and 1948, Orozco painted murals in Mexico City, Orizaba, Claremont, California, New York City, Hanover, New Hampshire, Guadalajara, Jalisco, and Jiquilpan, Michoacán. His drawings and paintings are exhibited by the Carrillo Gil Museum in Mexico City, and the Orozco Workshop-Museum in Guadalajara. Orozco was known for being a politically committed artist. He promoted the political causes of peasants and workers.
November 23, 1805
Mary Jane Seacole (23 November 1805 – 14 May 1881), née Grant, was a Jamaican-born woman of Scottish and Creole descent who set up a 'British Hotel' behind the lines during the Crimean War, which she described as 'a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers,' and provided succour for wounded servicemen on the battlefield. She was posthumously awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit in 1991. In 2004 she was voted the greatest black Briton. She acquired knowledge of herbal medicine in the Caribbean. When the Crimean War broke out, she applied to the War Office to assist but was refused. She travelled independently and set up her hotel and assisted battlefield wounded. She became extremely popular among service personnel who raised money for her when she faced destitution after the war. After her death, she was forgotten for almost a century, but today is celebrated as a woman who successfully combatted racial prejudice. Her autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), is one of the earliest autobiographies of a mixed-race woman, although some aspects of its accuracy have been questioned. It has been claimed that Seacole's achievements have been exaggerated for political reasons and a plan to erect a statue of her at St Thomas' Hospital, London, describing her as a 'pioneer nurse', has generated controversy. Further controversy broke out in the United Kingdom late in 2012 over reports of a proposal to remove her from the country's National Curriculum.
November 23, 1907
William Andrew Swanberg (November 23, 1907 in St. Paul, Minnesota – September 17, 1992 in Southbury, Connecticut) was an American biographer. He may be known best for Citizen Hearst, a biography of William Randolph Hearst, which was recommended by the Pulitzer Prize board in 1962 but overturned by the trustees. He won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for his 1972 biography of Henry Luce, and the National Book Award in 1977 for his 1976 biography of Norman Thomas.
November 23, 1953
Rick Bayless (born November 23, 1953) is an American chef who specializes in traditional Mexican cuisine with modern interpretations. He is widely known for his PBS series Mexico: One Plate at a Time.
November 23, 1950
Born in Havana, Carlos Eire is now the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. He lives in Guilford, Connecticut, with his wife, Jane, and their three children.
November 23, 1913
Dorothy Sterling (née Dannenberg) (November 23, 1913 – December 1, 2008) was an American writer and historian. After college, she worked as a journalist and writer in New York for several years, including work for the Federal Writers’ Project. In 1937 she married Philip Sterling (died 1989), also a writer. Her daughter, Anne Fausto-Sterling, is a noted biologist, the Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Biology and Gender Studies at Brown University, and is married to playwright Paula Vogel.
November 23, 1947
Daniel Hosler "Dan" O'Brien is an American author, wildlife biologist, and rancher.
November 23, 1911
JOSEFINA VICENS (November 23, 1911, Villahermosa, Mexico - November 22, 1988, Mexico City, Mexico) belongs to a select company of remarkably inventive yet not prolific Mexican writers, (Julio Torri, José Gorostiza and Juan Rulfo). As a novelist, Vicens was a late beginner and the first edition of Los anosfalsos [THE FALSE YEARS] was published in 1982. Her first novel, Blank Pages, appeared in 1966. She did most of her writing for the movies, sometimes in collaboration with Juan Rulfo. Three of the best known films for which she wrote scripts are Las señoritas Vivanco [The Vivanco Ladies] (1952), Los perros de Dios [God’s Dogs] (1970) and Renuncia por motivos de salud [Resignation Due to Illness] (1972). From 1968 to 1976 she served as Secretary of the Screen Writers’ Guild in the Workmen’s Syndicate of the Mexican filmmaking industry. David Lauer is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University. Originally published as El libro vacio in 1958.
November 23, 1948
Zoë Wicomb (born 23 November 1948) is a South African-Scottish author and academic who has lived in the UK since the 1970s. In 2013 she was awarded the inaugural Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for her fiction.
November 23, 1924
Lewis Yablonsky (November 23, 1924, Irvington, NJ - January 29, 2014, Santa Monica, CA) was Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Criminology at California State University-Northridge. He is the author of 15 best-selling books, including The Violent Gang, The Hippie Trip, PsychodramaFathers and Sons.
November 23, 1933
William Wantling (November 23, 1933 – May 2, 1974) was an American poet, novelist, ex-Marine, ex-convict, and college professor born in East Peoria, Illinois. After graduating high school he joined the Marine Corps until 1955. He served in Korea during 1953. After leaving the Marines he moved to California and eventually had a son with his then-wife Luana. Wantling went to San Quentin State Prison in 1958 convicted of forgery and possession of narcotics. During his imprisonment Luana divorced him and took custody of the child. He was released in 1963, and returned to Peoria. There he married Ruth Ann Bunton, a fellow divorcee, in 1964. In 1966 he enrolled at Illinois State University, where he received both a BA and MA. He taught at the university up until his death on May 2, 1974. Wantling died of heart failure, possibly brought about by his extensive drug use. Wantling alleged that he was the youngest Marine Sergeant (at 18) in combat. He also claimed that he spent ten days in a coma and eight weeks in the hospital recovering from burns after the jeep he was riding in hit a landmine, causing a 50-gallon barrel of gasoline on the jeep to ignite. A character based on Wantling has appeared in the poetry of Charles Bukowski, who was an acquaintance. Wantling and his second wife also appeared as characters in Bukowski's 1978 novel Women. Much of his poetry deals with his time spent in Korea during the war. Pusan Liberty is a first person account of the life of a heroin dealer in Pusan, South Korea. And without laying claim is a short and shocking poem about the indifference with which the American forces treated killing. Initiation is about a couple trying to raise money to sustain their drug (presumably heroin) addiction. Unwilling to rob a stranger, the girlfriend offers to sell her body. Poetry is about the failure of classic poetic devices to capture the reality and brutality of prison life. The three poems mentioned above are included in the collection "The Awakening" by William Wantling (Rapp & Whiting, London, 1968) and the last two are included in "San Quentin's Stranger" by William Wantling (Caveman Press, Dunedin, 1973).
November 24, 1935
Manlio Argueta (November 24, 1935-) is a Salvadoran writer, critic, and novelist born in 1935. Although he considers himself first and foremost a poet, he is known in the English speaking world for his book One Day of Life.
November 24, 1849
Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett (24 November 1849 – 29 October 1924) was an English-American playwright and author. She is best known for her children's stories, in particular Little Lord Fauntleroy (published in 1885-6), A Little Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden (1911).
November 24, 1945
Nuruddin Farah is the author of ten previous novels, most recently LINKS and KNOTS, the first two volumes of the Past Imperfect trilogy, which is completed by CROSSBONES. His books have been translated into seventeen languages and have brought him numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. His plays and essays, has been featured in The New Yorker and other publications. Born in Baidoa, Somalia, Farah divides his time between Cape Town and Minneapolis, where he holds the Winton Chair in the Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota.
November 24, 1927
Ahmadou Kourouma (24 November 1927 Boundiali – 11 December 2003 Lyon) was an Ivorian novelist. The eldest son of a distinguished Malinké family, Ahmadou Kourouma was born in 1927 in Côte d'Ivoire. Raised by his uncle, he initially pursued studies in Bamako, Mali. From 1950 to 1954, when his country was still under French colonial control, he participated in French military campaigns in Indochina, after which he journeyed to France to study mathematics in Lyon. Kourouma returned to his native Côte d'Ivoire after it won its independence in 1960, yet he quickly found himself questioning the government of Félix Houphouët-Boigny. After brief imprisonment, Kourouma spent several years in exile, first in Algeria (1964–69), then in Cameroon (1974–84) and Togo (1984–94), before finally returning to live in Côte d'Ivoire. Determined to speak out against the betrayal of legitimate African aspirations at the dawn of independence, Kourouma was drawn into an experiment in fiction. His first novel, Les soleils des indépendances (The Suns of Independence, 1970) contains a critical treatment of post-colonial governments in Africa. Twenty years later, his second book Monnè, outrages et défis, a history of a century of colonialism, was published. In 1998, he published En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages (translated as Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote), a satire of postcolonial Africa in the style of Voltaire in which a griot recounts the story of a tribal hunter's transformation into a dictator, inspired by president Gnassingbé Eyadéma of Togo. In 2000, he published Allah n'est pas obligé (translated as Allah is Not Obliged), a tale of an orphan who becomes a child soldier when traveling to visit his aunt in Liberia. At the outbreak of civil war in Côte d'Ivoire in 2002, Kourouma stood against the war as well as against the concept of Ivorian nationalism, calling it "an absurdity which has led us to chaos." President Laurent Gbagbo accused him of supporting rebel groups from the north of the country. In France, each of Ahmadou Kourouma's novels has been greeted with great acclaim, sold exceptionally well, and been showered with prizes including the Prix Renaudot in the year 2000 and the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens for Allah n'est pas obligé. In the English-speaking world, Kourouma has yet to make much of an impression: despite some positive reviews, his work remains largely unknown outside university classes in African fiction. At the time of his death, he was working on a sequel to Allah n'est pas obligé, entitled Quand on refuse on dit non (translated roughly as "When One Disagrees, One Says No"), in which the protagonist of the first novel, a child soldier, is demobilized and returns to his home in Côte d'Ivoire, where a new regional conflict has arisen.
November 24, 1941
Ricardo Piglia (November 24, 1941, Adrogué, Argentina – January 6, 2017, Buenos Aires) was one of the foremost contemporary Argentine writers. Piglia was born in Adrogué and raised in Mar del Plata, where he went to live in 1955 after the fall of Juan Perón, whom his father supported. He studied history in the National University of La Plata. He then went to work in various publishing houses in Buenos Aires and was in charge of the Serie Negra which published well known authors of crime fiction including Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, David Goodis and Horace McCoy. A fan of American literature he was also influenced by F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, as well as by European authors Franz Kafka and Robert Musil. He is known for his fiction, including several collections of short stories; the novels Artificial Respiration (1980), The Absent City (1992), Burnt Money (1997); and criticism including Criticism and Fiction (1986), Brief Forms (1999) and The Last Reader (2005). Piglia has received a number of awards, including the Premio internacional de novela Rómulo Gallegos (2011), Premio Iberoamericano de las Letras (2005), Premio Planeta (1997), Premio Casa de las Américas (1967). He was a longtime resident of the United States, where he taught Latin American literature at Princeton University.
November 24, 1961
Suzanna Arundhati Roy (born 24 November 1961) is an Indian author who is best known for the 1998 Man Booker Prize for Fiction-winning novel The God of Small Things (1997), which became the biggest-selling book by a nonexpatriate Indian author. She is also known as a political activist involved in human rights and environmental causes.
November 24, 1713
Laurence Sterne (24 November 1713 – 18 March 1768) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He is best known for his novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy.
November 24, 1970
Marlon James (born 24 November 1970) is a Jamaican writer. He has published three novels: John Crow's Devil (2005), The Book of Night Women (2009), and A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize. Now living in Minneapolis, James teaches literature at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. James was born in Kingston, Jamaica, to parents who were both in the Jamaican police: his mother (who gave him his first prose book, a collection of stories by O. Henry) became a detective and his father (from whom James took a love of Shakespeare and Coleridge) a lawyer. James is a 1991 graduate of the University of the West Indies, where he read Language and Literature. He left Jamaica because he was scared of homophobic violence. He received a master's degree in creative writing from Wilkes University (2006). James has taught English and creative writing at Macalester College since 2007. His first novel, John Crow's Devil – which was rejected 70 times before being accepted for publication – tells the story of a biblical struggle in a remote Jamaican village in 1957. His second novel, The Book of Night Women, is about a slave woman's revolt in a Jamaican plantation in the early 19th century. His most recent novel, 2014's A Brief History of Seven Killings, explores several decades of Jamaican history and political instability through the perspectives of many narrators. It won the fiction category of the 2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, having been the first book by a Jamaican author ever to be shortlisted. He is the second Caribbean winner of the prize, following Trinidad-born V. S. Naipaul who won in 1971. James has indicated his next work will be a fantasy novel, titled Black Leopard, Red Wolf. It will be the first in a series.
November 24, 1826
Carlo Lorenzini (November 24, 1826 – October 26, 1890), better known by the pen name Carlo Collodi, was an Italian children's writer known for the world-renowned fairy tale novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio.
November 24, 1950
David M. Lubin, Charlotte C. Weber Professor of Art at Wake Forest University, is author of Titanic (1999), Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America (1994), and Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James (1985).
November 24, 1632
Baruch Spinoza (later Benedict Spinoza, November 24, 1632 - February 21, 1677) was a Portuguese descendant Dutch Jewish philosopher. Revealing considerable scientific aptitude, the breadth and importance of Spinoza's work was not fully realized until years after his death. Today, he is considered one of the great rationalists of the 17th-century philosophy, laying the groundwork for the 18th century Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism. By virtue of his magnum opus, the posthumous Ethics, in which he opposed Descartes' mind–body dualism, Spinoza is considered to be one of Western philosophy's most important philosophers. Philosopher and historian Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said of all contemporary philosophers, ‘You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all.’ Spinoza was raised in the Dutch Jewish community, where he received an excellent Jewish education from a number of leading contemporary rabbis. He emerged extremely well-versed in the Hebrew Bible and other Jewish texts. In time, however, he developed highly controversial ideas regarding the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible and the nature of the Divine, which it is believed led Jewish community leaders to issue a cherem, or a kind of excommunication, against him, effectively dismissing him from Jewish society at age 23. His books were put on the Catholic Index of banned books, and were burned by Dutch Protestants.Spinoza lived quietly as a lens grinder, turning down rewards and honors throughout his life, including prestigious teaching positions, and gave his family inheritance to his sister. Spinoza's philosophical accomplishments and moral character prompted 20th century philosopher Gilles Deleuze to name him ‘the 'prince' of philosophers.’ Spinoza died at the age of 44 allegedly of a lung illness, perhaps tuberculosis or silicosis exacerbated by fine glass dust inhaled while plying his trade. Spinoza is buried in the churchyard of the Christian Nieuwe Kerk in The Hague.
November 24, 1940
Arthur Tress (born November 24, 1940 in Brooklyn, New York) is a photographer. He is known for his staged surrealism and exposition of the human body.
November 24, 1968
Gregory Pardlo is the author of the award-winning Totem and translator of Niels Lyngsoe’s Pencil of Rays and Spiked Mace. The recipient of numerous fellowships, he is a PhD candidate in English at the Graduate Center, CUNY and teaches at Columbia University.
November 25, 1899
William Riley Burnett (November 25, 1899 - April 25, 1982), often credited as W. R. Burnett, was an American novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for the crime novel Little Caesar, whose film adaptation is considered the first of the classic American gangster movies. Burnett was born in Springfield, Ohio, U.S. He left his civil service job there to move to Chicago when he was 28, by which time he had written over a hundred short stories and five novels, all unpublished.
November 25, 1936
William McIlvanney (born 25 November 1936) was a Scottish writer of novels, short stories, and poetry. McIlvanney is a champion of gritty yet poetic literature; his works Laidlaw, The Papers of Tony Veitch, and Walking Wounded are all known for their portrayal of Glasgow in the 1970s. He is regarded as ‘the father of 'Tartan Noir.’
November 25, 1845
José Maria de Eça de Queiroz or Eça de Queirós (November 25, 1845 - August 16, 1900) is generally considered to be the greatest Portuguese writer in the realist style. Zola considered him to be far greater than Flaubert. The London Observer critics rank him with Dickens, Balzac and Tolstoy. Eça de Queirós was born in Póvoa de Varzim, Portugal, in 1845. An illegitimate child, he was officially recorded as the son of José Maria de Almeida Teixeira de Queirós and Carolina Augusta Pereira d'Eça. At age 16, he went to Coimbra to study law at the University of Coimbra; there he met the poet Antero de Quental. Eça's first work was a series of prose poems, published in the Gazeta de Portugal magazine, which eventually appeared in book form in a posthumous collection edited by Batalha Reis entitled Prosas Bárbaras (‘Barbarous texts’). He worked as a journalist at Évora, then returned to Lisbon and, with his former school friend Ramalho Ortigão and others, created the Correspondence of the fictional adventurer Fradique Mendes. This amusing work was first published in 1900. In 1869 and 1870, Eça de Queirós travelled to Egypt and watched the opening of the Suez Canal, which inspired several of his works, most notably O Mistério da Estrada de Sintra (‘The Mystery of the Sintra Road’, 1870), written in collaboration with Ramalho Ortigão, in which Fradique Mendes appears. A Relíquia (‘The Relic’) was also written at this period but was published only in 1887. When he was later dispatched to Leiria to work as a municipal administrator, Eça de Queirós wrote his first realist novel, O Crime do Padre Amaro (‘The Sin of Father Amaro’), which is set in the city and first appeared in 1875. Eça then worked in the Portuguese consular service and after two years' service at Havana was stationed at 53 Grey Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, from late 1874 until April 1879. His diplomatic duties involved the dispatch of detailed reports to the Portuguese foreign office concerning the unrest in the Northumberland and Durham coalfields - in which, as he points out, the miners earned twice as much as those in South Wales, along with free housing and a weekly supply of coal. The Newcastle years were among the most productive of his literary career. He published the second version of O Crime de Padre Amaro in 1876 and another celebrated novel, O Primo Basílio (‘Cousin Bazilio’) in 1878, as well as working on a number of other projects. These included the first of his ‘Cartas de Londres’ (‘Letters from London’) which were printed in the Lisbon daily newspaper Diário de Notícias and afterwards appeared in book form as Cartas de Inglaterra. As early as 1878 he had at least given a name to his masterpiece Os Maias (‘The Maias’), though this was largely written during his later residence in Bristol and was published only in 1888. There is a plaque to Eça in that city and another was unveiled in Grey Street, Newcastle, in 2001 by the Portuguese ambassador. Eça, a cosmopolite widely read in English literature, was not enamoured of English society, but he was fascinated by its oddity. In Bristol he wrote: ‘Everything about this society is disagreeable to me - from its limited way of thinking to its indecent manner of cooking vegetables.’ As often happens when a writer is unhappy, the weather is endlessly bad. Nevertheless, he was rarely bored and was content to stay in England for some fifteen years. ‘I detest England, but this does not stop me from declaring that as a thinking nation, she is probably the foremost.’ It may be said that England acted as a constant stimulus and a corrective to Eça’s traditionally Portuguese Francophilia. In 1888 he became Portuguese consul-general in Paris. He lived at Neuilly-sur-Seine and continued to write journalism (Ecos de Paris, ‘Echos from Paris’) as well as literary criticism. He died in 1900 of either tuberculosis or, according to numerous contemporary physicians, Crohn's disease.
November 25, 1880
Leonard Sidney Woolf (25 November 1880 – 14 August 1969) was an English political theorist, author, publisher and civil servant, and husband of author Virginia Woolf. Woolf was born in London, the third of ten children of Solomon Rees Sidney Woolf (known as Sidney Woolf), a barrister and Queen's Counsel, and Marie (née de Jongh). His family was Jewish. After his father died in 1892 Woolf was sent to board at Arlington House School near Brighton, Sussex. From 1894 to 1899 he attended St Paul's School, and in 1899 he won a classical scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was elected to the Cambridge Apostles. Other members included Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, GE Moore and EM Forster. Thoby Stephen, Virginia Stephen's brother, was friendly with the Apostles, though not a member himself. Woolf was awarded his BA in 1902, but stayed for another year to study for the Civil Service examinations. In October 1904 Woolf moved to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to become a cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service, in Jaffna and later Kandy, and by August 1908 was named an assistant government agent in the Southern Province, where he administered the District of Hambantota. Woolf returned to England in May 1911 for a year's leave. Instead, however, he resigned in early 1912 and that same year married Virginia Stephen (Virginia Woolf). Together Leonard and Virginia Woolf became influential in the Bloomsbury group, which also included various other former Apostles. In December 1917 Woolf became one of the co-founders of the 1917 Club, which met in Gerrard Street, Soho. After marriage, Woolf turned his hand to writing and in 1913 published his first novel, The Village in the Jungle, which is based on his years in Sri Lanka. A series of books followed at roughly two-yearly intervals. On the introduction of conscription in 1916, during the First World War, Woolf was rejected for military service on medical grounds, and turned to politics and sociology. He joined the Labour Party and the Fabian Society, and became a regular contributor to the New Statesman. In 1916 he wrote International Government, proposing an international agency to enforce world peace. As his wife began to suffer from mental illness Woolf devoted much of his time to caring for her (he himself suffered from depression). In 1917 the Woolfs bought a small hand-operated printing press and with it they founded the Hogarth Press. Their first project was a pamphlet, hand-printed and bound by themselves. Within ten years the Press had become a full-scale publishing house, issuing Virginia's novels, Leonard's tracts and, among other works, the first edition of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Woolf continued as the main director of the Press until his death. His wife's mental problems continued, however, until her suicide in 1941. Later Leonard fell in love with a married artist, Trekkie Parsons. In 1919 Woolf became editor of the International Review. He also edited the international section of the Contemporary Review from 1920 to 1922. He was literary editor of The Nation and Atheneum, generally referred to simply as The Nation, from 1923 to 1930), and joint founder and editor of The Political Quarterly from 1931 to 1959), and for a time he served as secretary of the Labour Party's advisory committees on international and colonial questions. In 1960 Woolf revisited Sri Lanka and was surprised at the warmth of the welcome he received, and even the fact that he was still remembered. Woolf accepted an honorary doctorate from the then-new University of Sussex in 1964 and in 1965 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He declined the offer of CH in the Queen's Birthday honours list in 1966.
November 25, 1911
Frank Donner (November 25, 1911 – June 10, 1993) was a civil liberties lawyer, author and the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) Project on Political Surveillance. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Donner earned both his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Wisconsin and a law degree from Columbia University. Donner worked for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) from 1940 to 1945 before leaving for private practice, primarily representing the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America and the United Steelworkers of America. With attorneys Arthur Kinoy and Marshall Perlin he founded the New York firm Donner, Kinoy & Perlin, which specialized in representing progressive and leftist clients, including Soviet spy Morton Sobell and the Labor Youth League. In the 1950s, the firm represented numerous individuals, including labor officials, who refused to take loyalty oaths or to testify on their membership in communist organizations, as well as several who were prosecuted under the Smith Act. Donner, himself, was brought before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956, accused of membership in a Communist cell within the NLRB in the 1940s. He refused to testify, invoking his fifth amendment rights. Donner was a board member for the National Lawyers Guild. Beginning in 1980, Donner headed the Project on Political Surveillance for the ACLU. During that time he wrote several books outlining official use of domestic surveillance and the use of Red Squads, programs like COINTELPRO, and other agencies to infiltrate organizations suspected of political dissent. Donner also cited the government's use of scapegoats to divert attention from government criticism onto other political groups.
November 25, 1952
Crescent Dragonwagon (née Ellen Zolotow, November 25, 1952, New York City) is a writer in six different genres, and a workshop leader. She has written fifty traditionally published books, including two novels, seven cookbooks / culinary memoirs, more than twenty children's books, a biography, and a collection of poetry. In addition, she has written for magazines ranging from New York Times Book Review to Lear's, Cosmopolitan, McCall's, and Horn Book. Dragonwagon and her late husband, Ned Shank, owned Dairy Hollow House, a country inn and restaurant in the Ozark Mountain community of Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Dragonwagon later co-founded the non-profit Writer's Colony at Dairy Hollow, and was active in the cultural and literary life of Arkansas throughout the 31 years she lived in the state full-time. After Shank's death in 2000, Dragonwagon moved to her family's summer home in Vermont. Since the 2014 death of her subsequent partner, filmmaker-activist David R. Koff, with whom she lived in Vermont for a decade, she has divided her time between New York, Vermont, and Arkansas. Dragonwagon is the daughter of the writers Charlotte Zolotow and the late Hollywood biographer Maurice Zolotow.
November 25, 1562
Félix Lope de Vega y Carpio (25 November 1562 – 27 August 1635) was a Spanish playwright, poet and novelist. He was one of the key figures in the Spanish Golden Century of Baroque literature. His reputation in the world of Spanish literature is second only to that of Cervantes, while the sheer volume of his literary output is unequalled, making him one of the most prolific authors in the history of literature. Nicknamed "The Phoenix of Wits" and "Prodigy of Nature" (because of the volume of his work) by Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega renewed the Spanish theatre at a time when it was starting to become a mass cultural phenomenon. He defined its key characteristics, and along with Calderón de la Barca and Tirso de Molina, took Spanish baroque theatre to its greatest heights. Because of the insight, depth and ease of his plays, he is regarded as one of the greatest dramatists in Western literature, his plays still being produced worldwide. He was also one of the best lyric poets in the Spanish language, and author of several novels. Although not well known in the English-speaking world, his plays were presented in England as late as the 1660s, when diarist Samuel Pepys recorded having attended some adaptations and translations of them, although he omits mentioning the author. Some 3,000 sonnets, 3 novels, 4 novellas, 9 epic poems, and about 500 plays are attributed to him. Although he has been criticised for putting quantity ahead of quality, nevertheless at least 80 of his plays are considered masterpieces. He was a friend of the writers Quevedo and Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, and the volume of his lifework made him envied by not only contemporary authors such as Cervantes and Góngora, but also by many others: for instance, Goethe once wished he had been able to produce such a vast and colourful oeuvre.
November 25, 1812
Henry Mayhew (25 November 1812 – 25 July 1887) was an English social researcher, journalist, playwright and advocate of reform. He was one of the co-founders of the satirical and humorous magazine Punch in 1841, and was the magazine's joint-editor, with Mark Lemon, in its early days. He is also known for his work as a social researcher, publishing an extensive series of newspaper articles in the Morning Chronicle that was later compiled into the book series London Labour and the London Poor (1851), a groundbreaking and influential survey of the city's poor.
November 25, 1951
Arturo Pérez-Reverte Gutiérrez (born 25 November 1951 in Cartagena) is a Spanish novelist and journalist. He worked as a war correspondent for RTVE and was a war correspondent for 21 years (1973–1994). His first novel, El húsar, set in the Napoleonic Wars, was released in 1986. He is well known outside Spain for his "Alatriste" series of novels. He is now a member of the Royal Spanish Academy, a position he has held since 12 June 2003.
November 25, 1890
Isaac Rosenberg (25 November 1890 – 1 April 1918) was an English poet of the First World War. His Poems from the Trenches are recognised as some of the most outstanding written during the First World War. Isaac Rosenberg was born in Bristol, the second of six children and eldest son of his parents, Barnett (formerly Dovber) and Hacha Rosenberg, who were Orthodox Jews from Dvinsk (now in Latvia). In 1897, the family moved to 47 Cable Street in a poor district of the East End of London, and one with a strong Jewish community. He attended St. Paul's School Whitechapel around the corner in Wellclose Square, until his family (of Russian descent) moved to Stepney in 1900, so he could experience Jewish schooling, and he attended the Baker Street school. He left school at the age of fourteen and became an apprentice at a firm of engravers in Fleet Street. He was interested in both poetry and visual art, and attended evening classes at the Birkbeck College art school. He completed his apprenticeship in 1911, and managed to find the finances to attend the Slade School of Fine Art at University College, London (UCL). During his time at Slade School, Rosenberg notably studied alongside David Bomberg, Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth, Dora Carrington, William Roberts, and Christopher Nevinson. He was taken up by Laurence Binyon and Edward Marsh, and began to write poetry seriously, but he suffered from ill-health. He published a pamphlet of ten poems, Night and Day, in 1912. He also exhibited paintings at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1914. Afraid that his chronic bronchitis would worsen, Rosenberg hoped to try to cure himself by emigrating in 1914 to the warmer climate of South Africa, where his sister Mina lived in Cape Town. He wrote the poem 'On Receiving News of the War' in Cape Town. While others wrote about war as patriotic sacrifice, Rosenberg was critical of the war from its onset. However, needing employment in order to help support his mother, Rosenberg returned to England in October 1915, where he published a second pamphlet of poems, Youth and then enlisted in the British Army. Rosenberg was assigned to the 12th Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment, a bantam battalion for men under the usual minimum height of 5'3'. After turning down an offer to become a lance corporal, Private Rosenberg was later transferred to another bantam battalion, the 11th (Service) Battalion of The King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment. In June 1916, he was sent with his Battalion to serve on the Western Front in France. He continued to write poetry while serving in the trenches, including Break of Day in the Trenches, Returning we Hear the Larks, and Dead Man's Dump. Having just finished night patrol, he was killed at dawn on 1 April 1918; there is a dispute as to whether his death occurred at the hands of a sniper or in close combat. In either case, he died in a town called Fampoux, north-east of Arras. He was first buried in a mass grave, but in 1926, his remains were identified and reinterred at Bailleul Road East Cemetery, Plot V, Saint-Laurent-Blangy, Pas de Calais, France. On 11 November 1985, Rosenberg was among 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner. The inscription on the stone was written by a fellow Great War poet, Wilfred Owen. It reads: 'My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.' Rosenberg appears in the novel Grosse Fugue by Ian Phillips. In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell's landmark study of the literature of the First World War, Fussell identifies Rosenberg's 'Break of Day in the Trenches' as 'the greatest poem of the war.'
November 25, 1946
Donald Sassoon (born November 25, 1946 in Cairo, Egypt) was educated in Paris, Milan, and London. He is a professor of history at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the highly acclaimed author of One Hundred Years of Socialism and Contemporary Italy: Economy, Society, Politics Since 1945, and is a frequent contributor to major British and European publications. He lives in London.
November 25, 1941
Gerald Seymour (born 25 November 1941 in Guildford, Surrey) is a British writer of crime and espionage novels. Gerald Seymour was born to William Kean Seymour and his second wife, Rosalind Wade. He was educated at Kelly College, now known as Mount Kelly in Tavistock, Devon, and took a BA Hons degree in Modern History at University College London. Initially a journalist, he joined ITN in 1963, covering such topics as the Great Train Robbery, Vietnam War, The Troubles, the Munich Olympics massacre, Germany's Red Army Faction, Italy's Red Brigades and Palestinian militant groups. His first book, Harry's Game, was published in 1975, and Seymour then became a full-time novelist, living in the West Country. In 1999, he featured in the Oscar-winning documentary, One Day in September, which portrayed the Munich massacre. He has been a full-time writer since 1978. Television adaptations have been made of his books Harry's Game, The Glory Boys, The Contract, Red Fox, The Informant based on Field of Blood, A Line in the Sand and The Waiting Time.
November 25, 1933
George Stade is the author of three novels: CONFESSIONS OF A LADY-KILLER, SEX AND VIOLENCE: A LOVE STORY, LOVE IS WAR. He has edited numerous scholarly books, and is Consulting Editorial Director of Barnes and Noble Classics and Editor-in-Chief of Scribner's British Writers Series and the fourteen-volume European Writers Series. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University. His murder mystery CONFESSIONS OF A LADY KILLER was published by W.W. Norton. The New York Times called it ‘a novel that bristles with irony and wit’ and The Washington Post praised its ‘Nabokovian control of language.’ Siri Hustvedt praised his SEX AND VIOLENCE, A LOVE STORY as ‘a sex comedy for the twenty-first century’ and Steven Marcus called it a ‘rousingly robust and comic novel.’ George Stade was runner-up in the fiction section of the Grub Street Book Prize, 2007 for his novel LOVE HIS WAR.
November 25, 1962
Joel Waldfogel is the Ehrenkranz Professor and Chair of Business and Public Policy at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Tyranny of the Market and has been a columnist for Slate.
November 25, 1845
José Maria de Eça de Queirós (1845–1900) is Portugal’s most celebrated novelist of the nineteenth century. Gregory Rabassa has translated more than forty works from Portuguese and Spanish. Earl E. Fitz is Professor of Portuguese, Spanish, and Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University. Published with the support of the Luso-American Foundation
November 25, 1921
Sandor Rakos (November 25, 1921 - December 25, 1999) was born in 1921 , the son of a village school teacher in northeastern Hungary. He studied economics in Budapest, but took no degree; worked in various administrative, journalistic, and editorial jobs; and in 1952 began to devote himself to writing. Today he heads the Translators' Section of the Hungarian Writers Union. He has published four books of poetry and one of essays as well as translations of Gilgamesh and other pieces of Mesopotamian poetry, and a volume of folk poems from the South Sea Islands.
November 26, 1909
Eugène Ionesco (born Eugen Ionescu, 26 November 1909 – 28 March 1994) was a Romanian playwright who wrote mostly in French, and one of the foremost figures of the French Avant-garde theatre. Beyond ridiculing the most banal situations, Ionesco's plays depict the solitude and insignificance of human existence in a tangible way. Ionesco was born in Olt County, Romania, to a Romanian father belonging to the Orthodox Christian church and a mother of French and Romanian heritage, whose faith was Protestant (the faith into which her father was born and to which her originally Greek Orthodox Christian mother had converted). Eugène himself was baptized into the Orthodox Christian faith. Many sources cite his birthdate as 1912, this error being due to vanity on the part of Ionesco himself, who wanted the year of his birth to coincide with that when his idol, Romanian playwright Caragiale, died. He spent most of his childhood in France and, while there, had an experience he claimed affected his perception of the world more significantly than any other. As Deborah B. Gaensbauer describes in Eugene Ionesco Revisited, ‘Walking in summer sunshine in a white-washed provincial village under an intense blue sky, [Ionesco] was profoundly altered by the light.’ He was struck very suddenly with a feeling of intense luminosity, the feeling of floating off the ground and an overwhelming feeling of well-being. When he ‘floated’ back to the ground and the ‘light’ left him, he saw that the real world in comparison was full of decay, corruption and meaningless repetitive action. This also coincided with the revelation that death takes everyone in the end. Much of his later work, reflecting this new perception, demonstrates a disgust for the tangible world, a distrust of communication, and the subtle sense that a better world lies just beyond our reach. Echoes of this experience can also be seen in references and themes in many of his important works: characters pining for an unattainable ‘city of lights’ (The Killer, The Chairs) or perceiving a world beyond (A Stroll in the Air); characters granted the ability to fly (A Stroll in the Air, Amédée, Victims of Duty); the banality of the world which often leads to depression (the Bérenger character); ecstatic revelations of beauty within a pessimistic framework (Amédée, The Chairs, the Bérenger character); and the inevitability of death (Exit the King). He returned to Romania with his father and mother in 1925 after his parents divorced. There he attended Saint Sava National College, after which he studied French Literature at the University of Bucharest from 1928 to 1933 and qualified as a teacher of French. While there he met Emil Cioran and Mircea Eliade, and the three became lifelong friends. In 1936 Ionesco married Rodica Burileanu. Together they had one daughter for whom he wrote a number of unconventional children's stories. He and his family returned to France in 1938 for him to complete his doctoral thesis. Caught by the outbreak of World War II in 1939, he returned to Romania, but soon changed his mind and, with the help of friends, obtained travel documents which allowed him to return to France in 1942, where he remained during the rest of the war, living in Marseilles before moving with his family to Paris after its liberation. Ionesco was made a member of the Académie française in 1970. He also received numerous awards including Tours Festival Prize for film, 1959; Prix Italia, 1963; Society of Authors Theatre Prize, 1966; Grand Prix National for theatre, 1969; Monaco Grand Prix, 1969; Austrian State Prize for European Literature, 1970; Jerusalem Prize, 1973; and honorary Doctoral Degrees from New York University and the Universities of Leuven, Warwick and Tel Aviv. Eugène Ionesco died at age 84 on 28 March 1994 and is buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.
November 26, 1938
Luisa Valenzuela (born November 26, 1938, in Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a post-'Boom' novelist and short story writer. Her writing is characterized by an experimental, avant-garde style which questions hierarchical social structures from a feminist perspective. She is best known for her work written in response to the dictatorship of the 1970s in Argentina. Works such as Como en la guerra (1977), Cambio de armas (1982) and Cola de lagartija (1983) combine a powerful critique of dictatorship with an examination of patriarchal forms of social organization and the power structures which inhere in human sexuality and gender relationships.
November 26, 1919
Frederik George Pohl, Jr. (November 26, 1919 – September 2, 2013) was an American science fiction writer, editor and fan, with a career spanning more than seventy-five years—from his first published work, the 1937 poem ‘Elegy to a Dead Satellite: Luna’, to the 2011 novel All the Lives He Led and articles and essays published in 2012. From about 1959 until 1969, Pohl edited Galaxy and its sister magazine If; the latter won three successive annual Hugo Awards as the year's best professional magazine. His 1977 novel Gateway won four ‘year's best novel’ awards: the Hugo voted by convention participants, the Locus voted by magazine subscribers, the Nebula voted by American science fiction writers, and the juried academic John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He won the Campbell Memorial Award again for the 1984 collection of novellas Years of the City, one of two repeat winners during the first forty years. For his 1979 novel Jem, Pohl won a U.S. National Book Award in the one-year category Science Fiction. It was a finalist for three other years' best novel awards. He won four Hugo and three Nebula Awards. The Science Fiction Writers of America named Pohl its 12th recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award in 1993 and he was inducted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1998, its third class of two dead and two living writers. Pohl won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 2010, for his blog, ‘The Way the Future Blogs’.
November 26, 1940
Paul J. Nahin is Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at the University of New Hampshire. His books include Dr. Euler’s Fabulous Formula, When Least Is Best, and Duelling Idiots and Other Probability Puzzlers (all Princeton).
November 26, 1941
Wolfgang Schivelbusch is a German scholar of cultural studies, historian, and author. Schivelbusch was born on 26 November 1941 in Berlin. He studied literature, sociology, and philosophy. He has lived in New York since 1973. Schivelbusch is an independent scholar, not affiliated to any academic institution. He is known for using the method of history of mentalities. Schivelbusch works also on the history of perception and cultural history. In 2003 he was awarded the Heinrich Mann prize of the Academie of Arts in Berlin. He has cited Norbert Elias as one of his main influences and inspirations.
November 26, 1949
Michel-Rolph Trouillot (November 26, 1949, Haiti - July 5, 2012, Chicago, IL) was a Haitian academic and anthropologist. He was Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Rolph (as he was known conversationally) was the son of Ernest Trouillot and Anne-Marie Morisset, both Black intellectuals from Port-au-Prince. His father was a lawyer and his uncle, Hénock Trouillot was a professor who worked in the National Archives of Haiti. Hénock was an influential noiriste historian. He attended the Petit Séminaire Collège Saint-Martial, moving on to the École Normale Supérieur. However, faced with repression from the Duvalier regime in 1968, Trouillot joined a mass exodus of students who found refuge in New York. In 2011, Trouillot was awarded the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award, which is given annually by the Caribbean Philosophical Association in recognition of work of special interest to Caribbean thought. In 1977, his first book Ti dife boule sou Istwa Ayiti on the origins of the Haitian slave revolution was published. It has been described as 'the first book-length monograph written in Haitian Creole.' In July 2012, Université Caraïbe Press reprinted this masterful work. Trouillot's lifetime of work presented a vision for anthropology and the social sciences, informed by historical depth and empirical examination of Caribbean societies. The Haitian historian and novelist Henock Trouillot was his uncle. Trouillot died on July 5, 2012.
November 26, 1969
Kara Elizabeth Walker (born November 26, 1969) is an African-American contemporary painter, silhouettist, print-maker, installation artist, and film-maker who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity in her work. She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes. Walker lives in New York City and has taught extensively at Columbia University. She is currently serving a five-year term as Tepper Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University.
November 27, 1909
James Rufus Agee (November 27, 1909 – May 16, 1955) was an American author, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, he was one of the most influential film critics in the U.S. His autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), won the author a posthumous 1958 Pulitzer Prize.
November 27, 1874
Charles Austin Beard (November 27, 1874 – September 1, 1948) was, with Frederick Jackson Turner, one of the most influential American historians of the first half of the 20th century. He published hundreds of monographs, textbooks and interpretive studies in both history and political science. His works included a radical re-evaluation of the founding fathers of the United States, who he believed were motivated more by economics than by philosophical principles. Beard's most influential book, written with his wife Mary Beard, was the wide-ranging and bestselling The Rise of American Civilization (1927), which had a major influence on American historians. Beard was famous as a political liberal, but he strenuously opposed American entry into World War II, for which he blamed Franklin D. Roosevelt more than Japan or Germany. This stance helped to destroy his career, as his fellow scholars first repudiated his foreign policy and subsequently dropped his materialistic model of class conflict. Richard Hofstadter concluded in 1968: ‘Today Beard's reputation stands like an imposing ruin in the landscape of American historiography. What was once the grandest house in the province is now a ravaged survival.’
November 27, 1946
Ronald "Ron" Rosenbaum (born November 27, 1946) is an American literary journalist, literary critic, and novelist. Rosenbaum was born into a Jewish family in New York City, New York and grew up in Bay Shore, New York. He graduated from Yale University in 1968 and won a Carnegie Fellowship to attend Yale's graduate program in English Literature, though he dropped out after taking one course. He was an editor of The Fire Island News and then wrote for The Village Voice for several years, leaving in 1975 after which he wrote for Esquire, Harper's, High Times, Vanity Fair, New York Times Magazine and Slate. Rosenbaum spent more than ten years doing research on Adolf Hitler including travels to Vienna, Munich, London, Paris, and Jerusalem, interviewing leading historians, philosophers, biographers, theologians and psychologists. Some of those interviewed by Rosenbaum included Daniel Goldhagen, David Irving, Rudolph Binion, Claude Lanzmann, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Alan Bullock, Christopher Browning, George Steiner, and Yehuda Bauer. The result was his 1998 book, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil. In Explaining Hitler, Ron Rosenbaum also recounted in detail the previously little-reported story of the efforts of anti-Hitler journalists at the Munich Post who, from 1920 to 1933, published repeated exposés on the criminal activities of the National Socialist German Workers Party (i.e. the Nazis). Matthew Ricketson, coordinator of the Journalism program at RMIT University's School of Applied Communication in Melbourne, Australia, called this book "a brilliant piece of research". In 1987 he began writing a weekly column for the New York Observer called "The Edgy Enthusiast". He currently writes a column for Slate called The Spectator. In The Shakespeare Wars he discussed recent controversies among literary historians, actors, and directors over how the works of William Shakespeare should be read, understood, and produced. His most recent book is How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III, which discusses the paradoxes of deterrence, the danger of nuclear proliferation, and whether the bomb comprises an "exceptionalist" argument about warfare and genocide. In December 2015 Rosenbaum published the article "Thinking the Unthinkable," in which he expresses his view that there exists a frightening possibility that Israel might not survive as a nation. In it he claims that 'The Palestinians want a Hitlerite Judenrein state, however much violence it takes to accomplish it. Not separation, elimination.' The Palestinians are, he asserts, engaged in incessant state and religious incitement to murder Jews. The 'stabbing intifada' is not an insurgency, but a matter of 'the ritual murder of Jews'. Whereas Hitler tried to hide his crimes, the Palestinians celebrate killing Jews.
November 27, 1943
Nicole Brossard is a poet, novelist, and essayist and the author of more than thirty books. She is a major voice in French-language avant-garde poetry and one of Canada's greatest living writers. Jennifer Moxley is a poet, translator, and editor, and the author of many books including Often Capital.
November 27, 1942
Daniel Chirot is Professor of International Studies and Sociology at the University of Washington. His books include Modern Tyrants (Princeton) and How Societies Change. Clark McCauley is Professor of Psychology at Bryn Mawr College, Director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania, and a Co-Director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.
November 27, 1938
Mohammed Alioum Fantouré (born Mohammed Touré on November 27 , 1938 in Forécariah in the Republic of Guinea) is a Guinean writer.
November 27, 1915
Adonias Aguiar Filho (November 27, 1915 – August 2, 1990) was a writer and novelist from Bahia, Brazil, and a member of the Academia Brasileira de Letras.
November 27, 1933
Jacques Godbout (born November 27, 1933) is a Canadian novelist, essayist, children's writer, journalist, filmmaker and poet. By his own admission a bit of a dabbler (touche-à-tout), Godbout has become one of the most important writers of his generation, with a major influence on post-1960 Quebec intellectual life.
November 27, 1965
Betool Khedairi (born 27 November 1965 in Baghdad, Iraq) is a novelist born to an Iraqi father and Scottish mother. She is most known for her debut novel, A Sky So Close which has been published in numerous languages such as Arabic, English, Italian, French and Dutch. The novel was first published in Lebanon in 1999 and is often used as the subject of literary critique studies in various international universities. She received a BA in French literature in 1988 from the University of Mustansiriya in Baghdad, and then she used to divide her time between Iraq, Jordan and the United Kingdom while working in her family’s business; in the food industry. She lived in Iraq until she was 24 and now resides in Amman, Jordan.
November 27, 1925
Sir John Royden Maddox, (27 November 1925 – 12 April 2009) was a British biologist and science writer. He was an editor of Nature for 22 years, from 1966–1973 and 1980–1995.
November 27, 1944
Charles Royster is an American historian, and a retired Boyd Professor at Louisiana State University.
November 27, 1921
Ole Sarvig (1921 Copenhagen - 1981, Copenhagen) was a Danish author and poet, known for his participation in the literary journal heretica. In 1967 he received the grand prize of the Danish Academy. In 2004 his 1943 work Regnmaaleren was included in the Danish Culture Canon. He was a friend and mentor to the poet Michael Strunge, whose poem 'December' remembers Sarvig's death by suicide in December 1981. Like Sarvig, Strunge took his life by jumping from a building.
November 27, 1865
José Asunción Silva ((Bogotá, November 27, 1865 - May 23, 1896) was a renowned Colombian writer and is still one of the country’s most revered cultural icons. Kelly Washbourne is Assistant Professor of Spanish Translation at Kent State University in Ohio. .
November 27, 1960
Kevin Henkes is an American writer and illustrator of children's books. As an illustrator he won the Caldecott Medal for Kitten's First Full Moon. Two of his books were Newbery Medal Honor Books, Olive's Ocean in 2004 and The Year of Billy Miller in 2014.
November 28, 1757
William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form ‘what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language’. His visual artistry has led one contemporary art critic to proclaim him ‘far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced’. Although he lived in London his entire life except for three years spent in Felpham he produced a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced the imagination as ‘the body of God’, or ‘Human existence itself’. Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His paintings and poetry have been characterised as part of both the Romantic movement and ‘Pre-Romantic’, for its large appearance in the 18th century. Reverent of the Bible but hostile to the Church of England – indeed, to all forms of organised religion – Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions, as well as by such thinkers as Jakob Böhme and Emanuel Swedenborg. Despite these known influences, the singularity of Blake's work makes him difficult to classify. The 19th-century scholar William Rossetti characterised Blake as a ‘glorious luminary,’ and as ‘a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors’.
November 28, 1924
Dennis Vincent Brutus (28 November 1924 – 26 December 2009) was a South African activist, educator, journalist and poet best known for his campaign to have apartheid South Africa banned from the Olympic Games.
November 28, 1958
Sara Rose Diamond (born November 28, 1958) is an American sociologist and attorney, and the author of four books that "study and expose the agenda and tactics of the American political right wing." After graduating from the University of California at Irvine, Diamond earned a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in sociology. Having conducted research since the early 1980s, her Ph.D. dissertation, entitled "Right-Wing Movements in the United States, 1945-1992", served as the basis for her second book, Roads to Dominion. Her book, Not by Politics Alone: The Enduring Influence of the Christian Right, was reviewed by Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, and Publisher's Weekly. She has taught journalism and sociology at several California universities, and for several years wrote a regular column for Z Magazine. She is also known[citation needed] for her critique of the US Institute of Peace. Diamond then switched careers, attending the Hastings College of Law, from which she graduated in 2003. The Bancroft Library at U.C. Berkeley maintains the Sara Diamond Collection on the U.S. Right, an archive of the materials she assembled about the conservative movement in the United States. University publications have described it as one of the largest collections of its type in the country.
November 28, 1820
Friedrich Engels (28 November 1820 – 5 August 1895) was a German social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research. In 1848 he co-authored The Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx, and later he supported Marx financially to do research and write Das Kapital. After Marx's death Engels edited the second and third volumes. Additionally, Engels organized Marx's notes on the ‘Theories of Surplus Value’ and this was later published as the ‘fourth volume’ of Capital. He has also made important contributions to family economics.
November 28, 1947
Gustav Hasford (November 28, 1947 – January 29, 1993) was an American journalist, novelist, and poet. His semi-autobiographical novel The Short-Timers (1979) was the basis of the film Full Metal Jacket (1987). He was also a United States Marine Corps veteran, who served during the Vietnam War.
November 28, 1881
Stefan Zweig (November 28, 1881 – February 22, 1942) was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most famous writers in the world.
November 28, 1907
Alberto Moravia, born Alberto Pincherle (November 28, 1907 – September 26, 1990) was an Italian novelist and journalist. His novels explored matters of modern sexuality, social alienation, and existentialism. He is best known for his debut novel Gli indifferenti (published in 1929), and for the anti-fascist novel Il Conformista (The Conformist), the basis for the film The Conformist (1970) by Bernardo Bertolucci.
November 28, 1805
John Lloyd Stephens (November 28, 1805 – October 13, 1852) was an American explorer, writer, and diplomat. Stephens was a pivotal figure in the rediscovery of Maya civilization throughout Middle America and in the planning of the Panama railroad.
November 28, 1931
Jean-Thomas ‘Tomi ‘ Ungerer (born 28 November 1931) is a French illustrator and a writer in three languages. He has published over 140 books ranging from much loved children's books to controversial adult work and from the fantastic to the autobiographical. He is known for sharp social satire and witty aphorisms. Ungerer received the international Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1998 for his "lasting contribution" as a children's illustrator.
November 28, 1931
Dervla Murphy (born 28 November 1931, Ireland) is an Irish touring cyclist and author of adventure travel books for over 40 years. Murphy is best known for her 1965 book Full Tilt: Ireland to India With a Bicycle, about an overland cycling trip through Europe, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. She followed this by volunteering with Tibetan refugees in India and Nepal, and trekking with a mule through Ethiopia. Murphy took a break from travel writing following the birth of her daughter, and then wrote about her travels with Rachel in India, Pakistan, South America, Madagascar and Cameroon. She later wrote about her solo trips through Romania, Africa, Laos, the states of the former Yugoslavia, and Siberia. In 2005 she visited Cuba with her daughter and three granddaughters. Murphy has normally travelled alone and unaided, without luxuries and depending on the hospitality of local people. She has been in dangerous situations; for example, she was attacked by wolves in the former Yugoslavia, threatened by soldiers in Ethiopia, and robbed in Siberia. However, she described her worst incident as tripping over cats at home and shattering her left arm.
November 28, 1914
Owen Vincent Dodson (November 28, 1914 - June 21, 1983) was an American poet, novelist, and playwright. He was one of the leading African-American poets of his time, associated with the generation of black poets following the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Brooklyn, New York, USA, Dodson studied at Bates College (B.A. 1936) and at the Yale School of Drama (M.F.A. 1939). He taught at Howard University, where he was chair of the Drama Department, from 1940 to 1970, and briefly at Spelman College and Atlanta University. James V. Hatch has explained that Dodson ‘is the product of two parallel forces - the Black experience in America with its folk and urban routes, and a classical humanistic education.’ Dodson's poetry varied widely and covered a broad range of subjects, styles, and forms. He wrote at times, though rarely, in black dialect, and at others quoted and alluded to classical poetry and drama. He wrote about sexuality - he was gay, though he was briefly engaged to Priscilla Heath, a Bates classmate - and about religion. He was closely associated with poets W. H. Auden and William Stanley Braithwaite, but his influences were difficult to pin down. In an interview with Charles H. Rowell, he said: ‘Well, every writer, at the beginning of his career, is influenced by somebody. Surely it's true that the ragtime rhythms of Langston Hughes and the order of Countee Cullen, his devotion to the church, have influenced me. But you know if you listen to Bach and then listen to the early Haydn you can see a cross between the two--you can see that Bach was influenced by Haydn. Then, if you listen to Haydn at his maturity and then listen to Beethoven, then you can see that Beethoven was influenced at the beginning of his career. And if you listen to the greatest Beethoven and then you listen to the early Brahms, you can see that the early Brahms was influenced by the later Beethoven. Then he became his own style. He got his own idea of life. You admire your father, and you imitate his gestures and his stance--the way he talks, the way he holds his glass, the way he kisses his wife. There is something about him that influences you. But then as you grow older, you begin to get your own style, your own class, your own idea of what is going on. Oh, yes, it's true that Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen influenced me.’ In drama, he cited Henrik Ibsen as an influence, though again as an initial relationship later to be reworked and half-forgotten. Dodson's two novels are generally considered to be autobiographical. Dodson died from cardiovascular disease at the age of 69. Dodson is one of the subjects of Hilton Als' 1996 book THE WOMEN; according to Als, Dodson was his mentor and lover.
November 28, 1931
Robert B. Edgerton (November 28, 1931 - March 12, 2017) taught in the Departments of Psychiatry and Anthropology at UCLA. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and president of the Society of Psychological Anthropology. His previous books include Warriors of the Rising Sun: A History of the Japanese Military and Hidden Heroism: Black Soldiers in America's Wars. He lived in Los Angeles.
November 28, 1943
Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria (born 28 November 1943, Sagua La Grande, Cuba) is the R. Selden Rose Professor of Spanish at Yale University, where he is also chairman of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and chairman of the Latin American Studies Program.
November 28, 1961
Michael Larsen was born in 1961 in Copenhagen. He worked for a number of years as a journalist and in 1992 his first book was published, Med livet i hælene (Pursued by Life), a comedy stand-up novel. 1994 saw the publication of Uden sikker viden (Uncertainty), a thriller which has been sold to 25 countries - including Germany, UK, USA, France, Italy and most recently Japan - making Michael Larsen one of the most translated Danish authors. This distinguished status is now being further enhanced by the major thriller Slangen i Sydney (The Serpent in Sydney) which appeared in 1997 and has been sold to Germany, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and Lithuania.
November 28, 1908
Claude Lévi-Strauss (28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theory of structuralism and structural anthropology. He held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France between 1959 and 1982 and was elected a member of the Académie française in 1973. He received numerous honors from universities and institutions throughout the world and has been called, alongside James George Frazer and Franz Boas, the "father of modern anthropology". Lévi-Strauss argued that the "savage" mind had the same structures as the "civilized" mind and that human characteristics are the same everywhere. These observations culminated in his famous book Tristes Tropiques that established his position as one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought. As well as sociology, his ideas reached into many fields in the humanities, including philosophy. Structuralism has been defined as "the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity."
November 28, 1973
Noah Lukeman is an American literary agent, actor, script-writer and author of works about writing and literature. A number of his books are widely used in creative writing programmes. Lukeman also contributes to a number of newspapers and journals, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
November 28, 1908
Mary Oppen (November 28, 1908 – May 14, 1990) was an American activist, artist, photographer, poet and writer.
November 28, 1880
Alexander Alexandrovich Blok (28 November 1880 – 7 August 1921) was a Russian lyrical poet. Blok was born in Saint Petersburg, into a sophisticated and intellectual family. Some of his relatives were literary men, his father being a law professor in Warsaw, and his maternal grandfather the rector of Saint Petersburg State University. After his parents' separation, Blok lived with aristocratic relatives at the manor Shakhmatovo near Moscow, where he discovered the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov, and the verse of then-obscure 19th-century poets, Fyodor Tyutchev and Afanasy Fet. These influences would affect his early publications, later collected in the book Ante Lucem. In 1903 he married Lyubov (Lyuba) Dmitrievna Mendeleeva, daughter of the renowned chemist Dmitri Mendeleev. Later, she would involve him in a complicated love-hate relationship with his fellow Symbolist Andrei Bely. To Lyuba he dedicated a cycle of poetry that made him famous, Stikhi o prekrasnoi Dame (Verses About the Beautiful Lady, 1904). During the last period of his life, Blok emphasized political themes, pondering the messianic destiny of his country (Vozmezdie, 1910–21; Rodina, 1907–16; Skify, 1918). Influenced by Solovyov's doctrines, he had vague apocalyptic apprehensions and often vacillated between hope and despair. ‘I feel that a great event was coming, but what it was exactly was not revealed to me’, he wrote in his diary during the summer of 1917. Quite unexpectedly for most of his admirers, he accepted the October Revolution as the final resolution of these apocalyptic yearnings. By 1921 Blok had become disillusioned with the Russian Revolution. He did not write any poetry for three years. Blok complained to Maksim Gorky that his ‘faith in the wisdom of humanity’ had ended. He explained to his friend Korney Chukovsky why he could not write poetry any more: ‘All sounds have stopped. Can't you hear that there are no longer any sounds?’ Within a few days Blok became sick. His doctors requested that he be sent for medical treatment abroad, but he was not allowed to leave the country. Gorky pleaded for a visa. On 29 May 1921, he wrote to Anatoly Lunacharsky: ‘Blok is Russia's finest poet. If you forbid him to go abroad, and he dies, you and your comrades will be guilty of his death’. Blok received permission only on 10 August, after his death. Several months earlier, Blok had delivered a celebrated lecture on Alexander Pushkin, the memory of whom he believed to be capable of uniting White and Soviet Russian factions.
November 28, 1958
Doris Kareva is one of Estonia's leading poets. She was born in Tallinn in 1958, daughter of the composer Hillar Kareva, and published her first poems at the age of 14. In 1977 she entered the University of Tartu as an already acknowledged young poet. Due to her dissident connections she was expelled but graduated as a distance student in Romance and Germanic philology. She has worked for the cultural weekly Sirp (Sickle) and as the Secretary-General of the Estonian National Commission for UNESCO from 1992 to 2008, and is currently an editor for the literary journal Looming (Creation). Following the restoration of Estonian independence, Kareva's collection In Place of the World received the national cultural prize in 1993. She used the prize money to set up the `Straw Stipend' for the publication of debut collections, to support emerging talent in unsettled times. Kareva has published 15 collections of poetry, a collection of essays and a work of prose. She has also translated poetry (Anna Akhmatova, Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Kabir, Rumi) and plays, essays and prose (W.H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Joseph Brodsky, Kahlil Gibran, Shakespeare). She has compiled anthologies, written texts for music and theatre, and given lectures on culture, education and ethics in Estonia and abroad. Her poetry has been translated into over 20 languages and has inspired composers and directors in Estonia and abroad - sounding equally fitting at a punk concert and the funeral ceremony of a president, in a Warner Classics studio and at the Estonian Song Festival. Kareva has been honoured with two national cultural prizes and four literary prizes; in 2001 she was awarded the Estonian Order of the White Star. She has two books of poetry in English translation, Shape of Time, translated by Tiina Aleman (Arc Publications, 2010), and Days of Grace: Selected Poems, translated by Miriam McIlfatrick-Ksenofontov (Bloodaxe Books, 2018).
November 29, 1832
Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist best known as author of the novel Little Women and its sequels Little Men and Jo's Boys. Raised by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott in New England, she grew up among many of the well-known intellectuals of the day such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau.
November 29, 1943
John Shannon is one of America’s leading writers of neo-noir. An L.A. Times bestselling author, he has published fourteen novels in the Jack Liffey mystery series, one of the most critically praised mystery series in the genre, reviewed by newspapers from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal to the Denver Post and Los Angeles Times. The novels are set in the various gritty subcultures and ethnic communities of Los Angeles.
November 29, 1781
Andrés de Jesús María y José Bello López (November 29, 1781 – October 15, 1865) was a Venezuelan humanist, diplomat, poet, legislator, philosopher, educator and philologist, whose political and literary works constitute an important part of Spanish American culture. Bello is featured on the old 2,000 Venezuelan bolívar and the 20,000 Chilean peso notes. There is also a decoration, the Venezuelan Order of Andrés Bello.
November 29, 1931
Wally Broecker is the Newberry Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. His books include Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal about the Current Threat--and How to Counter It and Chemical Oceanography. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
November 29, 1927
Ernst Anselm Joachim Honigmann (29 November 1927 – 18 July 2011) was Professor of English Literature, Shakespeare scholar, and Fellow of the British Academy. Born in Breslau, Germany (now Wroc?aw, Poland), Ernst Honigmann arrived in England in 1935, age 7, as a refugee from Nazi Germany, together with his father, the zoologist Dr Hans D.S. Honigmann (Director of Breslau Zoo), mother, Ursula, and brothers, Friederich and Paul. Honigmann attended Hillhead High School (Glasgow). He took his first degree in English Literature at the University of Glasgow 1944-48. He gained his BLitt working on a study of the chronology of Shakespeare's plays, under the supervision of J. C. Maxwell, at Merton College, Oxford 1948-50. Honigmann was one of the three founder Fellows of the Shakespeare Institute (University of Birmingham) in Stratford-upon-Avon where he worked from 1951-54. He gained his DLitt after returning to the University of Glasgow from 1954–67, where he was Lecturer in English alongside Peter Alexander, his former teacher. In 1968 Honigmann became Reader and two years later Joseph Cowen Professor of English Literature at Newcastle University (also holding the position of leader of the English Department for 20 years), until his retirement from active University life in 1989, whereupon he was appointed Emeritus Professor. Honigmann was also elected to the Fellowship of the British Academy in 1989. Honigmann authored and edited many books and papers, annotated editions of texts, and was a General Editor of the Revels Plays & Revels Plays Companion Library from 1976 - 2000. His classic texts remain relevant, and have been reprinted many times. Honigmann continued to write after his retirement with his last paper being published posthumously. In retirement he worked both independently and on several collaborations in Shakespeare studies, created a new edition of Othello for the Arden Shakespeare, wrote a personal memoir Togetherness: episodes from the Life of a refugee, and created poetry and short stories (the latter mainly for the amusement of his grandchildren).
November 29, 1928
Andrzej Kijowski (29 November 1928, Krakow, Poland – 29 June 1985, Warsaw, Poland) was a Polish literary critic, essayist, prose and screenwriter. His son is poet and critic Andrzej Tadeusz Kijowski. Kijowski, Sr. wrote for such publications as Przegl?d Kulturalny and Tygodnik Powszechny. He was editor for many years of Twórczo??, where the well-known Kroniki Dedala (Daedalus Chronicles) was published. He authored the Polish writers' resolution against censorship after the play Dziady (Ghost) by Adam Mickiewicz was withdrawn from the stage on 29 February 1968. A literary director at Warsaw’s Dramatic Theatre from 1967 to 1968, he was removed by the Communist authorities. He was one of the organizers of the Polish Flying University. Director at Juliusz S?owacki Theatre in Krakow from 1981 until he resigned in February 1982 after being released from Jaworze, where he had been interned for reasons connected to Martial law in Poland.
November 29, 1921
Leon Zdzis?aw Stroi?ski (29 November 1921 in Warsaw - 16 of August 1944) was a Polish poet. Stroi?ski was born into a family of intellectuals - his father, Józef Stroi?ski, was legal counsel Zamoyski, and he spent his early youth n Zamosc. In 1941, he began studying law and Polish philology at the secret UW. In 1942 he joined a group of Polish teachers gathered around the underground magazine "Art and the Nation." He was a soldier in the resistance and was arrested on May 25, 1943. And then released July 19, 1943. Stroi?ski died on August 16, 1944 in the Warsaw Uprising. His poetic work originated in the poetics of avant-garde Krakow, and reflected the reality of war and occupation, as can be seen in her series prose poems, Window 1943.
November 29, 1910
Antanas Šk?ma (November 29, 1910 – August 11, 1961) was a Lithuanian writer, stage actor and director. His best known work is the novel The White Shroud (Balta drobul?). Antanas Šk?ma was born on November 29, 1910 (according to his birth certificate in 1911) in ?ód?, Poland where his father was sent to work as a teacher. During World War I he lived in Russia with his parents. In 1921, they all came back to Lithuania. He attended high schools in Radviliškis and Kaunas. In 1929, he entered the University of Lithuania medical faculty, but in 1931 he transferred his studies to the Faculty of Law. At the time university was renamed to Vytautas Magnus University. In 1935 he entered the theater studio directed by V.Sipavi?ius-Fedotas. While attending the studio he was also accepted to the Lithuanian State Theatre in Kaunas – in 1936, Šk?ma started acting on Lithuania's greatest stage. When he was in Kaunas he married Janina Solkeviciute, a Polish economist. From 1940 to 1944 he did work in Vilnius State Theater, at first as an actor, and later as a director. Šk?ma had parts in nearly every play of that time. His daughter, Kristina, was born in 1940 in Vilnius, days after the German occupation of the city. In 1944, he left Lithuania for Germany, where he was involved in some artistic work with Lithuanian troupes, primarily in DP camps. In 1949, Šk?ma left Europe for United States, and actively joined Lithuanian exile cultural and theatrical activities . He acted at the Chicago Theater and also in Boston's Drama Group performances. In 1960–1961 he worked in the editorial office of Vienyb? newspaper. In addition, he was lecturing, writing and printing articles about theater and literature in several publications. Antanas Šk?ma died in a car accident in Pennsylvania on August 11, 1961. Šk?ma's only novel, "The White Shroud" (1958), aroused vivid literary discussions. Most of the literary critics considered "The White Shroud" an interesting literary experiment that tried to lead the Lithuanian novel down a new path. The novel traces the route towards madness of a poet named Antanas Garšva who, like Šk?ma, works as an elevator operator. The author discloses the character of Garšva and his tragic experiences. The style of Antanas Šk?ma is very particular, full of unexpected metaphor and subconscious. Nevertheless, there are stylistic contrasts also: lyric and aesthetically delicate confessions are suddenly followed by coarse, cynical images and rude words. He often plays with the sounds of language, disengaging phonemes from their literal meaning, as if to suggest a more transcendent meaning to the sounds. He's sometimes referred to as Lithuanian Albert Camus.
November 30, 1906
John Dickson Carr (November 30, 1906 – February 27, 1977) was an American author of detective stories, who also published using the pseudonyms Carter Dickson, Carr Dickson and Roger Fairbairn. Carr is generally regarded as one of the greatest writers of so-called "Golden Age" mysteries, complex, plot-driven stories in which the puzzle is paramount. He was influenced in this regard by the works of Gaston Leroux and by the Father Brown stories of G. K. Chesterton. He was a master of so-called locked room mystery, in which a detective solves apparently impossible crimes. The Dr. Fell mystery The Hollow Man (1935), usually considered Carr's masterpiece, was selected during 1981 as the best locked-room mystery of all time by a panel of 17 mystery authors and reviewers. He was also an author of historical mystery. A resident of England for a number of years, Carr is often grouped among "British-style" mystery writers. Most (though not all) of his novels had English settings, especially country villages and estates, and English characters. His two best-known fictional detective characters were English. The son of Wooda Nicholas Carr, a U.S. congressman from Pennsylvania, Carr graduated from The Hill School in Pottstown during 1925 and Haverford College during 1929. During the early 1930s, he relocated to England, where he married an Englishwoman. He began his mystery-writing career there, returning to the United States as an internationally known author during 1948. During 1950, his biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle earned Carr the first of his two Special Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America; the second was awarded during 1970, in recognition of his 40-year career as a mystery writer. He was also presented the MWA's Grand Master award during 1963. Carr was one of only two Americans ever admitted to the British Detection Club. During early spring 1963, while living in Mamaroneck, New York, Carr suffered a stroke, which paralyzed his left side. He continued to write using one hand, and for several years contributed a regular column of mystery and detective book reviews, "The Jury Box", to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Carr eventually relocated to Greenville, South Carolina, and he died there of lung cancer during 1977.
November 30, 1924
Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm (November 30, 1924 – January 1, 2005) was an American politician, educator, and author. She was a Congresswoman, representing New York's 12th Congressional District for seven terms from 1969 to 1983. In 1968, she became the first African-American woman elected to Congress. On January 25, 1972, she became the first major-party black candidate for President of the United States and the first woman to run for the Democratic presidential nomination (Margaret Chase Smith had previously run for the 1964 Republican presidential nomination). She received 152 first-ballot votes at the 1972 Democratic National Convention.
November 30, 1835
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called 'the Great American Novel'.
November 30, 1947
David Alan Mamet (November 30, 1947) is an American playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and film director. As a playwright, Mamet has won a Pulitzer Prize and received Tony nominations for Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) and Speed-the-Plow (1988). As a screenwriter, he has received Oscar nominations for The Verdict (1982) and Wag the Dog (1997). Mamet's books include: The Old Religion (1997), a novel about the lynching of Leo Frank; Five Cities of Refuge: Weekly Reflections on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy (2004), a Torah commentary with Rabbi Lawrence Kushner; The Wicked Son (2006), a study of Jewish self-hatred and antisemitism; Bambi vs. Godzilla, a commentary on the movie business; The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (2011), a commentary on cultural and political issues; and Three War Stories (2013), a trio of novellas about the physical and psychological effects of war.
November 30, 1874
Lucy Maud Montgomery (November 30, 1874 – April 24, 1942), publicly known as L. M. Montgomery, was a Canadian author best known for a series of novels beginning in 1908 with Anne of Green Gables.
November 30, 1667
Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whigs, then for the Tories), poet and cleric who became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. He is remembered for works such as Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal, A Journal to Stella, Drapier's Letters, The Battle of the Books, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, and A Tale of a Tub. Swift is regarded by the Encyclopædia Britannica as the foremost prose satirist in the English language, and is less well known for his poetry. Swift originally published all of his works under pseudonyms – such as Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, MB Drapier – or anonymously. He is also known for being a master of two styles of satire: the Horatian and Juvenalian styles.
November 30, 1916
John Franklin Bardin (November 30, 1916 - July 9, 1981) was an American crime writer, best known for three novels he wrote between 1946 and 1948. Bardin was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, where his father was a well-to-do coal merchant and his mother an office worker. Nearly all of his immediate family died of various illnesses, however, with an elder sister dying of septicaemia, and, a year later, his father succumbing to a coronary and leaving little money. Bardin, who by then had graduated from Walnut High School, was studying engineering at the University of Cincinnati, and had to leave in his first year in order to work full-time as a ticket-taker and bouncer at a roller-skating rink, and later as a night clerk at a bookstore, where he would educate himself by reading. ‘Mother had become a paranoid schizophrenic by then,’ Bardin said. ‘It was on visits to her that I first had an insight into the 'going home' hallucinations’ that would later form the core of his third novel, Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly. Other jobs, held in some combination of Cincinnati and New York City, to which he moved before turning 30, including working as a bench hand in a valve foundry; in the advertising department of a bank; in the production department of an advertising agency; and doing freelance market research for Barron Collier. In New York, he began working in 1944 for the ad agency Edwin Bird Wilson, Inc., and from 1946 to 1948 completed the three novels for which he would be best known: The Deadly Percheron, The Last of Philip Banter, and Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly, published over the course of 18 months, though that last not in the United States until the 1960s. Bardin would eventually write 10 novels over the course of his lifetime. His magazine articles include ‘The Disadvantages of Respectability’, a review of the book Father of the Man: How Your Child Gets His Personality, by W. Allison Davis and Robert J. Havighurst, in The Nation, May 3, 1947. After gradually rising to become vice president and director of Edwin Bird Wilson, Bardin left that agency in 1963. Two years earlier he had begun teaching creative writing and advertising at the New School for Social Research, which he would continue to do through 1966. That year he worked as associate publicity director for the United Negro College Fund, and from 1967 to 1968, he wrote for the United Jewish Appeal of Greater New York. Turning to magazines, he then served as an editor at Coronet through 1972. For the next two years at least, Bardin lived in Chicago, Illinois, where he served as managing editor of the American Medical Association magazine Today's Health through 1973; and through 1974 originated, and served as managing editor of, two American Bar Association Press magazines, Learning and the Law and Barrister. While his official site states he returned to New York in 1974, one source places him in Chicago still in 1978. He resided in New York City's East Village until his death on July 9, 1981. In 1946, Bardin entered a period of intense creativity during which he wrote three crime novels that were relatively unsuccessful at first, one of them not even being published in America until the late 1960s, but which have since become well-regarded cult novels. He went on to write four more novels under the pen names Gregory Tree or Douglas Ashe; the writer Julian Symons, in his introduction to an omnibus collection of Bardin's first three works, called those later novels ‘slick, readable, unadventurous crime stories’. Under his own name, Bardin also wrote three more novels, the first two of which Symons called, respectively, ‘an interesting but unsuccessful experiment’ and ‘disastrously sentimental’. His best-regarded works, The Deadly Percheron, The Last of Philip Banter and Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly experienced renewed interest in the 1970s when they were discovered by British readers. Symons, who compiled the omnibus, had difficulty tracking down information on Bardin. He was unable to find any American critic who had heard of him and even his original publishers and agents did not know how to contact him or even whether he was still alive. Symons wrote that Third Degree, the journal of Mystery Writers of America, found Bardin in Chicago, editing an American Bar Association magazine, and willing and eager to see his work republished. The Deadly Percheron tells the story of a psychiatrist who encounters a patient with apparent delusions and a strange story to tell, but who does not otherwise exhibit signs of mental instability. His story turns out to have at least some connection to reality, drawing the psychiatrist into a complicated alternate identity that changes his life. The Last of Philip Banter sees a man receiving (or apparently writing) disturbing predictions about his life. The predictions partly become true, the effect of the predictions themselves being destructive and mind-altering. Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly, perhaps his most acclaimed work, is a complicated story told almost entirely in terms of the psychology of the protagonist Ellen, a mental patient who experiences mental disintegration. Bardin gave his literary influences as Graham Greene, Henry Green and Henry James. In the film Mona Lisa one of the characters is reading The Deadly Percheron and makes several conversational references to it.
November 30, 1978
Robert Kirkman (born November 30, 1978) is an American comic book writer best known for creating The Walking Dead and Invincible for Image Comics, in addition to Ultimate X-Men and Marvel Zombies for Marvel Comics. He has also collaborated with Image Comics co-founder Todd McFarlane on the series Haunt. He is one of the five partners of Image Comics, and the only one of the five who was not one of its co-founders.
November 30, 1931
Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., (November 30, 1931, Teaneck, NJ - June 25, 2012, Davis, CA) was Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His works include A Behavioral Approach to Historical Analysis; Salvation and the Savage: An Analysis of Protestant Missions and American Indian Response, 1787-1962; and The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present.
November 30, 1964
THOMAS HETTCHE is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Robert Walser Prize. THE ARBOGAST CASE is his fourth book. He lives in Frankfurt, Germany. . Elizabeth Gaffney is editor at large of The Paris Review. Her first novel, Metropolis, will be released in 2004. Originally published in German as Der Fall Arbogast, 2001 - DuMont Buchverlag, Germany.
November 30, 1900
Geoffrey Edward West Household (30 November 1900 — 4 October 1988) was a prolific British novelist who specialised in thrillers. He is best known for his novel Rogue Male (1939). He was born in Bristol; his father Horace was a barrister. Household was educated at Clifton College, Bristol (1914-1919) and at Magdalen College, Oxford, from which he received a B.A. in English literature in 1922. He became an assistant confidential secretary for Bank of Romania, in Bucharest (1922-1926). In 1926 he went to Spain, where he worked selling bananas as a marketing manager for the United Fruit Company (Elders and Fyffes). In 1929 Household moved to the United States where he wrote for children's encyclopedias and composed children's radio plays for the Columbia Broadcasting System. From 1933 to 1939 he was a traveling salesman for John Kidd, a manufacturer of printing ink, in Europe, the Middle East and South America. He served in British Intelligence during World War II in Romania, Greece and the Middle East. He married twice, secondly in 1942 to Ilona Zsoldos-Gutman, by whom he had a son and two daughters. After the War he lived the life of a country gentleman and wrote. In his later years, he lived in Charlton, near Banbury, Oxfordshire and died in Wardington. He began to write in the 1920s. His first short story, "The Salvation of Pisco Gabar" was published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1936. His first novel The Terror of Villadonga was published that same year. His first short story collection, The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories, came out in 1938. In all, he wrote twenty-eight novels (including four for young adults and a novella), seven short story collections and an autobiography, Against the Wind, published in 1958. Many of his stories have scenes set in caves, and there is a science-fiction or supernatural element in some, although this is handled with restraint. The typical Household hero was a strong, capable Englishman with a high sense of honour which bound him to a certain course of action. He described himself, in terms of his writing, as "sort of a bastard by Stevenson out of Conrad ... Style is enormously important to me and I do try to develop my hero as a human being in trouble." Indiana University holds a collection of Household's manuscripts and correspondence.
November 30, 1904
ANDRZEJ KUSNIEWICZ (November 30, 1904, Kovynychi, Ukraine - May 15, 1993, Warsaw, Poland) was born in Poland in 1904. During World War II he was a member of the French Resistance, and afterward served as Poland’s consul general in France. He published his first book at the age of fifty-two, a volume of poetry. He is the author of two additional collections of poetry and five novels, for which he has twice been awarded the National Prize for Literature in Poland.
November 30, 1931
John Samuel Mbiti (born 30 November 1931) is a Kenyan-born Christian religious philosopher and writer. He is an ordained Anglican priest, and as of 2005 a canon. Born in Kenya, Mbiti studied in Uganda and the United States, taking his doctorate in 1963 at the University of Cambridge, UK. He taught religion and theology in Makerere University, Uganda from 1964 to 1974 and was subsequently director of the World Council of Churches' Ecumenical Institute in Bogis-Bossey, Switzerland. He has held visiting professorships at universities across the world and published extensively on philosophy, theology and African oral traditions. Mbiti's seminal book, African Religions and Philosophy (1969), was the first work to challenge Christian assumption that traditional African religious ideas were "demonic and anti-Christian". His sympathetic treatment of traditional religions was based on massive field work. Mbiti is clear that his interpretation of these religions is from a firmly Christian perspective, and this aspect of his work has sometimes been severely criticized. Mbiti's research interests include theology in Africa and Asia, and ecumenism. He has also collaborated on a book of African proverbs, collected from across the continent. As of 2005, Mbiti is an Emeritus professor at the University of Bern and parish minister to the town of Burgdorf, Switzerland. He is married to Verena Mbiti-Siegenthaler and has four children.
November 30, 1817
Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen (30 November 1817 – 1 November 1903) was a German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer generally regarded as one of the greatest classicists of the 19th century. His work regarding Roman history is still of fundamental importance for contemporary research. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902 for being "the greatest living master of the art of historical writing, with special reference to his monumental work, A History of Rome", after having been nominated by 18 members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. He was also a prominent German politician, as a member of the Prussian and German parliaments. His works on Roman law and on the law of obligations had a significant impact on the German civil code (BGB).
November 30, 1940
Kevin Price Phillips (born November 30, 1940) is an American writer and commentator on politics, economics, and history. Formerly a Republican Party strategist before becoming an Independent, Phillips became disaffected with the party from the 1990s, and became a critic. He is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times, Harper's Magazine, and National Public Radio, and was a political analyst on PBS' NOW with Bill Moyers. Phillips was a strategist on voting patterns for Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign, which was the basis for a book, His predictions regarding shifting voting patterns in presidential elections proved accurate, though they did not extend "down ballot" to Congress until the Republican revolution of 1994. Phillips also was partly responsible for the design of the Republican "Southern strategy" of the 1970s and 1980s. The author of fourteen books, he lives in Goshen, Connecticut.
November 30, 1941
Richard Price (born November 30, 1941, in New York City) is an American anthropologist and historian, best known for his studies of the Caribbean and his experiments with writing ethnography.
November 30, 1554
Sir Philip Sidney (30 November 1554 – 17 October 1586) was an English poet, courtier, Scholar, and soldier, who is remembered as one of the most prominent figures of the Elizabethan age. His works include Astrophel and Stella, The Defence of Poesy (also known as The Defence of Poetry or An Apology for Poetry), and The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia.
November 30, 1925
Paolo Spriano (30 November 1925, Turin , - 26 September 1988, Rome) is the author of a five-volume history of the Italian Communist Party (Storth del Partito comunista ilaliano, Turin, 1967-75). He has written several books on Gramsci ‘and has edited a major anthology of his political writings.
December 1, 1942
John Crowley (born December 1, 1942) is an American author of fantasy, science fiction and mainstream fiction. He studied at Indiana University and has a second career as a documentary film writer. He is best known as the author of Little, Big (1981), which received the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and has been called ‘a neglected masterpiece’ by Harold Bloom and his Aegypt series of novels which revolve around the same themes of Hermeticism, memory, families and religion.
December 1, 1946
Dale Furutani (born December 1, 1946, in Hilo, Hawaii) is the first Asian American to win major mystery writing awards. He has won the Anthony Award and the Macavity Award and has been nominated for the Agatha Award. His book, The Toyotomi Blades, was selected as the best mystery of 1997 by the Internet Critics Group. Furutani's family came from Yamaguchi Prefecture in Japan to Hawaii in 1896. He was raised in San Pedro, California, where he attended school. He has a degree in Creative Writing from California State University, Long Beach, and an MBA in Marketing from UCLA. He has written mysteries set in modern Los Angeles and Tokyo as well as a mystery trilogy set in 1603 Japan. He has received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and have been on the Mystery Writers of America national bestseller list, the Los Angeles Times Bestseller List for all fiction, and numerous local mystery bestseller lists.
December 1, 1944
Tahar ben Jelloun (born in Fes, French Morocco, 1 December 1944) is a Moroccan writer. The entirety of his work is written in French, although his first language is Arabic.
December 1, 1955
Azar Nafisi is a professor at Johns Hopkins University. She won a fellowship from Oxford and taught English literature at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University and Allameh Tabatabai University in Iran. She was expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the veil and left Iran for America in 1997. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New Republic, has appeared on countless radio and television programs, and is the author of ANTI-TERRA: A CRITICAL STUDY OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV’S NOVELS. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and two children.
December 1, 1944
Daniel Pennac (real name Daniel Pennacchioni, born 1944 in Casablanca, Morocco) is a French writer. He received the Prix Renaudot in 2007 for his essay Chagrin d'école. After studying in Nice he became a teacher. He began to write for children and then wrote his book series La Saga Malaussène, that tells the story of Benjamin Malaussène, a scapegoat, and his family in Belleville, Paris. In a 1997 piece for Le Monde, Pennac stated that Malaussène's youngest brother, Petit, was the son of Jerome Charyn's New York detective Isaac Sidel. His writing style can be humorous and imaginative like in La Saga Malaussène, but he can also write Comme un roman, a pedagogic essay. His Comic Débauche, written jointly with Jacques Tardi, treats the topic of unemployment, revealing his social preoccupations.
December 1, 1944
Tahar ben Jelloun (born in Fes, French Morocco, 1 December 1944) is a Moroccan writer. The entirety of his work is written in French, although his first language is Arabic. His novels L'Enfant de sable and La Nuit sacrée are translated into 43 languages. Le racisme expliqué à ma fille has been translated into 33 languages. He has participated in translating many of his works.
December 1, 1083
Anna Komnene, Latinized as Comnena (1 December 1083 – 1153), was a Greek princess, scholar, physician, hospital administrator, and the daughter of Emperor Alexios I Komnenos of Byzantium and Irene Doukaina. She wrote the Alexiad, an account of her father’s reign, which is unique in that it was written by a princess about her father.
December 1, 1943
Selwyn R. Cudjoe (born December 1, 1943, Tacarigua, Trinidad and Tobago) is Professor of Africana Studies, Margaret E. Deffenbaugh and LeRoy T. Carlson Professor in Comparative Literature, and, from 1995 to 1999, was the fourth Marion Butler McLean Chair in the History of Ideas at Wellesley College. He teaches courses on the African American literary tradition, African literature, black women writers, and Caribbean literature. A graduate of Fordham University where he received both a B.A. in English (1969) and an M.A. in American Literature (1972), Professor Cudjoe earned a Ph.D. in American Literature from Cornell University (1976). Prior to joining the Wellesley faculty in 1986, he taught at Ithaca College and Cornell, Harvard, Brandeis, Fordham, and Ohio universities. He has been a lecturer at Auburn (N.Y.) State Prison and taught at Bedford-Stuyvesant (N.Y.) Youth-In-Action. Professor Cudjoe is the author and editor of several books, and has produced several documentaries. He has written for the New York Times; The Washington Post; Boston Globe; Harvard Educational Review; International Herald Tribune; New Left Review; Baltimore Sun; the Amsterdam News; Trinidad Guardian; and Trinidad Express.
December 1, 1896
Irving Albert Leonard (December 1, 1896 in New Haven, Connecticut – October 1, 1996 in Alexandria, Virginia) was an American historian and translator, specialising in Hispanic history and art. His best known publications are Books of the Brave (1949) and Baroque Times in Old Mexico: Seventeenth-Century Persons, Places and Practices (1959), which won the Conference on Latin American History award for the best book in English. Books of the Brave, a valuable account of the introduction of literary culture to Spain's New World, was updated in 1992. He had many papers published in the American Historical Review and the Hispanic American Historical Review, such as A Frontier Library, 1799 (Feb. 1943, vol. 23, no. 1, p. 21–51). In 1960, Leonard served as chair of the Conference on Latin American History, the professional organization of Latin American historians.
December 1, 1936
Ma V?n Kháng (born Hanoi, 1 December 1936) is a Vietnamese writer. He was one of the first doi moi authors to appear alongside Lê L?u and D??ng Thu H??ng.
December 1, 1869
Henri Émile Benoît Matisse (1 December 1869 – 3 November 1954) was a French artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. Along with Picasso, Matisse helped to define and influence radical contemporary art in the 20th century. Although he was initially labelled a Fauve (wild beast), by the 1920s he was being hailed as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. His mastery of the expressive language of colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art.
December 1, 1944
Sally Engle Merry is Silver Professor of Anthropology at New York University. She is also a Faculty Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York University School of Law, and past president of the American Ethnological Society. Her books include Colonizing Hawai‘i (Princeton, 2000), Human Rights and Gender Violence (Chicago, 2006), Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective (Blackwell, 2009), The Practice of Human Rights, (co-edited with Mark Goodale; Cambridge, 2007), and The Seductions of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). She has co-edited two books on quantification, The Quiet Power of Indicators, with Kevin Davis and Benedict Kingsbury (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and A World of Indicators, with Richard Rottenburg, Song-Joon Park, and Johanna Mugler (Cambridge University Press 2015). She received the Hurst Prize for Colonizing Hawai‘i in 2002, the Kalven Prize for scholarly contributions to sociolegal scholarship in 2007, and the J.I. Staley Prize for Human Rights and Gender Violence in 2010.
December 1, 1982
Zach Savich is the author of four books of poetry, as well as a book of prose, Events Film Cannot Withstand. He teaches in the BFA Program for Creative Writing at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and co-edits Rescue Press’s Open Prose Series.
December 2, 1943
John B. Balaban (born December 2, 1943) is an American poet and translator, an authority on Vietnamese literature. Balaban was born in a housing project neighborhood in Philadelphia to Romanian immigrant parents, Phillip and Alice Georgies Balaban. His father taught himself calculus, invented a model airplane, and studied engineering in Romania, while his mother was a peasant with 'almost no education'. Balaban wrote his first poem at the age of eight or nine, and cites the influence of show tunes that his elder sisters used to sing while washing the dishes after dinner. He became a Quaker at the age of sixteen, while searching for alternatives to the violence in his neighborhood. He obtained a B.A. with highest honors in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1966. A Woodrow Wilson Fellowship that he received in his senior year at the university allowed him to study English literature at Harvard University, where he received his A.M. During the Vietnam War, Balaban was a conscientious objector; He went to Vietnam with the International Volunteer Services where he taught at a university until it was bombed in the Tet Offensive. He was wounded in the shoulder by shrapnel and evacuated; after his recovery, he worked to save burned and injured children from the war. He left Vietnam in 1969, but returned in 1971 to work on Ca Dao Viet Nam, a collection of poems in the Ca Dao folk tradition. Balaban's first published collection of verse, After Our War (1974), was a Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. In 2000, he released Spring essence, a collection of poems by H? Xuân H??ng, an 18th-century poet and the preeminent woman poet of Vietnam. The book included English translations and versions in both the current Vietnamese alphabet and the historical Ch? Nôm writing system. Balaban has written other works that draw on his experiences in Vietnam. His anthology Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems won the 1998 William Carlos Williams Award. He is currently the Poet-in-Residence and Professor of English in the creative writing program of North Carolina State University.
December 2, 1934
Sissela Bok (born Sissela Myrdal on 2 December 1934) is a Swedish-born American philosopher and ethicist, the daughter of two Nobel Prize winners: Gunnar Myrdal who won the Economics prize with Friedrich Hayek in 1974, and Alva Myrdal who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982. She received her B.A. and M.A. in psychology from George Washington University in 1957 and 1958, and her Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University in 1970. Formerly a Professor of Philosophy at Brandeis University, Sissela Bok is currently a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, Harvard School of Public Health. She is married to Derek Bok, former president (1971-1991) and interim president (2006-2007) of Harvard. Her daughter, Hilary Bok, is also a philosopher. Sissela Bok's brother, Jan Myrdal, is a leftist-political writer and journalist. She was awarded the Courage of Conscience award on 24 April 1991 'for her contributions to peacemaking strategies in the tradition of her mother'.
December 2, 1948
Tom Coraghessan Boyle (born Thomas John Boyle; also known as T.C. Boyle; born December 2, 1948) is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published fourteen novels and more than 100 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988, for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
December 2, 1817
José Mármol (1818 – 1871) was an Argentine journalist, politician, librarian, and writer of the Romantic school. Born in Buenos Aires, he initially studied law, but abandoned his studies in favor of politics. In 1839, no sooner had he begun to make a name for himself than he was arrested for his opposition to Argentina's conservative caudillo, Juan Manuel de Rosas. He was held in irons for six days. A year and a half later, the political climate spurred him, as it had many other Argentine dissenters, to flee the country. He found passage to Montevideo on a French schooner. He was welcomed by other exiles, among them Juan Bautista Alberdi, Florencio Varela, Esteban Echeverría, Juan María Gutiérrez, and Miguel Cané. Three years later, the siege of Montevideo by Rosas's ally Manuel Oribe led Mármol to flee yet again, this time to Rio de Janeiro. Here he remained until February 1843, at which point he boarded a ship for Chile. The ship encountered fierce storms and was eventually forced to return to Rio de Janeiro. He remained in the city another two years before returning to Montevideo, where he spent the next seven years. The fall of Rosas after his defeat at the Battle of Caseros (1852) allowed Mármol to return to Argentina. After an exile that had lasted thirteen years, he was elected a senator and later a national deputy from the province of Buenos Aires. The secession of Buenos Aires from the Argentine Confederation prevented him from serving as plenipotentiary to Chile, a post to which he had been appointed. However, he later served as plenipotentiary to Brazil. In 1858 he became director of the Biblioteca Nacional de la República Argentina, until blindness forced him to retire. He died in Buenos Aires in 1871. By coincidence, his two most notable successors in the office of chief librarian, Paul Groussac and Jorge Luis Borges, also suffered from blindness in their old age.
December 2, 1947
CHARLES L. MUNGOSHI was born near Enkeldoorn, Rhodesia in 1947. He was educated at All Saints School, Daramombe School and St. Augustine's Secondary School. He worked for a year as a research assistant with the Forestry Commission and then for three years for Textbook Sales in Salisbury. He has published a collection of stories, COMING OF THE DRY SEASON (OUP Nairobi) and a novel in Shona.
December 2, 1936
Hebe Uhart (2 December 1936 – 11 October 2018) was an Argentine writer. In 2017, she received the Manuel Rojas Ibero-American Narrative Award. She studied Philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). Later she worked as a teacher, both at primary and secondary level, and university at the UBA and the National University of Lomas de Zamora. She lived in Buenos Aires, where she gave literary workshops. She was a frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines, such as El País in Montevideo. Her stories were adapted into the play Querida mamá o guiando la hiedra, directed by Laura Yusem. In 2010 she published a compilation of her short stories and novels from 1962 to 2004 in the volume Relatos reunidos.
December 2, 1946
David Macaulay (born 2 December 1946) is a British-born American illustrator and writer. His most famous works include Cathedral (1973), The Way Things Work (1988) and The New Way Things Work (1998). His illustrations have been featured in popular, nonfiction books combining text and illustrations explaining architecture, design and engineering. He has also written a number of children's fiction books. Macaulay was a 2006 recipient of a MacArthur Fellows Program award and also a recipient of the Caldecott Medal in 1991 for Black and White (1990).
December 2, 1956
Fae Myenne Ng is an American novelist, and short story writer. She is a first-generation Chinese American author whose debut novel Bone told the story of three Chinese American daughters growing up in her real childhood hometown of San Francisco Chinatown.
December 2, 1884
Jean Paulhan (2 December 1884 – 9 October 1968) was a French writer, literary critic and publisher, director of the literary magazine Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF) from 1925 to 1940 and from 1946 to 1968. He was a member (Seat 6, 1963–68) of the Académie française. He was born in Nîmes (Gard) and died in Paris. Paulhan's father was the philosopher Frédéric Paulhan and his mother was Jeanne Thérond. From 1908 to 1910 he worked as a teacher in Madagascar, and he later translated Malagasy poems, or Hainteny, into French; Paulhan's translations attracted the interest of Guillaume Apollinaire and Paul Éluard. In 1925 Paulhan succeeded Jacques Rivière as editor of the NRF. One of his most famous works of literary criticism was The Flowers of Tarbes, or Terror in Literature (1941), a study of the nature of language in fiction. Paulhan also wrote several autobiographical short stories; English translations of several appeared in the collection Progress in Love on the Slow Side. During the Second World War, Paulhan was an early and active member of the French Resistance and was arrested by the German Gestapo. After the war he founded Cahiers de la Pléiade and in 1953 re-launched La Nouvelle Revue Française. Paulhan provoked controversy by opposing independence for Algeria, and supporting the French military during the Algerian War; this resulted in a rift between Paulhan and his friend Maurice Blanchot. Author Anne Desclos revealed that she had written the novel Story of O as a series of love letters to her lover Paulhan, who had admired the work of the Marquis de Sade.
December 2, 1923
Christopher Agamemnon Pallis (2 December 1923, Bombay – 10 March 2005, London) was an Anglo-Greek neurologist and socialist intellectual. Under the pen-names Martin Grainger and Maurice Brinton, he wrote and translated for the British libertarian socialist group Solidarity from 1960 until the early 1980s. As a neurologist, he produced the accepted criteria for brainstem death, and wrote the entry on death for Encyclopædia Britannica. Chris Pallis was born to a prominent Anglo-Greek family, "of whose intellectual achievements he was always extremely proud". The poet Alexandros Pallis was a great-uncle, and so the writers Marietta Pallis and Marco Pallis were also relatives. His father Alex was general manager of the family firm of merchant bankers, Ralli Brothers; when he retired, he returned from India to settle in Switzerland. Educated there, Chris Pallis became fluent in French, English and Greek. In 1940 the family managed to take the last boat out of France, and settled in England. Pallis went up to study medicine at Balliol College, Oxford in 1941. Joining the Communist Party of Great Britain, he was quickly expelled for criticising its policy on the Second World War, and became a member of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party. In 1947 he married Jeanne Marty, a working-class French university student, and for a decade he dropped out of politics to pursue his medical career. In 1957 he joined the Trotskyist group led by Gerry Healy, the Club, which in 1959 became the Socialist Labour League. He was expelled by Healy in 1960 and with a group of other ex-members of the SLL immediately set up Solidarity. Like a number of other former members of the SLL he was also involved with the journal International Socialism in the early 1960s. For the next 20 years, he combined a distinguished medical career under his real name with pseudonymous revolutionary socialist writing and translation. His work includes several eyewitness accounts of key moments in European left politics (the Belgian general strike of 1960, Paris in May 1968, Portugal's Carnation Revolution in 1974-75), a substantial body of English translations of the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, the main thinker of the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie, and two short books — one (The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control, 1970) on the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution, and one (The Irrational in Politics, 1974) on sexual politics. Chris Pallis died in March 2005.
December 2, 1954
Ibrahim Nasrallah is considered one of the most influential voices of his generation. Raised in a refugee camp to Palestinian parents, he became a journalist before turning to creative writing. His work includes fourteen novels. He lives in Amman, Jordan. An award-winning translator of Naguib Mahfouz, Ghada Samman, and Mohamed el-Bisatie, Nancy Roberts lives in Amman, Jordan.
December 2, 1980
Brittney Cooper(born December 2, 1980) is a black feminist scholar, author, and professor. Her areas of research and work include black women organizations, black women intellectuals, and hip-hop feminism. In 2013 and 2014, she was named to the Root.com's Root 100, an annual list of Top Black Influencers.
December 3, 1953
Patrick Chamoiseau is a French author from Martinique known for his work in the créolité movement. Chamoiseau was born on December 3, 1953 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, where he currently resides. After he studied law in Paris he returned to Martinique inspired by Édouard Glissant to take a close interest in Creole culture. Chamoiseau is the author of a historical work on the Antilles under the reign of Napoléon Bonaparte and several non-fiction books which include Éloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness), co-authored with Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant. Awarded the Prix Carbet (1990) for Chemins d’enfance. His novel Texaco was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1992, and was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. It has been described as ‘a masterpiece, the work of a genius, a novel that deserves to be known as much as Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Cesaire’s Return to My Native Land’. Chamoiseau may also safely be considered as one of the most innovative writers to hit the French literary scene since Louis-Ferdinand Céline. His freeform use of French language — a highly complex yet fluid mixture of constant invention and ‘creolism’ — fuels a poignant and sensuous depiction of Martinique people in particular and humanity at large.
December 3, 1924
Francisco Sionil José (born 3 December 1924) is one of the most widely read Filipino writers in the English language. His novels and short stories depict the social underpinnings of class struggles and colonialism in Filipino society. José's works—written in English—have been translated into 28 languages, including Korean, Indonesian, Czech, Russian, Latvian, Ukrainian and Dutch.
December 3, 1921
Geoffrey Stephen Kirk (3 December 1921 – 10 March 2003) was an English classicist known for his writings on Ancient Greek literature and mythology. He was Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge from 1974 to 1984. ZKirk was born and grew up in Nottingham, the son of Frederick Kirk, MC. He was educated at Rossall School and Clare College, Cambridge. Kirk's time at Cambridge was interrupted by war. He joined the Royal Navy in 1941 and was commissioned as an officer one year later. He spent much of his service in the Aegean Sea with the Levant Schooner Flotilla commanded by Adrian C. C. Seligman. The unit included schooners and caïques engaged in irregular operations in support of Allied special forces. Kirk fought on many Greek islands and along a wide section of the Turkish coast. He was engaged in operations at Tekegas Barnu, Didyma, Icaria and Andros. He was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross (DSC) in 1945. After the war, Kirk returned to Cambridge, graduated in 1946 and gained a research fellowship at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He later became a lecturer and then a reader at Cambridge. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1959 and served as its vice-president in 1972–73. He also held visiting positions at Yale and Harvard. In 1974 he became the 35th Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge. Following his retirement, in 1982, Kirk produced a six-volume commentary on the Iliad and updated his book The Presocratic Philosophers with J. E. Raven and M. Schofield. He died in 2003.
December 3, 1950
Derek Sayer is Professor of Cultural History at Lancaster University and a former Canada Research Chair at the University of Alberta. His previous books include The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (Princeton) and Capitalism and Modernity. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
December 3, 1857
Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Ukraine, in 1857. After both of his parents died of tuberculosis, Conrad went to live with his uncle in Switzerland. After attending school in Kraków, he joined the French and then the British merchant marines, sailing to exotic destinations like the West Indies and the Congo, which would later become the backdrops for some of his fiction. In 1894 he settled down in England and began his literary career. In 1902 Conrad published his most famous work, Heart of Darkness, and continued to write until his death in 1924.
December 3, 1933
Aditya Narayan Dhairyasheel Haksar (born 3 December 1933) is a well known translator of Sanskrit classics into English. Born in Gwalior, central India, he is a graduate of The Doon School, Allahabad University and Oxford University. He was a career diplomat, serving as Indian High Commissioner to Kenya and the Seychelles, Minister in the United States, Ambassador to Portugal and Yugoslavia, and he also served as Dean of India's Foreign Service Institute and President of the U.N. Environment Programme's Governing Council. Haksar is noted for his collection of translations from Sanskrit, including The Shattered Thigh & Other Plays of Bhasa, Dandin's Tales of the Ten Princes, the fables of Narayana's Hitopadesha, the story collection Simhasana Dvatrimsika, the verse anthology Subhashitavali, the Kama Sutra, Three Satires from Ancient Kashmir, Tales from the Panchatantra, and the Jatakamala of Arya Shura. He has also edited Glimpses of Sanskrit Literature and compiled A Treasury of Sanskrit Poetry for the Indian Council for Cultural Relations. Haksar has increasingly focused on the katha or narrative Sanskrit literature, the manuscript archive of which may amount to some 40,000 volumes. This is in part because many generations of orientalist scholars had overlooked this rich tradition in favor of more ancient religious texts. His katha translations include Shuka Saptati, and the first ever renditions into English of Madhavanala Katha and Samaya Matrika, respectively published as Madhav & Kama and The Courtesan's Keeper.
December 3, 1922
Henry Anatole Grunwald (1922-2005) was a celebrated editor, journalist, and writer. He was managing editor of Time magazine and subsequently editor in chief of Time Inc. He served as America's ambassador to Austria, the country of his birth. He was the author of six books, including ONE MAN'S AMERICA and A SAINT, MORE OR LESS.
December 3, 1879
Kaf? Nagai (December 3, 1879 - April 30, 1959) is the pen name of Japanese author, playwright, essayist, and diarist Nagai S?kichi. His works are noted for their depictions of life in early 20th-century Tokyo, especially among geisha, prostitutes, cabaret dancers, and other denizens of the city's lively entertainment districts. Kaf? was born at Kanetomi-ch? 45, Koishikawa-ku (now Kasuga-ch?, Bunky?, Tokyo), the eldest son of Nagai Ky?ichir?, his father, who was 28 years old, and Nagai Tsune, 19. Ky?ichir? was a scholar, bureaucrat, and businessman who later became known for his Chinese poetry. Kaf? had three brothers and one sister. When the second son was born in 1883, Kaf? was sent to live with his mother's family. In 1884, he attended the kindergarten affiliated with the Ochanomizu women's teachers' college, and his father visited Europe on government business. Kaf? returned to his parents' home in January 1886, when he started elementary school. In 1891, he attended a private English-language school in Kanda, Tokyo. In 1894, he became ill, perhaps with scrofula, and spent several months in 1895 in a hospital in Odawara. He began studying the shakuhachi and Chinese poetry in 1896 at the age of 17. In February of the following year, he made his first of many visits to the Yoshiwara red-light district. The same year, he graduated from middle school and failed the entrance exam for university. With his mother and younger brothers, he visited Shanghai, where his father was working for the shipping company Nippon Yusen. He returned to Japan in the autumn and enrolled in the Chinese-language department of the institutions for foreign-language educations affiliated with the Higher Commercial School. In 1898, he began writing short stories and studied with the novelist Hirotsu Ry?r?. In 1899 he became involved in writing and performing rakugo and dropped out of the foreign-language school. In 1900, he began publishing short stories. In 1901, he got a job briefly as a newspaper reporter and later began studying French. During World War II, the amount of Japanese literature published was limited due to extreme censorship by the government, which sought to encourage artists and writers to direct their focus toward the war effort. Nagai Kafu became one of the rebels who opposed the government and continued to write. As a result, he was able to maintain his status as a popular novelist throughout the war. After the war, many Japanese authors were emotionally and psychologically affected, and the aftereffects began to show in narratives, poems and essays related to death, disease, despair and defeat. However, since Nagai Kafu did not contribute to the war effort, he was not influenced as heavily by the defeat and continued to write about the things he loved in life, notably geisha, prostitutes and dancers, until his death, on April 30, 1959, from a gastric ulcer. The edition of his collected works published by Iwanami Shoten in the 1990s runs to 30 volumes. Nagai's writing style varied depending on his genre and audience. Reflecting his study of classical Chinese and his wide reading of premodern Japanese texts, his diaries and some of his essays are written in the highly literary bungo style. Most of his plays and novels, in contrast, are written in a modern style typical of the era in which he wrote, and the dialogue spoken by his characters seems particularly natural and unaffected.
December 3, 1872
Clemente Palma (born December 3, 1872 in Lima - d. August 13, 1946 in Lima) was a Peruvian writer. He was the son of famous Peruvian author and scholar Ricardo Palma and his lover Clemencia Ramínez. His halfsister Angélica Palma was also a writer. On 1876, his father married Cristina Román, and they had seven children: Félix Vital, Angélica, Ricardo, Peregrina Augusta, Cristina, Cristián and Renée Cristina. In 1897 he obtained a degree in Letters from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, with a thesis entitled El Porvenir de las Razas en el Perú ("The Future of the Races in Peru") in which he defended the controversial thesis that the Peruvian race had to be improved and that this could be achieved through the introduction of Germans into Peru. He also obtained a doctorate from this university with a thesis on philosophy and art and became a professor at the university subsequently. In 1899 he obtained a bachelor of law degree from the same university. During his university studies, he worked as curator of the National Library of Peru and started his activities as a writer. From 1902 to 1904 he was the consul of Peru in Barcelona. In Spain he met Maria Manuela Schmalz whom he married in 1902. They had five children: Judith, Clemente Ricardo, Ricardo, Clemencia and Isabel. Upon his return to Peru, he resumed his position as curator of the National Library of Peru, a post that he held until November 1911. During this period, he founded several cultural and literary magazines such as Prisma and Variedades and the daily newspaper La Crónica. From 1911 to 1918, he dedicated himself to the direction of these magazines. He was director of the magazines Prisma (1906–1908) and Variedades (1908–1931) and the newspaper La Crónica (1912–1929). Between 1919 and 1930, Clemente Palma was a Member of Parliament, supporting the authoritarian President Augusto B. Leguia, who had taken power through a coup. During this period, he remained active in the press and also taught classes of aesthetics and art history at his alma mater. In 1930, he was imprisoned for a while after the coup of Luis Miguel Sánchez Cerro. He was liberated thanks to the pressure of his friends but was forced into exile to Chile in 1932. He could return to Peru only after the assassination of Luis Miguel Sánchez Cerro in 1933. During his exile in Chile, he wrote the science fiction novel XYZ. After the publication of this novel, he mainly wrote literary criticism and essays. Clemente Palma was an important literary critic in Peru and exercised an important influence through the magazine Variedades. In that role, he has been criticized for not recognising the genius of César Vallejo when the latter sent him one of his early poems for review. Palma's best known works are in the realm of fiction. He is one of the first adherents of modernism in Peru. He made a great contribution to the development of the short story and science fiction in Peru and introduced new themes in its literature. His stories deal mostly with fantastic themes, psychological horror and science fiction. He was attracted to the morbid and many of his characters are abnormal and perverse. As his father was the director of the National Library of Peru, he had the opportunity to read the works of many foreign authors. His work shows a strong influence of Edgar Allan Poe and, to a lesser extent, nineteenth-century Russian writers and symbolist and decadent French writers, as well as the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. His two short story collections Cuentos malévolos ("Malevolent Tales") (1904) and Historietas Malignas ("Malignant Tales") (1925) are in the style of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Contes cruels. Influenced by decadent themes and subject matter, they are filled with dark humor, blasphemy and the supernatural. His Tres cuentos Verdes (1922) were in the style of his father's Tradiciones en Salsa Verde. He also wrote several novels, including Mors et Vita ("Death and Life") (1923) and XYZ (1934). This last novel has some similarities with the science fiction novel The Invention of Morel published by the Argentine Adolfo Bioy Casares in 1940.
December 3, 1942
David K. Shipler (born December 3, 1942) is an American author. He won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction in 1987 for Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land. He also wrote the book, The Working Poor: Invisible in America. Formerly, he was a foreign correspondent of The New York Times.
December 3, 1954
Etienne van Heerden, born 3 December 1954, is a South African author. Van Heerden was born in 1954, six years after the official advent of apartheid. His mother was an English speaking mathematics teacher. His father, an Afrikaans speaking merino stud breeder, farmed the family farm in the Karoo. Van Heerden was reared Afrikaans, with English reserved for use at home on Tuesdays, and learned from comics ordered from London. Due to being born blind in the right eye, he was not called up for combat duty, but served as a dog handler, playing his alsatian at major festivals. Van Heerden initially studied law, and was admitted to the South African Side Bar as attorney. He freelanced as deputy sheriff for the Civil Court, and moved about in the townships around Cape Town, dispensing civil summonses and learning a great deal about life in these suppressed communities. As a young practitioner, his clients were mostly from the black and coloured crime-ridden communities around Cape Town. Van Heerden also lectured Legal Practice at the Peninsula Technikon and spent two years in advertising. At age thirty, with the birth of his eldest daughter, Van Heerden left the routine of a budding Cape Town advertising agency. He and his family relocated to northern Natal where he started out on his academic career in Literature at the University of Zululand. His PhD was a study on engagement and postmodernism. During the 1980s he was member of a group of Afrikaans writers secretly meeting the banned ANC of Mandela and exiled writers at the (now famous) Victoria Falls Writers’ Conference, held in Zimbabwe. Van Heerden is seen as member of a generation of Afrikaans artists who contributed significantly to opening up the Afrikaner psyche to change. He regularly teaches at universities in Europe, and has been Writer in Residence at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, and the University of Antwerp in Belgium. He was a member of the University of Iowa’s prestigious International Writing Program in 1990, and has been back on visits to this university, of which he is an Honorary Fellow in Writing. He regularly reads his fiction at events such as the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland, the Winter Nights Festival in the Hague, Netherlands, the Time of the Writer Festival in Berlin, Germany, the Zimbabwe Book Fair and other festivals and events internationally. Despite at times at odds with the apartheid government, van Heerden never left South Africa permanently, and now teaches at the University of Cape Town, where he is the Hofmeyr Professor in the School of Languages and Literatures, and chairs the Afrikaans and Netherlandic Studies Section. His current activities at the University of Cape Town include the supervision of Creative Writing, where he has led a generation of young Afrikaans authors to published status, and the lecturing of courses in Literary Theory, Media Studies, and South African and Dutch Literature. Van Heerden is married to Kaia, a practising doctor, and lives in Stellenbosch. The couple has two daughters, Imke and Menán. Although he lives in the Western Cape, Van Heerden returns, in his writing, to the Karoo of his childhood. He describes this arid and mythological part of South Africa’s deep interior is his own landscape of the mind. He serves on the board of directors of NB Publishers, which includes, amongst others, Kwela, Tafelberg, Best Books and Human and Rousseau publishers.
December 4, 1835
Samuel Butler (4 or 5 December 1835 – 18 June 1902) was an iconoclastic Victorian-era English author who published a variety of works. Two of his most famous pieces are the Utopian satire Erewhon and a semi-autobiographical novel published posthumously, The Way of All Flesh. He is also known for examining Christian orthodoxy, substantive studies of evolutionary thought, studies of Italian art, and works of literary history and criticism. Butler also made prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey which remain in use to this day.
December 4, 1921
Carlos Franqui (December 4, 1921 – April 16, 2010) was a Cuban writer, poet, journalist, art critic, and political activist. After the Fulgencio Batista coup in 1952, he became involved with the 26th of July Movement which was headed by Fidel Castro. Upon the success of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, he was placed in charge of the rebellion's newspaper Revolución, which became an official government publication. When he came to have political differences with the regime, he left Cuba with his family. In 1968 he broke with the Cuban government when he signed a letter condemning the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He became a vocal critic of the Castro government, writing frequently until his death on April 16, 2010.
December 4, 1903
Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich (4 December 1903 – 25 September 1968) was an American novelist and short story writer who sometimes wrote under the pseudonyms William Irish and George Hopley. His biographer, Francis Nevins Jr., rated Woolrich the fourth best crime writer of his day, behind only Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner and Raymond Chandler. A check of film titles reveals that more film noir screenplays were adapted from works by Woolrich than any other crime novelist, and many of his stories were adapted during the 1940s for Suspense and other dramatic radio programs. Born in New York City, Woolrich's parents separated when he was young. He lived for a time in Mexico with his father before returning to New York City to live with his mother, Claire Attalie Woolrich. He attended Columbia University but left in 1926 without graduating when his first novel, Cover Charge, was published. Cover Charge was one of six Jazz Age novels inspired by the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He soon turned to pulp and detective fiction, often published under his pseudonyms. For example, William Irish was the byline in Dime Detective Magazine (February, 1942) on his 1942 story ‘It Had to Be Murder’, (source of the 1954 Alfred Hitchcock movie Rear Window) and based on H. G. Wells' short story ‘Through a Window’. François Truffaut filmed Woolrich's The Bride Wore Black and Waltz Into Darkness in 1968 and 1969, respectively, the latter as Mississippi Mermaid. Ownership of the copyright in Woolrich's original story ‘It Had to Be Murder’ and its use for Rear Window was litigated before the United States Supreme Court in Stewart v. Abend, 495 U.S. 207 (1990). Woolrich was homosexual and sexually active in his youth. In 1930, while working as a screenwriter in Los Angeles, Woolrich married Violet Virginia Blackton (1910–65), daughter of silent film producer J. Stuart Blackton. They separated after three months, and the marriage was annulled in 1933. Woolrich returned to New York where he and his mother moved into the Hotel Marseilles (Broadway and West 103rd Street). He lived there until her death on October 6, 1957, which prompted his move to the Hotel Franconia (20 West 72nd Street). In later years, he socialized on occasion in Manhattan bars with Mystery Writers of America colleagues and younger fans such as writer Ron Goulart, but alcoholism and an amputated leg (caused by an infection from a too-tight shoe which went untreated) left him a recluse. He did not attend the premiere of Truffaut's film of his novel The Bride Wore Black in 1968, even though it was held in New York City. He died weighing 89 pounds. He is interred in the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. Woolrich bequeathed his estate of about $850,000 to Columbia University, to endow scholarships in his mother's memory for writing students. Woolrich's novels written between 1940 to 1948 are considered his principal legacy. During this time, he definitively became an author of novel-length crime fiction which stand apart from his first six works, written under the influence of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Most of Woolrich's books are out of print, and new editions have not come out because of estate issues. However, new collections of his short stories were issued in the early 1990s. Woolrich died leaving fragments of an unfinished novel, The Loser; fragments have been published separately and also collected in Tonight, Somewhere in New York (2005).
December 4, 1903
Dr. Alfred Leslie Rowse (4 December 1903 – 3 October 1997), known publicly as A. L. Rowse but to friends and family as Leslie, was a British author and historian from Cornwall, England, UK. Rowse is best known for his work on Elizabethan England and his poetry about Cornwall. He was also a Shakespearean scholar and biographer.
December 4, 1949
Andrew Scott Berg (born December 4, 1949) is an American biographer. After graduating from Princeton University in 1971, Berg expanded his senior thesis on editor Maxwell Perkins into a full-length biography, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (1978), which won a National Book Award. His second book Goldwyn: A Biography was published in 1989. Berg's third book Lindbergh, a highly anticipated biography of aviator Charles Lindbergh was published in 1998, becoming a New York Times Best Seller, and winning the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. In 2003 Berg published Kate Remembered, a biography-cum-memoir about his friendship with actress Katharine Hepburn that received mixed reviews. His biography of Woodrow Wilson was published in 2013. Berg also wrote the story for Making Love (1982), a controversial film that was the first major studio drama to address the subjects of gay love, closeted marriages, and coming out. He has contributed articles to magazines such as Architectural Digest and Vanity Fair.
December 4, 1795
Thomas Carlyle (4 December 1795 – 5 February 1881) was a Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, translator, historian, mathematician, and teacher. Considered one of the most important social commentators of his time, he presented many lectures during his lifetime with certain acclaim in the Victorian era.
December 4, 1946
Geert Ludzer Mak (born 4 December 1946 in Vlaardingen) is a Dutch journalist and a non-fiction writer in the field of history. His ten books about Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Europe have earned him great popularity. His best-known work, In Europe, a combination of a travelogue through the continent of Europe and a history of the 20th century, has appeared in over a dozen languages. In 1968, he was arrested for publishing a pamphlet in a student paper with the heading "Johnson oorlogsmisdadiger volgens de normen van Tokio en Neurenberg." ("Johnson war criminal according to the norms of Tokyo and Nuremberg."), referring to the Vietnam War that reached its peak during Johnson's presidency. Mak was accused of "insulting a friendly head of state", likely under American pressure due to the Cold War. He faced harsh sentences, including three weeks in jail, but ended up only having to pay 200 guilders. Mak is married to Mietsie Ruiters. He has two step-children and five grandchildren. In Europe was the best-selling book by a Dutch author in the Netherlands in 2004, selling over 400,000 copies. The British reviews were generally enthusiastic, although for the professional historian or political scientist the book has little to offer: In Europe hardly breaks new ground historically writes Martin Woollacott in an otherwise positive review in The Guardian. Mak himself sees his work as journalism. In an interview with a Dutch journalism trade-journal he says: my approach is journalistic. My books are filled with newspaper tricks. Historians are generally cautious when it comes to judging Mak’s work. Hermann von der Dunk, emeritus professor of history at Utrecht University says about Mak: it is well written, and historically correct, but it is not what I would call academic history. There is no analysis of historical development. A 35-part VPRO television series based on In Europe prompted some historians to point to errors and comment that the makers were ill-informed about current debates in the field of history.
December 4, 1930
Born in South Chicago, Hugo Martínez-Serros holds degrees from the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. A Professor Emeritus at Lawrence University, Appleton, Wisconsin, he currently resides in Madison, Wisconsin. Three women stand at the heart of ENAMORED DUST, a tale of loves in Los Tecolotes, a fictitious village in central Mexico. The village lives in peace and safety, far from the explosive violence that is beginning to sweep over parts of the country. It is the early 1900s. When the violence turns to Revolution and armed horsemen arrive in the village, lives and loves are battered and wrecked, but not the stubborn will to stand up to disaster. STEELING CHICAGO: SOUTH SIDE STORIES is set in the ethnic neighborhoods where the author grew up. He brings to life the hostility, joy and irony of that world and its challenges through the lens of his Mexican-American heritage.
December 4, 194
Maria Antònia Oliver Cabrer is a Spanish writer of Catalan descent. She is a member of the Ofèlia Dracs collective. Her work has been translated into German, English, Spanish, Galician, French, Portuguese, and Russian. She has been honored with the Premi d'Honor de les Lletres Catalanes in 2016.
December 4, 1945
William O’Rourke is the author of the novels THE MEEKNESS OF ISAAC, IDLE HANDS, and CRIMINAL TENDENCIES, as well as THE HARRISBURG 7 AND THE NEW CATHOLIC LEFT and SIGNS OF THE LITERARY TIMES: ESSAYS, REVIEWS, PROFILES 1970-1992. He is the editor of ON THE JOB: FICTION ABOUT WORK BY CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN WRITERS and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. He has taught writing at Rutgers University, Mount Holyoke College, and is currently professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.
December 4, 1882
Friderike Maria Zweig-Winternitz comes from an old Austrian family. At the time of her first marriage she was engaged in literary work of her own. During her marriage with Stefan Zweig, for a period of more than twenty years, she placed her own talents entirely at the service of her husband’s work, deemed by her so immeasurably more important. When in 1936, after three years of voluntary exile from Austria, her intimate relation with Stefan Zweig was disrupted, she took up the threads of her own production again. Her major interest, an expression of her entire personality, are topics connected with, men and women such as Jane Addams, Louis Pasteur, Romain Rolland - idealists, undaunted and undauntable, faithful servants of mankind. On Pasteur she has written a fine book which has appeared in several languages. She endeavors to live her own life in emulation of her admired models, among whom her deceased husband occupies an outstanding position. She has organized in New York City a service center for uprooted European authors; and, far from allowing her cherished memories to wither and grow old, she manages to play her part in the tradition of active humanism to which Stefan Zweig, too, had devoted his life.
December 4, 1875
Rainer Maria Rilke was born on December 4, 1875 in Prague. He published his first book of poetry in 1894. The lover of Lou Andreas-Salome and secretary to Auguste Rodin, Rilke went on to become a famous figure in his own right, publishing his great book, New Poems, in 1907. After WWI, he moved permanently to Switzerland where he wrote the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus in the last years of his life. He died of leukemia on December 29, 1926. Susan Ranson is the co-translator, with Marielle Sutherland, of Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poems (Oxford World's Classics, 2011). Ben Hutchinson is Reader in Modern German at the University of Kent, UK.
December 4, 1919
Lawrence Stone (4 December 1919 – 16 June 1999) was an English historian of early modern Britain. He is noted for his work on the English Civil War and the history of marriage, families and the aristocracy. He was educated at Charterhouse School and Christ Church, Oxford. He was a lecturer at University College, Oxford, from 1947 to 1950, and a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, from 1950 to 1963. After 1963 he was Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University, and Director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, also at Princeton. Professor Stone contributed numerous articles to learned journals and periodicals. His published works include The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641, and (editor) School ing and Society. He is also author of Sculpture in Britain: The Middle Ages, published in The Pelican History of Art series.
December 5, 1936
James Lee Burke (born December 5, 1936) is an American author of mysteries, best known for his Dave Robicheaux series. He has won an Edgar Award for Black Cherry Blues (1990) and Cimarron Rose (1998). The Robicheaux character has been portrayed twice on screen, first by Alec Baldwin (Heaven's Prisoners) and then Tommy Lee Jones (In the Electric Mist). Burke has also written seven miscellaneous crime novels, two short story anthologies, four books starring protagonist Texas attorney Billy Bob Holland, and three books starring Billy Bob's cousin Texas sheriff Hackberry Holland.
December 5, 1934
Joan Didion (born December 5, 1934) is an American author best known for her novels and her literary journalism. Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation. A sense of anxiety or dread permeates much of her work.
December 5, 1954
Hanif Kureishi (born 5 December 1954) is a British playwright, screenwriter, filmmaker and novelist of Pakistani and English descent. In 2008, The Times included Kureishi in their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
December 5, 1925
John Alfred Williams (December 5, 1925 – July 3, 2015) was an African American author, journalist and academic. Williams was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and, after naval service in World War II, graduated in 1950 from Syracuse University. His novels, which include THE ANGRY ONES (1960) and THE MAN WHO CRIED I AM (1967) are mainly about the black experience in white America. THE MAN WHO CRIED I AM, a fictionalized account of the life and death of Richard Wright, introduced the King Alfred Plan - a fictional CIA-led scheme supporting an international effort to eliminate people of African descent. This ‘plan’ has since been cited as fact by some members of the Black Community and conspiracy theorists. In the early 1980s, In 1970 Williams received the Syracuse University Centennial Medal for Outstanding Achievement, and in 1998 his Safari West won the American Book Award. He was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
December 5, 1930
Robin W. Winks (December 5, 1930 in Indiana – April 7, 2003 in New Haven, Connecticut) was an American academic, historian, diplomat, and writer on the subject of fiction, especially detective novels. After joining the faculty of Yale University in 1957, he rose in 1996-1999 to become the Randolph Townsend Professor of History and Master of Berkeley College. At Oxford University he served as George Eastman Professor in 1992-3, and as Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History in 1999-2000.
December 5, 1939
John Berendt (born December 5, 1939) is an American author, known for writing the best-selling non-fiction book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which was a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.
December 5, 1914
Stanis?aw Dygat (1914-1978) was a Polish writer. His most famous novel, ‘Jezioro Bode?skie’ (‘Lake Constance‘), was written during the World War II and published in 1946. All of his works are partly autobiographical (ex. because of his French origin, he was an internee in Constance in 1939).
December 5, 1961
Laura Flanders (born December 5, 1961) is an English broadcast journalist living in the United States, who presents the weekly, long-form interview show The Laura Flanders Show. Flanders has described herself as a "lefty person." The brothers Alexander, Andrew and Patrick Cockburn—all journalists—are her half uncles. Author Lydia Davis is her half-aunt. Her sister is Stephanie Flanders, a former BBC journalist. Flanders is the daughter of the British comic songwriter and broadcaster Michael Flanders and the American-born Claudia Cockburn, first daughter of well-known radical journalist Claud Cockburn and American author Hope Hale Davis.
December 5, 1942
Sylvia Lopez-Medina was born in Modesto on December 5, 1942. She worked earlier in her life as a legal assistant, returning to school in the mid-1980s. In 1991 she received a degree in creative writing and English literature from the University of California at Santa Cruz. In 1992 the University of New Mexico Press published her first novel, "Cantora," based on her family and ancestral heritage. She received much critical acclaim and praise for it as a first-time author. It was later published in paperback. Her second book, "Sigui-riya," was released by Harper Collins last September. Her third book, a novel that would have completed her trilogy, was near completion. She died on March 5, 1998, at age 55.
December 5, 1968
Lydia Millet is an American novelist. Her third novel, My Happy Life, won the 2003 PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, and she has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
December 5, 1936
Lewis Nkosi is the author of HOME AND EXILE, THE TRANSPLANTED HEART, and UNDERGROUND PEOPLE. He has written for The New York Review of Books.
December 5, 1932
Jacques Roubaud (born 1932 in Caluire-et-Cuire, Rhône) is a French poet and mathematician. Jacques Roubaud is a professor of poetry at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and he was a professor of Mathematics at University of Paris X. He is a retired Poetry professor from EHESS and a member of the Oulipo group, he has also published poetry, plays, novels, and translated English poetry and books into French such as Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark.
December 6, 1935
Edward Jay Epstein (born in 1935 in New York City) is an American investigative journalist and a former political science professor at Harvard, UCLA, and MIT. He taught courses at these schools for three years. While a graduate student at Cornell University in 1966, he published the book Inquest, an influential critique of the Warren Commission probe into the John F. Kennedy assassination. Epstein wrote two other books about the Kennedy assassination, eventually collected in The Assassination Chronicles: Inquest, Counterplot, and Legend (1992). His books Legend (1978) and Deception (1989) drew on interviews with retired CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Jesus Angleton, and his 1982 book The Rise and Fall of Diamonds was an expose of the diamond industry and its economic impact in southern Africa. After teaching at Harvard, UCLA, and MIT, Epstein decided to pursue his writing career back in New York City.
December 6, 1942
Peter Handke (born 6 December 1942) is an Austrian novelist, playwright and political activist. His body of work has been awarded numerous literary prizes. His writings about the Yugoslav Wars and subsequent NATO bombing of Yugoslavia with criticism of the Western position and his speech at the funeral of Slobodan Miloševi? have caused controversy. Handke and his mother (a Carinthian Slovene whose suicide in 1971 is the subject of Handke's A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, a reflection on her life) lived in the Soviet-occupied Pankow district of Berlin from 1944 to 1948 before resettling in Griffen. According to some of his biographers, his stepfather Bruno's alcoholism and the limited cultural life of the small town contributed to Handke's antipathy to habit and restrictiveness. In 1954 Handke was sent to the Catholic Marianum boys' boarding school at Tanzenberg Castle in Sankt Veit an der Glan, Carinthia. Here, he published his first writing in the school newspaper, Fackel. In 1959, he moved to Klagenfurt, where he went to high school, and in 1961, he commenced law studies at the University of Graz. While studying, Handke established himself as a writer, linking up with the Grazer Gruppe (the Graz Authors' Assembly), an association of young writers. The group published the literary digest manuskripte. Its members included Elfriede Jelinek and Barbara Frischmuth. Handke abandoned his studies in 1965, after the German publishing house Suhrkamp Verlag accepted his novel Die Hornissen (The Hornets) for publication. He gained attention after an appearance at a meeting of avant-garde artists belonging to the Gruppe 47 in Princeton, New Jersey, USA, where he presented his play Publikumsbeschimpfung (Offending the Audience). Handke became one of the co-founders of the publishing house Verlag der Autoren in 1969 and participated as a member of the group Grazer Autorenversammlung from 1973 to 1977. Handke has written many scripts for films. He directed Die linkshändige Frau (The Left–Handed Woman), which was released in 1978. Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide's description of the film is that a woman demands that her husband leave and he complies. ‘Time passes... and the audience falls asleep.’ The film was nominated for the Golden Palm Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1978, and won the Gold Award for German Arthouse Cinema in 1980. Handke also won the 1975 German Film Award in Gold for his screenplay Falsche Bewegung. Since 1975 Handke has been a jury member of the European literary award Petrarca-Preis. After leaving Graz, Handke lived in Düsseldorf, Berlin, Kronberg (all in Germany), in Paris, France, in the USA (1978 to 1979) and in Salzburg, Austria (1979 to 1988). Since 1991, he has lived in Chaville near Paris. In 1996 his travelogue Eine winterliche Reise zu den Flüssen Donau, Save, Morawa und Drina oder Gerechtigkeit für Serbien (A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia) created considerable controversy, as Handke portrayed Serbia among the victims of the Yugoslav Wars. In the same essay, Handke also attacked Western media for misrepresenting the causes and consequences of the war. Former Yugoslavian president Slobodan Miloševic asked that Handke be summoned as witness for the defence before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, but the writer declined. He did, however, visit the tribunal as a spectator, and later published his observations in Die Tablas von Daimiel (The Tablas of Daimiel). In 1999, Salman Rushdie wrote that Handke ‘has astonished even his most fervent admirers by his current series of impassioned apologias for the genocidal regime of Slobodan Milosevic.’ He noted that Handke received the Order of the Serbian Knight from Milosevic for his propaganda services during a visit to Belgrade, and that his ‘previous idiocies include the suggestion that Sarajevo's Muslims regularly massacred themselves and then blamed the Serbs; and his denial of the genocide carried out by Serbs at Srebrenica.’ In 18 March 2006, in front of more than 20,000 mourners at Miloševic's funeral, Handke gave a speech in Serbian which sparked controversy in the West. In a letter to the French Nouvel Observateur, he offered a translation of his speech: ‘The world, the so-called world, knows everything about Yugoslavia, Serbia. The world, the so-called world, knows everything about Slobodan Miloševic. The so-called world knows the truth. This is why the so-called world is absent today, and not only today, and not only here. I don't know the truth. But I look. I listen. I feel. I remember. This is why I am here today, close to Yugoslavia, close to Serbia, close to Slobodan Miloševic’. In 2006 Handke was nominated for the Heinrich Heine Prize, but the prize money of €50,000 had to be approved by the city council of Düsseldorf. Members of the council's major parties stated they would vote against awarding the prize to Handke, resulting in the prize being withdrawn. In 2014, Handke was awarded the International Ibsen Award, which caused some calls for the jury to resign. The decision was condemned by PEN Norway. Bernt Hagtvet, an expert on totalitarianism, called the award an ‘unprecedented scandal,’ stating that ‘awarding Handke the Ibsen Prize is comparable to awarding the Immanuel Kant Prize to Goebbels.’ A group of demonstrators protested against him when he arrived to receive the prize. On the other hand, Jon Fosse, former recipient of the prize, welcomed the decision, saying that Handke was a worthy recipient and deserved the Nobel Prize in Literature.
December 6, 1919
George Eric Newby (6 December 1919 – 20 October 2006) was an English travel author. Newby's best known works include A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, The Last Grain Race, and Round Ireland in Low Gear. From 1963 to 1973, Newby was Travel Editor for The Observer newspaper. He was awarded a CBE in 1994 and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the British Guild of Travel Writers in 2001. His life and work was profiled in ITV's The South Bank Show (director Tony Knox) in 1994. He made travel films for the BBC, returning to Parma with his wife Wanda in The Travel Show (director Paul Coueslant, 1994) and visiting one of his favourite cities, Istanbul (1996). He died at age 86 in Guildford.
December 6, 1936
Margaret Randall (born December 6, 1936, New York City, USA) is an American-born writer, photographer, activist and academic. Born in New York City, she lived for many years in Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua, and spent time in North Vietnam during the last months of the U.S. war in that country. She has written extensively on her experiences abroad and back in the United States, and has taught at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and other colleges.
December 6, 1968
Karl Ove Knausgaard was born in Norway in 1968. His debut novel Out of This World won the Norwegian Critics Prize in 2004 and his A Time for Everything (Archipelago) was a finalist for the Nordic Council Prize. For My Struggle, Knausgaard received the Brage Award in 2009 (for Book One), the 2010 Book of the Year Prize in Morgenbladet, and the P2 Listeners’ Prize. It is also a finalist for The Believer Fiction Prize. My Struggle has been translated into more than fifteen languages. Knausgaard lives in Sweden with his wife and three children.
December 6, 1900
Germán Arciniegas Angueyra (December 6, 1900 - November 30, 1999) was a Colombian historian, author and journalist who was known for his advocacy of educational and cultural issues, as well as his outspoken opposition to dictatorship. He also served as a college professor and held positions in the government, including Minister of Education and several ambassadorships. Arciniegas was the son of Rafael Arciniegas Tavera, a farmer, and his wife Aurora Angueyra Figueredo. He had three brothers and four sisters. His father died young, leaving his mother struggling to support the family. His maternal great-grandfather was Perucho Figueredo, an early Cuban freedom fighter who wrote La Bayamesa, Cuba's national anthem. Both of Perucho's daughters fled the country when he was executed. Luz, the younger daughter, was married to a Cuban engineer who went to Colombia to help build a railroad line. It was there, amid the dangers of the jungle, that Germán's mother was born. At the age of eighteen, he began studying law at the National University of Colombia. At that time he had already created two journals: Año Quinto (1916) and Voz de la Juventud (1917). While a student he founded and managed the magazine Universidad (1921). He collaborated with many well-known figures at all three periodicals, including Luis López de Mesa, José Vasconcelos, León de Greiff and José Juan Tablada, who introduced the haiku into Spanish literature via Universidad. His love of journalism led him to establish and manage numerous cultural magazines throughout his life. In 1928, he joined El Tiempo, a daily newspaper in Bogotá, where he managed the editorial section, put together the Sunday Literary Supplement and wrote a weekly column, becoming the general manager in 1937. He would continue to contribute articles and opinion pieces to El Tiempo for the rest of his life, speaking out against drug trafficking, Marxist guerrillas and restrictive immigration policies. With the assistance of Carlos Pellicer, he established the Federation of Colombian Students. The group opposed Jesuit influence in the nation's universities and held student carnivals which verged on riots. He narrowly missed being killed when a bullet grazed his head at one student rally. Their activism eventually helped to end the Conservative Party's grip on the government and, in 1933, led to the passage of university reforms, which gave students the right to elect their own rectors and have a representative in the legislature to act as their advocate; a position Arciniegas held for a time. For him, students were the axis around which all political and intellectual movements had turned throughout history. This gave rise to his first book El Estudiante de la Mesa Redonda (The Student of the Round Table, 1932), in which he speaks of history as a "tavern" with the students sitting at a single table, drinking, recounting their deeds and laughing at everybody else. He continued his fight for students' rights during his brief tenures as Minister of Education in 1942 and 1945-46. During this time, he founded the Caro and Cuervo Institute and moved the Colombian National Museum to its current home in a former prison building. During World War II, he supported giving aid and asylum to refugees. This was in opposition to Luis López de Mesa, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who prohibited the entry of Jews into Colombia. Due to this resurgence of Conservative ideology in the 1940s, Arciniegas felt that he and his family were in danger and moved to the United States, taking advantage of an offer to teach at Columbia University. He lived in New York for ten years (1947–57). At this time, he wrote his most important and most often banned book, Entre la Libertad y el Miedo (Between Freedom and Fear, 1952). The work analyzes a critical period in Latin-America, when seven dictators were in power at the same time. He also criticized the U.S. State Department for its conciliatory behavior towards these regimes and, as a result, was detained for questioning several times after returning from trips abroad. The publication and translation of the book was prohibited in at least ten countries. General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, the President of Colombia, accused Arciniegas of being a Communist and ordered all of his books to be burnt. Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic, put Arciniegas on his hit list. In terms of culture, Arciniegas strove to achieve and maintain a synthesis between the indigenous and the European. This approach was the driving force behind all of his diplomatic and political activities. He served as vice consul in London (1929), chancellor at the Colombian embassy in Argentina (1940) and as Ambassador to Italy (1959), Israel (1962), Venezuela (1966) and the Holy See (1976). In all of these positions, he acted as an advocate for the art and culture of America, which he perceived as extending from Alaska to Patagonia. In 1992, he was appointed President of the National Commission for the Celebration of the Five-Hundredeth Anniversary of the Discovery of America. He was summarily dismissed by then First-Lady Ana Milena Muñoz de Gaviria, who took over the commission herself; an action that generated much controversy.
December 6, 1861
Thomas Capek, (December 06, 1861 in Czech Republic - March 28, 1950), was born in Chrastovice, Strakonice, Bohemia, December 6, 1861. Came to this country in summer of 1879. In 1883 became editor of the Pokrok Zapadu in Omaha and in the fall of 1886 entered Ann Arbor, to study law. In 1889 studied in Columbia, New York, and after graduating practiced law in Omaha. In 1890--1891 was a member of the Nebraska legislature, democrat. In 1894 married Miss Anna Vostrovsky of San Jose, California, and began to practice law in New York. In 1910 with four compatriots established the Bank of Europe, of which he was vice-president, since 1912 president. Author of the following books in English: Bohemia, past and present; Austria Hungary and the Slavonians; The Slovaks in Hungary (1906); Bohemia under Hapsburg Misrule (1915) ; Bohemian (Cech) Bibliography (in collaboration with his wife, Anna V., 1918); The Cechs (Bohemians) in America (1920); The Czechs and Slovaks in American Banking (in collaboration with his son Thomas Jr., 1920) The Cech Community in New York (1921). In Czech: Pamatky ceskych emigrantu v Americe, (Monuments of Czech emigrants in America (first edition, 1889 second, 1907); Padesat let ceskeho tisku v Americe (Fifty years of Czech letters in America 1911); Jan Vratislav Capek (his brother's biography); Z New Yorku do Prahy a zpet (From New York to Prague and return), and Nase Amerika (Our America, 1926). He edited the Bohemian Voice in Omaha, 1892-1894 and was on the editorial staff of the Pokrok Zapadu in the early eighties.
December 6, 1478
Baldassare Castiglione (December 6, 1478 – February 2, 1529), count of Casatico, was an Italian courtier, diplomat, soldier and a prominent Renaissance author.
December 6, 1924
Wallace Maynard Cox (December 6, 1924 – February 15, 1973) was an American comedian and actor, particularly associated with the early years of television in the United States. He appeared in the U.S. television series Mr. Peepers (1952–1955), plus several other popular shows, and as a character actor in over 20 films. Cox was the voice of the popular animated canine superhero Underdog. Although often cast as a meek milquetoast, he was actually quite athletic as well as a military veteran. He married three times and was a close friend of Marlon Brando.
December 6, 1949
Lê Minh Khuê (born 6 December 1949, in T?nh Gia) is a Vietnamese writer. Her works have been translated into English and several other languages. She was interviewed in Ken Burns's series The Vietnam War.
December 6, 1918
William Peter McGivern (December 6, 1918 - November 18, 1982) was an American novelist and television scriptwriter. He published more than 20 novels, mostly mysteries and crime thrillers, some under the pseudonym Bill Peters. His novels were adapted for a number of films, among them Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), a noir tale of three losers, starring Harry Belafonte; The Big Heat (1953), starring Glenn Ford as a cop who will do anything to get his man; Shield for Murder, about an honest cop going bad; and Rogue Cop (1954), a film noir directed by Roy Rowland, about a crooked cop trying to redeem himself. The Big Heat received an Edgar Award in 1954 as Best Motion Picture, which McGivern shared as author of the original novel. He also published more than one hundred science fiction stories during the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s, he moved to Los Angeles, where he wrote for television and film.
December 6, 1947
Henk van Woerden (6 December 1947 – 16 November 2005) was a Dutch painter and writer with close ties to South Africa. He was born in Leiden. In 1956 he emigrated with his family to Cape Town, South Africa. He received the Royal Award for Painting in 1980, and represented the country at international exhibitions. In the 80's the focus of his artistic work shifted to writing. The first books are part of his South African trilogy, beginning with Moenie kyk nie (Don't Look, 1993) and Tikoes (1996), and followed by Een mond vol Glas (1998), which won the 2001 Alan Paton Award.
December 6, 1964
Garth Stein is an American author and film producer from Seattle, Washington. Widely known as the author of the novel The Art of Racing in the Rain, Stein is also a documentary film maker, playwright, teacher, and amateur racer.
December 6, 1942
Robert Wokler (1942-2006) was at the time of his death Senior Lecturer in Political Science and in the Directed Studies program at Yale University. He was formerly Reader in the History of Political Thought at the University of Manchester. He was the author of Rousseau on Society, Politics, Music and Language and Rousseau: A Very Short Introduction. He was also the editor or coeditor of many books, including The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, Diderot: Political Writings, The Enlightenment and Modernity and Inventing Human Science.
December 7, 1928
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, political critic, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. In addition to his work in linguistics, he has written on war, politics, and mass media, and is the author of over 100 books.
December 7, 1888
Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary (7 December 1888 – 29 March 1957) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and artist.
December 7, 1873
Willa Sibert Cather (December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947) was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, in works such as O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Song of the Lark. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I. Cather grew up in Nebraska and graduated from the University of Nebraska. She lived and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years, then at the age of 33 she moved to New York, where she lived for the rest of her life.
December 7, 1948
Mark Kurlansky (born December 7, 1948 in Hartford, Connecticut) is an American journalist and writer of general interest non-fiction. During the '70s he worked as a correspondent in Western Europe for the Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and eventually the Paris-based International Herald Tribune. He moved to Mexico in 1982 where he continued to do journalism. He wrote his first book, A Continent of Islands, in 1992 and went on to write several books throughout the 1990s.
December 7, 1956
Susan Minot (born 7 December 1956) is an American novelist and short story writer. Minot was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She grew up in Manchester, Massachusetts, the second of eight children. She graduated from Concord Academy and then attended Brown University, where she studied writing and painting; in 1983 she graduated from Columbia University School of the Arts with an M.F.A. in creative writing. Sexuality and the difficulties of romantic relationships are a constant theme in Minot's work. Her second book, Lust and Other Stories, focuses on 'the relations between men and women in their twenties and thirties having difficulty coming together and difficulty breaking apart'. Reviewing her novella Rapture in The Atlantic Monthly, James Marcus notes that 'Sex and the single girl have seldom been absent from Susan Minot's fiction', and Dave Welch at Powells.com identifies one of Minot's themes as 'the emotional safeguards within family and romantic relations that hold people apart'. In 2014 Minot's novel 'Thirty Girls' came out. Jane, an American journalist, goes to Uganda to report on Kone, a militant rebel leader who kidnaps children from their schools and turns them into soldiers, concubines and drug addicts. Minot has co-authored two screenplays that have been made into films: Stealing Beauty (1996) with Bernardo Bertolucci, and Evening (based on her novel of the same name, 2007), written with Michael Cunningham.
December 7, 1952
Doug Henwood (born December 7, 1952) is an American journalist, economic analyst, and financial trader who writes frequently about economic affairs. He publishes a newsletter, Left Business Observer, that analyzes economics and politics from a left-wing perspective, is co-owner and co-editor, along with Phillipa Dunne, of The Liscio Report, an independent newsletter focusing on macroeconomic analysis, and is a contributing editor at The Nation.
December 7, 1941
Melba Joyner Pattillo Beals (née Pattillo; born December 7, 1941) is a journalist and member of the Little Rock Nine, a group of African-American students who were the first to integrate Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas. Melba Pattillo Beals grew up in a family who all valued and knew the importance of education. Her mother, Lois Marie Pattillo, a PhD, was one of the first black graduates of the University of Arkansas in 1954 and was a middle school English teacher at the time of the Little Rock Nine integration of Central High School. Her father, Howell Pattillo, worked for the Missouri Pacific Railroad. Melba also has a brother, Conrad Pattillo, who served as a U.S. marshal in Little Rock, and they all lived with her grandmother, India Peyton at the time of the crisis. While attending Horace Mann High School in Little Rock, an all-black high school, Melba was aware that she was not receiving the same quality education as her peers at Central High School. Pattillo then volunteered to transfer to the all-white Central High School with eight other black students from Horace Mann and Dunbar Junior High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Melba was not aware at this time what she was up against. Volunteering for this cause meant putting herself at risk and in danger of others in the community and at school. In an interview with the San Francisco Examiner in 1997 Melba says, "Mostly what I think about when I think back is how sad for somebody (to go through that) when they're 15," "Because when you're 15 you want to be loved and accepted, and I just wasn't ready for the kind of response I would get coming to school". Beals recounted that the soldier assigned to protect her instructed her, In order to get through this year, you will have to become a soldier. Never let your enemy know what you are feeling. Beals took the soldier’s advice and endured what she could of the rest of the school year. She did not get to finish her school career there, because the governor, Orval Faubus closed all of the Little Rock schools the following year to block integration. Beals was 14 years old when in May 1956, she chose to go to Central High school, an all-white school. Two years later, she was enrolled as a student at Central High. White students and some parents spat at and mocked the integrating students. The nine black students also faced mobs that forced President Dwight D. Eisenhower to send in the 101st Airborne Division to protect their lives after the governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, used troops to block the Nine's entry to the school. At least one white student, a senior named Link, helped her avoid dangerous areas during the school day, and a few Central High students were benign and even slightly helpful, but for the most part, she and the other black students faced daily hostility and persecution. In her book Warriors Don't Cry, Beals described one extreme incident in which a segregationist student threw acid into her eyes, attempting to blind her. Beals wrote in Warriors Don't Cry that she planned on returning to Central High for the 1958–59 school year, but Governor Faubus shut down Little Rock's high schools that failed to resist integration, leading other school districts across the South to do the same.[citation needed] Not until August 1959 did Central High reopen on an integrated basis To finish school, Beals moved to Santa Rosa, California, with help from the NAACP, living with foster parents Dr. George and his wife Carol McCabe and their four children while she completed her senior year at Montgomery High School. She then attended San Francisco State University, earning a bachelor's degree. At age seventeen she began writing for major newspapers and magazines. She later earned a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University. While in college, she met John Beals, who she later married. She has one daughter, Kellie and twin sons, Matthew and Evan. Beals' book Warriors Don't Cry chronicles the events of 1957 during the Little Rock crisis, based partly on diaries she kept during that period. She also wrote White is a State of Mind, which begins where Warriors left off. In 1959, the NAACP awarded the Spingarn Medal to Beals and to the other members of the Little Rock Nine, together with civil rights leader Daisy Bates, who had advised the group during their struggles at Central High. In 1999, she and the rest of the Nine were awarded the highest civilian honor, the Congressional Gold Medal. Only three hundred others have received this. On May 22, 2009, she received her Doctoral Degree in Education at the University of San Francisco. The day marked USF's 150th annual commencement ceremony. Today, Beals lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She taught journalism at Dominican University of California, where she is the chair emeritus of the communications department.
December 7, 1954
David Borofka is an America novelist and short story writer. He is the author of the short story collection, Hints of His Mortality, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award in 1996, and the novel, The Island (1997). Borofka has won the Missouri Review’s Editors’ Prize, Carolina Quarterly’s Charles B. Wood Award for Distinguished Writing. His short fiction has appeared in Image, Southern Review, Manoa, and Glimmer Train. He is a professor of composition, literature and creative writing at Reedley College.
December 7, 1915
Leigh Douglass Brackett (December 7, 1915 – March 18, 1978) was an American writer, particularly of science fiction, and has been referred to as the Queen of Space Opera. She was also a screenwriter, known for her work on such films as The Big Sleep (1946), Rio Bravo (1959), The Long Goodbye (1973) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980).
December 7, 1872
Johan Huizinga (7 December 1872 – 1 February 1945) was a Dutch historian and one of the founders of modern cultural history.
December 7, 1930
Christopher Robin Nicole (born 7 December 1930) is a prolific British writer of over 200 novels and non-fiction books since 1957. He has written as Christopher Nicole and also under several pseudonyms including Peter Grange, Andrew York, Robin Cade, Mark Logan, Christina Nicholson, Alison York, Leslie Arlen, Robin Nicholson, C.R. Nicholson, Daniel Adams, Simon McKay, Caroline Gray and Alan Savage. He also wrote under the pen name Max Marlow when co-authoring with his wife, fellow author Diana Bachmann. Christopher Robin Nicole was born on 7 December 1930 in Georgetown, in British Guiana (now Guyana), where he was raised. He is the son of Jean Dorothy (Logan) and Jack Nicole, a police officer. Both his parents were Scottish. He studied at Queen's College in Guyana and at Harrison College in Barbados. He was a fellow at the Canadian Bankers Association and a clerk for the Royal Bank of Canada in Georgetown and Nassau from 1947 to 1956. In 1957, he moved to Guernsey, Channel Islands, United Kingdom, where he currently lives, but he also has a domicile in Spain. Nicole was first published in 1957, when he wrote a book about West Indian Cricket. He published his first novel in 1959, his first stories being set in his native Caribbean. Later he wrote many historical novels, set in tumultuous periods such as World War I, World War II and the Cold War, and depicting places in Europe, Asia and Africa. He also wrote classic romance novels.
December 7, 1951
Alberto Ruy-Sánchez Lacy is a Mexican writer and editor born in Mexico City on 7 December 1951. He is an author of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Since 1988 he has been the chief editor and founding publisher of Latin America's leading arts magazine, Artes de Mexico. He has been a visiting professor at several universities including Stanford, Middlebury and La Sorbonne, and has been invited to give lectures in Europe, Africa, Asia, North America and South America. His work has been praised by Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, Severo Sarduy, Alberto Manguel and Claude Michel Cluny and has received awards from several international institutions. Ruy-Sánchez's parents, Joaquín Ruy-Sánchez and María Antonieta Lacy, were both born in the northern Mexican state of Sonora. Alberto was the first of five children. For a few years, the family spent almost half the year in Mexico City and the other half in northern Mexico. These relocations included long residence periods in Ciudad Obregón, Sonora and Villa Constitución in the Sonoran desert of Baja California, where Ruy-Sánchez lived from ages three to five. This experience gave him a unique early experience of the desert. Ruy-Sánchez had forgotten his early childhood experiences until he suddenly recalled them in 1975, visiting the Sahara for the first time. From that involuntary sudden recollection he developed a special creative relationship with the Moroccan desert, especially the walled city of Essaouira (the ancient Mogador), which became a principal setting for most of his novels. As he explains in his essay, 'The nine gifts that Morocco gave me': My first trip to Mogador became a much longer and deeper journey. First came the shock of discovering a place that on spite of being so distant from Mexico provoked a strong impression of recognition, much greater than the one a Mexican receives upon arriving to Spain. A combination of body language, place and objects made me feel that I had ventured into another Mexico.(...) Our legacy derives from five centuries of mixing Indian and Spanish blood, but we must not overlook the Arabic heritage running through our veins, introduced by Spanirds bodies. We must not forget that for eight centuries two-thirds of what is now Spain and Portugal was Arabic: the Andalusí civilization.' - Alberto Ruy-Sánchez. before travelling to Morocco for the first time as a teenager, and later returning as a college student,Ruy-Sánchez received a severe humanistic education from Jesuit schools in Mexico. From these experiences he gained 'a Baroque idea of the world as a complex reality that can only be fully understood and enjoyed with all the senses.' The baroque aim of 'listening with the eyes, looking with the fingers and the ears, tasting with the smell, etc, as an artistic principle' is a common theme in his poetry and prose. Ruy-Sánchez's large Sonoran family finally fully emigrated to Mexico City and held weekly meetings where Ruy-Sánchez learned 'the big pleasure of hearing and telling stories, and it was there that I felt growing inside me the desire of being a writer.' This desire was confirmed when he visited the Djemaa el Fna square in Marrakech in 1975 and 1976, where traditional storytellers are responsible for the square's designation as an UNESCO Oral Human Heritage Site in June 1997. The theme of the search in Sánchez's novels also has its roots in his own life. Specifically, he uses his novels as a means to search for knowledge in the senses of investigating life's mysteries and going beyond observed material reality. Ruy-Sánchez began writing seeking to understand women's desire, through the stories women told him those he witnessed. This first search led to the novel Mogador, the names of the air. This became a series that included En los labios del agua, Los Jardines secretos de Mogador, and Nueve veces el asombro. The full series took almost twenty years to write, as each published novel generated many letters in response, mostly from women telling their own stories of desire. Sánchez would consider those stories, alter them, and create another book, following this ongoing theme of search. Ruy-Sánchez had a number of jobs while living in Paris, but in between he became a tantra student, a tantra instructor, and worked for a sexual therapist. This exploration of tantra contributed to the search through writing both in the sense of literally searching for women's desire and in a more spiritual or religious sense of seeking transcendent experiences. Ruy-Sánchez describes in a statement essay his books as 'material objects, geometrical compositions, that could help people think, feel, understand and improve their lives'. Ruy-Sánchez lived in Paris from 1975 to 1983. He took writing seminars from his thesis director Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière and André Chastel and received a PhD from the University of Paris. He worked as both an editor and a writer, building on his experiences as managing editor of the Mexican magazine Vuelta, edited by Octavio Paz, from 1984 to 1987. Paz called Ruy-Sánchez, 'the strangest of Mexican writers, a true cosmopolitan poet telling stories from a territory wider than just a country because he is the poet from the Skin. That is why his language is the Touch, the sense that implies all the others.' The Cuban writer Severo Sarduy wrote that Ruy-Sánchez, 'invented not only novels but a new way of reading, the way of poetic lightning stroke.' Ruy-Sánchez's books have been translated into several languages – mainly French, but also Portuguese, Italian, German, Arabic, Serbian and Turkish. Only one of his books has been published in English, however. They remain in print in Spanish as cult favorites, unusual for poetry. His first work came out in 1987, when he was awarded the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize, the most prestigious literary recognition in Mexico. The University of New Mexico awarded him as Literary Essayist in 1991 and he was also a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In February 2000 he was decorated by the French Government as Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. The Governor of Kentucky awarded him as 'Kentucky Colonel', the highest distinction given in that state, where he also is Honnorary Citizen of Louisville. Between 1999 and 2003 he was appointed Chairman of the Creative Non-Fiction Summer Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada. In November 2006 The Editor's Guild of Mexico awarded him with the Premio Juan Pablos al Mérito Editorial, a lifetime achievement recognition for 26 years of working as an editor and mainly for his work in creating the publishing house Artes de México, a leading cultural project in the Americas. ruy-Sánchez currently lives in Mexico City with his wife, historian Margarita De Orellana, coeditor of Artes de México, and their children Andrea (born 1984) and Santiago (born 1987). He continues to speak internationally and travel within Mexico as a researcher of diverse Mexican cultures. Mark Schafer has translated works by Virgilio Piniera and, with Cedric Belfrage, and The Book of Embraces by Eduardo Galeano.
December 8, 1953
Norman Gary Finkelstein (born December 8, 1953) is an American political scientist, activist, professor and author. His primary fields of research are the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the politics of the Holocaust, an interest motivated by the experiences of his parents who were Jewish Holocaust survivors. He is a graduate of Binghamton University and received his Ph.D in Political Science from Princeton University. He has held faculty positions at Brooklyn College, Rutgers University, Hunter College, New York University, and, most recently, DePaul University, where he was an assistant professor from 2001 to 2007. In 2007, after a highly publicized row between Finkelstein and a notable opponent of his, Alan Dershowitz, Finkelstein's tenure bid at DePaul was denied. Finkelstein was placed on administrative leave for the 2007–2008 academic year, and on September 5, 2007, he announced his resignation after coming to a settlement with the university on generally undisclosed terms. An official statement from DePaul strongly defended the decision to deny Finkelstein tenure, stated that outside influence played no role in the decision.
December 8, 1898
Zenith Jones Brown (December 8, 1898 – August 25, 1983) was an American crime fiction writer who also wrote for a time in England. She wrote under the pseudonyms David Frome, Leslie Ford, and Brenda Conrad. She is perhaps best known for her novels featuring the fictional Grace Latham and John Primrose, though some of her earlier standalone work has been praised.\
December 8, 1947
Ron Hansen (born December 8, 1947) is an American novelist, essayist, and professor. Hansen was born in Omaha, Nebraska, attended a Jesuit high school, Creighton Preparatory School and earned a Bachelor's degree in English from Creighton University in Omaha in 1970. Following military service, he earned an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1974 and held a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship at Stanford University. He later earned an M.A. in Spirituality from Santa Clara University. Hansen has received fellowships from the Michigan Society of Fellows, the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Lyndhurst Foundation, as well as an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Hansen is the Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University, where he teaches courses in writing and literature. He is married to the writer Bo Caldwell and is the stepfather of her two children, John Scott ‘Scotty’ Caldwell Arnold and Kate Arnold. Scotty attends Hansen's place of employment, Santa Clara University, and Kate is pursuing her medical degree at Georgetown University. In January 2007, Hansen was ordained as a permanent deacon of the Catholic Church. In May 2009, Hansen was inducted to the college of fellows at Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology. Hansen frequently writes about the Old West, mixing history with morality and drama. Hansen's first novel, Desperadoes (1979), reimagines the story of the Dalton Gang. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a 1983 novel chronicling the life and death of the iconic outlaw, was Hansen's most popular work and brought him wide critical acclaim, as well as his being a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Catholic themes of unconditional love, redemption and resurrection also recur in Hansen's novels and stories. Mariette in Ecstasy (1991), a study of the faith and religious experience in the context of a cloistered Catholic nun who apparently bears the stigmata, earned him near universal critical praise, as well as the fiction prize from the Bay Area Reviewers Association and the Gold Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. Hansen's latest novel, Exiles (2008), tells the story of the shipwreck that cost the lives of five young nuns and prompted Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins to write what some consider his masterpiece, The Wreck of the Deutschland. Hansen's 1996 novel, Atticus, about the bond of love between a father and a son who has died under mysterious circumstances in a dusty Mexican town, was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Hitler's Niece (1999) is a historical novel that offers a view of Hitler as seen through the eyes of Geli Raubal, the daughter of his half-sister. Isn't It Romantic? (2003) is a comic novel about two sophisticated Parisians stranded in small-town Nebraska. Hansen has published numerous short stories in literary magazines nationwide. His short story collection, Nebraska, was published in 1989. Hansen also edited the anthology You Don't Know What Love Is: Contemporary American Stories (1987) and co-edited with Jim Shepard You've Got to Read This: Contemporary American Writers Introduce Stories That Held Them in Awe (1994). In addition to his novels and short stories, Hansen has published a compilation of essays on faith and fiction (A Stay Against Confusion) and a children's book (The Shadowmaker). Hansen also wrote the screenplay for the 1996 film adaptation of Mariette in Ecstasy. In 2006, The Assassination of Jesse James was adapted for the screen in a film written and directed by Andrew Dominik and starring Brad Pitt as James. Initially intended for a 2006 release, the film was postponed and re-edited for a September 21, 2007 release. In 2009, ‘Mariette In Ecstasy‘ was adapted for the stage at Lifeline Theatre in Chicago.
December 8, 65 BC
Quintus Horatius Flaccus (8 December 65 BC – 27 November 8 BC), known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus (also known as Octavian). The rhetorician Quintillian regarded his Odes as just about the only Latin lyrics worth reading: 'He can be lofty sometimes, yet he is also full of charm and grace, versatile in his figures, and felicitously daring in his choice of words.' Horace also crafted elegant hexameter verses (Sermones and Epistles) and caustic iambic poetry (Epodes). The hexameters are amusing yet serious works, friendly in tone, leading the ancient satirist Persius to comment: 'as his friend laughs, Horace slyly puts his finger on his every fault; once let in, he plays about the heartstrings'. His career coincided with Rome's momentous change from Republic to Empire. An officer in the republican army defeated at the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC, he was befriended by Octavian's right-hand man in civil affairs, Maecenas, and became a spokesman for the new regime. For some commentators, his association with the regime was a delicate balance in which he maintained a strong measure of independence (he was 'a master of the graceful sidestep') but for others he was, in John Dryden's phrase, 'a well-mannered court slave'.
December 8, 65 BC
Quintus Horatius Flaccus (8 December 65 BC – 27 November 8 BC), known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus (also known as Octavian). The rhetorician Quintillian regarded his Odes as just about the only Latin lyrics worth reading: 'He can be lofty sometimes, yet he is also full of charm and grace, versatile in his figures, and felicitously daring in his choice of words.' Horace also crafted elegant hexameter verses (Sermones and Epistles) and caustic iambic poetry (Epodes). The hexameters are amusing yet serious works, friendly in tone, leading the ancient satirist Persius to comment: 'as his friend laughs, Horace slyly puts his finger on his every fault; once let in, he plays about the heartstrings'. His career coincided with Rome's momentous change from Republic to Empire. An officer in the republican army defeated at the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC, he was befriended by Octavian's right-hand man in civil affairs, Maecenas, and became a spokesman for the new regime. For some commentators, his association with the regime was a delicate balance in which he maintained a strong measure of independence (he was 'a master of the graceful sidestep') but for others he was, in John Dryden's phrase, 'a well-mannered court slave'. Persius, in full Aulus Persius Flaccus (/?p??r?i?s, ?p??r??s/; 4 December 34, in Volterra – 24 November 62), was a Roman poet and satirist of Etruscan origin. In his works, poems and satires, he shows a stoic wisdom and a strong criticism for what he considered to be the stylistic abuses of his poetic contemporaries. His works, which became very popular in the Middle Ages, were published after his death by his friend and mentor, the stoic philosopher Lucius Annaeus Cornutus.
December 8, 1881
Padraic Colum (8 December 1881 – 11 January 1972) was an Irish poet, novelist, dramatist, biographer and collector of folklore. He was one of the leading figures of the Celtic Revival. Colum was born Padraic Columb in a County Longford workhouse, where his father worked. He was the first of eight children. When the father lost his job in 1889, he moved to the United States to participate in the Colorado gold rush. Padraic and his mother and siblings remained in Ireland. When the father returned in 1892, the family moved to Glasthule, outside Dublin where his father was employed as Assistant Manager at Sandycove and Glasthule railway station. His son attended the local national school. When Colum's mother died in 1897, the family was temporarily split up. Padraic and one brother remained in Dublin while the father and remaining children moved back to Longford. Colum finished school the following year and at the age of seventeen, he passed an exam for and was awarded a clerkship in the Irish Railway Clearing House. He stayed in this job until 1903. During this period, Colum started to write and met a number of the leading Irish writers of the time, including W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Æ. He also joined the Gaelic League and was a member of the first board of the Abbey Theatre. It was at this time that he dropped the 'b' from his surname. He became a regular user of the National Library of Ireland. Here he met James Joyce and the two became lifelong friends. He also collected Irish folk songs, including the famous She Moved Through the Fair, for which Colum wrote most of the words, with the musicologist Herbert Hughes. He was awarded a five year scholarship to University College Dublin by a wealthy American benefactor Thomas Kelly. He was awarded a prize by Cumann na nGaedheal for his anti-enlistment play ‘The Saxon Shillin'‘. Through his plays he became involved with the National Theatre Society and became involved in the founding of the Abbey Theatre, writing several of its early productions. His play, Broken Sail (1903) was performed by the Irish Literary Theatre. The Land (1905), was one of that theatre's first great public successes. Colum's earliest published poems appeared in The United Irishman, a paper edited by Arthur Griffith. His first book, Wild Earth (1907) collected many of these poems and was dedicated to Æ. He published several poems in Arthur Griffiths' paper The United Irishman this time, with The Poor Scholar bringing him to the attention of WB Yeats. He became a friend of Yeats and Lady Gregory. In 1908, he wrote an introduction to the Everyman's Library edition of Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination. In 1911, with Mary Gunning Maguire, a fellow student from UCD, and David Houston and Thomas MacDonagh, he founded the short-lived literary journal The Irish Review, which published work by Yeats, George Moore, Oliver St John Gogarty, and many other leading Revival figures. In 1912 he married Maguire, who was working at Patrick Pearse's experimental school, St Enda's, Rathfarnam, County Dublin. At first the couple lived in the Dublin suburb of Donnybrook, where they held a regular Tuesday literary salon. They then moved to Howth, a small fishing village just to the north of the capital. In 1914, they traveled to the USA for what was intended to be a visit of a few months but lasted eight years. In America, Colum took up children's writing and published a number of collections of stories for children, beginning with The King of Ireland's Son (1916). This book came about when Colum started translating an Irish folk tale from Gaelic because he did not want to forget the language; After it was published in the New York Tribune, Hungarian Illustrator Willy Pógany suggested the possibility of a book collaboration, so Colum wove the folktale into a long, epic story. Three of his books for children were awarded retrospective citations for the Newbery Honor. A contract for children's literature with Macmillan Publishers made him financially secure for the rest of his life. In 1922 he was commissioned to write versions of Hawaiian folklore for young people. This resulted in the publication of three volumes of his versions of tales from the island. He also started writing novels. These include Castle Conquer (1923) and The Flying Swans (1937). The Columns spent the years from 1930 to 1933 living in Paris and Nice, where Padraic renewed his friendship with James Joyce and became involved in the transcription of Finnegans Wake. After their time in France, the couple moved to New York City, where they both did some teaching at Columbia University and CCNY. Colum was a prolific author and published a total of 61 books, not counting his plays. He adopted the form of Noh drama in his later plays. Molly died in 1957 and Pádraic finished Our Friend James Joyce, which they had worked on together before her death. It was published in 1958. Colum divided his later years between the United States and Ireland. In 1961 the Catholic Library Association awarded him the Regina Medal. He died in Enfield, Connecticut, aged 90, and was buried in St. Fintan's Cemetery, Sutton. Asked how to say his name, he told The Literary Digest the last name was the same as the word column. ‘In my first name, the first a has the sound of au. The ordinary pronunciation in Irish is pau'drig.’ (Charles Earle Funk, What's the Name, Please?, Funk & Wagnalls, 1936.).
December 8, 1925
Carmen Martín Gaite (8 December 1925 – 22 July 2000) was one of Spain's leading novelists. She is the author of numerous works of fiction and criticism, including Variable Clouds and, most recently, The Farewell Angel. The Back Room was the first of her novels to appear in Spain after the death of Franco, and the first of her novels to be translated into English. In 1978 it was awarded Spain's National Prize for Literature. She also wrote screenplays. Born in Salamanca, over the course of her life she won various awards, including the Prince of Asturias Awards in 1988, the Award Premio Castilla y León de las Letras in 1992, and the Premio Acebo de Honor awarded to her life work. She was married to fellow writer Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio.
December 8, 1941
V.Y. Mudimbe (born 8 December 1941, Jadotville) is a philosopher, professor, and author of books and articles about African culture, poems, and novels. He was born in the Belgian Congo, which became Zaire and is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As a young man, he joined a monastery, but left in order to study the forces that shaped African history. After teaching at Haverford College and Stanford University, he now teaches at Duke University. Mudimbe focuses most closely on phenomenology, structuralism, mythical narratives, and the practice and use of language. As a professor, he teaches classes on these topics, as well as on ancient Greek cultural geography.
December 8, 1929
Goffredo Parise (Vicenza, 8 December 1929 – Treviso, 31 August 1986) was an Italian writer and journalist. He spent his childhood in company with the pauper children, beggars, indigent tradesmen, hawkers, prostitutes, and thieves who were to inspire the his novel Don Gastone and the Ladies (published as The Priest Among The Pigeons in England). Parise earned his living as a reporter, a director of a public dancehall, an employee in a publishing house, a salesman, and as a contributor to major Italian newspapers. He won the Viareggio Prize in 1965 and the Strega Prize in 1982.
December 8, 1940
Alfonso Quijada Urías, born December 8, 1940 (age 74), is a Salvadoran poet and an author. Urías has published various poems such as the anthology 'De aquí en adelante' (San Salvador), in conjunction with the poets José Roberto Cea, Manlio Argueta, Tirso Canales and Roberto Armijo. Many of his works deal with the effects of war and the realities of urban life in Central America. Urías was born in Quezaltepeque, in the La Libertad Department of El Salvador. In 1962, he won the second prize in the III Certamen Cultural de la Asociación de Estudiantes de Humanidades de la Universidad de El Salvador. In 1963, he won the third prize from the Juegos Florales de Zacatecoluca. In 1967, he won the first prize for poetry at the Juegos Florales de Quetzaltenango in Guatemala. In 1971 he won first prize at the Bienal de Poesía Latinoamericana in Panama. In 1981, he moved to Nicaragua, and later to Mexico, where he worked as a journalist. In 2003, he won the Cervantes prize known as the 'Premio de Poesía Instituto Cervantes'.
December 8, 1894
James Thurber (December 8, 1894, Columbus, OH - November 2, 1961, New York City, NY), one of the outstanding American humorists and cartoonists of the twentieth century, was born in Columbus, Ohio, and launched his professional writing career as a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch in 1920. He began writing for The New Yorker in 1927 after his friend E. B. White got him a job at the magazine. Though hampered by failing eyesight, Thurber wrote nearly forty books, including collections of essays, short stories, fables, and children’s stories. He won a Tony Award for his popular Broadway play, A Thurber Carnival.
December 8, 1945
William John Banville (born 8 December 1945), who writes as John Banville and sometimes as Benjamin Black, is an Irish novelist, adapter of dramas, and screenwriter. He is recognised for his precise, cold, forensic prose style, Nabokovian inventiveness, and for the dark humour of his generally arch narrators. His stated ambition is to give his prose ‘the kind of denseness and thickness that poetry has’. Banville's career has seen him presented with numerous awards. His novel The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Guinness Peat Aviation award in 1989. His eighteenth novel, The Sea, won the Booker Prize in 2005. He was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in 2011 and is a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
December 8, 1919
Mary Benson (born December 8, 1919, Pretoria, S.Af.—died June 20, 2000, London, Eng.), South African writer and antiapartheid activist who , rejected her privileged upbringing as a white in South Africa to campaign against her country’s racial policies. She was a cofounder and secretary (1952–56) of the London-based antiapartheid Africa Bureau and secretary (1957) of the defense fund set up for Nelson Mandela and others. Benson, who lived in voluntary exile in London from the mid-1960s, was also the author of a history of the African National Congress, the authorized biography Nelson Mandela (1986), and a candid autobiography, A Far Cry: The Making of a South African (1989).
December 8, 1896
Jørgen Peter Pedersen Bukdahl (8 December 1896 in Sundby , Stadager Sogn - November 2, 1982 in Askov ) was a Danish cultural writer and literary critic.
December 8, 1957
Greg Dawes is assistant professor of Latin American literature and culture at North Carolina State University. He has published articles on literary theory and Latin American literature. Currently he is working on a critique of the culture and politics of the Old Left in Latin America.
December 8, 1934
ISABEL FRAIRE was born in Mexico City in 1934. Her literary criticism, reviews, and translations as well as her poetic production have been important contributions to arts and letters in Mexico since the early 1960s. In 1978, her third book of poetry, Poemas en el regazo de la muerte, was awarded the Villaurrutia Prize. Her translations into Spanish of Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Cummings, Auden, and W.C. Williams appeared in Seis poetas de Iengua inglesa (SEP/Setentas, 1976), and her translations of North American poets from the 1950s to the present will appear later this year. Ms. Fraire currently alternates living in London and Mexico City. . THOMAS HOEKSEMA has published essays, translations, and reviews in the area of contemporary Mexican and Latin American literature. He is translator and editor of Isabel Fraire: Poems and Signals From the Flames: The Poetry of Jose Emilio Pacheco. He is Associate Editor of Mundus Artium: A Journal of International Literature and Contributing Editor and co-founder of Translation Review. He is currently’ Associate Professor of international literature at New Mexico State University where he also serves as Director of the University Honors Program.
December 8, 1912
Jean Garrigue (December 8, 1912, Evansville, Indiana – December 27, 1972, Boston, Massachusetts) was an honored, widely read, and imitated poet during her lifetime. She was a contemporary of Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, and Randall Jarrell. Even apart from the poems, Garrigue’s life was fascinating both in itself, and as an example of a fearless and brilliant female artistic consciousness at large in the world. She was born Gertrude Louise Garrigus on December 8, 1912, in Evansville, Indiana. Her life is the story of a dreamy and intelligent young girl from the Midwest drawn irresistibly to the world of art and the creative life. She lived in Indianapolis for much of her early life then left to attend the University of Chicago, where she roomed with Marguerite Young, followed by a period of post-graduate study at the University of Iowa, When she first arrived to live in New York City she changed her name from Gertrude Louise Garrigus to Jean Garrigue. She eventually settled in New England where she wrote The Ego and the Centaur (1947), her first full-length publication. She travelled in Europe in 1953-54, 1957–58, and 1962–63 and this influenced much of her later writing. It is the story of a woman who deliberately evaded domestic comfort and happiness—never married or settled into a lasting relationship, never had children—in favor of continuous contact with raw and extreme emotional experience. Her story intertwines with those of several important literary figures. She was a lover of writers: R.P. Blackmur, Alfred Kazin, Delmore Schwartz, and Stanley Kunitz among others. The most important relationship in her life was her lengthy, but troubled liaison with the novelist Josephine Herbst who died in 1969. Garrigue edited a weekly newspaper in the late thirties, was a researcher at Colliers, edited a U.S.O. publication during World War II, and was an assistant editor of an aeronautical magazine The Flying Cadet. She was an instructor of English literature at the University of Iowa, in Iowa City, IA (1942–43), Bard College, Annandale, NY (1951–52), Queens College, Flushing, NY (1952–53), The New School for Social Research, New York, NY (1955–56), the University of Connecticut, Storrs (1960–61), and Smith College (1965-66). She also taught at the University of Washington, the University of California, Riverside, and Rhode Island College. She was Poet-in-residence at a number of colleges and universities, including the University of California, Riverside, in 1971. She was a visiting poet at the University of Washington, Seattle, in 1970. In 1971, she was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease.
December 8, 1882
Manuel Ponce was born on February 19, 1913, in Tancítaro, Michoacán, where he received his early education at the Morelia Seminary, where he studied philosophy, Latin and literature. Ordained a priest in 1936, he taught history, literature and apologetics at the Seminary for the next twenty-five years. During this period Ponce also served as editor of Trento, a highly-regarded regional publication that featured the works of several generations of Michoacán poets.A builder and administrator as well as a writer/teacher, Ponce founded the Fra Angelico Academy and the Academy of Regional Ecclesiastical History. The latter facility published a number of team projects, among them Vasco de Quiroga y el arzobispado de Michoacán and Jardín moreliano de poetas. The first celebrates Vasco de Quiroga, the famed 16th Century bishop renowned for his humanity and creative approach to Indian education and vocational training, while the second spotlights poets who have flourished in the "Morelian garden." Ponce also founded the Arca Cultural Institute, a charitable and educational organization aimed at the youth of Michoacán's capital city. In 1969, on orders from the Mexican episcopate, Ponce started up the National Commission of Sacramental Art, a body dedicated to preserving Mexico's patrimony of religious paintings. This talented ecclesiastic is also responsible for restoration of the El Calvario ("Calvary") Church in Tlalpan, on the outskirts of the Federal District. With this heavy burden of pastoral and administrative duties, Ponce's literary output has been intermittent though highly praised. In addition to Trento, where he was at the editorial helm, his articles have appeared in Abside, Letras de Mexico, Romance, El Hijo Pródigo, Viñetas de Morelia and América -- all intellectually prestigious publications. Best-known among Ponce's prose works are a monograph on retirement, published in 1948, a literary study titled Diego José Abad (1954), the introduction to a compilation of sermons by Bishop Luis Altamirano (1955), and a pastoral monograph titled Tota Pulchra (1956). His most acclaimed poetic works are " Circle of Virgins" (1942), " A Second Passion at Forty" (1944), " Mysteries to Sing Under the Poplars" (1946), " The Incredible Garden" (1950), " Christ and Mary" (1953), " Pastoral Register" (1954), " Elegies and Theophanies" (1963), and poetic anthologies published in 1982 and 1983. All these titles are translations from Spanish, in which they were published. But one of his works, with the title " Some of my Poems" ( Amazon.com link) was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1987. Maria Luisa Rodriguez Lee, Associate Professor of Spanish, teaches in the Department of Foreign Languages, University of Minnesota, Morris. Her strong interest in music involves her in the areas of music research and chamber music performance. At present she is working on two hooks of literary and musical analyses on Spanish poets and composers.
December 8, 1943
Alan Riding (born 8 December 1943, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is a British author and journalist. He was a long-time foreign correspondent for The New York Times, most recently as the paper’s European Cultural Correspondent based in Paris. His latest book is And The Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris. After spending his first 11 years in Brazil, Riding went to England to attend Rossall School, Lancashire, and later Bristol University. He studied law before deciding instead to become a journalist. Riding started with Reuters in New York City, covering the United Nations. In 1971, he left Reuters and moved to Mexico to work as a freelance reporter, principally for The Financial Times, The Economist, and The New York Times. In 1978, he joined The New York Times as Mexico City bureau chief. Before leaving Mexico for Brazil in 1984, he wrote Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans, on modern Mexico. As the Rio de Janeiro bureau chief, Riding covered the transitions from military regimes to democracies in Brazil and many neighboring countries as well as guerrilla wars and drug trafficking in Peru and Colombia. In 1989, after a brief stint in Rome, he was named The New York Times 's Paris bureau chief, which included coverage of the European Union and NATO. In 1995, he became the paper’s European Cultural Correspondent, a post that involved covering all the arts in the region. During this period, he also co-authored (with Leslie Dunton-Downer) "Essential Shakespeare Handbook" and "Opera". In 2007, Riding left journalism to write And The Show Went On, published by Knopf in 2010. It has also been published in Britain and has been translated into Spanish, Catalan, French, Polish, Chinese and Portuguese. He has since devoted himself to writing for the theater. Riding lives in Paris, with his wife Marlise Simons who is a reporter for The New York Times.
December 8, 1913
Delmore Schwartz (December 8, 1913 – July 11, 1966) was an American poet and short story writer. Schwartz was born in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York, where he also grew up. Schwartz spent time at Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin before graduating with a B.A. from New York University in 1935. He then did some graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University, where he studied with the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, but left and returned to New York without receiving a degree. In 1937, he married Gertrude Buckman, a book reviewer for Partisan Review, whom he divorced after six years. Soon thereafter, he made his parents' disastrous marriage the subject of his most famous short story, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities", which was published in 1937 in the first issue of Partisan Review. This story and other short stories and poems became his first book, also titled In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, published in 1938 when Schwartz was only 25 years old.
December 8, 1907
Laudomia Bonanni (December 8, 1907 – February 21, 2002) was an Italian writer and journalist. Although she started publishing when she was a teenager, her writing career took off in 1948 thanks to a literary contest and she went on to be a prolific and award-winning author. The Nobel laureate Eugenio Montale compared her realism to James Joyce’s Dubliners.
December 8, 1942
Mario Savio (December 8, 1942 – November 6, 1996) was an American activist and a key member in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. He is most famous for his passionate speeches, especially the "put your bodies upon the gears" address given at Sproul Hall, University of California, Berkeley on December 2, 1964. Savio remains historically relevant as an icon of the earliest phase of the 1960s counterculture movement. Robert Cohen is a professor of history and social studies in New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. He is an affiliated member of NYU’s History Department. His historical scholarship focuses on politics, higher education, and social protest in twentieth-century America. His books include Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s, The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s (co-edited with Reginald E. Zelnik), and Rebellion in Black and White: Southern Student Activism in the 1960s (co-edited with David S. Snyder). Tom Hayden is an American social and political activist, author, and politician. He is director of the Peace and Justice Resource Center in Culver City, California. Robert Reich is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.
December 8, 1918
Hans Børli (8 December 1918 – 26 August 1989) was a Norwegian poet and writer, who besides his writings worked as a lumberjack all his life. He was born in Eidskog, in South-Eastern Norway, close to the Norwegian border to Sweden. He was buried at Eidskog Church. Hans Børli was raised on a small farm in a road-less area in the forests in Eidskog Kommune. The experience of poverty and hardship would leave a deep imprint on his later art. However, the positive effects of living close to nature, the wisdom of tradition and the solidarity between workers also had significant bearing on his writings. Extensive reading spawned an early urge to write. This was both a way of expressing personal feelings, frowned upon in a masculine work environment, and possibly a way of literally escaping the economic and social inferiority. His mother's father, one of the last great oral narrator of legends and stories of the area, Ole Gundersen Børli, is also considered an important influence on the young writer-to-be, Hans Børli. A strict Christian upbringing would leave Børli forever struggling with the counteractive forces of rebellion and a deeply embedded sense of religious awe. In a social setting where education beyond mandatory schooling was rare, the young Hans, considered a gifted boy, was given a free place in Talhaug Mercantile School, inKongsvinger which a he later left when he was admitted to a military academy in Oslo, but his education was aborted by the outbreak of the Second World War. Børli fought the Germans, and was involved in some intense battles in Vardal, and was captured in Verdal. After being released, he went back to Eidskog and worked as a teacher and forest worker for the remaining of the war. He was also involved in illegal activity, such as guiding refugees across the Swedish border, all the while he was preparing his first collection of poetry "Tyrield" (Pine Passion) (1945). Hans Børli was by his own account (ref) heavily influenced by the Norwegian poet Olav H. Hauge.
December 9, 1948
Gioconda Belli (born December 9, 1948 in Managua, Nicaragua) is an author, novelist and renowned Nicaraguan poet.
December 9, 1957
Emmanuel Carrère (born in Paris on 9 December 1957) is a French author, screenwriter and director. He is the son of Louis Édouard Carrère, often known as Louis Carrère d'Encausse after his wife's pen name, and French historian Hélène Carrère d'Encausse. Carrère studied at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris (better known as Sciences Po). Much of his writing, both fiction and nonfiction, centers around the primary themes of the interrogation of identity, the development of illusion and the direction of reality. Several of his books have been made into films; in 2005, he personally directed the film adaptation of his novel La Moustache. He was the president of the jury of the book Inter 2003. He was scheduled to be part of the jury at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival in May. He has been announced as a member of the jury for the Cinéfoundation and Short Films sections of the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.
December 9, 1955
David Dabydeen (born 9 December 1955) is a Guyanese-born critic, writer, novelist and academic. Since 2010 he has been Guyana's ambassador to China. Dabydeen was born in Berbice, Guyana, his birth registered at New Amsterdam Registrar of Births as David Horace Clarence Harilal Sookram. His parents divorced while he was young and he grew up with his mother, Veronica Dabydeen, and his maternal grandparents. At the age of 10 he won a scholarship to Queen's College in Georgetown. When he was 13 years old, he moved to London, England, to rejoin his father, attorney David Harilal Sookram, who had migrated to Britain. At the age of 18 he took up a place at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, to read English, and he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with honours. He then gained a Ph.D. in 18th-century literature and art at University College London in 1982, and was awarded a research fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford. Between 1982 and 1984 Dabydeen worked as a community education officer in Wolverhampton. He subsequently went to the Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick in Coventry, where he progressed over the years from lecturer to director. He was president of the Association for the Teaching of Caribbean, African, and Asian Literature between 1985 and 1987. He is a Professor at the Centre for British Comparative Cultural Studies at Warwick University. In 1993 he was made Guyana's ambassador at UNESCO and is a member of their Executive Board. In 2010 Dabydeen was appointed as Guyana’s Ambassador to China. Dabydeen is the author of novels, collections of poetry and works of non-fiction and criticism, as editor as well as writer. His first book, Slave Song (1984), a collection of poetry, won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Quiller-Couch Prize. A further collection, Turner: New and Selected Poems, was published in 1994, and reissued in 2002; the title-poem, Turner is an extended sequence or verse novel responding to a painting by J. M. W. Turner, ‘Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying — Typhoon coming on‘ (1840). His first novel, The Intended (1991), the story of a young Asian student abandoned in London by his father, won the Guyana Prize for Literature. Disappearance (1993) tells the story of a young Guyanese engineer working on the south coast of England who lodges with an elderly woman. The Counting House (1996) is set at the end of the nineteenth century and narrates the experiences of an Indian couple whose hopes of a new life in colonial Guyana end in tragedy. The story explores historical tensions between indentured Indian workers and Guyanese of African descent. His 1999 novel, A Harlot's Progress, is based on a series of pictures painted in 1732 by William Hogarth (who was the subject of Dabydeen's PhD) and develops the story of Hogarth's black slave boy. Through the character of Mungo, Dabydeen challenges traditional cultural representations of the slave. His latest novel, Our Lady of Demerara, was published in 2004. Dabydeen has been awarded the title of fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He is the second West Indian writer (V.S. Naipaul was the first) and the only Guyanese writer to receive the title. In 2001 Dabydeen wrote and presented The Forgotten Colony, a BBC Radio 4 programme exploring the history of Guyana. His one-hour documentary Painting the People was broadcast by BBC television in 2004. The Oxford Companion to Black British History, co-edited by Dabydeen, John Gilmore and Cecily Jones, appeared in 2007. In 2007, Dabydeen was awarded the Hind Rattan (Jewel of India) Award for his outstanding contribution to literature and the intellectual life of the Indian diaspora.
December 9, 1930
Ronald Angus Fraser (9 December 1930 – 10 February 2012) was a British historian noted for his oral histories and in particular for Blood of Spain, his oral history of the Spanish Civil War.
December 9, 1848
Joel Chandler Harris (December 9, 1848 – July 3, 1908) was an American journalist, fiction writer, and folklorist best known for his collection of Uncle Remus stories. Harris was born in Eatonton, Georgia, where he served as an apprentice on a plantation during his teenage years. He spent most of his adult life in Atlanta working as an associate editor at the Atlanta Constitution. Harris led two professional lives: as the editor and journalist known as Joe Harris, he supported a vision of the New South with the editor Henry W. Grady (1880–1889), stressing regional and racial reconciliation after the Reconstruction era. As Joel Chandler Harris, fiction writer and folklorist, he wrote many 'Brer Rabbit' stories from the African-American oral tradition and helped to revolutionize literature in the process.
December 9, 1916
Wolfgang Hildesheimer (9 December 1916 – 21 August 1991) was a German author who incorporated the Theatre of the Absurd. He originally trained as an artist, before turning to writing.
December 9, 1608
John Milton (9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674) was an English poet, polemicist, man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell. He wrote at a time of religious flux and political upheaval, and is best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost (1667), written in blank verse. Milton's poetry and prose reflect deep personal convictions, a passion for freedom and self-determination, and the urgent issues and political turbulence of his day. Writing in English, Latin, Greek, and Italian, he achieved international renown within his lifetime, and his celebrated Areopagitica (1644)—written in condemnation of pre-publication censorship—is among history's most influential and impassioned defences of free speech and freedom of the press. William Hayley's 1796 biography called him the 'greatest English author,' and he remains generally regarded 'as one of the preeminent writers in the English language,' though critical reception has oscillated in the centuries since his death (often on account of his republicanism). Samuel Johnson praised Paradise Lost as 'a poem which...with respect to design may claim the first place, and with respect to performance, the second, among the productions of the human mind,' though he (a Tory and recipient of royal patronage) described Milton's politics as those of an 'acrimonious and surly republican'.
December 9, 1945
Susanna Moore (born December 9, 1945) is an American writer. Moore was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania and grew up in Hawaii. Her memoir, I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawaii gives the reader deep insight into a life in Hawaii other than that presented by tourist brochures. In 1999, she received the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2006 she received a Fellowship in Literature at the American Academy in Berlin; and in 2007 she received a Fellowship in Literature from the Asian Cultural Council. Susanna Moore was Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Yale University in 1988, 1989 & 1994; Visiting Lecturer at New York Graduate School in 1995; Creative Writing Teacher at Brooklyn Federal Detention Center between 2004 and 2006; and Lecturer of Creative Writing at Princeton University between 2007 and 2009. During May to August 2009, Susanna Moore will be Writer-in-Residence at Australia's University of Adelaide. Worked for a while in LA the late 1960s as Warren Beatty's assistant.
December 9, 1942
David Harsent (born in Devon on 9 December 1942) is an English poet and TV scriptwriter. As Jack Curtis and David Lawrence he has published a number of crime fiction novels. During his early career he was part of a circle of poets centred on Ian Hamilton and forming something of a school, promoting conciseness and imagist-like clarity in verse, though his work has changed and developed a good deal since then. He has published eleven collections of poetry which have won several literary prizes and awards. Legion won the Forward Prize for best collection 2005 and was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot and Whitbread Awards. His work in music theatre has involved collaborations with a number of composers (but most often with Sir Harrison Birtwistle, the opera Gawain being their most notable collaboration) and has been performed at the Royal Opera House, Carnegie Hall, the Southbank Centre, The Proms, the Wiener Kammeroper, and broadcast on BBC Two, Channel 4 and Trio (USA). A new opera, The Minotaur (also with Birtwistle), opened at The Royal Opera House in 2008. Birtwistle once again turned to Harsent's words for his major song cycle Songs from the Same Earth (2012–13). Harsent is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Honorary Research Fellow at Royal Holloway University and in 2005 was appointed Distinguished Writing Fellow at Sheffield Hallam University, where he is now a visiting professor. In 2012 he was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. He left Bath Spa University in favour of The University of Roehampton in July 2013 after receiving an honorary degree. He lives with his wife, the actress Julia Watson, and their daughter in Barnes, London.
December 9, 1899
Jean de Brunhoff (December 9, 1899 – October 16, 1937) was a French writer and illustrator known for creating the Babar books, the first of which appeared in 1931. He was the fourth and youngest child of Maurice de Brunhoff, a publisher, and his wife Marguerite. He attended Protestant schools, including the prestigious Ecole Alsacienne. Brunhoff joined the army and reached the front lines when World War I was almost over. Afterwards, he decided to be a professional artist and studied painting at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. In 1924 he married Cécile Sabouraud, a talented pianist, and they had two sons Laurent and Mathieu in 1925 and 1926; a third son, Thierry, was born nine years later. The Babar books began as a bedtime story Cécile de Brunhoff (née Sabouraud) invented for their children, Mathieu and Laurent, when they were four and five years old, respectively. He turned it into a picture book, with text, which was published by a family-run publishing house, Le jardin des modes. Originally, it was planned that the book's title page would describe the story as told by Jean and Cécile de Brunhoff. However, she had her name removed. Due to the role she played in the genesis of the Babar story, many sources continue to refer to her as the creator of the Babar story. After the first book Histoire de Babar (The Story of Babar), six more titles followed before Jean de Brunhoff died of tuberculosis at the age of 37. He was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. After Jean's death, his brother Michel de Brunhoff, who was the editor of French Vogue, oversaw the publication in book form of his two last books, Babar and His Children and Babar and Father Christmas, both of which had been done in black and white for a British newspaper, The Daily Sketch. Michel de Brunhoff arranged for the black and white drawings to be painted in color, drafting the then-thirteen-year-old Laurent to do some of the work. The French publishing house Hachette later bought the rights to the Babar series. The first seven Babar albums were reprinted and millions of copies were sold all around the world. Soon after the end of World War II, Laurent, who had followed in his father's footsteps as a painter and had also studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere, began work on a Babar book of his own. Although his style of painting was different from his father's and he emphasized picture more than text in the creation of his books, he trained himself to draw elephants in strict accord with the style of his father. Consequently many people did not notice any difference in authorship and assumed the six-year gap in the series was because of the war. Laurent has always been careful to emphasize that Babar was his father's creation (and to some extent his mother's) and that he continued the series largely as a way of keeping his father and his own childhood alive.
December 9, 1952
ROBERT GILDEA is Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford, and the author of MARIANNE IN CHAINS, the winner of the Wolfson Prize for history.
December 9, 1934
Joan M. Jensen (born December 9, 1934 St. Paul, Minnesota) is an American historian. She attended Pasadena City College, and earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D at the University of California at Los Angeles. From 1962 to 1971, she taught at U.S. International University, in San Diego, California. She left her job to join a farming commune in southern Colorado. From 1974 to 1975, she taught at Arizona State University, and from 1975 to 1976 she taught at UCLA. She taught history at New Mexico State University 1976-1993 and holds the rank of Professor Emerita. In 1990 the Coalition for Western Women's History honored Jensen by creating the Joan Jensen - Darlis Miller Prize for the best scholarly article published in the preceding year in the field of women and gender in the trans-Mississippi West.
December 9, 1943
Michael Krüger is a German writer, publisher and translator. Michael Krüger grew up in Berlin. After the graduating he was apprenticed to a publisher and later studied philosophy and literature. From 1962 to 1965 he worked as a bookseller in London.
December 9, 1880
Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain ( 9 December 1880 – 9 December 1932), commonly known as Begum Rokeya, was a Bengali writer, thinker, educationist, social activist, advocate of women's rights, and widely regarded as the pioneer of women's education in the Indian subcontinent during the time of the British rule. She wrote novels, poems, short stories, science fiction, satires, treatises, and essays. In her writings, she advocated that both men and women should be treated equally as rational beings, and the lack of education is the main reason of women's lagging behind. Her major works include Abarodhbasini, a spirited attack on the extreme forms of purdah that endangered women's lives and thoughts; Sultana's Dream, a science fiction novella set in a place called Ladyland in nisah, a world ruled by women; Padmarag ("Essence of the Lotus", 1924), another feminist utopian novel; Matichur, collection of essays in two volumes. Rokeya suggested that education of women is the foremost requisite of women's liberation; hence she established the first school aimed primarily at Bengali Muslim girls in Kolkata. Rokeya is said to have gone from house to house persuading the parents to send their girls to her school in nisah. Until her death, she ran the school despite facing hostile criticism and various social obstacles. In 1916, she founded the Muslim Women’s Association, an organization that fought for women’s education and employment. In 1926, Rokeya presided over the Bengal Women’s Education Conference convened in Kolkata, the first significant attempt to bring women together in support of women’s education rights. She was engaged in debates and conferences regarding the advancement of women until her death on 9 December 1932, shortly after presiding over a session during the Indian Women’s Conference. Bangladesh observes Rokeya Day on 9 December every year to commemorate her works and legacy. On that day, Bangladesh government also confers Begum Rokeya Padak on individual women for their exceptional achievement. In 2004, Rokeya was ranked number 6 in BBC's poll of the Greatest Bengali Of All Time.
December 9, 1942
Joseph Ralph McGinniss, Sr. (December 9, 1942 – March 10, 2014), known as Joe McGinniss, was an American non-fiction writer and novelist. The author of twelve books, he first came to prominence with the best-selling The Selling of the President 1968 which described the marketing of then-presidential candidate Richard Nixon. He is popularly known for his trilogy of bestselling true crime books — Fatal Vision, Blind Faith and Cruel Doubt — which were adapted into TV miniseries in the 1980s and 90s. His last book was The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, an account of Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska who was the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee.
December 9, 1960
Gina B. Nahai is the author of Cry of the Peacock, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, Sunday's Silence and Caspian Rain. Her novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages. She is a Lecturer in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California.
December 9, 1928
Sarah Elizabeth Wright (December 9, 1928 – September 13, 2009) was an American writer. Her novel This Child's Gonna Live, published in 1969, was acclaimed by critics and "was among the first to focus on the confluence of race, class and sex". The New York Times named it "outstanding book of 1969" and it was called a "small masterpiece". Sarah Elizabeth Wright was born in Wetipquin, Maryland, and began writing poetry at the age of eight. She attended Salisbury Colored High School, then entered Howard University. In the late 1940s she moved to Philadelphia and a decade later to New York City. Although This Child's Gonna Live (Delacorte Press, 1969) was her only published novel, she spent many years working on a second novel, which was never completed. She also published critical essays, a volume of poetry entitled Give Me a Child (Kraft Publishing, 1955, with Lucy Smith); and a nonfiction book for young people, A. Philip Randolph: Integration in the Workplace (Silver Burdett, 1990). Wright was a former vice-president of the Harlem Writers Guild and was involved in many political causes. Her novel is featured in the exhibit concerning the Eastern Shore of Maryland in the African-American Museum of History and Culture. Wright died in Manhattan, New York, at the age of 80.
December 9, 1926
Jan K?esadlo was the primary pseudonym used by Václav Jaroslav Karel Pinkava (December 9, 1926 in Prague - August 13, 1995 in Colchester), a Czech psychologist who was also a prizewinning novelist and poet. An anti-communist, Pinkava emigrated to Britain with his wife and four children following the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet-led armies of the Warsaw pact. He worked as a clinical psychologist until his early retirement in 1982, when he turned to full-time writing. His first novel "Mrchop?vci" (GraveLarks) was published by Josef Škvorecký's emigre publishing house 68 Publishers, and earned the 1984 Egon Hostovský prize. He chose his pseudonym (which means firesteel) partly because it contains the uniquely Czech sound ?; in addition, he was fond of creating more pseudonyms such as Jake Rolands (an anagram), J. K. Klement (after his grandfather, for translations into English), Juraj Hron (for his Slovak-Moravian writings), Ferdinand Lu?ovický z Lu?ovic a na Suchým dole (for his music), Kamil Troud (for his illustrations), and more. Pinkava was also active in choral music, composing (among others) a Glagolitic Mass. As well, he worked in mathematical logic, discovering the many-valued logic algebra which bears his name. A polymath and polyglot, Pinkava was fond of setting intense goals for himself, such as translating Jaroslav Seifert's interwoven sonnet cycle about Prague, 'A Wreath of Sonnets'. He published a collection of his own poems in seven languages. Perhaps his most staggering achievement is ????????????? (Astronautilia) Hv?zdoplavba, a 6575-line science fiction epic poem, an odyssey in classical Homeric Greek, with its parallel hexameter translation into Czech. This was published shortly after his death, in a limited edition. (ISBN 80-237-2452-5). At the time of writing only his first, prize-winning novel has been published in English translation, as GraveLarks (ISBN 80-86013-81-2). He is the father of film director Jan Pinkava who received an Oscar for Geri's Game in 1998.
December 10, 1925
Robert Edmond Alter was born on December 10, 1925 in San Francisco, California. During his early years he spent time working as a migrant worker picking fruit in and around Santa Paula. For a brief period he worked as a stock boy at Vroman’s Books in Pasadena before attending the Pasadena City College and University of California. Alter studied at the famed Pasadena Playhouse and as a result managed a few roles as an extra in films. By 1949, he had settled into the security of the life of a civil servant working at the post office in Altadena. Robert Edmond Alter is remembered chiefly for two novels, paperback originals from the 1960s: SWAMP SISTER (1961) and CARNY KILL (1966). He also wrote children's novels and sold stories to some of the top magazines and digests of his day, including Mike Shayne, Manhunt, Man From UNCLE, Trapped, Argosy and The Saturday Evening Post. Alter’s best work fused lurid intrigue and crime melodrama with an interesting cross section of characters that might include spies, unfaithful wives and husbands, hillbillies, ghosts, and even skin divers. Alter died of cancer at the age of 40. Some of his later works were published for the first time many years after his death.
December 10, 1898
Carlos Samayoa Chinchilla (1898–1973) was a Guatemalan writer. For decades he worked in various roles in the government of Guatemala, but is best remembered for his writing, both fiction and non fiction. He worked as personal secretary for President Jorge Ubico; after Ubico's death he published the memoir El Dictador y Yo ('The Dictator and I'). He afterwards served as director of the Instituto de Antropología e Historia (IDAEH), Guatemala's national institution of anthropology, archaeology, and history, and wrote a number of works on those subjects. In 1957, Falcon's Wing Press in Colorado published a collection of his short stories, 'The Emerald Lizard: Tales and Legends of Guatemala.' Samayoa Chinchilla wrote 'El arco de Balam-Acab' (The Bow of Balam-Acab), included in a book of stories and legends, Madre Milpa in 1934. He was married to well-known poet Claudia Lars.
December 10, 1933
Philip R. Craig (December 10, 1933 – May 8, 2007) was a writer known for his Martha's Vineyard mysteries.
December 10, 1950
Desmond Hogan (born 10 December 1950) is an Irish writer. Awarded the 1977 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and 1980 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, his oeuvre comprises novels, plays, short stories and travel writing. The Cork Examiner said: 'Like no other Irish writer just now, Hogan sets down what it's like to be a disturbed child of what seems a Godforsaken country in these troubled times.' The Irish Independent said he is 'to be commended for the fidelity and affection he shows to the lonely and the downtrodden.' The Boston Globe said there 'is something mannered in Hogan's prose, which is festooned with exotic imagery and scattered in sentence fragments.' A contemporary of Bruce Chatwin, Ian McEwan, Peter Carey, Salman Rushdie and a close friend of Kazuo Ishiguro, he has since vanished off the literary scene.
December 10, 1920
Clarice Lispector (December 10, 1920 – December 9, 1977) was a Brazilian novelist and short story writer acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, as an infant she moved to Brazil with her family, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War.
December 10, 1923
Jorge Semprún Maura (10 December 1923 – 7 June 2011) was a Spanish writer and politician who lived in France most of his life and wrote primarily in French. From 1953 to 1962, during the era of Francisco Franco, Semprún lived clandestinely in Spain working as an organizer for the exiled Communist Party of Spain, but was expelled from the party in 1964. After the death of Franco and change to a democratic government, he served as Minister of Culture Minister in Spain's socialist government from 1988 to 1991. He was a screenwriter for two successive films by the Greek director Costa-Gavras, Z (1969) and The Confession (1970), which dealt with the theme of persecution by governments. For his work on The War Is Over (film) (1966) and Z (1969) Semprun was nominated for the Oscar. In 1996, he became the first non-French author elected to the Académie Goncourt, which awards an annual literary prize.
December 10, 1830
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life. After she studied at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she spent a short time at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family's house in Amherst. Considered an eccentric by the locals, she became known for her penchant for white clothing and her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even leave her room. Most of her friendships were therefore carried out by correspondence. While Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly 1,800 poems were published during her lifetime.
December 10, 1984
Helen Olajumoke Oyeyemi (born 10 December 1984) is a British novelist. In 2013 she was included in the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list. Oyeyemi wrote her first novel, The Icarus Girl, while still at school studying for her A-levels at Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School. While studying social and political sciences at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, two of her plays, Juniper's Whitening and Victimese, were performed by fellow students to critical acclaim and subsequently published by Methuen. He other works include The Opposite House (inspired by Cuban mythology), White is for Witching (having "roots in Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe"), Mr Fox, and Boy, Snow, Bird.
December 10, 1907
Michael Seymour Blankfort (December 10, 1907 – July 13, 1982) was an American screenwriter, author and playwright. He served as a front for the blacklisted Albert Maltz on the Academy Award-nominated screenplay of Broken Arrow (1950). He was born in New York City and died in Los Angeles. The Writers Guild of America, West, in its 1991 restoration of credit for the Broken Arrow screenplay to Maltz, expressed "a strong statement of appreciation for the courage of screenwriter Michael Blankfort" for his action in fronting for Maltz, in which Blankfort "risked being blacklisted himself to help his friend". Among his own screenplays were The Juggler (1953) and The Caine Mutiny. He was president of the Writers Guild of America, West from 1967 to 1969 and won the Guild's Valentine Davies Award (along with Norman Corwin) in 1972. He also served on the Board of Governors of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 1969 to 1971.
December 10, 1964
Robert William Flay (born December 10, 1964) is an American celebrity chef, restaurateur, and reality television personality. He is the owner and executive chef of several restaurants: Mesa Grill in Las Vegas and the Bahamas; Bar Americain in New York and at Mohegan Sun, Uncasville, Connecticut; Bobby Flay Steak in Atlantic City; Gato in New York, and Bobby's Burger Palace in 19 locations across 11 states. Flay has hosted several Food Network television programs, appeared as a guest and hosted a number of specials on the network. Flay is also featured on the Great Chefs television series
December 10, 1891
Nelly Sachs (10 December 1891 – 12 May 1970) was a Jewish German poet and playwright whose experiences resulting from the rise of the Nazis in World War II Europe transformed her into a poignant spokeswoman for the grief and yearnings of her fellow Jews. Her best-known play is Eli: Ein Mysterienspiel vom Leiden Israels (1950); other works include the poems 'Zeichen im Sand' (1962), 'Verzauberung' (1970), and the collections of poetry In den Wohnungen des Todes (1947), Flucht und Verwandlung (1959), Fahrt ins Staublose (1961), and Suche nach Lebenden (1971). RUTH AND MATTHEW MEAD are the translators of Bobrowski, Borchers, Bachler, Bienek, Holzer, and Sabais. Mead’s own two books of verse are IDENTITIES and THE ADMINISTRATION OF THINGS. MICHAEL HAMBURGER is a leading translator of German poetry, as well as a critic (CONTRARIES: STUDIES IN GERMAN LITERATURE and THE TRUTH OF POETRY) and a poet (WEATHER & SEASON).
December 10, 1824
George MacDonald (10 December 1824 – 18 September 1905) was a Scottish author, poet and Christian minister. He was a pioneering figure in the field of fantasy literature and the mentor of fellow writer Lewis Carroll.
December 10, 1955
Margaret Salinger is the daughter of J. D. Salinger. She wrote in her memoir Dream Catcher that she believes her parents would not have married, nor would she have been born, had her father not read the teachings of Lahiri Mahasaya, a guru of Paramahansa Yogananda, which brought the possibility of enlightenment to those following the path of the "householder" (a married person with children).
December 10, 1947
Janusz Szuber was born on December 10, 1947 and has published eighteen collections of poetry in Poland. His work has been translated into numerous languages, and he has received a number of awards, including the Kazimiera Illakowiczowna Prize for Best Poetic Debut and the highest award from the Polish Foundation of Culture. He lives in the old city of Sanok. Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough's translations of Polish poetry have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, TriQuarterly, The Paris Review, and Image, among other publications. She divides her time between Krakow and Fresno, California.
December 10, 1928
ALICIA YANEZ COSSIO was born December 10, 1928 and is considered to be one of Ecuador’s principal novelists. Bruna and Her Sisters in the Sleeping City is the first of her novels to be translated into English. KENNETH J. A. WISHNIA is a novelist who has taught at SUNY at Stony Brook and Queens College CUNY.
December 11, 1930
Ivan T. Berend (born December 11, 1930), Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, is former President of the International Committee of Historical Sciences and former President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1995-2000). He has published widely on the economy and culture of Central and Eastern Europe.
December 11, 1920
Elena Garro (December 11, 1920 – August 22, 1998) was a Mexican writer. She was once married to writer Octavio Paz. Elena Garro was born to a Spanish father and a Mexican mother on December 11, 1920 in Puebla, Mexico. (Birth Certificate says ‘11 Diciembre de PROX. Pasado,’ which means Dec. 11, 1916: She spent her childhood in Mexico City but moved to Iguala, Guerrero, during the Cristero War. She studied literature, choreography and theater in the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. While she lived in Mexico City she met Octavio Paz, whom she married in 1937. They had one daughter, Helena, but divorced in 1959. However, according to her final will, Elena died without knowing she was divorced. After the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre, she accused certain Mexican intellectuals of being responsible of instigating the students and later abandoning them. These accusations caused resentment in the intellectual community who repudiated her. In 1972, Garro left the country and lived in exile in France for twenty years. She suffered from lung cancer due to smoking and Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (CONACULTA) covered her medical expenses. She later died from this illness. Her work touches on the themes of the marginalization of women and racism. Most important was her criticism of the Mexican government. She also portrayed a critical vision of the Mexican Revolution (1910) in her master novel ‘Los recuerdos del porvenir’ (1963), which was awarded the Xavier Villarutia Prize, and which has been translated into several languages. Her novel ‘Y Matarazo no llamó . . . ‘ criticizes how the government used excessive force to stop the labor strike. In her short story, ‘La culpa es de los tlaxcaltecas,’ she vindicates la Malinche. Her play ‘Felipe Angeles’ is a documentary drama where she resurrects the General Felipe Angeles, a revolutionary leader who was executed in 1919 by the government of Venustiano Carranza] against the will of the people. This was a result of his success in saving the lives of many people in Chihuahua, when Pancho Villa ordered the execution of one hundred soldiers. He is also known for his triumph in Zacatecas. Angeles fought against the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz with Francisco Madero, president of Mexico who was also assassinated.
December 11, 1937
James ‘Jim’ Harrison (born December 11, 1937) is an American author known for his poetry, fiction, reviews, essays about the outdoors, and writings about food. He has been called ‘a force of nature’, and his work has been compared to that of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Harrison's characters tend to be rural by birth and to have retained some qualities of their agrarian pioneer heritage in spite of their intelligence and some formal education. They attune themselves to both the natural and the civilized world, surrounded by excesses but determined to live their lives as well as possible.
December 11, 1957
William Joyce lives in Shreveport, Louisiana, with his lovely wife, Elizabeth, and their children, Mary Katherine and Jack. They also have a dachshund named Rose and something else named Rex. Mr. Joyce has produced two animated television shows based on his books: Rolie Polie Olie and George Shrinks. He also produced and designed the animated feature film Robots. Every once in a while he does a cover for The New Yorker. His alarmingly optimistic picture books include Dinosaur Bob and His Adventures with the Family Lazardo, Santa Calls, The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs, and Bently & Egg.He is currently futzing around on several books and stories that embrace the alleged healing power of heroically scaled silliness.
December 11, 1911
NAGUIB MAHFOUZ (1911-2006) was born in the crowded Cairo district of Gamaliya. He graduated in philosophy from King Fuad University in 1934, and went on to write nearly forty novel-length works, plus hundreds of short stories and numerous screenplays. He was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1988. WILLIAM M. HUTCHINS is the principal translator of Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy, and has most recently translated Mohammed Khudayyir's Basrayatha (AUC Press, 2007), Fadhil al-Azzawi's THE LAST OF THE ANGELS (AUC Press, 2007), and CELL BLOCK FIVE (AUG Press, 2008).
December 11, 1932
Keith Waldrop (born December 11, 1932, in Emporia, Kansas) is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, and has translated the work of Claude Royet-Journoud, Anne-Marie Albiach, and Edmond Jabès, among others. A recent translation is Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (2006). With his wife Rosmarie Waldrop, he co-edits Burning Deck Press. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and teaches at Brown University. The French government has named him Chevalier des arts et des lettres. Waldrop won the 2009 National Book Award for poetry for TRANSCENDENTAL STUDIES: A TRILOGY.
December 11, 1931
Jerome Rothenberg (born December 11, 1931) is an American poet, translator and anthologist, noted for his work in the fields of ethnopoetics and performance poetry.
December 11, 1963
Valerie Boyd (born December 11, 1963), is a widely published journalist, author, and cultural critic, best known for the critically acclaimed biography, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. She obtained her bachelor's degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in 1985 and her MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College in 1999. Currently, Boyd is an Associate Professor and the Charlayne Hunter-Gault Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia, where she teaches narrative nonfiction writing, as well as arts and literary journalism. She has also taught creative nonfiction in the graduate writing program at Antioch University in Los Angeles. She lives in Atlanta.
December 11, 1952
Andrea De Carlo (born December 11, 1952 in Milan) is a popular Italian writer. Andrea De Carlo grew up in Milan. His "love-hatred" relationship with the capital of Lombardy would come to be detailed in his novels. He attended the liceo classico Giovanni Berchet (which appears in the initial chapters of Due di Due); then he graduated in modern literature, with a degree in contemporary history. He worked for a time as a photographer, as second assistant to Oliviero Toscani and then doing portraits and reportage on his own. He traveled widely in the United States, living first in Boston, then New York City, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, where he did odd jobs and taught Italian. Then he moved on to Australia, staying in Sydney and Melbourne. In this period, he wrote two novels intended as "exercises of style", which he decided not to publish. He settled back in Italy, in Milan and Rome and then in the countryside near Urbino. In 1981 the Einaudi publishing house published his first novel, Treno di Panna, which he had already written in English under the title "Cream Train". Italo Calvino wrote an introduction. A movie adapted from the book would later be produced. His second novel, Uccelli da gabbia e da voliera ("Cage and Aviary Birds"), published in 1982, was praised by Federico Fellini, with whom De Carlo worked as assistant director in the movie E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On). Towards the end of shooting, De Carlo made the short film Le facce di Fellini ("The Faces of Fellini") about the relationship between the great Italian director and his actors. He later collaborated with Michelangelo Antonioni on the screenplay for a film that was never made. His best-known novel is Due di Due ("Two Out of Two"), a partly autobiographical story of friendship: De Carlo's role is divided between the contrasting personalities of the creative, adventurous, anarchic Guido Laremi and the more subdued and down-to-earth Mario, the narrator of the story. He is the author of 18 novels, which have been translated into 26 languages.
December 11, 1906
Birago Diop (11 December 1906 – 25 November 1989) was a Senegalese poet and storyteller whose work restored general interest in African folktales and promoted him to one of the most outstanding African francophone writers. A renowned veterinarian, diplomat and leading voice of the Négritude literary movement, Diop exemplified the "African renaissance man." Son of Ismael and Sokhna Diop, Birago Diop was born on 11 December 1906 in Ouakam, a neighborhood in Dakar. His mother raised him with his two older brothers, Massyla and Youssoupha; his father, for unknown reasons, disappeared two months before Diop was born. Diop's childhood exposed him to many folktales which he later used in his literary work. In 1920, Diop earned a scholarship to attend the French-speaking school Lycée Faidherbe in Saint-Louis, which was then Senegal's capital. During this time, he became fascinated with the poems and style of writing of Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe and several others and began writing his own. In the late 1920s, he served as a nurse in a military hospital and later went on to study veterinary medicine at the University of Toulouse in France, graduating in 1933. Although he was mostly recognized for his poems and folktales, Birago Diop also worked as a veterinary surgeon for the French colonial government in several West African countries, spending 1937- 1939 in the French Sudan (now Mali), 1940 in the Ivory Coast and French Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), and 1950 in Mauritania. Throughout his civil service career in 1934, he collected and reworked Wolof folktales, and also wrote poetry, memoirs, and a play. He also served as the first Senegalese ambassador to Tunisia from 1960 to 1965. During his time in France as a veterinary student, Diop met numerous African, African-American and Caribbean students, among them Léopold Sédar Senghor, who later to become Senegal's first president after its independence. Inspired by these young black intellectuals, artists and poets, Diop drafted his earliest poems in L'étudiant noir (the black student) - a student review that established the idea of the Négritude movement which protested against the assimilation theory in favor of African cultural values. During his work as the head of the government's cattle-inspection service for several regions in Senegal and Mali, he was introduced to traditional folktales, most of which he committed to memory. These served as the main inspiration for much of his literary work. Indeed, most of his poems and tales have their roots in oral African traditions. Generally recited to a group at night by a professional storyteller, called a griot, folktales were repeated in different places by the people who heard them. These ceremonies commonly consisted of songs and dances in addition to these folktales. Although the tales served as entertainment, they also had the greater purpose of teaching younger generations about the beliefs and values of their ancestors. By combining his mastery of the French language with his experience with African folktakes, Diop was able to spread the values and beliefs of his ancestors throughout the world. In the early 1940s, during World War II, Birago Diop was forced to return to France for two years. Homesick, he began writing down adaptions of folktales as advised by his fellow Negritude writers. When Diop finally returned to Africa, he served as a director of zoological technical services in Ivory Coast and Upper Volta (modern day Burkina Faso). His first literary piece Les Contes D'Amadou Koumba was published in 1947. The work, totaling three volumes, managed to earn him the Grand prix littéraire award. Each volume contained a collection of short stories: animal-centered tales he directly transcribed from the griot Amadou Koumba's accounts. These tales provided a combination of humor, fantasy and realism where people, supernatural beings, and animals interacted. As soon as Senegal gained its independence, Birago was nominated as the first Senegalese ambassador in Tunisia. Upon accepting this position, he claimed to have "broken his pen," suggesting that he was ready to give up writing altogether and focus on his diplomatic career. It was not until the mid-1970s, towards the end of his life, that his "pen was mended." He published La plume raboutée in 1978, followed by À rebrousse-temps (1982), À rebrousse-gens (1982), and Senegal du temps de...(1986). Birago Diop died on November 25, 1989 in Dakar at the age of 83. He was survived by his wife of many years, Marie-Louise Pradére, and two children, Renée and Andrée. His legacy includes the titles of novelist, diplomat, a founder of the Negritude movement and veterinarian. Even now, decades after his death, his stories and poems remain, sharing African values and culture.
December 11, 1947
Kenneth R. Manning (born December 11, 1947) is an American academic professor and author. He is currently the Thomas Meloy Professor of Rhetoric and of the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Born in Dillon, South Carolina and educated in local schools, Manning eventually moved to North Haven, Connecticut, soon afterwards. Manning entered Harvard University in 1966 and completed his Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in 1970, his Master of Arts (M.A.) in 1971, and his Ph.D. in 1974. While he was doing his graduate studies, Manning helped guide fellow Dillon native Ben Bernanke, who would eventually become the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, to apply to Harvard. He helped assuage the Bernanke family, who were concerned that Ben would "lose his Jewish identity" if he went to Harvard, that "there were Jews in Boston." Manning has been on the faculty at MIT since 1974. Manning's 1983 book, Black Apollo of Science: The Life of Ernest Everett Just, depicts the life and career of Ernest Everett Just, who was born in Charleston, South Carolina and went on to become a world-famous biologist. Manning won several awards for the book and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography. Manning was also inducted into the Order of the Palmetto by former South Carolina governor, Richard Riley. Manning's other writings have appeared in numerous scholarly publications. He is currently working on a book manuscript that examines health care for African Americans and the role and experience of blacks in the American medical profession from 1860 until 1980.
December 11, 1939
Thomas Francis McGuane III (born December 11, 1939) is an American writer. His work includes ten novels, short fiction and screenplays, as well as three collections of essays devoted to his life in the outdoors. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The National Cutting Horse Association Hall of Fame and the Flyfishing Hall of Fame. Thomas McGuane was the keynote speaker for the 2016 Montana State University Trout and Salomonid Lecture Series. McGuane also partook in an oral history project conducted by Montana State University pertaining to his life as an angler and angling author. McGuane has three children, Annie, Maggie and Thomas
December 11, 1918
Aleksandr Isayevich[a] Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist, historian, and critic of Soviet totalitarianism. He helped to raise global awareness of the gulag and the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system. While his writings were long suppressed in the USSR, he wrote many books, most notably The Gulag Archipelago, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, August 1914 and Cancer Ward. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, 'for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature'. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 but returned to Russia in 1994 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
December 11, 1948
Quintard Taylor is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West.
December 11, 1904
Philippe Thoby-Marcelin (1904–1975), was a Haitian poet, novelist, journalist, folklorist and politician. Philippe Thoby-Marcelin was born December 11, 1904 in Port-au-Prince. He and his younger brother, Pierre Marcelin (1908-?), worked together on the writing of several novels about rural Haiti, highlighting the themes of peasant life and Haitian folklore. Philippe went to high school in Port-au-Prince and finished his education in Paris where he studied law. While there, he became acquainted with Valéry Larbaud, who arranged to have some of his poems published in La revue européenne, a monthly literary journal that was published from 1923 to 1931. Back in Haiti, he began his career as general secretary at the Ministry of Public Works. Like most Haitian intellectuals, he was opposed to the American occupation of Haiti, which had been established in 1915. In 1927, together with Jacques Roumain, Carl Brouard, Émile Roumer and Normil Sylvain (1900-1929), he helped create La Revue Indigène, a literary journal in which they published their poems. They idea was to honor the indigenous Haitian literary and artistic material, and return the culture to its pre-occupational state. His first novel Canapé-Vert, was published in 1944. In 1946, he participated in the founding of the short-lived Popular Socialist Party (PSP), together with Anthony Lespès (fr). That same year he published his second novel, La Bête de Musseau, translated as The Beast of the Haitian Hills. In 1948, when the PSP was declared illegal by President Dumarsais Estimé, he moved to the United States, where he worked as a translator for the Pan-American Union. His third novel, Le Crayon de Dieu, appeared in 1952. His last novel, Tous les Hommes sont Fous was published in 1972 and translated into English by his wife, Eva. He died at his home in Cazenovia, near Syracuse, New York, in 1975.
December 11, 1941
Tino Villanueva (born December 11, 1941, San Marcos, Texas) is an American poet and writer.
December 11, 1964
Ayelet Waldman (born December 11, 1964) is an Israeli-American novelist and essayist. She has written seven mystery novels in the series The Mommy-Track Mysteries and four other novels. She has also written autobiographical essays about motherhood. Waldman spent three years working as a federal public defender and her fiction draws on her experience as a lawyer.
December 12, 1928
Chyngyz Aitmatov (12 December 1928 – 10 June 2008) was a Soviet and Kyrgyz author who wrote in both Russian and Kyrgyz. He is the best known figure in Kyrgyzstan's literature. He was born to a Kyrgyz father and Tatar mother. Aitmatov's parents were civil servants in Sheker. In 1937 his father was charged with ‘bourgeois nationalism‘ in Moscow, arrested and executed in 1938. Aitmatov lived at a time when Kyrgyzstan was being transformed from one of the most remote lands of the Russian Empire to a republic of the USSR. The future author studied at a Soviet school in Sheker. He also worked from an early age. At fourteen he was an assistant to the Secretary at the Village Soviet. He later held jobs as a tax collector, a loader, an engineer's assistant and continued with many other types of work. In 1946 he began studying at the Animal Husbandry Division of the Kirghiz Agricultural Institute in Frunze, but later switched to literary studies at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow, where he lived from 1956 to 1958. For the next eight years he worked for Pravda. His first two publications appeared in 1952 in Russian. His first work published in Kyrgyz was White rain (1954), and his well-known work ‘Jamila‘ (Jamila) appeared in 1958. In 1961 he was a member of the jury at the 2nd Moscow International Film Festival. In 1971 he was a member of the jury at the 7th Moscow International Film Festival. 1980 saw his first novel The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years; his next significant novel, The Scaffold was published in 1988. The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years and other writings were translated into several languages. In 1994 he was a member of the jury at the 44th Berlin International Film Festival. In 2002 he was the President of the Jury at the 24th Moscow International Film Festival. Aitmatov suffered kidney failure, and on 16 May 2008 was admitted to a hospital in Nuremberg, Germany, where he died of pneumonia on 10 June 2008 at the age of 79. After his death, Aitmatov was flown to Kyrgyzstan, where there were numerous ceremonies before he was buried in Ata Beyit cemetery, which he helped found and where his father most likely is buried, in Chong-Tash village, Alamüdün district, Chüy oblast, Kyrgyzstan. His obituary in The New York Times characterized him as ‘a Communist writer whose novels and plays before the collapse of the Soviet Union gave a voice to the people of the remote Soviet republic of Kyrgyz’ and adds that he ‘later became a diplomat and a friend and adviser to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.’ Chinghiz Aitmatov belonged to the post-war generation of writers. His output before ‘Jamila‘ was not significant, a few short stories and a short novel called Face to Face. But it was Jamila that came to prove the author's work. Seen through the eyes of an adolescent boy, it tells of how Jamilia, a village girl, separated from her soldier husband by the war, falls in love with a disabled soldier staying in their village as they all work to bring in and transport the grain crop. Aitmatov's representative works also include the short novels Farewell, Gulsary!, The White Ship, The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, and The Scaffold. Aitmatov was honoured in 1963 with the Lenin Prize for Tales of the Mountains and Steppes (a compilation including ‘Jamila’, ‘First Teacher’ and ‘Farewell Gulsary’) and was later awarded a State prize for Farewell, Gulsary!. Aitmatov's art was glorified by admirers. Even critics of Aitmatov mentioned the high quality of his novels. Aitmatov's work has some elements that are unique specifically to his creative process. His work drew on folklore, not in the ancient sense of it; rather, he tried to recreate and synthesize oral tales in the context of contemporary life. This is prevalent in his work; in nearly every story he refers to a myth, a legend, or a folktale. In The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, a poetic legend about a young captive turned into a mankurt serves as a tragic allegory and becomes a significant symbolic expression of the philosophy of the novel. A second aspect of Aitmatov's writing is his ultimate closeness to our ‘little brothers’ the animals, for their and our lives are intimately and inseparably connected. The two center characters of Farewell, Gulsary! are a man and his stallion. A camel plays a prominent role in The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years; one of the key turns of the novel which decides the fate of the main character is narrated through the story of the camel's rut and riot. The Scaffold starts off and finishes with the story of a wolf pack and the great wolf-mother Akbara and her cub; human lives enter the narrative but interweave with the lives of the wolves. Some of his stories were filmed, like ‘Red Scarf’ (1970) as The Girl with the Red Scarf (1978). In addition to his literary work, Chinghiz Aitmatov was first the ambassador for the Soviet Union and later for Kyrgyzstan, to the European Union, NATO, UNESCO and the Benelux countries.
December 12, 1905
Mulk Raj Anand (12 December 1905 – 28 September 2004) was an Indian writer in English, notable for his depiction of the lives of the poorer castes in traditional Indian society. One of the pioneers of Indo-Anglian fiction, he, together with R. K. Narayan, Ahmed Ali and Raja Rao, was one of the first India-based writers in English to gain an international readership.
December 12, 1954
Yvette Christiansë (born December 12, 1954, South Africa) is a South African born poet and novelist. She currently lives in New York City and teaches at Barnard College.
December 12, 1821
Gustave Flaubert (December 12, 1821 – May 8, 1880) was an influential French writer who is counted among the greatest novelists in Western literature. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary (1857), for his Correspondence, and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style. The celebrated short story writer Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert. Gustave Flaubert (December 12, 1821 – May 8, 1880) was an influential French writer who is counted among the greatest novelists in Western literature. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary (1857), for his Correspondence, and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style. The celebrated short story writer Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert. The publication of Madame Bovary in 1856 was followed by more scandal than admiration; it was not understood at first that this novel was the beginning of something new: the scrupulously truthful portraiture of life. Gradually, this aspect of his genius was accepted, and it began to crowd out all others. At the time of his death he was widely regarded as the most influential French Realist. Under this aspect Flaubert exercised an extraordinary influence over Guy de Maupassant, Edmond de Goncourt, Alphonse Daudet, and Zola. Even after the decline of the Realist school, Flaubert did not lose prestige in the literary community; he continues to appeal to other writers because of his deep commitment to aesthetic principles, his devotion to style, and his indefatigable pursuit of the perfect expression. He has been admired or written about by almost every major literary personality of the 20th century, including philosophers and sociologists such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Paul Sartre whose partially psychoanalytic portrait of Flaubert in The Family Idiot was published in 1971. Georges Perec named Sentimental Education as one of his favourite novels. The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa is another great admirer of Flaubert. Apart from Perpetual Orgy, which is solely devoted to Flaubert's art, one can find lucid discussions in Vargas Llosa's Letters to a Young Novelist (published 2003)
December 12, 1905
Vasily Semyonovich Grossman (December 12, 1905 - September 14, 1964) was a Soviet writer and journalist. Grossman trained as an engineer and worked in the Donets Basin, but changed career in the 1930s and published short stories and several novels. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he became a war correspondent for the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda, writing firsthand accounts of the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk and Berlin. Grossman's eyewitness accounts of conditions in a Nazi extermination camp, following the liberation of Treblinka, were among the earliest. Grossman also translated Armenian literature into Russian, despite the fact that (as he writes in 'Dobro Vam!', - the account of a sojourn in Armenia in the early 1960s, during which he worked at the translation of a book by a local writer called Martirosjan) he lacked the ability to read Armenian, and worked on an interlinear translation made for him by a third person. After World War II, Grossman's faith in the Soviet state was shaken by Joseph Stalin's turn towards antisemitism in the final years before his death in 1953. While Grossman was never arrested by the Soviet authorities, his two major literary works (Life and Fate and Everything Flows) were censored during the ensuing Nikita Khrushchev period as unacceptably anti-Soviet, and Grossman himself became in effect a nonperson. The KGB raided Grossman's flat after he had completed Life and Fate, seizing manuscripts, notes and even the ribbon from the typewriter on which the text had been written. Grossman was told by the Communist Party's chief ideologist Mikhail Suslov that the book could not be published for two or three hundred years. At the time of Grossman's death from stomach cancer in 1964, these books were unreleased. Copies were eventually smuggled out of the Soviet Union by a network of dissidents, including Andrei Sakharov and Vladimir Voinovich, and first published in the West, before appearing in the Soviet Union in 1988. Born Iosif Solomonovich Grossman in Berdychiv, Russian Empire (today in Ukraine) into an emancipated Jewish family, he did not receive a traditional Jewish education. A Russian nanny turned his name Yossya into Russian Vasya (a diminutive of Vasily), which was accepted by the whole family. His father had social-democratic convictions and joined the Mensheviks. Young Vasily Grossman idealistically supported the Russian Revolution of 1917. Grossman began writing short stories while studying at Moscow State University and later continued his literary activity working as an engineer in the Donbass. One of his first short stories, In the town of Berdichev, drew favourable attention and encouragement from Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Bulgakov. The film Commissar (director Aleksandr Askoldov), made in 1967, suppressed by the KGB and released only in October 1990, is based on this four-page story. In the mid-1930s Grossman left his job as an engineer and committed himself fully to writing. By 1936 he had published two collections of stories and the novel Glyukauf, and in 1937 was accepted into the privileged Union of Writers. His novel Stepan Kol'chugin (published 1937-40) was nominated for a Stalin prize but deleted from the list by Stalin himself for alleged Menshevik sympathies. During the Great Purge some of his friends and close relatives were arrested, including his common-law wife. For months he petitioned the authorities to release her, which happened in 1938. When Nazi-Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Grossman's mother was trapped in Berdychiv by the invading German Army, and eventually murdered together with 20,000 to 30,000 other Jews who had not evacuated. Grossman was exempt from military service, but volunteered for the front, where he spent more than 1,000 days. He became a war correspondent for the popular Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star). As the war raged on, he covered its major events, including the Battle of Moscow, the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk and the Battle of Berlin. In addition to war journalism, his novels (such as The People are Immortal) were being published in newspapers and he came to be regarded as a legendary war hero. The novel Stalingrad (1950), later renamed For a Just Cause, is based on his own experiences during the siege. Grossman described Nazi ethnic cleansing in German occupied Ukraine and Poland, and the liberation by the Red Army of the Nazi-German Treblinka and Majdanek extermination camps. He collected some of the first eyewitness accounts - as early as 1943 - of what later became known as the Holocaust. His article The Hell of Treblinka (1944) was disseminated at the Nuremberg Trials as evidence for the prosecution. Grossman participated in the assembly of the Black Book, a project of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to document the crimes of the Holocaust. The post-war suppression of the Black Book by the Soviet state shook him to the core, and he began to question his own loyal support of the Soviet regime. First the censors ordered changes in the text to conceal the specifically anti-Jewish character of the atrocities and to downplay the role of Ukrainians who worked with the Nazis as police. Then, in 1948, the Soviet edition of the book was scrapped completely. The poet Semyon Lipkin, Grossman's friend, believed it was Joseph Stalin's post-war antisemitic campaign that cracked Grossman's belief in the Soviet system. Grossman also criticized collectivization and political repression of peasants that led to the Holodomor tragedy. He wrote that ‘The decree about grain procurement required that the peasants of the Ukraine, the Don and the Kuban be put to death by starvation, put to death along with their little children.’ Because of state persecution, only a few of Grossman's post-war works were published during his lifetime. After he submitted for publication his magnum opus, the novel Life and Fate (1959), the KGB raided his flat. The manuscripts, carbon copies, notebooks, as well as the typists' copies and even the typewriter ribbons were seized. The Politburo ideology chief Mikhail Suslov told Grossman that his book could not be published for two or three hundred years. Grossman wrote to Nikita Khrushchev: ‘What is the point of me being physically free when the book I dedicated my life to is arrested... I am not renouncing it... I am requesting freedom for my book.’ However, Life and Fate and his last major novel, Everything Flows (1961) were considered a threat to the Soviet power; these novels were suppressed and the dissident writer effectively transformed into a nonperson. Grossman died of stomach cancer in 1964, not knowing whether his major novels would ever be read by the public. Life and Fate was published in 1980 in Switzerland, thanks to fellow dissidents: physicist Andrei Sakharov secretly photographed draft pages preserved by Semyon Lipkin, and the writer Vladimir Voinovich managed to smuggle the photographic films abroad. Two dissident researchers, professors and writers, Efim Etkind and Shimon Markish retyped the text from the microfilm, with some mistakes and misreadings due to the bad quality. The book was finally published in the Soviet Union in 1988 after the policy of glasnost was initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev. The text was published again in 1989, because further original manuscripts emerged after the first publication. Everything Flows was also published in the Soviet Union in 1989. Life and Fate is considered to be in part an autobiographical work. Robert Chandler, the novel's English translator, has written in his introduction to the Harvill edition that its leading character, Viktor Shtrum, ‘is a portrait of the author himself,’ reflecting in particular his anguish at the murder of his mother at the Berdichev Ghetto. Chapter 18, a letter from Shtrum's mother, Anna, has been dramatized for the stage and film The Last Letter (2002), directed by Frederick Wiseman, and starring Catherine Samie. Chandler additionally suggests that aspects of the character and experience of Shtrum are based on the physicist Lev Landau. The late novel Everything Flows, in turn, is especially noted for its quiet, unforced, and yet horrifying condemnation of the Soviet totalitarian state: a work in which Grossman, liberated from worries about censors, spoke honestly about Soviet history. Some critics have compared Grossman's novels to the work of Leo Tolstoy.
December 12, 1929
John James Osborne (12 December 1929 – 24 December 1994) was an English playwright, screenwriter, actor and critic of the Establishment. The success of his 1956 play Look Back in Anger transformed English theatre. In a productive life of more than 40 years, Osborne explored many themes and genres, writing for stage, film and TV. His personal life was extravagant and iconoclastic. He was notorious for the ornate violence of his language, not only on behalf of the political causes he supported but also against his own family, including his wives and children. Osborne was one of the first writers to address Britain's purpose in the post-imperial age. He was the first to question the point of the monarchy on a prominent public stage.
December 12, 1925
Laurence (David) Lerner (December 12, 1925, Cape Town, South Africa - January 19, 2016) was a South African born British literary critic and poet and novelist. He was born in Cape Town to parents of Lithuanian-Jewish ancestry, and educated at the University of Cape Town and Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was lecturer in English, at the University College of the Gold Coast, 1949–53, tutor then lecturer in English, Queen's University, Belfast, 1953–62, lecturer then reader then professor of English, University of Sussex 1962-84, and professor of English, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, 1985-95. He won the 1991 Harvie Branscomb Distinguished Professor Award. He was also a Governor of Leighton Park School, the Quaker school in England. He was at one point associated with the group of poets known as The Movement.
December 12, 1942
Born in Hai Hung Province, Le Luu was an army courier on the Ho Chi Minh trail and a combat correspondent during the American War. He is an editor for the literary magazine Van Nghe Quan Doi. Writer-translator Ngo Vinh Hai and poet--literary scholar Nguyen Ba Chung are both natives of Viet Nam and now live near Boston. Kevin Bowen is adjunct professor of English and director of the William Joiner Center and David Hunt is professor of history, both at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
December 12, 1958
Elizabeth Maguire (1958-2006) was born in New York City and had a distinguished twenty-five year career as an editor and publisher. She nurtured numerous prize-winning books and was especially known as a champion of African-American nonfiction and for her deep commitment to African-American writers. Maguire published one novel, Thinner, Blonder, Whiter (2003), during her lifetime. She had just completed her second novel, The Open Door, at the time of her death from ovarian cancer.
December 12, 1924
Tapfumaneyi Maurice Nyagumbo (12 December 1924 – 28 April 1989) was a Zimbabwean politician. Nyagumbo was born in Makoni near Rusape, and had his primary education at St Faith Anglican Mission and St Augustine's Penhalonga. Working in South Africa in the 1940s, he joined the South African Communist Party. In 1955 he became a founder member of the Zimbabwe Youth League. In 1959 he joined the African National Congress in 1959 and later that year he was detained. He spent most of the subsequent years until 1979 in prison in Rhodesia. During his time in detention he wrote a book, With the People: An Autobiography From the Zimbabwe Struggle, which was published soon after independence (Allison & Busby, 1979). He associated with Joshua Nkomo and James Chikerema, and they were arrested together in 1964. Nyagumbo was elected to the House of Assembly in 1980. He was a ZANU (the Zimbabwe African National Union) representative in the 1985 talks to merge ZANU and Nkomo's ZAPU. Nyagumbo was later was appointed Minister of Mines, and then was Minister of Political Affairs until 1988, when he became Senior Minister of State for Political Affairs. He resigned from his ministerial post and his post as administrative secretary of the governing party on 13 April 1989, in the wake of a report investigating corruption involving the sale of vehicles on the black market by Willowvale Motor Industries. Nyagumbo committed suicide in 1989, aged 64, by drinking rat poison after being charged with perjury during so-called Willowgate scandal.
December 12, 1961
Karen Palmer, a Los Angeles native, is the author of two novels, All Saints and Border Dogs. She has received an NEA fellowship and a Pushcart Prize, and her writing has been published in the Bedford/St. Martin’s Introduction to Literature, The Kenyon Review, Five Points, and The Manifest-Station.
December 12, 1940
Thomas Powers is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and writer best known for his books on the history of intelligence organizations. Among them are INTELLIGENCE WARS: AMERICAN SECRET HISTORY FROM HITLER TO AL-QAEDA; HEISENBERG’S WAR: THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE GERMAN BOMB; and THE MAN WHO KEPT THE SECRETS: RICHARD HELMS AND THE CIA. For most of the last decade Powers kept a 1984 Volvo at a nephew’s house in Colorado, which he drove on frequent trips to the northern Plains. He lives in Vermont with his wife, Candace.
December 12, 1957
Susanna Tamaro (born 12 December 1957) is an Italian novelist. She has also worked as a scientific documentarist and movie maker direction assistant. Susanna Tamaro was born in a middle class family in Trieste. Her mother is related to Italian's writer Italo Svevo. In 1976 Tamaro obtained a teaching diploma, and she received a scholarship to study at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, an Italian school of cinema, where she obtained a diploma in direction. In 1978, she started wring her first short stories and in 1981 she wrote her first novel: Illmitz. It was rejected by all the publishing houses she approached and to these days it is unpublished. In the 1980s she collaborated with RAI. In 1989, her novel La testa fra le nuvole (Head in Clouds) was published by Marsilio. She fell ill with asthmatic bronchitis and was forced to move from Rome to Orvieto, in Umbria. Her second novel Per voce sola (Just For One Voice) (1991) won the International PEN price and was translated into several languages. In 1991, she wrote a book for children Cuore di ciccia. In 1994, she wrote Va' dove ti porta il cuore (in English Follow your Heart). The book was an international bestseller and it became the "Italian book most sold in the 20th century". The plot of Follow Your Heart revolves around Olga, an elderly woman who decides to write a long letter to her granddaughter in America. Olga reflects on her life and reveals to her granddaughter their family's secrets. This novel was translated into more than 35 languages. In 1996, the Italian director, Cristina Comencini, made a film based on the novel. In 2006, she wrote Ascolta la mia voce (Listen to my voice), a sequel of Follow your Heart. This novel was translated in twelve languages. From 1996 to 1998 she contributed to Famiglia Cristiana, a popular Italian magazine. In 1997, she published the novel "Anima Mundi," chronicling the story of a friendship between two women. In 2001 she wrote Raccontami; in 2002 Più fuoco, più vento; in 2003 Fuori. In this novel, Tamaro revealed her position as pro-life, euthanasia and scientific research on embryos. She is largely sympathetic to the position taken by the Catholic Church on these topics. In 2008, she published Luisito- A Love Story.
December 12, 1949
Douglas Valentine has lectured and appeared on TV and radio talk shows, testified as an expert witness, served as a documentary film consultant and worked as a private investigator. His previous books include The Hotel Tacloban, The Phoenix Program and TDY.
December 12, 1937
Frederic Evans Wakeman, Jr. (December 12, 1937 – September 14, 2006) was a prominent American scholar of East Asian history and Professor of History at University of California, Berkeley. He served as president of the American Historical Association and of the Social Science Research Council. Jonathan D. Spence said of Wakeman that he was an evocative writer who chose, "like the novelist he really wanted to be, stories that split into different currents and swept the reader along," adding that he was "quite simply the best modern Chinese historian of the last 30 years."
December 12, 1918
VITTORIO LANTERNARI (December 12, 1918, Ancona, Italy - August 5, 2010, Rome, Italy) was Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Bari and a lecturer in ethnology at the University of Rome. He was born in 1918 and received his degree in the History of Religions from the University of Rome.
December 13, 1924
Beatriz Guido (13 December 1924 – 4 March 1988) was an Argentine novelist and screenwriter. Guido was born in Rosario, Santa Fe Province, the daughter of architect Ángel Guido (renowned as the creator of the National Flag Memorial) and of Uruguayan actress Berta Eirin. She studied at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires. She wrote her first novel, La casa del ángel, in 1954. She also wrote a short story named Usurpacion. Because of her outspoken anti-Peronism, she was branded a 'right-wing writer' and a 'false aristocrat' by the government of Juan Perón. In 1959 she married film director and screenwriter Leopoldo Torre Nilsson. She started working with her husband, who took several of her works to the screen. In 1984 she won the Konex Merit Diploma on Letters. That year she was appointed cultural attaché of the Argentine Embassy in Spain. She died of a heart attack in Madrid four years later, at the age of 63.
December 13, 1915
Ross Macdonald is the pseudonym of the American-Canadian writer of crime fiction Kenneth Millar (December 13, 1915 – July 11, 1983). He is best known for his series of hardboiled novels set in southern California and featuring private detective Lew Archer. Brought up in Ontario, he eventually settled in California, where he died in 1983.
December 13, 1911
Kenneth Patchen (December 13, 1911 – January 8, 1972) was an American poet and novelist. He experimented with different forms of writing and incorporated painting, drawing, and jazz music into his works, which were often compared with those of William Blake and Walt Whitman. Patchen's biographer wrote that he ‘developed in his fabulous fables, love poems, and picture poems a deep yet modern mythology that conveys a sense of compassionate wonder amidst the world's violence.’ Along with his friend and peer Kenneth Rexroth, he was a central influence over the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat Generation.
December 13, 1887
George Pólya (December 13, 1887 – September 7, 1985) was a Hungarian mathematician. He was a professor of mathematics from 1914 to 1940 at ETH Zürich and from 1940 to 1953 at Stanford University. He made fundamental contributions to combinatorics, number theory, numerical analysis and probability theory. He is also noted for his work in heuristics and mathematics education.
December 13, 1939
Joseph M. Forshaw is one of Australia’s foremost ornithologists and is recognized internationally as a leading expert on parrots. He is the author of several books, including Parrots of the World, with William Cooper; Australian Parrots; The Birds of Paradise and Bower Birds; Kingfishers and Related Birds; and Turacos: A Natural History of the Musophagidae. Frank Knight has been an illustrator for more than twenty-five years, producing illustrations for scientific papers, books, and lectures. His work appears in A Field Guide to the Birds of Australia; and in A Field Guide to the Mammals of Australia.
December 13, 1903
Willis Todhunter Ballard (December 13, 1903 – December 27, 1980) was a Cleveland, Ohio-born American author, known for his Westerns and mystery novels. Ballard was a prolific pulp writer, most notably for the legendary mystery magazine Black Mask under the name W. T. Ballard. He also authored several mystery and crime novels under that name. Between 1959 and 1966 Black Mask veteran Willis Todhunter Ballard penned seven books as Neil McNeil for the Gold Medal line of paperback originals about a pair of private eyes named Tony Costaine and Bert McCall. Ballard wrote western novels as Todhunter Ballard and the following pseudonyms: Jack Slade, Hunter D'Allard, Clay Turner, John Hunter, Sam Bowie, Parker Bonner, Brian Fox, and Clint Reno. He wrote numerous teleplays for shows such as Death Valley Days and Shannon. Ballard attended schools in Cleveland and Westtown, Pennsylvania. In 1926 he graduated from Wilmington College, Wilmington, Ohio. He was married to Phoebe Dwiggins, daughter of Clare Victor Dwiggins, the popular American cartoonist known as "Dwig." Ballard wrote thousands of magazines stories and over fifty television scripts. Almost all of these stories were in the mystery or western genre. Ballard died on December 27, 1980 in Mount Dora, Florida.
December 13, 1906
Sir Laurens Jan van der Post (13 December 1906 – 16 December 1996), was a 20th-century Afrikaner author, farmer, war hero, political adviser to British heads of government, close friend of Prince Charles, godfather of Prince William, educator, journalist, humanitarian, philosopher, explorer and conservationist.
December 13, 1960
José Eduardo Agualusa (Alves da Cunha) (born December 13, 1960, in Huambo, Angola—then called Nova Lisboa, Overseas Province of Angola) is an Angolan journalist and writer. He studied agronomy and silviculture in Lisbon, Portugal. He currently spends most of his time in Portugal, Angola and Brazil, working as a writer and journalist. His books have been translated into twenty-five languages. He writes monthly for the Portuguese magazine LER and weekly for the Brazilian newspaper O Globo and the Angolan portal Rede Angola. He hosts the radio program A Hora das Cigarras, about African music and poetry, on the channel RDP África. In 2006, he launched, with Conceição Lopes and Fatima Otero, the Brazilian publisher Língua Geral, dedicated exclusively to Portuguese-language authors.
December 14, 1953
Wade Davis (born December 14, 1953) is a Canadian anthropologist, ethnobotanist, author, and photographer whose work has focused on worldwide indigenous cultures, especially in North and South America and particularly involving the traditional uses and beliefs associated with psychoactive plants. Davis came to prominence with his 1985 best-selling book The Serpent and the Rainbow about the zombies of Haiti. Davis is Professor of Anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia. Davis has published popular articles in Outside, National Geographic, Fortune, and Condé Nast Traveler. Davis is an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. Named by the NGS as one of the Explorers for the Millennium, he has been described as a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity. In recent years his work has taken him to East Africa, Borneo, Nepal, Peru, Polynesia, Tibet, Mali, Benin, Togo, New Guinea, Australia, Colombia, Vanuatu, Mongolia, and the high Arctic of Nunuvut and Greenland.
December 14, 1910
Philip Sheldon Foner (December 14, 1910 – December 13, 1994) was an American labor historian and teacher. Foner was a prolific author and editor of more than 100 books. He is considered a pioneer in his extensive works on the role of radicals, blacks, and women in American labor and political history, which were generally neglected in mainstream academia at the time. A Marxist thinker, he influenced more than a generation of scholars, inspiring some of the work published by younger academics from the 1970s on. In 1941, Foner became a public figure as one among 26 persons fired from teaching and staff positions at City College of New York for political views, following an investigation of communist influence in education by a state legislative committee, known as the Rapp-Coudert Committee. Foner is best remembered for his 10-volume History of the Labor Movement in the United States, published between 1947 and 1994. He also edited the 5-volume collection The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, and wrote a biography of the abolitionist leader. His works Organized Labor and the Black Worker, (1974 and 1982 editions) and the two-volume Women in the American Labor Movement (1979 and 1980) also broke new ground in history.
December 14, 1942
Yun Heunggil (born 14 December 1942) is a South Korean novelist known for his treatment of conflicts between the individual and society. He received his degree in Korean literature from Wonkwang University in 1973. In 1977 he won the Korean Literature Writers Award.
December 14, 1922
Gualberto José Antonio Rodríguez Larreta Ferreira (14 December 1922 – 19 August 2015), better known as Antonio Larreta or Taco Larreta, was a Uruguayan writer, critic and actor.
December 14, 1916
Shirley Hardie Jackson (December 14, 1916 – August 8, 1965) was an American author. She was a popular writer in her time, and her work has received increased attention from literary critics in recent years. She influenced Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Nigel Kneale, and Richard Matheson. She is best known for the short story ’The Lottery‘ (1948), which suggests a secret, sinister underside to bucolic small-town America. In her critical biography of Jackson, Lenemaja Friedman notes that when ‘The Lottery’ was published in the June 26, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, it received a response that ‘no New Yorker story had ever received’. Hundreds of letters poured in that were characterized by, as Jackson put it, ‘bewilderment, speculation, and old-fashioned abuse’. In the July 22, 1948, issue of the San Francisco Chronicle, Jackson offered the following in response to persistent queries from her readers about her intentions: ‘Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.’ Jackson's husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, wrote in his preface to a posthumous anthology of her work that ‘she consistently refused to be interviewed, to explain or promote her work in any fashion, or to take public stands and be the pundit of the Sunday supplements. She believed that her books would speak for her clearly enough over the years.’ Hyman insisted the darker aspects of Jackson's works were not, as some critics claimed, the product of ‘personal, even neurotic, fantasies’, but that Jackson intended, as ‘a sensitive and faithful anatomy of our times, fitting symbols for our distressing world of the concentration camp and the Bomb’, to mirror humanity's Cold War-era fears. Jackson may even have taken pleasure in the subversive impact of her work, as revealed by Hyman's statement that she ‘was always proud that the Union of South Africa banned 'The Lottery', and she felt that they at least understood the story.’
December 14, 1640
Aphra Behn (14 December 1640 – 16 April 1689) was a prolific dramatist of the English Restoration, one of the first English professional female literary writers. Along with Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood, she is sometimes referred to as part of 'The fair triumvirate of wit.' Little is known for certain about Behn's life except for her work as an author and as a spy for the British crown. There is almost no documentary evidence of the details of her first 27 years. She possibly spent time in Surinam, although much of her fiction has become entwined with her apocryphal biography. During the 1660s she was deployed as a political operative in the Netherlands. Facing debt and poverty Behn embarked on a writing career, producing over 19 plays, plus poetry, translation and novels. Despite success in her own lifetime, Behn died in poverty. The bawdy topics of many of her plays led to her oeuvre being ignored or dismissed since her death. Her reputation slowly improved during the 20th century, but she is still little known to modern audiences.
December 14, 1948
Warwick Collins (14 December 1948 - 10 February 2013) was a British novelist, screenwriter, yacht designer, and evolutionary theorist. Collins was born in Johannesburg to English-speaking parents.
December 14, 1890
Sigurd Hoel (14 December 1890 – 14 October 1960) was one of the most influential literary figures in Norway between the wars. His scope was broad; besides being a major novelist, he was a subtle and incisive critic, a vigorous cultural commentator, and a distinguished editor. The translator, Sverre Lyngstad, is noted for his studies of Ivan Goncharov, Sigurd Hoel, Jonas Lie and, forthcoming, Knut Hamsun. He has translated numerous books by Hamsun, and works by Hoel and other Scandinavian writers such as Kjell Askildsen, Knut Faldbakken and Arne Garborg. GREEN INTEGER EL-E-PHANT 54. . .
December 14, 1929
Born in Harlem, he was a graduate of the New York City Public School System. Patterson received his BA in Political Science from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he was class poet, and won the Boretone Mountain Poetry Award for best poem written by an undergraduate. He received his MA in English from NYU. A prolific poet whose work was widely anthologized, Patterson was author of "26 Ways of Looking at a Black Man and Other Poems" published in 1969, and "Elemental Blues," published in 1983. He also wrote two opera librettos and an unpublished book-length poem on the life of Phillis Wheatley. Patterson read his works widely, from local venues to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and at the 60th Birthday Celebration of Chinua Achebe at the University of Nigeria. He collaborated with his wife in the creation of Black Poets Reading, a non-profit speakers' bureau; he represented the U.Ss at the Struga Festival in Macedonia. He was an Umbra Poet who served on the executive boards of the Poetry Society of America, the PEN American Center, and the Walt Whitman Birthplace. Patterson was also a well-known figure on the Long Island poetry landscape, a dignified voice for poetry who served for many years as a mentor to many individual writers regionally. His poetry also appeared in publications like Transatlantic Review, Ohio Review and Beloit Poetry Journal, as well as in many anthologies including "The Poetry of the Negro," "New Black Voices," "The Norton Introduction to Literature," and "The Best American Poetry of 1996." Patterson joined the New York City College faculty in 1968 and was founder of its Langston Hughes Festival, which he directed from 1973 to 1993. Patterson was on the board of the Walt Whitman Birthplace for many years. Ray Patterson died on April 5, 2001, at the age of 71.
December 14, 1952
Mark Gibney (born December 14, 1952) is the Carol G. Belk Distinguished Professor in Humanities at the University of North Carolina–Asheville. He has authored numerous books and is an award-winning scholar of human rights.
December 14, 1941
Award-winning poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis, professor emerita of English at Temple University, is also a critic and scholar with a special interest in modern and contemporary poetry. She is the author of several critical books, including Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934. DuPlessis is also the editor of The Selected Letters of George Oppen.
December 15, 1936
Donald Goines (pseudonym: Al C. Clark) (December 15, 1936 – October 21, 1974) was an African-American writer of urban fiction. His novels were deeply influenced by the work of Iceberg Slim. Goines was born in Detroit, Michigan on December 15, 1936. His parents were a middle-class black couple that ran a laundry business, with his mother Myrtle Goines telling Goines that her family was descended from Jefferson Davis and a slave. At 15 Goines lied about his age to join the Air Force, where he fought in the Korean War. During his stint in the armed forces, Goines developed an addiction to heroin that continued after his honorable discharge from the military in the mid-1950s. In order to support his addiction Goines committed multiple crimes, including pimping and theft, and was sent to prison several times. He began writing while serving a sentence in Michigan's Jackson Penitentiary. Goines initially attempted to write westerns, but decided to write urban fiction after reading Iceberg Slim's autobiography Pimp: The Story of My Life. Goines continued to write novels at an accelerated pace in order to support his drug addictions, with some books taking only a month to complete. His sister Joan Goines Coney later said that Goines wrote at such an accelerated pace in order to avoid committing more crimes and based many of the characters in his books on people he knew in real life. In 1974 Goines published Crime Partners, the first book in the Kenyatta series under the name "Al C. Clark". Holloway House's chief executive Bentley Morriss requested that Goines publish the book under a pseudonym in order to avoid having the sales of Goines's work suffer due to too many books releasing at once. The book dealt with an anti-hero character named after Jomo Kenyatta that ran a Black Panther-esque organization to clear the ghetto of crime. In his book The Low Road, Eddie B. Allen remarked that the series was a departure from some of Goines's other works, with the character of Kenyatta symbolizing a sense of liberation for Goines. Inner City Hoodlum, which Goines had finished before his death, was published posthumously in 1975. The story, set in Los Angeles, was about "smack", money and murder. On October 21, 1974 Goines and his common-law wife were discovered dead in their Detroit apartment. The police had received an anonymous phone call earlier that evening and responded, discovering Goines in the living room of the apartment and his common-law wife Shirley Sailor's body in the kitchen. Both Goines and Sailor had sustained multiple gunshot wounds to the chest and head. The identity of the killer or killers is unknown, as is the reason behind the murders. Popular theories involve Goines being murdered due to his basing several of his characters on real life criminals as well as the theory that Goines was killed due to his being in debt over drugs. Goines was later buried with his mother placing several of his books in his coffin.
December 15, 1930
Peter Hopkirk (December 15, 1930-August 22, 2014) was a British journalist and author who has written six books about the British Empire, Russia and Central Asia. Hopkirk was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford. Hopkirk travelled widely over many years in the regions where his six books are set – Russia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, China, India, Pakistan, Iran, and eastern Turkey. Before turning full-time author, he was an ITN reporter and newscaster for two years, the New York correspondent of Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express, and then worked for nearly twenty years on The Times; five as its chief reporter, and latterly as a Middle East and Far East specialist. In the 1950s, he edited the West African news magazine Drum, sister paper to its South African namesake. Before entering Fleet Street, he served as a subaltern in the King's African Rifles – in the same battalion as Lance-Corporal Idi Amin, later to emerge as a Ugandan tyrant. No stranger to misadventure, Hopkirk has twice been held in secret-police cells – in Cuba and the Middle East – and has also been hijacked by Arab terrorists. His works have been translated – officially – into fourteen languages, and unofficial versions in local languages are apt to appear in the bazaars of Central Asia. In 1999, he was awarded the Sir Percy Sykes Memorial Medal for his writing and travels by the Royal Society for Asian Affairs. Hopkirk's wife Kathleen wrote A Traveller's Companion to Central Asia, published by John Murray in 1994 (ISBN 0-7195-5016-5). Hopkirk died on 22 August 2014 at the age of 83.
December 15, 1963
Jennifer Lauck (born December 15, 1963) is an American fiction and non-fiction author, essayist, speaker and writing instructor.
December 15, 1937
Ronald William Loewinsohn (December 15, 1937 – October 14, 2014) was an American poet and novelist who was associated with the poetry of the San Francisco Renaissance since his inclusion in Donald Allen's 1960 poetry anthology, The New American Poetry 1945–1960. He was Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Born in Iloilo, Philippines, Loewinsohn and his family relocated Los Angeles in the United States in 1945. They later lived in The Bronx and then settled in San Francisco, where he lived until 1967. Loewinsohn credits this proximity to North Beach with his own development as a poet: 'I graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1955, with the Beat generation happening all around me. I met all of the principals, heard Ginsberg, Snyder, Whalen and McClure read in Berkeley in April, 1956, and continued to write, mostly poetry, in that vernacular and (I thought) oracular mode.' Loewinsohn then traveled, married in 1957, and worked as a lithographer for 12 years. In 1959, he published his first collection of poetry, Watermelons which contained an introduction by Allen Ginsberg and a prefatory letter by William Carlos Williams. He also co-edited the little magazine Change with Richard Brautigan. The poets who were most influential on his work included William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Richard Brautigan, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov. In the early 1960s, Loewinsohn taught a poetry workshop at San Francisco State University Extension, an experience which made him realize that he wanted to be a teacher. He received a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1967 and Ph.D. from the Harvard University in 1971 (his dissertation was on William Carlos Williams). He joined the faculty of the department of English at University of California, Berkeley in 1970 and retired in 2005. His papers are archived in Stanford University's Department of Special Collections and University Archives.
December 15, 1920
Albert Memmi (born December 15, 1920) is a French writer and essayist of Tunisian-Jewish origin. Born in Tunisia under French protectorate, from a Tunisian Jewish mother, Marguerite Sarfati, and a Tunisian-Italian Jewish father, François Memmi, he speaks French and Tunisian-Judeo-Arabic. He claims to be of Berber ancestry. He was educated in French primary schools, and continued on to the Carnot high school in Tunis, the University of Algiers where he studied philosophy, and finally the Sorbonne in Paris. Albert Memmi found himself at the crossroads of three cultures, and based his work on the difficulty of finding a balance between the East and the West. Parallel with his literary work, he pursued a career as a teacher; first as a teacher at the Carnot high school in Tunis (1953) and later in France (where he remained after Tunisian independence) at the Practical School of Higher Studies, at the HEC High School in Paris and at the University of Nanterre (1970). Although he supported the independence movement in Tunisia, he was not able to find a place in the new Muslim state[clarification needed]. His well-regarded first novel, La statue de sel (translated as The Pillar of Salt) was published in 1953 with a preface by Albert Camus and was awarded the Fénéon Prize in 1954. His other novels include Agar (translated as Strangers), Le Scorpion (The Scorpion), and Le Desert (The Desert). His best-known nonfiction work is The Colonizer and the Colonized, about the interdependent relationship of the two groups. It was published in 1957, a time when many national liberation movements were active. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the preface. The work is often read in conjunction with Frantz Fanon's Les damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth) and Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) and Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism. In October 2006, Memmi's follow-up to this work, entitled Decolonization and the Decolonized, was published. In this book, Memmi suggests that in the wake of global decolonization, the suffering of former colonies cannot be attributed to the former colonizers, but to the corrupt leaders and governments that control these states. Memmi's related sociological works include Dominated Man, Dependence, and Racism. Sean P. Hier, in a review of Memmi's Racism, calls it 'well-written and autobiographically informed.' He writes that Memmi's main claim is that racism is a ''lived experience' arising within human situations which only secondarily become 'social experiences.' According to Hier, Memmi writes that racism is 'endemic to collective human existence.' Memmi has also written extensively on Judaism, including 'Portrait of a Jew,' 'Liberation of the Jew' and 'Jews and Arabs.' He is also known for the 'Anthology of Maghrebian literature' (written in collaboration) published in 1965 (vol. 1) and 1969 (vol. 2). Scholar Judith Roumani reviews Memmi's fictional works, asserting that the Tunisian writer's work 'reveals the same philosophical evolution over time from his original viewpoints to less radical but perhaps more realistic positions.' She concludes that 'his latest fiction is certainly more innovative and different than his earlier work.' In 1995, Memmi writes about his own work: 'All of my work has been in sum an inventory of my attachments; all of my work has been, it should be understood, a constant revolt against my attachments; all of my work, for certain, has been an attempt at...reconciliation between the different parts of myself.'
December 15, 1930
Edna O'Brien (born 15 December 1930) is an Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short story writer. She is considered the 'doyenne' of Irish literature. Philip Roth considers her 'the most gifted woman now writing in English', while former President of Ireland Mary Robinson regards her as 'one of the great creative writers of her generation.' O'Brien's works often revolve around the inner feelings of women, and their problems in relating to men, and to society as a whole. Her first novel, The Country Girls, is often credited with breaking silence on sexual matters and social issues during a repressive period in Ireland following World War II. The book was banned, burned and denounced from the pulpit, and O'Brien left Ireland behind. O'Brien now lives in London. She received the Irish PEN Award in 2001. Saints and Sinners won the 2011 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the world's richest prize for a short story collection. Faber and Faber published her memoir, Country Girl, in 2012.
December 15, 1913
Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913 – February 12, 1980) was an American poet and political activist, best known for her poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her ‘exact generation’. One of her most powerful pieces was a group of poems entitled The Book of the Dead (1938), documenting the details of the Hawk's Nest incident, an industrial disaster in which hundreds of miners died of silicosis. Her poem ‘To be a Jew in the Twentieth Century’ (1944), on the theme of Judaism as a gift, was adopted by the American Reform and Reconstructionist movements for their prayer books, something Rukeyser said ‘astonished’ her, as she had remained distant from Judaism throughout her early life. She attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, a private school in The Bronx, then Vassar College in Poughkeepsie. From 1930 to 32, she attended Columbia University. Her literary career began in 1935 when her book of poetry, Theory of Flight, based on flying lessons she took, was chosen by the American poet Stephen Vincent Benét for publication in the Yale Younger Poets Series. ‘Rukeyser was one of the great integrators, seeing the fragmentary world of modernity not as irretrievably broken, but in need of societal and emotional repair.’ - Adrienne Rich. Rukeyser was active in progressive politics throughout her life. At age 18, she covered the Scottsboro case in Alabama, then worked for the International Labor Defense, which handled the defendants' appeals. She wrote for the Daily Worker and a variety of publications including Decision (payne), Life & Letters Today (London) for which she covered the People's Olympiad (Olimpiada Popular, Barcelona), the Catalonian government's alternative to the Nazis' 1936 Berlin Olympics. While she was in Spain, the Spanish Civil War broke out, the basis of her Mediterranean. Most famously, she traveled to Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, to investigate the recurring silicosis among miners there, which resulted in her well-regarded poem sequence The Book of the Dead. During and after World War II, she gave a number of striking public lectures, published in her The Life of Poetry (excerpts here). For much of her life, she taught university classes and led workshops, but she never became a career academic. In 1996, Paris Press reissued The Life of Poetry, which had been published in 1949 but had fallen out of print. In a publisher's note, Jan Freeman called it a book that ‘ranks among the most essential works of twentieth century literature.’ In it she makes the case that poetry is essential to democracy, essential to human life and understanding. In the 1960s and 1970s, a time when she presided over PEN's American center, her feminism and opposition to the Vietnam War (she traveled to Hanoi) drew a new generation to her poetry. The title poem of her last book, The Gates, is based on her unsuccessful attempt to visit Korean poet Kim Chi-Ha on death row in South Korea. In 1968, she signed the ‘Writers and Editors War Tax Protest’ pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. In addition to her poetry, she wrote a fictionalized memoir, The Orgy, plays and screenplays, and translated work by Octavio Paz and Gunnar Ekelöf. She also wrote biographies of Josiah Willard Gibbs, Wendell Wilkie, and Thomas Hariot. Andrea Dworkin worked as her secretary in the early 1970s. Also in the 1970s she served on the Advisory Board of the Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective, a New York City based theatre group that wrote and produced plays on feminist issues. Rukeyser died in New York on February 12, 1980 from a stroke, with diabetes as a contributing factor. She was 66.
December 15, 1933
Donald James Woods (15 December 1933 – 19 August 2001) was a South African journalist and anti-apartheid activist. As editor of the Daily Dispatch, he was known for befriending fellow activist Steve Biko, who died in police custody after being detained by the South African government. Woods continued his campaign against apartheid in London, and in 1978 became the first private citizen to address the United Nations Security Council.
December 15, 1948
Pascal Bruckner is the award-winning author of many books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novel Bitter Moon, which was made into a film by Roman Polanski. Bruckner’s nonfiction books include Perpetual Euphoria (Princeton) and The Tyranny of Guilt.
December 15, 1943
Peter Guralnick’s books include his prizewinning, two-volume Elvis Presley biography; a widely praised trilogy on the roots of American popular music, comprising Feel Like Going Home, Lost Highway, and Sweet Soul Music; and Searching for Robert Johnson. He lives in Massachusetts.
December 16, 1921
Tamás Aczél (16 December 1921 – 18 April 1994) was a Kossuth Prize-winning Hungarian poet, writer, journalist and university professor. Aczél was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1921. He graduated in his hometown in 1939, subsequently he went to Italy to study commerce and catering (1939–1941). After returned to Hungary, Aczél enrolled at the Pázmány Péter Catholic University and earned academic degree from Hungarian and English. Initially, Aczél came out with poems; the first collection of these was published in 1941. Later, being favoured by the post-war Hungarian government, he wrote agitational poems and schematic novels, for them he was awarded the Kossuth Prize (1949) and the Stalin Prize (1952). By 1953 Aczél radically broke with his earlier works; he gave up his an agitative poetry and became a leading figure of the literary opposition formed around Imre Nagy, that initiated the dismissal of the Stalinist-Rákosist literary control. After the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was repressed, Aczél fled the country and emigrated to England (1957–1966), before eventually settled in the United States (1966–1994). He became one of the best-known figures of the Hungarians emigrants and did a lot to make the story of the Hungarian Revolution more known. In the United States he was a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst until his death. Aczél met his wife, Olympic champion athlete Olga Gyarmati in emigration in England. Gyarmati was part of the 1956 Hungarian Olympic team of which many member decided to flee to the West following the unsuccessful revolution and the subsequent Soviet invasion of Hungary. They had two children, a son Tamás, and a daughter Júlia.
December 16, 1902
Rafael Alberti Merello (16 December 1902 – 28 October 1999) was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27. He is considered one of the greatest literary figures of the so-called Silver Age of Spanish Literature, and he won numerous prizes and awards. He died aged 96. After the Spanish Civil War, he went into exile because of his Marxist beliefs. On his return to Spain after the death of Franco, he was named Hijo Predilecto de Andalucía in 1983 and Doctor Honoris Causa by the Universidad de Cádiz in 1985. He published his memoirs under the title of La Arboleda perdida (‘The Lost Grove’) in 1959 and this remains the best source of information on his early life.
December 16, 1775
Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature. Her realism and biting social commentary have gained her historical importance among scholars and critics.
December 16, 1917
Sri Lankabhimanya Sir Arthur Charles Clarke (16 December 1917 – 19 March 2008) was a British science fiction writer, popularizer of space travel, futurist, and inventor. He is perhaps most famous for being co-writer of the screenplay for the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, generally considered one of the most influential films of all time. His other science fiction writings earned him a number of Hugo and Nebula awards, along with a large readership, making him into one of the towering figures of the field. For many years he, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, were known as the ‘Big Three’ of science fiction. Clarke was also a science writer, who was both an ardent proponent of space travel and a futurist of uncanny ability, who won several awards in the field. These all together eventually earned him the moniker ‘prophet of the space age’. Clarke served in the Royal Air Force as a radar instructor and technician from 1941 to 1946. In 1945, he proposed a satellite communication system—an idea that, in 1963, won him the Franklin Institute's Stuart Ballantine Medal. He was the chairman of the British Interplanetary Society from 1947 to 1950 and again in 1953. In 1956, Clarke emigrated to Sri Lanka, largely to pursue his interest in scuba diving. That year, he discovered the underwater ruins of the ancient Koneswaram temple in Trincomalee. He lived in Sri Lanka until his death. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1998 and was awarded Sri Lanka's highest civil honour, Sri Lankabhimanya, in 2005. Later on he was host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World.
December 16, 1929
Sir Bernard Rowland Crick (16 December 1929 – 19 December 2008) was a British political theorist and democratic socialist whose views can be summarised as 'politics is ethics done in public'. He sought to arrive at a 'politics of action', as opposed to a 'politics of thought' or of ideology, and he held that 'political power is power in the subjunctive mood.' He was a leading critic of behaviouralism.
December 16, 1928
Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 – March 2, 1982) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, and altered states. In his later works Dick's thematic focus strongly reflected his personal interest in metaphysics and theology. He often drew upon his own life experiences in addressing the nature of drug abuse, paranoia, schizophrenia, and transcendental experiences in novels such as A Scanner Darkly and VALIS. The novel The Man in the High Castle bridged the genres of alternate history and science fiction, earning Dick a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, a novel about a celebrity who awakens in a parallel universe where he is unknown, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel in 1975. ‘I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards,’ Dick wrote of these stories. ‘In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.’ In addition to 44 published novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, ten popular films based on his works have been produced, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, and The Adjustment Bureau. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series.
December 16, 1927
Peter Malcolm de Brissac Dickinson (born 16 December 1927) is an English author and poet who has written a wide variety of books, notably children's books and detective stories, over a long and distinguished career. Dickinson was born in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), but his parents moved back to England so that he and his brothers could attend English schools: Dickinson was at Eton College from 1941 to 1946. After completing his National Service (1946–48), he studied at King's College, Cambridge, where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1951. For seventeen years, from 1952–1969, he worked as assistant editor, resident poet and reviewer for Punch magazine. Dickinson has written almost fifty books, which fall into three general categories: mysteries for adults (including the James Pibble series), novels for younger readers (many of which have a fantastic or supernatural element), and a few simpler children's books. Both of Dickinson's first crime novels won the Crime Writers' Association's Gold Dagger, SKIN DEEP in 1968 and A PRIDE OF HEROES in 1969. He has been similarly successful with his children's books. He won the Guardian Award in 1977 for THE BLUE HAWK and the Whitbread prize for best children's book in 1979 for TULKU. In 1982 he was placed on the International Board of Books for Young People Honor List for TULKU, and THE IRON LION was selected one of New York Times Notable Books. In 1989 he won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Eva. He was also shortlisted for the Whitbread award for his book THE KIN. Dickinson's three early books, THE WEATHERMONGER, HEARTSEASE and THE DEVIL'S CHILDREN, make up the Changes Trilogy, which was adapted (with many alterations) into the BBC TV series The Changes in 1975. The trilogy was written in reverse order: THE DEVIL'S CHILDREN is actually the first book in terms of the trilogy's chronology, HEARTSEASE the second, and The Weathermonger the third. A pair of alternative history novels, KING AND JOKER (1976) and SKELETON-IN-WAITING (1989), are based on the premise that Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence survives and ultimately reigns as Victor I of England. A collection of his own previously published and new poetry, THE WEIR: POEMS BY PETER DICKINSON, was published on the occasion of his 80th birthday in 2007, as a gift from his four children. His latest work is FIRE (2009), published by Putnam Books, USA, which he co-wrote with Robin McKinley. Dickinson married Mary Rose Barnard in 1953; the couple had two sons (one the author, John Dickinson) and two daughters. He is now married to the novelist Robin McKinley. Dickinson was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2009 Birthday Honours.
December 16, 1923
Silvio Alberto (Tip) Marugg (Willemstad, Curaçao, 16 December 1923–22 April 2006) was a Dutch-Antillian writer and poet of Venezuelan/Swiss heritage. Marugg wrote three novels in Dutch: Weekendpelgrimage (1957), In de straten van Tepalka (1967); and De morgen loeit weer aan (1988), which was nominated for a major Dutch literature prize. His style is best characterized as a variation on magic realism. Marugg also wrote several poems (published in literary magazines as well as his book of poems Afschuw van Licht) and a Dikshonario Erotiko; a dictionary of all words with an erotic meaning used in Papiamentu.
December 16, 1909
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
December 16, 1900
V.S. Pritchett, who was born on December 16, 1900, in Ipswich, England, to Sawdon and Beatrice (Martin) Pritchett, told the story of his life in two volumes. The first of these is A CAB AT THE DOOR: A MEMOIR (the British subtitle is CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH, 1900-1920), and the second is MIDNIGHT OIL (1971). His account of his life is humorous at times and rather detached. His father, a religious seeker, found refuge in later years in Christian Science. Micawber-like, Sawdon Pritchett was optimistic about the get-rich-quick schemes which left the family in straitened circumstances and which accounted for the title, A CAB AT THE DOOR. The family had to move frequently, with disastrous consequences for Pritchett's formal education. The mother, Beatrice Martin, was a sometimes vain and sometimes foolish woman of a decent lower class family. Pritchett loved literature and read Dickens and Hardy. He felt that he lacked grounding in mathematics and science. When his father, in 1915, decided that the son must learn a trade, the youth was upset at having his education interrupted. Though he didn't like his work in the leather trade, he did enjoy meeting and associating with people. At 20 he left for Paris. He continued to read not only British authors and poets but the more important modern French ones. He acquired a fluency in French of which he was very proud. It was almost by chance that he submitted three pieces for publication in 1921. The Christian Science Monitor published one of these, and his career was launched. During his two-year stay in Paris he made friends with other young people, though he was rather shy and certainly innocent by today's standards. He longed for the love of a young woman and ultimately lost his innocence. Evidently there was something about this short, shy youth that brought out the maternal instinct in older women: more than once he was mothered and advised by a woman older than himself. In 1923 he returned to London and was asked by the Christian Science Monitor to write a series of articles about Ireland. The extended visit to Ireland, as well as a subsequent visit to Spain, led to a series of travel books written over a span of nearly 40 years. Pritchett traveled to various parts of Ireland to acquire first-hand material for his articles and in the process developed an admiration for the Irish, though an occasional dreariness of the landscape depressed him. When he visited Spain he was impressed with the country, and it provided him with the setting for some of his stories and furnished him with journalistic material. He published his first novel, Clare Drummer, in 1929 and a collection of short stories, THE SPANISH VIRGIN AND OTHER STORIES, in 1930. Neither book was a critical success. These were followed by another novel, ELOPEMENT INTO EXILE - or SHIRLEY SANZ, to give it its British title. This book was not a critical success either. NOTHING LIKE LEATHER, which appeared in 1935, traces the material success and moral disintegration of Matthew Burkle when by dint of hard work he begins to rise in the leather tannery where he is employed. The industrial town in which the novel is set is vividly and realistically described. In 1935 DEAD MAN LEADING appeared. Its setting - the jungles of Brazil - was more exotic. As in Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS, there is a symbolic journey motif, and two of the men who make the journey, Philips and Johnson, attempt to find in Wright a father figure. After 15 years, in 1951, another novel, MR. BELUNCLE, appeared. Like Pritchett's own father, Beluncle, the protagonist, is searching for religious fulfillment. Brendan Gill, writing in the New Yorker, admitted that the novel amused, yet he thought it only partially successful because he found it also ‘forced and cold.’ In MIDNIGHT OIL Pritchett mentions in passing that his father thought that he saw himself in the novel, and the author nowhere denies that the protagonist was based on his father, whose penchant for schemes of easy wealth has already been mentioned. It may be that the objectivity that can be achieved by the lapse of time between actual events and their recollection had not yet been reached. Certainly Pritchett's biography of the great 19th-century novelist Honoré de Balzac deserves mention. Though Millicent Bell pointed out that in BALZAC (1974) he broke no new ground, she found him good at ‘describing persons and scenes’ and considered that he wrote ‘in a sinewy and witty style.’ There can be no doubt that his sympathies lie with his subject, and Balzac's lover, Madame Hanska, who might have treated the author more handsomely than she did (though she did fulfill on his deathbed her promise to marry him), comes out a decided second best. In reviewing his COLLECTED STORIES (1982), Valentine Cunningham, who called Pritchett ‘the best living English author, ‘ commented that he was ‘always on the alert for the illustrative moment, ‘ that he turned ‘human moments into epiphanies, ‘ and that he was ‘celebrating the heroicism of banal life.’ The last comment rings true, for the lives examined are only seemingly banal and the deep current beneath them is all. Cunningham singled out for special praise ‘ Many Are Disappointed’; however, another superior story, ‘Blind Love, ‘ which deals with a blind man and his housekeeper who hides from the world a disfiguring birthmark that the blind man cannot see, truly illustrates that a rich and turbulent life can exist beneath an outwardly placid, banal one. In 1983 MORE COLLECTED STORIES was published. Both this collection and the earlier one go back many years. A MAN OF LETTERS: SELECTED ESSAYS by Pritchett was published in 1986. As a literary critic Pritchett was incisive, and in a happy choice of phrase he could lay bare for the reader an author's method of approaching his subject. In THE MYTH MAKERS: LITERARY ESSAYS (1979) he said of Jean Genet that ‘he proceeds from criminal ritual to the literary without losing his innate interest in violence, ‘ and again, ‘Genet is the natural product of an age of violence, a cult figure for those who feel guilty because they have escaped martyrdom.’ In his essay on Gustave Flaubert he says of MADAME BOVARY ‘She is dignified by a real fate - not by a false word 'Fate, ' one of the clichés Flaubert derided, ‘ and he described Flaubert himself as ‘her fellow adolescent.’ Of Gabriel Garcia Márquez's method in ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, he said that ‘Marquez seems to be sailing down the blood stream of his people, ‘ and spoke of ‘the slippery comedies and tragedies of daily life’ as depicted in that novel. In an essay on the British writer Henry Yorke, Pritchett called the author ‘sensitive to that rarity which is buried in people who outwardly might be commonplace, ‘ and he went on to say that he thought that Yorke's characters ‘were living in the imagination and this made him a master of comedy of what can only be called the human underground.’ These words aptly fit Pritchett's own method and characters. Pritchett himself preferred his travel books, short stories, and novels to his reviews, but he was wrong to so belittle his talents as a critic, and his critical ability, if anything, grew with the passage of time. Cunningham shared Pritchett's own belief that the short stories he wrote in the 1920s were merely ‘apprenticeship work’ and that he came into his own in the 1930s. At his very best he endowed his stories with an interest and understanding of the human condition that will be felt by readers yet unborn. Even into his eighties, Pritchett took on an enormous workload, writing reviews nearly full time and publishing his final biography, of Chekhov, in 1988. V.S. Pritchett died in London's Whittingham Hospital on March 21, 1997, at the age of 96.
December 16, 1936
John David Caute (born 16 December 1936 in Alexandria, Egypt) is a British author, novelist, playwright, historian and journalist. Caute was educated at Edinburgh Academy, Wellington College, Wadham College, Oxford and St Antony's College, Oxford. A Henry Fellow at Harvard (1960–61), he was elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford in 1959, but resigned in 1965. From 1966 to 1985 Caute held various academic positions, including Reader at Brunel University, and Visiting Professor at New York University, Columbia University, University of California, Irvine, and Bristol University. He was Literary Editor of the New Statesman 1979-80, and Co-Chairman of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain, 1982. His novel Comrade Jacob (1961) was adapted as the film Winstanley (1975). Caute's book The Great Fear, a history of the Red Scare in 1940s and 1950s America, was praised by Tribune magazine. He has been a JP and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
December 16, 1936
Morris Seligman Dees Jr. (born December 16, 1936) is an American attorney who is the co-founder and chief trial counsel for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and a former market engineer for book publishing. Along with his law partner, Joseph J. Levin Jr., Dees founded the SPLC in 1971. Dees and his colleagues at the Southern Poverty Law Center have been "credited with devising innovative ways to cripple hate groups" such as the Ku Klux Klan.
December 16, 1929
Allen D. Grimshaw (December 16, 1929 - June 15, 2011) was professor emeritus of sociology at Indiana University. His teaching focused on social conflict as well as on language and its use in social context.
December 16, 1863
Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, known in English as George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952), was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. Originally from Spain, Santayana was raised and educated in the United States from the age of eight and identified himself as an American, although he always kept a valid Spanish passport. He wrote in English and is generally considered an American man of letters. At the age of forty-eight, Santayana left his position at Harvard and returned to Europe permanently, never to return to the United States. Santayana is popularly known for aphorisms, such as "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", "Only the dead have seen the end of war", and the definition of beauty as "pleasure objectified".
December 16, 1938
Liv Johanne Ullmann (born 16 December 1938) is a Norwegian actress and film director. She is known as one of the "muses" of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. Ullmann won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama in 1972 for the film The Emigrants (1971), and has been nominated for another four. In 2000, she was nominated for the Palme d'Or for her second directorial feature film, Faithless. She has also received two BAFTA Award nominations for her performances in Scenes from a Marriage (1973) and Face to Face (1976), and two Academy Award nominations for The Emigrants and Face to Face.
December 16, 1857
František ?eho? (December 16, 1857 St?žery - October 6, 1899 Prague ) was a Czech ethnographer focused on the study of Ruthenians , Ukrainians and other nationalities in Galicia and Bukovina.
December 16, 1932
Thanassis Valtinos was born in Greece in 1932. A recipient of a Ford Foundation grant and an honorary fellow of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Valtinos has won numerous awards for his innovative work. A member of the International Theater Institute and the former president of the Society of Greek Writers, he continues to write fiction and screenplays and to translate classical Greek drama for the theater. His novel Data Decade of the Sixties is also available from Northwestern University Press. Jane Assimakopoulos, an American writer and translator, lives in Ioannina, Greece. Stavros Deligiorgis is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Iowa.
December 16, 1946
Adriaan van Dis (Bergen aan Zee, 16 December 1946) is a Dutch author. He debuted in 1983 with the novella Nathan Sid. In 1995 his book Indische Duinen (My Father's War), which in its narrative is a follow up to his debut novella, was also awarded several prestigious literary awards. He is also known as the host of his own award-winning television talkshow named Hier is... Adriaan van Dis, that lasted from 1983 to 1992 and several successful award-winning television documentaries. With the publication of his Indies inspired compilation book De Indie boeken (The Indies books) in 2012, van Dis establishes himself as one of the most significant second generation authors of Dutch Indies literature.
December 16, 1990
SAFIA ELHILLO is a Cave Canem fellow and poetry editor at Kinfolks Quarterly. Her work has appeared in several journals and anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. She is the author of The Life and Times of Susie Knuckles.
December 17, 1903
Erskine Caldwell (born Dec. 17, 1903, Coweta county, Ga., U.S. - died April 11, 1987, Paradise Valley, Ariz.) U.S. author. Caldwell became familiar with poor sharecroppers through his father's missionary work. Fame arrived with TOBACCO ROAD (1932), a controversial novel whose title became a byword for rural squalor; adapted as a play, it ran more than seven years on Broadway. GOD'S LITTLE ACRE (1933), also a best-seller, featured a cast of hopelessly poor degenerates. Like his other novels and stories about the rural Southern poor, they mix violence and sex in grotesque tragicomedy.
December 17, 1896
Gustavo Corção Braga (17 December 1896 – 6 July 1978) was a Brazilian Catholic writer. Corção was educated at the Polytechnic School of UFRJ, but left the institution in 1920 without obtaining his degree in engineering, specializing later in electronics. He was an active member of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) at this time. After meeting Alceu Amoroso Lima, however, he kept himself at a distance from communist groups and remained close to Catholic circles until his conversion, in 1939. Corção studied Thomism and theology with Benedictine monks and played an important role at Dom Vital Centre in Rio, founded by Jackson de Figueiredo. He participated in the ‘Catholic revival’ movement in Brazil, which converted many intellectuals previously attracted to Positivism. The writings of G.K. Chesterton had a strong effect on Corção. In 1946 he published an essay on Chesterton's ideas and even translated one of his books, The Barbarism of Berlin. Corção was also strongly influenced by the work of the French Catholic writer Jacques Maritain, while still close to the Action Française. His only novel, Lições de Abismo (Who if I Cry Out), was awarded by Unesco and later translated into many languages. Corção worked for decades as a journalist, collaborating to several prestigious newspapers, such as Tribuna da Imprensa, Diário de Notícias, Estado de S. Paulo and O Globo. In O Século do Nada (The Century of Nothing), he passionately defended the Francoist Spain and José Antonio Primo de Rivera. According to him, the Second Vatican Council was a ‘terminal sin.’ In August 1969, he founded Permanência, a split from Dom Vital Centre. Corção's influence among traditionalist Catholics persists to this day. In France, for instance, the Abbey of Sainte-Madeleine du Barroux has published two of his books, La Découverte de l'Autre and Le Siècle de l'Enfer. French historian Olivier Companion also notes the publication of some of Corção's work in Jean Madiran's newspaper, Routes. His work has been highly regarded by Antonio Olinto, Ariano Suassuna, Gilberto Freyre, Nelson Rodrigues and Manuel Bandeira. The translator, Clotilde Wilson, is an associate professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literature at the University of Washington.
December 17, 1873
Ford Madox Ford (17 December 1873 – 26 June 1939), born Ford Hermann Hueffer, was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature. He is now remembered best for his publications The Good Soldier (1915), the Parade's End tetralogy (1924–28) and The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906–08). The Good Soldier is frequently included among the great literature of the 20th century, including the Modern Library 100 Best Novels, The Observer's ‘100 Greatest Novels of All Time’, and The Guardian's ‘1000 novels everyone must read’. Ford was born to Catherine and Francis Hueffer, the eldest of three; his brother was Oliver Madox Hueffer. His father, who became music critic for The Times, was German and his mother English. His paternal grandfather Johann Hermann Hüffer was first to publish the fellow Westphalian poet and author Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, a Catholic aristocrat. He used the name of Ford Madox Hueffer and during 1919 changed it to Ford Madox Ford (allegedly, in the aftermath of World War I because ‘Hueffer’ sounded too German) in honour of his grandfather, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, whose biography he had written. One of his most famous works is The Good Soldier (1915), a novel set just before World War I which chronicles the tragic lives of two ‘perfect couples’ using intricate flashbacks. In the ‘Dedicatory Letter to Stella Ford’, his wife, that prefaces the novel, Ford reports that a friend pronounced The Good Soldier ‘the finest French novel in the English language!’ Ford pronounced himself a ‘Tory mad about historic continuity’ and believed the novelist's function was to serve as the historian of his own time. Ford was involved with British war propaganda after the beginning of World War I. He worked for the War Propaganda Bureau, managed by C. F. G. Masterman, with other writers and scholars who were popular during that time, such as Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Murray. Ford wrote two propaganda books for Masterman, namely When Blood is Their Argument: An Analysis of Prussian Culture (1915), with the help of Richard Aldington, and Between St Dennis and St George: A Sketch of Three Civilizations (1915). After writing the two propaganda books, Ford enlisted at 41 years of age into the Welch Regiment on 30 July 1915, and was sent to France, thus ending his cooperation with the War Propaganda Bureau. His combat experiences and his previous propaganda activities inspired his tetralogy Parade's End (1924–1928), set in England and on the Western Front before, during and after World War I. Ford also wrote dozens of novels as well as essays, poetry, memoirs and literary criticism, and collaborated with Joseph Conrad on three novels, The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903) and The Nature of a Crime (1924, although written much earlier). During the three to five years after this direct collaboration, Ford's best known achievement was The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906–1908), historical novels based on the life of Katharine Howard, which Conrad termed, at the time, ‘the swan song of historical romance.’ Ford's novel Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (1911, extensively revised during 1935) is, in a sense, the reverse of Twain's novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. During 1908, he initiated The English Review, in which he published works by Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, John Galsworthy and William Butler Yeats, and gave debuts to Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas. During 1924, he initiated The Transatlantic Review, a journal with great influence on modern literature. Staying with the artistic community in the Latin Quarter of Paris, he befriended James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Jean Rhys, all of whom he would publish (Ford is the model for the character Braddocks in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises). As a critic, he is known for remarking ‘Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.’ George Seldes recounts Ford's disappointment with Hemingway: ‘'and he disowns me now that he has become better known than I am.' Tears now came to Ford's eyes.’ Ford says, ‘I helped Joseph Conrad, I helped Hemingway. I helped a dozen, a score of writers, and many of them have beaten me. I'm now an old man and I'll die without making a name like Hemingway.’ Seldes observes, ‘At this climax Ford began to sob. Then he began to cry.’ Hemingway devoted a chapter of his Parisian memoir A Moveable Feast to an encounter with Ford at a café in Paris during the early 1920s. During a later sojourn in the United States, he was involved with Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter and Robert Lowell (who was then a student). Ford was always a champion of new literature and literary experimentation. During 1929, he published The English Novel: From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad, a brisk and accessible overview of the history of English novels. He had an affair with Jean Rhys, which ended acrimoniously. Ford spent the last years of his life teaching at Olivet College in Michigan, and died in Deauville, France, at the age of 65.
December 17, 1916
EMILIO SALLES GOMES began his career as a critic in 1941 and is considered to be the greatest critic of cinematography ever to have emerged from Brazil. In 1936 he had been imprisoned for protesting against the Fascist Vargas regime. He traveled to Europe, where he completed his film studies, which resulted in the now classic study of the films of Jean Vigo, which has been published here and in France. In 1977, he published P.’S THREE WOMEN, a three-part comic capitulation of the spirit in its battle with the flesh, in the forms of Helena, Hermengarda, and Her. TWICE WITH HELENA was made into a film, MEMORIAS DE HELENA, by the Brazilian director David Neves. Immediately upon publication, the work was hailed as a classic of erotic comedy, with critics comparing the author to Philip Roth and Machado de Assis. It was to be his only novel; he died shortly after its publication.
December 17, 1884
Stanislaus Joyce (December 17, 1884, Dublin, Republic of Ireland Died: June 16, 1955, Trieste, Italy), the brother of James Joyce, was a professor of literature in Trieste. His wife, Nelly Joyce, published My Brother's Keeper after his death. George H. Healey was Professor of English and Curator of Rare Books, University Libraries, Cornell University.
December 17, 1905
Erico Verissimo (December 17, 1905 – November 28, 1975) was an important Brazilian writer, born in the State of Rio Grande do Sul. His father, Sebastião Veríssimo da Fonseca, heir of a rich family in Cruz Alta, Rio Grande do Sul, met financial ruin during his son's youth. Veríssimo worked in a pharmacy before obtaining a job at Editora Globo, a book publisher, where he translated and released works of writers like Aldous Huxley. During the Second World War, he went to the United States. This period of his life was recorded in some of his books, including: Gato Preto em Campo de Neve ('Black Cat in a Snow Field'), A Volta do Gato Preto ('The Return of the Black Cat'), and História da Literatura Brasileira ('History of Brazilian Literature'), which contains some of his lectures at UCLA. His epic O Tempo e o Vento ('The Time and the Wind'') became one of the great masterpieces of the Brazilian novel, alongside Os Sertões by Euclides da Cunha, and Grande Sertão: Veredas by Guimarães Rosa. Four of Veríssimo's works, Time and the Wind, Night, Mexico, and His Excellency, the Ambassador, were translated into the English language by Linton Lomas Barrett. He was the father of another famous writer of Rio Grande do Sul, Luis Fernando Veríssimo. Érico Veríssimo was the son of Sebastião Veríssimo da Fonseca and Abegahy Lopes Veríssimo. He was born into a wealthy family that went bankrupt, and consequentially didn't manage to complete secondary school because of the need to work. Veríssimo settled in Cruz Alta as the owner of a drugstore, but was unsuccessful. He then moved to Porto Alegre in 1930, willing to live solely by selling his writing. There he began to live around writers of renown, such as Mário Quintana, Augusto Meyer, Guilhermino César and others. In the following year, he was hired to occupy the position of secretary of edition of the Revista do Globo, of which he would become editor in 1933. He then undertook the whole editorial project at Editora Globo, propelling its nationwide fame. He published his first work, Fantoches ('Puppets'), in 1932, with a sequence of short stories, mostly in the form of short plays. The following year, he saw his first great success with the romance Clarissa. Veríssimo married in 1931 to Mafalda Volpe and had two children, Luis Fernando Veríssimo, also a writer, and Clarissa. In 1943 he moved with his family to the United States, where he gave lessons on Brazilian Literature in the University of Berkeley, until 1945. Between 1953 and 1956 he was director of the Department of Cultural Affairs of the Organization of American States, in Washington, D.C.. From these trips and from the stay in the US, two books originated: Gato Preto em Campo de Neve ('Black Cat in a Snow Field') in 1941, and A Volta do Gato Preto ('The Return of the Black Cat') in 1947. His historical trilogy O Tempo e o Vento ('The Time and the Wind') is considered as his greatest work, written in the period of 1949-1961, from which arose primordial characters such as Ana Terra and Capitão Rodrigo that went on to become popular amongst his readers. In 1965 Veríssimo published the romance O Senhor Embaixador ('His Excellency, the Ambassador'), in which he reflected upon the deviations of Latin America. In the romance Incidente em Antares ('Incident in Antares'), written in 1971, he traces a parallel with Brazilian politics with the use of fantasy, with the rebellion of corpses during a strike of the gravekeepers, in the fictitious city of Antares. After suffering from a heart attack in 1975, Veríssimo was unable to complete the second volume of his autobiography entitled Solo de Clarineta ('Clarinet Solo'), which was intended to be a trilogy, apart from a romance which would be entitled A Hora do Sétimo Anjo ('The Hour of the Seventh Angel').
December 17, 1905
Bento Munhoz da Rocha Neto (Paranaguá, December 17, 1905 - Curitiba, November 12, 1973 ) was a Brazilian engineer, teacher, writer, sociologist, and politician. He was a federal deputy from 1946 to 1950, when he was elected governor of the state of Paraná , governing from January 31, 1951 to April 3, 1955. In 1955 he took over the Ministry of Agriculture, and from 1958 to 1962 he was a federal deputy. He taught History of America at the Federal University of Paraná , Sociology at the Catholic University and Political Economy at the Faculty of Engineering. He was a constituent federal deputy from 1946 to 1950, when he was elected governor of the State of Paraná and, in 1955, he assumed the Ministry of Agriculture, and from 1958 to 1962 he was a federal deputy. As a constituent deputy, he was the first secretary of the Federal Chamber, being one of the leaders of the movement that extinguished the Iguaçu Territory, created by the Estado Novo. Elected governor of Paraná by a coalition of parties for the five-year period 1951–1955, he did not fully complete his mandate, resigning from governance on February 2, 1955, to be a candidate for the vice presidency of the Republic. Disarticulated the movement, occupied the Pasta of Agriculture, in the governments of Café Filho and Carlos Luz. Among his fourteen published works, the following stand out: An Interpretation of the Americas (translated into English ), November Radiography (2nd edition), Message from America (translated into English), Itinerary (2nd edition), Profiles , Tingüís and Presença of Brazil , among others.
December 17, 1919
Es'kia Mphahlele (1919-2008) was born Ezekiel Mphahlele. His writings include his celebrated first story collection, MAN MUST LIVE, and an acclaimed autobiography, DOWN SECOND AVENUE. Peter N. Thuynsma succeeded Es'kia Mphahlele as professor of African literature at the University of Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he lives.
December 17, 1894
Hans Henny Jahnn (17 December 1894, Stellingen – 29 November 1959, Hamburg) was a German playwright, novelist, and organ-builder. As a playwright, he wrote: Pastor Ephraim Magnus (1917), which The Cambridge Guide to Theatre describes as a nihilistic, Expressionist play "stuffed with perversities and sado-masochistic motifs"; Coronation of Richard III (1922; "equally lurid"); and a version of Medea (1926). Later works include the novel Perrudja, an unfinished trilogy of novels River without Banks (Fluss ohne Ufer), the drama Thomas Chatterton (1955; staged by Gustaf Gründgens in 1956), and the novella The Night of Lead. Erwin Piscator staged Jahnn's The Dusty Rainbow (Der staubige Regenbogen) in 1961. Jahnn was also a music publisher, focusing on 17th-century organ music. He was a contemporary of organ-builder Rudolf von Beckerath. He met Gottlieb Friedrich Harms "Friedel" (1893-1931), with whom he was united in a "mystical wedding" in 1913, at a secondary school (the St. Pauli Realschule) which they both attended, and they lived together between 1914 and 1918. They met Ellinor Philips in 1918. In 1919, Jahnn founded the community of Ugrino with a sculptor, Franz Buse. In 1926, Jahnn married Ellinor, and Harms married Sybille Philips, Ellinor's sister, in 1928. Jahnn's bisexuality, well-documented in his life, appears as well throughout his literary work. Hans Henny Jahnn is buried alongside Harms and Ellinor at Nienstedten Cemetery, Hamburg, Germany.
December 17, 1847
Auguste Émile Faguet (17 December 1847 - 7 June 1916) was a French author and literary critic. Faguet was born at La Roche-sur-Yon, Vendée, and educated at the École normale supérieure in Paris. After teaching for some time in La Rochelle and Bordeaux, he returned to Paris to act as assistant professor of poetry in the university. He became professor in 1897. He was elected to the Académie française in 1900, and received the ribbon of the Légion d'honneur in the next year. He acted as dramatic critic to the Soleil; from 1892 he was literary critic to the Revue Bleue; and in 1896 took the place of Jules Lemaître on the Journal des débats. He died in Paris, aged 68.
December 17, 1962
Jan Bondeson (born 17 December 1962) is a Swedish-British rheumatologist, scientist and author, working as a senior lecturer and consultant rheumatologist at the Cardiff University School of Medicine. He has also written several non-fiction books on various topics such as medical anomalies and unsolved murders. In 2003 Bondeson told an interviewer, "I've always had a profound interest in history, especially the history of medicine, and a bit of a fancy for the macabre and odd." Bondeson is the biographer of a predecessor of Jack the Ripper, the London Monster, who stabbed fifty women in the buttocks, of Edward "the Boy" Jones, who stalked Queen Victoria and stole her underwear, and Greyfriars Bobby, a Scottish terrier which supposedly spent 14 years guarding his master's grave.
December 17, 1959
Andrew Patner (December 17, 1959 – February 3, 2015) was an American Chicago-based journalist, broadcaster, critic, and interviewer. From 1989-1990, Patner served as a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Beginning in 1991, Patner was a regular contributor of arts criticism to the Chicago Sun-Times. Patner contributed over 2,000 pieces of arts criticism covering a broad range of topics including music, dance, books, and film. Beginning in 2006, he served as the publication’s classical music and opera critic. Patner worked for Chicago’s National Public Radio affiliate WBEZ for eight years as an arts critic, program host, and producer. He also served as critic-at-large for WFMT Fine Arts Radio, where he hosted a weekly program called Critical Thinking from 1998 until his death in 2015.
December 17, 1933
Edmond André Coralie Schietekat (17 December 1933 – 19 October 1981) pseudonym Paul Snoek, was a Belgian poet. He was a son of Omer William Schietekat, a textile manufacturer, and Paula Sylvia Snoeck. In 1961, he married Maria Magdalena Vereecke (Mylène), and together they had three children, a twin Jan and Paul in 1963 and in 1966 Sophie. He died in a car accident in Egem. At the Nuns Catholic School in Berkenboom he was considered a mediocre student. He went to high school at the Sint-Lievenscollege in Antwerp and the Sint-Jozef Klein Seminarie in Sint-Niklaas, where he had Anton van Wilderode as a teacher. As a young boy he already showed interest in nature and painting. During the war his father earned a living making paintings that he sold to the local farmers or exchanged for food. For a while he studied law and philology at the University of Ghent. In 1955, together with Hugues C. Pernath, he founded the avant-garde journal the Gard Sivik (civil guard). After his military service in Germany (1956–1957) he decided to become a full-time artist, yet he soon changed his mind. He started working in his father's textile factory and visited several countries as a salesman. In 1963, he founded his own import - and export company of Japanese printed silk. Afterwards he became sales director in a company specialized in pile foundations. In 1967 he bought a farm in Slijpe and started to paint again in 1972, this time with more success. Several exhibitions followed. His paintings sold so well that he started working part-time for Atlas and then, in 1975, fully committed himself to painting. Paul Snoek became an editor of the Nieuw Vlaams Tijdschrift. In his free time he collected antiques and was an amateur motocross rider. He was a close friend of Gaston Burssens.
December 17, 1948
Hue-Tam Ho Tai is Kenneth T. Young Professor of Sino-Vietnamese History at Harvard University. She is the editor of The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam (UC Press) and the author of Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution and Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam.
December 17, 1937
John Kennedy Toole (December 17, 1937 – March 26, 1969) was an American novelist from New Orleans, Louisiana, best known for his posthumously published, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces. He also wrote The Neon Bible. Although several people in the literary world felt his writing skills were praiseworthy, Toole's novels were rejected during his lifetime. After suffering from paranoia and depression due in part to these failures, he committed suicide at the age of 31. Toole was born to a middle-class family in New Orleans. From a young age, his mother taught him an appreciation of culture. She was thoroughly involved in his affairs for most of his life, and at times they had a difficult relationship. With his mother's encouragement, Toole became a stage performer at the age of 10 doing comic impressions and acting. At 16 he wrote his first novel, The Neon Bible, which he later dismissed as ‘adolescent’. Toole received an academic scholarship to Tulane University. After graduating from Tulane, he studied English at Columbia University in New York while teaching simultaneously at Hunter College. He also taught at various Louisiana colleges, and during his early career as an academic he was valued on the faculty party circuit for his wit and gift for mimicry. His studies were interrupted when he was drafted into the army, where he taught English to Spanish-speaking recruits in San Juan, Puerto Rico. After receiving a promotion, he used his private office to begin writing A Confederacy of Dunces, which he finished at his parents' home after his discharge. Dunces is a picaresque novel featuring the misadventures of protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly, a lazy, obese, misanthropic, self-styled scholar who lives at home with his mother. It is hailed for its accurate depictions of New Orleans dialects. Toole based Reilly in part on his college professor friend Bob Byrne. Byrne's slovenly, eccentric behavior was anything but professorial, and Reilly mirrored him in these respects. The character was also based on Toole himself, and several personal experiences served as inspiration for passages in the novel. While at Tulane, Toole filled in for a friend at a job as a hot tamale cart vendor, and worked at a family owned and operated clothing factory. Both of these experiences were later adapted into his fiction. Toole submitted Dunces to publisher Simon & Schuster, where it reached noted editor Robert Gottlieb. Gottlieb considered Toole talented but felt his comic novel was essentially pointless. Despite several revisions, Gottlieb remained unsatisfied, and after the book was rejected by another literary figure, Hodding Carter Jr., he shelved the novel. Suffering from depression and feelings of self-persecution, Toole left home on a journey around the country. He stopped in Biloxi, Mississippi to end his life by running a garden hose in from the exhaust of his car to the cabin. Some years later, his mother brought the manuscript of Dunces to the attention of novelist Walker Percy, who ushered the book into print. In 1981, Toole was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
December 17, 1963
JON KALMAN STEFANSSON (born 17 December 1963), novelist and poet, was born in Reykjavik in 1963. His novels have been nominated three times for the Nordic Council Prize for Literature (2001, 2004, 2007) and his novel Summer Light and then Comes the Night received the Icelandic Prize for Literature in 2005. In 2011, Stefánsson won the P.O. Enquist Award. PHILIP ROUGHTON is a translator of, among others, the works of Halldór Laxness and The Islander, a biography of Laxness by Halldór Guômundsson.
December 18, 1927
William Ramsey Clark (born December 18, 1927) is an American lawyer, activist and former federal government official. A progressive, New Frontier liberal, he occupied senior positions in the United States Department of Justice under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, notably serving as United States Attorney General from 1967 to 1969; previously he was Deputy Attorney General from 1965 to 1967 and Assistant Attorney General from 1961 to 1965. As Attorney General, he was known for his vigorous opposition to the death penalty, his aggressive support of civil liberties and civil rights, and his dedication in enforcing antitrust provisions. Clark supervised the drafting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Civil Rights Act of 1968. Since leaving public office Clark has led many progressive activism campaigns, including opposition to the War on Terror, and he has offered legal defense to controversial figures such as Charles Taylor, Slobodan Miloševi?, Saddam Hussein, and Lyndon LaRouche. Clark is one of only two living members of Johnson's Cabinet, along with Alan Boyd.
December 18, 1917
Ossie Davis (born Raiford Chatman Davis; December 18, 1917 – February 4, 2005) was an American film, television and Broadway actor, director, poet, playwright, author, and civil rights activist. He was married to Ruby Dee, with whom he frequently performed, until his death in 2005. He and his wife were named to the NAACP Image Awards Hall of Fame; were awarded the National Medal of Arts and were recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors. He was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1994.
December 18, 1898
Eric Walrond (December 18, 1898 - August 8, 1966) born in Georgetown, British Guiana, in 1898, was the son of a Barbadian mother and a Guyanese father. His first eight years were spent in Guiana. But his parents’ marital difficulties led Walrond into an almost wayfaring existence. In 1906, his father abandoned Walrond and his mother. His mother moved the two of them to a small village in Barbados to live with their relatives. Walrond began his education in Barbados at St. Stephen’s Boys’ School, located in Black Rock. Around 1910, Walrond and his mother traveled in search of his father to the Panama Canal Zone, where thousands of west Indians and Guyanese were employed to dig the canal. Walrond and his mother never found his father and they made a home in Colon. It is in Colon where Walrond completed his public and secondary school education between 1913 and 1916. During his education in Colon, Walrond was exposed to the Spanish culture and became bilingual. Around this time he was trained as a secretary and stenographer, and acquired a job as a clerk in the Health Department of the Canal commission at Cristobal. Through the years 1916 and 1918 he began a journalistic career which he pursued while in the United States. Walrond worked as a general reporter, court reporter, and sportswriter for the Panama Star-Herald, ‘the most important contemporaneous newspaper in the American tropics.’ Walrond was also associated with the Harlem Renaissance. In the early 1920s he published short stories in periodicals such as the Opportunity, Smart Set, and Vanity Fair. In 1923, he wrote ‘On Being a Domestic,’ ‘Miss Kenny’s Marriage,’ ‘The Stone Rebounds,’ and ‘The Stone Rebounds.’ Walrond’s stories focused on a realistic presentation of racial situations in New York City. In 1924 he focused on a more impressionistic presentation of life in the American tropics. He did not return to the realistic form of writing until 1927, when he wrote ‘City Love,’ which is the last story he published before he left the United States. His works include - ‘On Being Black’ (1922); ‘On being a Domestic,’ ‘Miss Kenny’s Marriage,’ ‘The Stone Rebounds,’ ‘Cynthia Goes to the Prom,’ ‘The New Negro Faces America,’ ‘The Negro Exodus from the South’ (1923); ‘Vignettes of the Dusk,’ ‘The Black City’ (1924); ‘A Cholo Romance,’ ‘Imperator Africanus, Marcus Garvey: Menace or Promise?’ (1925); Tropic Death (1926); ‘City Love’ (1927).
December 18, 1946
Stephen Bantu Biko (18 December 1946 – 12 September 1977) was an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. A student leader, he later founded the Black Consciousness Movement which would empower and mobilize much of the urban black population. Since his death in police custody, he has been called a martyr of the anti-apartheid movement. While living, his writings and activism attempted to empower black people, and he was famous for his slogan ‘black is beautiful’, which he described as meaning: ‘man, you are okay as you are, begin to look upon yourself as a human being.’ MILLARD ARNOLD, an American, is a graduate of Howard University and Notre Dame Law School. He is Director of the Southern Africa Project of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Washington, D.C.
December 18, 1943
Alan Dawley (December 18, 1943 - March 12, 2008) was a professor of history at The College of New Jersey.
December 18, 1941
Howard E. McCurdy is a professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University; author of Faster, Better, Cheaper: Low-Cost Innovation in the U.S. Space Program, Inside NASA: High Technology and Organizational Change in the U.S. Space Program, and The Space Station Decision: Incremental Politics and Technological Choice; and coauthor of Robots in Space: Technology, Evolution, and Interplanetary Travel, all published by Johns Hopkins.
December 18, 1913
Alfred Bester (December 18, 1913, New York City, NY - September 30, 1987, Doylestown, PA) was an American science fiction author, TV and radio scriptwriter, magazine editor and scripter for comic strips and comic books.
December 19, 1953
Manthia Diawara (born December 19, 1953) is a Malian writer, filmmaker, cultural theorist, scholar, and art historian. He holds the title of University Professor at New York University (NYU), where he is Director of the Institute of Afro-American Affairs. Diawara was born in Bamako, Mali, and received his early education in France. He later received a PhD from Indiana University in 1985. Prior to teaching at NYU, Diawara taught at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California at Santa Barbara. Much of his research has been in the field of black cultural studies, though his work has differed from the traditional approach to such study formulated in Britain in the early 1980s. Along with other notable recent scholars, Diawara has sought to incorporate consideration of the material conditions of African Americans to provide a broader context for the study of African diasopric culture. An aspect of this formulation has been the privileging of "Blackness" in all its possible forms rather than as relevant to a single, perhaps monolithic definition of black culture. Diawara has contributed significantly to the study of black film. In 1992, Indiana University Press published his African Cinema: Politics & Culture and in 1993, Routledge published a volume he edited entitled Black-American Cinema. A filmmaker himself, Diawara has written and directed a number of films. His 1998 book In Search of Africa is an account of his return to his childhood home of Guinea and was published by Harvard University Press. Diawara is the editor-in-chief of Renaissance Noire, a journal of arts, culture, and politics dedicated to work that engages contemporary Black concerns. He serves on the advisory board of October, and is also on the editorial collective of Public Culture. In 2003, Diawara released We Won't Budge: A Malaria Memoir, the title a tribute to Salif Keita's anthemic protest song "Nou Pas Bouger". The book was described by The Village Voice as "by turns elegiac, unsentimental, angry, and wise....his story unfolds in the triumphant days post-1960 (when Mali gained independence from France), trips into reverie for a youth spent in thrall to rock and roll, and evokes his awakenings to art and racism in the West." Diawara serves on the board of TransAfrica Forum, alongside Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, and Walter Mosely, which supported Barack Obama's successful candidacy for President in 2008. In 2015, he was featured in the documentary Sembene! on the life and career of legendary Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, a filmmaker Diawara himself profiled in his own documentary on the filmmaker, Sembene: the Making of African Cinema.
December 19, 1910
José Lezama Lima (December 19, 1910 – August 9, 1976) was a Cuban writer and poet who is considered one of the most influential figures in Latin American literature. Born in the Columbia Military Encampment close to Havana in the city of Marianao where his father was a colonel, Lezama lived through some of the most turbulent times of Cuba's history, fighting against the Machado dictatorship. His literary output includes the semi-autobiographical, baroque novel Paradiso (1966), the story of a young man and his struggles with his mysterious illness, the death of his father, and his developing sensuality and poetic sensibilities. Lezama Lima also edited several anthologies of Cuban poetry and the magazines Verbum and Orígenes, presiding as the patriarch of Cuban letters for most of his later years. Although he only left Cuba twice (trips to Mexico in 1949 and 1950), Lezama's poetry, essays and two novels draw images and ideas from nearly all of the world's cultures and from all historical time periods. The baroque style that he forged relied equally upon his Góngora-influenced syntax and stunning constellations of unlikely images. Lezama Lima's first published work, a long poem called 'Muerte de Narciso,' released when he was only twenty-seven, brought him national acclaim and established his well-wrought style and classical subject matter. In addition to his poems and novels, Lezama wrote many essays on figures of world literature such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Valéry, Góngora and Rimbaud as well as on Latin American baroque aesthetics. Most notably the essays published as La Expresión Americana lay out his vision of the European baroque, its relation to the classical, and the American baroque. Lezama Lima died in 1976 at age 65 and was buried in the Colon Cemetery, Havana. He was influential for Cuban and Puerto Rican writers of his generation and the next, such as Virgilio Piñera, Reinaldo Arenas, Fernando Velázquez Medina, René Marqués, and Giannina Braschi, who depict his life and works in their writing. Twenty-three years after pinning him up the pillory for his 'anti-revolutionary activities', the Cuban people pay homage to Lezama Lima through the release of a film, Strawberry and Chocolate (1994): Lezama is a model for Diego, a gay intellectual; and David, a member of the local Communist youths, discovers the author of Paradiso, and becomes a man after a grand supper 'a la Lezama.'
December 19, 1955
Lucinda Roy was born on December 19, 1955 in Battersea, South London. Her father was Maroon Jamaican artist, sculptor, and writer, Namba Roy. He r mother was English--a former actor who went into teaching later in life. Her biracial heritage and her experiences living and working on three continents have had a profound influence on her writing and her art. An author, professor, and artist, she is married to Larry Jackson, a computer systems network engineer. They have one son, and live in Blacksburg, Virginia. Roy graduated from King’s College, London with a B.A. (hons) in 1977. She was the recipient of the Jelf Medal. She then left England to work for V.S.O ., the British equivalent of the Peace Corps. She was assigned to a convent school in Sierra Leone, and taught English there from 1977-79, returning briefly in 1980. During that time, she worked at Our Lady of Guadalupe Secondary School for Girls, in Lunsar. In a 2006/2007 visit back to Sierra Leone, following the brut al civil war there, she tried to locate the family she was close to and some of the students she had taught. She is working on a book about Sierra Leone and its struggle to recover from the devastating effects of the war. In 1980, Roy began attending the graduate program in education at King’s College, London, and was awarded a post-graduate certificate of education in 1981. After her marriage to a former Peace Corps volunteer from Arkansas, she enrolled in the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where she studied with Jim Whitehead, Miller Williams, Heather Ross Miller, Carolyn Forche, and Bill Harrison. She graduated in 1985 and was appointed as a lecturer at Virginia Tech. A few years later, following the U.K. publication of her book of poems, Wailing the Dead to Sleep , she was moved to a tenure track position. Roy has held three endowed professorships. President Paul Torgersen appointed her as the first Gloria D. Smith professor in Black Studies at Virginia Tech, a professorship she was invited to name and help shape. (The late Gloria D. Smith was a dedicated African American counselor at Virginia Tech, and Roy requested that it be a rotating professorship rather than a permanent one in hopes that it would benefit the Black Studies program, which has since become Africana Studies.) Roy was also the Margaret Bundy Scott visiting professor at Williams College. Currently she is an Alumni Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech, the first woman and the first person of African descent to be appointed to as a distinguished professor at that institution. A novelist, poet, and writer of nonfiction, Roy had published two novels, Lady Moses and The Hotel Alleluia ), the first set on three continents, the second set during the time of civil war in Sierra Leone. Lady Moses was a Discover Great New Writers selection. She has two collections of poetry, Wailing the Dead to Sleep and The Humming Birds . The Humming Birds was selected by Lucille Clifton as the winner of The Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize, and contains the long slave narrative poem ‘Needlework,’ which received the Baxter Hathaway Prize in Poetry from Epoch . In 2009, her nonfiction memoir- critique, No Right to Remain Silent: The Tragedy at Virginia Tech , was published by Harmony Books. An attempt to learn from what happened and to communicate openly about the issue of troubled students, the book details Roy’s interactions with Seung-Hui Cho and the with the Virginia Tech administration, and warns of the likelihood of similar attacks if the fundamental issues relating to severely disturbed students are not addressed. Like her father, Namba Roy, Lucinda is also a visual artist. Two of her paintings have been featured on the covers of her poetry books, and she is currently working on a series of oil paintings depicting the trials and triumphs of the Middle Passage.
December 19, 1861
ITALO SVEVO was born in Trieste in 1861 and was given a commercial education in Germany. CONFESSIONS OF ZENO was published in 1923 and was immediately hailed by European critics as the finest Italian novel. At the time of his accidental death in 1928 Svevo was one of the best known and most successful businessmen in Triesie, though he was only beginning to enjoy fame as a writer. UNA VITA, his first novel, appeared in 1892 and was followed by SENILITA in 1898. In 1912 Italo Svevo met James Joyce, and it is Joyce that we have to thank, not only for calling attention to him at that time, but for persuading him to continue writing. The war kept Svevo away from business and gave him the opportunity. The fact that writing was never his means of livelihood made it possible for him to disregard tradition and slowly develop his own introspective style.
December 19, 1924
Michel Tournier (born 19 December 1924) is a French writer. His works are highly considered and have won important awards such as the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française in 1967 for Friday, or, The Other Island and the Prix Goncourt for The Erl-King in 1970. His works dwell on the fantastic, his inspirations including traditional German culture, Catholicism, and the philosophies of Gaston Bachelard. He currently lives in Choisel and is a member of the Académie Goncourt. His autobiography has been translated and published as The Wind Spirit (Beacon Press, 1988). Born in Paris from parents who met at the Sorbonne while studying German, he spent his youth in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. He learned German early, staying each summer in Germany. His education was deeply marked by the German culture, music and Catholicism. Later he discovered the thought of Gaston Bachelard. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and at the university of Tübingen and attended Maurice de Gandillac's course. He wished to teach philosophy at high-school but, like his father, failed to obtain the French agrégation. He joined Radio France as a journalist and translator and hosted L'heure de la culture française. In 1954 he worked in advertisement for Europe 1. He also collaborated for Le Monde and Le Figaro. From 1958 to 1968, he was the chief editor of Plon. In 1967 he published his first book, Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique, retelling Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, adding to the story a philosophical depth. He was awarded the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française for it.
December 19, 1910
Jean Genet (19 December 1910 – 15 April 1986) French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but later took to writing. His major works include the novels Querelle of Brest, The Thief's Journal, and Our Lady of the Flowers, and the plays The Balcony, The Blacks, The Maids and The Screens.
December 19, 1933
Melvyn Hayes "Mel" Gussow (December 19, 1933 – April 29, 2005) was an American theater critic, movie critic, and author who wrote for The New York Times for 35 years.
December 19, 1949
Le Ly Hayslip (born December 19, 1949) is a Vietnamese-American memoirist and humanitarian. Through her foundations, she has worked to rebuild cultural bridges between Vietnam and America following the Vietnam War.
December 19, 1901
Oliver Hazard Perry La Farge II (December 19, 1901, New York City, NY - August 2, 1963, Santa Fe, NM) was an American writer and anthropologist. During 1925 he explored early Olmec sites in Mexico, and later studied additional sites in Central America and the American Southwest.
December 19, 1942
Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942-1995) was the author of 11 noir novels, of which THREE TO KILL is the first to be published in English. An amateur jazz saxophonist, one-time political activist and prolific TV screen writer and literary critic, Manchette renewed French noir in the post-1968 period and established the new genre of the néo-polar. His writing was influenced as much by Guy Debord as by Gustave Flaubert.
December 19, 1937
Caryl Rivers is an American novelist and journalist. Her 1984 novel Virgins was a New York Times Best Seller and sold millions of copies around the world. Her articles have appeared in major publications such as The Huffington Post, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The Los Angeles Times. Rivers is a professor of journalism at Boston University. In 1979 she and historian Howard Zinn were among a group of Boston University faculty members who defended the right of the school's clerical workers to strike and were threatened with dismissal after refusing to cross a picket line. In 2008 Rivers was awarded The Helen Thomas for Lifetime Achievement which is awarded to an individual for a lifetime of contribution to the journalism profession.
December 19, 1954
Matteo Guarnaccia ( Milan , 1954 ) is an artist and historian of the Italian costume.
December 20, 1954
Sandra Cisneros (born December 20, 1954) is an American writer best known for her acclaimed first novel The House on Mango Street (1984) and her subsequent short story collection Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991). Her work experiments with literary forms and investigates emerging subject positions, which Cisneros herself attributes to growing up in a context of cultural hybridity and economic inequality that endowed her with unique stories to tell. She is the recipient of numerous awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and is regarded as a key figure in Chicana literature. Cisneros's early life provided many experiences she would later draw on as a writer: she grew up as the only daughter in a family of six brothers, which often made her feel isolated, and the constant migration of her family between Mexico and the USA instilled in her the sense of ‘always straddling two countries ... but not belonging to either culture.’ Cisneros's work deals with the formation of Chicana identity, exploring the challenges of being caught between Mexican and Anglo-American cultures, facing the misogynist attitudes present in both these cultures, and experiencing poverty. For her insightful social critique and powerful prose style, Cisneros has achieved recognition far beyond Chicano and Latino communities, to the extent that The House on Mango Street has been translated worldwide and is taught in American classrooms as a coming-of-age novel. Cisneros has held a variety of professional positions, working as a teacher, a counselor, a college recruiter, a poet-in-the-schools, and an arts administrator, and has maintained a strong commitment to community and literary causes. In 1998 she established the Macondo Foundation, which provides socially conscious workshops for writers, and in 2000 she founded the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation, which awards talented writers connected to Texas. Cisneros currently resides in San Antonio, Texas.
December 20, 1946
Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. He was Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009. Born as Andrei Perlmutter on December 20, 1946 in Sibiu, Romania, he published his first poems in Romanian under the pen name Andrei Steiu. In 1965 he left the country to escape from the communist regime. After some time in Italy, he emigrated to the United States in 1966, and settled in Detroit where he became a regular at John Sinclair’s Artists and Writers’ Workshop. A year later he moved to New York where he became part of the literary scene on the Lower East Side. There he met Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, and Anne Waldman, and published his first poems in English. In 1970, his poetry book, License to Carry a Gun, won the ‘Big Table Award’. He moved to San Francisco in 1970, and lived on the West Coast for seven years, four of those in Monte Rio, a Sonoma County town on the Russian River. He also lived in Baltimore (where he taught at Johns Hopkins University), New Orleans and Baton Rouge, publishing a book every year, and actively participating in literary life by writing poetry, stories, essays and reviews for many publications, including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Harper's, and the Paris Review. He had regular columns in The Baltimore Sun, the City Paper, Architecture, Funny Times, Gambit Weekly, and Neon. He has been a regular commentator on National Public Radio’s news program, All Things Considered, since 1983. He won the 1995 Peabody Award for the film Road Scholar, an American road saga that he wrote and starred in, and is a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. He has been called ‘one of our most magical writers’ by The New York Times. In 1989, Codrescu's coverage of the Romanian Revolution of 1989 for National Public Radio and ABC News’ Nightline, was critically acclaimed, and his renewed interest in Romanian language and literature led to new work written in Romanian, including ‘Miracle and Catastrophe’, a book-length interview conducted by the theologian Robert Lazu, and ‘The Forgiven Submarine’, an epic poem written in collaboration with poet Ruxandra Cesereanu, which won the 2008 Romania Radio Cultural award. His books were translated into Romanian by Ioana Avadani, Ioana Ieronim, Carmen Firan, Rodica Grigore, and Lacrimioara Stoie. In 2005 he was awarded the prestigious international Ovidius Prize (also known as the Ovid Prize), previous winners of which include Mario Vargas Llosa, Amos Oz, and Orhan Pamuk. In 1981, Codrescu became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He is the editor and founder of the online journal Exquisite Corpse, a journal of ‘books and ideas’. He reigned as King of the Krewe du Vieux for the 2002 New Orleans Mardi Gras season. He has two children, Lucian and Tristan, from his marriage to Alice Henderson, and is currently married to Laura Cole.
December 20, 1957
Lulu Delacre (born December 20, 1957 Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico) is the author/illustrator of many award winning children's books. Some of her most famous works include Arroz con leche: Popular Songs and Rhymes from Latin America, Vejigante Masquerader, and The Bossy Gallito. Delacre's writes books that celebrate her Latino heritage and promote cultural diversity.
December 20, 1880
Cora Sandel (20 December 1880, Oslo — 3 April 1974, Uppsala) was the pen name of Sara Cecilia Görvell Fabricius, a Norwegian writer and painter who lived most of her adult life abroad. Her most famous works are the novels now known as the Alberta Trilogy. Sara Cecilia Görvell Fabricius was born in Kristiania (now Oslo). Her parents were Jens Schow Fabricius (1839–1910) and Anna Margareta Greger (1858–1903). When she was 12 years old, financial difficulties forced her family to move to Tromsø where her father was appointed a naval commander. She started painting under the tutelage of Harriet Backer, and at 25 years of age moved to Paris to paint. In 1913, she married the Swedish sculptor Anders Jönsson (1883–1965). In 1921, they returned to Sweden. The couple separated in 1922. Their divorce was finalized in 1926, the same year 'Albert and Jacob' published. During her years in Paris, Sandel helped support the family with short stories and sketches published in Norway. However, her first novel and first tome in the trilogy, Alberte and Jakob, was not published until 1926 when Sandel was 46 years of age. This began the semi-autobiographical Alberta trilogy. Sandel used many elements from her own life and experiences in her stories, which often centre on the spiritual and societal struggles women marginalized by the strict confines of 19th century society. The Alberta trilogy traced the protaginist's emotional development juxtaposed with the men in her social circle: as a child, her brother Jacob, and lovers and fellow artists as a young woman in Paris. These novels earned her an immediate place in the Scandinavian canon, but it was not until the 1960s that Sandel, then living quietly in Sweden, was discovered by the English-speaking world. Despite her great literary success, she remained hidden behind her pseudonym and lived a rather secluded life. She was decorated with the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav in 1957. Her home in Tromsø, built in 1838, now houses the Perspektivet Museum.
December 20, 1838
Edwin Abbott Abbott (20 December 1838 – 12 October 1926), the author of more than fifty books on classics, theology, history, and Shakespeare, was headmaster of the City of London School and one of the leading educators of his time.
December 20, 1951
Kate Atkinson (born 20 December 1951) is an English writer of novels, plays and short stories. She is known for creating the Jackson Brodie series of detective novels, which has been adapted into the BBC One series Case Histories. She won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize in 1995 in the Novels category for Behind the Scenes at the Museum, winning again in 2013 and 2015 under its new name the Costa Book Awards.
December 20, 1941
James L. Axtell (born December 20, 1941 in Endicott, New York) is an American historian. He is a professor of history at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Axtell, whose interests lie in American Indian history and the history of higher education, is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Humanities. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. Axtell retired at the end of the spring 2008 semester, though he taught a class at Princeton University in the fall of 2009.
December 20, 1950
Patricia Bell-Scott (born 1950), professor of child and family development, women’s studies, and psychology at the University of Georgia, is senior editor of DOUBLE STITCH: BLACK WOMEN WRITE ABOUT MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS, for which she won the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize. She is also cofounder of SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women and coeditor of the prize-winning BUT SOME OF US ARE BRAVE (Feminist Press, 1981). She lives in Athens, Georgia, with her spouse. Arvin Scott, a jazz percussionist and educator. Jacket design by Debra Morton Hoyt. Jacket art/photo by Albert Chong
December 20, 1960
NALO HOPKINSON was born in Jamaica and grew up in Guyana, Trinidad, and Canada. The daughter of a poet/playwright and a library technician, she has won the Ontario Arts Council Foundation Award for Emerging Writers, and her most recent book, the award-winning short fiction collection SKIN FOLK, was selected in 2002 for the New York Times Summer Reading List and was one of the New York Times Best Books of the Year. She is also the author of BROWN GIRL IN THE RING and MIDNIGHT ROBBER and editor of MOJO: CONJURE STORIES. Hopkinson lives in Toronto.
December 20, 1935
Michael Holquist (December 20, 1935 - June 26, 2016) was Chairman of the Slavic Department at the University of Texas, Austin.
December 20, 1954
David Wong Louie (December 20, 1954 – September 19, 2018) was a Chinese-American novelist and short story writer. He received an M.F.A. (Master of Fine Arts) in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa in 1981 and a BA from Vassar College in 1977. He taught at the University of California, Los Angeles. Pangs of Love received the 1991 First Fiction Award from the Los Angeles Times and the John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares. It was also named a Notable Book by The New York Times and a Voice Literary Supplement Favorite. The Barbarians are Coming won the Shirley Collier Prize. In 2001, he was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship. He has also had a fellowship with the National Foundation for the Advancement of Arts. His short story "Displacement" was included in 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt October 6, 2015.
December 20, 1934
Claude Pélieu was a French poet and artist born in Beauchamp (near Pontoise , Val d'Oise ) on December 20, 1934 and died December 24, 2002 in Norwich, New York. As a child he lived with his family in Beauchamp, near Pontoise. In 1952 Claude Pélieu entered the School of the Beaux-Arts in Paris. In that year he also participated in a group show, in Paris, at the Galerie du Haut-Pavé in the Center Saint-Jacques on the rue Danton. Through Father Gilles Vallée, Claude met the future architect Henri Caubel who arranged in 1999 to 2001 retrospective shows of Claude Pélieu’s collages. From 1952 to 1953 Pélieu worked as a library aide at La maison des amis des livres, a bookstore founded by Adrienne Monnier, the friend of Sylvia Beach (a second cousin of Mary Beach, Claude Pélieu’s second wife). Claude Pélieu’s first texts were published in 1955 in journal Le Libertaire (or Lib), a political journal, close to the Lettrist movement. At the time, the future poet is politically active in the libertarian movement. This is the beginning of Claude Pélieu’s interest in the poetry of Jacques Prévert but also in collage. He continued to draw assiduously (the sale of drawings provided a meager living). In 1956 he participated in a group show at the bookstore/gallery The Sun in the Head organized by the mother of Jean-Jacques Lévêque, Marguerite Fos. In 1963 after separating from his first wife (Lula), Pélieu developed an addiction to heroin and left for San Francisco with Mary Beach. From 1964 to 1968 Claude Pélieu lived in San Francisco, New York and Hawaii. Automatic Pilot was published at the end of 1964, in Mary Beach’s translation. She also translated, with the assistance of Claude Pélieu, several books of William Burroughs, Bob Kaufman, Allen Ginsberg. Between the years 1969 and 1979 Pélieu published a dozen or so books, mostly with Bourgois, Soleil Noir, and 10/18. From 1979 to 2002 Claude Pélieu devoted himself to collage while continuing to write and publish irregularly. At the end of the 1990s, several exhibits of his collages occurred in France. He published several new books right up to his death December 24, 2002 in New York.
December 21, 1917
Diana Athill (born December 21, 1917) is a British literary editor, novelist and memoirist who worked with some of the most important writers of the 20th century. Diana Athill was born in the English county of Norfolk. Her parents were Major Lawrence Athill (1888-1957) and Alice Carr Athill (1895-1990). Her maternal grandfather was William Carr (1862-1925). Her maternal grandmother's father was James Franck Bright (1832-1920) a Master of University College, Oxford. Athill graduated from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford in 1939 and worked for the BBC throughout the Second World War. After the war Athill helped André Deutsch establish his publishing company and worked closely with many of his authors, including Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, John Updike, Mordecai Richler, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Rhys, Gitta Sereny, Brian Moore, V. S. Naipaul, Charles Gidley Wheeler and David Gurr. She retired in 1993 at the age of 75, after more than 50 years in publishing. She continues to influence the publishing world through her revealing memoirs about her editorial career. She is best known for her books of memoirs (these were not written in chronological order, Yesterday Morning being the account of her childhood), and has also translated various works from French. She appeared on Desert Island Discs at the age of 86 and selected a recording of Haydn's The Creation as the most valued of the eight records and Thackeray's Vanity Fair as the book. Athill was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2009 New Year Honours. In 2008, she won the Costa Book Award for her memoir Somewhere Towards The End, a book about old age. For the same book, she also received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2009. In June 2010, she was the subject of a BBC documentary, ‘Growing Old Disgracefully’, part of the Imagine series. In 2013, she was listed as one of the fifty best-dressed over 50s by the Guardian. According to journalist Nick Brown, ‘She attributes her flight from convention to her first love, Tony Irvine, an RAF pilot with whom she fell in love at age 15, and who was blessed, she says, 'with a very open approach to life.' ‘The failure of her relationship to Irvine, her ‘great love’, ‘blighted’ many years. ‘My affairs after that, I kept them trivial if I possibly could. I was frightened of intensity, because I knew I was going to be hurt.’ She says she was a ‘sucker for oppressed foreigners’, an inclination she described as a ‘funny kink’ in her maternal instinct: ‘I never particularly wanted children, but it came out in liking lame ducks.’ One lover, the Egyptian author Waguih Ghali, a depressive, committed suicide in her flat. Her most remarkable affair, about which she later wrote a book, was ‘a fleeting, and distinctly odd’ relationship with Hakim Jamal, an American Black radical who asserted he was God. Jamal's other lover Gale Benson, was murdered by Trinidadian Black Power leader Michael X. Jamal was killed by others a year later. Athill's account of these events was published in 1993 as Make Believe: A True Story. Her longest relationship was with the Jamaican playwright Barry Reckord. The affair lasted eight years, but he shared her flat for forty. She described it as a ‘detached’ sort of marriage.
December 21, 1917
Heinrich Böll is the first German to win the Nobel Prize for literature since Thomas Mann in 1929. His best-known novels include BILLIARDS AT HALF-PAST NINE, THE CLOWN, GROUP PORTRAIT WITH LADY, AND, MOST RECENTLY, THE SAFETY NET and WHAT’S TO BECOME OF THE BOY? He is also renowned for his short stories. Böll is past president of International P.E.N. and a leading defender of the intellectual freedom of writers throughout the world.
December 21, 1938
John Harvey (born 21 December 1938 in London) is a British author of crime fiction most famous for his series of jazz-influenced Charlie Resnick novels, based in the City of Nottingham.
December 21, 1932
Edward Hoagland (born December 21, 1932 in New York) is an author best known for his nature and travel writing.
December 21, 1923
Richard Hugo (December 21, 1923 – October 22, 1982), born Richard Hogan, was an American poet. Primarily a regionalist, Hugo's work reflects the economic depression of the Northwest, particularly Montana. Born in Seattle, Washington, he was raised by his mother's parents after his father left the family. In 1942 he legally changed his name to Richard Hugo, taking his stepfather's surname. He served in World War II as a bombardier in the Mediterranean. He left the service in 1945 after flying 35 combat missions and reaching the rank of first lieutenant. Hugo received his B.A. in 1948 and his M.A. in 1952 in Creative Writing from the University of Washington where he studied under Theodore Roethke. He married Barbara Williams in 1952, the same year he started working as a technical writer for Boeing. In 1961 his first book of poems, A Run of Jacks, was published. Soon after he took a creative writing teaching job at the University of Montana. He later became the head of the creative writing program there. His wife returned to Seattle in 1964, and they divorced soon after. He published five more books of poetry, a memoir, a highly respected book on writing, and also a mystery novel. His posthumous book of collected poetry, Making Certain It Goes On, evinces that his poems are marked by crisp, gorgeous images of nature that often stand in contrast to his own depression, loneliness, and alcoholism. Although almost always written in free verse, his poems have a strong sense of rhythm that often echoes iambic meters. He also wrote of large number of informal epistolary poems at a time when that form was unfashionable. Hugo’s The Real West Marginal Way is a collection of essays, generally autobiographical in nature, that detail his childhood, his military service, his poetics, and his teaching. Hugo remarried in 1974 to Ripley Schemm Hansen. In 1977, he was named the editor of the Yale Younger Poets Series. Hugo died of leukemia on October 22, 1982. Richard Hugo House is named after Hugo.
December 21, 1926
Arnošt Lustig (21 December 1926 – 26 February 2011) was a renowned Czech Jewish author of novels, short stories, plays, and screenplays whose works have often involved the Holocaust. Lustig was born in Prague. As a Jewish boy in Czechoslovakia during World War II, he was sent in 1942 to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, from where he was later transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, followed by time in the Buchenwald concentration camp. In 1945, he escaped from a train carrying him to the Dachau concentration camp when the engine was destroyed by an American fighter-bomber. He returned to Prague in time to take part in the May 1945 anti-Nazi uprising. After the war, he studied journalism at Charles University in Prague and then worked for a number of years at Radio Prague. He worked as a journalist in Israel at the time of its War of Independence where he met his future wife, who at the time was a volunteer with the Haganah. He was one of the major critics of the Communist regime in June 1967 at the 4th Writers Conference, and gave up his membership in the Communist Party after the 1967 Middle East war, to protest his government's breaking of relations with Israel. However, following the Soviet-led invasion that ended the Prague Spring in 1968, he left the country, first to Yugoslavia, then Israel and later in 1970 to the United States. He spent the academic year 1970-1971 as a scholar in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. After the fall of eastern European communism in 1989, he divided his time between Prague and Washington, D.C., where he continued to teach at the American University. After his retirement from the American University in 2003, he became a full-time resident of Prague. He was given an apartment in the Prague Castle by then President Václav Havel and honored for his contributions to Czech culture on his 80th birthday in 2006. In 2008, Lustig became the eighth recipient of the Franz Kafka Prize, and the third recipient of the Karel ?apek Prize in 1996. Lustig was married to the former V?ra Weislitzová (1927), daughter of a furniture maker from Ostrava who was also imprisoned in the Terezín concentration camp. Unlike her parents, she was not deported to Auschwitz. She wrote of her family's fate during the Holocaust in the collection of poems entitled "Daughter of Olga and Leo." They have two children, Josef (1951) and Eva (1956). Lustig died at age 84 in Prague on 26 February 2011 after suffering from Hodgkin lymphoma for five years. His most renowned books are A Prayer For Katerina Horowitzowa (published and nominated for a National Book Award in 1974), Dita Saxová (1962, trans. 1979 as Dita Saxova), Night and Hope (1957, trans. 1985), and Lovely Green Eyes (2004). Dita Saxová and Night and Hope have been filmed in Czechoslovakia.
December 21, 1909
Seicho Matsumoto was born in 1909 in Fukuoka Prefecture in southern Japan. Although he only started writing in his forties, his works proved very popular, and in 1952 he won the coveted Akutagawa Literary Prize His best-known work is Ten to Sen, published in English under the title POINTS AND LINES, which has sold over one and a quarter million copies. His prodigious output has ensured that even today he retains his position as Japan’s leading mystery writer. Adam Kabat gained his master’s degree from the University of Tokyo, and is now assistant professor at Musashi University in Tokyo. He has translated works by Yukio Mishima, Hisashi Inoue, and Junnosuke Yoshiyuki, among others, and is at present researching the late Meiji period novelist Izumi Kyoka.
December 21, 1921
Augusto Monterroso Bonilla (December 21, 1921 - February 7, 2003) was a Honduran writer, known for the ironical and humorous style of his short stories. He is considered an important figure in the Latin American 'Boom' generation, and received several awards, including the Prince of Asturias Award in Literature (2000), Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature (1997), and Juan Rulfo Award (1996). Monterroso was born in Tegucigalpa, Honduras to a Honduran mother and Guatemalan father. In 1936 his family settled definitively in Guatemala City, where he would remain until early adulthood. Here he published his first short stories and began his clandestine work against the dictatorship of Jorge Ubico. To this end he founded the newspaper El Espectador with a group of other writers. He was detained and exiled to Mexico City in 1944 for his opposition to the dictatorial regime. Shortly after his arrival in Mexico, the revolutionary government of Jacobo Arbenz triumphed in Guatemala, and Monterroso was assigned to a minor post in the Guatemalan embassy in Mexico. In 1953 he moved briefly to Bolivia upon being named Guatemalan consul in La Paz. He relocated to Santiago de Chile in 1954, when Arbenz's government was toppled with help from an American intervention. In 1956 he returned definitively to Mexico City, where he would occupy various academic and editorial posts and continue his work as a writer for the rest of his life. In 1988, Augusto Monterroso received the highest honour the Mexican government can bestow on foreign dignitaries, the Águila Azteca. He was also awarded the Spanish Prince of Asturias Award, in 2000. In 1997, Monterroso was awarded the Guatemala National Prize in Literature for his body of work. He died due to heart failure at the age of 81, in Mexico City.Although Monterroso limited himself almost exclusively to the short story form, he is widely considered a central figure in the Latin American 'Boom' generation, which was best known for its novelists. As such he is recognized alongside such canonical authors as Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo and Gabriel García Márquez. Save for Lo demás es silencio ('The Rest is Silence'), his foray into the form of the novel, Monterroso only published short pieces. He worked throughout his career to perfect the short story form, often delving into analogous genres (most famously the fable) for stylistic and thematic inspiration. Even Lo demás es silencio, however, largely eschews the traditional novelistic form, opting instead for the loose aggregation of various apocryphal short texts (newspaper clippings, testimonials, diary entries, poems) to sketch the 'biography' of its fictional main character. Monterroso is often credited with writing one of the world's shortest stories, 'El Dinosaurio' ('The Dinosaur'), published in Obras completas (Y otros cuentos). The story reads, in its entirety: Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí. ('Upon awakening, the dinosaur was still there.'). Carlos Fuentes wrote of Monterroso (referring specifically to The Black Sheep and Other Fables): 'Imagine Borges' fantastical bestiary having tea with Alice. Imagine Jonathan Swift and James Thurber exchanging notes. Imagine a frog from Calaveras County who has seriously read Mark Twain. Meet Monterroso.
December 21, 1905
Charles Everit Poverman (born November 8, 1944, New Haven, Connecticut) is an American fiction writer.
December 21, 1905
Anthony Dymoke Powell, CH, CBE (21 December 1905 – 28 March 2000) was an English novelist best known for his twelve-volume work A Dance to the Music of Time, published between 1951 and 1975. Powell's major work has remained in print continuously and has been the subject of TV and radio dramatisations. In 2008, The Times newspaper named Powell among their list of 'The 50 greatest British writers since 1945'.
December 21, 1944
James Sallis is the author of the popular and critically acclaimed Lew Griffin novels as well as other works of and multiple collections of stories, poems, and essays.
December 21, 1910
Jean-Louis Baghio'o (21 December 1910 – 20 December 1994) is the pseudonym of the French writer who was born as Victor Jean-Louis on 21 December 1910 at Fort-de-France (Martinique) to a family settled at Sainte-Anne (Guadeloupe), and who died in Paris on 20 December 1994.
December 21, 1900
Werner Blumenberg (December 21, 1900 - October 1, 1965) was a member of the underground against Hitler both in Germany and as an migr in Holland. Gareth Stedman Jones is a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge University and in 2010 become Professor of the History of Ideas at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of An End to Poverty? and Languages of Class: Studies in Working-Class History 1832-1982.
December 21, 1804
Benjamin Disraeli (21 December 1804 – 19 April 1881) was a British Conservativepolitician and writer, who twice served as Prime Minister. He played a central role in the creation of the modern Conservative Party, defining its policies and its broad outreach.
December 21, 1945
RICHARD PERCEVAL GRAVES was educated at Copthorne School, Sussex. at Charterhouse, and at St. John’s College, Oxford, where he studied modern history.
December 21, 1950
Thomas Hürlimann is a Swiss playwright and novelist. His 1989 novel Das Gartenhaus was published as The Couple in the United States in 1991. In 2011, he was awarded the Großer Literaturpreis der Bayerischen Akademie der Schönen Künste.
December 21, 1938
Shizuko Natsuki (December 21, 1938, Tokyo Prefecture - March 19, 2016, Fukuoka, Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan) was born in Tokyo in 1938. She graduated from Keio University with a degree in English literature. She married in 1963 and moved to Fukuoka, where she has lived since that time with the exception of nine years spent in Nagoya. Natsuki is not only one of Japan’s best-selling mystery writers but also one of the most prolific. She has written more than eighty novels and short-story collections, and more than forty of her novels and stories have been made into films. Natsuki published her first mystery novel, Tenshi ga kiete iku (the angel has gone), in 1970. The first of her novels to be translated into English was W no higeki (1982; Murder at Mount Fuji, 1984). Several of her short stories have been published in translation in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Natsuki’s writing, like that of many other Japanese mystery writers of her generation, often shows the strong influence of well-known mystery writer Seich Matsumoto.
December 21, 1939
Leif Svalesen (December 21, 1939 - 2010) grew up on Tromoya Island off the coast of Arendal, an area known for its rich shipping traditions. His diving skills are matched by a keen interest in marine archeology and the Fredensborg wreck is only one of the many shipwrecks he has charted in conjunction with the Norwegian Maritime Museum. He is a member of the Norwegian Maritime Museum's Council and a Board member of UNESCO's International Scientific Committee for the Slave Routes Project.
December 21, 1953
Svetislav Basara (born December 21, 1953 in Bajina Bašta, Yugoslavia, today Serbia) is a contemporary Serbian author. In addition to writing, he was politically active through Democratic Christian Party of Serbia (DHSS) and also had a diplomatic stint. He is the author of more than twenty literary works, including novels, story collections, and essays. He has received numerous Serbian literary awards, and his novel The Cyclist Conspiracy (Fama o biciklistima, literally ‘Fuss about Cyclists’) is considered by his countrymen to be one of the ten best novels of the last decade. He received the NIN Prize for the best novel published in Serbia in 2006 for the novel 'Uspon i pad Parkinsonove bolesti' (The Rise and Fall of Parkinson's Disease). For a few years in the 2000s, Basara was the Serbian ambassador to Cyprus.
December 21, 1892
Dame Cicely Isabel Fairfield (21 December 1892 – 15 March 1983), known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. An author who wrote in many genres, West reviewed books for The Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Sunday Telegraph, and the New Republic, and she was a correspondent for The Bookman. Her major works include Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), on the history and culture of Yugoslavia; A Train of Powder (1955), her coverage of the Nuremberg trials, published originally in The New Yorker; The Meaning of Treason, later The New Meaning of Treason, a study of the trial of the British Fascist William Joyce and others; The Return of the Soldier, a modernist World War I novel; and the "Aubrey trilogy" of autobiographical novels, The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund. Time called her "indisputably the world's number one woman writer" in 1947. She was made CBE in 1949, and DBE in 1959, in each case, the citation reads: "writer and literary critic". She took the pseudonym "Rebecca West" from the rebellious young heroine in Rosmersholm by Henrik Ibsen.
December 21, 1957
Raymond Albert Romano (born December 21, 1957) is an American stand-up comedian, actor and screenwriter. He is best known for his role on the sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, for which he received an Emmy Award, and as the voice of Manny in the Ice Age film series. He created and starred in the TNT comedy-drama Men of a Certain Age (2009–11). From 2012 to 2015, Romano had a recurring role as Hank Rizzoli, a love interest of Sarah Braverman in Parenthood, and co-starred in the romantic comedy The Big Sick (2017).
December 21, 1944
Werner Busch was professor of art history at the Freie Universität Berlin from 1988 to 2010
December 22, 1956
Percival Everett is Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His 13 previous books include FRENZY (1997), WATERSHED (1996), and SUDER (1983).
December 22, 1924
Peter Morris Green (born 22 December 1924) is a British classical scholar and novelist noted for his works on the Greco-Persian Wars, Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age of ancient history, generally regarded as spanning the era from the death of Alexander in 323 BC up to either the date of the Battle of Actium or the death of Augustus in 14 AD. Green's most famous books are Alexander of Macedon, a historical biography first issued in 1970, then in a revised and expanded edition in 1974, which was first published in the United States in 1991; his Alexander to Actium, a general account of the Hellenistic Age, and other works. He is the author of a translation of the Satires of the Roman poet Juvenal, now in its third edition. He has also contributed poems to many journals, including to Arion and the Southern Humanities Review.
December 22, 1639
Jean Racine (22 December 1639 – 21 April 1699), was a French dramatist, one of the three great playwrights of 17th-century France (along with Molière and Corneille), and an important literary figure in the Western tradition. Racine was primarily a tragedian, producing such 'examples of neoclassical perfection' as Phèdre, Andromaque, and Athalie, although he did write one comedy, Les Plaideurs, and a muted tragedy, Esther, for the young. Racine's plays displayed his mastery of the dodecasyllabic alexandrine; he is renowned for elegance, purity, speed, and fury, and for what Robert Lowell described as a 'diamond-edge', and the 'glory of its hard, electric rage'. The linguistic effects of Racine's poetry are widely considered to be untranslatable, although many eminent poets have attempted to do so, including Lowell, Ted Hughes, and Derek Mahon into English, and Schiller into German. The latest attempt to translate Racine's plays into English earned a 2011 American Book Award for the poet Geoffrey Argent. Racine's dramaturgy is marked by his psychological insight, the prevailing passion of his characters, and the nakedness of both the plot and stage.
December 22, 1905
Kenneth Rexroth (December 22, 1905–June 6, 1982) was an American poet, translator and critical essayist. He was among the first poets in the United States to explore traditional Japanese poetic forms such as haiku. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance. Rexroth wrote a large body of literary and cultural criticism, much of which has been compiled in anthologies. His incisive views of topics ranging from D. H. Lawrence to gnosticism testify to his familiarity with the world and extensive self-education. He is said to have read the entire Encyclopædia Britannica ‘like a novel’ once a year. His books indicate familiarity with subjects ranging from political anarchism, painting, and world religions, to classical Chinese literature and philosophy. In 1973, Rexroth wrote the Encyclopædia Britannica article on ‘literature‘. Despite the value of his critical prose, he dismissed these works as being financially motivated.
December 22, 1957
Susan Powter (born 22 December 1957) is an Australian-born American motivational speaker, nutritionist, personal trainer, and author, who rose to fame in the 1990s with her catchphrase "Stop the Insanity!", the centerpiece of her weight-loss infomercial. She hosted her own talk show The Susan Powter Show in the 1990s.
December 22, 1896
Myron Brinig (December 22, 1896 – May 13, 1991) was a Jewish-American author who wrote twenty-one novels from 1929 to 1958. Brinig was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota to Romanian parents, but grew up in Butte, Montana. Brinig began studying at New York University in 1914, where poet Joyce Kilmer gave him lectures on writing. He then studied at Columbia University and started his career by writing short stories for magazines. Brinig's first novel, Madonna Without Child, was released in 1929. Published by Doubleday, the novel tells the story of a woman who is obsessed with another woman's baby. Many of Brinig's early novels depicted the settlement and development of Montana, the state he grew up in. These novels include Singermann (1929), Wide Open Town (1931), This Man Is My Brother (1932), and The Sun Sets in the West (1935). Brinig based the main character of these novels, Singermann, on his father, Maurice Brinig, who was a Romanian immigrant and shopkeeper. Brinig's novels often depicted miners, labor organizers, farmers, and businessmen living in Montana. These usually became bestsellers in the United States and were praised by critics of The New York Times. One of the best-selling novels, The Sisters, was adapted to a feature-length film in 1938, starring Bette Davis and Errol Flynn. Brinig's novels often dealt with homosexuality, likely because he was a homosexual himself (although he was publicly closeted all his life). According to the Gay & Lesbian Literary Heritage, Brinig was the "first American Jewish novelist to write in any significant way about the gay experience." In 1951, The New York Times Book Review said Brinig's "sentimental streak and his sympathetic touch with characters usually lend his books a warm glow of humanity, if not of art." At the beginning of his career, Brinig was praised by critics for his "artistry and inventiveness in narrative, character and incident." In the early 1930s, he was described as one of the leading young writers in America. Brinig's last novels, however, were met with mixed reviews from critics, who criticized them for their "verbosity and banality." Brinig died on May 13, 1991. The cause of his death was gastrointestinal hemorrhage.
December 22, 1961
Marcia Douglas (born December 22, 1961) is the author of the novels, Madam Fate and Notes from a Writer's Book of Cures and Spells as well as a poetry collection, Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies internationally, including Edexcel Anthology for English Language, The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse, and The Art of Friction: Where (Non) Fictions Come Together. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
December 22, 1823
Thomas Wentworth Higginson (December 22, 1823 – May 9, 1911) was an American Unitarian minister, author, abolitionist, and soldier. He was active in the American Abolitionism movement during the 1840s and 1850s, identifying himself with disunion and militant abolitionism. During the Civil War, he served as colonel of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, the first federally authorized black regiment, from 1862–1864. Following the war, Higginson devoted much of the rest of his life to fighting for the rights of freed slaves, women and other disfranchised peoples.
December 22, 1907
Julia Clara Catherine Dolores Birk Olsen Hitchens was born in Texas, USA. She worked as a nurse and as a teacher before she started her writing career. She also wrote under the pseudonyms ‘Dolan Birkley’, ‘Noel Burke’, and ‘D.B. Olsen’. She also wrote together with her husband Hubert Allen Hitchens.
December 22, 1965
Nora Okja Keller (born 22 December 1965, Seoul, South Korea) is a Korean American author. Her 1997 breakthrough work of fiction, Comfort Woman, and the 2002 sequel, Fox Girl, focus on multigenerational trauma resulting from Korean women's experiences as sex slaves, euphemistically called comfort women, for Japanese troops during World War II. Keller’s novels explore her own complex ethnic identity in the context of Hawaii’s multi-ethnic society and her relationship with her mother (upon whom ‘some details’ of characters in her fiction are based).
December 22, 1881
Edith Lewis (December 22, 1881–August 11, 1972) was a magazine editor at McClure's Magazine, the managing editor of Every Week Magazine, and an advertising copywriter at J. Walter Thompson Co. Lewis was Willa Cather's domestic partner and was named executor of Cather's literary estate in Willa Cather's will. After Cather's death, Lewis published a memoir of Willa Cather in 1953 titled Willa Cather Living. Lewis graduated from Smith College in 1902. Following her graduation, she relocated to her hometown, Lincoln, Nebraska, to teach for a year. While in Lincoln, she met Willa Cather for the first time at the home of the publisher of the Lincoln Courier, Sarah Harris. Although historically scholarship concerning Edith Lewis in the context of Willa Cather's career have painted her as a mere copy editor or secretary, recent work has indicated that Edith Lewis had a rich editorial and professional career that had a significant impact upon Willa Cather's creative process. Lewis shared a home with Willa Cather in New York City for almost 40 years. When Edith Lewis acquired a summer cottage on the island of Grand Manan in New Brunswick, Canada in 1926, the two shared a summer home there. Lewis died on August 11, 1972 and is buried beside Willa Cather in Jaffrey, New Hampshire.
December 22, 1922
JEAN MALAURIE was trained as a geomorphologist, but after his experience with the Polar Eskimos he turned to authorship, publishing, research, and exploration. In 1967 he recorded on film the disintegrating culture of Thule, and from 1974 to 1977 he produced a multipart film documentary on all of the world’s Eskimos.
December 22, 1936
Victor Francis Perkins (22 December 1936 – 15 July 2016) was a British film critic, best known for his work on film aesthetics and interpretation. He was born in Devon, and began teaching at the Warwick University in 1978. Best known for his first book, Film as Film (1972), which quickly became a core text in Film Studies courses, Perkins influenced the way in which film is studied and became internationally known for his sharp intellect and jargon-less approach to the critical analysis of film. Victor Perkins remained an active scholar until he died, continuing to lecture at Warwick University, as well as write and give papers on film analysis at home and abroad. He died on 15 July 2016, after suffering an aneurysm. His son is the Labour Member of Parliament for Chesterfield, Toby Perkins.
December 22, 1939
Jerry Pinkney (born December 22, 1939) is an American illustrator of children's books. He won the 2010 Caldecott Medal for U.S. picture book illustration, recognizing The Lion & the Mouse, a wordless version of Aesop's fable. He also has five Caldecott Honors. He has five Coretta Scott King Awards, four New York Times Best Illustrated Awards (most recently in 2006 for Little Red Hen), four Gold and four Silver medals from the Society of Illustrators, and the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award (John Henry, 1994). In 2000, he was given the Virginia Hamilton Literary award from Kent State University and in 2004 the University of Southern Mississippi Medallion for outstanding contributions in the field of children’s literature. In 2016, he received the Coretta Scott King - Virginia Hamilton Award for lifetime achievement. For his contribution as a children's illustrator, Pinkney was U.S. nominee in 1998 for the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest international recognition for creators of children's books.
December 22, 1949
Gisli Palsson is professor of anthropology at the University of Iceland. He is the author, editor, or coeditor of many books.
December 23, 1926
Robert Bly (born December 23, 1926) is an American poet, author, activist and leader of the mythopoetic men's movement. His most commercially successful book to date was Iron John: A Book About Men (1990), a key text of the mythopoetic men's movement, which spent 62 weeks on the The New York Times Best Seller list. He won the 1968 National Book Award for Poetry for his book The Light Around the Body.
December 23, 1896
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (December 23, 1896 – July 23, 1957) was an Italian writer. He is most famous for his only novel, Il Gattopardo (first published posthumously in 1958, translated as The Leopard), which is set in Sicily during the Risorgimento. A taciturn and solitary man, he passed a great deal of his time reading and meditating, and used to say of himself, ‘I was a boy who liked solitude, who preferred the company of things to that of people.’
December 23, 1899
David Magarshack (23 December 1899 – 1977) was a British translator and biographer of Russian authors, best known for his translations of Dostoevsky. Magarshack was born in Riga, in present-day Latvia (Riga was then part of Russia), travelled to Britain in 1920 and became naturalised in 1931. After graduating from University College London in English Language and Literature, he worked in Fleet Street and published a number of novels. He was the biographer of Chekhov (1952, 1955(US)), Gogol (1957), Dostoevsky (1962), Pushkin (1967), Stanislavsky (1951, 1976) and Turgenev (1954). Magarshack died in London in 1977.
December 23, 1960
Miyuki Miyabe (Born December 23, 1960, Tokyo, Japan) is a popular contemporary Japanese author active in a number of genres that include science fiction, mystery fiction, historical fiction, social commentary, and young adult literature. Her most famous novels in the English-speaking world are Crossfire (published in 1998, and Kasha (translated by Alfred Birnbaum as All She Was Worth, published in 1999. Among anime fans, her fantasy novel Brave Story is well regarded; it has notably been adapted into an animated film, an "alternate retelling" manga series, and a series of video games.
December 23, 1919
Poul Ørum (December 23, 1919, Nykøbing Mors, Denmark - December 27, 1997, Fanø, Denmark) was one of Denmark’s leading writers. He worked as a laborer, farmer, sailor, actor, and journalist, is the author of over twenty-five books, and was awarded the Danish Poe Association’s prize for the best crime novel of the year. This is his first book to appear in English.
December 23, 1941
Olive Marjorie Senior (born 23 December 1941) is a Jamaican poet, novelist, short story and non-fiction writer based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She was awarded the Musgrave Gold Medal awarded in 2005 by the Institute of Jamaica for her contributions to literature. Born in rural Jamaica in Trelawny, Cockpit Country, Olive Senior was the seventh of 10 children. Senior attended Montego Bay High School For Girls. At nineteen, she joined the staff of the Jamaica Gleaner in Kingston and later worked with the Jamaica Information Service. Senior later won a scholarship to study journalism at the Thomson Foundation in Cardiff, Wales and as a Commonwealth scholar attended Carleton University School of Journalism in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. While at university she began writing fiction and poetry. On her return to Jamaica, she worked as a freelancer in public relations, publishing, and speech writing before joining the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of the West Indies, where she edited the journal Social and Economic Studies (1972–77). In 1982 she joined the Institute of Jamaica as editor of the Jamaica Journal. In 1987 Senior won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for her first collection of stories. After Hurricane Gilbert hit Jamaica in 1988, Senior moved to Europe, where she lived in Portugal, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, before settling in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in the early 1990s. Senior has published three collections of poems: Talking of Trees (1985), Gardening in the Tropics (1994), and Over the Roofs of the World (2005). Her short story collection Summer Lightning (1986) won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize; it was followed by Arrival of the Snake Woman (1989, 2009) and Discerner of Hearts (1995). Her most recent collection of stories, The Pain Tree (2015), was the overall winner of the 2016 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, having won the fiction category. Her first novel, Dancing Lessons (Cormorant Books, 2011), was shortlisted for the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize in the Canada region. Her non-fiction works include The Message Is Change (1972), about Michael Manley's first election victory; A-Z of Jamaican Heritage (1984, expanded and republished as Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage in 2004); and Working Miracles: Women's Lives in the English-Speaking Caribbean (1991). Senior's most recent non-fiction book, Dying To Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal, was published in September 2014 – 100 years after the opening of the Panama Canal, 15 August 1914. On 1 April 2015 the book was shortlisted for the 2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, winning the non-fiction category. An extended critical evaluation of Senior's work can be found in Olive Senior by Denise deCaires Narain (2011), published by Northcote House Publishers (UK) in collaboration with the British Council as part of the Writers and Their Work series. Senior's work often addresses questions of Caribbean identity in terms of gender and ethnicity. She has said: "I've had to deal with race because of who I am and how I look. In that process, I've had to determine who I am. I do not think you can be all things to all people. As part of that process, I decided I was a Jamaican. I represent many different races and I'm not rejecting any of them to please anybody. I'm just who I am and you have to accept me or not." Her work has been adapted as drama and broadcast by the BBC and CBC, and she also wrote the radio play Window for the CBC. Her writing features in a wide range of anthologies including Her True-True Name (eds Elizabeth Wilson and Pamela Mordecai, 1989), Daughters of Africa (ed. Margaret Busby, 1992), The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry (eds Ian McDonald and Stewart Brown, 1992), Concert of Voices: An Anthology of World Writing in English (ed. Victor J. Ramraj, 1994), The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Tenth Annual Collection (eds Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, 1997), The Wadsworth Anthology of Poetry (ed. Jay Parini, 2005), Best Poems on the Underground (eds Gerard Benson, Judith Chernaik and Cicely Herbert, 2010), So Much Things to Say: 100 Calabash Poets (2010), and numerous others.
December 23, 1931
Sara Gallardo Drago Mitre (23 December 1931 – 14 June 1988) was an influential Argentine author. Gallardo was born in Buenos Aires to an upper class family with extensive agricultural property. She became an astute observer and critic of the Argentine aristocracy, much along the lines of Charlotte Brontë. She was Bartolomé Mitre's great-great-granddaughter. She was married twice, first to Luis Pico Estrada and then to H. A. Murena. Gallardo began publishing in 1958. In addition to her numerous newspaper columns and essays, she published five novels, a collection of short stories, several children’s books, and a number of travelogues. She contributed to the magazines Primera Plana, Panorama and Confirmado among others. She is quoted as often saying, "Writing is an absurd and heroic activity." Greatly affected by the death of her second husband in 1975, she moved with her children to La Cumbre, Córdoba Province, to a house that was provided by the writer Manuel Mujica Láinez. Then in 1979, moved to Barcelona, Spain where she wrote The Rose in the Wind (La Rosa en el Viento), her last book. She continued her travels in Switzerland and Italy, but did not finish any more works. Upon her return to Argentina she died of an asthma attack in Buenos Aires at age 56. She left notes on a planned biography of the Jewish intellectual and Carmelite nun, Edith Stein, who had been killed at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942. Enero ("January ")(1958) was her first novel and details the intensely private world of an adolescent farmworker. It is written in a deliberately ambiguous way to reflect the confusions that face the heroine as she deals with her unwanted pregnancy, the product of her being raped. El País del Humo ("Country of the Smoke")(1977) was a collection of her short stories, and literary sketches that showed more of her fantastical side that had formerly appeared more in her children’s books. Some of them have been considered outright science fiction.
December 24, 1931
Walter Abish (born December 24, 1931) is an Austrian-American author of experimental novels and short stories. Abish was born in Vienna, Austria to Adolph and Frieda (Rubin). At a young age, his family fled from the Nazis, traveling first to Italy and Nice before settling in Shanghai from 1940 to 1949. In 1949, they moved to Israel, where Abish served in the army and developed an interest in writing. He moved to the United States in 1957 and became an American citizen in 1960. Since 1975, Abish has taught at several eastern universities and colleges. Abish received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1981 for his book How German Is It. He has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship, and sits on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions. Abish is married to Cecile Gelb, a photographer and sculptor. He served on the board of International PEN from 1982-1988. He was on the board of governors for the New York Foundation for the Arts. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998. He has worked/taught at Empire State College, Wheaton College, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Columbia University, Brown University, Yale University, and Cooper Union. Abish's work shows both imaginative and experimental elements. In Alphabetical Africa, for instance, the first chapter consists entirely of words beginning with the letter ‘A.’ In the second chapter, words beginning with ‘A’ and ‘B’ appear, and so on through the alphabet. In the Future Perfect is a collection of short stories where words are juxtaposed in unusual patterns.
December 24, 1881
Juan Ramón Jiménez Mantecón (24 December 1881 – 29 May 1958) was a Spanish poet, a prolific writer who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1956. One of Jiménez's most important contributions to modern poetry was his advocacy of the French concept of ‘pure poetry.’ Jiménez was born in Moguer, near Huelva, in Andalucia, on 24 December 1881. He studied law at the University of Seville, but he declined to put this training to use. He published his first two books at the age of eighteen, in 1900. The death of his father the same year devastated him, and a resulting depression led to his being sent first to France, where he had an affair with his doctor's wife, and then to a sanatorium in Madrid staffed by novitiate nuns, where he lived from 1901 to 1903. In 1911 and 1912, he wrote many erotic poems depicting romps with numerous females in numerous locales. Some of them alluded to sex with novitiates who were nurses. Eventually, apparently, their mother superior discovered the activity and expelled him, although it will probably never be known for certain whether the depictions of sex with novitiates were truth or fantasy. The main subjects of many of his other poems were music and color, which, at times, he compared to love or lust. He celebrated his home region in his prose poem about a writer and his donkey called Platero y Yo (1914). In 1916 he and Zenobia got married in the United States. Zenobia became his indispensable companion and collaborator. Upon the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he and Zenobia went into exile in Cuba, the United States, and Puerto Rico, where he settled in 1946. Jiménez was hospitalized for eight months due to another deep depression. He later became a Professor of Spanish Language and Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. The university later named a building on campus and a living-and-learning writing program in his honor. He was also a professor at the University of Miami, in Coral Gables, Florida. While living in Coral Gables he wrote: ‘Romances de Coral Gables’. In 1956, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature; three days later, his wife died of ovarian cancer. Jiménez never got over this loss, and he died two years afterwards, on 29 May 1958, in the same clinic where his wife had died. Both of them are buried in Spain.
December 24, 1907
Isidor Feinstein Stone (December 24, 1907 – June 18, 1989), born Isidor Feinstein, better known as I. F. Stone and Izzy Stone, was an American investigative journalist and author. He is best remembered for his self-published newsletter, I. F. Stone's Weekly, which was ranked 16th in a poll of his fellow journalists of 'The Top 100 Works of Journalism in the United States in the 20th Century'.
December 24, 1963
Naja Marie Aidt was born in Greenland on December 24, 1963, and raised in Copenhagen. She is the author of seven collections of poetry and five short story collections, including Baboon (Two Lines Press), which received the Nordic Council's Literature Prize and the Danish Critics Prize for Literature. Rock, Paper, Scissors is her first novel. K. E. Semmel is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in Ontario Review, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. His translations include books by Karin Fossum, Erik Valeur, Jussi Adler-Olsen, and Simon Fruelund.
December 24, 1822
Matthew Arnold (24 December 1822 – 15 April 1888) was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator. Matthew Arnold has been characterised as a sage writer, a type of writer who chastises and instructs the reader on contemporary social issues.
December 24, 1938
John Baeder (born December 24, 1938) is an American painter closely associated with the Photorealist movement. He is best known for his detailed paintings of American roadside diners and eateries.
December 24, 1927
Mary Theresa Eleanor Higgins Clark Conheeney (née Higgins; born December 24, 1927), known professionally as Mary Higgins Clark, is an American author of suspense novels. Each of her 51 books has been a bestseller in the United States and various European countries, and all of her novels remained in print as of 2015, with her debut suspense novel, Where Are the Children, in its seventy-fifth printing. Higgins Clark began writing at an early age. After several years working as a secretary and copy editor, she spent a year as a stewardess for Pan-American Airlines before leaving her job to marry and start a family. She supplemented the family's income by writing short stories. After her husband died in 1964, Higgins Clark worked for many years writing four-minute radio scripts until her agent persuaded her to try writing novels. Her debut novel, a fictionalized account of the life of George Washington, did not sell well, and she decided to exploit her love of mystery/suspense novels. Her suspense novels became very popular, and as of 2007 her books had sold more than 80 million copies in the United States alone. Her daughter Carol Higgins Clark and former daughter-in-law Mary Jane Clark, are also writers.
December 24, 1959
Mark Dery (born December 24, 1959) is an American author, lecturer and cultural critic. He writes about "media, the visual landscape, fringe trends, and unpopular culture." From 2001 to 2009, he taught media criticism, literary journalism, and the essay in the Department of Journalism at New York University. In January 2000, he was appointed Chancellor's Distinguished Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. In summer 2009, he was awarded a scholar-in-residence position at the American Academy in Rome, Italy. In 2010, Publisher's Weekly reported that he was writing a biography of the artist Edward Gorey for Little, Brown.
December 24, 1941
Jo Durden-Smith (24 December 1941 – 10 May 2007) was a British documentary film maker. His work included The Doors are Open, The Stones in the Park, Johnny Cash at St Quentin, and, later, television work Russian Godfathers on the Russian oligarchs.
December 24, 1934
Enrique Domingo Dussel Ambrosini (born December 24, 1934) is an Argentine-Mexican writer and philosopher. Dussel was born in Argentina, but since he was attacked with a bomb in his house by a military group in 1973, he was forced into exile in Mexico in 1975, and today he is a Mexican citizen. He is a professor in the Department of Philosophy in the Metropolitan Autonomous University (UAM), Campus Iztapalapa in Mexico City and has also taught at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He has acquired a doctorate in philosophy in the Complutense University of Madrid and a doctorate in history from the Sorbonne of Paris. He also has a license in theology from Paris and Münster. He has been awarded doctorates honoris causa from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and the Higher University of San Andrés in Bolivia, and has been visiting professor for one semester at Frankfurt University, Notre Dame University, California State University, Los Angeles, Union Theological Seminary (New York), Loyola University Chicago, Vanderbilt University, Duke University, Harvard University, and others. In March 2013 he was named President of the Autonomous University of Mexico City for an extraordinary period of one year. Dussel has maintained dialogue with philosophers such as Karl-Otto Apel, Gianni Vattimo, Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty and Emmanuel Lévinas He is the founder with others of the movement referred to as the Philosophy of Liberation, and his work is concentrated in the field of Ethics and Political Philosophy. Through his critical thinking he proposed a new way (a critical way) to read the universal history, criticizing the Eurocentric discourse. Author of more than 50 books, his thoughts cover many themes including: theology, politics, philosophy, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, and ontology. He has been a critic of postmodernity, preferring instead the term 'transmodernity.'
December 24, 1889
Carl Ortwin Sauer (December 24, 1889 – July 18, 1975) was an American geographer.
December 24, 1900
Frederick G. Heymann was born in Berlin on December 24, 1900. He studied history, philosophy, economics and sociology at the Universities of Berlin, Göttingen, Heidelberg and Frankfurt. He received his PhD from the University of Frankfurt in 1922 and spent two years on postgraduate work with Werner Sombart, an historian of modern capitalism. Heymann started his journalism career in 1925 as the assistant economic policy editor for Frankfurter Zeitung, a highly regarded newspaper in pre-Hitler Germany. In 1932 he moved to Czechoslovakia as head of the Prague editorial office. Heymann’s writing came under increasing criticism from the German legation as being too friendly to the Czech people and to Czechoslovak policy. In 1935 the office was taken over by the Nazis and Heymann moved on to the Bohemia, a local daily paper of which he was editor, chief editorial writer and diplomatic correspondent. Both of these positions involved intensive diplomatic travel and study of the politics, economies and history of Eastern European countries. Several members of the Bohemia’s editorial staff were arrested in March 1939; although Heymann was questioned, he was subsequently let go. With the help of Dr. Zdenek Schmoranz from the Press Department in the office of the Prime Minister, Heymann was able to leave the country with his family, arriving in England in July 1939. He expected to travel on to Australia but the outbreak of the war prevented him from doing so, and also contributed to his 10-week stay in an internment camp on the Isle of Man. Heymann took classes to become proficient in English and was eventually employed in 1941 by the British Ministry of Information. He wrote and edited articles and became the military correspondent for Die Zeitung, a German language paper sponsored by the Ministry. In 1944 he was hired by the United States Office of War Information, a position that enabled him to travel to Germany as a civilian editor for the illustrated weekly Heute. At the end of the war, Heymann and his family emigrated to the United States, arriving in New York in July 1946. Once in America, Heymann taught history at high schools and pursued his life-long passion of research and writing. His first book was published in 1955, a major work on John Žižka and the Hussite Revolution. Between 1956-1958 he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and then was Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa 1958-1959. He joined the University of Calgary in 1959 as an associate professor of history, later serving as Head of the Department. Heymann was widely acknowledged as an authority on Czech history and would publish numerous articles, chapters and books, including George of Bohemia, King of Heretics (1965) and Poland and Czechoslovakia (1966). He retired from the University of Calgary in 1973 and was granted Professor Emeritus status for his outstanding scholarship and service. Heymann and his first wife Edith had two children, Ruth Bean and Frank. Edith died in 1966. Heymann married his second wife Dr. Lili Rabel from the Department of Linguistics, University of Calgary, in 1969. He died in 1983.
December 24, 1943
Volker Kriegel (24 December 1943 – 15 June 2003) was a German jazz guitarist and founding member of the United Jazz + Rock Ensemble. Volker Kriegel was born in Germany and as well as being an author and artist, was primarily known as a famous guitarist and the "Father of Jazz Rock". His albums include Tropical Harvest and Spectrum. He died in Spain in June 2003 at the age of 59.
December 24, 1956
Adam Lizakowski was born December 24, 1956 in Dzierzoniow, Poland, and came to U.S in 1982. He is a bookstore owner, journalist, and poet. His books include - Cannibalism, 1984, Anteroom, 1986, Wiersze amerykanskie, 1990, Zlodzieje czeresni, 1990, Wspolczesny prymitywizm. Wiersze i poematy, 1992. His honors include: Golden Poetry Award, World of Poetry, 1987, 1990; M. Hlasko Award, Polish Writers Club, Vienna (Austria), 1990; 2nd award, Emigrant Poets' Contest, Horyzonty, 1990.
December 24, 1938
Elayne Antler Rapping (December 24, 1938 – June 7, 2016) was an American critic and analyst of popular culture and social issues. She authored several books covering topics such as media theory, popular culture, women's issues, and the portrayal of the legal system on television. As a regular contributor to such publications as The Nation, The Progressive, and The New York Times, she wrote on a wide variety of cultural issues including film and movie reviews.
December 25, 1931
Joseph Nicholas Gores (December 25, 1931 - January 10, 2011) was an American mystery writer. He was known best for his novels and short stories set in San Francisco and featuring the fictional "Dan Kearney and Associates" (the "DKA Files") private investigation firm specializing in repossessing cars, a thinly veiled escalation of his own experiences as a confidential sleuth and repo man. Gores was also recognized for his novels Hammett (1975; made into the 1982 film Hammett), Spade & Archer (the 2009 prequel to Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon) and his Edgar Award-winning or -nominated works, such as A Time of Predators, 32 Cadillacs and Come Morning.
December 25, 1914
Oscar Lewis, born Lefkowitz (December 25, 1914 – December 16, 1970) was an American anthropologist. He is best known for his vivid depictions of the lives of slum dwellers and his argument that a cross-generational culture of poverty transcends national boundaries. Lewis contended that the cultural similarities occurred because they were "common adaptations to common problems" and that "the culture of poverty is both an adaptation and a reaction of the poor classes to their marginal position in a class-stratified, highly individualistic, capitalistic society." He won the 1967 U.S. National Book Award in Science, Philosophy and Religion for La vida: a Puerto Rican family in the culture of poverty--San Juan and New York.
December 25, 1922
William Demby (December 25, 1922 – May 23, 2013) was an American writer. His works include Beetlecreek (1950) and The Catacombs (1965). Demby was born in Pittsburgh. After spending the years of World War II in Italy he attended Fisk University in Nashville, and was graduated in 1947. He returned to Italy the same year, where he finished his first novel, BEETLECREEK. When it was published in 1931, the New Yorker wrote: ‘It would be hard to give Mr. Demby too much praise for the skill with which he has maneuvered the various relationships in his book. At times, one has the feeling that he simply set the scene and named the characters, and let them carry on alone from there, so naturally and inevitably does their story develop to its ending.’ In the years that followed, he worked in the Italian film industry as a writer and translator, and, with Rome as his base, traveled in Europe, Ethiopia, Japan and Thailand. Late in 1963, Mr. Demby returned to live in America.
December 25, 1961
Aleš Debeljak (25 December 1961 – 28 January 2016), was a Slovenian cultural critic, poet, and essayist. Debeljak was born in the Slovenian capital Ljubljana, then part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. He graduated from comparative literature at the University of Ljubljana in 1985. He continued his studies in the United States, obtaining a PhD in sociology of culture at Syracuse University in 1989. He was later a Senior Fulbright fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He also worked at the Institute for Advanced Studies Collegium Budapest, the Civitella Ranieri Center and the Bogliasco Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanitites. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Debeljak took an active part in civil society movements. He was one of the co-editors of the critical alternative journal Nova revija. He also participated in the social liberal think tank Forum 21, led by the former President of Slovenia Milan Ku?an. He was professor of cultural studies at the Faculty for Social Studies of the University of Ljubljana. He was married to the columnist, translator and American-Slovenian writer Erica Johnson Debeljak. Debeljak began publishing poetry in his college years. He was spotted by the poet Veno Taufer who helped him in the literary scene. His first collection of poetry was very well received also by the poet Tomaž Šalamun, who declared Debeljak as the best poet of the young generation of Slovene authors. Debeljak's poetry is noted for its melancholy and a new reaffirmation of traditional values such as family and God. Besides poetry and cultural criticism, Debeljak also worked as a columnist for the most important newspaper in Slovenia, Delo. His works have been translated in many languages, including English, German, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Czech, Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Rumanian, Slovak, Finnish, and Catalan (by Simona Škrabec). Aleš died in a car accident on January 28, a month after his 54th birthday.
December 25, 1946
Sir Christopher John Frayling (born 25 December 1946) is a British educationalist and writer, known for his study of popular culture.
December 25, 1907
Julia Clara Catherine Maria Dolores Robins Norton Birk Olsen Hitchens (December 25, 1907 in San Antonio, Texas – August 1, 1973 in Orange County, California), better known as Dolores Hitchens, was an American mystery novelist who wrote prolifically from 1938 until her death. She also wrote as D. B. Olsen, a version of her first married name, and under the pseudonyms Dolan Birkley and Noel Burke. Hitchens collaborated on five railroad mysteries—"police procedurals about a squad of railroad cops"—with her second husband, Bert Hitchens, a railroad detective. She also branched out into other genres including Western fiction. Many of her mystery novels centered on a spinster character named Rachel Murdock. Hitchens wrote Fool's Gold, the 1958 novel adapted by Jean-Luc Godard for his film Bande à part (Band of Outsiders, 1964). Her novel, The Watcher, was adapted for an episode of the TV series "Thriller" which aired November 1, 1960.
December 25, 1948
Gennady Spirin (born December 25, 1948) was classically educated at the Moscow Art School at the Academy of Arts and at the Moscow Stroganov Institute. Influenced by Russian Renaissance painters, Mr. Spirin has developed his own unique style of illustration using traditional Russian art techniques. His work appeared four times on the annual New York Times Ten Best Illustrated Books of the Year list. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
December 25, 1930
Khamsing Srinawk is a writer from the Isan region of Thailand. He writes under the pen-name Lao Khamhom. He was named a National Artist in Literature in 1992 and is best known for his satirical short stories published in his 1958 collection Fa Bo Kan (The Sky is No Barrier). Political scientist and historian Benedict Anderson argues that Khamsing is the best known short-story writer in the Kingdom of Thailand.
December 26, 1860
Esteban Mesa Montejo (1860-1965) was a runaway Cuban slave. He told his story to the Cuban ethnologist Miguel Barnet in taped interviews carried out in 1963. Barnet edited the transcripts and published them in 1966, as Biografía de un cimarrón. An English translation was published as Biography of a Runaway Slave and The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave. Montejo and Barnet's book includes descriptions of Afro-Cuban religious expression and of Montejo's life as a fugitive slave, along with recollections of the Cuban war for independence from Spain, which ultimately involved the United States. The book ends in 1905, following the US occupation of 1898-1902.[Miguel Barnet, Cuban poet and anthropologist, is responsible for capturing Montejo’s story. For two years he talked with Montejo, taping conversations, filling shoeboxes with notes, and finally putting everything on paper. The result is a literary achievement of high order and a remarkably rich human experience. Miguel Barnet was born and educated in Havana. He originally studied for a degree in Social Sciences, but after the revolution he extended his field to cover ethnography and anthropology, specializing in Afro-Cuban survivals. He regards himself primarily as a poet. His third collection of poems won the Casa de las Americas prize. He has also edited a book of Cuban fables for children and the tape-recorded autobiography of a celebrated Cuban music-hall queen.
December 26, 1904
Alejo Carpentier y Valmont (December 26, 1904 - April 24, 1980) was a Cuban novelist, essay writer, and musicologist who greatly influenced Latin American literature during its famous ‘boom’ period. Carpentier was born in Lausanne, Switzerland. For a long time it was believed that he was born in La Habana where his family moved immediately before his birth, but following his death a birth certificate was found in Switzerland. His mother was a Russian professor of languages and his father was a French architect. At 12, his family moved to Paris, where he began to study music theory at the lycee Jeanson de Sailly. When they returned to Cuba in the 1920s, he began a study of architecture which he never completed. He also studied music. Carpentier became a cultural journalist, writing mostly about avant-garde developments in the arts, particularly music. His journalistic work was also considered as leftist and helped found the Cuban Communist Party. Together with the composer Amadeo Roldán, he helped organize the Cuban premieres of works by Stravinsky and Poulenc. 1927, Carpentier was arrested for opposing the Gerardo Machado y Morales dictatorship and spent forty days in jail. It is during this brief period in jail when he started working on his first novel, Ecué-Yamba-O (1933), an exploration of Afro-Cuban traditions among the poor of the island, which he later disavowed for being superficial. He was released in early 1928. After his release, he escaped Cuba with the help of poet journalist Robert Desnos who had lent him his passport and papers. While exiled in France, Carpentier was introduced to the surrealists by Desnos, including André Breton, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, Jacques Prévert, and Antonin Artaud. He also met Guatemalan author Miguel Angel Asturias, whose work on pre-Columbian mythology influenced his writing. He continued to earn his living writing, both in French and Spanish, on contemporary culture, as well as contributing to the Communist Party journal. While in France, he made several visits to Spain, during which he developed a fascination for the Baroque. In 1937 (during the Spanish Civil War) he attended an international conference in Madrid of writers against fascism. Carpentier returned to Cuba and continued to work as a journalist at the outbreak of World War II. He also began research on a book on Cuban music. It was published in 1946 as La musica in Cuba (Music in Cuba). He also wrote stories which were later collected in The War of Time (1958). While in Cuba, Carpentier also attended a voodoo ceremony that was to develop his interest in Afro-Cubanism. In 1943, Carpentier, accompanied by French theatrical director Louis Jouvet, made a crucial trip to Haiti, during which he visited the fortress of the Citadelle La Ferriere and the Palace of Sans-Souci, both built by the black king Henri Christophe. This trip, along with readings from Oswald Spengler’s cyclical interpretation of history, provided the inspiration for his second novel, The Kingdom of this World (1949). In 1945, Carpentier moved to Caracas. From 1945 to 1959 he lived in Venezuela, which is the obvious inspiration for the unnamed South American country in which much of The Lost Steps is set. In 1949, he finishes his novel The Kingdom of this World. This novel has a prologue that ‘outlines Carpentier’s faith in the destiny of Latin America and the aesthetic implications of its peculiar cultural heritage.’ He returned to Cuba after the Fidel Castro’s Communist revolution in 1959. He worked for the State Publishing House while he completed the baroque-style book, Explosion in a Cathedral (1962).’ This novel discusses the advent of the Enlightenment and the ideas of the French Revolution in the New World. It has twin leitmotifs of the printing press and the guillotine and can be read as a ‘meditation on the dangers inherent in all revolutions as they begin to confront the temptations of dictatorship.’ After reading the book Gabriel García Márquez is said to have discarded the first draft of One Hundred Years of Solitude and begun again from scratch. In 1966, he settled in Paris as he served as Cuban ambassador to France. In 1975 he was the recipient of the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca. He received the Cervantes Prize in 1977 and was recipient of the French Laureates Prix Médicis étranger in 1979 for La harpe et l’ombre. Carpentier was struggling with cancer as he completed his final novel and he died in Paris on April 24, 1980. His remains were returned to Cuba for interment in the Colon Cemetery, Havana. Carpentier is widely known for his baroque style of writing and his theory of ‘lo real maravilloso,’. It was in the prologue to The Kingdom of this World, a novel of the Haitian Revolution, that he described his vision of ‘lo real maravilloso’ (‘But what is the history of Latin America but a chronicle of magical realism?’). Some critics interpret the ‘real maravilloso’ as being synonymous with magical realism. His most famous works include - Ecue-yamba-o! (Praised Be the Lord!, 1933); The Kingdom of this World (1949); The Lost Steps (1953); El acoso (1956) (Manhunt); War of Time (1958); El siglo de las luces (1962) (Explosion in a Cathedral); El recurso del método (1974) (Reasons of State); Concierto barroco (1974) (Concierto barroco), based on the 1709 meeting of Vivaldi, Handel and Domenico Scarlatti, with cameo appearances by Wagner and Stravinsky, and fictional characters from the new world who inspire the Venetian composer’s opera, Motezuma; La consagración de la primavera (1978) (The Consecration of Spring); El arpa y la sombra (1978) (The Harp and the Shadow) dealing with Columbus. (original title: El Siglo de las Luces, 1962).
December 26, 1947
Jean Echenoz (born 26 December 1947 in Orange, Vaucluse, France) is a French writer. Son of a psychiatrist, Echenoz studied in Rodez, Digne-les-Bains, Lyon, Aix-en-Provence, Marseille and Paris, where he has lived since 1970. He published his first book, Le méridien de Greenwich in 1979. He has published twelve novels to date and received about ten literary prizes, including the prix Médicis 1983 for Cherokee, the prix Goncourt 1999 for I'm Off (Je m'en vais), and the prix Aristeion for Lac (1989).
December 26, 1891
Henry Valentine Miller (December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980) was an American writer. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms, developing a new sort of semi-autobiographical novel that blended character study, social criticism, philosophical reflection, explicit language, sex, surrealist free association and mysticism.
December 26, 1945
DINITIA SMITH has been a journalist and screenwriter - the winner of an Emmy award in 1975 for her work as writer-producer of a television documentary. Her short fiction has been published in The Hudson Review. She lives in New York City.
December 26, 1842
Laura Gonzenbach (1842–1878) was a Swiss folklorist, active in Messina, who collected fairy tales in a number of Sicilian dialects. Gonzenbach was born in a Swiss-German community of Sicily, to a German-speaking mercantile family, her sister, Magdelena, began a school in Messina. She became well educated and gained renown for the stories she gathered from a diverse range of sources, often other women. After the prompting of Otto Hartwig for material to append to a historical survey of the country, she produced what would become an important two volume collection, Sicilianische Märchen (Sicilian folk-tales), published in 1870. Her seminal works collected tales given verbally, by peasants or other working and middle classes, and is noted as one of the few major collections of the nineteenth century to be compiled by a woman Jack Zipes, one of the world’s experts on fairy tales and folklore, is the acclaimed translator of the COMPLETE FAIRY TALES OF THE BROTHRS GRIMM (Bantam), editor of the OXFORD COMPANION TO FAIRY TALES, and the author of more than a dozen books on children’s literature and culture, including DON’T BET ON THE PRINCE, STICKS AND STONES, and CREATIVE STORYTELLING. He is Professor of German at the University of Minnesota.
December 26, 1894
Jean Toomer (December 26, 1894 – March 30, 1967) was an American poet and novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance. His first book Cane, published in 1923, is considered by many his most significant. Toomer was born Nathan Eugene Pinchback Toomer in Washington, D.C. His father was a prosperous farmer, originally born into slavery in Hancock County, Georgia. His mother, Nina Pinchback, was of mixed ethnic descent. Her father, Louisiana Governor P. B. S. Pinchback, was a planter and the first African American to become governor of a U.S. state. Her mother was a mulatto slave. Both of Toomer's maternal grandparents had white fathers. After Reconstruction, the Pinchbacks had moved to Washington, D.C., where they became part of the ‘mulatto elite.’ Toomer's father (also called Nathan Toomer) abandoned the family when his son was an infant, and the boy and his mother lived with her parents. As a child in Washington, Toomer attended all-black schools. When his mother re-married and they moved to suburban New Rochelle, New York, he attended an all-white school. After his mother's death, Toomer returned to Washington to live with his Pinchback grandparents. He graduated from the M Street School, an academic black high school. By his early adult years, Toomer resisted racial classifications and wanted to be identified only as an American. Between 1914 and 1917 Toomer attended six institutions of higher education (the University of Wisconsin, the Massachusetts College of Agriculture, the American College of Physical Training in Chicago, the University of Chicago, New York University, and the City College of New York) studying agriculture, fitness, biology, sociology, and history, but he never completed a degree. His wide readings among prominent contemporary poets and writers, and the lectures he attended during his college years, shaped the direction of his writing. After leaving college, Toomer published some short stories and continued writing in the volatile social period following World War I. He worked for some months in a shipyard in 1919, then escaped to middle-class life. Labor strikes and race riots occurred in several major cities during the summer of 1919, and artistic ferment was high. He devoted several months to the study of Eastern philosophies and continued to be interested in this. Some of his early writing was political, and he published three essays from 1919-1920 in the prominent socialist paper New York Call. They drew from the socialist and ‘New Negro’ movements of New York. Toomer was reading much new American writing, for instance Waldo Frank's Our America (1919). In 1921 Toomer took a job for a few months as a principal at a new rural agricultural and industrial school for blacks in Sparta, Georgia. It was in the center of Hancock County and in the Black Belt 100 miles southeast of Atlanta. His exploration of his father's roots in Hancock County, as well as being forced into witnessing the segregation and labor peonage of the Deep South, led him to identify more strongly as an African American. Several lynchings took place in Georgia during 1921-1922, continuing to enforce white supremacy with violence. In 1908 the state had ratified a constitution essentially disfranchising blacks; by Toomer's time, it passed laws to prevent outmigration and established high licenses fees for employers recruiting labor in the state. African Americans had started their Great Migration north and planters feared losing their pool of cheap labor. It was a formative experience for Toomer; he started writing about it while still in Georgia and submitted the long story ‘Georgia Night’ to the Liberator in New York while there. Toomer returned to New York where he became friends with Waldo Frank, who also served as his mentor and editor on his novel Cane. In 1923, Toomer published the High Modernist novel Cane, in which he used a variety of forms, and material inspired by his time in Georgia. It was also an ‘analysis of class and caste’, with ‘secrecy and miscegenation as major themes of the first section’. He had conceived it as a short-story cycle, and acknowledged the influence of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919) as his model, in addition to other influential works of that period. He also appeared to have absorbed The Waste Land of T. S. Eliot and considered him one of the American group of writers he wanted to join, ‘artists and intellectuals who were engaged in renewing American society at its multi-cultural core.’ Many scholars considered Cane to be his best work. A series of poems and short stories about the black experience in America, Cane was hailed by critics and is seen as an important work of both the Harlem Renaissance and the Lost Generation. Toomer resisted racial classification and did not want the book marketed as a black work. As he said to his publisher Horace Liveright, ‘My racial composition and my position in the world are realities that I alone may determine.’ Toomer found it more difficult to get published throughout the 1930s, as did many authors during the Great Depression. He became very interested in the work of the spiritual leader George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, who had a lecture tour in the United States in 1924. That year, and in 1926 and 1927, Toomer went to France to study with Gurdjieff, who had settled at Fontainebleau. He was a student of Gurdjieff until the mid-1930s. In 1931 Toomer married the writer Margery Latimer. The following year she died in childbirth in August 1932 and he named their only daughter Margery. In 1934 he married a second time, to Marjorie Content. Because Toomer was notable as a writer, his two marriages, both classed as inter-racial, attracted notice and some social criticism. In 1940 the Toomers moved to Doylestown, Pennsylvania. There he formally joined the Quakers and began to withdraw from society. Toomer wrote a small amount of fiction and published essays in Quaker publications during this time, but devoted most of his time to serving on Quaker committees and working with high school students. His last literary work published during his lifetime was Blue Meridian, a long poem extolling ‘the potential of the American race’. He stopped writing for publication after 1950, although he wrote for himself, including several autobiographies. He died in 1967 after several years of poor health. Darwin T. Turner is presently professor of English and chairman of the Afro-American Studies program at the University of Iowa. He has also taught at Clark College, Morgan State College, Florida A&M, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Hawaii. He is the author of numerous essays in Black Studies and in American literature, and is prominent in professional organizations. He has currently been working with Jean Toomer’s unpublished writings.
December 26, 1921
Stephen Valentine Patrick William ‘Steve’ Allen (December 26, 1921 – October 30, 2000) was an American television personality, musician, composer, actor, comedian, and writer. Though he got his start in radio, Allen is best known for his television career. He first gained national attention as a guest host on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts. He graduated to become the first host of The Tonight Show, where he was instrumental in innovating the concept of the television talk show. Thereafter, he hosted numerous game and variety shows, including The Steve Allen Show, I've Got a Secret, The New Steve Allen Show, and was a regular panel member on CBS' What's My Line? Allen was a credible pianist and a prolific composer, having penned over 14,000 songs, one of which was recorded by Perry Como and Margaret Whiting, others by Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, Les Brown, and Gloria Lynne. Allen won a Grammy award in 1963 for best jazz composition, with his song The Gravy Waltz. His vast number of songs has never been equaled. Allen wrote more than 50 books, has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and a Hollywood theater named in his honor.
December 26, 1940
Jean Eisenstaedt is Senior Researcher at France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) attached to the Paris Observatory. The widely praised French edition of The Curious History of Relativity was published as Einstein et la relativité générale. Eisenstaedt’s most recent book is Avant Einstein. Relativité, lumière, gravitation (Before Einstein: Relativity, Light, Gravitation).
December 26, 1884
Harry Hansen (December 26, 1884 – January 3, 1977) was an American journalist, editor, literary critic and historian. He is notable as one of the many authors who wrote for the Random House Landmark Series of children's history during the 1950s and 1960s and he also edited the World Book from 1950 to 1965.
December 26, 1956
Sir Noel Robert Malcolm is an English political journalist, historian and academic. A King's Scholar at Eton College, Malcolm read history at Peterhouse, Cambridge and received his Doctorate in History from Trinity College, Cambridge.
December 26, 1893
Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-Tung, December 26, 1893 – September 9, 1976), also known as Chairman Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary, poet, political theorist and founding father of the People's Republic of China, which he ruled as the Chairman of the Communist Party of China from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976. His theories and military strategies and political policies are collectively known as Maoism or Marxism–Leninism–Maoism. Born the son of a wealthy farmer in Shaoshan, Hunan, Mao adopted a Chinese nationalist and anti-imperialist outlook in early life, particularly influenced by the events of the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 and May Fourth Movement of 1919. Mao adopted Marxism–Leninism while working at Peking University and became a founding member of the Communist Party of China (CPC), leading the Autumn Harvest Uprising in 1927. During the Chinese Civil War between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the CPC, Mao helped to found the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, led the Jiangxi Soviet's radical land policies and ultimately became head of the CPC during the Long March. Although the CPC temporarily allied with the KMT under the United Front during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), after Japan's defeat China's civil war resumed and in 1949 Mao's forces defeated the Nationalists who withdrew to Taiwan. On October 1, 1949 Mao proclaimed the foundation of the People's Republic of China (PRC), a single-party state controlled by the CPC. In the following years Mao solidified his control through land reforms and through a psychological victory in the Korean War, and through campaigns against landlords, people he termed "counter-revolutionaries", and other perceived enemies of the state. In 1957 he launched a campaign known as the Great Leap Forward that aimed to rapidly transform China's economy from an agrarian economy to an industrial one. This campaign led to the deadliest famine in history and the deaths of more than 15 million people. In 1966, he initiated the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a program to remove "counter-revolutionary" elements of Chinese society that lasted 10 years and which was marked by violent class struggle, widespread destruction of cultural artifacts and unprecedented elevation of Mao's personality cult and which is officially regarded as a "severe setback" for the PRC. In 1972, Mao welcomed American President Richard Nixon in Beijing, signalling a policy of opening China, which was furthered under the rule of Deng Xiaoping (1978–1989). Mao suffered a series of heart attacks in 1976 and died at the age of 82 on September 9. Mao was succeeded as paramount leader by Chairman Hua Guofeng (1976–1978), who was quickly sidelined and replaced by Deng. A controversial figure, Mao is regarded as one of the most important individuals in modern world history and is also known as a theorist, military strategist, poet and visionary. Supporters credit him with driving imperialism out of China, modernising China and building it into a world power, promoting the status of women, improving education and health care, as well as increasing life expectancy as China's population grew from around 550 million to over 900 million under his leadership. Conversely, his autocratic totalitarian regime has been vastly condemned for overseeing mass repressions and destruction of religious and cultural artifacts and sites, which through arbitrary executions, purges and forced labor caused an estimated 40 to 70 million deaths, which would rank his tenure as the top incidence of excess mortality in human history.
December 26, 1962
Volker Kutscher (born December 26, 1962) studied German language and literature studies, philosophy and history. He works as journalist and writer. His crime stories took place in the Berlin during the Weimar Republic and contain a lot of descriptions of this city and time.
December 27, 1914
Giuseppe Berto (27 December 1914 – 1 November 1978) was an Italian writer. He is mostly known for his novels, among which Il cielo è rosso (THE SKY IS RED) and Il male oscuro (INCUBUS); he also wrote for cinema.
December 27, 1896
Louis Bromfield (December 27, 1896 – March 18, 1956) was an American author and conservationist. He gained international recognition, winning the Pulitzer Prize and pioneering innovative scientific farming concepts.
December 27, 1942
Antonio Alfonso Cisneros Campoy, (27 December 1942 - 6 October 2012) was a Peruvian poet. He died in Lima, aged 69.
December 27, 1948
Meja Mwangi (born 27 December 1948) is one of Kenya's leading novelists. Mwangi has worked in the film industry, including screenwriting, assistant directing, casting and location management. He was born David Dominic Mwangi in Nanyuki, and was educated at Nanyuki Secondary School, Kenyatta College and the University of Leeds. He then worked on odd-jobs for foreign broadcasters before he turned to full-time writing. He was Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa (1975-6).
December 27, 1910
Charles Olson (27 December 1910 – 10 January 1970) was a second generation American modernist poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance. Consequently, many postmodern groups, such as the poets of the language school, include Olson as a primary and precedent figure. He described himself not so much as a poet or writer but as 'an archeologist of morning.'
December 27, 1927
John Evangelist Walsh (December 27, 1927, Manhattan, New York City, NY - March 19, 2015, Monroe, WI) was an American author, biographer, editor, historian and journalist. He was best known for leading a team of 7 editors tasked with creating a condensed version of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible.
December 27, 1933
Robert Paul Wolff is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the author of numerous books including Understanding Rawls (Princeton).
December 27, 1966
Chris Abani was born in Nigeria on December 27, 1966 and published his first novel at sixteen. He was imprisoned for his writings, and after his release he eventually moved to the United States. He is the author of ten books of poetry and fiction, including the best-selling novel GraceLand. He teaches at the University of California-Riverside and lives in Los Angeles.
December 27, 1948
Juan Felipe Herrera (born December 27, 1948, Fowler, California) is a poet, performer, writer, cartoonist, teacher, and activist. Herrera was the United States Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017. Herrera's experiences as the child of migrant farmers have strongly shaped his work a lot, such as the children's book Calling the Doves, which won the Ezra Jack Keats Book Award in 1997. Community and art have always been part of what has driven Herrera, beginning in the mid-seventies, when he was director of the Centro Cultural de la Raza, an occupied water tank in Balboa Park that had been converted into an arts space for the community. Herrera’s publications include fourteen collections of poetry, prose, short stories, young adult novels and picture books for children with twenty-one books in total in the last decade. His 2007 volume 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross the Border: Undocuments 1971-2007 contains texts in both Spanish and English that examine the cultural hybridity that "revolve around questions of identity" on the U.S.-Mexico border. Herrera was awarded the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for Half the World in Light. In 2012, he was appointed California Poet Laureate by Gov. Jerry Brown. In 2011, Herrera was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2015, Herrera was appointed as the nation's first Chicana or Chicano poet laureate. On June 11, 2016, Herrera was awarded an honorary Doctorate from Oregon State University.
December 27, 1969
Götz Hoeppe is an editor of the popular German science magazine Spektrum der Wissenschaft and a lecturer in social anthropology at Heidelberg University. He is the author of Conversations on the Beach: Fishermen’s Knowledge, Metaphor and Environmental Change in South India.
December 27, 1969
Sarah Jane Vowell (born December 27, 1969) is an American historian, author, journalist, essayist, social commentator and actress. Often referred to as a "social observer," Vowell has written seven nonfiction books on American history and culture. She was a contributing editor for the radio program This American Life on Public Radio International from 1996 to 2008, where she produced numerous commentaries and documentaries and toured the country in many of the program's live shows. She was also the voice of Violet Parr in the animated film The Incredibles and its 2018 sequel.
December 28, 1872
Pío Baroja y Nessi (December 28, 1872 – October 30, 1956) was a Spanish Basque writer, one of the key novelists of the Generation of '98. He was a member of an illustrious family, his brother Ricardo was a painter, writer and engraver, and his nephew Julio Caro Baroja, son of his younger sister Carmen, was a well known anthropologist. The son of Serafin Baroja, a Basque writer, opera librettist and mining engineer, Pío was born in San Sebastian, Spain. Although educated as a physician, Baroja only practised this profession briefly. As a matter of fact, he would use his student's memories - some of them he would consider terrible - as the raw material for his novel The Tree of Knowledge. He also managed the family bakery for a short time and ran unsuccessfully on two occasions for a seat at the Cortes (Spanish parliament) as a Radical Republican. Baroja's true calling, however, was always writing, which he began seriously at the age of 13. His first novel --La casa de Aizgorri (The House of Aizgorri, 1900)-- is part of a trilogy called La Tierra Vasca (The Basque Country, 1900–1909). This trilogy also includes El Mayorazgo de Labraz (The Lord of Labraz, 1903) which became one of his most popular novels in Spain. However, he is best known internationally by another trilogy entitled La lucha por la vida (The Struggle for Life, 1922–1924) which offers a vivid depiction of life in Madrid's slums. John Dos Passos greatly admired these works and wrote about them. Another major work --Memorias de un Hombre de Acción (Memories of a Man of Action, 1913–1931)-- offers a depiction of one of his ancestors who lived in the Basque region during the Carlist uprising in the 19th century. Another of his trilogies is called La mar (The sea) and comprises La estrella del capitán Tximista, Los Pilotos de altura, and Los mercaderes de esclavos. Baroja also wrote the biography of Juan Manuel Antonio Julian Van Halen, a mariner who lived in the late 18th century. However, some believe his masterpiece to be El árbol de la ciencia (1911) (translated as The Tree of Knowledge), a pessimistic Bildungsroman that depicts the futility of the pursuit of knowledge and of life in general. The title is ironically symbolic: The more the chief protagonist Andres Hurtado learns about and experiences life, the more pessimistic he feels and the more futile his life seems. In keeping with Spanish literary tradition, Baroja often wrote in a pessimistic, picaresque style. His deft portrayal of the characters and settings brought the Basque region to life much as Benito Pérez Galdós' works offered an insight into Madrid. Baroja's works were often lively, but could be lacking in plot and are written in an abrupt, vivid, yet impersonal style. Sometimes he is even accused of grammatical errors, which he never denied. Baroja as a young man believed loosely in anarchistic ideals, as other members of the '98 Generation. However, later he would derive into simple admiration of men of action, somehow similar to Nietzsche's superman. His vitalistic vision of life -although pessimistic- led his novels, his ideas and his figure to be considered somehow a precursor of a kind of Spanish fascism. In any case, he was not loved by Catholic and traditionalist ideologists and his life was at risk during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). Ernest Hemingway was greatly influenced by Baroja, and told him when he visited him in October 1956, ‘Allow me to pay this small tribute to you who taught so much to those of us who wanted to be writers when we were young. I deplore the fact that you have not yet received a Nobel Prize, especially when it was given to so many who deserved it less, like me, who am only an adventurer.’
December 28, 1951
Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Democracy, Human Rights, and Journalism at Bard College. His many books include Anglomania (Random House), Inventing Japan (Modern Library), and Murder in Amsterdam (Penguin), which won a Los Angeles Times Book Award. He is a regular contributor to many publications, including the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the Guardian, and the Financial Times.
December 28, 1949
Wendy Kaminer (born 1949) is an American lawyer and writer. She has written several books on contemporary social issues, including A Fearful Freedom: Women's Flight From Equality, about the conflict between egalitarian and protectionist feminism; I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions, about the self-help movement; and Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety.
December 28, 1933
Charles Portis lives in Arkansas, where he was born and educated. He served in the Marine Corps during the Korean War. As a reporter, he wrote for the New York Herald-Tribune, and was also its London bureau chief. His first novel, Norwood, was published in 1966. His other novels are True Grit, The Dog of the South, and Gringos.
December 28, 1931
Guy Louis Debord (28 December 1931 – 30 November 1994) was a French Marxist theorist, philosopher, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International (SI). He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.
December 28, 1921
Johnny Otis (born Ioannis Alexandres Veliotes, December 28, 1921 – January 17, 2012) was an American singer, musician, composer, arranger, bandleader, talent scout, disc jockey, record producer, television show host, artist, author, journalist, minister, and impresario. A seminal influence on American R&B and rock and roll, Otis discovered artists such as Little Esther, Big Mama Thornton, Jackie Wilson, Little Willie John and Hank Ballard and Etta James. Known as the original 'King of Rock & Roll', he is commonly referred to as the 'Godfather of Rhythm and Blues'.
December 28, 1789
Catharine Maria Sedgwick (December 28, 1789 – July 31, 1867), was an American novelist of what is sometimes referred to as 'domestic fiction'. She promoted Republican motherhood.
December 28, 1917
Mouloud Mammeri was a Berber writer, poet, anthropologist and linguist. Born on December 28, 1917 in Tawrirt Mimun, Ait Yenni, in Tizi Ouzou Province, Algeria; died in February 1989 near Aïn Defla in a car accident while returning from a conference in Oujda, Morocco. Mouloud Mammeri attended a primary school in his native village. In 1928 he emigrated to Morocco to live in his uncle's house in Rabat. Four years later he returned to Algiers and pursued his studies at Bugeaud College. He then went to Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris intending to join the École Normale Supérieure. Conscripted in 1939 and discharged in October 1940, Mouloud Mammeri registered at the Faculté des Lettres d’Alger. Re-conscripted in 1942 after the American landing, he participated in the allied campaigns in France, Italy, and Germany. After the end of the war, he received his degree as a professor of arts and returned to Algeria in September 1947. He taught in Médéa, and then in Ben Aknoun, and published his first novel, The Forgotten Hill in 1952. He was forced to leave Algiers in 1957 because of the Algerian War. Mouloud came back to Algeria shortly after its independence, in 1962. From 1965 to 1972 he taught Berber at the university in the department of ethnology. Teaching Berber was prohibited in 1962 by the Algerian government. He voluntarily taught some Berber courses under certain permission until 1973, when certain courses such as ethnology and anthropology were judged as "colonial sciences" and disbanded. From 1969 to 1980 Mouloud Mammeri directed the Anthropological, Prehistoric and Ethnographic Research center at Algiers (CRAPE). He also headed the first national union of Algerian writers for a time, until he left due to disagreements over views of the role of writers in society. In 1969 Mouloud Mammeri collected and published texts of the Berber poet Si Mohand. In 1980, the prohibition of one of his conferences at Tizi Ouzou on kabyle poetry caused riots and what would be called the Berber Spring in Kabylie. In 1982, he founded the Center of Amazigh Studies and Research (CERAM) and a periodical called Awal (The Word) in Paris, and organized several seminars on amazigh language and literature at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). Thus he was able to compile a wealth of information on the Berber language and literature. In 1988 Mouloud Mammeri received an honorary doctorate from Sorbonne. Mouloud Mammeri died the evening of February 26, 1989 in a car accident, which took place near Ain-Defla on his return from a symposium in Oujda (Morocco). His funeral was spectacular, with more than 200,000 people in attendance. No officials attended the funeral, where the crowd organized in demonstrating against the government.
December 28, 1956
Burkhard Spinnen (born December 28, 1956 in Mönchengladbach) is a German author.Spinnen grew up in Mönchengladbach as the only child of Willy and Cornelia Spinnen. After completing his secondary education and his military service in 1976, he studied Mass communication, Sociology and German Studies at the University of Münster, completing his master's degree in 1984 and then his doctorate in the Faculty of Philosophy in 1989. Following his studies, he worked at the Institute for German Studies as an Assistant until 1995 after which, from 1996 onward, he decided to become a freelance writer. Burkhard Spinnen is a member of PEN Centre Germany.From 1997 to 2000 he was guest professor at the Deutsches Literaturinstitut in Leipzig. From 2000 to 2006 he was a member of the Jury of the Klagenfurt-based Ingeborg-Bachmann-Prize, and from 2008 to 2014 the Jury Chairman. Since 2011 he has been a member of the prestigious North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts. As well as writing novels, short stories, essays and criticism, Spinnen writes reviews and opinion pieces for the newspapers and radio. Spinnen has received numerous awards for his work. Spinnen has lived in Münster since 1996 as a freelance writer. He is married with two sons. In 2016 he published a frank account of his mother’s gradual decline into dementia.
December 29, 1944
Gilbert Adair (29 December 1944 – 8 December 2011) was a Scottish novelist, poet, film critic and journalist. He was critically most famous for the 'fiendish' translation of Georges Perec's postmodern novel A Void, in which the letter e is not used, but was more widely known for the films adapted from his novels, including Love and Death on Long Island (1997) and The Dreamers (2003).
December 29, 1921
Dobrica Cosic (29 December 1921 – 18 May 2014) was a Serbian politician, writer, and political theorist. ?osi? was twice awarded the prestigious NIN award for literature and Medal of Pushkin for his writing. His books have been translated in 30 languages. He was the first President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia with his tenure lasting from 1992 to 1993. Admirers sometimes refer to him as the Father of the Nation due to his influence on modern Serbian politics and the national revival movement in the late 1980s while his opponents use that term in an ironic manner.
December 29, 1922
William Thomas Gaddis, Jr. (December 29, 1922 – December 16, 1998) was an American novelist. The first and longest of his five novels, The Recognitions, was named one of TIME magazine's 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005 and two others won the annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. A collection of his essays was published posthumously as The Rush for Second Place (2002). The Letters of William Gaddis was published by Dalkey Archive Press in February 2013. Gaddis is one of the first and most important American postmodern writers. Because of their complexity and inventiveness in structure and style, his novels are often challenging to read; for example, his National Book Award winners J R and A Frolic of His Own are written almost entirely in unattributed dialogue and without much description, leaving the reader with only different characters' verbal tics, stock phrases and obsessions to identify who is speaking. His books are also known for their extensive use of literary and cultural allusions, most of which are annotated in The Gaddis Annotations.
December 29, 1956
Jim Shepard is the author of the novels FLIGHTS, PAPER DOLL, LIGHTS OUT IN THE REPTILE HOUSE, and KISS OF THE WOLF. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, TriQuarterly, The Paris Review, and THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES.
December 29, 1888
Gustavo Dodt Barroso (December 29, 1888 in Fortaleza – December 3, 1957 in Rio de Janeiro) was a Brazilian writer and politician associated with Brazilian Integralism. He was half German by birth, his mother coming from Württemberg. Barroso made his name as a journalist and was for a time involved with the socialist Clube Maximo Gorki. However his politics became more conservative after he secured a law degree in Rio de Janeiro in 1910. He soon became an important figure in Ceará state, serving variously as Secretary of the Interior and Justice, and being elected a Representative in the National Congress. He even formed part of the Brazilian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, 1919. He would later rise to hold such positions as president of the Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy) and secretary-general of the International Committee of Legal Advisers. In 1933, Barroso joined the Integralista party that had fascist characteristics. He soon became the head of the extreme anti-Jewish faction within the Integralista party. Noted for his hard-line antisemitism, he took charge of the group's militia from 1934 to 1936 before being appointed to the party's Supreme Council. An extensive writer, his polemical works at this time included many anti-semitic books and newspaper articles in Fon-Fon and Século XX magazines. Due to political differences Barroso came to be regarded as dangerous by the more constitutionally minded Integralista party's leader, Plínio Salgado, who suspended him from collaborating for six months with the party's newspaper, A Ofensiva. However Barroso continued to pursue his antisemitic ideals, translating the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion into Portuguese and even suggesting setting up concentration camps. Following the formation of the Estado Novo dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas (1938–1945), Barroso was arrested in 1938 after the Integralista party attempted a violent coup d´etat. However Barroso was never tried due to a lack of evidence of his involvement in the coup d´etat. He subsequently left political activism and became largely accepting of Getúlio Vargas posterior constitutional government (1951–1954), serving as a special ambassador to Uruguay (1952) and Peru (1954). He was awarded a posthumous honorary doctorate from a Rio de Janeiro University. A museum in Fortaleza, his home town, the Museu Gustavo Barroso, bears his name. A keen Folklorist, Barroso built up a collection of exhibits relating to Brazil's past at the Museu Histórico Nacional in Rio de Janeiro and produced around 50 non-political books including historical and regional novels, folklore studies and biographies of Brazilian national military heroes such as General Osório and Admiral Tamandaré. As a novelist, he produced the work Terra de Sol (1912), which demonstrated his admiration for the people of northeastern Brazil's rural areas. Barroso was often linked in with the neorealist school of Brazilian literature, although he differed from the neorealism typified by the likes of Erico Verissimo, Amando Fontes and Telmo Vergara by his emphasis on rural rather than urban settings. Barroso belonged to the regionalist documentary strand of Brazilian neorealism, although, along with Mário Sete, he rejected the modernism inherent in the works of contemporaries in the genre such as Jorge Luis de Rêgo and Jorge Amado. An a political writer, his polemical works when joined to the Integralista party included O Liceu do Ceará, Brasil: Colônia de Banqueiros and História Secreta do Brasil. He also translated the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion into Portuguese. As Brazil had relatively few Jews by then, Barroso's anti-semitic writings tended to focus on the international conspiracy theory of Jewish world control, as espoused notably in his book The Paulista Synagogue.
December 29, 1956
MARK HERTSGAARD is an investigative journalist living in Washington, D.C. He is the author of NUCLEAR INC.: THE MEN AND MONEY BEHIND NUCLEAR ENERGY, and his writing has appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, and the Columbia Journalism Review, among other publications.
December 29, 1924
Eric Mottram (29 December 1924 – 16 January 1995) was a teacher, critic, editor and poet who was one of the central figures in the British Poetry Revival.
December 29, 1936
The author, Angelina Muniz-Huberman was born in Hyeres, France, of Spanish parents in 1937; she has lived most of her life in Mexico City. Her novels include Morada interior (1972), Tierra adentro (1977), and La Guerra del unicornio (1983). She has a collection of poetry Vilano al viento (1983), and writes regularly for the Mexican periodicals, Vuelta and Uno mas uno. Another collection of short fiction was published in 1988 by the Fondo de Cultura Economica in Mexico City. Ms. Muniz-Huberman is professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. . The translator: Lois Parkinson Zamora is professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Houston. She has written critical studies on contemporary U.S. and Latin American fiction, including WRITING THE APOCALYPSE: HISTORICAL VISION IN CONTEMPORARY U.S. AND LATIN AMERICAN FICTION (Cambridge University Press). She is currently translating selected short fiction by the Uruguayan writer, Felisberto Hernandez. The cover artist: Giulia Cardinali was born in Milan, Italy. Ashe studied design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, and then completed her doctorate in architecture at the Polytechnic University in Milan. She is currently professor of Architecture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She has had exhibitions of her engravings in Mexico City, New York, Venice, and Rome. .
December 29, 1911
António Alves Redol (December 29, 1911 - November 29, 1969) was one of the most influential Portuguese neorealist writers. Redol was born in Vila Franca de Xira to António Redol da Cruz, shopkeeper, and Inocência Alves Redol. When he was 15 he started publishing articles in the local weekly newspaper Vida Ribatejana. Finishing secondary school in 1927, in the next year travelled to Angola (a Portuguese colony at the time), where he stayed for three years. His stay in Angola was mainly unfruitful but influenced his world view, which later became visible in his literature. In 1936 he marries Maria dos Santos Mota. Alves Redol works with newspapers identified with the opposition to the Estado Novo: O Diabo and Sol Nascente. November 29, 1936 is published his first collaboration with O Diabo, the short story Kangondo, set in an African ambiance. He will continue writing chronicles and tales, showing to be identified with the social issues of his region, Ribatejo. Redol would not become known for his work as a journalist though. Instead, he became known for his novels. In 1939 he published his first book, Gaibéus. According to the author, Gaibéus was not intended as a piece of art, but rather as a report of the way of life of peasants in Ribatejo[citation needed]. This novel starts a series of works of fiction depicting the harsh lives of peasants and fishermen in Portugal, in the first half of the 20th century: Gaibéus (1939), Marés (1941), Avieiros (1942) and Fanga (1943). The publication of Fanga in 1943 coincides with the birth of his only son, António. The preoccupation of going beyond a writer of novels by being a reporter the real world is one of the main characteristics of Redol's work. Redol used to get in touch with the workers in the agricultural fields, such as the rice fields near Tagus river, and hear their stories and experiences. In the beginning of the 1940s he joins the Portuguese Communist Party, which was then illegal. Alves Redol is arrested in May 1944. In November 1945 he is included in the Central Committee of the Movement of Democratic Unity (Movimento de Unidade Democrática (M.U.D.)) for which he actively participates in the campaigns for the fake elections held by the Salazar regime. In 1947 he is nominated Secretary-General of the Portuguese section of the International PEN. In 1948 he participates in the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace, in Wroc?aw, Poland. His novel Horizonte Cerrado (1948) is the first volume of a trilogy concerning the Portuguese winemaking region of Douro. Os Homens e as Sombras (1951) and Vindima de Sangue (1953) complete the so-called Port wine cicle. Alves Redol's later works include A Barca dos Sete Lemes (1958), Uma Fenda na Muralha (1959) and finally Barranco de Cegos (1962), considered the clymax of his work. A Barca dos Sete Lemes was translated into the English language by Linton Lomas Barrett and published as A Man with Seven Names by Knopf in 1964. Alves Redol died in Lisbon, in 1969.
December 29, 1938
Epifanio San Juan Jr., also known as E. San Juan Jr. (born December 29, 1938) , at Sta. Cruz, Manila, Philippines), is a known Filipino American literary academic, Tagalog writer, Filipino poet, civic intellectual, activist, writer, essayist, video/film maker, editor, and poet whose works related to the Filipino Diaspora in English and Filipino writings have been translated into German, Russian, French, Italian, and Chinese. As an author of books on race and cultural studies, he was a "major influence on the academic world". He was the director of the Philippines Cultural Studies Center in Storrs, Connecticut in the United States. In 1999, San Juan received the Centennial Award for Achievement in Literature from the Cultural Center of the Philippines because of his contributions to Filipino and Filipino American Studies.
December 29, 1967
Tommie Shelby is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University.
December 29, 1944
Willard Spiegelman is the Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist University and has been editor of the "Southwest Review" since 1984. He lives in Dallas, Texas.
December 29, 1966
Christian Kracht is a Swiss novelist whose books have been translated into twenty-seven languages. His previous novels include Faserland, 1979, and I Will Be Here in Sunshine and in Shadow. Imperium was the recipient of the 2012 Wilhelm Raabe literature prize. Daniel Bowles teaches German studies at Boston College. His previous translations include novels by Thomas Meinecke and short texts by Alexander Kluge and Rainald Goetz.
December 29, 1943
Molly Garrett Bang (born December 29, 1943) is an American illustrator. For her illustration of children's books she has been a runner-up for the American Caldecott Medal three times and for the British Greenaway Medal once. Announced June 2015, her 1996 picture book Goose is the 2016 Phoenix Picture Book Award winner – that is, named by the Children's Literature Association the best English-language children's picture book that did not win a major award when it was published twenty years earlier.
December 30, 1910
Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 – November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
December 30, 1930
Takeshi Kaik? (30 December 1930 – 9 December 1989) was a prominent post-World War II Japanese novelist, short-story writer, essayist, literary critic, and television documentary writer. He was distinguished by his knowledge, intellect, sense of humor and conversational skills, and although his style has been criticized as wordy and obtuse, he was one of the more popular Japanese writers in the late Showa period.
December 30, 1865
Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) was an English short-story writer, poet, and novelist. He wrote tales and poems of British soldiers in India and stories for children. He was born in Bombay, in the Bombay Presidency of British India, and was taken by his family to England when he was five years old. Kipling's works of fiction include The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), and many short stories, including 'The Man Who Would Be King' (1888). His poems include 'Mandalay' (1890), 'Gunga Din' (1890), 'The Gods of the Copybook Headings' (1919), 'The White Man's Burden' (1899), and 'If—' (1910). He is regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story; his children's books are enduring classics of children's literature; and one critic described his work as exhibiting 'a versatile and luminous narrative gift'. Kipling was one of the most popular writers in England, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Henry James said: 'Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known.' In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and its youngest recipient to date. Among other honours, he was sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, all of which he declined. Kipling's subsequent reputation has changed according to the political and social climate of the age and the resulting contrasting views about him continued for much of the 20th century. George Orwell called him a 'prophet of British imperialism'. Literary critic Douglas Kerr wrote: 'He [Kipling] is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary and cultural history is far from settled. But as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognised as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and an increasing recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts, make him a force to be reckoned with.'
December 30, 1873
Count Miklós Bánffy de Losoncz (30 December 1873—June 6, 1950) was a Hungarian nobleman, politician, and novelist. His books include The Transylvanian Trilogy (They Were Counted, They Were Found Wanting and They Were Divided), and The Phoenix Land. The Bánffy family emerged in 15th century Transylvania and established itself among the foremost dynasties of the country. They owned a grand palace in Kolozsvár (Romanian: Cluj-Napoca, German: Klausenburg), one of the main cities of Transylvania and one of the province's largest castles at Bonchida. One branch was raised to a barony in the 1660s, while another became counts in 1855. The barons produced a 19th century prime minister of Hungary (Dezso Bánffy), and the counts held important offices at court. Among the latter was Count Miklós, born in Kolozsvár on December 30, 1873. Beginning his political career at the time when Hungary was a constituent of Austria-Hungary, Bánffy was elected a Member of Parliament in 1901 and became Director of the Hungarian State Theatres (1913–1918). Both a traditionalist and a member of the avant-garde, he wrote five plays, two books of short stories, and a distinguished novel. Overcoming fierce opposition, his intervention made it possible for Béla Bartók's works to have their first performance in Budapest. Bánffy became Foreign Minister of Hungary in his cousin Count István Bethlen's government of 1921. Although he detested the politics of the Regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, he worked to review the boundary revisions confirmed by the Treaty of Trianon after World War I through which Transylvania had been transferred to Romania. Little progress was made, and he retired from office. His trilogy, A Transylvanian Tale, also called The Writing on the Wall, was published between 1934 and 1940. Bánffy portrayed pre-war Hungary as a nation in decline, failed by a shortsighted aristocracy. In April 1943, Bánffy visited Bucharest to persuade Ion Antonescu's Romania together with Hungary to abandon the Axis and sue for a separate peace with the Allies (see also Romania during World War II). The negotiations with a delegation led by Gheorghe Mironescu broke down almost instantaneously, as the two sides could not agree on a future status for Northern Transylvania (which Romania had ceded to Hungary in 1940, and where Bonchida was located). Two years later, in revenge for Bánffy's actions in Bucharest, his estate at Bonchida was burned and looted by the retreating German army. Hungary and Transylvania were soon invaded by the Soviet Union's Red Army, an event which marked an uncertain status for Northern Transylvania until its return to Romania. His wife and daughter fled to Budapest while Bánffy remained on the spot in a vain attempt to prevent the destruction of his property. Soon after, the frontier was closed. The family remained separated until 1949, when he was allowed by Romanian communist authorities to leave for Budapest, where he died the following year. A mellowing communist regime in Hungary permitted the reissue of A Transylvanian Tale in 1982, and it was translated into English for the first time in 1999. The Castle of Bonchida is now being restored as a cultural center. An apartment is being prepared for the use of the Count's family.
December 30, 1917
Seymour Melman (December 30, 1917 – December 16, 2004) was an American professor emeritus of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. He wrote extensively for fifty years on "economic conversion", the ordered transition from military to civilian production by military industries and facilities. Author of The Permanent War Economy and Pentagon Capitalism, he was an economist, writer, and gadfly of the military-industrial complex.
December 30, 1950
Timothy Peter Mo (born 30 December 1950) is a British novelist. Born to a British mother and a Hong Kong father, Mo lived in Hong Kong until the age of 10, when he moved to Britain. Educated at Mill Hill School and St John's College, Oxford, Mo worked as a journalist before becoming a novelist. He self-publishes his books under the label 'Paddleless Press'
December 30, 1966
Born in Ghana on December 30, 1966, educated in Europe, and now living in Los Angeles, Akosua Busiais a novelist and an actress who appeared alongside Whoopi Goldberg in The Color Purple. She is currently at work on her second novel.
December 30, 1962
Joshua Clover (born December 30, 1962), author of award-winning book of poetry Madonna anno domini (1996) and many other works, is Associate Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, Davis. He writes on art and politics for the Village Voice.
December 30, 1961
Douglas Coupland (born December 30, 1961) is a Canadian novelist and artist. His fiction is complemented by recognized works in design and visual art arising from his early formal training. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized terms such as "McJob" and "Generation X".
December 30, 1819
Theodor Fontane (30 December 1819 – 20 September 1898) was a German novelist and poet, regarded by many as the most important 19th-century German-language realist writer.
December 30, 1955
Deborah M. Gordon, Ph.D., studied at Oberlin College, Stanford University, and Duke University, and researched at Harvard University and the University of Oxford before joining the faculty at Stanford, where she is Associate Professor of Biological Sciences. She lives in Redwood City, California.
December 30, 1950
Sharon "Safiya" Henderson-Holmes (1950–2001) was an African-American poet from New York. She published two collections of poetry, had her work included in multiple anthologies, and received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She was an assistant professor at Syracuse University at the time of her death.
December 30, 1916
O. F. Snelling (30 December 1916 – 6 November 2001) was an author and auctioneer clerk in the antiquarian book trade. Oswald Frederick Snelling is best known for his 1964 bestseller, Double O Seven, James Bond, A Report, and is also noted for his books and articles on boxing and British thriller writers. Snelling began his working life as an illustrator of books. After serving in the British Army in World War II, he wrote book reviews, film criticism and articles on sports for magazines such as The Leader and Band Wagon. He wrote three books under the pen-name "Oswald Frederick including a quiz book, Fight Quiz (1946), and two boxer biographies, Battling Bruce: The Fighting Career and Rise to Fame of Bruce Woodcock (1946) and White Hope: The Story of the Jack Johnson Era (1947). Needing more secure employment, Snelling took a job in the antiquarian book trade, working first as a clerk at Hodgson's in 1949, later Sotheby's Rare Book Department, and became Chief Clerk until the firm was closed in 1981. It was there he met author Ian Fleming, assisting him in research for the James Bond novels. Snelling is best known for his 1964 analysis of the James Bond books, Double O Seven, James Bond, A Report, the only such title personally authorized by Ian Fleming. Knowing novelist Kingsley Amis was also working on a similar study (published as The James Bond Dossier in 1965), Snelling rushed out his book to compete with Amis, and the two titles have been frequently compared ever since as the earliest serious studies of the James Bond phenomena.
December 30, 1865
João de Melo ( Achadinha , Island of São Miguel - Azores , 1949 ) is a Portuguese writer. He was born on the island of São Miguel (Azores) in 1949, where he completed primary education, after which he continued his studies in the continent. In 1967 he began to live and work in Lisbon . After participating in the colonial war in Angola between 1971 and 1974 (theme of two of his most significant works, the anthology "The Years of War" and the novel "Autopsy of a Sea of ??Ruins"), he worked in trade union life , of Portuguese authors and literary critic. Attended the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon , for which he graduated in 1981 with the course of Romance Philology. Professor of secondary and higher education for several years, he was invited by the Portuguese government to the post of cultural adviser to the Portuguese embassy in Spain (which he played for 9 years, between 2001 and 2010). In 2003, in Madrid, he created the "Mostra Portuguesa" (Portuguese Mostra), the largest Portuguese cultural event outside of its borders (held 7 annual editions of this festival between 2003 and 2009). The culture of our country in Spain and in the period in which it has performed those functions have never been promoted. He has translated into Spanish the following books of his own: "Happy people with tears", "Anthology of the Portuguese story" (Alfaguara), "Chronica of the beginning and of water and other stories", "My world is not of this kingdom" "Sea of ??Madrid" and "Autopsy of a sea of ??ruins" (Linteo Ediciones). Author of works of fiction, essays, anthologies, poetry, chronicles and travel books, de Melo’s books have been translated into Spanish, Italian, French, Dutch, Romanian, Bulgarian, English, Hungarian, German, and Serbian.
December 31, 1960
Joel Leroy Achenbach (born December 31, 1960) is an American staff writer for The Washington Post and the author of seven books, including A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea, The Grand Idea, Captured by Aliens, It Looks Like a President only Smaller, and three compilations of his former syndicated newspaper column 'Why Things Are'. He is a contributor to many publications, including Slate and National Geographic, where he is a former monthly columnist. Mr. Achenbach has been a commentator on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, and does occasional lectures and other speaking engagements. In addition to his work in the print version of The Washington Post, Achenbach was one of the first Post writers to have a significant presence on the Internet and currently writes the popular Post blog, 'The Achenblog'. Achenbach is a native of Gainesville, Florida and graduated from Princeton University in 1982 with an B. A. degree in Politics. Prior to his tenure with The Washington Post in 1990, Achenbach was a staff writer for the Miami Herald from 1982–90, where he worked closely with Pulitzer Prize winners Gene Weingarten and Dave Barry. Achenbach was awarded the Philip J. Klass Award for outstanding contributions in promoting critical thinking and scientific understanding for 2011, by National Capital Area Skeptics (NCAS). In the months after the Deepwater Horizon Disaster, Achenbach wrote and contributed to an extensive series of articles for The Washington Post that led to his most recent book, A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea. Achenbach lives in Washington DC with his wife and three children.
December 31, 1944
Eleanor Taylor Bland (December 31, 1944 – June 2, 2010) was an African-American writer of crime fiction. She was the creator of Lincoln Prairie, Illinois (based on Waukegan, Illinois) police detective Marti McAllister. Eleanor Taylor Bland was born in Boston, Massachusetts. But after marrying at the age of 14, she moved to the Naval Station Great Lakes in North Chicago, Illinois, with her husband, Anthony Bland, who was serving in the US Navy. Taylor was her father's name, not her maiden name. She and her husband remained together for 31 years, before parting. Although she was diagnosed with Gardner syndrome in the 1970s and given a short time to live, she managed to overcome the disease. In later years, however, she fought several bouts with cancer. Bland received a BA from the University of Southern Illinois in 1981, and from 1981 to 1999 worked as an accountant. She had two children and several grandchildren, and resided in Waukegan, Illinois, during the later years of her life. Bland died of Gardner's syndrome on June 2, 2010, at Vista Medical Center East in Waukegan.
December 31, 1916
Paul F. Boller Jr. was born on December 31, 1916, in Spring Lake, New Jersey. When he was offered the Lyndon B. Johnson Chair at Texas Christian University in 1976, he did not hesitate to accept. It was at TCU that he came up with a new idea for a book about American presidents. Presidential Anecdotes, published in 1981 by Oxford University Press, was unique, presenting short biographical sketches of the presidents followed by stories gathered from many sources that illustrated their lives, careers, and personalities. It became a best seller and was followed by other presidentially themed works: Presidential Campaigns (1984), Presidential Wives (1988), Presidential Inaugurations (2001), and Presidential Diversions (2007).
December 31, 1933
Edward Heward Bunker (December 31, 1933 – July 19, 2005) was an American author of crime fiction, a screenwriter, and an actor. He wrote numerous books, some of which have been adapted into films. He was a screenwriter on Straight Time (1978), Runaway Train (1985) and Animal Factory (2000). Bunker was a bright but troublesome child, who spent much of his childhood in different foster homes and institutions. He started on a criminal career at a very early age, and continued on this path throughout the years, returning to prison again and again. He was convicted of bank robbery, drug dealing, extortion, armed robbery, and forgery. A repeating pattern of convictions, paroles, releases and escapes, further crimes and new convictions continued until he was released yet again from prison in 1975, at which point he finally left his criminal days permanently behind and became a writer. Bunker stayed out of jail thereafter, and instead focused on his career as a writer and actor.
December 31, 1951
Susan Elaine Eisenhower (born December 31, 1951) is a consultant, author, and expert on international security, space policy, energy, and relations between the Russian Federation and the United States of America. She is the daughter of John Eisenhower, and the granddaughter of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
December 31, 1878
Horacio Silvestre Quiroga Forteza (31 December 1878 – 19 February 1937) was an Uruguayan playwright, poet, and short story writer. He wrote stories which, in their jungle settings, use the supernatural and the bizarre to show the struggle of man and animal to survive. He also excelled in portraying mental illness and hallucinatory states. His influence can be seen in the Latin American magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez and the postmodern surrealism of Julio Cortázar. Horacio Quiroga was born in 1878 as the sixth child and second son of Prudencio Quiroga and Pastora Forteza, a middle-class family. At the time of his birth, his father worked for 18 years as head of the Vice-Consulate Argentine Break. Before Quiroga was two and a half months old, on March 14 of 1879 his father accidentally fired a gun he carried in his hand and died. Quiroga was baptized just about three months later in the parish of his birth town. Quiroga finished school in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. During this time, he worked in a repair shop and it was under the influence of the owner's son that he became interested in philosophy. He described the man as a, 'frank and passionate soldier of materialistic philosophy.' When he was 22, Quiroga put out his poetic feelers and discovered the poetry of Leopoldo Lugones and Edgar Allan Poe and would become a personal friend of the former. The discovery of these authors moved him to dabble in various schools and styles: post-romanticism, Symbolism and modernism. Armed with this background, he soon began to publish his poems in his hometown. As he continued studying, working with publications and Reform Magazine he improved his style and became well-known. During a carnival of 1898, the young poet met his first love, a girl named Mary Esther Jurkovski, who would inspire two of his most important works: The Slaughter (1920) and A Season of Love. Sadly, the misunderstandings caused by the parents of the young girl, who disapproved of the relationship because Quiroga wasn't Jewish, reached a crisis and the parents separated them. In his hometown he founded a magazine called Revista de Salto (1899). In the same year, his stepfather committed suicide by shooting himself and Quiroga found the body. With the money he received as inheritance he went on a four month trip to Paris. The trip was a failure and he came back sad and discouraged. Upon returning to his country, Quiroga gathered his friends Federico Ferrando, Alberto Brignole, July Jaureche, Fernandez Saldaña, Jose Hasd and Asdrubal Delgado, and with them founded the 'Consistorio del Gay Saber' (The Consistory of The Gay Science), a literary laboratory for their experimental writing where they found new ways to express themselves and their modernist goals. In 1901, Quiroga published his first book, Los Arrecifes de Coral ('Coral Reefs'), but this achievement was overshadowed by the deaths of his two brothers, Prudencio and Pastora, who were victims of typhoid fever in Chaco. The fateful year of 1901 still held another horrible surprise for the writer: his friend Federico Ferrando, had received bad reviews from Germain Papini, a Montevideo journalist, and challenged him to a duel. Quiroga, worried about the safety of Ferrando, offered to check and clean the gun that was to be used. Unexpectedly, while inspecting the weapon, he accidentally fired off a shot that hit Ferrando in the mouth, killing him instantly. When the police arrived, Quiroga was arrested, interrogated and transferred to a correctional prison. The police investigated the unfortunate circumstances of the homicide and deemed the incident accidental, releasing Quiroga after four days of detention. He was eventually exonerated. Racked with grief and guilt over the death of his beloved friend, Quiroga dissolved 'The Consistory' and moved from Uruguay to Argentina. He crossed the Rio de la Plata in 1902 and went to live with Mary, one of his sisters. In Buenos Aires, the artist reached professional maturity, which would reach its climax during his stays in the jungle. In addition, his sister introduced him to pedagogy, and found him work as a teacher under contract on the board of examination for the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. He was appointed professor of Castilian in the British School of Buenos Aires in March 1903. He wrote the story el hijo. In June of that year, Quiroga, already an experienced photographer, would follow Leopoldo Lugones on an expedition, funded by the Ministry of Education, in which the famous Argentine poet planned to investigate some ruins of Jesuit missions in the province. The jungle missionary left a profound impression on Quiroga that marked his life forever: he spent six months and the last of his inheritance (seven thousand pesos) on some land for cotton in Chaco, located seven kilometers from Resistance, next to the Saladito River. The project failed, due to problems with his aboriginal workers, but Quiroga's life was enriched by experiencing life as a country man for the first time. His narrative benefited from his new knowledge of country people and rural culture; this permanently changed his style. Upon returning to Buenos Aires after his failed experience in the Chaco, Quiroga embraced the short story with passion and energy. In 1904 he published a book of stories called The Crime of Another, which was heavily influenced by the style of Edgar Allan Poe. Quiroga did not mind these early comparisons with Poe, and until the end of his life he would often say that Poe was his first and principal teacher. Quiroga worked for the next two years on a multitude of stories, many were about rural terror, but others were delightful stories for children. During this time he wrote the magnificent horror story, 'The Feather Pillow'. It was published in 1907 by a famous magazine in Argentina, Caras y Caretas ('Faces and Masks'), which went on to publish eight of his other stories that year. Shortly after it was published, Quiroga became famous and his writings were eagerly sought by thousands of readers. In 1906 Quiroga decided to return to his beloved jungle. Taking advantage of the fact that the government wanted the land to be used, Quiroga bought a farm (with Vincent Gozalbo) of 185 hectares in the province of Misiones, on the banks of the Upper Parana, and began making preparations, while teaching Castilian and Literature nearby. He moved in during the winter of 1908. Quiroga fell in love with one of his teenage students, Ana Maria Cires, to whom he would dedicate his first novel, entitled, History of a Troubled Love. Quiroga insisted on the relationship despite the opposition of her parents, eventually garnering their permission to marry her and take her to live in the jungle with him. Quiroga's parents-in-law were concerned about the risks of living in Misiones, a wild region, and that is why they decided to join their daughter and son-in-law, and live close by in order to help them. So, Ana Maria's parents and a friend of her mother, moved into a house near Quiroga. In 1911, Ana Maria gave birth to the couple's first child, at their home in the jungle; they named her Egle Quiroga. During the same year the writer began farming in partnership with his friend, fellow Uruguayan, Vicente Gozalbo, and was also appointed Justice of the Peace in the Civil Registry of San Ignacio. This job was t the best fit for Quiroga who, forgetful, disorganized and careless, took to the habit of jotting down deaths, marriages and births on small pieces of paper and 'archived' them in a cookie tin. Later, a character of one of his stories was given a similar trait. The following year Ana Maria gave birth to a son, named Darius. Quiroga decided, just as the children were learning to walk, that he would personally take care of their education. Stern and dictatorial, Quiroga demanded that every little detail was done according to his requirements. From a young age, his children got used to the mountains and jungle. Quiroga exposed them to danger (risk-free danger) so that they would be able to cope alone and overcome any situation. He even went as far as to leave them alone one night in the jungle, or another time made them sit on the edge of a cliff with their legs dangling in the void. The daughter learned to breed wild animals and the son to use the shotgun, ride a bike and sail alone in a canoe. Quiroga's children never refused to be part of these experiences and, actually, enjoyed them. Their mother, however, was terrified and exasperated. Between 1912 and 1915 the writer, who already had experience as a cotton farmer and herbalist, undertook a bold pursuit to increase the farming and maximize the natural resources of their lands. He began to distill oranges, produce coal and resins, as well as, many other similar activities. Meanwhile, he raised livestock, domesticated wild animals, hunted and fished. Literature continued to be the peak of his life: in the journal Fray Mocho de Buenos Aires Quiroga published numerous stories, many set in the jungle and populated by characters so naturalistic that they seemed real. But Quiroga's wife was not happy: although she had become well adapted to life in the jungle the relationship between her and her husband was fraught with discord. Clashes between the couple occurred frequently and although the cause was usually trivial their excessive arguments became daily setbacks. These incidences, accentuated by Quiroga's volatile nature, excacerbated his wife so greatly that she became severely depressed. So Ana Maria would become a new tragedy in Quiroga's life when, after a violent fight with the writer, she ingested a fatal dose of 'sublimado' or Mercury(II) chloride. Unfortunately, the poison did not kill her instantly; instead she was forced to endure terrible agony for eight days before finally dying in her husband's arms on December 14, 1915. The tragedy of Ana Maria's painful death left Quiroga and his two children, five-year-old Eglé and four-year-old Darío, plunged into dark despair. After this tragedy, Quiroga quickly left for Buenos Aires with his children where he became an Under-Secretary General Accountant in the Uruguayan Consulat, thanks to the efforts of some of his friends who wanted to help. Throughout the year 1917 Quiroga lived in a basement with his children on Avenue Canning, alternating his diplomatic work with setting up a home office and working on many stories, which were being published in prestigious magazines. Quiroga collected most of the stories in several books, the first was Tales of Love, Madness and Death (1917). Manuel Galvez, owner of a publishing firm, had suggested that he write it and the volume immediately became a huge success with audiences and critics, consolidating Quiroga as the true master of the Latin American short story. The following year he settled in a small apartment on Calle Agüero, while he published Jungle Tales (1918, a collection of children's stories featuring animals and set in the Misiones rainforest). Quiroga dedicated this book to his children, who accompanied him during that rough period of poverty in the damp basement. 1919 was a good year for Quiroga, with two major promotions in the consular ranks and the publication of his new book of stories, The Wild. The next year, following the idea of 'The Consistory', Quiroga founded the Anaconda Association, a group of intellectuals involved in cultural activities in Argentina and Uruguay. His only play, The Slaughtered, was published in 1920 and was released in 1921, when Anaconda was released (another book of short stories). An important Argentine newspaper, La Nación (The Nation), also began to publish his stories, which by now already enjoyed impressive popularity. Between 1922 and 1924, Quiroga served as secretary of a cultural embassy to Brazil and he published his new book: The Desert (stories). For a while the writer was devoted to film criticism, taking charge of the magazine section of 'Atlantis, The Home and The Nation'. He also wrote the screenplay for a feature film (The Florida Raft) that was never filmed. Shortly thereafter, was invited to form a School of Cinematography, by Russian investors, but it was unsuccessful. After Quiroga returned to Misiones. He was in love again, this time with a 22-year-old Ana Maria Palacio. He tried to persuade her parents to let her go to live in the jungle with him. The constant refusal of the parents and the consequent failure of love inspired the theme of his second novel, Past love (published later, in 1929). The novel contains autobiographical elements of the strategies he used himself to get the girl, like, leaving messages in a hollowed branch, sending letters written in code and trying to dig a long tunnel to her room with thoughts of kidnap. Finally the parents grew tired of Quiroga's attempts and took her away so he was forced to renounce his love. In the workshop in his home where he would build a boat baptized Gaviota. His home was on the water and he used the boat to go from San Ignacio downriver to Buenos Aires and on numerous river expeditions. In early 1926, Quiroga returned to Buenos Aires and rented a villa in a suburban area. At the very apex of his popularity, a major publisher honored him, along with other literary figures of the time such as Arturo Capdevila, Baldomero Fernandez Moreno, Benito Lynch, Juana de Ibarbourou, A lover of classical music, Quiroga came often to the concerts of the Wagner Association. He also tirelessly read technical texts, manuals on mechanics, and books on arts and physics. In 1927, Quiroga decided to raise and domesticate wild animals, while publishing his new book of short stories, Exiles. But the amorous artist had already set his eyes on what would be his last and final love: Maria Elena Bravo, a classmate of his daughter Egle, who married him that year, not even 20 years old (He was 49). In 1932 Quiroga last settled in Misiones, where he would retire, with his wife and third daughter (Maria Elena, called Pitoca ', who was born in 1928). To do this, he got a decree transferring his consular office to a nearby city. He was devoted to living quietly in the jungle with his wife and daughter. But due to a change of government, his services were declined and he was expelled from the consulate. To exacerbate Quiroga's problems, his wife did not like living in the jungle, so fighting and violent discussions became a daily activity. In this time of frustration and pain he published a collection of short stories titled Beyond (1935). From his interest in the work of Munthe and Ibsen, Quiroga began reading new authors and styles, and began planning his autobiography. In 1935 Quiroga began to experience uncomfortable symptoms, apparently related to prostatitis or other prostate disease. With the pain intensifying and difficulty urinating, his wife managed to convince him to go to Posadas, where he was diagnosed with prostate hypertrophy. But the problems continued for the Quiroga family: his wife and daughter left him permanently, leaving him alone and sick in the jungle. They went back to Buenos Aires, and the writer's spirits fell completely in the face of this serious loss. When he could not stand the disease anymore, Quiroga traveled to Buenos Aires for treatment. In 1937, an exploratory surgery revealed that he suffered from an advanced case of prostate cancer, untreatable and inoperable. Maria Elena and his large group of friends came to comfort him. When Quiroga was in the emergency ward, he had learned that a patient was shut up in the basement with hideous deformities similar to those of the infamous English Joseph Merrick (the 'Elephant Man'). Taking pity, Quiroga demanded that the patient, named Vicent Batistessa, be released from confinement and moved into his room. As expected, Batistessa befriended and paid eternal gratitude to the great storyteller. Feeling desperate about his present suffering and realizing that his life was over, he told Batistessa his plan to shorten his suffering and Batistessa promised to help. That morning (February 19, 1937) in the presence of his friend, Horacio Quiroga drank a glass of cyanide that killed him within minutes of unbearable pain. His body was buried in the grounds of the Casa del Teatro de la Sociedad Argentina de Escritores (SADE), of which he was the founder and vice president, though, his remains were later repatriated to his homeland. Follower of the modernist school founded by Rubén Darío and being an obsessive reader of Edgar Allan Poe and Guy de Maupassant, Quiroga was attracted to topics covering the most intriguing aspects of nature, often tinged with horror, disease, and suffering for human beings. Many of his stories belong to this movement, embodied in his work Tales of Love, Madness and Death. Quiroga was also inspired by British writer Rudyard Kipling (The Jungle Book), which is shown in his own Jungle Tales, a delightful exercise in fantasy divided into several stories featuring animals. His Ten Rules for the Perfect Storyteller, dedicated to young writers, provides certain contradictions in his own work. While the Decalogue touts economic and precise style, using few adjectives, natural and simple wording, and clarity of expression, in many of his own stories Quiroga did not follow his own precepts, using ornate language, with plenty of adjectives and at times ostentatious vocabulary. As he further developed his particular style, Quiroga evolved into realistic portraits (often anguished and desperate) of the wild nature around him in Misiones: the jungle, the river, wildlife, climate, and terrain make up the scaffolding and scenery in which his characters move, suffer, and often die. Especially in his stories, Quiroga describes the tragedy that haunts the miserable rural workers in the region, the dangers and sufferings to which they are exposed, and how this existential pain is perpetuated to succeeding generations. He also experimented with many subjects considered taboo in the society of the early twentieth century. In his first book, Coral Reefs, consisting of 18 poems, 30 pages of poetic prose, and four stories, Quiroga shows his immaturity and adolescent confusion. On the other hand, he shows a glimpse of the modernist style and naturalistic elements that would come to characterize his later work. His two novels: History of a Troubled Love and Past Love deal with the same theme that haunted the author in his personal life: love affairs between older men and teenage girls. In the first novel Quiroga divided the action into three parts. In the first, a nine-year-old girl falls in love with an older man. In the second part, it is eight years later, and the man, who had noticed her affection, begins to woo her. The third part is the present tense of the novel, in which it has been ten years since the young girl left the man. In Past Love history repeats itself: a grown man returns to a place after years of absence and falls for a young woman he had loved as a child. Knowing the personal history of Quiroga, the two novels feature some autobiographical components. For example, the protagonist in History of a Trouble Love is named Egle (the name of Quiroga's daughter, whose classmate he later married). Also, in these novels there is a great deal of emphasis on the opposition of the girls' parents, rejection that Quiroga had accepted as part of his life and that he always had to deal with. The critics never liked his novels and called his only play, The Slaughtered, 'a mistake.' They considered his short stories to be his most transcendent works, and some have credited them with stimulaing all Latin American short stories after him. This makes sense since Quiroga was the first to be concerned about the technical aspects of the short story, tirelessly honing his style (for which he always returns to the same subjects) to reach near-perfection in his last works. Though clearly influenced by modernism, he gradually begins to turn the decadent Uruguayan language to describing the natural surroundings with meticulous precision. But he makes it clear that Nature's relationship with man is always one of conflict. Loss, injury, misery, failures, starvation, death, and animal attacks plague Quiroga's human characters. Nature is hostile, and it almost always wins. Quiroga's morbid obsession with torment and death is much more easily accepted by the characters than by the reader: in the narrative technique the author uses, he presents players accustomed to risk and danger, playing by clear and specific rules. They know not to make mistakes because the forest is unforgiving, and failure often means death. Nature is blind but fair, and the attacks on the farmer or fisherman (a swarm of angry bees, an alligator, a bloodsucking parasite, etc.) are simply obstacles in a horrible game in which Man tries to snatch property or natural resources (reflecting Quiroga's efforts to in life), and Nature absolutely refuses to let go, an unequal struggle that usually ends with the human loss, dementia, death, or simply disappointment. Sensitive, excitable, given to impossible love, thwarted in his commercial enterprises but still highly creative, Quiroga waded through his tragic life and suffered through nature to construct, with the eyes of a careful observer, narrative work that critics considered 'autobiographical poetry'. Perhaps it is this 'internal realism' or the 'organic' nature of his writing that created the irresistible draw that Quiroga continues to have on readers.
December 31, 1935
Jeff Torrington (31 December 1935 – 11 May 2008) was a novelist from Glasgow in Scotland. His novels draw on the changing face of modern Scotland. Swing Hammer Swing (1992) was set during the demolition of the old Gorbals. It took 30 years to write. The Devil's Carousel (1998) drew on the decline of a fictionalised version of the Rootes/Chrysler car plant at Linwood. Torrington worked there for eight years, as a telex sequencer, before the plant's closure. Swing Hammer Swing was Whitbread Book of the Year in 1992. Torrington's first published stories appeared in newspapers. He later attended a Paisley writers' group set up by James Kelman and a creative writing group in Glasgow associated with Philip Hobsbaum, which also included Kelman, Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead, Alasdair Gray and Aonghas MacNeacail.
December 31, 1956
Lyonel Trouillot is a poet, novelist, and essayist of the post-Duvalierist generation of Haitian writers. Linda Coverdale is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the award-winning translator of over fifty books, including Trouillot’s Street of Lost Footsteps (PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize finalist) and Patrick Chamoiseau’s School Days and Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows, all available in Bison Books editions. .
December 31, 1735
Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecœur (December 31, 1735 – November 12, 1813), naturalized in New York as John Hector St. John, was a French-American writer. He was born in Caen, Normandy, France, to the Comte and Comtesse de Crèvecœur (Count and Countess of Crèvecœur).
December 31, 1887
Francis Farquhar (December 31, 1887, Newton, MA - November 21, 1974, Berkeley, CA) has twice served as President of the Sierra Club, and has also served as President of the California Historical Society. His acquaintance with the Sierra extends over more than half a century, during which time he has collected the material for this book. In addition to editing the Sierra Club Bulletin from 1926 to 1946, Mr. Farquhar has written innumerable articles and is the author of several books, including PLACE NAMES OF THE HIGH SIERRA and YOSEMITE, THE BIG TREES AND THE HIGH SIERRA – A SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY.
December 31, 1895
Amy Euphemia Jacques Garvey (31 December 1895 – 25 July 1973) was the Jamaican-born second wife of Marcus Garvey, and a journalist and activist in her own right. She was one of the pioneering Black women journalists and publishers of the 20th century. Louis J. Parascandola is a professor of English at Long Island University. He is the author of ‘Puzzled Which to Choose’: Conflicting Sociopolitical Views in the Works of Captain Frederick Marryat and editor of a book on Coney Island and editor or coeditor of four critical editions of Caribbean immigrant writing. His articles have appeared in Langston Hughes Review, Comparative Literature Studies, and Journal of Caribbean Studies, among others.