Jan 01 2026
Born on January 1, 1919, J. D. Salinger became one of the most influential and mysterious figures in twentieth-century American literature. His reputation rests on a remarkably small published body of work: one novel, several collections of interconnected stories, and a handful of pieces scattered through magazines. Yet The Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories, …
Dec 29 2025
On December 29, 1957, Paul Rudnick was born in Piscataway, New Jersey. Over the decades that followed, he would become one of America’s most versatile comic writers—a playwright, novelist, screenwriter, essayist, humorist, and creator of one of the most wonderfully opinionated fictional movie critics ever to pass judgment on Hollywood. If you have laughed at …
Dec 28 2025
On December 28, 1934, Alasdair Gray was born in Glasgow, Scotland. He would become one of the most original figures in modern Scottish culture—a novelist, painter, playwright, poet, illustrator, muralist, designer, teacher, and political writer whose imagination transformed the way his native city appeared on the literary map. Gray did not publish his first novel …
Dec 25 2025
December 25, 1925, is generally accepted as the birth date of Carlos Castaneda, the Peruvian-born writer whose books about an elusive Indigenous sorcerer named Don Juan Matus became international bestsellers and helped shape the spiritual counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Even that apparently simple statement requires a qualification. Castaneda spent much of his adult …
Dec 21 2025
On December 21, 1926, Arnošt Lustig was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Years later, his birthday offers an opportunity to remember one of the most important Czech-Jewish writers of the twentieth century—a novelist, short-story writer, journalist, screenwriter, teacher, and Holocaust survivor who spent much of his literary life trying to find language for experiences that seemed …
Dec 18 2025
Born on December 18, 1913, Alfred Bester was never content to stay in one corner of the storytelling world. He wrote science fiction, superhero comics, radio dramas, television scripts, magazine journalism, and novels, moving between popular entertainment and literary experimentation with unusual ease. Yet Bester’s reputation rests largely on two extraordinary science-fiction novels: The Demolished …
Dec 15 2025
Born on December 15, 1896, Betty Smith transformed memories of a difficult Brooklyn childhood into one of the most beloved American novels of the twentieth century. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn made Francie Nolan’s Williamsburg neighborhood famous, but behind Francie stood a writer whose own journey had included poverty, interrupted schooling, factory and office work, …
Dec 14 2025
Born on December 14, 1951, Amy Hempel has built an extraordinary literary career from one of fiction’s smallest forms. Rather than moving from short stories toward sprawling novels, Hempel made the short story itself the center of her work, demonstrating how a handful of pages—or sometimes only a handful of paragraphs—can hold grief, guilt, desire, …
Dec 13 2025
Born on December 13, 1911, Kenneth Patchen spent his career refusing to accept boundaries between poetry, painting, music, fiction, and performance. He wrote fiercely against war and cruelty, celebrated love with equal intensity, experimented with typography decades before visual poetry became widely fashionable, painted directly onto books, and helped pioneer the fusion of spoken poetry …
Dec 12 2025
Born on December 12, 1821, Gustave Flaubert became one of the great craftsmen of the nineteenth-century novel. He published relatively few books, wrote with agonizing slowness, and could spend enormous amounts of time struggling over a single passage. Yet that relentless attention to language helped transform modern fiction. Flaubert is most closely associated with Madame …
