Jun 15 2026
Born on June 15, 1881, William McFee spent much of his life moving between two demanding professions: marine engineering and writing. Long before he became known for novels and essays about ships and sailors, he had worked in engine rooms, crossed oceans aboard merchant vessels, risen to the rank of chief engineer, and experienced the …
Jun 14 2026
Born on June 14, 1923, Judith Kerr created some of the most comforting and recognizable books in modern children’s literature, yet her own childhood began with an upheaval few children could imagine. She fled Nazi Germany with her family at the age of nine, lived as a refugee in Switzerland and France, eventually settled in …
Jun 10 2026
Born on June 10, 1928, Maurice Sendak changed children’s literature by taking children seriously. His stories could be funny, strange, frightening, mischievous, tender, and sometimes unsettling because he understood that childhood itself contains all of those things. Children become angry. They feel jealous, lonely, frightened, possessive, adventurous, and overwhelmed. They imagine monsters and occasionally behave …
Jun 09 2026
Born on June 9, 1946, James Kelman became one of the most distinctive voices in modern Scottish literature by insisting that the lives, language, thoughts, frustrations, and humor of ordinary working people belonged at the center of serious fiction. Across novels, short stories, essays, and plays, he has returned repeatedly to people negotiating work, unemployment, …
Jun 05 2026
Born on June 5, 1898, Federico García Lorca became one of the most recognizable voices in twentieth-century Spanish literature, creating poetry and drama filled with music, moonlight, horses, blood, desire, loneliness, violence, dreams, and the landscapes of his native Andalusia. His career lasted only a few decades, yet within that short period he produced work …
May 29 2026
Born on May 29, 1892, Alfonsina Storni became one of the most distinctive voices in early twentieth-century Latin American poetry, writing with unusual directness about women’s independence, desire, motherhood, love, hypocrisy, loneliness, work, aging, and the expectations imposed upon women by a society that offered men considerably greater freedom. Swiss-born but raised in Argentina from …
May 28 2026
Born on May 28, 1912, Patrick White became one of the most formidable figures in twentieth-century Australian literature, creating novels filled with outsiders, mystics, eccentrics, failed explorers, artists, suburban families, lonely visionaries, and people searching for spiritual meaning beneath the ordinary surfaces of life. His prose could be difficult, comic, lyrical, cruel, visionary, and intensely …
May 27 2026
Born on May 27, 1912, John Cheever became one of the great American masters of the short story by looking closely at places that seemed, from the outside, almost impossibly comfortable. His characters live in handsome houses, ride commuter trains, attend cocktail parties, swim in backyard pools, raise children, mow lawns, drink martinis, worry about …
May 22 2026
Born on May 22, 1859, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created one of the most recognizable characters in world literature, yet Sherlock Holmes represented only one part of an extraordinarily varied life. Conan Doyle was a physician, novelist, short-story writer, historian, war correspondent, campaigner against miscarriages of justice, sportsman, political candidate, lecturer, and passionate advocate of …
May 20 2026
Born on May 20, 1949, Mary Pope Osborne has spent decades doing something children instinctively understand: opening a door and asking what might be on the other side. Sometimes the door leads to the age of dinosaurs. Sometimes it opens onto a medieval castle, the decks of the Titanic, ancient Egypt, Pompeii, the American Civil …
