May 02 2026
Born on May 2, 1963, Esther Freud has built a literary career around memory, family, childhood, belonging, secrecy, and the strange transformations that occur when lived experience becomes fiction. Her novels often begin with recognizable pieces of real life—a childhood journey through Morocco, an unconventional family, years spent training as an actress, a house near …
May 01 2026
Born on May 1, 1923, Joseph Heller transformed one of the most frightening experiences of his life into one of the funniest, darkest, and most influential American novels of the twentieth century. Catch-22 emerged partly from Heller’s experience as a bombardier during World War II, but it was never simply a war memoir disguised as …
Apr 30 2026
Born on April 30, 1928, Hugh Hood became one of the most ambitious and intellectually distinctive figures in modern Canadian literature. A novelist, short-story writer, essayist, teacher, and critic, Hood spent decades trying to capture the texture of Canadian life in fiction, particularly the worlds of Toronto, Montreal, Ontario cottage country, universities, politics, art, religion, …
Apr 28 2026
Born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama, Harper Lee wrote one of the most widely read American novels of the twentieth century and then spent much of the rest of her life resisting the kind of public literary career its enormous success seemed to demand. To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960, won the …
Apr 23 2026
There was a star danced, and under that was I born.-William Shakespeare Few writers have become so completely woven into world culture as William Shakespeare. More than four centuries after his death, his plays continue to fill theaters, classrooms, films, television adaptations, operas, ballets, novels, and countless reinterpretations around the world. Characters including Hamlet, Macbeth, …
Apr 19 2026
Born on April 19, 1938, Stanley Fish became one of the most provocative and influential American literary critics of the late twentieth century by asking a deceptively simple question: where does the meaning of a piece of writing actually come from? For centuries, readers had often been encouraged to imagine that meaning was sitting somewhere …
Apr 18 2026
Born on April 18, 1959, Susan Faludi became one of the most influential American journalists writing about gender, work, culture, and power during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Her books have examined women confronting resistance to social change, men struggling with changing expectations of masculinity, a country reaching for comforting myths after national …
Apr 17 2026
Born on April 17, 1897, Thornton Wilder became one of the rare American writers to achieve lasting distinction in both fiction and drama. His novels ranged from philosophical historical fiction to stories of American wanderers and families, while his plays transformed ordinary towns, marriages, meals, wars, and daily routines into meditations on time, mortality, endurance, …
Apr 16 2026
Born on April 16, 1939, Diane Middlebrook became one of the most distinctive American literary biographers of the late twentieth century. She began her career as a poet and scholar of modern poetry, spent decades teaching at Stanford University, helped establish feminist studies there, and eventually discovered that biography offered the form she had been …
Apr 14 2026
Born on April 14, 1954, Bruce Sterling became one of the writers most responsible for giving cyberpunk its identity, arguments, vocabulary, and sense of itself as a literary movement. Yet describing him simply as a cyberpunk novelist captures only one part of an unusually restless career. Sterling has also written about hackers, network culture, climate …
