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 27 2026
Born on April 27, 1920, Edwin Morgan became one of the most inventive and expansive voices in modern Scottish poetry. He could write about a Glasgow bus, a Renaissance painting, a computer, a cancer cell, an alien encounter, a love affair, the Loch Ness Monster, the Big Bang, or the opening of the Scottish Parliament …
Apr 26 2026
Born on April 26, 1946, Marilyn Nelson has spent decades demonstrating that poetry can do something history books often struggle to accomplish: return individual human lives to the center of the past. Her poems have explored her own family across generations, the Tuskegee Airmen, scientist George Washington Carver, the enslaved Connecticut man known as Fortune, …
Apr 25 2026
Born on April 25, 1949, James Fenton developed one of the most unusual literary careers of his generation. He became known as a poet of remarkable formal skill, but poetry was only one part of his life. He worked as a foreign correspondent in Southeast Asia, a political journalist, theater critic, book reviewer, art critic, …
Apr 24 2026
Born on April 24, 1905, Robert Penn Warren occupied an unusually large place in twentieth-century American literature. He was a poet, novelist, critic, teacher, essayist, historian, interviewer, and one of the central figures in the development of New Criticism. He won three Pulitzer Prizes, became the first person officially designated Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry …
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 22 2026
Born on April 22, 1943, Louise Glück became one of the defining American poets of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Her poems are often spare, controlled, and deceptively simple. They rarely announce their importance through elaborate language. Instead, a garden, a family dinner, a marriage, a myth, a childhood memory, or a flower …
Apr 21 2026
Born on April 21, 1955, Murathan Mungan has spent half a century refusing to remain inside a single literary category. He is a poet, playwright, novelist, short-story writer, essayist, editor, songwriter, screenwriter, critic, and one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Turkish literature. His work moves between ancient myths and modern cities, family memory …
Apr 20 2026
Born on April 20, 1884, Daniel Varoujan became one of the defining voices of modern Western Armenian poetry during a literary career that lasted barely more than a decade. He wrote with extraordinary intensity about Armenian history, cultural identity, rural life, physical beauty, labor, suffering, desire, mythology, and the relationship between an ancient civilization and …
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 …
