Sep 07 2026
Every September 7 offers an opportunity to rediscover Elinor Wylie, an American poet and novelist whose brief life contained enough literary ambition, personal upheaval, beauty, controversy, and reinvention for several lifetimes. Born Elinor Morton Hoyt on September 7, 1885, Wylie became one of the most recognizable literary figures of the 1920s. Her carefully crafted poems …
Sep 06 2026
Every September 6 offers an opportunity to remember Robert M. Pirsig, the American writer and philosopher whose Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance transformed a father-and-son road trip into one of the most unusual philosophical journeys in modern literature. Born Robert Maynard Pirsig on September 6, 1928, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Pirsig spent much of …
Sep 05 2026
Every September 5 offers an opportunity to remember Nicanor Parra, the Chilean poet, physicist, mathematician, teacher, and literary provocateur who spent much of his extraordinarily long life trying to knock poetry off its pedestal. Born on September 5, 1914, Parra became one of the most influential Latin American poets of the twentieth century by deliberately …
Sep 04 2026
Every September 4 offers an opportunity to remember Richard Wright, the American novelist, memoirist, essayist, journalist, poet, and intellectual whose writing forced millions of readers to confront realities of racism, poverty, segregation, violence, and restricted opportunity that American culture had often ignored or distorted. Born on September 4, 1908, near Natchez, Mississippi, Wright emerged from …
Sep 03 2026
Every September 3 offers an opportunity to remember Sergei Dovlatov, the Russian writer and journalist whose deceptively simple prose transformed failed careers, bureaucratic absurdities, prison camps, unhappy marriages, drunken evenings, emigration, and ordinary disappointment into some of the funniest and saddest literature of the late twentieth century. Born on September 3, 1941, Dovlatov spent much …
Sep 02 2026
Every September 2 offers an opportunity to remember Eugene Field, the American poet, humorist, journalist, and storyteller whose lullabies and poems about childhood became familiar to generations of readers. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1850, Field became especially famous for poems such as “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” “Little Boy Blue,” “The Sugar-Plum Tree,” and …
Sep 01 2026
On September 1, we celebrate the birthday of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the American novelist whose imagination carried generations of readers into jungles, beneath the surface of the Earth, across lost prehistoric worlds, and all the way to Mars. Born in Chicago on September 1, 1875, Burroughs became one of the great architects of twentieth-century popular …
Aug 31 2026
On August 31, we celebrate the birthday of Amrita Pritam, one of the most influential literary voices of twentieth-century South Asia. Born on August 31, 1919, Pritam wrote through a century marked by enormous political upheaval, displacement, changing expectations for women, and the painful division of the Punjab she loved. She became a poet, novelist, …
Aug 30 2026
On August 30, we celebrate the birthday of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the English novelist whose imagination gave the world one of literature’s most enduring creations. Born on August 30, 1797, Mary Shelley lived only 53 years, yet the story she began writing as a teenager has survived for more than two centuries. Frankenstein; or, The …
Aug 29 2026
On August 29, we remember Thom Gunn, the British-born poet who spent much of his adult life in San Francisco and created one of the most distinctive bodies of poetry of the late 20th century. Born on August 29, 1929, in Gravesend, Kent, England, Gunn belonged to a generation of writers coming of age after …
