Nov 22 2025
Christmas may dominate the holiday-movie calendar, but Thanksgiving has produced its own wonderfully strange collection of films. Thanksgiving movies tend to be less interested in magic, decorations, and perfect endings than Christmas movies are. Instead, they focus on getting home, surviving family reunions, cooking a meal that refuses to cooperate, revisiting old resentments, welcoming unexpected …
Nov 22 2025
Born on November 22, 1969, in Rasht, Iran, Marjane Satrapi became one of the most distinctive visual storytellers of her generation. She was a graphic novelist, illustrator, filmmaker, screenwriter, painter, and public intellectual whose work moved easily between autobiography and fiction, private memory and public history, humor and grief. For millions of readers, Satrapi will …
Nov 21 2025
Born on November 21, 1694, François-Marie Arouet—better known to history as Voltaire—became one of the defining voices of the European Enlightenment. He wrote plays, poems, histories, philosophical essays, letters, pamphlets, dictionaries, scientific explanations, and short satirical fiction, but his greatest talent may have been his ability to make ideas move. Voltaire understood that an argument …
Nov 20 2025
Born on November 20, 1908, Alistair Cooke spent much of the twentieth century doing something deceptively difficult: explaining one country to another. To millions of British radio listeners, Cooke was the measured, conversational voice behind Letter from America, the weekly broadcast in which he explored American politics, culture, language, sports, personalities, customs, tragedies, arguments, and …
Nov 19 2025
Born on November 19, 1934, in Vallejo, California, Joanne Kyger became one of the quietly essential figures of postwar American poetry. Her life intersected with several of the most influential literary communities of the twentieth century—the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beat Generation, Black Mountain poetry, the experimental writing culture surrounding Naropa, and the remarkable gathering …
Nov 18 2025
Born on November 18, 1971, in Columbia, South Carolina, Terrance Hayes has become one of the most inventive voices in contemporary American poetry. Across collections including Muscular Music, Hip Logic, Wind in a Box, Lighthead, How to Be Drawn, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, and So to Speak, Hayes has continually experimented …
Nov 17 2025
Born on November 17, 1983, Christopher Paolini has one of the most unusual origin stories in modern fantasy publishing. He began writing Eragon as a teenager in rural Montana, initially treating the enormous fantasy adventure as a personal challenge rather than the beginning of an international literary career. His parents helped him edit and self-publish …
Nov 16 2025
Born on November 16, 1930, in Ogidi in southeastern Nigeria, Chinua Achebe became one of the most influential literary voices of the twentieth century. His novels transformed the way millions of readers encountered African history and culture, not by presenting Africa as a symbolic setting or distant mystery, but by placing African communities, families, political …
Nov 15 2025
Born on November 15, 1887, Marianne Moore became one of the most original voices in twentieth-century American poetry. Her poems can be immediately recognizable yet surprisingly difficult to describe. They are precise and playful, learned and conversational, meticulously constructed and full of unexpected turns. Animals wander through them. Quotations from books, advertisements, newspapers, conversations, and …
Nov 14 2025
Born on November 14, 1907, near the small Swedish town of Vimmerby, Astrid Lindgren became one of the most beloved and influential children’s authors of the twentieth century. Her fictional world is filled with independent children, secret adventures, robbers, detectives, mischievous brothers, lonely princes, mysterious rooftop visitors, talking animals, enchanted lands, and one astonishingly strong …
