Oct 02 2025
Wallace Stevens spent his working life in a world of insurance policies, offices, legal documents and corporate decisions. Yet inside that orderly professional existence, he created some of the strangest, most imaginative and intellectually adventurous poetry of twentieth-century America. Born on October 2, 1879, Stevens did not follow the familiar story of the young poet …
Oct 01 2025
Long before Julie Andrews floated over the rooftops of London with an umbrella or ran across an Austrian mountainside singing about the hills, she was a young English performer whose extraordinary voice had already made adults stop and listen. Over the decades that followed, Andrews would become one of the most recognizable performers of her …
Sep 30 2025
W. S. Merwin spent much of his life writing about things that disappear: languages, forests, animals, memories, places, people, and moments that vanish almost as soon as we become aware of them. Yet his poetry rarely treats disappearance as a reason to stop looking. If anything, the knowledge that something may be lost makes attention …
Sep 29 2025
Few fictional characters have escaped their books as completely as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. More than four centuries after they first rode across the plains of La Mancha, their names still evoke impossible dreams, stubborn idealism, friendship, comedy, and the strange distance that can open between the world as it is and the world …
Sep 28 2025
Some movies simply feel like fall. Maybe it is the sight of golden leaves scattered across a New York sidewalk, the return to a school campus at the beginning of a new term, a family gathering around a crowded table, or the particular combination of sweaters, books, old houses, rainy afternoons, and crisp evening air …
Sep 28 2025
Before Kate Douglas Wiggin created the spirited girl at the center of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, she had already spent years thinking seriously about children: how they learned, what they needed, how stories shaped them, and why education should nourish imagination rather than simply demand obedience. Long before she became a bestselling author, Wiggin was …
Sep 27 2025
Born on September 27, 1729, Michael Denis occupied an unusual place in eighteenth-century European culture. He was a poet, Jesuit priest, teacher, translator, librarian, bibliographer, and student of the natural world, moving easily between literature and scholarship during an era when those fields were not yet separated as sharply as they often are today. Denis …
Sep 26 2025
Born on September 26, 1888, T. S. Eliot became one of the defining voices of twentieth-century literature, a poet whose work captured the anxiety, fragmentation, loneliness, spiritual uncertainty, and rapidly changing rhythms of the modern world. His poems could be difficult, allusive, unsettling, and sometimes deliberately disorienting, but they altered the possibilities of poetry so …
Sep 25 2025
Born on September 25, 1930, Shel Silverstein became one of those rare writers whose books children often discover before they have any idea that poetry is supposed to be serious. His pages are filled with impossible creatures, ridiculous situations, rebellious children, strange inventions, disappearing body parts, enormous appetites, terrible excuses, unexpected sadness, and drawings that …
Sep 24 2025
Born on September 24, 1944, Eavan Boland spent much of her literary life asking who gets remembered in poetry and who disappears from the record. Irish poetry had long drawn upon heroic history, national struggle, mythology, landscape, and public events, but Boland repeatedly turned toward experiences that had often been treated as too ordinary or …
