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![]() | Adonis (Ali Ahmed Said) January 1, 1930 Ali Ahmad Said Esber (born 1 January 1930), also known by the pen name Adonis or Adunis, is a Syrian poet, essayist, and translator. He has written more than twenty books and volumes of poetry in the Arabic language as well as translated several works from French. Imprisoned in Syria in the mid-1950s as a result of his beliefs, Adunis settled abroad and has made his career largely in Lebanon and France. A perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he has been regularly nominated for the award since 1988 and has been described as the greatest living poet of the Arab world. |
![]() | Azuela, Mariano January 1, 1873 Mariano Azuela González (January 1, 1873 – March 1, 1952) was a Mexican author and physician, best known for his fictional stories of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. He wrote novels, works for theatre and literary criticism. Azuela wrote many pieces including the newspaper piece ‘Impressions of a Student’ in 1896, the novel Andrés Pérez, maderista in 1911, and Los de abajo, (or The Underdogs), in 1915. Azuela was born in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco. During his days in the Mexican Revolution, Azuela wrote about the war and its impact on Mexico. He served under president Francisco I. Madero as chief of political affairs in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco - his home town. After Madero's death, he joined the military forces of Julián Medina, a follower of Pancho Villa, where he served as a field doctor. He later was forced for a time to emigrate to El Paso, Texas. There he wrote Los de abajo, a first-hand description of combat during the Mexican revolution, based on his experiences in the field. In 1917 he moved to Mexico City where for the rest of his life he continued his writing and worked as a doctor among the poor. In 1942 he received the Mexican national prize for literature. On April 8, 1943 he became a founding member of Mexico's National College. In 1949 he received the Mexican national prize for Arts and Sciences. He died in Mexico City March 1, 1952 and was placed in a sepulchre of the Rotonda de los Hombres Ilustres. |
![]() | Chang, Henry January 1, 1951 Henry Chang is an Asian-American detective story author from New York City. Born and raised in Chinatown, Chang bases his Detective Jack Yu Series primarily in this setting, and his objective "insider's" view influences the development of his stories' settings. His series focuses on the violence and poverty in Chinatown which he witnessed as he grew up. He is a graduate of CCNY. He began writing his first novel whilst working as a director of security for the Trump Organization. In 2011, Chang was honored by Hamilton Madison House, an organization for improving impoverished areas of Manhattan, for his literary contributions to historic Chinatown. He has been featured at the Asian American Literary Festival and has done readings in collaboration with the New Museum's Festival of Ideas for the New City and the Museum of Chinese in America. He lives in Chinatown, Manhattan. |
![]() | Collyer, Jaime January 1, 1955 Jaime Collyer (born January 1, 1955, Santiago, Chile) is a Chilean writer, born in Santiago, Chile in 1955 who became part of a generation of writers known as the 'Nueva narrativa chilena' or the New Chilean Narrative. His works have been translated into English, French and other languages, winning various literary prizes and acclaim. Born in 1955, Collyer claims he discovered the joy of writing fiction as a child in school at a young age. Later in university, studying psychology, he realised 'the only thing I wanted to do was to write.' Having finished his degree in 1980, Collyer moved to Madrid, Spain in 1981 to begin a writing career and to study International Relations and Political Science. In 1986, he co-wrote a children's book Hacia el nuevo mundo, and his writing career began in earnest from there. He published El infiltrado in 1989, which was awarded a prize as the best Latin-American novel translated to French that year. Collyer has continued to publish works to much critical acclaim and has won the Premio Municipal de Santiago for his short story collections, amongst various other awards for his publications in general. The New York Times Book Review described him as 'a born writer'. Collyer cites a diverse and wide ranging set of influences from various countries and cultures. Amongst them are Rudyard Kipling and Vladimir Nabokov as well as German post war writers such as Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass. Chief amongst his influences are authors of Latin-American extraction, including Julio Cortázar and Juan Carlos Onetti. Perhaps his most salient influence, an author to whom he has been compared, is the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges. Undoubtedly an influence, Collyer was even dubbed 'The New Borges' after the release of the collection Gente al acecho (People on the Prowl). Borges is mentioned within the collection in the story 'Ultimos días de nuestro vecino', in which a character comes across the Aleph, a place where all points on the earth can be seen from one point, something which Borges had described in his own short story in the collection The Aleph. |
![]() | Del Vecchio, John M. January 1, 1947 John M. Del Vecchio was drafted in 1969 shortly after graduating from Lafayette College with a Bachelors Degree in Psychology and minor emphasis in Civil Engineering. In 1970 he volunteered for Viet Nam where he served as a combat correspondent for the 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile); in 1971 he was awarded a Bronze Star for Heroism in Ground Combat. Along with The 13th Valley, Del Vecchio is the author of For the Sake of All Living Things, Carry Me Home, Darkness Falls, numerous articles and papers including the widely quoted, ‘The Importance of Story’; the forward for Wounds Of War and the afterword for Code Word: Geronimo. His books have been translated into four languages and published worldwide. He has lectured extensively on the history of the Viet Nam War in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, and has appeared on FOX News as a military/political commentator. Del Vecchio is currently working on screenplays based on his novels, a book about resilience in the fourth quarter of life tentatively titled Exit Strategies, and an expose on the financial crisis from ‘a street-level’ perspective tentatively titled From The Bottom Looking Up. |
![]() | Edgeworth, Maria January 1, 1768 Maria Edgeworth (1 January 1768 – 22 May 1849) was a prolific Anglo-Irish writer of adults' and children's literature. She was one of the first realist writers in children's literature and was a significant figure in the evolution of the novel in Europe. She held advanced views, for a woman of her time, on estate management, politics and education, and corresponded with some of the leading literary and economic writers, including Sir Walter Scott and David Ricardo. |
![]() | Espada, Martin January 1, 1957 Martín Espada (born 1957) is a Latino poet, and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches poetry. Puerto Rico has frequently been featured as a theme in his poems. |
![]() | Tuomainen, Antti January 1, 1971 ANTTI TUOMAINEN (born January 1, 1971) was an award-winning copywriter in the advertising industry before he made his literary debut in 2007 as a suspense author. In 2011 Tuomainen’s third novel, THE HEALER, was awarded the Clue Award for ‘Best Finnish Crime Novel 2011’ and it is now being translated into twenty-six languages. He lives in Helsinki, Finland. |
![]() | Forster, E. M. January 1, 1879 Edward Morgan Forster OM, CH (1 January 1879 – 7 June 1970) was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: ‘Only connect … ’. His 1908 novel, A Room with a View, is his most optimistic work, while A Passage to India (1924) brought him his greatest success. |
![]() | Frazer, Sir James George January 1, 1854 Sir James George Frazer (1 January 1854 – 7 May 1941) was a Scottish social anthropologist and folklorist influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion. He is often considered one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology. His most famous work, The Golden Bough (1890), documents and details the similarities among magical and religious beliefs around the globe. Frazer posited that human belief progressed through three stages: primitive magic, replaced by religion, in turn replaced by science. |
![]() | Fuller, John January 1, 1937 A prolific poet, novelist, children’s writer, critic, and editor, John Fuller has written or edited nearly 50 books, including more than a dozen collections of poetry. Fuller was born in Kent, England, and his father was the poet Roy Fuller. John Fuller was mentored by W.H. Auden and also influenced by Eliot, Graves, and Stevens. His poetry displays a virtuosic ease within the constraints of formal, metered verse; it is a poetry of ideas. |
![]() | Garcia-Roza, Luiz Alfredo January 1, 1936 Luiz Alfredo Garcia Roza (born 1936 in Rio de Janeiro) is a retired Brazilian professor and current novelist. As an academic he wrote philosophy and psychology textbooks. After retiring from academia he became known as a novelist and shared the Prêmio Jabuti for Literature in 1997. He is known for his Detective fiction, in particular his Inspector Espinosa Mystery series. He had little knowledge of crime or police-work before he began writing. Some of his works have been translated into English. |
![]() | Ousmane, Sembene January 1, 1923 Ousmane Sembene, who was born into a Senegalese fishing family in 1923, worked at a diversity of jobs before writing his first book, THE BLACK DOCKER, in 1956. Since then he has written several novels and short story collections, through which he tells the saga of his land and its people. He has also gained a reputation for his films, particularly BLACK GIRL and THE MONEY ORDER, which were well received both in the U.S. and abroad. |
![]() | Johnson, E. Richard January 1, 1938 Emil Richard Johnson (born 1938 in Prentice, Wisconsin ; died December 1997 ) was an American writer of crime fiction. When Johnson left the army in 1960, he had trouble integrating into civilian life. With no fixed abode, he entered into a life of crime. In 1962 during a robbery in Minnesota Johnson shot a security guard. He already had two convictions and as a result was sentenced to forty years in prison at the State Prison of Stillwater in Minnesota. In prison, Johnson began writing out of boredom. His debut novel, Death on Silver Street ( Silver Street ), proved to be his literary breakthrough. Audiences and critics alike were enthusiastic, and the novel won an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America in 1969. |
![]() | Laye, Camara January 1, 1928 Camara Laye (January 1, 1928—February 4, 1980) was an African writer from Guinea. He was the author of The African Child (L'Enfant noir), a novel based loosely on his own childhood, and The Radiance of the King (Le Regard du roi). Both novels are among the earliest major works in Francophone African literature. Camara Laye later worked for the government of newly independent Guinea, but went into voluntary exile over political issues. Camara Laye was born in Kouroussa, a town in what was then the colony of French Guinea. His family were Malinke (a Mandé speaking ethnicity), and he was born into a caste that traditionally worked as blacksmiths and goldsmiths. His mother was from the village of Tindican, and his immediate childhood surroundings were not predominantly influenced by French culture. He attended both Koranic and French elementary schools in Kouroussa. At age fifteen he went to Conakry, the colonial capital, to continue his education. He attended vocational studies in motor mechanics. In 1947, he travelled to Paris to continue studying mechanics. There he worked and took further courses in engineering and worked towards the baccalauréat. Camara Laye published his first novel in 1953, the autobiographical L'Enfant noir (The African Child, also published under the title The Dark Child). It follows his own journey from childhood in Kouroussa, his education in Conakry, and eventual departure for France. The book won the Prix Charles Veillon in 1954. L'Enfant noir was followed the next year by Le Regard du roi (The Radiance of the King). The Radiance of the King was described by Kwame Anthony Appiah as 'one of the greatest of the African novels of the colonial period.' In 1956 Camara Laye returned to Africa, first to Dahomey, then the Gold Coast, and finally to newly independent Guinea, where he held several government posts. He left Guinea for Senegal in 1965 because of political issues, never returning to his home country. In 1966 Camara Laye's third novel, Dramouss (A Dream of Africa), was published. In 1978 his fourth and final work, Le Maître de la parole - Kouma Lafôlô Kouma (The Guardian of the Word), was published. The novel was based on a Malian epic told by the griot Babou Condé about Sundiata Keita, the thirteenth-century founder of the Mali Empire. Camara Laye's authorship of Le Regard du roi was questioned by literary scholar Adele King in her book Rereading Camara Laye.She claimed that he had considerable help in writing L'Enfant noir and did not write any part of Le Regard du roi. Scholar F. Abiola Irele, in an article called In Search of Camara Laye asserts that the claims are not 'sufficiently grounded' to adequately justify that Laye did not author the mentioned work. |
![]() | Markandaya, Kamala January 1, 1924 Kamala Markandaya (January 1, 1924 - May 16, 2004) was a pseudonym used by Kamala Purnaiya Taylor, an Indian novelist and journalist. A native of Mysore, India, Markandaya was a graduate of Madras University, and afterwards published several short stories in Indian newspapers. After India declared its independence, Markandaya moved to Britain, though she still labeled herself an Indian expatriate long afterwards. Known for writing about culture clash between Indian urban and rural societies, Markandaya's first published novel, NECTAR IN A SIEVE, was a bestseller and named a notable book of 1955 by the American Library Association. Other novels include SOME INNER FURY (1955), A SILENCE OF DESIRE (1960), POSSESSION (1963), A HANDFUL OF RICE (1966), THE NOWHERE MAN (1972), TWO VIRGINS (1973), THE GOLDEN HONEYCOMB (1977), and PLEASURE CITY (1982/1983). Kamala Markandaya belonged to that pioneering group of Indian women writers who made their mark not just through their subject matter, but also through their fluid, polished literary style. NECTAR IN A SIEVE was her first published work, and its depiction of rural India and the suffering of farmers made it popular in the West. This was followed by other fiction that dramatized the Quit India movement in 1942, the clash between East and West and the tragedy that resulted from it, or the problems facing ordinary middle-class Indians—making a living, finding inner peace, coping with modern technology and its effects on the poor. Markandaya died in London on May 16, 2004. |
![]() | Mda, Zakes January 1, 1948 Zakes Mda (born January 1, 1948) is professor of creative writing in the Department of English at Ohio University, and a South African novelist, poet, and playwright. |
![]() | Olcott, Anthony January 1, 1950 Anthony Olcott is a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Intelligence, and was Officer in Residence at Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. While at the Director of National Intelligence's Open Source Center, he served as Senior Analyst in the Emerging Media Group, and also as an Expert Analyst covering Russia and Central Asia. Olcott has received numerous awards and citations from the intelligence community. |
![]() | Orton, Joe January 1, 1933 John Kingsley 'Joe' Orton (1 January 1933 – 9 August 1967) was an English playwright and author. His public career was short but prolific, lasting from 1964 until his death three years later. During this brief period he shocked, outraged, and amused audiences with his scandalous black comedies. The adjective Ortonesque is sometimes used to refer to work characterised by a similarly dark yet farcical cynicism. |
![]() | Pears, Iain January 1, 1955 Iain Pears (born in 1955) is an English art historian, novelist and journalist. He was educated at Warwick School, Warwick, Wadham College and Wolfson College, Oxford. Before writing, he worked as a reporter for the BBC, Channel 4 (UK) and ZDF (Germany) and correspondent for Reuters from 1982 to 1990 in Italy, France, UK and US. In 1987 he became a Getty Fellow in the Arts and Humanities at Yale University. His well-known novel series features Jonathan Argyll, art historian, though international fame first arrived with his best selling book An Instance of the Fingerpost (1998), which was translated into several languages. Pears currently lives with his wife and children in Oxford. |
![]() | Rankine, Claudia January 1, 1963 Claudia Rankine is a Jamaican poet and playwright born in 1963 and raised in Kingston, Jamaica and New York City. She has taught at Case Western Reserve University, Barnard College, University of Georgia, and in the writing program at the University of Houston. As of 2011, Rankine is the Henry G. Lee Professor of Poetry at Pomona College. |
![]() | Salinger, J. D. January 1, 1919 Jerome David 'J. D.' Salinger (January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010) was an American writer who won acclaim early in life. He led a very private life for more than a half-century. He published his final original work in 1965 and gave his last interview in 1980. In 1951, his novel The Catcher in the Rye was an immediate popular success. His depiction of adolescent alienation and loss of innocence in the protagonist Holden Caulfield was influential, especially among adolescent readers. |
![]() | Setubal, Paulo January 1, 1893 Paulo de Oliveira Leite Setúbal (January 1, 1893 – May 4, 1937) was a Brazilian writer, lawyer, journalist, essayist and poet. He occupied the 31st chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters from 1934 until his death in 1937. |
![]() | Shaogong, Han January 1, 1953 Han Shaogong (born January 1, 1953) is an award-winning novelist, essayist, and translator. He is author of Moon Orchid (1985), Bababa (1985), Womanwomanwoman (1985), and Deserted City (1989). He is also former editor of the magazines Hainan Review and Frontiers, and is vice-chairman of the Hainan Writer's Association. |
![]() | Smith, Iain Crichton January 1, 1928 Iain Crichton Smith, OBE (1 January 1928 – 15 October 1998) was a Scottish poet and novelist, who wrote in both English and Gaelic. He was born in Glasgow, but moved to the isle of Lewis at the age of two, where he and his two brothers were brought up by their widowed mother in the small crofting town of Bayble, which also produced Derick Thomson. Educated at the University of Aberdeen, Crichton Smith took a degree in English, and after serving in the National Service Army Education Corps, went on to become a teacher. He taught in Clydebank, Dumbarton and Oban from 1952, retiring to become a full-time writer in 1977, although he already had many novels and poems published. |
![]() | Tan, Maureen January 1, 1951 Maureen Tan is the author of numerous articles, four fiction novels, and several short stories. She is a consultant specializing in the science/technology and healthcare fields. Before beginning her consulting practice, she worked for the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and also served as a Public Affairs Officer for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. |
![]() | Tozzi, Federigo January 1, 1883 Federigo Tozzi (January 1, 1883 in Siena; died March 21, 1920 in Rome), a follower of Gabriele D'Annunzio and Giovanni Verga, was encouraged by Luigi Pirandello and was himself a major influence on Alberto Moravia, who held him in the highest regard. In his short but prolific writing life, during the second decade of the twentieth century, he produced one hundred and twenty stories, five novels, two books of poetry, as well as plays, essays, and piles of drafts, notes, and letters. Yet after his initial success, he was virtually ignored in the fifty years following his death and only belatedly recognized as a supreme stylist and master of Italian realism. |
![]() | Clarke, John Henrik (associate editor) January 1, 1915 John Henrik Clarke (born John Henry Clark, January 1, 1915 – July 16, 1998), was a Pan-Africanist American-African writer, historian, professor, and a pioneer in the creation of Africana studies and professional institutions in academia starting in the late 1960s. |
![]() | Beard, Mary January 1, 1955 Winifred Mary Beard (born 1 January 1955) is an English Classical scholar. She is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge, a fellow of Newnham College, and Royal Academy of Arts professor of ancient literature. She is also the classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement, and author of the blog, "A Don's Life", which appears in The Times as a regular column. Her frequent media appearances and sometimes controversial public statements have led to her being described as "Britain's best-known classicist." |
![]() | Whyte, Lancelot Law January 1, 1896 Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) was a Scottish philosopher, theoretical physicist, historian of science and financier. He claimed to have worked with Albert Einstein on the unified field theory. He further claimed that this work was based on the theory of the 18th century natural philosopher Roger Boscovich. Whyte proposed something he called "the unitary principle" to unify physics theories. Experimental work on this theory was carried out by Leo Baranski. Whyte was the author of the book Internal Factors in Evolution (1968). He proposed that Darwin's theory of natural selection is limited to external factors, and internal factors are a second directive agency in evolution. Whyte proposed the term "internal selection", John Tyler Bonner in the American Scientist positively reviewed the book. Other scientists have been more critical. Biologist Robert E. Hillman gave the book a negative review, commenting "in a weak and ill-supported effort to deemphasize the role of natural selection in evolution Whyte has detracted from what could have been a fine analysis and philosophical discussion of the latest advances in the chemical basis of heredity and evolution." |
![]() | Gerchunoff, Alberto January 1, 1883 Alberto Gerchunoff (January 1, 1883 – March 2, 1950), was an Argentine writer born in the Russian Empire, in the city of Proskuriv, now Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine. His family emigrated in 1889 to the Argentinian Jewish agricultural colony of Moïseville, now Moisés Ville. His father, Rab Gershon ben Abraham Gerchunoff was murdered by a gaucho on February 12, 1891. After a few months the family moved to Rajil, founded by philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch as a haven for Jews fleeing the pogroms of Europe. Later, he lived in Buenos Aires, Argentine. Jorge Luis Borges described him thus: 'He was an indisputable writer, but his reputation transcends that of a man of letters. Unintentionally and perhaps unwittingly, he embodied an older type of writer ... who saw the written word as a mere stand-in for the oral, not as a sacred object.' Although he worked primarily as a journalist for Argentina's leading newspaper La Nación, he also wrote many important novels and books on Jewish life in Latin America, including The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas, which was later produced into a movie. For most of his life Gerchunoff espoused assimilationism for the Jews of Argentina, though altered his stance with the rise of Hitler, eventually advocating for the establishment of the state of Israel before the United Nations in 1947. He is said to have collaborated with Wilhelm Reich on a version of his orgone box designed to preserve the core of Jewish cultural memories, many of which were collected by him as oral histories and published under the title Héroes de los Intersticios in 1948. |
![]() | Aciman, Andre (editor) January 2, 1951 André Aciman (born 2 January 1951 in Alexandria, Egypt) is a writer, currently distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of City University of New York teaching the history of literary theory and the works of Marcel Proust. His memoir, Out of Egypt (1995), won a Whiting Writers' Award. He previously taught creative writing at New York University and French literature at Princeton University. In 2009 Aciman was Visiting Distinguished Writer at Wesleyan University. Influences:Marcel Proust, James Joyce. Aciman was born in Egypt in a French-speaking home where family members also spoke Italian, Greek, Ladino, and Arabic. His family were Jews of Turkish and Italian origin who settled in Alexandria, Egypt in 1905. Aciman moved with his family to Italy at the age of fifteen and then to New York at nineteen. He has a B.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Lehman College and an A.M. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. |
![]() | Asimov, Isaac January 2, 1920 Isaac Asimov (born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov, January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992) was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. His books have been published in nine out of ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal Classification. Asimov is widely considered a master of hard science fiction and, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, he was considered one of the ‘Big Three’ science fiction writers during his lifetime. Asimov's most famous work is the Foundation Series; his other major series are the Galactic Empire series and the Robot series. The Galactic Empire novels are explicitly set in earlier history of the same fictional universe as the Foundation Series. Later, beginning with Foundation's Edge, he linked this distant future to the Robot and Spacer stories, creating a unified ‘future history‘ for his stories much like those pioneered by Robert A. Heinlein and previously produced by Cordwainer Smith and Poul Anderson. He wrote hundreds of short stories, including the social science fiction ‘Nightfall‘, which in 1964 was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America the best short science fiction story of all time. Asimov wrote the Lucky Starr series of juvenile science-fiction novels using the pen name Paul French. The prolific Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as much nonfiction. Most of his popular science books explain scientific concepts in a historical way, going as far back as possible to a time when the science in question was at its simplest stage. He often provides nationalities, birth dates, and death dates for the scientists he mentions, as well as etymologies and pronunciation guides for technical terms. Examples include Guide to Science, the three volume set Understanding Physics, Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery, as well as works on astronomy, mathematics, the Bible, William Shakespeare's writing and chemistry. Asimov was a long-time member and vice president of Mensa International, albeit reluctantly; he described some members of that organization as ‘brain-proud and aggressive about their IQs’. He took more joy in being president of the American Humanist Association. The asteroid 5020 Asimov, a crater on the planet Mars, a Brooklyn, New York elementary school, and a literary award are named in his honor. |
![]() | Barry, Lynda January 2, 1956 Lynda Barry (born Linda Jean Barry; January 2, 1956) is an American cartoonist, author, and teacher. Barry is best known for her weekly comic strip Ernie Pook's Comeek. She garnered attention with her 1988 illustrated novel The Good Times are Killing Me, about an interracial friendship between two young girls, which was adapted into a play. Her second illustrated novel, Cruddy, first appeared in 1999. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. |
![]() | Cherry-Garrard, Apsley January 2, 1886 Apsley George Benet Cherry-Garrard (2 January 1886 – 18 May 1959) was an English explorer of Antarctica. He was a member of the Terra Nova Expedition and is acclaimed for his historical account of this expedition, The Worst Journey in the World. Born in Lansdowne Road,[A] Bedford, as Apsley George Benet Cherry, the son and eldest child of Major General Apsley Cherry (later Cherry-Garrard) of Denford Park in Berkshire (later of Lamer Park in Hertfordshire where he became High Sheriff) and his wife, Evelyn Edith (née Sharpin), daughter of Henry Wilson Sharpin of Bedford. He was educated at Winchester College and Christ Church, Oxford where he read Classics and Modern History. While at Oxford he rowed in the 1908 Christ Church crew which won the Grand Challenge Cup at the Henley Royal Regatta. His surname was changed from Cherry to Cherry-Garrard by the terms of his great-aunt's will, through which his father inherited the enormous Lamer Park estate near Wheathampstead in Hertfordshire. Apsley inherited the estate on his father's death in 1907. Cherry-Garrard had always been enamoured by the stories of his father's achievements in India and China where he had fought with merit for the British Defence Forces, and felt that he must live up to his father's example. In September 1907, Dr Edward Adrian 'Bill' Wilson met with Captain Scott at Reginald Smith's home in Cortachy, to discuss another Antarctic expedition; Smith's young cousin Apsley Cherry-Garrard happened to visit and decided to volunteer. |
![]() | Duranti, Francesca January 2, 1935 FRANCESCA DURANTI was born on January 2, 1935. Her 1986 novel THE HOUSE ON MOON LAKE was a literary triumph, winning the Bagutta Prize, the Martina Franca Prize, and the City of Milan Prize. Her next novel, HAPPY ENDING, was a bestseller in Italy and was praised as ‘beautiful, lively, and intelligent’ (Library Journal) when published in the United States. Ms. Duranti has a law degree from the University of Pisa and has translated novels from French, German, and English. She lives in Milan, Italy. |
![]() | Franklin, John Hope January 2, 1915 John Hope Franklin (January 2, 1915 – March 25, 2009) was an American historian of United States and former president of Phi Beta Kappa, the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Southern Historical Association. Franklin is best known for his work From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947, and continually updated. More than three million copies have been sold. In 1995, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. |
![]() | Judt, Tony January 2, 1948 TONY JUDT (2 January 1948 – 6 August 2010) was born in London in 1948. He was educated at King's College, Cambridge, and the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, and has taught at Cambridge, Oxford, Berkeley and New York University, where he is currently the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies and Director of the Remarque Institute, which is dedicated to the study of Europe and that he founded in 1995. The author or editor of eleven books, he is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, The New York Times and many other journals in Europe and the United States. |
![]() | Jessup, Richard January 2, 1925 Richard Jessup (January 2, 1925 in Savannah, Georgia - October 22, 1982 in Nokomis, Florida) was a prolific American author and screenwriter. He also wrote under the name of Richard Telfair. Jessup was raised by his mother, Annie Jessup, until at the age of 16, he join the United States Merchant Marine. He was a merchant seaman and junior officer for 11 years during which time he said he read a book every day. He learned to be a writer by copying War and Peace on a typewriter whilst afloat, corrected all the errors, then threw the work over the side. His first published novel was The Cunning and the Haunted published in 1954 based on his experiences in orphanages. In the same year, Jessup wrote a teleplay for Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. The novel was filmed as The Young Don't Cry in 1957 with Jessup writing the screenplay for the film with Sal Mineo as the lead. He began writing Westerns in 1957 with Cheyenne Saturday and finishing with Chuka where he wrote the screenplay for the film of the same name for actor and producer Rod Taylor. Jessup wrote a series of five Westerns featuring Wyoming Jones under the name Richard Telfair. With his Western series ending, in the same year he wrote again as Telfair for a series of spy novels featuring Montgomery Nash. He used the name Telfair for an original novel based on the TV series Danger Man (the half-hour precursor to 'Secret Agent', as it was known in the US) called Target for Tonight in 1962. Inspired by The Hustler, Jessup wrote a novel of poker playing called The Cincinnati Kid that was filmed with Steve McQueen. Another of his novels, The Deadly Duo, was also filmed. In 1969, he wrote Sailor based on his experiences as a merchant seaman. Otto Preminger bought the rights to his novel Foxway for filming, but the movie was never made. His final work was Threat published in 1981. He died of cancer in 1982. |
![]() | Micheaux, Oscar January 2, 1884 Oscar Devereaux Micheaux (January 2, 1884 – March 25, 1951) was an American author, film director and independent producer of more than 44 films. Although the short-lived Lincoln Motion Picture Company produced some films, he is regarded as the first major African-American feature filmmaker, the most successful African-American filmmaker of the first half of the twentieth century and the most prominent producer of race films. He produced both silent films and ‘talkies’ after the industry changed to incorporate speaking actors. |
![]() | Szichman, Mario January 2, 1945 Mario Szichman was born on January 2, 1945 in Buenos Aires. Between 1967 and 1971, he lived in Caracas, where in addition to his first two novels, he wrote the controversial book Miguel Otero Silva: mitologia de una generacion frustrada. He returned to Buenos Aires in 1971 and during a four-year stay was editor for an Argentinian news agency and wrote a critical study of contemporary Venezuelan history entitled Uslar: cultura y dependencia. Back in Caracas from 1975 to 1981, Szichman was given a professorial position at the University of Andres Bello, and appointed director of the literary supplement of Ultimas Noticias. He presently resides in New York City, where he is a correspondent for the Capriles chain of Caracas, and writes for the Latin Desk of United Press International. He is working on a new novel set in Argentina. During a decade, Mario Szichman sketched Out alternate versions of a single inexhaustible theme of dual and analagous identity, of culture loss and revelation in the New World, in the human context of a group of desperate low-life immigrants within an older Argentina still ruled by senorialpatricians. First the theme took form in Crónica falsa (1969), then in Los judios del Mar Dulce (1971), later returning to La verdadera crónica falsa (1972) and now finding its point of convergence, of climax, in the saga of the Pechof family, in At 8: 25 Evita Became Immortal. |
![]() | Tamer, Zakaria January 2, 1931 Zakaria Tamer (born January 2, 1931 in Damascus, Syria) is an influential master of the Arabic-language short story. He is one of the most important and widely read and translated short story writers in the Arab world, as well as being the foremost author of children’s stories in Arabic. He also writes children's stories and works as a freelance journalist, writing satirical columns in newspapers. His volumes of short stories, are often reminiscent of folktales, and are renowned for their relative simplicity on the one hand and the complexity of their many potential references on the other. They often have a sharp edge and are often a surrealistic protest against political or social oppression and exploitation. Most of Zakaria Tamer’s stories deal with people’s inhumanity to each other, the oppression of the poor by the rich and of the weak by the strong. The political and social problems of his own country, Syria, and of the Arab world, are reflected in the stories and sketches in the satirical style typical of his writing. His first stories were published in 1957. Since then he has published eleven collections of short stories, two collections of satirical articles and numerous children’s books. His works have been translated into many languages, with two collections in English, Tigers on the Tenth Day (translated by Denys Johnson-Davies, Quartet 1985) and Breaking Knees, published June 2008. In 2009 he won the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary prize |
![]() | Willeford, Charles January 2, 1919 Charles Ray Willeford III (January 2, 1919 – March 27, 1988) was an American writer. An author of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and literary criticism, Willeford is best known for his series of novels featuring hardboiled detective Hoke Moseley. The first Hoke Moseley book, MIAMI BLUES (1984), is considered one of its era's most influential works of crime fiction. Film adaptations have been made of three of Willeford's novels: COCKFIGHTER, MIAMI BLUES, and THE WOMAN CHASER. |
![]() | Ruiz, Teofilo F. January 2, 1943 Teofilo F. Ruiz is professor of history and of Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA. His many books include Spain’s Centuries of Crisis and From Heaven to Earth. In 2007, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and selected as one of UCLA’s Distinguished Teachers. |
![]() | Beaumont, Charles January 2, 1929 Charles Beaumont (January 2, 1929 – February 21, 1967) was an American author of speculative fiction, including short stories in the horror and science fiction subgenres. He is remembered as a writer of classic Twilight Zone episodes, such as "The Howling Man", "Miniature", "Printer's Devil", and "Number Twelve Looks Just Like You", but also penned the screenplays for several films, among them 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, The Intruder, and The Masque of the Red Death. In 1963, when Beaumont was 34 and overwhelmed by numerous writing commitments, he began to suffer the effects of "a mysterious brain disease" which seemed to age him rapidly. His ability to speak, concentrate, and remember became erratic. By 1965 Beaumont was too ill to even create or sell story ideas. Charles Beaumont died in Woodland Hills, California at the age of 38. His son Christopher later said that "he looked ninety-five and was, in fact, ninety-five by every calendar except the one on your watch". |
![]() | Telfair, Richard (pseudonym Richard Jessup) January 2, 1925 Richard Jessup (January 2, 1925 in Savannah, Georgia - October 22, 1982 in Nokomis, Florida) was a prolific American author and screenwriter. He also wrote under the name of Richard Telfair. Jessup was raised by his mother, Annie Jessup, until at the age of 16, he joined the United States Merchant Marine. He was a merchant seaman and junior officer for 11 years during which time he said he read a book every day. He learned to be a writer by copying War and Peace on a typewriter whilst afloat, corrected all the errors, then threw the work over the side. His first published novel was The Cunning and the Haunted published in 1954 based on his experiences in orphanages. In the same year, Jessup wrote a teleplay for Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. The novel was filmed as The Young Don't Cry in 1957 with Jessup writing the screenplay for the film with Sal Mineo as the lead. He began writing Westerns in 1957 with Cheyenne Saturday and finishing with Chuka where he wrote the screenplay for the film of the same name for actor and producer Rod Taylor. Jessup wrote a series of five Westerns featuring Wyoming Jones under the name Richard Telfair. With his Western series ending, in the same year he wrote again as Telfair for a series of spy novels featuring Montgomery Nash. He used the name Telfair for an original novel based on the TV series Danger Man (the half-hour precursor to 'Secret Agent', as it was known in the US) called Target for Tonight in 1962. Inspired by The Hustler, Jessup wrote a novel of poker playing called The Cincinnati Kid that was filmed with Steve McQueen. Another of his novels, The Deadly Duo, was also filmed. In 1969, he wrote Sailor based on his experiences as a merchant seaman. Otto Preminger bought the rights to his novel Foxway for filming, but the movie was never made. His final work was Threat published in 1981. He died of cancer in 1982. |
![]() | Ada, Alma Flor January 3, 1938 Alma Flor Ada (born January 3, 1938 in Camagüey, Cuba) has lived in Cuba, Spain, and Peru. She now lives in San Francisco, California, where she is a Professor Emerita of multicultural education at the University of San Francisco. She is an award-winning Cuban-American author of children’s books, poetry, and novels. Dr. Ada is recognized for her work promoting bilingual and multicultural education in the United States. |
![]() | Tolkien, J. R. R. January 3, 1892 John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor who is best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. |
![]() | Boyd, Robin January 3, 1919 Robin Gerard Penleigh Boyd CBE (3 January 1919 – 16 October 1971) was an influential Australian architect, writer, teacher and social commentator. He, along with Harry Seidler, stands as one of the foremost proponents for the International Modern Movement in Australian architecture. He is the author of the influential book The Australian Ugliness (1960), a critique on Australian architecture, particularly the state of Australian suburbia. Like his American contemporary John Lautner, Boyd had relatively few opportunities to design major buildings and his best known and most influential works as an architect are his numerous and innovative small house designs. |
![]() | Bruen, Ken January 3, 1951 Ken Bruen (born 1951) is an Irish writer of hard-boiled and noir crime fiction Education and teaching career Born in Galway, he was educated at Gormanston College, County Meath and later at Trinity College Dublin, where he earned a PhD in metaphysics. Bruen spent twenty-five years as an English teacher in Africa, Japan, S.E. Asia and South America. His travels have been hazardous at times, including a stint in a Brazilian jail. Bruen is part of a literary circle that includes Jason Starr, Reed Farrel Coleman, and Allan Guthrie. His works include the well-received White Trilogy and The Guards. In 2006, Hard Case Crime released Bust, a collaboration between Bruen and New York crime author Jason Starr. Bruen's short story "Words Are Cheap" (2006) appears in the first issue of Murdaland. He has also edited an anthology of stories set in Dublin, Dublin Noir. Jack Taylor's informant, named China, is a nod of the head by Ken Bruen to author Alan Hunter's original informant character named China, in the George Gently series of novels, first published in 1955. Bruen is also the recipient of the first David Loeb Goodis Award (2008) for his dedication to his art. Other works of note include The Killing of the Tinkers, The Magdalen Martyrs, The Dramatist and Priest, all part of his Jack Taylor series, which began with The Guards. Set in Galway, the series relates the adventures and misadventures of a disgraced former police officer working as a haphazard private investigator whose life has been marred by alcoholism and drug abuse. It chronicles the social change in Ireland in Bruen's own lifetime, paying particular attention to the decline of the Catholic Church as a social and political power. Themes also explored include Ireland's economic prosperity from the mid-1990s onwards, although it is often portrayed as a force which has left Ireland as a materialistic and spiritually drained society which still harbours deep social inequality. This is the side of the Celtic Tiger best portrayed in Bruen's Ireland-based novels. Immigration is also a theme to be found in these works. Bruen is the recipient of many awards: The Shamus Award in 2007 (The Dramatist) and 2004 (The Guards), both for Best P.I. Hardcover; The Macavity Award in 2005 (The Killing of the Tinkers) and 2010 (Tower, cowritten by Reed Farrel Coleman), both for Best Mystery Novel; The Barry Award in 2007 (Priest) for Best British Crime Novel; the Grand Prix de Literature Policiere in 2007 (Priest) for Best International Crime Novel. He was also a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 2004 (The Guards) and 2008 (Priest), both for Best Novel. |
![]() | Cicero, Marcus Tullius January 3, 106 BC Marcus Tullius Cicero (3 January 106 BC – 7 December 43 BC), was a Roman philosopher, politician, lawyer, orator, political theorist, consul and constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the Roman equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists. His influence on the Latin language was so immense that the subsequent history of prose in not only Latin but European languages up to the 19th century was said to be either a reaction against or a return to his style. According to Michael Grant, 'the influence of Cicero upon the history of European literature and ideas greatly exceeds that of any other prose writer in any language'. Cicero introduced the Romans to the chief schools of Greek philosophy and created a Latin philosophical vocabulary (with neologisms such as humanitas, qualitas, quantitas, and essentia) distinguishing himself as a linguist, translator, and philosopher. Petrarch's rediscovery of Cicero's letters is often credited for initiating the 14th-century Renaissance in public affairs, humanism, and classical Roman culture. According to Polish historian Tadeusz Zieli?ski, 'Renaissance was above all things a revival of Cicero, and only after him and through him of the rest of Classical antiquity.' The peak of Cicero's authority and prestige came during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and his impact on leading Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke, David Hume, and Montesquieu was substantial. His works rank among the most influential in European culture, and today still constitute one of the most important bodies of primary material for the writing and revision of Roman history, especially the last days of the Roman Republic. Though he was an accomplished orator and successful lawyer, Cicero believed his political career was his most important achievement. It was during his consulship that the Second Catilinarian Conspiracy attempted to overthrow the government through an attack on the city by outside forces, and Cicero suppressed the revolt by executing five conspirators without due process. During the chaotic latter half of the 1st century BC marked by civil wars and the dictatorship of Gaius Julius Caesar, Cicero championed a return to the traditional republican government. Following Julius Caesar's death Cicero became an enemy of Mark Antony in the ensuing power struggle, attacking him in a series of speeches. He was proscribed as an enemy of the state by the Second Triumvirate and consequently killed in 43 BC. |
![]() | D'alpuget, Blanche January 3, 1944 Blanche d’Alpuget was born in Sydney and now lives in Canberra. She has worked as a journalist in the United Kingdom, Indonesia, and Malaysia as well as in Australia. |
![]() | Darrieussecq, Marie January 3, 1969 Marie Darrieussecq (born Bayonne, Pyrénées-Atlantiques 1969) is a French writer. |
![]() | Frater, Alexander January 3, 1937 Alexander Russell Frater (born New Hebrides, 3 January 1937) is a travel writer and journalist. Frater's grandfather and his father were Scottish Presbyterian missionaries in the New Hebrides, now Vanuatu. His grandfather Maurice was based on the island of Paama, which had previously been hostile to all outsiders, from 1900-1939. His father Alexander, who became a doctor after training in Sydney, established a hospital on the island of Iririki, offshore from Parliament House in Port Vila, training many Pacific Islanders in the treatment of tropical diseases. His mother established and ran two schools in Vanuatu. In 1946 the family moved to Suva, Fiji, where Frater Snr. became Professor at the Central Medical School (he later took a post in New Zealand and died there). After primary school Frater was sent to Scotch College in Melbourne, and then attended the University of Melbourne as an undergraduate in the late 1950s. He married Marlis (d. 19 October 2011) in 1962 and moved to the UK to pursue a career as a journalist (with further study, Durham and Perugia). They had 2 children, Tania and John. He lives in south west London. Frater is noted for three well-regarded travel books, the most recent, Tales from the Torrid Zone, is in part an autobiography (of his childhood in Vanuatu) and a travelogue, was reviewed by the New York Times and described as "a pleasing grab bag of a book, a jumble of funny encounters, strange sights, forgotten history and really bad food". Chasing the Monsoon (1990) is another notable work in which he follows the Monsoon in India. It was made into a BBC documentary in which he featured. In the book Beyond the Blue Horizon (1984) the author in went to Statesman-Aldwych Travel in London and asked them to provide him with a ticket to all the airfields that Imperial Airways used on their route from London to Australia in 1935. He succeeded in visiting most of the many strange airfields used then, and also describes the many intermediate flights between them with local airlines unknown to most readers. The book also covers how it was to travel as a passenger to these far-away and forgotten places back in 1935. His latest book to date, published in 2008, is The Balloon Factory. It focuses on the pioneers of aviation based at The Balloon Factory in Farnborough, UK |
![]() | Herman, Josef January 3, 1911 Josef Herman (3 January 1911 – 19 February 2000), was a highly regarded Polish-British realist painter who influenced contemporary art, particularly in the UK. His work often had subjects of workers and was inherently political. He was among more than a generation of eastern European Jewish artists who emigrated to escape persecution and worked abroad. For eleven years he lived in South Wales. |
![]() | Jackson, Kevin January 3, 1955 Kevin Jackson (born 3 January 1955 in London) is an English writer, broadcaster, filmmaker and pataphysician. He was educated at the Emanuel School, Battersea, and Pembroke College, Cambridge. After teaching in the English Department of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, he joined the BBC, first as a producer in radio and then as a director of short documentaries for television. In 1987 he was recruited to the Arts pages of The Independent. He has been a freelance writer since the early 1990s and is now a regular contributor to BBC radio programmes, including Radio 4's Saturday Review. Jackson often collaborates on projects in various media: with, among others, the film-maker Kevin Macdonald, with whom he co-produced a Channel 4 documentary on Humphrey Jennings, The Man Who Listened to Britain (2000); with the cartoonist Hunt Emerson, on comic strips about the history of Western occultism for Fortean Times, on two comics inspired by John Ruskin (published by the Ruskin Foundation) and on a book-length version of Dante's Inferno (Knockabout Books, 2102); with the musician and composer Colin Minchin (lyrics for various songs, and the rock opera Bite, first staged in West London, October 2011); and with the songwriter Peter Blegvad (short surreal plays for BBC Radio 3 – eartoons). Jackson also conducted a long biographical interview with Blegvad, published by Atlas Press in September 2011 as The Bleaching Stream. Jackson appears, under his own name, as a semi-fictional character in Iain Sinclair's account of a pedestrian journey around the M25, London Orbital. Worple Press published Jackson's book of interviews with Sinclair, The Verbals in 2002. He was among the founder members of the London Institute of 'Pataphysics, and holds the Ordre de la Grande Gidouille from the College de Pataphysique in Paris. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Companion of the Guild of St George. From 2009–2011 he was Visiting Professor in English at University College, London. |
![]() | Montero, Rosa January 3, 1951 Rosa Montero (born 3 January 1951 in Madrid, Spain) is an award-winning journalist for the Spanish newspaper El País and an author of contemporary fiction. Montero was born into a lower-middle-class family in Cuatro Caminos, a district of Madrid. A bout of tuberculosis forced her to remain at home between the ages of five and nine, and she began reading and writing extensively during that time. She then entered the Beatriz Galindo Institute of Madrid, and at 17, she began her university studies in Madrid's School of Philosophy and Arts (Facultad de Filosofía y Letras). The following year she was admitted into the Journalism School, and during her university years, she participated in independent theater groups. After school, she began working as a journalist, and in 1976 she began working at El País. In 1977 she began publishing interviews in the Sunday edition of the paper, and the following year, she won the 'Manuel del Arco' prize for her work, and was the first woman to receive it. She, as well, published her first novel in 1979, Crónica del desamor (Chronicle of Enmity). In 1980, she won the National Journalism prize for her articles and literary reports, and that year she was named editor in chief of the weekly version of El País. In 1981 she published La función Delta (The Delta Function), and the following year, a collection of her interviews previously published in El País was released, with the title 'Cinco años de país' (Five Years of El País). The novel Te trataré como una reina (I Will Treat You Like a Queen) followed in 1983 and was a commercial success. She was awarded the World Prize of interviews in 1987, and published Temblor (Tremor) in 1990. Her first children's story, 'El nido de los sueños' (The Nest of Dreams), was published in 1992, and in the following years she released Bella y oscura (Beautiful and Dark, 1993) and La vida desnuda (The Naked Life, 1994). In 1994 she was awarded the Journalism Prize, and in 1997 she received the Spring Novel Prize for her work La hija del caníbal (The Cannibal's Daughter). In 1999, she published Pasiones (Passions), and in 2002, Estampas bostonianas y otros viajes. In 2003, she published what she considers one of her best works, La loca de la casa (The Lunatic of the House). This book won the 'Qué Leer' Prize to the best book published in Spain in 2003, and the Grinzane Cavour Prize for the best foreign book published in Italy in 2004. In 2005 she published 'Historia del Rey Transparente' (Story of the Transparent King), which has also won the 'Qué Leer' Prize as the best book published in Spain in 2005. |
![]() | Olmstead, Robert January 3, 1954 Robert Olmstead (born January 3, 1954) is an American novelist and educator. Olmstead is the author of the novels AMERICA BY LAND, A TRAIL OF HEART'S BLOOD WHEREVER WE GO and SOFT WATER. He is also the author of a memoir STAY HERE WITH ME, as well as River Dogs, a collection of short stories, and the textbook ELEMENTS OF THE WRITING CRAFT. His novel COAL BLACK HORSE has received national acclaim, including the 2007 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Fiction and the 2008 Ohioana Book Award for Fiction. He is currently the Director of Creative Writing at Ohio Wesleyan University. He has also served as the Senior Writer in Residence at Dickinson College and as the director of creative writing at Boise State University. |
![]() | Raskin, Jonah January 3, 1942 Jonah Raskin is Professor of Communication Studies at Sonoma State University and the author of THE RADICAL JACK LONDON: WRITINGS ON WAR AND REVOLUTION, AMERICAN SCREAM: ALLEN GINSBERG'S ‘HOWL’ AND THE MAKING OF THE BEAT GENERATION, and FOR THE HELL OF IT: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ABBIE HOFFMAN, all available from University of California Press. |
![]() | Thompson, Jean January 3, 1950 Jean Thompson is the author, most recently of Who Do You Love: Stories, a 1999 National Book Award finalist for fiction. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundations, she lives in Urbana, Illinois. |
![]() | Horne, Gerald C. January 3, 1949 Gerald Horne is an African-American historian who currently holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. Born in January 1949 he was raised in St. Louis, USA. After undergraduate education at Princeton University he received his PhD from Columbia University and a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a frequent contributor to Political Affairs magazine. |
![]() | Drinnon, Richard January 4, 1925 Richard T. Drinnon (born January 4, 1925, in Portland, Oregon; died April 19, 2012 in Port Orford, Oregon) was professor emeritus of history at Bucknell University. He received his PhD from the University of Minnesota. In 1961, while Drinnon was a professor at the University of California, he was discovered by police to be the next person on the target list of John Harrison Farmer, who felt that he was on a mission from God to kill people that he believed were associated with communism. During the Columbia University protests of 1968, Drinnon participated in a student walkout of a speech at Bucknell University by Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, when Humphrey blamed protesters for disorder on the campus. Drinnon shouted 'This is a disgrace' and walked out along with about 30 students. |
![]() | Eastman, Max January 4, 1883 Max Forrester Eastman (January 4, 1883 – March 25, 1969) was an American writer on literature, philosophy and society; a poet, and a prominent political activist. Moving to New York City for graduate school, Eastman became involved with liberal and radical circles in Greenwich Village. He supported socialism and became a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance, and an activist for a number of liberal and radical causes. For several years, he edited The Masses. With his sister Crystal Eastman, in 1917 he co-founded The Liberator, a radical magazine of politics and the arts. In later life, however, Eastman changed his views, becoming highly critical of socialism and communism after his experiences during a nearly two-year stay in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, as well as later studies. He was influenced by the deadly rivalry between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, by which Trotsky was assassinated, as well as the wholesale abuses of the 1930s show trials under Stalin, who conducted widespread terror against his citizens; repression and purges that resulted in the imprisonment and deaths of millions of people in the Soviet Union. Eastman became an advocate of free-market economics and anti-communism, while remaining an atheist and independent thinker. In 1955, he published Reflections on the Failure of Socialism. He published more frequently in The National Review and other conservative journals in later life, but always remained independent in his thinking; for instance, he publicly opposed United States involvement in the Vietnam War in the 1960s, earlier than most. |
![]() | James, C. L. R. January 4, 1901 Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine. |
![]() | Kilbourne, Jean January 4, 1943 Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D. is an author, speaker, and filmmaker who is internationally recognized for her work on the image of women in advertising and her critical studies of alcohol and tobacco advertising. |
![]() | Prucha, Francis Paul January 4, 1921 Francis Paul Prucha (January 4, 1921 – July 30, 2015) was an American Jesuit, historian, and professor emeritus of history at Marquette University. His work, The Great Father, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and is regarded as a classic among professional historians |
![]() | Sa'edi, Gholam-Hossein January 4, 1936 GHOLAM-HOSSEIN SA’EDI was born in Tabriz in 1935. While studying for a medical degree, he became involved in political activities that later caused him to be imprisoned by the Shah. After being tortured, he was released and allowed to come to the United States. Sa’edi has published over thirty works - including plays and short stories - and is now living in Iran. |
![]() | Sawyer-Laucanno, Christopher January 4, 1951 Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno lives in Montague, Massachusetts, with his wife, the poet Patricia Pruitt, and their little white dog, Salty. In 2007 he was guest writer at the first Mussoorie Writers' Festival in India. His books include E.E. Cummings: A Biography (Methuen Publishing, 2005) and The Continual Pilgrimage: American Writers in Paris, 1944-1960 (City Lights, 2001). He currently teaches in the program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT. |
![]() | Wallace, Michele January 4, 1952 Michele Faith Wallace (born January 4, 1952) is a black feminist author, cultural critic, and daughter of artist Faith Ringgold. Michele Wallace was born in Harlem in 1952. She attended the New Lincoln School and the College of the City of New York, and has worked at Newsweek and taught writing at New York University. She has written for many journals, among them Ms. Magazine, The Village Voice, and Esquire. She is best known for her 1979 book Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. Wallace's writings on literature, art, film, and popular culture have been widely published and have made her a leader of African-American intellectuals. She is a Professor of English at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). |
![]() | Fernández Guardia, Ricardo January 4, 1867 Ricardo Fernandez Guardia (Alajuela, January 4, 1867 - San Jose, February 25, 1950 ) was a Costa Rican writer, politician and diplomat. He was the son of Isabel Guardia Gutiérrez and the historian León Fernández Bonilla. Not only did he continue his father's historical studies and contribute to the development of new research incorporating key texts in the country's history, he also elevated Costa Rican history to a higher category merging scientific and literary material to create his chronicles. A cultivator and follower of the best of the Spanish and French literary traditions, Fernández Guardia identified himself with the birth of literary realism and the Costa Rican theater. He is considered by some to be the first classical author in Costa Rica. His concern for the purity of the language and the logical structuring of the expression of his ideas make up a unit of style unprecedented in Costa Rican letters. He was Secretary of Foreign Relations and attached portfolios from 1909 to 1910. He wrote numerous and documented historical works, including: The Discovery and the Conquest, Historical Book of Costa Rica, Colonial Chronicles, Historical Review of Talamanca, Morazán in Costa Rica, Independence, Things and People of Yesteryear, the League War and the Quijano invasion, Gleaning in the past and Don Florencio del Castillo in the Cortes of Cádiz . He was also the author of several literary works and political essays, including a 1916 message, in which the policies of President Alfredo González Flores were criticized. He was Secretary of the Legation of Costa Rica in Europe (1885-1889) and Charge d'Affaires ad interim in Spain (1886-1887), First Secretary of the Legation in Europe (1897-1901), Minister on a special mission in Italy (1900 ), Minister on special mission in Honduras (1904), Confidential agent of Costa Rica in the United States (1917), Minister on special mission in Panama (1920) and in Mexico (1921), Consul General in Spain (1929-1930) and Minister Plenipotentiary of Costa Rica in Guatemala (1944-1945). Declared Benemérito de la Patria by the Costa Rican legislature in 1944. |
![]() | Due, Tananarive January 5, 1966 TANANARIVE DUE is a Miami Herald columnist and the author of THE BETWEEN, a novel the New York Times Book Review hailed as ‘a finely honed work that always engages and frequently surprises.’ A finalist for the Bram Stoker Award for a first novelist, she is also included in NAKED CAME THE MANATEE, a collaborative mystery novel featuring several Miami writers. |
![]() | Durrenmatt, Friedrich January 5, 1921 Friedrich Dürrenmatt (January 5, 1921 – December 14, 1990) was a Swiss author and dramatist. He was a proponent of epic theater whose plays reflected the recent experiences of World War II. The politically active author gained fame largely due to his avant-garde dramas, philosophically deep crime novels, and often macabre satire. One of his leading sentences was: ‘A story is not finished, until it has taken the worst turn’. Dürrenmatt was a member of the Gruppe Olten. Dürrenmatt was born in Konolfingen, in the Emmental (canton of Bern), the son of a Protestant pastor. His grandfather Ulrich Dürrenmatt was a conservative politician. The family moved to Bern in 1935. Dürrenmatt began to study of philosophy and German language and literature at the University of Zurich in 1941, but moved to the University of Bern after one semester. In 1943 he decided to become an author and dramatist and dropped his academic career . In 1945-46, he wrote his first play ‘It is written’. On October 11 1946 he married the actress Lotti Geissler. She died on January 16 1983 and Dürrenmatt married again in 1984 to another actress, Charlotte Kerr. Dürrenmatt also some of his own works and his drawings were exhibited in Neuchâtel in 1976 and 1985, as well as in Zürich in 1978. Like Brecht, Dürrenmatt explored the dramatic possibilities of epic theater. His plays are meant to involve the audience in a theoretical debate, rather than as purely passive entertainment. When he was 26, his first play, It Is Written, premiered to great controversy. The story of the play revolves around a battle between a sensation-craving cynic and a religious fanatic who takes scripture literally, all of this taking place while the city they live in is under siege. The play’s opening night in April, 1947 caused fights and protests in the audience. His first major success was the play Romulus the Great. Set in the year 476 A.D., the play explores the last days of the Roman Empire, presided over, and brought about by its last emperor. The Visit (Der Besuch der alten Dame, 1956) which tells of a rich benefactor visiting her beneficiaries, is the work best known in the United States. The satirical drama The Physicists (Die Physiker, 1962) which deals with issues concerning science and its responsibility for dramatic and even dangerous changes to our world has also been presented in translation. Radio plays published in English include Hercules in the Augean Stables (Herkules und der Stall des Augias, 1954), Incident at Twilight (Abendstunde im Spätherbst, 1952) and The Mission of the Vega (Das Unternehmen der Wega, 1954). The two late works ‘Labyrinth’ and ‘Turmbau zu Babel’ are a collection of unfinished ideas, stories, and philosophical thoughts. In 1990, he gave two famous speeches, one in honour of Václav Havel (Die Schweiz, ein Gefängnis? / Switzerland a Prison?), and the other in honour of Mikhail Gorbachev (Kants Hoffnung / Kant’s Hope). Dürrenmatt often compared the three Abrahamic religions and Marxism, which he also saw as a religion. Even if there are several parallels between Dürrenmatt and Brecht, Dürrenmatt never took a political position, but represented a pragmatic philosophy of life. In 1969, he traveled in the USA, in 1974 to Israel, and in 1990 to Auschwitz in Poland. Dürrenmatt died on December 14, 1990 in Neuchâtel. (original title: Die Panne, 1956 - Peter Schifferli, Verlags AG. ‘Die Arche’, Zurich). |
![]() | Eatwell, Roger January 5, 1949 Roger Eatwell (born January 5, 1949) is a British academic currently a Professor of Politics at the University of Bath. Eatwell studies far-right extremist European politics, and has authored several books and articles on fascism and right-wing Euoprean movements. |
![]() | Eco, Umberto January 5, 1932 Umberto Eco is Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna. His collections of essays include Kant and the Platypus, Serendipities, Travels in Hyperreality , and How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays . He is also the author of the novels: The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum , and The Island of the Day Before. |
![]() | Goytisolo, Juan January 5, 1931 Juan Goytisolo Gay (5 January 1931 – 4 June 2017) was a Spanish poet, essayist, and novelist. He lived in Marrakech from 1997 until his death in 2017. He was considered Spain's greatest living writer at the beginning of the 21st century, yet he had lived abroad since the 1950s. |
![]() | Krasznahorkai, Laszlo January 5, 1954 LASZLO KRASZNAHORKAI lives in Pilissentlãszló, Hungary. He has won numerous prizes including Best Book of the Year in Germany in 1993 for THE MELANCHOLY OF RESISTANCE. Two of his novels have been made into award-winning films by the renowned filmmaker Béla Tarr. |
![]() | Levinson, Luisa Mercedes January 5, 1904 LUISA MERCEDES LEVINSON (January 5, 1904, Buenos Aires, Argentina - March 4, 1988, Buenos Aires, Argentina) was born in Buenos Aires to a Spanish mother and Australian father. Undoubtedly, family influences account for her cosmopolitan outlook and freedom of spirit which contributed in no small measure to the formation of a picturesque personality. Yet her sensitivity to the cultural values of her native land pulsates and is reflected in her many works. Many of her books have been translated into various languages. Levinson was the recipient of prestigious literary awards not only in her native Argentina, but abroad as well, winning the admiration of the literary world. Her daughter, Luisa Valenzuela, is currently an award-winning writer of international renown. |
![]() | Lyons, Arthur January 5, 1946 Arthur Lyons was born on January 5, 1946 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He was a writer, known for Slow Burn (1986) and E! Mysteries & Scandals (1998). He was married to Barbara. He died on March 21, 2008 in Palm Springs, California. |
![]() | Ngugi wa Thiong'o January 5, 1938 Ngugi wa Thiong'o (born January 5, 1938) is a Kenyan author, formerly working in English and now working in Gikuyu. His work includes novels, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children's literature. He is the founder and editor of the Gikuyu-language journal, Mutiiri. In 1977, Ngugi embarked upon a novel form of theater in his native Kenya which sought to liberate the theatrical process from what he held to be ‘the general bourgeois education system’, by encouraging spontaneity and audience participation in the performances. Ngugi's project sought to ‘demystify’ the theatrical process, and to avoid the ‘process of alienation [which] produces a gallery of active stars and an undifferentiated mass of grateful admirers’ which, according to Ngugi, encourages passivity in ‘ordinary people’. Although Ngaahika Ndeenda was a commercial success, it was shut down by the authoritarian Kenyan regime six weeks after its opening. Ngugi was subsequently imprisoned for over a year. Adopted as an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, the artist was released from prison, and fled Kenya. In the United States, he taught at Yale University for some years, and has since also taught at New York University, with a dual professorship in Comparative Literature and Performance Studies, and the University of California, Irvine. Ngugi has frequently been regarded as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. His son is the author Mukoma wa Ngugi. Ngugi was born in Kamiriithu, near Limuru in Kiambu district, Kenya, of Kikuyu descent, and baptised James Ngugi. His family was caught up in the Mau Mau War; his half brother Mwangi was actively involved in the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, and his mother was tortured at Kamriithu homeguard post. He received a B.A. in English from Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, in 1963; during his education, a play of his, THE BLACK HERMIT, was produced in Kampala in 1962. He published his first novel, WEEP NOT, CHILD, in 1964, which he wrote while attending the University of Leeds in England. It was the first novel in English to be published by an East African. His second novel, THE RIVER BETWEEN (1965), has as its background the Mau Mau rebellion, and described an unhappy romance between Christians and non-Christians. THE RIVER BETWEEN is currently on Kenya's national secondary school syllabus. His novel A Grain of Wheat (1967) marked his embrace of Fanonist Marxism. He subsequently renounced English, Christianity, and the name James Ngugi as colonialist; he changed his name back to Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and began to write in his native Gikuyu and Swahili. The uncensored political message of his 1977 play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I WILL MARRY WHEN I WANT) provoked then Vice President Daniel arap Moi to order his arrest. While detained in the Kamiti Maximum Security Prison, he wrote the first modern novel in Gikuyu, Caitaani mutharaba-Ini (DEVIL ON THE CROSS), on prison-issued toilet paper. After his release, he was not reinstated to his job as professor at Nairobi University, and his family was harassed. Due to his writing about the injustices of the dictatorial government at the time, Ngugi and his family were forced to live in exile. Only after Arap Moi was voted out of office, 22 years later, was it safe for them to return. His later works include Detained, his prison diary (1981), DECOLONISING THE MIND: THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE IN AFRICAN LITERATURE (1986), an essay arguing for African writers' expression in their native languages, rather than European languages, in order to renounce lingering colonial ties and to build an authentic African literature, and MATIGARI (1987), one of his most famous works, a satire based on a Gikuyu folktale. In 1992 he became a professor of Comparative Literature and Performance Studies at New York University, where he held the Erich Maria Remarque Chair. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature as well as the Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine. On August 8, 2004, Ngugi returned to Kenya as part of a month-long tour of East Africa. On August 11, robbers broke into his apartment: they assaulted both the Professor and his wife, and stole money and a computer. Since then, Ngugi has returned to America, and in the summer 2006 the American publishing firm Random House published his first new novel in nearly two decades, WIZARD OF THE CROW, translated to English from Gikuyu by the author. On November 10, 2006, while in San Francisco at Hotel Vitale at the Embarcadero, Ngugi was harassed and ordered to leave the hotel by an employee. The event led to a public outcry and angered the Kenyan community in the San Francisco Bay area and abroad, prompting an apology by the hotel. |
![]() | Page, Marco (pseudonym of Harry Kurnitz) January 5, 1908 Harry Kurnitz (January 5, 1908 – March 18, 1968) was an American playwright, novelist, and prolific screenwriter who wrote swashbucklers for Errol Flynn and comedies for Danny Kaye. He also wrote some mystery fiction under the name Marco Page. Kurnitz grew up in Philadelphia and attended the University of Pennsylvania. He entered journalism as a book and music reviewer for The Philadelphia Record in 1930. In his spare time he wrote fiction. A mystery story Kurnitz wrote in 1937, Fast Company, about skulduggery in the rare-book business, led him to Hollywood. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bought the book, and Kurnitz wrote the screenplay. Kurnitz wrote more than forty movie scripts, among them Witness for the Prosecution, What Next, Corporal Hargrove?, and How to Steal a Million. His first play was Reclining Figure, a 1954 comedy about painters and their patrons and the tricks of the dealers and collectors who prey on them. Later, Kurnitz wrote the hit comedy Once More, with Feeling!. Other plays included High Fidelity and The Girl Who Came to Supper, a musical he wrote with Noël Coward, who composed the music and lyrics. On March 18, 1968, Kurnitz died of a heart attack. At the time of his death he was working on a detective story. |
![]() | Prada, Manuel Gonzalez January 5, 1844 Jose Manuel de los Reyes González de Prada y Ulloa (Lima, January 5, 1844 – Lima, July 22, 1918) was a Peruvian politician and anarchist, literary critic and director of the National Library of Peru. He is well remembered as a social critic who helped develop Peruvian intellectual thought in the early twentieth century, as well as the academic style known as modernismo. He was close in spirit to Clorinda Matto de Turner whose first novel, Torn from the Nest approached political indigenismo, and to Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera, who like González Prada, practiced a positivism sui generis. David Sobrevilla is Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Saint Marcos of Lima and of Philosophy of Law at the University of Lima. He has published numerous works on philosophy, philosophy of law and of culture, German and Latin American aesthetics, and theory of aesthetics. Frederick Fornoff is Professor of Spanish, Comparative Literature, and Creative Writing at The University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. He is the recipient of many awards including the NEA, NEH, and Fulbright. |
![]() | Cendrars, Blaise January 5, 1921 Blaise Cendrars (September 1, 1887 - January 21, 1961) was born in 1887 of mixed Swiss and Scottish descent. At the age of fifteen he swung down from a fifth-floor balcony to escape his parents and begin his world traveling. Employed by a jewel merchant, he first went through Russia, Persia, and China; from then on he traveled everywhere, living by his wits, making films, serving as a corporal in the Foreign Legion during World War I, and writing. Cendrars died in Paris in 1961. |
![]() | Gibbons, Stella January 5, 1902 Stella Dorothea Gibbons (5 January 1902 – 19 December 1989) was an English author, journalist, and poet. She established her reputation with her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932), which won the literary Prix Femina Étranger and has been reprinted many times. Although she was active as a writer for half a century, none of her later 22 novels or other literary works—which included a sequel to Cold Comfort Farm—achieved the same critical or popular success. Much of her work was long out of print before a modest revival in the 21st century. The daughter of a London doctor, Gibbons had a turbulent and often unhappy childhood. After an indifferent school career she trained as a journalist, and worked as a reporter and features writer, mainly for the Evening Standard and The Lady. Her first book, published in 1930, was a collection of poems which was well received, and through her life she considered herself primarily a poet rather than a novelist. After Cold Comfort Farm, a satire on the genre of rural-themed 'loam and lovechild' novels popular in the late 1920s, most of Gibbons's novels were based within the middle-class suburban world with which she was familiar. Gibbons became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. Her style has been praised by critics for its charm, barbed humour and descriptive skill, and has led to comparison with Jane Austen. The impact of Cold Comfort Farm dominated her career, and she grew to resent her identification with the book to the exclusion of the rest of her output. Widely regarded as a one-work novelist, she and her works have not been accepted into the canon of English literature—partly, other writers have suggested, because of her detachment from the literary world and her tendency to mock it. |
![]() | Cook, Pam January 6, 1943 Pam Cook (born January 6, 1943, Farnborough, United Kingdom) is Professor Emerita in Film at the University of Southampton. She was educated at Sir William Perkins's School, Chertsey, Surrey and Birmingham University, where she was taught by Stuart Hall, |
![]() | De Contreras, Alonso January 6, 1582 Alonso de Contreras (Madrid, Spain, 6 January 1582 - 1641), was a Spanish sailor (captain of a frigate), soldier (captain of infantry and then of cavalry), privateer, adventurer and writer, best known as the author of his autobiography; one of the very few autobiographies of Spanish soldiers under the Spanish Habsburgs and possibly one of the finest, together with the True History of the Conquest of New Spain (Historia Verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España) by Bernal Diaz del Castillo. |
![]() | Deblieu, Jan January 6, 1955 Jan DeBlieu is an American writer whose work often focuses on how people are shaped by the landscapes in which they live. Her own writing has been influenced by her adopted home on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. She is the author of four books including Hatteras Journal, Meant to Be Wild, Wind (which won the John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Natural History Writing, the highest national honor for that genre) and Year of the Comets. Her fifth book, which examines living in service to others, is forthcoming. She also has published dozens of essays and magazine articles, both in literary journals and mainstream publications like The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, Audubon, and Orion. Her work has been widely anthologized. In 2003 she was named the Cape Hatteras Coastkeeper for the North Carolina Coastal Federation, a post she held until 2012. She has since returned to full-time writing. While DeBlieu's work has mostly focused on naturally history, landscape, and place, this shifted after the death of her son in a car accident in 2009. Since then she has concentrated on exploring how ordinary people can help change the lives of people in need. |
![]() | Doctorow, E. L. January 6, 1931 Edgar Lawrence Doctorow (January 6, 1931 – July 21, 2015) was an American novelist, editor, and professor, best known internationally for his works of historical fiction. He wrote twelve novels, three volumes of short fiction and a stage drama. They included the award-winning novels Ragtime (1975), Billy Bathgate (1989), and The March (2005). These, like many of his other works, placed fictional characters in recognizable historical contexts, with known historical figures, and often used different narrative styles. His stories were recognized for their originality and versatility, and Doctorow was praised for his audacity and imagination. A number of Doctorow's novels were also adapted for the screen, including Welcome to Hard Times (1967) starring Henry Fonda, Daniel (1983) starring Timothy Hutton, Billy Bathgate (1991) starring Dustin Hoffman, and Wakefield (2016) starring Bryan Cranston. His most notable adaptations were for the film Ragtime (1981) and the Broadway musical of the same name (1998), which won four Tony Awards. Doctorow was the recipient of numerous writing awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Ragtime, National Book Critics Circle Award for Billy Bathgate, National Book Critics Circle Award for The March, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction. Former President Barack Obama called him "one of America's greatest novelists". |
![]() | Genelin, Michael January 6, 1950 Michael Genelin (born January 6, 1950) is an American author and former Los Angeles Head Deputy District Attorney in the Hardcore Gang Division. Genelin has been involved around the world in Penal Code reform, Anti-Corruption reform in government, including legislative drafting, Ethics Establishment and Training, Freedom of Information laws, Witness Protection Practices, Trial Advocacy, Investigation and Trial of Cases, particularly homicides, Judicial Procedures, Reform and Creation of Evidence Procedures, Human Resources, all aspects of training, including Anti-Corruption Investigation and Prosecution and the general operations of law enforcement/prosecution/criminal court programs, Investigative Journalism Training, and Interactive Governmental Communications. |
![]() | Gitlin, Todd January 6, 1943 Todd Alan Gitlin (born January 6, 1943) is an American sociologist, political writer, novelist, and cultural commentator. He has written about the mass media, politics, intellectual life and the arts, for both popular and scholarly publications. |
![]() | Lernoux, Penny January 6, 1940 Penny Lernoux (January 6, 1940 - October 9, 1989, Mount Kisco, NY) was a reporter and an expert on the Latin American Church. She lived in Bogota, Colombia, for several years. She was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Southern California and has written on Latin America for Newsweek, the Nation, Copley News Service, U.S. Information Agency, and the National Catholic Reporter. She was a Fellow and grant recipient of the Alicia Peterson Foundation. The grant was awarded her to do research into the Church in Latin America. |
![]() | Lopez, Barry January 6, 1945 Barry Holstun Lopez (born January 6, 1945) is an American author, essayist, and fiction writer whose work is known for its humanitarian and environmental concerns. He won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for Arctic Dreams (1986) and his Of Wolves and Men (1978) was a National Book Award finalist. |
![]() | Lotz, Wolfgang January 6, 1921 Wolfgang Lotz (6 January 1921 – 13 May 1993), who later adopted the Hebrew name Ze'ev Gur-Arie, was an Israeli spy in Egypt during the 1960s providing intelligence and conducting terror operations against Egyptian military scientists. He was arrested by Egypt in 1965, and subsequently repatriated to Israel in a prisoner exchange. |
![]() | Morris, Wright January 6, 1910 Wright Marion Morris (January 6, 1910 – April 25, 1998) was an American novelist, photographer, and essayist. He is known for his portrayals of the people and artifacts of the Great Plains in words and pictures, as well as for experimenting with narrative forms. Wright Morris died April 25, 1998 at the age of 88 years. He is buried in the Chapman Cemetery. |
![]() | Nelson, Antonya January 6, 1961 Antonya Nelson (born January 6, 1961) is an American author and teacher of creative writing who writes primarily short stories. She received a BA degree from the University of Kansas in 1983 and an MFA degree from the University of Arizona in 1986.She lives in Telluride, Colorado; Las Cruces, New Mexico; and Houston, Texas. Nelson's short stories have appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker, Quarterly West, Redbook, Ploughshares, Harper's, and other magazines. They have been anthologized in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories.Several of her books have been New York Times Book Review Notable Books: In the Land of Men (1992), Talking in Bed (1996), Nobody's Girl: A Novel (1998), Living to Tell: A Novel (2000), and Female Trouble (2002). |
![]() | Obradovic, Nadezda (editor) January 6, 1936 Nadezda Obradovic (January 6, 1936, Belgrade, Serbia - 2004, Belgrade, Serbia) was a Serbian-Yugoslavian translator. |
![]() | Olbracht, Ivan January 6, 1882 Ivan Olbracht (January 6, 1882, Semily, Czech Republic - December 30, 1952, Prague, Czech Republic) was born in the Czech town of Semily in 1882. After studying law and history in Berlin and Prague and serving two years in the Austrian army, he bavame a journalist and later edited Rude Pravo (Red Power), the leading Czech communist paper. Olbracht wrote several novels and shorter works and translated Arnold Zweig, Thomas Mann, and others into Czech. He is best known for the novel Nikola the Outlaw (1933) and the story collection The Sorrowful Eyes of Hannah Karajich (1937). He died in Prague in 1952. Marie K. Holecek is a translator and former history professor. Her translation of Josef Pesek's Story of Czechoslovakia, appeared in 1930. Holecek's most recent translation is Alois Jirasek's Old Czech Legends. |
![]() | Onyeama, Dillibe January 6, 1951 Dillibe Onyeama (born January, 6 1951) was born in Enugu, travelled to UK in 1959, stayed there 22 years, and returned in 1981 to head a book publishing company called DELTA PUBLICATIONS (NIGERIA) LIMITED, which has over 500 titles on its list. He has 26 published books to his name, published mainly in Europe. Married with 6 adult children. Studied in notable British schools, and got a Diploma in Journalism at The Writers School of Great Britain (incorporating The Premier School of Journalism). |
![]() | Soriano, Osvaldo January 6, 1943 Osvaldo Soriano, Journalist and writer. Born January 6, 1943 in Mar del Plata, Argentina – died on January 29, 1997 in Buenos Aires. Soriano became a staff writer at La Opinión right from the start in 1971 when editor Jacobo Timerman founded the newspaper. La Opinión was permeated with progressive politics and soon there was an attempt to squash the left-wing influence with-in the paper. After six months of not having any of his articles published, Soriano began writing a story in which a character named Osvaldo Soriano reconstructs the life of English actor Stan Laurel. The work became his first novel, Triste, solitario y final (English: Sad, lonely and final), a melancholic parody set in Los Angeles with the famed fictional Philip Marlowe detective as his joint investigator. It was some months after the publication of his novel that he visited the American city, and actually stood by the grave of Stan Laurel, leaving there a copy of his book. Shortly after the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional coup d'etat in Argentina in 1976, he moved to Brussels first (where he met his wife Catherine), and then to Paris, where he lived in exile until 1984. While in France he befriended Julio Cortázar with whom he founded the short-lived experience of the monthly magazine Sin censura. After the fall of the military junta he returned to Buenos Aires and the publication of his books were met with large success, not only in South America but also in several other countries where his works begun to be translated and published. |
![]() | Timerman, Jacobo January 6, 1923 Jacobo Timerman (6 January 1923 – 11 November 1999), was a Soviet-born Argentine publisher, journalist, and author of Lithuanian Jewish descent, who is most noted for his confronting and reporting the atrocities of the Argentine military regime's Dirty War during a period of widespread repression in which an estimated 30,000 political prisoners were "disappeared." He was persecuted, tortured and imprisoned by the Argentine junta in the late 1970s and was exiled in 1979 with his wife to Israel. He was widely honored for his work as a journalist and publisher. In Israel, Timerman wrote and published his most well-known book, Prisoner Without A Name, Cell Without a Number (1981), a memoir of his prison experience that added to his international reputation. A longtime Zionist, he published a strongly critical book about Israel's 1982 Lebanon war. Timerman returned to Argentina in 1984, and testified to the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons. He continued to write, publishing books in 1987 about Chile under the Augusto Pinochet regime and in 1990 about Cuba under Fidel Castro. |
![]() | Vellinho, Moyses January 6, 1902 Moysés Vellinho (January 6, 1902 - August 27, 1980, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) was born in Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, in 1902. He studied at the Colégios Anchieta e Jólio de Castilhos in Pôrto Alegre and took a degree in juridical and social sciences at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in 1926. Mr. Vellinho served as district attorney for Caxias do Sul and Jaguarão in 1926-7; as Chief of the Cabinet, Department of the Interior from 1928 to 1930; and as a cabinet official in the Ministry of Justice in 1931. From 1935 to 1937 he was a deputy in the state assembly and from 1938 to 1964 minister of the State Court of Accounts. He is an active associate of the Instituto Histórico e Geogrâfico do Rio Grande do Sul and a member of the Academia Internacional da Cultura Portuguesa in Lisbon and the Conselho Federal de Cultura in Rio de Janeiro. His publications include Letras da Provincia (1944), Simôes Lopes Neto (1957), and Machado de Assis (1960). Mr. Vellinho lives in Pôrto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, and is currently working on another historical study of the region. . (original title: Capitania d’El Rei, 1964 - Editora Globo, Porto Alegre). |
![]() | Watts, Alan January 6, 1915 Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master's degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest in 1945, then left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies. Peter J. Columbus is Administrator of the Shantigar Foundation in Rowe, Massachusetts. Donadrian L. Rice is Professor of Psychology at the University of West Georgia. Together they are the coeditors of Alan Watts—Here and Now: Contributions to Psychology, Philosophy, and Religion, also published by SUNY Press. |
![]() | Duncan, Robert January 7, 1919 Robert Duncan (January 7, 1919 – February 3, 1988) was an American poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black Mountain College. Duncan's mature work emerged in the 1950s in the literary context of Beat culture. Duncan was a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance. |
![]() | Baker, Nicholson January 7, 1957 Nicholson Baker (born January 7, 1957) is an American writer of fiction and non-fiction. His fiction generally de-emphasizes narrative in favor of careful description and characterization. He often focuses on minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness. Baker has written about poetry, literature, library systems, history, politics, time manipulation, youth, and sex. He has written about libraries getting rid of books and newspapers and created the American Newspaper Repository. He received a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001 for his nonfiction book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper and the International Hermann Hesse Price (Germany) in 2014. Baker has also written about and edited at Wikipedia. A pacifist, he has also written about the buildup to World War II. |
![]() | Bell, Ian January 7, 1956 Ian Bell (7 January 1956 – 10 December 2015) was a Scottish journalist and author who won the Orwell Prize for political journalism in 1997. Over a thirty-year career he wrote for and edited: The Scotsman, The Herald, The Sunday Herald, the Daily Record and The Times Literary Supplement. He was named Scotland's columnist of the year four times between 2000 and 2012. |
![]() | Brand, Dionne January 7, 1953 Dionne Brand (born January 7, 1953) is a Canadian poet, novelist, essayist and documentarian. She was Toronto's third Poet Laureate from September 2009 to November 2012. |
![]() | Collymore, Frank A. January 7, 1893 Frank Appleton Collymore (7 January 1893 - 17 July 1980) was a famous Barbadian literary editor, author, poet, stage performer and painter. His nickname was ‘Barbadian Man of the Arts’. He also taught for 50 years at Combermere School, where he sought out and encouraged prospective writers in his classes, notably George Lamming. Collymore was born at Woodville Cottage, Chelsea Road, Saint Michael, Barbados (where he lived all his life). Aside from being a student at Combermere School (from 1903 until 1910), he was also one of its staff members until his retirement in 1958, up to which point he was its Deputy Headmaster. After this, he often returned to teach until 1963. On the stage, he became a member of the ‘Bridgetown Players’, which began in 1942. As an artist, he made many drawings and paintings to illustrate his own writings. He called them ‘Collybeasts’ or ‘Collycreatures’. In 1942, he began the famous Caribbean literary magazine BIM (originally published four times a year), for which he is most well-known, and was also its editor until 1975. John T. Gilmore has written of Collymore: ‘As a lover of literature, he was also a dedicated and selfless encourager of the work of others, lending books to aspiring writers from their schooldays onwards, publishing their early work in Bim, the literary magazine he edited for more than fifty issues from the 1940s to the 1970s, and helping them to find other markets, especially through the relationship he established with Henry Swanzy, producer of the influential BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices.’ Three literary awards have been named after him. |
![]() | Durrell, Gerald January 7, 1925 Gerald 'Gerry' Malcolm Durrell (7 January 1925 – 30 January 1995) was an English naturalist, zookeeper, conservationist, author and television presenter. He founded what is now called the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and the Jersey Zoo (now Durrell Wildlife Park) on the Channel Island of Jersey in 1958, but is perhaps best remembered for writing a number of books based on his life as an animal collector and enthusiast. He was the youngest brother of the novelist Lawrence Durrell. |
![]() | Eady, Cornelius January 7, 1954 Cornelius Eady (born 1954) is an American poet focusing largely on matters of race and society, particularly the trials of the African-American race in the United States. His poetry often centers around jazz and blues, family life, violence, and societal problems stemming from questions of race and class. His poetry is often praised for its simple and approachable language. |
![]() | Hurston, Zora Neale January 7, 1891 Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist whose fictional and factual accounts of black heritage remain unparalleled. Her many books include DUST TRACKS ON A ROAD; THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD; JONAH'S GOURD VINE; MOSES, MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN; MULES AND MEN; and EVERY TONGUE GOT TO CONFESS. |
![]() | Kenner, Hugh January 7, 1923 William Hugh Kenner (January 7, 1923 – November 24, 2003), was a Canadian literary scholar, critic and professor. Kenner was born in Peterborough, Ontario, on January 7, 1923. His father Dr. H.R.H. Kenner taught classics and his mother Mary (Williams) Kenner taught French and German at Peterborough Collegiate Institute. Kenner attributed his interest in literature to his poor hearing, caused by a bout of influenza during his childhood. Attending the University of Toronto, Kenner studied under Marshall McLuhan, who wrote the introduction to Kenner's first book Paradox in Chesterton, about G. K. Chesterton's works. Kenner's second book, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951) was dedicated to McLuhan, who had introduced Kenner to Pound on June 4, 1948, during Pound's incarceration at St. Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, D.C., where Kenner and McLuhan had driven as a detour from their trip from Toronto to New Haven, Connecticut. (Pound, who became a friend of Kenner's, had suggested the book be titled The Rose in the Steel Dust.) Later, Kenner said of McLuhan, ‘I had the advantage of being exposed to Marshall when he was at his most creative, and then of getting to the far end of the continent shortly afterward, when he couldn't get me on the phone all the time. He could be awfully controlling.’Later, when McLuhan wrote that the development of cartography during the Renaissance created a geographical sense that had never previously existed, Kenner sent him a postcard reading in full: ‘Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, Yours, Hugh.’’ In 1950, Kenner earned a Ph.D. from Yale University, with a dissertation on James Joyce, James Joyce: Critique in Progress, for Cleanth Brooks. This work, which won the John Addison Porter Prize at Yale, became Dublin's Joyce in 1956. His first teaching post was at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1951 to 1973); he then taught at Johns Hopkins University (from 1973 to 1990) and the University of Georgia (from 1990 to 1999). Kenner played an influential role in raising Ezra Pound's profile among critics and other readers of poetry. The publication of The Poetry of Ezra Pound in 1951 ‘was the beginning, and the catalyst, for a change in attitude toward Pound on the American literary and educational scenes.’ The Pound Era, the product of years of scholarship and considered by many to be Kenner's masterpiece, was published in 1971. This work was responsible for enshrining Pound's reputation (damaged by his wartime activities) as one of the greatest Modernists. Though best known for his work on modernist literature, Kenner's range of interests was wide. His books include an appreciation of Chuck Jones, an introduction to geodesic math, and a user's guide for the Heathkit H100/Zenith Z-100 computer; in his later years was a columnist for both Art & Antiques and Byte magazine. Kenner was also a contributor to National Review magazine and a friend of William F. Buckley, Jr. Kenner was married twice: his first wife, Mary Waite, died in 1964; the couple had three daughters and two sons. His second wife, whom he married in 1965, was Mary-Anne Bittner; they had a son and a daughter. Hugh Kenner died at his home in Athens, Georgia on November 24, 2003. |
![]() | Mazza, Cris January 7, 1956 Cris Mazza is also the author of Something Wrong With Her, a hybrid memoir published by Jaded Ibis Press in 2014, a companion piece to Various Men Who Knew Us As Girls. She has authored over a dozen other books, mostly novels and collections of short fiction. Mazza now lives in the Midwest and is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois Chicago. |
![]() | Moffett, Mark W. January 7, 1958 Mark Moffett (born 7 January 1958) …has developed a career that combines science and photography, in spite of being a high school dropout. Although his family was not academic, encouraged by his parents he sought out biologists by the age of 12. He continues to travel to conduct research on ecology and behavior, photograph and write for National Geographic and other magazines, author books, and lecture and appear on television as an ecologist-storyteller. He has been compared to Jacques Cousteau and Jane Goodall, and National Geographic has called him the Indiana Jones of Entomology" |
![]() | Posse, Abel January 7, 1934 Abel Parentini Posse, born Córdoba, Argentina, on 7 January 1934, is an Argentine diplomat and writer. He was designated at a diplomatic mission in Venice by Alejandro Agustín Lanusse in 1973 and hold similar offices during the following Argentine governments, both military and civilian. He was briefly considered as a possible foreign minister of Néstor Kirchner by the beginning of his mandate in 2003, but the role was finally designated to Rafael Bielsa. Posse's 1983 work Los perros del paraíso won the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos Prize. |
![]() | Addams, Charles Samuel January 7, 1912 Charles Samuel Addams (January 7, 1912, Westfield, NJ - September 29, 1988, New York City, NY) was an American cartoonist known for his darkly humorous and macabre characters. He signed his cartoons Chas Addams. Some of the recurring characters, who became known as the Addams Family, have been the basis for spin-offs in several other forms of media. |
![]() | Kwakye, Benjamin January 7, 1967 Benjamin Kwakye (born 7 January 1967) is a Ghanaian novelist. His first novel, The Clothes of Nakedness, won the 1999 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, best first book, Africa. His novel The Sun by Night won the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Best Book Africa. His novel The Other Crucifix won the 2011 IPPY award. Kwakye was born in Accra, Ghana. He graduated from Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School. He practises law around Chicago, and is a director of the African Education Initiative. |
![]() | Sciascia, Leonardo January 8, 1921 Leonardo Sciascia (January 8, 1921 – November 20, 1989) was an Italian writer, novelist, essayist, playwright and politician. Some of his works have been made into films, including Open Doors (1990) and Il giorno della civetta (1968). Sciascia was born in Racalmuto, Sicily. In 1935 his family moved to Caltanissetta; here Sciascia studied under Vitaliano Brancati, who would become his model in writing and introduce him to French novelists. From Giuseppe Granata, future Communist member of the Italian Senate, he learned about the French Enlightenment and American literature. In 1944 he married Maria Andronico, an elementary school teacher in Racalmuto. In 1948 his brother committed suicide, an event which had a profound impact on Sciascia. Sciascia's first work, Favole della dittatura (Fables of the Dictatorship), a satire on fascism, was published in 1950 and included 27 short poems. This was followed in 1952 by La Sicilia, il suo cuore, also a poetry collection, illustrated by Emilio Greco. The following year Sciascia won the Premio Pirandello, awarded by the Sicily region, for his essay 'Pirandello e il pirandellismo.' In 1954 he began collaborating with literature and ethnology magazines published by Salvatore Sciascia in Caltanissetta. In 1956 he published Le parrocchie di Regalpetra, an autobiographic novel inspired by his experience as an elementary school teacher in his home town. In the same year he moved to teach in Caltanissetta, only to move again to Rome in 1957. In the autumn of that year he published Gli zii di Sicilia, including sharp views about themes such as the influence of the US and of communism in the world, and the 19th century unification of Italy. After one year in Rome, Sciascia moved back to Caltanissetta, in Sicily. In 1961 he published the mystery Il giorno della civetta (The Day of the Owl), one of his most famous novels, and in 1963, the historical novel Il consiglio d'Egitto (The Council of Egypt), set in 18th-century Palermo. After a series of essays, in 1965 he wrote the play L'onorevole (The Honorable), a denunciation of the complicities between government and mafia. Another political mystery novel is 1966's A ciascuno il suo (To Each His Own). The following year Sciascia moved to Palermo. In 1969 he began a collaboration with Il Corriere della Sera. That same year he published the play Recitazione della controversia liparitana dedicata ad A.D., dedicated to Alexander Dubcek. In 1971 Sciascia returned again to mystery with Il contesto (The Challenge), which inspired Francesco Rosi's movie Cadaveri eccellenti (1976). The novel created polemics due to its merciless portrait of Italian politics. Same was the fate of Todo modo, in this case due to its description of Italian Catholic clergy. At the 1975 communal elections in Palermo, Sciascia ran as an independent within the Italian Communist Party (PCI) slate, and was elected to the city council. In the same year he published La scomparsa di Majorana, dealing with the mysterious disappearance of scientist Ettore Majorana. In 1977 he resigned from PCI, due to his opposition to any dealing with the Christian Democratic party. Later he would be elected to the Italian and European Parliament with the Radical Party. Sciascia last works include the essay collection Cronachette (1985), the novels Porte aperte (1987) and Il cavaliere e la morte (1988). He died in June 1989 at Palermo. A number of his books, such as The Day of the Owl (Il giorno della civetta) and Equal Danger (Il contesto), demonstrate how the Mafia manages to sustain itself in the face of the anomie inherent in Sicilian life. He presented a forensic analysis of the kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro, a prominent Christian Democrat, in his book The Moro Affair. Sciascia's work is intricate and displays a longing for justice while attempting to show how corrupt Italian society had become and remains. His linking of politicians, intrigue, and the Mafia gave him a high profile, which was very much at odds with his private self. This high profile resulted in his becoming widely disliked for his criticism of Giulio Andreotti, then Prime Minister, for his lack of action towards freeing Moro and answering the demands of the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades). Sciascia was part of a House of Deputies investigation into Moro's kidnapping, which concluded that there was a certain amount of negligence on the part of the Christian Democrat Party in their stance that the state was bigger than a person and that they would not swap Moro for 13 political prisoners, even though Moro himself had stated that the swapping of innocent people for political prisoners was a valid option in negotiations with terrorists. However, senior members of the party conveniently forgot this stance and even went as far as to say that Moro had been drugged and tortured to utter these words. Sciascia's books are rarely characterized by a happy end and by justice for the ordinary man. Prime examples of this are Equal Danger, in which the police's best detective is drafted to Sicily to investigate a spate of murders of judges. Focusing on the inability of authorities to handle such investigation into the corruptions, Sciascia's hero is finally thwarted. Sciascia wrote of his unique Sicilian experience, linking families with political parties, the treachery of alliances and allegiances and the calling of favors that result in outcomes that are not for the benefit of society, but of those individuals who are in favor. His 1984 opus Occhio di Capra is a collection of Sicilian sayings and proverbs gathered from the area around his native village, to which he was intensely attached throughout his life. |
![]() | Collins, Wilkie January 8, 1824 William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 – 23 September 1889) was an English novelist, playwright, and author of short stories. His best-known works are The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Armadale, and No Name. Collins was born into the family of painter William Collins in London. He received his early education at home from his mother. He then attended an academy and a private boarding school. He also traveled with his family to Italy and France, and learned the French and Italian languages. He served as a clerk in the firm of the tea merchants Antrobus & Co. His first novel Iolani, or Tahiti as It Was; a Romance, was rejected by publishers in 1845. His next novel, Antonina, was published in 1850. In 1851 he met Charles Dickens, and the two became close friends. A number of Collins's works were first published in Dickens's journals All the Year Round and Household Words. The two collaborated on several dramatic and fictional works, and some of Collins's plays were performed by Dickens's acting company. Collins published his best known works in the 1860s, achieving financial stability and an international reputation. During this time he began suffering from gout, and developed an addiction to opium, which he took (in the form of laudanum) for pain. He continued to publish novels and other works throughout the 1870s and 80s, but the quality of his writing declined along with his health. He died in 1889. |
![]() | Colter, Cyrus January 8, 1910 The distinguished African-American writer and educator Cyrus Colter was born in Noblesville, Indiana, on January 8, 1910. A recipient of the prestigious University of Iowa School of Letters first prize award for short fiction, Colter published many short stories and poems, as well as six novels, throughout his career. Colter worked for the Illinois Commerce Commission before resigning to take a faculty position at Northwestern in the Department of African-American Studies. He remained at Northwestern until his retirement in 1978. Colter died in 2002. Colter was one of two children born to James Alexander Colter and Ethel Marietta Basset Colter. His father's various jobs included insurance salesman, actor, musician and regional director of the Central Indiana division of the NAACP, which took the family from Noblesville to Greensboro, Indiana, and later to Youngstown, Ohio. Cyrus Colter graduated from Rayen Academy in Youngstown and pursued his undergraduate degree at Youngstown University (Ohio) and Ohio State. In 1940 he earned a degree from the Chicago-Kent College of Law. On January 1, 1943, he married Imogene Mackay, a teacher, who served as his supporter and critic until her death in 1984. Colter's early life was marked by his legal and military pursuits. After a brief stint as an agent for the Internal Revenue Agency, Colter served in World War II as a field artillery captain and saw combat in Europe in the Fifth Army under General Mark Clark. In 1946, he returned to civilian life and the practice of law in Chicago. Four years later, Governor Adlai Stevenson appointed him to the Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC), where his twenty-three year tenure was the longest in that agency's history. In 1960, at the age of fifty, Colter reassessed his life's work and began an accelerated reading program that focused on Russian literature. Colter became more and more impressed with the range of characters depicted by Tolstoy, Dostoevski, and Chekhov, and he recognized the deficiency of African-American literature in this regard. When his wife challenged him to address this problem in fiction, Colter began to write. Colter's first short story, A Chance Meeting, was published in 1960 in Threshold, a little magazine out of Belfast, Ireland. Ten years later, a collection of his short stories, The Beach Umbrella (1970), won the prestigious University of Iowa School of Letters first prize award for short fiction (chosen by Kurt Vonnegut). In the years that followed, he published countless short stories and poems, and six novels: The Rivers of Eros (1972), The Hippodrome (1973), Night Studies (1979), A Chocolate Soldier (1988), The Amoralists and Other Tales (1988) and City of Light (1993). Now widely read, his works have been translated into German, Italian, Hungarian, Danish, French, and Japanese. Colter resigned from the ICC in 1973 in order to accept a professorship of creative writing in Northwestern's Department of African-American Studies, then two years old. A year later Colter was named as the first Chester D. Tripp Professor of the Humanities, a post he held until his retirement in 1978. Colter died on April 17, 2002. Throughout his lifetime, Colter received countless accolades, including an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Illinois (Chicago). One of the highest honors was bestowed in 1990 when Colter's was one of the names engraved on the frieze of the new Illinois State Public Library alongside such Illinois literary figures as Upton Sinclair, Carl Sandburg, Studs Turkel and Gwendolyn Brooks. |
![]() | Forrest, Leon January 8, 1937 Leon Forrest was born in Chicago in 1937 and is considered one of the most important African American writers of his generation. He taught English and African American studies at Northwestern University until his death in 1997. His novels include There Is a Tree More Ancient than Eden (Random House, 1973), The Bloodworth Orphans (Random House, 1977), Divine Days (Another Chicago Press, 1992), and Two Wings to Veil My Face (Asphodel, 1997). |
![]() | Littell, Robert January 8, 1935 Robert Littell (born January 8, 1935) is an American novelist and journalist who resides in France. He specializes in spy novels that often concern the CIA and the Soviet Union. Littell was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family, of Russian Jewish origin. He is a 1956 graduate of Alfred University in western New York. He spent four years in the U.S. Navy and served at times as his ship's navigator, antisubmarine warfare officer, communications officer, and deck watch officer. Later Littell became a journalist and worked many years for Newsweek during the Cold War. He was a foreign correspondent for the magazine from 1965 to 1970. Littell is an amateur mountain climber and is the father of award-winning novelist Jonathan Littell. |
![]() | Marse, Juan January 8, 1933 Juan Marsé (born January 8, 1933 in Barcelona as Juan Faneca Roca) is a Spanish novelist, journalist and screenwriter. In 2008 he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, 'the Spanish-language equivalent' to the Nobel Prize in Literature. His mother died in childbirth, and he was soon adopted by the Marsé family. At age 14 he started to publish some of his writings in Insula magazine and in a cinema magazine while working as an apprentice jeweller. One of his stories won the Sésamo Prize, and in 1958 he published his first novel, Encerrados con un solo juguete (Locked up with a Single Toy), which was a finalist of the Biblioteca Breve Seix Barral Prize. Afterwards, he spent two years in Paris working as 'garçon de laboratoire' at the Pasteur Institute and translating screenplays and teaching Spanish. Back in Spain he wrote Esta cara de la luna (This Side of the Moon), repudiated and never included in his complete works. In 1965 he won the Biblioteca Breve Prize with Últimas tardes con Teresa (Last Evenings with Teresa). He married Joaquina Hoyas and began working in advertising and writing dialogues for films. He wrote La oscura historia de la prima Montse (The Dark Story of Cousin Montse), which was not very successful, and Si te dicen que caí (If They Tell You I Fell), which was published in Mexico due to Francoist censorship and won the Novel International Prize. In 1974, he started a column in the magazine Por Favor while continuing writing for the film industry. His novel La muchacha de las bragas de oro (Girl with Golden Panties) won the Planeta Prize in 1978, which made him known to the general public. He wrote two novels about post-war Barcelona, Un día volveré (One Day I'll Come Back) and Ronda del Guinardó, followed by the collection of short stories, Teniente Bravo. In the 1990s, he received numerous prizes, including Ateneo de Sevilla Prize for El amante bilingüe (The Bilingual Lover) and the Critic Prize and Aristeion Prize for El embrujo de Shanghai (The Shanghai Spell). In 1997 he was awarded the Juan Rulfo Prize for Latin American and Caribbean Literature. After seven years of silence he published Rabos de Lagartija (Lizards' Tails), which won the Critic Prize and Narrative National Prize. Marsé was the winner of the 2008 Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious award for Spanish-language literature. On 6 March 2014 MacLehose Press will publish The Calligraphy of Dreams. |
![]() | Muste, A. J. January 8, 1885 Abraham Johannes Muste (January 8, 1885 - February 11, 1967) was a socialist active in the pacifist movement, labor movement and the US civil rights movement. He was born in Zierikzee, the Netherlands, and became a naturalized United States citizen in 1896. He attended Hope College, where he was class valedictorian and captain of the basketball team, continuing a tradition of leadership and excellence in his beloved Fraternal Society (OKE). He earned a Bachelor’s degree (A. B.) in 1905 and a Master’s degree (M. A.) in 1909 from the Theological Seminary of the Dutch Reformed Church (now the New Brunswick Theological Seminary). He earned a doctorate (B. D.) from Union Theological Seminary in 1913. He also attended New York University, and Columbia University. Muste was the author of Non-violence in an Aggressive World (1940). Muste taught Latin and Greek at Northwestern Classical Academy (now Northwestern College (of Iowa)) from 1905 to 1906. He was ordained a minister of the Reformed Church in America in 1909. In 1917, he resigned his ministry when his pacifism led to conflicts with his parishioners. Muste volunteered for the American Civil Liberties Union and was enrolled as a minister of the Religious Society of Friends in 1918. Active in labor affairs from 1919, he was general secretary of the Amalgamated Textile Workers of America from 1920 to 1921. He also taught at Brookwood Labor College from 1921 to 1933. From 1940 to 1953, he was the executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, during which time he became an advisor to Martin Luther King Jr. After leaving Brookwood Labor College, he founded a socialist movement which, through a fusion with the Trotskyist organisation, became the Workers’ Party of the United States. Later he renounced Marxism and again became a Christian pacifist; throughout his life he remained an active participant in the activities of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. He supported the presidential candidacies of Eugene V. Debs and Robert M. La Follette, Sr., and also had close friendships with John Dewey and Norman Thomas. In 1957, Muste headed a delegation of pacifist and democratic observers to the 16th National Convention of the Communist Party. He was also on the national committee of the War Resisters League (WRL) and received their Peace Award in 1958. Always a creative activist, he led public opposition with Dorothy Day to civil defense activities in New York city during the 1950s and 1960s. At the end of his life, Muste took a leadership role in the movement against the Vietnam War. In 1966, he traveled, with members of the Committee for Non-Violent Action, to Saigon and Hanoi. He was arrested and deported from South Vietnam, but received a warm welcome in North Vietnam from Ho Chi Minh. |
![]() | Nicholson, Stuart January 8, 1948 Stuart Nicholson is a celebrated jazz writer. He is the author of several award-winning books, including a biography of Billie Holiday and a history of Jazz-Rock. He has contributed to major newspapers, from the New York Times to the Manchester Guarding, and major jazz publications including Downbeat 0 and Jazz Times . He lives in Woodlands St.-Mary, Berkshire, England. |
![]() | Rojas, Manuel January 8, 1896 Manuel Rojas Sepúlveda (January 8, 1896 – March 11, 1973) was a Chilean writer and journalist. Rojas was born in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, the son of Chilean parents. In 1899 his family returned to Santiago, but in 1903, after the father's death, the mother returned to Buenos Aires again, where he attended school until the age of eleven. In 1912, at the age of sixteen, he decided to return alone to Chile. Once he arrived to the country, he got involved with intellectuals and anarchist groups, while working in many different activities as an unskilled labourer: as house painter, electrician, agricultural worker, railroad handyman, loading ships, tailor's apprentice, cobbler, ship guard, and actor in small-time itinerant groups. Many of the situations and characters he encountered there later became part of his fictional world. He returned to Argentina in 1921 publishing his first poems there. Back in Chile, he worked intensely in his narrative production and at the same time he worked in the National Library and at the Universidad de Chile press. He married María Baeza and had three children. He joined the Los Tiempos and the Las Ultimas Noticias newspapers as a linotype operator first and ultimately worked on Santiago newspapers as a journalist, all the while also working at the Hipódromo Chile (Santiago racetrack). After the death of his wife, he married again and started to travel. He received the Chilean National Prize for Literature in 1957. He toured Europe, South America and the Middle East. He became a university professor of Chilean and American Literature in the US and at the Universidad de Chile. His works have as a central theme the representation of the instability, misery and marginality of the members of the working class. The development of the psychological and existential complexities of his characters established a difference between his work and prior literary movements (criollismo, mundonovismo), that were characterized by a less complex view of individuality. He died in Santiago on March 11, 1973. |
![]() | Yarbrough, Camille January 8, 1938 As an extension of her creative and activist self, Yarbrough turned to writing in the 1970’s. Her published works have appeared in The New York Times, The Black Collegian Magazine, and The Journal of African Civilization. In 1979 her first book, Cornrows, was published by Paperstar/Putnam Grosset. Later, three more books followed: The Shimmershine Queens, The Little Tree Growing in the Shade, and Tamika and the Wisdom Rings. Yarbrough is presently working on a new family book, scheduled for release in 2010. Quite naturally, Nana Camille Yarbrough is an educator. Her passion to teach is evidenced in her serving as a faculty member in the Black Studies Department at City College of New York (CUNY) for twelve years. She taught dance there. She also taught the Katherine Dunham technique at Southern Illinois University. Over the years and to this day, she has lectured at countless colleges, universities, conferences, festivals, and community events across the country, ranging from Howard University to the University of Wisconsin; from the Brooklyn Museum to the National Action Network, and many others. In 1994, Yarbrough was enthroned by ABLADEI, Inc. (Ghanian), GA as Naa Kuokor Agyman I Queen Mother to the late Dr. John Henrik Clarke. She is also founder of the Throne House of Harriet Tubman. In 2004, she was again enthroned in the village of Agogo-Asanti, Ghana as Nana Tabuoa Tonko II. Such an honor is reserved for very few people. |
![]() | Tomlinson, Charles (editor) January 8, 1927 Poet, artist, and translator Charles Tomlinson (January 8, 1927, Penkhull, Stoke-on-Trent, United Kingdom - August 22, 2015, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom) was born in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire in 1927. Fluent in German, French, and Italian, he read English at Queen’s College Cambridge, studying with poet Donald Davie, who was an early influence and later became a close friend. Tomlinson taught elementary school before joining the University of Bristol, where he taught for 36 years. His collections of poetry include Relations and Contraries (1951), American Scenes and Other Poems (1966), To Be Engraved on the Skull of a Cormorant (1968), The Shaft (1978), Jubilation (1995), Skywriting and Other Poems (2003), for which he won the New Criterion Poetry Prize, and New Collected Poems (2009). Tomlinson’s work is known for its attention to both visual and aural perception, its painterly effects, and its cosmopolitan, even urbane, style and subject matter. Though he wrote of the natural world, especially in his early work, his philosophical bent and interest in other places and cultures—as well as his highly regarded work as a translator—made him somewhat of an outsider in British poetry. According to the critic Michael Hennessy, Tomlinson is the most international and least provincial English poet of his generation. At a time when most of his contemporaries were drawing inward, nursing and grooming their ‘Englishness,’ Tomlinson was traveling, engaging with the world, and enriching his work through the agency of American, European, and even Japanese poetic traditions. Tomlinson was a champion of America and American poetry. He held visiting positions at the University of New Mexico and Princeton University; his collection A Peopled Landscape (1963) was influenced by the landscape of the American Southwest, while Notes from New York, and Other Poems (1984) was prompted by a visit to New York. Essay collections such as Some Americans (1981) and American Essays (2001) also treated his long-standing relationship with American culture and poetry. In an interview with the Paris Review he remarked that his sense of America cohered out of many fragments, among them that tiny reproduction of a Georgia O'Keeffe, utterly unknown here at the time. I came to America at a period when the New York School had shifted attention from Paris to that city. For me, it was one of those periods of rapid assimilation—Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, particularly Gorky. Tomlinson was influenced by American poets quite early in his career and admitted an affinity for American modernists such as William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, George Oppen, and Louis Zukofsky. Critical Quarterly writer Alan Young compared the American modernist poets’ project to Tomlinson’s own ‘basic theme’, in Tomlinson’s words: ‘that one does not need to go beyond sense experience to some mythic union, that the I can only be responsible in relationship and not by dissolving itself away into ecstasy or the Oversoul.’ And Jonathan Barker, also quoting Tomlinson in the Times Literary Supplement, pointed out that Tomlinson rejects symbolic poetry as representing ‘a view of life too subjective to allow accurate contemplation of the outside world.’ Tomlinson is also known as a translator, and translated work by César Vallejo, Attilio Bertolucci, Antonio Machado, and Octavio Paz, with whom he wrote the collection Airborn/Hijos del aire (1981), a bilingual edition of a single poem which each poet translated into the language of the other. In his Paris Review interview, Tomlinson noted of his work with Paz on Airborn: I simultaneously came to realize just how many of our poets, going back to Chaucer, had been great translators, all the time extending the possibilities of English by introducing new forms and new ideas for poetry. So I went ahead and edited The Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation (1980). Tomlinson’s work as an editor—he has also edited Marianne Moore: A Collection of Critical Essays (1969) and William Carlos Williams’ Selected Poems (1976)—and translator have secured his place as one of Britain’s most important and diverse talents. In learning his craft from numerous poets of varied backgrounds, Tomlinson has found a style all his own; critics such as Cal Bedient considered him to be unmistakably an original poet. Bedient continued in British Poetry since 1960: There is in him, it is true, a measure of Wordsworth ... [but] Wordsworth discovers himself in nature—it is this, of course, that makes him a Romantic poet. Tomlinson, on the other hand, discovers the nature of nature: a classical artist, he is all taut, responsive detachment. Ultimately, it is difficult to categorize Tomlinson as either distinctly British or American. To my mind, the poet Ed Hirsch has said, Tomlinson is one of the most astute, disciplined, and lucent poets of his generation. He is one of the few English poets to have extended the inheritance of modernism and I suspect that his quiet, meditative voice will reverberate on both sides of the Atlantic for a long time to come. Charles Tomlinson became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998. He received numerous awards and honors for his work, including the Italian Premio Internationale Flaiano per la Poesia and the Bennett Award from the Hudson Review. He was made a CBE in 2001 and received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Gloucestershire in 2008. He died in 2015. |
![]() | Capek, Karel January 9, 1890 Karel Capek (January 9, 1890 - December 25, 1938) was one of the most influential Czech writers of the 20th century. Capek was born in Malé Svatonovice, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic). He wrote with intelligence and humour on a wide variety of subjects. His works are known for their interesting and precise descriptions of reality, and Capek is renowned for his excellent work with the Czech language. He is perhaps best known as a science fiction author, who wrote before science fiction became widely recognized as a separate genre. He can be considered one of the founders of classical, non-hardcore European science fiction, a type which focuses on possible future (or alternative) social and human evolution on Earth, rather than technically advanced stories of space travel. However, it is best to classify him with Aldous Huxley and George Orwell as a speculative fiction writer, distinguishing his work from genre-specific hard science fiction. Many of his works discuss ethical and other aspects of revolutionary inventions and processes that were already anticipated in the first half of 20th century. These include mass production, atomic weapons, and post-human intelligent beings such as robots or intelligent salamanders. In addressing these themes, Capek was also expressing fear of impending social disasters, dictatorship, violence, and the unlimited power of corporations, as well as trying to find some hope for human beings. |
![]() | Carlon, Patricia January 9, 1927 Patricia Carlon (9 January 1927 – 29 July 2002) was an Australian crime fiction writer whose most notable works are fourteen suspenseful novels published between 1961 and 1970. She sometimes used the pseudonyms Patricia Bernard and Barbara Christie. She was rediscovered in the 1990s, after The Whispering Wall (1969) and The Souvenir (1970) were republished as part of a series of Australian Classic Crime. These and other novels have subsequently been reissued in the United States and Australia. Carlon lived almost all her life with, or next door to, her parents, in Wagga Wagga and the Sydney suburbs of Homebush and Bexley. Her income source from her late teens onwards was writing articles and short stories for magazines as well as her novels. She refused all interviews. After her death it became known that she had been profoundly deaf since the age of 11: something even her publishers had been unaware of, as she always communicated with them by letter. Her deafness has since been related to themes and plots in her novels, in which people in possession of the truth about a crime are often isolated and in peril, either through being physically trapped, or because they are unable make others believe them. |
![]() | De Beauvoir, Simone January 9, 1908 Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, often shortened to Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908 – April 14, 1986), was a French existentialist philosopher, public intellectual, and social theorist. She wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography in several volumes, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues. She is now best known for her metaphysical novels, including SHE CAME TO STAY and THE MANDARINS, and for her 1949 treatise THE SECOND SEX, a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism. She is also noted for her lifelong polyamorous relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre. |
![]() | Dunning, John January 9, 1942 John Dunning (born January 9, 1942) is an American writer of non-fiction and detective fiction. He is known for his reference books on old-time radio and his series of mysteries featuring Denver bookseller and ex-policeman Cliff Janeway. |
![]() | Jamba, Sousa January 9, 1966 Sousa Jamba (born 9 January 1966) is an Angolan author and journalist. Sousa Jamba was born in 1966 in Dondi, Huambo, in central Angola. His family were all supporters of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), which fought alongside the MPLA in the Angolan War for Independence (1961–75) and then against the MPLA in the ensuing civil war (1975–2002). In 1975, nine-year-old Jamba with his family left the country, fleeing the violence following Angola's independence, and went to Zambia, where he lived as a refugee, before going to England. Jamba has said: "There was a sense that if you were from Unita you either had to leave the country or go out into the bush, which is precisely what my family did." In 1985 Jamba returned to Angola, and worked as a reporter and translator for the UNITA News Agency. In 1986, he went to study in Britain on a journalism scholarship, and soon began writing for The Spectator. From 1988 to 1991 he studied for a BA degree in Media Studies at Westminster University, London. He also has a master's degree in Leadership and Strategic Communications from Seton Hall University in New Jersey. He returned to his home country after 27 years of exile. Jamba's books include Patriots (1992), an autobiographical novel that received much critical acclaim. Andrew McKie of The Telegraph writes of it: "Sousa Jamba's brilliant and terrifying (and often very funny) novel Patriots gives an account of a child's view of the war in Angola." Jamba's second novel, A Lonely Devil, was published in 1993. He has written widely for newspapers and journals, among them Granta, The Spectator and the New Statesman. He writes a weekly column for the Angolan newspaper Semanario Angolense. He also writes a column on leadership for the business magazine Exame. He currently lives in Jacksonville, Florida, USA. |
![]() | Marais, Eugene January 9, 1871 Eugène Nielen Marais (9 January 1871 – 29 March 1936) was a South African lawyer, naturalist, poet and writer. He has been hailed as an intellectual genius and an Afrikaner hero. Marais was born in Pretoria, the thirteenth and last child of Jan Christiaan Nielen Marais and Catharina Helena Cornelia van Niekerk. He attended school in Pretoria, Boshof and Paarl, and much of his early education was in English, as were his earliest poems. He matriculated at the age of sixteen. After leaving school, he worked in Pretoria as a legal clerk and then as a journalist before becoming owner (at the age of twenty) of a newspaper called Land en Volk (Country and (the Afrikaner) People). He involved himself deeply in local politics. He began taking opiates at an early age and graduated to morphine (then considered to be non-habit forming and safe) very soon thereafter. He became addicted, and his addiction ruled his affairs and actions to a greater or lesser extent throughout his life. When asked why he took drugs, he variously pleaded ill health, insomnia and, later, the death of his young wife as a result of the birth of his only child. Much later, he blamed accidental addiction while ill with malaria in Mozambique. Some claim his use of drugs was experimental and influenced by the philosophy of de Quincey. Marais married Aletta Beyers, but she died from puerperal fever a year later, eight days after the birth of their son. Eugène Charles Gerard was Marais' only child. In 1897 — still in his mid-twenties – Marais went to London to read medicine. However, under pressure from his friends, he entered the Inner Temple to study law. He qualified as an advocate. When the Boer War broke out in 1899, he was put on parole as an enemy alien in London. During the latter part of the war he joined a German expedition that sought to ship ammunition and medicines to the Boer Commandos via Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique). However, he was struck down in this tropical area by malaria and, before the supplies could be delivered to the Boers, the war ended. From 1905 Marais studied nature in the Waterberg ('Water mountain'), a wilderness area north of Pretoria, and wrote in his native Afrikaans about the animals he observed. His studies of termites led him to conclude that the colony ought to be considered as a single organism, a prescient insight that predated the elaboration of the idea by Richard Dawkins. In the Waterberg, Marais also studied the black mamba, spitting cobra and puff adder. Moreover, he observed a specific troop of baboons at length , and from these studies there sprang numerous magazine articles and the books My Friends the Baboons and The Soul of the Ape. He is acknowledged as the father of the scientific study of the behaviour of animals, known as Ethology. As the leader of the Second Afrikaans Language Movement, Marais preferred to write in Afrikaans, and his work was translated into various languages either late in his life or after his death. His book Die Siel van die Mier (The Soul of the Ant, but usually given in English as the Soul of the White Ant) was plagiarised by Nobel laureate Maurice Maeterlinck, who published La Vie des Termites (translated into English as The Life of Termites or The Life of White Ants), an entomological book, in what has been called "a classic example of academic plagiarism" by University of London's professor of biology, David Bignell. Marais accused Maeterlinck of having used his concept of the "organic unity" of the termitary in his book. Marais had published his ideas on the termitary in the South African Afrikaans-language press, both in Die Burger in January 1923 and in Huisgenoot, which featured a series of articles on termites under the title "Die Siel van die Mier" (The Soul of the (White) Ant) from 1925 to 1926. Maeterlinck's book, with almost identical content, was published in 1926. It is alleged that Maeterlinck had come across Eugene Marais' series of articles, and that it would have been easy for Maeterlinck to translate from Afrikaans to French, since Maeterlinck knew Dutch and had already made several translations from Dutch into French before. It was common at the time for worthy articles published in Afrikaans to be reproduced in Flemish and Dutch magazines and journals. Supported by a coterie of Afrikaner Nationalist friends, Marais sought justice through the South African press and attempted an international lawsuit. This was to prove financially impossible and the case was not pursued. However, Marais gained a measure of renown as the aggrieved party and as an Afrikaner researcher who had opened himself up to plagiarism because he published in Afrikaans out of nationalistic loyalty. Marais brooded at the time of the scandal: "I wonder whether Maeterlinck blushes when he reads such things [critical acclaim], and whether he gives a thought to the injustice he does to the unknown Boer worker?" Despite these misgivings, there is no reference to Eugène Marais in the bibliography. Maeterlinck's other works on entomology include The Life of the Ant (1930). Professor VE d'Assonville wrote about Maeterlinck as "the Nobel Prize winner who had never seen a termite in his whole life and had never put a foot on the soil of Africa, least of all in the Waterberg.". Robert Ardrey, an admirer of Eugène Marais's, attributed Marais' later suicide to this act of plagiarism and theft of intellectual property by Maeterlinck. Ardrey said in his introduction to The Soul of the Ape, published in 1969, that 'As a scientist he was unique, supreme in his time, yet a worker in a science unborn.' He also refers to Marais' work at length in his book African Genesis. There is evidence that Marais' time and research in the Waterberg brought him great peace and joy and provided him with artistic inspiration. In the poem Waar Tebes in die stil woestyn, he writes (as translated into English by J. W. Marchant) 'There would I know peace once more, where Tebes in the quiet desert lifts it mighty rockwork on high ...'. (Tebus is one of the principal peaks of the area). That said, Marais was a long-term morphine addict and suffered from melancholy, insomnia, depression and feelings of isolation. In 1936, deprived of morphine for some days, he borrowed a shotgun on the pretext of killing a snake and shot himself in the chest. The wound was not fatal, and Marais therefore put the gun barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He did so on the farm Pelindaba, belonging to his friend Gustav Preller. For those who are familiar with the dark moods of certain of Marais' poems, there is a black irony here; in Zulu, Pelindaba means 'the end of the business' – although the more common interpretation is 'Place of great gatherings' Marais and his wife Aletta are buried in the Heroes' Acre, Pretoria. Marais' work as a naturalist, although by no means trivial (he was one of the first scientists to practise ethology and was repeatedly acknowledged as such by Robert Ardrey and others), gained less public attention and appreciation than his contributions as a literalist. He discovered the Waterberg Cycad, which was named after him (Encephalartos eugene-maraisii). He was the first person to study the behaviour of wild primates, and his observations continue to be cited in contemporary evolutionary biology. He is among the greatest of the Afrikaner poets and remains one of the most popular, although his output was not large. Opperman described him as the first professional Afrikaner poet; Marais believed that craft was as important as inspiration for poetry. Along with J.H.H. de Waal and G.S. Preller, he was a leading light in the Second Afrikaans Language Movement in the period immediately after the Second Boer War, which ended in 1902. Some of his finest poems deal with the wonders of life and nature, but he also wrote about inexorable death. Marais was isolated in some of his beliefs. He was a self-confessed pantheist and claimed that the only time he entered a church was for weddings. An assessment of Marais' status as an Afrikaner hero was published by historian Sandra Swart. Although an Afrikaner patriot, Marais was sympathetic to the cultural values of the black tribal peoples of the Transvaal. |
![]() | Prados, John January 9, 1951 John Prados received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He is the author of The Soviet Estimate: U.S. intelligence and Russian Military Strength and The Sky Would Fall: Operation Vulture: The U.S. Bombing Mission in Indochina, 1954. The creator of many simulation games, he lives in Washington, D. C. |
![]() | Putnam, Robert D. January 9, 1941 Robert D. Putnam is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University and founder of the Saguaro Seminar, a program dedicated to fostering civic engagement in America. He is the author or coauthor of ten previous books and is former dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. |
![]() | Tucholsky, Kurt January 9, 1890 Kurt Tucholsky (January 9, 1890 – December 21, 1935) was a German-Jewish journalist, satirist and writer. He also wrote under the pseudonyms Kaspar Hauser, Peter Panter, Theobald Tiger and Ignaz Wrobel. Born in Berlin-Moabit, he moved to Paris in 1924 and then to Sweden in 1930. Tucholsky was one of the most important journalists of the Weimar Republic. As a politically engaged journalist and temporary co-editor of the weekly magazine Die Weltbühne he proved himself to be a social critic in the tradition of Heinrich Heine. He was simultaneously a satirist, an author of satirical political revues, a songwriter and a poet. He saw himself as a left-wing democrat and pacifist and warned against anti-democratic tendencies – above all in politics, the military and justice – and the threat of National Socialism. His fears were confirmed when the Nazis came to power in 1933: his books were listed on the Nazi's censorship as 'Entartete Kunst' ('Degenerate Art') and burned, and he lost his German citizenship. |
![]() | Øyehaug, Gunnhild January 9, 1975 Gunnhild Øyehaug is an award-winning Norwegian poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her story collection Knots was published by FSG in 2017, and Wait, Blink has been made into the acclaimed film Women in Oversized Men’s Shirts.She has also worked as a coeditor of the literary journals Vagant and Kraftsentrum. Øyehaug lives in Bergen, where she teaches creative writing. Kari Dickson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and grew up bilingual. She has a BA in Scandinavian studies and an MA in translation. Before becoming a translator, she worked in theater in London and Oslo. She teaches in the Scandinavian department at the University of Edinburgh. |
![]() | Americo De Almeida, Jose January 10, 1887 JOSE AMERICO DE ALMEIDA was born in 1887 and now lives in retirement in Joao Pessoa. His long life has been devoted almost entirely to public service and literature. His first novel A Bagacei’ra (Trash, 1928) enjoyed enormous success, but he continued his political career, supporting Getulio Vargas in the 1930 revolution in Brazil and subsequently holding such offices as Minister of Public Works and Ambassador to the Vatican. In 1937 he was a candidate for the Presidency of Brazil. He has served as senator and governor of the state of Paraiba. In 1966 he was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters. In addition to A Bagaceira José Américo has written two other novels, 0 Boquirao (1935) and Coiieiras (1936), and various volumes of memoirs, the most recent of which was published in 1976. |
![]() | Magrelli, Valerio January 10, 1957 Valerio Magrelli (born January 10, 1957 in Rome) is an Italian poet. He has published critical works on Dadaism and Paul Valéry, as well as notable translations of Mallarmé, Verlaine, and Valéry. He is currently working on a study of Baudelaire. |
![]() | Dadie, Bernard January 10, 1916 Bernard Binlin Dadié (or sometimes Bernard Dadie) (born 1916 near Abidjan) is a prolific Ivorian novelist, playwright, poet, and ex-administrator. Among many other senior positions, starting in 1957, he held the post of Minister of Culture in the government of Côte d'Ivoire from 1977 to 1986. Dadié was born in Assinie, Côte d'Ivoire, and attended the local Catholic school in Grand Bassam and then the Ecole William Ponty. He worked for the French government in Dakar, Senegal, but on returning to his homeland in 1947 became part of its movement for independence. Before Côte d'Ivoire's independence in 1960, he was detained for sixteen months for taking part in demonstrations that opposed the French colonial government. In his writing, influenced by his experiences of colonialism as a child, Dadié attempts to connect the messages of traditional African folktales with the contemporary world. With Germain Coffi Gadeau and F. J. Amon d'Aby, he founded the Cercle Culturel et Folklorique de la Côte d'Ivoire (CCFCI) in 1953. His humanism and desire for the equality and independence of Africans and their culture is also prevalent. |
![]() | Huidobro, Vicente January 10, 1893 Vicente García-Huidobro Fernández (January 10, 1893 – January 2, 1948) was a Chilean poet born to an aristocratic family. He was an exponent of the artistic movement called Creacionismo ('Creationism'), which held that a poet should bring life to the things he or she writes about, rather than just describe them. Huidobro was born into a wealthy family in Santiago. After spending his first years in Europe, he enrolled in a Jesuit secondary school in Santiago where he was expelled for wearing a ring, which he claimed, was for marriage. He studied literature at the University of Chile and published Ecos del alma (Soul's Echoes) in 1911, a work with modernist tendencies. The following year he married, and started to edit the journal Musa Joven (Young Muse), where part of his later book, Canciones en la noche (Songs in the Night) appeared, as well as his first calligram, 'Triángulo armónico' ('Harmonic Triangle'). In 1913, along with Carlos Díaz Loyola, he edited the three issues of the journal Azul, and published both Canciones en la noche and La gruta del silencio (The Grotto of Silence). The next year, he gave a lecture, Non serviam, which reflected his aesthetic creed. In another work of the same year, he explained his religious doubts and criticized the Jesuits, earning himself the reproach of his family. In 1916 he moved to Europe with his wife and children. While in Madrid, he met Rafael Cansinos-Asséns, with whom he had exchanged letters since 1914. He settled in Paris and published Adán (Adam), a work that began his next phase of artistic development. Huidobro met and mixed with most of the Parisian avant garde of this period: Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Jacques Lipchitz, Francis Picabia, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Paul Éluard and Blaise Cendrars. In October 1918 Huidobro traveled to Madrid, the first of a series of annual trips to that city. There he shared both Creacionismo and his knowledge of the Parisian vanguard with the artistic elite. Thus began the literary movement Ultraísmo. He corresponded with Tristan Tzara and collaborated with him on his Dadaist journal. The following year he brought a rough draft to Madrid of the series of poems that would eventually become his masterwork, Altazor. While Huidobro continued to write in Paris, in 1921 he founded and edited the international journal of art, Creación in Madrid; the journal featured a Lipchitz sculpture and the paintings of Georges Braque, Picasso, Gris and Albert Gleizes. In November he printed the second issue in Paris and entitled it Création Revue d'Art. In December he presented his famous lecture, La Poesía (Poetry), which served as prologue to Temblor de Cielo (Tremor of Heaven). He continued his diverse artistic activities in Europe until 1925, when he moved back to Chile to edit and publish political journalism and criticism. Youthful supporters proclaimed him their candidate for president. A bomb explosion followed in front of his house, however Huidobro escaped unharmed. He returned to Europe by the late 1920s, where he began to write the novel, Mío Cid Campeador; he also continued his work on Altazor and began Temblor de Cielo. It was at this time that he discovered that he was heir to the Marquisate of Casa Real. He also participated to the Mandrágora Surrealist movement founded in 1938. He died in Cartagena. |
![]() | Kilmartin, Terence January 10, 1922 Terence Kevin Kilmartin CBE (10 January 1922 – 17 August 1991) was an Irish-born translator who served as the literary editor of The Observer between 1952 and 1986. He is best known for his 1981 translation of Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. Kilmartin was born on 10 January 1922 in the Irish Free State. Moving to England as a child, he was educated at Xaverian College in Mayfield, East Sussex. His limited knowledge of French developed when, at the age of 17, he was recruited to teach English to a French family's children. During the Second World War, Kilmartin was keen to serve in the armed forces, however, with only one kidney he was deemed medically unfit. Instead he served in the Special Operations Executive (SOE). He worked in London under Colonel Maurice Buckmaster. Kilmartin defied orders from Buckmaster in 1944 to take part in a parachute jump into France as part of Operation Jedburgh. He subsequently earned medals for his military service. During his time at SOE Kilmartin became acquainted with David Astor. His first post after the war was as a radio journalist, before he joined the staff of The Observer in 1949. Initially, he worked in the foreign affairs office of the newspaper, becoming assistant literary editor in 1950 and literary editor in 1952. During this time, Kilmartin also began translation work of French literature, starting with the major works of Henri de Montherlant: The Bachelors, The Girls, The Boys, and Chaos and Night. He also translated works by Malraux and Sagan. It was he who performed the first revision of the Scott Moncrieff translation of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. As literary editor of The Observer, Kilmartin procured the freelance reviewing services of Anthony Burgess from 1960 onwards. A Reader's Guide to The Remembrance of Things Past Kilmartin compiled a comprehensive Reader's Guide to the Remembrance of Things Past (1983). The Guide comprises four separate indices: an index of characters in the Remembrance; an index of actual persons; an index of places; and an index of themes. The reader is thus enabled to locate almost any reference, e.g. Berlioz, or The Arabian Nights, or Madame Verdurin in any particular scene or setting, or Versailles. The volume and page numbers are keyed to the 3-volume Remembrance of Things Past of 1981, translated by Scott Moncrieff and revised by Kilmartin himself. They do not apply, of course, to other editions of the Remembrance or the Search for Lost Time, as it is now frequently called. |
![]() | Schade, Jens August January 10, 1903 Jens August Schade (10 January 1903, Skive, Denmark - 11 November 1978, Copenhagen) was a Danish poet. His debut was the 1926 poetry collection den levende violin, "the living violin". He referred to himself in his poetry as "the bright poet". The themes of his poetry were often the interconnection between the erotic and the forces of the cosmos. In 1963 he received the grand prize of the Danish Academy. His 1928 work "Læren om staten" is part of the Danish Culture Canon. |
![]() | Fergusson, Erna January 10, 1888 Erna Fergusson (January 10, 1888 – July 30, 1964) was an avid writer, historian, and storyteller, who documented the culture and history of New Mexico for more than forty years. |
![]() | Jeffers, Robinson January 10, 1887 John Robinson Jeffers (January 10, 1887 – January 20, 1962) was born in 1887 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The son of Presbyterian minister and Biblical scholar, Dr. William Hamilton Jeffers, as a boy Jeffers was thoroughly trained in the Bible and classical languages. The Jeffers family frequently traveled to Europe, and Robinson attended boarding schools in Germany and Switzerland. In 1902, Jeffers enrolled in Western University of Pennsylvania; when his family moved to California, he transferred to Presbyterian Occidental College as a junior. Jeffers graduated from college at age 18. Jeffers studied literature, medicine, and forestry during his years as a student. In 1906 he met a fellow graduate student, Una Call Kuster. The two fell in love, though at the time Una was married. They married in 1913, the day after Una’s divorce was finalized, and moved to Carmel, on California’s coast. Jeffers and his wife lived in Carmel for the rest of their lives, building the stone Tor House and Hawk Tower, both of which figure prominently in his work. It was at the beginning of his time in Carmel that Jeffers turned exclusively to writing poetry. Jeffers’ first volume of verse, Flagons and Apples, appeared in 1912, but it was the 1924 publication of Tamar and Other Poems that brought him attention. In the ensuing years his lyrics, written in a rugged, free-verse line derived from Walt Whitman, and his psychologically probing narrative poems, written in traditional blank verse, made him famous. Nature not only serves as a backdrop for Jeffers’s verse; animals and natural objects are frequently compared to man, with man shown to be the inferior. There is not one memorable person, Jeffers wrote in Contrast, there is not one mind to stand with the trees, one life with the mountains. Jeffers preferred nature to man because he felt that the human race was too introverted, that it failed to recognize the significance of other creatures and things in the universe. Jeffers termed his philosophy inhumanism, which he explained was a shifting of emphasis from man to not man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence.... It offers a reasonable detachment as a rule of conduct, instead of love, hate, and envy. Humanity had been spurned by an uncaring God, Jeffers believed, so each individual should rid himself of emotion and embrace an indifferent, nonhuman god. To develop his philosophy of inhumanism, Jeffers drew on his extensive reading in philosophy, religion, mythology, and science. Critics have connected Jeffers’s ideas to those of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Lucretius, and cyclical historians such as Giambattista Vico, Oswald Spengler, and Flinders Petrie. Certain motifs and symbols recur in Jeffers’s poetry and serve to underline his poetry's philosophical stance. Many of his narrative poems include images of rape or incest, which Jeffers uses to emphasize the danger of man’s introversion. Jeffers was not noted for his technical ingenuity, but he did develop a style that meshed with his philosophy. Poet, critic, and anthologist Louis Untermeyer praised Jeffers for his gift of biting language and the ability to communicate the phantasmagoria of terror. Critic Selden Rodman noted that Jeffers wrote his poetry with a one-dimensional straightforwardness that is almost Homeric. And the similes he uses, if not Homeric, are as primitively American as the flintlock and the Maypole. Jeffers reached the pinnacle of his fame early. In 1932 he was on the cover of Time, and in 1946 his version of the Greek drama Medea played on Broadway. But popular opinion began to turn against Jeffers when a full formulation of his doctrine seemed to calmly foresee the extinction of the human race. Some of his political views, including references in his work to Pearl Harbor, Hitler, Stalin, and Roosevelt, were also uneasily received in the period after World War II. His collection, The Double Axe (1948), included a publisher’s warning on the potentially unpatriotic poems inside. In recent years, Robinson Jeffers has regained his central place in the burgeoning field of eco-poetics. His uncompromising work celebrates the enduring beauty of sea, sky and stone and the freedom and ferocity of wild animals, and strives to create a vision of world in which human experience is productively questioned, qualified, and even decentered. Jeffers’ efforts to shift emphasis and significance from man to not-man and his prophetic rage at his country’s imperial ambitions have resonated with later readers and been crucial influences on such West Coast poets as William Everson, Yvor Winters, Gary Snyder and Robert Hass. |
![]() | Khadra, Yasmina January 10, 1955 Yasmina Khadra is the feminine pseudonym adopted by Mohammed Moulessehoul to avoid military censorship. Moulessehoul was born in the Algerian Sahara in 1955 and at one time was an officer in the Algerian military. His recent fiction trilogy on Middle Eastern realities-The Swallows of Kabul, The Attack, and The Sirens of Baghdad-has been widely acclaimed and translated. Moulessehoul is now retired from the military and living in France. Donald Nicholson-Smith and Alyson Waters are both seasoned translators. This is their first translation together. |
![]() | Delgado, James P. January 11, 1958 James P. Delgado is the President of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology. His previous books include LOST WARSHIPS: AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL TOUR OF WAR AT SEA, ACROSS THE TOP OF THE WORLD: THE QUEST FOR THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE, and THE BRITISH MUSEUM ENCYCLOPEDIA OF UNDERWATER AND MARITIME ARCHAEOLOGY. |
![]() | Ellison, Fred P. January 11, 1922 Fred Pittman Ellison (January 11, 1922 - October 4, 2014) was an assistant professor at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, he taught experimental classes in Spanish at both elementary and high school levels in a research project funded by the U.S. Department of Education. In 1962, on arriving at the University of Texas, he initiated the teaching of Portuguese in Austin, at Saint Edward's High School and was coordinator, with a Brazilian colleague, of a major project involving four other writers that eventuated in Modern Portuguese, an influential textbook used in U.S. universities for many years. In the sixties he founded the Portuguese Language Development Group of the AATSP, a nationwide group that continues to meet every year. Throughout his career Fred was especially drawn to Brazil, its people and its literature, a little-studied area which he had begun to explore in his dissertation on the Brazilian novel. |
![]() | Fforde, Jasper January 11, 1961 Jasper Fforde (born 11 January 1961) is a British novelist. Fforde's first novel, The Eyre Affair, was published in 2001. Fforde is mainly known for his Thursday Next novels, although he has written several books in the loosely connected Nursery Crime series and has begun two more independent series, The Last Dragonslayer and Shades of Grey. Fforde was born in London on 11 January 1961, the son of John Standish Fforde, the 24th Chief Cashier for the Bank of England (whose signature appeared on sterling banknotes during his time in office). He is the cousin, by her marriage to Desmond Fforde, of the author Katie Fforde, the grandson of Polish political adviser Joseph Retinger, and a great-grandson of journalist E. D. Morel. Fforde was educated at the progressive Dartington Hall School, and his early career was spent as a focus puller in the film industry, where he worked on a number of films, including The Trial, Quills, GoldenEye, and Entrapment. Fforde published his first novel, The Eyre Affair, in 2001. His published books include a series of novels starring the literary detective Thursday Next: The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, First Among Sequels, One of our Thursdays Is Missing and The Woman Who Died a Lot. The Eyre Affair had received 76 publisher rejections before its eventual acceptance for publication. Fforde won the Wodehouse prize for comic fiction in 2004 for The Well of Lost Plots. The Big Over Easy (2005), set in the same alternative universe as the Next novels, is a reworking of his first written novel, which initially failed to find a publisher. Its original title was Who Killed Humpty Dumpty?, and later had the working title of Nursery Crime, which is the title now used to refer to this series of books. These books describe the investigations of DCI Jack Spratt. The follow-up to The Big Over Easy, The Fourth Bear, was published in July 2006 and focuses on Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Fforde's books are noted for their profusion of literary allusions and wordplay, tightly scripted plots, and playfulness with the conventions of traditional genres. His works usually contain elements of metafiction, parody, and fantasy. None of his books has a chapter 13 except in the table of contents where there is a title of the chapter and a page number. In many of the books the page number is, in fact, the page right before the first page of chapter 14. However, in some the page number is just a page somewhere in chapter 12. Shades of Grey, the first novel in a new series, was published December 2009 in the United States and January 2010 in the United Kingdom. The sixth Thursday Next novel One of our Thursdays is Missing was published in February 2011. Fforde also plans a third Nursery Crime novel, The Last Great Tortoise Race: The Last Great Tortoise Race will be the third and final instalment of the NCD series. It is scheduled for 2017. In November 2010 he produced The Last Dragonslayer, unconnected with his other works but in a similar though simplified style, a young-adult fantasy novel about a teenage orphan. The book was originally planned as the first in a trilogy. Subsequent entries were released in 2011 and 2014; a fourth book is scheduled for 2016. In 2009, Fforde published a story in the Welsh edition of Big Issue magazine (a magazine distributed by the homeless) called 'We are all alike' (previously called 'The Man with no face'). He also published 'The Locked Room Mystery mystery' [sic] in the The Guardian newspaper in 2007 and this story remains online. The U.S. version of Well of Lost Plots features a bonus chapter (34b) called 'Heavy Weather', a complete story in itself, featuring Thursday Next in her position as Bellman. |
![]() | Hale, Janet Campbell January 11, 1946 Janet Campbell Hale (born January 11, 1946, Riverside, California) is a Native American writer. Her father was a full-blood Coeur d'Alene, and her mother was of Kootenay, Cree and Irish descent. In a sparse style that has been compared to Hemingway, Hale's work often explores issues of Native American identity and discusses poverty, abuse, and the condition of women in society. She wrote Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter (1993), which includes a discussion of the Native American experience as well as stories from her own life. She also wrote The Owl's Song (1974), The Jailing of Cecelia Capture (which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1985), Women on the Run (1999), and Custer Lives in Humboldt County & Other Poems (1978). Janet Campbell Hale has taught at Northwest Indian College, Iowa State University, College of Illinois, and University of California at Santa Cruz, and has served as resident writer at University of Oregon and University of Washington. Hale currently lives on the Coeur d'Alene Reservation in De Smet, Idaho. |
![]() | James, William January 11, 1842 William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist who was also trained as a physician. The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, James was one of the leading thinkers of the late nineteenth century and is believed by many to be one of the most influential philosophers the United States has ever produced, while others have labelled him the 'Father of American psychology'. |
![]() | Janevski, Slavko January 11, 1920 Slavko Janevski (January 11, 1920, Skopje - January 20, 2000) was a renowned Macedonian poet, prose and script writer. He finished high school in Skopje. From 1945 onwards he was the editor of the first teenage magazine called "Pioneer". Janevski is the author of the first novel to be written in Macedonian language "Seloto zad sedumte jaseni". As script writer he adapted the historical drama "Macedonian bloody wedding" in 1967. Janevski received many awards, among others "AVNOJ" 1968 and "Makedonsko slovo" for the book "Thought" |
![]() | Lepenies, Wolf January 11, 1941 Wolf Lepenies is one of Germany’s foremost intellectuals. He served as Rector of the Wissenschaftskolleg, the German Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (1986-2001), where he is now a Permanent Fellow. |
![]() | Lynch, John January 11, 1927 John Lynch (11 January 1927 – 4 April 2018) was Professor of Latin American History at the University of London. He spent most of his academic career at University College, and then from 1974 to 1987 as Director of the Institute of Latin American Studies. The main focus of his work was Spanish America in the period 1750–1850. John Lynch was born on 11 January 1927 in Boldon, County Durham, in northern England. He married Wendy Kathleen Norman in 1960, both are Catholic. They had 5 children. Lynch studied at the University of Edinburgh (MA, 1952), and at the University of London (Ph.D., 1955). He served in the British Army after World War II from 1945-48. He then taught at the University of Liverpool (1954–61) and, since 1961 has been teaching at the University of London. He was the director for the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of London from 1974 until his retirement in 1987. The scope of his work expanded over the years: from the River Plate area to Latin America as a whole; and from the 18th to the 19th centuries. He died on 4 April 2018 at the age of 91. |
![]() | Enard, Mathias January 11, 1972 Mathias Énard studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. A professor of Arabic at the University of Barcelona, he won the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie and the Prix Edmée de la Rochefoucault for his first novel, La perfection du tir. He has been awarded many prizes for ZONE, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre. Charlotte Mandell has translated fiction, poetry, and philosophy from the French, including works by Proust, Flaubert, Genet, Maupassant, Blanchot, and many other distinguished authors |
![]() | Mendoza, Eduardo January 11, 1943 Eduardo Mendoza Garriga (born 11 January 1943 in Barcelona, Spain) is a Spanish novelist. He studied law in the first half of the 1960s and lived in New York City between 1973 and 1982, working as interpreter for the United Nations, and then tried to become a lawyer and then he realized that he wanted to be a writer. He maintained an intense relationship with novelists Juan Benet and Juan García Hortelano, poet Pere Gimferrer and writer (and neighbour) Félix de Azúa. In 1975 he published his very successful first novel, La verdad sobre el caso Savolta (The Truth about the Savolta Case), where he shows his ability to use different resources and styles. The novel is considered a precursor to the social change in the Spanish post-Franco society and the first novel of the transition to democracy. He describes the union fights from the beginning of the 20th century, showing the social, cultural and economic reality of the Barcelona at the time. A year later he was awarded the Critic Prize. His most acclaimed novel is probably La ciudad de los prodigios (The City of Marvels, 1986), about the social and urban evolution of Barcelona between the Universal Expositions of 1888 and 1929. It was adapted to the screen by Mario Camus in 1999. In 1992, he published his novel, El Año del Diluvio (The Year of the Flood), which tells of the inner conflicts faced by Sister Consuelo after she meets and falls in love with Augusto Aixelâ, with very evocative descriptions of the post-(civil)war deprivations prevailing in Spain at that time. In 1996, he published his third major Barcelona novel, this time set in the 1940s, Una comedia ligera (A Light Comedy). Also within Mendoza's work stands the saga of the mad detective, a peculiar character, an unnamed accidental-detective locked up in a mental hospital. The first of these novels, El misterio de la cripta embrujada (The Mystery of the Bewitched Crypt, 1979) is a parody with hilarious moments mixing detective stories with gothic narrative. In the second novel of the saga, El laberinto de las aceitunas (The Labyrinth of the Olives, 1982) he confirms his talent as parodist; the novel is one of his most successful works. The third novel of the saga, La aventura del tocador de señoras (The Adventure of the Powder Room) and the fourth one, El enredo de la bolsa y la vida were published in 2002 and 2012, respectively. The 5th novel will be released in October 2015 under the name of "El secreto de la modelo extraviada". The newspaper El País published two of his novels by instalments, Sin noticias de Gurb (No Word from Gurb, 1990) and El último trayecto de Horacio Dos (The Last Journey of Horatio Dos, 2001), both of them science fiction comedy novels. In 1990, his work in Catalan Restauració made its debut. He later translated it into Spanish himself. In October 2010, he won the literary prize Premio Planeta for his novel Riña de gatos. Madrid, 1936. In December 2013, he won the European Book Prize (fiction) for Riña de gatos. In June 2015, he won the Franz Kafka Prize. And in 2016 he won Premio Cervantes. Eduardo Mendoza's narrative studies divides his work into serious novels, or major novels, and humorous novels, or minor ones, although recent studies have shown the seriousness, criticism and transcendence in his parodic novels, as well as the humor presents in his serious novels , due to the influence of the characteristics of the postmodern novel. |
![]() | Menendez, Miguel Angel January 11, 1904 Miguel Angel Menéndez (January 11, 1904, Izamal, Mexico - June 24, 1982, Mexico City, Mexico) was born in the province of Yucatan, but as a very young man he went to Mexico City to become a newspaper reporter. He was also active in both the political and financial worlds of Mexico and held several important governmental offices. Miguel Angel Menéndez wrote several very well-received volumes of poetry, NAYAR was his first novel. |
![]() | Nolte, Ernst January 11, 1923 Ernst Nolte (11 January 1923 – 18 August 2016) was a German historian and philosopher. Nolte’s major interest was the comparative studies of fascism and communism (cf. Comparison of Nazism and Stalinism). Originally trained in philosophy, he was professor emeritus of modern history at the Free University of Berlin, where he taught from 1973 until his 1991 retirement. He was previously a professor at the University of Marburg from 1965 to 1973. He was best known for his seminal work Fascism in Its Epoch, which received widespread acclaim when it was published in 1963. Nolte was a prominent conservative academic from the early 1960s and was involved in many controversies related to the interpretation of the history of fascism and communism, including the Historikerstreit in the late 1980s. In recent years, Nolte focused on Islamism and "Islamic fascism". He was the father of legal scholar Georg Nolte. Nolte received several prizes, including the Hanns Martin Schleyer Prize and the Konrad Adenauer Prize. |
![]() | Nugent, Walter January 11, 1935 Walter Nugent (January 11, 1935, Watertown, NY - 2012) was a former President of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and former president of the Western History Association. |
![]() | Palmer, R. R. January 11, 1909 R. R. Palmer was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. For many years he taught at Princeton University, and several of his books have been published by Princeton University Press. These include CATHOLICS AND UNBELIEVERS IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY FRANCE (1939), TWELVE WHO RULED: THE COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC SAFETY IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION (1941 and 1958), and a translation of Georges Lefebvre's THE COMING OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION (1947). |
![]() | Paton, Alan January 11, 1903 Alan Stewart Paton (11 January 1903 – 12 April 1988) was a South African author and anti-apartheid activist. |
![]() | Scott, Peter Dale January 11, 1929 Peter Dale Scott (born 11 January 1929) is a Canadian-born poet, former diplomat, and former English professor at the University of California, Berkeley. A son of the Canadian poet and constitutional lawyer F. R. Scott and painter Marian Dale Scott, he has been critical of American foreign policy since the era of the Vietnam War. Scott was a signatory in 1968 of the 'Writers and Editors War Tax Protest' pledge, in which participants vowed to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. He spent four years (1957–1961) with the Canadian diplomatic service. He retired from the UC Berkeley faculty in 1994. |
![]() | Taibo II, Paco Ignacio January 11, 1949 Born in Spain in 1949, PACO IGNACIO TAIBO II has lived in Mexico since 1958, and has been a nationalized Mexican citizen since 1980. He is currently professor of history at the UAM-Azcapotzalco (Metropolitan University of Mexico City), and is executive vice president of the International Association of Crime Writers. The author of numerous novels, works of history, and short-story collections, many of which have been published throughout the world, Taibo lives with his wife and daughter in Mexico City. |
![]() | Dahl, Arne January 11, 1963 Jan Arnald (born 11 January 1963) is a Swedish novelist and literary critic, who uses the pen name Arne Dahl when writing crime fiction. He is also a regular writer in Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. He published Barbarer (2001) and Maria och Artur (2006) under his own name, but under his pen name he has written a series of crime novels about a fictional group of Swedish crime investigators, called ‘A Gruppen’ in Swedish and ‘the Intercrime Group’ in the first English translation. |
![]() | Tobin, Daniel January 11, 1958 Daniel Tobin is an award-winning author and editor. He has been granted fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. |
![]() | Bartusek, Antonin January 11, 1921 ANTONIN BARTUSEK (January 11, 1921, Želetava, Czech Republic - April 24, 1974, Prague, Czech Republic) was born in 1925 in Zeltava, Western Moravia, and studied at Charles University, Prague. He now works at the State Office for Historical Monuments. His volumes of poetry arc: Fragments (1945), Destiny (1947) and then, following a prolonged silence during the period of Stalinism, Oxymoron (1965) and the existentialist Red Strawberries (1967), and more recently Dance of the Emu Bird and Antistar (1969) and Royal Progress (1970). He has translated American, French and German poetry and is the author of essays in the field of art history, scenography and literary criticism. |
![]() | Burke, Edmund January 12, 1729 Edmund Burke PC (12 January [NS] 1729 – 9 July 1797) was an Irish statesman born in Dublin; author, orator, political theorist, and philosopher, who, after moving to England, served for many years in the House of Commons of Great Britain as a member of the Whig party. Mainly, he is remembered for his support of the cause of the American Revolutionaries, and for his later opposition to the French Revolution. The latter led to his becoming the leading figure within the conservative faction of the Whig party, which he dubbed the 'Old Whigs', in opposition to the pro–French Revolution 'New Whigs', led by Charles James Fox. Burke was praised by both conservatives and liberals in the nineteenth century. Since the twentieth century, he has generally been viewed as the philosophical founder of conservatism. |
![]() | London, Jack January 12, 1876 John Griffith ‘Jack’ London (born John Griffith Chaney, January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916) was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. He is best remembered as the author of The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush. |
![]() | Mosley, Walter January 12, 1952 Walter Mosley is the author of more than forty books, including eleven previous Easy Rawlins mysteries, the first of which, DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS, was made into an acclaimed film starring Denzel Washington. ALWAYS OUTNUMBERED was an HBO film starring Laurence Fishburne, adapted from Mosley’s first Socrates Fortlow novel. A native of Los Angeles and a graduate of Goddard College, he holds an MFA from CCNY and lives in Brooklyn. New York. He is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, a Grammy, and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. |
![]() | Mitchell, David January 12, 1969 David Stephen Mitchell (born 12 January 1969) is an English novelist. He has published seven novels, two of which, number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004), were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. |
![]() | Molnar, Ferenc January 12, 1878 Ferenc Molnár (originally Ferenc Neumann; 12 January 1878 – 1 April 1952) was a Hungarian-born dramatist and novelist who adopted American citizenship. Molnár was born in Budapest. He emigrated to the United States to escape persecution of Hungarian Jews during World War II. As a novelist, Molnár may best be remembered for The Paul Street Boys, the story of two rival gangs of youths in Budapest. It was ranked second in a poll of favorite books as part of the Hungarian version of Big Read in 2005 and has been made into feature films on several different occasions. His most popular plays are Liliom (1909, tr. 1921), later adapted into a musical (Carousel); The Guardsman (1910, tr. 1924), which served as the basis of the film of the same name, which starred Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne (1931); and The Swan (1920, tr. 1922). His 1918 film, The Devil, was adapted three years later for American audiences, starring George Arliss in his first nationally released film. Two of Molnár's plays have been adapted for other media: The Good Fairy, was adapted by Preston Sturges and filmed in 1935 with Margaret Sullavan, and subsequently turned into the 1947 Deanna Durbin vehicle, I'll Be Yours. (It also served as the basis for the 1951 Broadway musical Make a Wish, with book by Sturges.) Molnár's play Olympia was adapted for the movies twice, the first time (quite unsuccessfully) as His Glorious Night (1929), and secondly as A Breath of Scandal (1960), starring Sophia Loren. In 1961, Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond turned Molnar's one-act play Egy, kett?, három into One, Two, Three, a film starring James Cagney and Horst Buchholz. His play, The Play at the Castle, has twice been adapted into English by writers of note: by P. G. Wodehouse as The Play's the Thing and by Tom Stoppard as Rough Crossing. Molnár served as a proud and jingoistic supporter of the Austro-Hungarian Empire while working as a war correspondent during the First World War. So positive were his war reports that he was decorated by the Habsburg Emperor, but criticized by some of his pacifist peers. He later wrote Reflections of a War Correspondent, describing his experiences. Molnár died, aged 74, in New York City, where he settled, via special immigration legislation, which was passed by the United States Congress, according him the status of returning [permanent] resident, to wit, Private Law 88-122/H. R. 3366, approved/enacted 19 December 1963 and retroactive to 9 December 1961. It is unclear if Molnar ever became a naturalized United States citizen. |
![]() | Murakami, Haruki January 12, 1949 Born in Kobe in 1949, Haruki Murakami studied classic Greek drama at Waseda University, then managed a jazz bar in Tokyo from 1974 to 1981, during which time he published three novels. The third of these was A Wild Sheep Chase, which earned him Japan’s prestigious Noma Literary Award for New Writers and ended his career at the jazz bar. His next novel, The End of the World and the Hard-Boiled Wonderland, won him the coveted Tanizaki Prize. With the publication of Norwegian Wood in 1987, the dam seemed to burst. The novel, issued in two volumes, has sold to date a total of 4.01 million copies. Dance, Dance, Dance, the sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, is his most recent work; published in 1988, in nine months it has sold over a million copies. Between books, Murakami has translated novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Irving, Paul Theroux, Raymond Carver, and Tim O’Brien into Japanese. He lives in Rome, Italy. Alfred Birnbaum, the translator, was born in Washington, DC, in 1957, and grew up in Tokyo. After his undergraduate years at the University of Southern California, he returned to Japan for graduate study at Waseda University, remaining in the country another nine years. He now lives in Barcelona, Spain. |
![]() | Riotta, Gianni January 12, 1954 Gianni Riotta is a novelist and journalist, and is the co-editor of La Stampa, one of Italy's leading newspapers. He lives in Turin and New York. |
![]() | Collins, Paul January 12, 1969 Paul Collins is a writer specializing in science history, memoir, and unusual antiquarian literature. His 7 books have been translated into 10 languages, and include Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books (2003) and The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (2011). His freelance work includes pieces for the New York Times, Slate, and New Scientist, and he appears on NPR Weekend Edition as its resident 'literary detective' on odd old books. Collins lives in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches in the MFA program at Portland State University. |
![]() | Perrault, Charles January 12, 1628 Charles Perrault (12 January 1628 – 16 May 1703) was a French author and member of the Académie française. He laid the foundations for a new literary genre, the fairy tale, with his works derived from pre-existing folk tales. The best known of his tales include Le Petit Chaperon rouge (Little Red Riding Hood), Cendrillon (Cinderella), Le Chat Botté (Puss in Boots), La Belle au bois dormant (The Sleeping Beauty) and La Barbe bleue (Bluebeard). Some of Perrault's versions of old stories may have influenced the German versions published by the Brothers Grimm 200 years later. The stories continue to be printed and have been adapted to opera, ballet (such as Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty), theatre, and film. Perrault was an influential figure in the 17th-century French literary scene, and was the leader of the Modern faction during the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. |
![]() | Alger Jr., Horatio January 13, 1832 Horatio Alger, Jr. (January 13, 1832 – July 18, 1899) was a prolific 19th-century American author, best known for his many juvenile novels about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of middle-class security and comfort through hard work, determination, courage, and honesty. His writings were characterized by the 'rags-to-riches' narrative, which had a formative effect on America during the Gilded Age. Alger's name is often invoked incorrectly as though he himself rose from rags to riches, but that arc applied to his characters, not to the author. Essentially, all of Alger's novels share the same theme: a young boy struggles through hard work to escape poverty. |
![]() | Canada, Geoffrey January 13, 1952 Geoffrey Canada (born January 13, 1952, The Bronx, New York City, NY), who is president of the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families in New York City, was awarded a 1995 Heinz Award for his leadership in nurturing and protecting children. This is his first book. |
![]() | Cozarinsky, Edgardo January 13, 1939 Edgardo Cozarinsky (born January 13, 1939, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a writer and filmmaker. He is best known for his Spanish-language novel Vudú urbano. Cozarinsky was born to an Argentine family of Ukrainian-Jewish descent. His last name comes from his grandparents, Ukrainian Jewish immigrants who arrived in Argentina from Kiev and Odessa in the late nineteenth century. After an adolescence spent in neighbourhood cinemas showing double bills of old Hollywood films and reading an inordinate amount of fiction in Spanish, English and French (favourite authors – Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, Henry James), he studied literature at Buenos Aires University, wrote for local and Spanish cinephile magazines, and published an early essay on James, which he developed from his university thesis – El laberinto de la apariencia (The Labyrinth of Appearance, 1964), a book which he later suppressed. In his early twenties he became acquainted with Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo in Buenos Aires. In 1973 he won a literary prize for his essay on gossip as narrative device in the writings of James and Proust. In 1974 he published Borges y el cine, a book that he expanded in every reprint (Spain, 1978 and 2002, and translations). He has since that time also declined to have this book reprinted. Cozarinsky visited Europe from September 1966 to June 1967, stopping for a visit to New York City on his return to Buenos Aires. Arriving back home, he more fully committed himself to his writing. He wrote for the culture sections of the Argentine weeklies Primera Plana and Panorama, then he produced his first film. It was an underground feature shot on weekends over the course of a year, knowing that it could not pass the local censorship of the period. It was nevertheless screened at festivals throughout Europe and the United States. Its title was already a challenge – ... (Puntos suspensivos – Dot Dot Dot). During the turmoil of Argentina's Dirty War, Cozarinsky left Buenos Aires for Paris, where he concentrated on his filmmaking. He produced fiction films and 'essays', mixing documentary material with personal refletions on the material. The most distinguished of these is La Guerre d'un seul homme (One Man's War, 1981), a confrontation between Ernst Jünger's wartime diaries and French newsreels of the occupation period. At a time when European television networks were willing to support such ventures, Cozarinsky was able to develop this approach in a series of original works. During the period 1970-1990, Cozarinsky published little. However, his sole novel from the period gained a wide audience - Vudú urbano (Urban voodoo, 1985), a mixture of fiction and essay not unlike his film work, with prologues by Susan Sontag and Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Cozarinsky returned to Buenos Aires for a short stay after the end of Argentina's military junta. He then returned three years later to produce Guerreros y cautivas (Warriors and Captive Women), filmed in the country's far southern reaches. He visited Argentina several times after that, occasionally filming segments or backgrounds for his films. His most adventurous later films were Rothschild's Violin and Ghosts of Tangier, both made between 1995 and 1996. Cozarinsky was diagnosed with cancer in 1999. This motivated him to dedicate his remaining time to his writing. While still in the hospital following his diagnosis he wrote the first two stories for La novia de Odessa (The Bride from Odessa). From that date on, his film work became sparse and he started publishing 'all the books I had not put on paper', fiction mostly but also essays and chronicles. He became established as a Spanish-language writer, and his works were also translated into several other languages. During this period he spent most of his time in Buenos Aires, returning to Paris for regular short stays. In 2005 he wrote and directed a play (Squash) and wrote a mini-opera Raptos (Raptures). In that year he also appeared on the alternative stage along with his medical doctor, in one of Vivi Tellas' 'documentary theater' ventures -Cozarinsky y su médico. In 2008 he started work on the libretto for a chamber opera with the musician Pablo Mainetti – Ultramarina, based on motives from his own novel El rufián moldavo (The Moldavian Pimp). Cozarinsky has filmed in such diverse locations as Budapest, Rotterdam, Tallinn, Tangiers, Vienna, Granada, Saint Petersburg, Seville and Patagonia. He presently alternates most of his time between Buenos Aires and Paris. |
![]() | Drvota, Mojmir January 13, 1923 Mojmír Drvota (January 13, 1923 in Czech Republic - April 27, 2006) was professor emeritus in the Department of Photography and Cinema at Ohio State University |
![]() | Geraghty, Tony January 13, 1932 Tony Geraghty is a British subject and an Irish citizen. He is a veteran of the British Red Berets and served as a military liaison officer with U.S. forces during the Gulf War, for which he was awarded the Joint Service Commendation Medal for Military Merit with a citation signed by General H. Norman Schwarzkopf. Geraghty has also worked in the United States as a writer for the Boston Globe. |
![]() | Goulart, Ron January 13, 1933 Ron Goulart (born January 13, 1933) is an American popular culture historian and mystery, fantasy and science fiction author. Goulart was prolific, and wrote many novelizations and other routine work under various pseudonyms: Kenneth Robeson (pen name), Con Steffanson (pen name), Chad Calhoun, R.T. Edwards, Ian R. Jamieson, Josephine Kains, Jillian Kearny, Howard Lee, Zeke Masters, Frank S. Shawn, and Joseph Silva. Goulart's first professional publication was a 1952 reprint of the SF story "Letters to the Editor" in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction; this parody of a pulp magazine letters column was originally published in the University of California, Berkeley's Pelican. His early career in advertising and marketing influenced much of his work. In the early 1960s, Goulart wrote the text for Chex Press, a newspaper parody published on Ralston Purina cereal boxes (Wheat Chex, Rice Chex, Corn Chex). He contributed to P.S. and other magazines, along with his book review column for Venture Science Fiction Magazine. Cheap Thrills: An Informal History of the Pulp Magazines (1972) is his best known non-fiction book. |
![]() | Magno, Paschoal Carlos January 13, 1906 PASCHOAL CARLOS MAGNO, a Brazilian now attached to the Embassy in London, wrote this novel in English. He is already well known in his native land as a poet and a playwright but this is his first fiction, and it appears suitably at the moment when an Anglo-Brazilian alliance has drawn our two countries together, and when we are beginning to realize how vital to the future peace and prosperity of the world will be the vast energies and possibilities of the greatest of the South American nations. |
![]() | Senapati, Fakir Mohan January 13, 1843 Fakir Mohan Senapati (13 January 1843 - 14 June 1918) born on January 13, 1843, at Mallikashpur in Balasore, played a leading role in establishing the distinct identity of Oriya, a language mainly spoken in the Indian state of Odisha. Fakirmohan Senapati is regarded as the father of Oriya nationalism and modern Oriya literature. |
![]() | Sørensen, Villy January 13, 1929 Villy Sørensen (13 January 1929 – 16 December 2001) was a Danish short-story writer, philosopher and literary critic of the Modernist tradition. His fiction was heavily influenced by his philosophical ideas, and he has been compared to Franz Kafka in this regard. He was the most influential and important Danish philosopher since Søren Kierkegaard. Born in Copenhagen, Sørensen graduated from the Vestre Borgerdydskole in 1947, and then attended the University of Copenhagen and the University of Freiburg studying philosophy. Although he did not graduate, he later received an honorary degree from the University of Copenhagen. Sørensen published his first collection of short stories, Strange Stories in 1953, which many critics have identified as being the start of Danish literary Modernism. He published additional collections of short stories in 1955 and 1964, all winning various awards in Denmark. These stories generally explored the absurd and hidden parts of the human psyche. Sørensen began editing the journal Vindrosen (with Klaus Rifbjerg) in 1959. Afterward, he became a member of the Danish Academy in 1965, subsequently editing several other Modernist journals and periodicals. Sørensen, though he continued to produce short fiction throughout his life, was also deeply engaged in philosophy, about which he wrote many essays and several books including Seneca: The Humanist at the Court of Nero and his response to Søren Kierkegaard's Either/Or, Hverken-eller (i.e. 'Neither/Nor'). He also published books and essays about Nietzsche, Kafka, Marx, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, and was a notable translator of over 20 books. |
![]() | Glaser, Elton January 13, 1945 Elton Glaser is the author of seven other poetry collections: Relics, Tropical Depressions, Color Photographs of the Ruins, Winter Amnesties, Pelican Tracks, Here and Hereafter, and The Law of Falling Bodies. His poems have appeared in the 1995, 1997, and 2000 editions of The Best American Poetry. Among Glaser's awards are two fellowships from the NEA, seven fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, the Iowa Poetry Prize, the 1996 Ohionana Poetry Award, and the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Akron, former director of the University of Akron Press, and former editor of the Akron Series in Poetry. |
![]() | Alterman, Eric January 14, 1960 Eric Alterman (born January 14, 1960) is an American historian, journalist, author, media critic, blogger, and educator. He is currently CUNY Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College, the media columnist for The Nation, and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress as well as the author of ten books. His weblog named Altercation was originally hosted by MSNBC.com from 2002 to 2006, moved to Media Matters for America until December 2008, and is now hosted by The Nation. |
![]() | Bennett, Ronan January 14, 1956 Ronan Bennett (born: 14 January 1956) is a Northern Irish novelist and screenwriter. Bennett was raised in a devout Roman Catholic family headed by William H. and Geraldine Bennett at 420 Merville Garden Village in the Whitehouse area of Newtownabbey, Northern Ireland. He attended the Christian Brothers Grammar School in West Belfast (generally known as St Mary's CBGS). In 1974, while still in school, Bennett was convicted of murdering Inspector William Elliott, a 49-year-old police officer in the Royal Ulster Constabulary during an Official IRA bank robbery at the Ulster Bank in The Diamond shopping area at Rathcoole, close to his Merville Garden Village home, on 6 September 1974. His conviction was overturned on appeal in 1975 and Bennett was released from Long Kesh prison near Lisburn, Co. Antrim. Later Bennett apparently displayed a sympathy towards the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), which made its name after it killed Margaret Thatcher's Northern Ireland advisor Airey Neave in 1979. Bennett then moved to London. In 1978 he was arrested for conspiracy to cause explosions and spent 16 months in prison on remand. Bennett conducted his own defence, and he and his co-defendants were acquitted in 1979. He studied history at King's College London receiving a first class honours degree, and later completed his Ph.D. at the college in 1987. Bennett lives in London with his family. His partner is Georgina Henry, editor of guardian.co.uk. Since 2006, he has co-hosted a regular Monday chess column with Daniel King in The Guardian, which seeks to be instructive, rather than topical. Through test positions taken from actual games, their amateur and expert assessments of the possible continuations are discussed and compared. It has been supposed that Nigel Short's column was axed to make way for the new feature and the justification for this change has been the subject of some debate in chess circles. Bennett has published five novels and two non-fiction works. It was his third novel The Catastrophist that brought him into the public eye. This novel was set in the Belgian Congo just before independence, with the rise and fall of Patrice Lumumba as political backdrop, The Catastrophist is the story of a doomed love affair between novelist James Gillespie and a fiery idealistic journalist, Inès. Critics hailed the novel, which drew inevitable comparisons to Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad and John le Carré's African novel, The Constant Gardener. It was nominated for the Whitbread Award in 1998. The Catastrophist is a bleak book about the impossibility of love and of political peace in certain circumstances. The central character, James, (who changes his name from the Irish 'Seamus' to the Anglo form when he moves to London) follows Inès to the Congo as the Belgian colons are preparing to leave and the Communist sympathiser Lumumba is about to be killed by a rival ‘tribe’ vying for control (with clandestine US support). James writes some pieces for the Observer in London as the political situation gets much worse, and he becomes more involved because Inès herself is heavily engagé, reporting for the Italian Communist Party newspaper. Their sexual relationship is handled with great frankness, and their love appears very real, but she moves away from him, into the cause, and takes a young African supporter of Lumumba as a lover. She asks James to help them escape as their lives become threatened by a dangerous CIA man and the black tribal group he supports. Despite his own bitterness about losing her, James refuses to tell the American and his African co-conspirators where Inès and her lover are hiding. He is jailed and badly beaten, but eventually the CIA man believes his story that he does not know where Inès is hiding, and lets him go. Inès consoles him with one final sexual act before escaping with her African lover. The sub-text is about James' impossible task in holding a woman who throws herself into a cause that the detached novelist cannot join. There is considerable poignancy in the scenes where he realises that she has gone for good, and no longer loves him. Bennett's fourth novel, Havoc, in its Third Year, was published in 2004. It is a dark tale of Puritan fanaticism, set in a town in northern England in the 1630s, in the decade before Cromwell and his Roundheads took over the kingdom. Havoc was also well received in the press. Bennett was an uncredited co-author of Stolen Years, the prison memoir of Paul Hill, one of the Guildford Four who were wrongfully convicted in 1975 for the Guildford and Woolwich pub bombings the previous year. Bennett has also written several acclaimed screenplays for film and television, among them The Hamburg Cell and the controversial Rebel Heart. He contributes regularly to the British and Irish press. In 2006, Bennett's new novel Zugzwang, was published week-by-week in the British Sunday newspaper The Observer. The novel was written in weekly installments with new chapters being submitted to the newspaper close to publication date. Each chapter was accompanied by illustrations created by British artist Marc Quinn. |
![]() | Bernlef, J. January 14, 1937 Hendrik Jan Marsman (14 January 1937 – 29 October 2012), better known by his pen name, J. Bernlef, was a Dutch writer, poet, novelist and translator, much of whose work centres on mental perception of reality and its expression. He won numerous literary awards, including the Constantijn Huygens Prize in 1984 and the P. C. Hooft Award in 1994, both of which were for his work as a whole. His book Hersenschimmen features on the list of NRC's Best Dutch novels. |
![]() | Dark, Sidney January 14, 1874 Sidney Ernest Dark (14 January 1874 – 11 October 1947) was an English journalist, author and critic who was editor of the Church Times, among other publications. Dark wrote more than 30 books on subjects ranging from the church to literature and theatre, as well as biographies and novels. |
![]() | Dos Passos, John January 14, 1896 John Roderigo Dos Passos (January 14, 1896 – September 28, 1970) was a radical American novelist and artist active in the first half of the twentieth century. |
![]() | Hlasko, Marek January 14, 1934 Marek Hlasko (14 January 1934 – 14 June 1969) was a Polish writer. Hlasko’s biography is highly mythologized, and many of the legends about his life he spread himself. His literary career started in 1951 when he wrote Baza Sokolowska, his first set of short stories. Hlasko became a correspondent for Trybuna Ludowa (a popular Polish daily) when he was working for ‘Metrobudowa’. He made his debut with Baza Sokolowska in Sztandar Mlodych (a daily paper published in Poland in 1950-1997) in 1954. He gained publicity and popularity thanks to his original working style as well as his unconventional behaviour and clothing. He was a legendary figure of the young generation, a symbol of non-conformism. He was well-built; however, the physical appearance concealed over-sensitivity and uncertainty. He was prone to depression and could not adapt to everyday reality. Marek’s inclination to rows contrasted with his friends’ positive opinions of him. In 1958, he went to Paris. The press there called him an Eastern European James Dean, as Hlasko strikingly resembled him. Hlasko really identified himself with this role: he vandalized pubs and restaurants. At this time, he gained worldwide publicity. Nonetheless, he liked the life of a vagrant, so he left Paris and went to Germany and then to Italy. The anticommunist edition of Cmentarze in the émigré Polish-language Parisian monthly Kultura launched a press campaign against him. When Marek was refused a renewal of his passport, he asked for political asylum in the Western Germany. After three months, he changed his mind and tried to return to Poland. However, while waiting for an answer from the Polish government, he decided to go to Israel in 1959. He could not live without Poland but at the same time he could not return to his homeland. In 1963, he spent a month in prison for his feuds with the police. In 1964 he twice attempted suicide. Between 1963 and 1965, he spent a total of 242 days in psychiatric clinics. In 1965, he divorced his wife, and in 1966, with Roman Polanski's help, he went to Los Angeles. He was supposed to write screenplays, but it did not work out. He had an affair with Betty, the wife of Nicholas Ray, the author of Rebel Without a Cause, and thereby ended his career as a screenwriter. He got a pilot’s licence instead. In December 1968, during one of his parties, he fell out with Krzysztof Komeda. As a result of this accident, Komeda got a brain hematoma and died four months later. Hlasko was to say: ‘If Krzysztof dies, I'll go along’ (Jesli Krzysio umrze, to i ja pójde). In 1969, he came back to Germany. He died in Wiesbaden at the age of 35. The circumstances of his death remain unknown. One hypothesis is that he mixed alcohol with sedative drugs. However, those who knew him maintain that suicide was out of the question in his case. In 1975, his ashes were taken to Poland, and buried at the Powazki Cemetery in Warsaw. |
![]() | Killens, John Oliver January 14, 1916 John Oliver Kittens was born in Macon, Georgia, in 1916. He attended Edward Waters College, Morris Brown College, and Howard University, as well as the Terrell Law School and Columbia and New York Universities. In 1936 he joined the staff of the National Labour Relations Board in Washington, where he served until 1942 and again in 1946 after his return from the war. For 26 months he was with the Amphibian Forces in the South Pacific. Mr Killens has won the Afro-Arts Theatre Cultural Award for 1955, the Brooklyn N.A.A.C.P. Literary Arts Award for 1957, and the Climbers Business Club Humanitarian Award for 1959. He is chairman of the Harlem Writers’ Guild Workshop and of the Writers’ Committee of the American Society of African Culture. He writes for television and films, his latest film being Odds Against Tomorrow, starring Harry Belafonte. Mr Kittens, who lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children, recently travelled by Land-Rover 12,000 miles through West Africa doing research for a proposed television series. AND THEN WE HEARD THE THUNDER is Mr Killens’s second novel; his first, YOUNGBLOOD, was published in 1954. |
![]() | Lofting, Hugh January 14, 1886 Hugh John Lofting (14 January 1886 – 26 September 1947) was a British author, trained as a civil engineer, who created the character of Doctor Dolittle, one of the classics of children's literature. |
![]() | Mason, J. Alden January 14, 1885 John Alden Mason (14 January 1885 – 7 November 1967) was an archaeological anthropologist and linguist. Mason was born in Orland, Indiana, but grew up in Philadelphia's Germantown. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1907 and a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in 1911. His dissertation was an ethnographic study of the Salinan Amerindian ethnic group of California. He also authored a number of linguistic studies, including a study of Piman languages. His later ethnographic works included studies of the Tepehuan. The first series of Juan Bobo stories published in the U.S. occurred in 1921. They appeared in the Journal of American Folklore under the title Porto Rican Folklore, and were collected by Mason from Puerto Rican school children. The story collection consisted of 56 "Picaresque Tales" about Juan Bobo, and included such exotic titles as Juan Bobo Heats up his Grandmother, Juan Bobo Delivers a Letter to the Devil, Juan Bobo Throws his Brother Down a Well, and Juan Bobo refuses to Marry the Princess. Mason was curator of the University Museum at the University of Pennsylvania from 1926 until his retirement in 1958. His papers are housed at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. |
![]() | Mayer, Martin January 14, 1928 Martin Prager Mayer (born January 14, 1928, New York City) is the writer of 35 non-fiction books, including Madison Avenue, U.S.A. (1958), The Schools (1961), The Lawyers (1967), About Television (1972), The Bankers (1975), The Builders (1978), Risky Business: The Collapse of Lloyd's of London (1995), The Bankers: The Next Generation (1997), The Fed (2001), and The Judges (2005). Mayer's books describe and criticize American industries or professional groups. His book on Madison Avenue was described by Cleveland Amory as "The first complete story on the ... advertising industry". Mayer wrote a music column for Esquire from 1952 to 1975. He was a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. He is married to Revenue Watch Institute President Karin Lissakers. |
![]() | Min, Anchee January 14, 1957 Anchee Min (born January 14, 1957) is a Chinese-American painter, photographer, musician, and author who lives in San Francisco and Shanghai. Min has published two memoirs, Red Azalea and The Cooked Seed: A Memoir, and six historical novels. Her fiction emphasizes strong female characters, such as Jiang Qing, the wife of chairman Mao Zedong, and Empress Dowager Cixi, the last ruling empress of China. She graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a B.F.A. and M.F.A. in Fine Arts. She is married to author Lloyd Lofthouse. |
![]() | Mishima, Yukio January 14, 1925 Yukio Mishima is the pen name of Kimitake Hiraoka (January 14, 1925 – November 25, 1970), a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, and film director. Mishima is considered one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century. |
![]() | Reed Jr., Adolph January 14, 1947 Adolph Leonard Reed Jr. (born January 14, 1947) is an American professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in race and American politics. He has taught at Yale, Northwestern, and the New School for Social Research and he has written on racial and economic inequality. He is a founding member of the U.S. Labor Party and a frequent contributor to The Progressive and The Nation. |
![]() | Stoloff, Carolyn January 14, 1927 Carolyn Stoloff is a poet and a painter. Her previous volume of verse, STEPPING OUT, was highly acclaimed by outstanding poets, and her poems have appeared in major poetry magazines and other periodicals. Ms. Stoloff has been the recipient of grants from the National Council on the Arts and from the MacDowell Colony in order to work on this volume. Four of her poems (three of which are included here) received the Theodore Roethke Award from Poetry Northwest, and others won the Poetry Contest of The Miscellany (North Carolina). She lives in New York, but spent the summer of 1972 working in Taos, New Mexico. |
![]() | Schweitzer, Albert January 14, 1875 Albert Schweitzer was a German - and later French - theologian, organist, philosopher, physician, and medical missionary in Africa, also known for his interpretive life of Jesus. |
![]() | Alexis, Andre January 15, 1957 André Alexis (born 15 January 1957 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago) is a Canadian writer who grew up in Ottawa and currently lives in Toronto, Ontario. His debut novel, Childhood (1997), won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and was a co-winner of the Trillium Award. In addition to his writing, he is a member of the editorial board of This Magazine. |
![]() | Anderson, Jon Lee January 15, 1957 JON LEE ANDERSON is the author of GUERRILLAS: JOURNEYS IN THE INSURGENT WORLD, CHE GUEVARA: A REVOLUTIONARY LIFE THE LION’S GRAVE: DISPATCHES FROM AFGHANISTAN, and, with his brother, Scott Anderson, WAR ZONES and INSIDE THE LEAGUE. |
![]() | Arenal, Humberto January 15, 1926 Humberto Arenal (Havana, January 15, 1926 - Havana, January 26, 2012) was a Cuban writer, playwright and theater director. During his career Arenal was the director of major cultural institutions on the island, such as the Teatro Nacional, the Teatro Musical de La Habana, the Conjunto Dramatico of Matanzas and the Teatro Lirico Nacional de Cuba. The author of El sol a plomo (1959), Los animales sagrados (1967) and Quien mato a Ivan Ivanovich? (1995), Arenal won the National Prize for Literature in 2007. He is still remembered for the great success of his open-air staging of the play Aire frio, by Virgilio Piñera, in 1962. Humberto Arenal died January 26, 2012 in Havana at the age of 85. |
![]() | Asbjornsen, Peter Christen and Moe, Jorgen January 15, 1812 Peter Christen Asbjørnsen (15 January 1812 – 5 January 1885) was a Norwegian writer and scholar. He and Jørgen Engebretsen Moe were collectors of Norwegian folklore. They were so closely united in their lives' work that their folk tale collections are commonly mentioned only as "Asbjørnsen and Moe". |
![]() | Carby, Hazel V. January 15, 1948 Hazel V. Carby (January 15, 1948, United Kingdom) is Chair of African American Studies at Yale University. She is the author of RECONSTRUCTING WOMANHOOD: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist and RACE MEN. |
![]() | Conroy, Frank January 15, 1936 Frank Conroy (January 15, 1936 – April 6, 2005) was an American author, born in New York, New York to an American father and a Danish mother. He published five books, including the highly acclaimed memoir Stop-Time. Published in 1967, this ultimately made Conroy a noted figure in the literary world. The book was nominated for the National Book Award. Conroy graduated from Haverford College, and was director of the influential Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa for 18 years, from 1987 until 2005, where he was also F. Wendell Miller Professor. He was previously the director of the literature program at the National Endowment for the Arts from 1982 to 1987. Conroy's published works included: the memoir Stop-Time; a collection of short stories, Midair; a novel, Body and Soul, which is regarded as one of the finest evocations of the experience of being a musician; a collection of essays and commentaries, Dogs Bark, but the Caravan Rolls On: Observations Then and Now; and a travelogue, Time and Tide: A Walk Through Nantucket. His fiction and non-fiction appeared in such journals as The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, Harper's Magazine and Partisan Review. He was named a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. In addition to writing, Conroy was an accomplished jazz pianist, winning a Grammy Award in 1986 for liner notes. His book Dogs Bark, But the Caravan Rolls On: Observations Then and Now includes articles that describe jamming with Charles Mingus and with Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman. The latter session occurred when Conroy was writing about the Rolling Stones for Esquire. Conroy had arrived at a mansion for the interview, found nobody there, and eventually sat down at a grand piano and began to play. Someone wandered in, sat down at the drums, and joined in with accomplished jazz drumming; then a fine jazz bassist joined in. They turned out to be Watts and Wyman, whom Conroy did not recognize until they introduced themselves after the session. Conroy died of colon cancer on April 6, 2005, in Iowa City, Iowa, at the age of 69. The Frank Conroy Reading Room in the Dey House, the home of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, was named in his honor. Conroy is the subject of Mentor: A Memoir by Tom Grimes, his former student at the Iowa Writers Workshop and long-time friend. |
![]() | Crosby, Alfred W. January 15, 1931 Alfred W. Crosby (born January 15, 1931, Boston, MA) is a Professor Emeritus of History, Geography, and American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of such books as The Columbian Exchange and Ecological Imperialism. |
![]() | Gaines, Ernest J. January 15, 1933 Ernest James Gaines (born January 15, 1933) is an African-American author. His works have been taught in college classrooms and translated into many languages, including French, Spanish, German, Russian and Chinese. Four of his works have been made into television movies. His 1993 novel, A Lesson Before Dying, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Gaines has been a MacArthur Foundation fellow, awarded the National Humanities Medal, and inducted into the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters) as a Chevalier. |
![]() | Gaines, Kevin K. January 15, 1933 Kevin K. Gaines is associate professor of history and African American studies at the University of Michigan. |
![]() | Gomez-Arcos, Agustin January 15, 1933 Agustin Gomez-Arcos (15 January 1933 – 20 March 1998) was a Spanish writer. He was born in Enix, Spain. He studied law but quit university for theater. However, some of his work was banned in Franco's Spain. He emigrated to London in 1966, then to Paris in 1968 and wrote primarily in French, often with themes condemning the fascist Spanish state. He died in Paris of cancer. |
![]() | Grooms, Anthony January 15, 1955 Anthony Tony Grooms was born January 15, 1955, and grew up in Louisa, Virginia. He is the oldest of six children in his African-American family, which also has Native American and European backgrounds. His parents, Robert E. Grooms and Dellaphine Scott, promoted education, so Grooms became a part of the Freedom of Choice plan. He attended a white public school in 1967 consisting of partial integration, and his experience there has had a significant influence on his writing. Graduating in 1978 from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, Anthony Grooms received a Bachelor of Arts in theatre and speech. He strived for a more advanced education and graduated in 1984 from George Mason University with a Masters of Fine Arts in English. He has taught at a variety of schools: Clark State University, University of Georgia, University of Cape Coast in Ghana, West Africa, and Kennesaw State University. Grooms has always been a writer, but he never considered himself one until graduate school. He moved to Atlanta, Georgia, in 1988 after first finishing graduate school and then marrying Pamela B. Jackson. In Atlanta, he found the civil rights movement during the 1960s as a basis for his writing. Grooms is now an instructor teaching creative writing, along with other English and literature courses, at Kennesaw State University outside of Atlanta, Georgia. Grooms has received many awards for his writings: the Lillian Smith Prize for Fiction (twice), the Sokolov Scholarship of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Lamar lectureship of Wesleyan College, and an Arts Administration Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2006, the Georgia Center of the Book chose two of Grooms’ published works, Ice Poems and Trouble No More, for Top 25 List of Books all Georgians should Read. Anthony Grooms is an author of published writings covering a variety of subjects, but his most well-known piece of literature, Bombingham, is a novel addressing issues faced during the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Other works of writing include Ice Poems, an assortment of poems, and Trouble No More, an assortment of short stories. His stories and poems have appeared in leading literary journals including Callaloo, African American Review, and Crab Orchard Review. |
![]() | King, Martin Luther Jr. January 15, 1929 Martin Luther King Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist who became the most visible spokesperson and leader in the civil rights movement from 1954 through 1968. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using the tactics of nonviolence and civil disobedience based on his Christian beliefs and inspired by the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi. King led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and in 1957 became the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). With the SCLC, he led an unsuccessful 1962 struggle against segregation in Albany, Georgia, and helped organize the nonviolent 1963 protests in Birmingham, Alabama. He also helped organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. On October 14, 1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. In 1965, he helped to organize the Selma to Montgomery marches, and the following year he and the SCLC took the movement north to Chicago to work on segregated housing. In his final years he expanded his focus to include opposition towards poverty and the Vietnam War, alienating many of his liberal allies with a 1967 speech titled "Beyond Vietnam". J. Edgar Hoover considered him a radical and made him an object of the FBI's COINTELPRO from 1963 on. FBI agents investigated him for possible communist ties, recorded his extramarital liaisons and reported on them to government officials, and on one occasion mailed King a threatening anonymous letter, which he interpreted as an attempt to make him commit suicide. In 1968, King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., to be called the Poor People's Campaign, when he was assassinated by James Earl Ray on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee; riots followed in many U.S. cities. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was established as a holiday in numerous cities and states beginning in 1971, and as a U.S. federal holiday in 1986. Hundreds of streets in the U.S. have been renamed in his honor, and a county in Washington State was also rededicated for him. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was dedicated in 2011. |
![]() | Heinesen, William January 15, 1900 Andreas William Heinesen (15 January 1900 – 12 March 1991) was a poet, novel writer, short story writer, children's book writer, composer and painter from the Faroe Islands. The Faroese capital Tórshavn is always the centre of Heinesen's writing and he is famous for having once called Tórshavn 'The Navel of the World'. His writing focuses on contrasts between darkness and light, between destruction and creativity. Then following is the existential struggle of man to take sides. This is not always easy, however, and the lines between good and bad are not always clearly defined. Heinesen was captivated by the mysterious part of life, calling himself religious in the broadest sense of the word. His life could be described as a struggle against defeatism with one oft-quoted aphorism of his is that 'life is not despair, and death shall not rule'. As he was born and raised before the Faroese language was taught in the schools, he wrote mainly in Danish but his spoken language was Faroese. All his books are later translated into his native Faroese. He published his first collection of poetry when he was 21 and he had three more published before he wrote his first novel Blæsende gry (Stormy Dawn) in 1934. He read every single one of the chapters to the painter Sámal Joensen-Mikines, as he was worried that his Danish wasn't good enough. That was followed up with Noatún (1938). Noatún has a strong political message – solidarity is the key to a good society. His next book The Black Cauldron (1949) deals with the aftermath of decadent living combined with religious hysteria. In The Lost Musicians (1950) Heinesen leaves the social realism of his earlier works behind, instead giving himself over to straightforward storytelling. Mother Pleiades (1952) is an ode to his imagination. Its subtitle is 'a Story From the Beginning of Time'. Heinesen wasn't content with writing only novels. In the fifties he began writing short stories as well. Most of them have been printed in these three collections entitled The Enchanted light, Gamaliel's Bewitchment and Cure Against Evil Spirits (1969). In the novel The Good Hope, his main character the Rev. Peder Børresen is based on the historical person Rev. Lucas Debes. When Heinesen was asked how long it had taken to write it, he answered 'forty years. But then I did other things in between' |
![]() | Hikmet, Nazim January 15, 1902 Nâz?m Hikmet Ran (15 January 1902 – 3 June 1963), commonly known as Nâz?m Hikmet, was a Turkish poet, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, director and memoirist. He was acclaimed for the 'lyrical flow of his statements'. Described as a 'romantic communist' and 'romantic revolutionary', he was repeatedly arrested for his political beliefs and spent much of his adult life in prison or in exile. His poetry has been translated into more than fifty languages. |
![]() | St. Omer, Garth January 15, 1931 Garth St. Omer was born in Castries, St Lucia, on 15 January 1931. On graduating from St Mary’s College, a Roman Catholic high school for boys in St Lucia, he taught for seven years, 1949—56, in high schools in the Eastern Caribbean. He entered the University College of the West Indies, Jamaica, in 1956 on a UCWI scholarship, and graduated in 1959 with an Honours degree in French, with Spanish as subsidiary subject. Between 1959 and 1961 he taught as an English Language Assistant in lycees in Dax and Albi, France. From 1961 to 1966 he taught French and English at Apam Secondary School, Ghana. The years 1966 to 1969 were devoted to full-time writing of fiction, in England and the West Indies. In 1969 he entered the graduate school of Fine Arts of Columbia University, taking courses in creative writing, translation, film-making, film history and film aesthetics. He graduated in 1971 with the MFA degree. In 1971 he enrolled in the Comparative Literature programme of Princeton University to read for the PhD degree. He successfully completed the requirements in 1975, his dissertation being on THE COLONIAL NOVEL, a comparative study of Albert Camus, V. S. Naipaul and Alejo Carpentier (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms, 1975). In 1975 he joined the English Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara, as Associate Professor, and was subsequently promoted to the rank of full Professor. His awards include a Writing Grant from the Arts Council, London, England (1967), a Columbia University fellowship (1969—71), a Ford Foundation fellowship (1969—73), and a Princeton University fellowship (1971—75). |
![]() | Lasky, Melvin J. (editor) January 15, 1920 Melvin Jonah Lasky (15 January 1920 – 19 May 2004) was an American journalist, intellectual, and member of the anti-Communist left. He founded the German journal Der Monat in 1948 and, from 1958 to 1991, edited Encounter, one of many journals revealed to have been secretly funded by the CIA through the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). From 1950 to 1963, the CIA covertly supported the CCF and a number of its publications, including Encounter. While Lasky did admit he knew of the CIA's role as a funding source prior to its reveal in 1966, rumors that he was a CIA agent have not been substantiated by evidence. In 1947, Lasky wrote an influential document that made the case for a cultural Cold War intended to win over European intellectuals. He was the older brother of Floria Lasky, an influential entertainment lawyer, and Joyce Lasky Reed, the President and founder of the Fabergé Arts Foundation and former Director of European Affairs at the American Enterprise Institute. |
![]() | Mandelstam, Osip January 15, 1891 Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (15 January 1891 – 27 December 1938) was a Russian poet and essayist who lived in Russia during and after its revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. He was one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets. He was arrested by Joseph Stalin's government during the repression of the 1930s and sent into internal exile with his wife Nadezhda. Given a reprieve of sorts, they moved to Voronezh in southwestern Russia. In 1938 Mandelstam was arrested again and sentenced to a camp in Siberia. He died that year at a transit camp. |
![]() | Milton, Giles January 15, 1966 Giles Milton (born 15 January 1966) is a writer who specialises in the history of exploration. His books have been published in seventeen languages worldwide and are international best-sellers. He has written eight works of non-fiction, two comic novels and two books for young children. He is best known for his 1999 best-selling title, Nathaniel's Nutmeg, a historical account of the violent struggle between the English and Dutch for control of the world supply of nutmeg in the early 17th century. |
![]() | Moliere January 15, 1622 baptised Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known by his stage name Molière (1622–1673), was a French playwright and actor who is considered to be one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature. Among Molière's best-known works are The Misanthrope, The School for Wives, Tartuffe, The Miser, The Imaginary Invalid, and The Bourgeois Gentleman. |
![]() | Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph January 15, 1809 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (15 January 1809 – 19 January 1865) was a French politician and the founder of mutualist philosophy. He was the first person to declare himself an anarchist using that term and is widely regarded as one of the ideology's most influential theorists. Proudhon is even considered by many to be the "father of anarchism". He became a member of the French Parliament after the revolution of 1848, whereafter he referred to himself as a federalist. Proudhon, who was born in Besançon, was a printer who taught himself Latin in order to better print books in the language. His best-known assertion is that Property is Theft!, contained in his first major work, What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and Government (Qu'est-ce que la propriété? Recherche sur le principe du droit et du gouvernement), published in 1840. The book's publication attracted the attention of the French authorities. It also attracted the scrutiny of Karl Marx, who started a correspondence with its author. The two influenced each other: they met in Paris while Marx was exiled there. Their friendship finally ended when Marx responded to Proudhon's The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty with the provocatively titled The Poverty of Philosophy. The dispute became one of the sources of the split between the anarchist and Marxist wings of the International Working Men's Association. Some, such as Edmund Wilson, have contended that Marx's attack on Proudhon had its origin in the latter's defense of Karl Grün, whom Marx bitterly disliked, but who had been preparing translations of Proudhon's work. Proudhon favored workers' associations or co-operatives, as well as individual worker/peasant possession, over private ownership or the nationalization of land and workplaces. He considered social revolution to be achievable in a peaceful manner. In The Confessions of a Revolutionary Proudhon asserted that, Anarchy is Order Without Power, the phrase which much later inspired, in the view of some, the anarchist circled-A symbol, today "one of the most common graffiti on the urban landscape." He unsuccessfully tried to create a national bank, to be funded by what became an abortive attempt at an income tax on capitalists and shareholders. Similar in some respects to a credit union, it would have given interest-free loans. Stewart Edwards, Lectuter in Politics at the University of Southampton and Visiting Assistant Professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, has drawn the main points from Proudhons disparate writings over two decades, particularly his notions of the state, economic organization, mutualisnt, history and revolution, and given them a lucid introduction. The translator is Elizabeth Fraser, Lecturer in French at the University of Southampton. |
![]() | Scholefield, Alan January 15, 1931 Alan Scholefield (15 January 1931 - 26 October 2017) was a South African writer famous for his Macrae and Silver series. |
![]() | Silverberg, Robert January 15, 1935 Robert Silverberg (born January 15, 1935) is an American author and editor, best known for writing science fiction. He is a multiple winner of both Hugo and Nebula Awards, a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, and a Grand Master of SF. He attended every Hugo Awards ceremony since the inaugural event in 1953. Silverberg was born in Brooklyn, New York. A voracious reader since childhood, he began submitting stories to science fiction magazines during his early teenage years. He received a BA in English Literature from Columbia University, in 1956. While at Columbia, he wrote the juvenile novel Revolt on Alpha C (1955), published by Thomas Y. Crowell with the cover notice: "A gripping story of outer space". He won his first Hugo in 1956 as the "best new writer". That year Silverberg was the author or co-author of four of the six stories in the August issue of Fantastic, breaking his record set in the previous issue. For the next four years, by his own count, he wrote a million words a year, mostly for magazines and Ace Doubles. He used his own name as well as a range of pseudonyms during this era, and often worked in collaboration with Randall Garrett, who was a neighbour at the time. (The Silverberg/Garrett collaborations also used a variety of pseudonyms, the best-known being Robert Randall.) From 1956 to 1959, Silverberg routinely averaged five published stories a month, and he had over 80 stories published in 1958 alone. In 1959, the market for science fiction collapsed, and Silverberg turned his ability to write copiously to other fields, from historical non-fiction to softcore pornography. "Bob Silverberg, a giant of science fiction... was doing two [books] a month for one publisher, another for a second publisher, and the equivalent of another book for a magazine... He was writing a quarter of a million words a month." In the mid-1960s, science fiction writers were becoming more literarily ambitious. Frederik Pohl, then editing three science fiction magazines, offered Silverberg carte blanche in writing for them. Thus inspired, Silverberg returned to the field that gave him his start, paying far more attention to depth of character development and social background than he had in the past and mixing in elements of the modernist literature he had studied at Columbia. The novels he wrote in this period are considered far superior to his earlier work.[citation needed] Perhaps the first book to indicate the new Silverberg was To Open the Sky, a fixup of stories published by Pohl in Galaxy Magazine, in which a new religion helps people reach the stars. That was followed by Downward to the Earth, a story containing echoes of material from Joseph Conrad's work, in which the human former administrator of an alien world returns after the planet's inhabitants have been set free. Other acclaimed works of that time include To Live Again, in which the memories and personalities of the deceased can be transferred to other people; The World Inside, a look at an overpopulated future; and Dying Inside, a tale of a telepath losing his powers. In the August 1967 issue of Galaxy, Pohl published a 20,000-word novelette called "Hawksbill Station". This story earned Silverberg his first Hugo and Nebula story award nominations. An expanded novel form of Hawksbill Station was published the following year. In 1969 Nightwings was awarded the Hugo for best novella. Silverberg won a Nebula award in 1970 for the short story "Passengers", two the following year for his novel A Time of Changes and the short story "Good News from the Vatican", and yet another in 1975 for his novella "Born with the Dead". After suffering through the stresses of a thyroid malfunction and a major house fire, Silverberg moved from his native New York City to the West Coast in 1972, and he announced his retirement from writing in 1975. In 1980 he returned, however, with Lord Valentine's Castle, a panoramic adventure set on an alien planet, which has become the basis of the Majipoor series—a cycle of stories and novels set on the vast planet Majipoor, a world much larger than Earth and inhabited by no fewer than seven different species of settlers. In a 2015 interview Silverberg said that he did not intend to write any more fiction. Silverberg received a Nebula award in 1986 for the novella Sailing to Byzantium, which takes its name from the poem by William Butler Yeats; a Hugo in 1987 for the novella Gilgamesh in the Outback, set in the Heroes in Hell universe of Bangsian Fantasy; a Hugo in 1990 for Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted Silverberg in 1999, its fourth class of two deceased and two living writers, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America made him its 21st SFWA Grand Master in 2005. Silverberg has been married twice. He and Barbara Brown married in 1956, separated in 1976, and divorced a decade later. Silverberg and science fiction writer Karen Haber married in 1987. They live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Before the age of 30, Silverberg was independently wealthy through his investments and once owned the former mansion of New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. |
![]() | Stajner, Karlo January 15, 1902 Karlo Štajner (15 January 1902 – 1 March 1992) was a Yugoslavian communist activist and author of Austrian origin and a prominent Gulag survivor. Štajner was born in Vienna, where he joined the Communist Youth of Austria, but emigrated to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1922 on the order of the Young Communist International to help the newly established Communist Party of Yugoslavia. After an illegal communist printing house in Zagreb where Štajner worked was searched by the police in 1931, he fled Yugoslavia, visiting Paris, Vienna, and Berlin before finally settling in the Soviet Union in 1932 where he worked in the Comintern publishing house in Moscow. During the Great Purge in 1936, Štajner was arrested and spent the next 17 years in prisons and gulags and three more years in exile in Siberia. He was released in 1956 after being rehabilitated, and returned to Yugoslavia. He spent the rest of his life in Zagreb with his wife Sonya whom he married in Moscow in the 1930s. In 1971, Štajner published a book titled "Seven Thousand Days in Siberia" about his experiences. The book was a bestseller in Yugoslavia and was named the "book of the year 1972" by the Vjesnik newspaper. |
![]() | Benitez, Fernando January 16, 1912 Fernando Benitez (Mexico City, January 16, 1912 - Mexico City, February 21, 2000) was a Mexican journalist, writer, editor, and historian. |
![]() | Benmalek, Anouar January 16, 1956 Anouar Benmalek (January 16, 1956) is a novelist, journalist, mathematician and poet. He was born in Casablanca. After the 1988 riots in Algeria in protest of government policies, he became one of the founders of the Algerian Committee Against Torture. His novel Lovers of Algeria was awarded the Prix Ragid. The novel, The Child of an Ancient People, won the Prix R.F.O. du Liv. Benmalek's work has been described as "elegiac, multilayered meditation on Algeria's violent history." He has been compared to Camus and Faulkner. |
![]() | Burn, Gordon January 16, 1948 Gordon Burn (16 January 1948 - 17 July 2009) was an English writer born in Newcastle upon Tyne and the author of four novels and several works of non-fiction. Burn's novels deal with issues of modern fame and faded celebrity as lived through the media spotlight. His novel Alma Cogan (1991), which imagined the future life of the British singer Alma Cogan had she not died in 1966, won the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel. His other novels, Fullalove and The North of England Home Service, appeared in 1995 and 2003, respectively. His non-fiction deals primarily with sport and true crime. His first book, Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son, was a study of Peter Sutcliffe, 'the Yorkshire Ripper,' and his 1998 book, Happy Like Murderers: The Story of Fred and Rosemary West, dealt in similar detail with two of Britain's most notorious serial killers. Burn's interest in such infamous villains extended to his fiction, with Myra Hindley, one of the 'Moors murderers', featuring prominently in the novel Alma Cogan. His sport-based books are Pocket Money: Inside the World of Snooker (1986) and Best and Edwards: Football, Fame and Oblivion (2006), which deals with the twin stories of Manchester United footballers Duncan Edwards and George Best, and the 'trajectory of two careers unmoored in wildly different ways.' He also wrote a book with British artist Damien Hirst, On the Way to Work, a collection of interviews from various dates between 1992-2001. He contributed to The Guardian regularly, usually writing about contemporary art. Gordon Burn died of bowel cancer in 2009, aged 61. |
![]() | Chion, Michel January 16, 1947 Michel Chion has written many books on the cinema, including a series of groundbreaking works on film sound as well as Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey (BFI, 2001) and two volumes in the BFI Modern Classics series—on Eyes Wide Shut (2002) and The Thin Red Line (2004). |
![]() | Christensen, Inger January 16, 1935 Inger Christensen (16 January 1935 – 2 January 2009) was a Danish poet, novelist, essayist and editor considered the foremost Danish poetic experimentalist of her generation. Born in the town of Vejle, on the eastern, Jutland coast of Denmark, Christensen's father was a tailor, her mother a cook before her marriage. After graduating from Vejle Gymnasium, she moved to Copenhagen and, later, to Århus, studying at the Teachers’ College there. She received her certificate in 1958. During this same period, Christensen began publishing poems in the journal Hvedekorn, and was guided by the noted Danish poet and critic Poul Borum (1934–1995), whom she married in 1959 and divorced in 1976. After teaching at the College for Arts in Holbæk from 1963 to 1964, she turned to writing full-time, producing two of her major early collections, Lys (Light, 1962) and Græs (Grass, 1963), both examining the limits of self-knowledge and the role of language in perception. Her most acclaimed work of the 1960s, however, was It (det), which, on one level, explored social, political and aesthetic issues, but more deeply probed large philosophical questions of meaning. The work, almost incantatory in tone, opposes issues such as fear and love and power and powerlessness. In these years Christensen also published two novels, Evighedsmaskinen (1964) and Azorno (1967), as well as a shorter fiction on the Italian Renaissance painter Mantegna, presented from the viewpoint of various narrators (Mantegna's secretary Marsilio, the Turkish princess Farfalla, and Mantagena's young son), Det malede Værelse (1976, translated into English as The Painted Room by Harvill Press in 2000). Much of Christensen's work was organized upon ‘systemic’ structures in accordance with her belief that poetry is not truth and not even the ‘dream’ of truth, but ‘is a game, maybe a tragic game—the game we play with a world that plays its own game with us.’ In the 1981 poetry collection Alfabet, Christensen used the alphabet (from a [‘apricots’] to n [‘nights’]) along with the Fibonacci mathematical sequence in which the next number is the sum of the two previous ones (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34…). As she explained: ‘The numerical ratios exist in nature: the way a leek wraps around itself from the inside, and the head of a snowflower, are both based on this series.’ Her system ends on the n, suggesting many possible meanings including ‘n’s’ significance as any whole number. As with It, however, despite its highly structured elements this work is a poetically evocative series concerned with oppositions such as an outpouring of the joy of the world counterposed with the fears for and forces poised for its destruction. Sommerfugledalen of 1991 (Butterfly Valley: A Requiem, 2004) explores through the sonnet structure the fragility of life and mortality, ending in a kind of transformation. Christensen also wrote works for children, plays, radio pieces, and numerous essays, the most notable of which were collected in her book Hemmelighedstilstanden (The State of Secrecy) in 2000. In 1978, she was appointed to the Royal Danish Academy; in 1994, she became a member of the Académie Européenne de Poésie (‘European Academy of Poetry’); in 2001, the Akademie der Künste (‘Academy of the Arts’) in Berlin. She won the Grand Prix des Biennales Internationales de Poésie in 1991; She received the Rungstedlund Award in 1991. Der österreichische Staatspreis für Literature (‘Austrian State Prize for European Literature‘) in 1994; in 1994, she won the Swedish Academy Nordic Prize, known as the 'little Nobel'; the European Poetry Prize in 1995; The America Award in 2001; the German Siegfried Unseld award in 2006; and received numerous other distinctions. Her works have been translated into several languages, and she was frequently mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature. DENISE NEWMAN was born in New Jersey, and studied comparative literature at the University of Copenhagen. She is herself a published poet. . Originally published in Danish in 1976 as Det Malede Vaerelse. |
![]() | Christian, Shirley January 16, 1938 Shirley Christian (born January 16, 1938, Pettis County, Missouri, MO) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author. Her most recent book, Before Lewis and Clark: The Story of the Chouteaus, the French Dynasty that Ruled America’s Frontier, was published in April 2004 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Previously, she was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, The Miami Herald and the Associated Press. She lived and worked in numerous countries of Latin America for nearly 20 years, and in New York and Washington, winning the Pulitzer for international reporting in 1981 for articles published in The Miami Herald about the wars in Central America. Her first book, Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family, was published in 1985 by Random House. Shirley Christian was born in a farmhouse in Pettis County, Missouri, and grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, where she attended public schools. She earned a bachelor’s degree in language and literature from Pittsburg (Kan.) State University in 1960 and a master’s degree in international journalism from Ohio State University in 1966. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University during the 1973-74 academic year. In addition to books and her work on newspapers, Shirley Christian has written magazine articles for The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and other publications. She was an adjunct professor of journalism at Columbia University and the University of Kansas. She lives in Kansas City. |
![]() | Dillon, Richard H. January 16, 1924 Richard Hugh Dillon (born January 16, 1924 in Sausalito, California) was a librarian and the author of many articles and books on California, including California trail herd (1961), The legend of Grizzly Adams (1966), Fool's gold: the biography of John Sutter (1967), Humbugs and heroes: a gallery of California pioneers (1970), and Delta country (1982). The collection consists of ca. 300 photographs of old and new San Francisco Chinatown and the Mother Lode country, as well as photostats, captions, and signed mounts. There are also illustrative photographs used in Richard H. Dillon's Hatchet men (1962). |
![]() | Eisner, Pavel January 16, 1889 Pavel Eisner (16 January 1889 – 8 July 1958), also known as Paul Eisner and under the pseudonym Vincy Schwarze, was Czech-German linguist and translator and the author of many studies about Czech language. He is considered one of the most important Czech translators of all time and was said to be proficient in 12 languages - English, French, Icelandic, Italian, Hungarian, German, Norwegian, Persian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, and Tibetan. He produced some of the earliest Czech language translations of Franz Kafka's work. Eisner came from a Jewish family in Prague. He was bilingual from his childhood. He went to college at Prague's German University, where he studied Slavonic, German, and Romance languages and graduated in 1918. He worked as a translator for the Czech Chamber of Commerce and Crafts and, at the same time, edited for the German newspaper, Prager Presse. During this time, he also contributed to several cultural magazines. During the German occupation, he and his wife were persecuted as members of the Jewish community, though he managed to publish a book under the pseudonym, Vincy Schwarze. |
![]() | Guirty, Geraldo January 16, 1906 Geraldo Guirty is a four-generation Saint Thomian. He was born January 16, 1906, a subject of Denmark, and witnessed the transfer of his island country, Saint Thomas, to Uncle Sam. Guirty began his education at Saint Thomas’s Catholic School, finished high school with Rhodes Preparatory, New York City, and graduated from Long Island University. Post-graduate courses were taken at Columbia, the City University, and New York Law School. Guirty has traveled the Orient, the United States, South America, Europe, and the Caribbean. The author has written for the New York Amsterdam News, the Jamaica (West Indies) Daily Gleaner, and the Guyana (South America) Chronicle. Presently he writes for the Virgin Islands Daily News. Guirty is married to Louise Blake. They celebrated their golden anniversary in January 1989. |
![]() | Hutner, Gordon (editor) January 16, 1952 Gordon Hutner is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and founding editor of the journal American Literary History. |
![]() | Karr, Mary January 16, 1955 Mary Karr (born January 16, 1955) is an American poet, essayist and memoirist. She rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. She is the Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University. |
![]() | Kennedy, William January 16, 1928 William Joseph Kennedy (born January 16, 1928) is an American writer and journalist born and raised in Albany, New York, to William J. Kennedy and to Mary E. McDonald. Kennedy was raised a Catholic. Many of his novels feature the interaction of members of the fictional Irish-American Phelan family, and make use of incidents of Albany's history and the supernatural. Kennedy's works include The Ink Truck (1969), Legs (1975), Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (1978), Ironweed (1983, winner of 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; film, 1987), and Roscoe (2002). |
![]() | Leech, Geoffrey January 16, 1936 Geoffrey Neil Leech FBA (16 January 1936 – 19 August 2014) was a specialist in English language and linguistics. He was the author, co-author or editor of over 30 books and over 120 published papers. His main academic interests were English grammar, corpus linguistics, stylistics, pragmatics and semantics. |
![]() | Scammell, Michael January 16, 1935 Michael Scammell is the author of Solzhenitsyn, a Biography, which won the Los Angeles Times and English PEN’s prizes for best biography after its publication. He is the editor of The Solzhenitsyn Files, Unofficial Art from the Soviet Union, and Russia’ s Other Writers, and has translated Nabokov, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and other Russian authors into English. His reviews and articles have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Harpers, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing and translation in the School of the Arts at Columbia University in New York. |
![]() | Soares, Jo January 16, 1938 JO SOARES is one of Brazil’s best-known and most- loved cultural figures. His hugely successful career in television, theater, and film has been supplemented over recent years by his entry into the world of books and journalism with the publication of three works of nonfiction and numerous articles in Brazil. A SAMBA FOR SHERLOCK is his first novel. |
![]() | Sontag, Susan January 16, 1933 Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer and filmmaker, teacher and political activist, publishing her first major work, the essay 'Notes on 'Camp'', in 1964. Her best known works include On Photography, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, The Way We Live Now, Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others, The Volcano Lover and In America. Sontag was active in writing and speaking about, or travelling to, areas of conflict, including during the Vietnam War and the Siege of Sarajevo. She wrote extensively about photography, culture and media, AIDS and illness, human rights, and communism and leftist ideology. Her essays and speeches sometimes drew criticism. The New York Review of Books called her 'one of the most influential critics of her generation.' |
![]() | Tisma, Aleksander January 16, 1924 Aleksandar Tišma (16 January 1924 – 15 February 2003) was a Serbian novelist. Tišma was born in Horgoš, Kanjiža on the present-day border of Serbia and Hungary, to a Serbian father and an Hungarian-speaking Jewish mother. He completed his elementary and middle school education in Novi Sad before going on to study economy and French language and literature in Budapest during World War II, finally graduating in Germanistics from the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philology. From 1945 to 1949 he worked as a journalist for Slobodna Vojvodina and Borba newspapers, and then as editor and redactor at Matica srpska until his retirement in 1982. He became a corresponding member of the Vojvodina Academy of Sciences and Arts (VANU) in 1979 and was promoted into a regular member in 1984, and subsequently became a regular member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) upon their fusion 1992. From 2002, he was also a member of the Academy of Arts, Berlin. Tišma's works were concerned with themes of humanity's search for freedom, and suffering, violence, horror and guilt people encounter along the way. Along with Czes?aw Mi?osz, Danilo Kiš and György Konrád, his works are sometimes classified as part of "Mitteleuropa" literature—dark and contemplative, yet humanistic and thought-provoking. In political affairs, Tišma often publicly supported and acted in favor of pro-democratic movements in Serbia, although he was reluctant to openly join any political organization. In 1993, as a sign of disagreement with Slobodan Miloševi?'s regime and increasing nationalist hysteria in the country, he left Serbia and lived in self-imposed exile in France until 1996. He died in 2003, aged 79, in Novi Sad. His works were translated into 17 languages. Among other awards, he received the Novi Sad October Award, the NIN Award for best novel of the year (for The Use of Man, 1977), the Andri? Award and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (1995). He also translated works of other authors from German and Hungarian into Serbian, notably Imre Kertész's novel Fatelessness. |
![]() | Trambley, Estela Portillo January 16, 1936 Estela Portillo-Trambley (January 16, 1936 - December 1, 1999) was a Chicana poet and playwright. Portillo-Trambley was born on January 16, 1936 in El Paso, Texas. She earned a B.A. and M.A. in English from the University of Texas at El Paso and had a career as a high school teacher from 1957 to 1964, at the El Paso Technical Institute, before dedicating herself to writing. She is the first Chicana to publish a short story collection and the first to write a musical comedy. She was the resident dramatist at El Paso Community College from 1970-75. While there she produced and directed the college's dramatic productions and served as a drama instructor. She died on December 1, 1999. Portillo-Trambley won the 1973 Quinto Sol Award, a literary award presented by Quinto Sol Publications. and in 1985 attained second place in the 1985 New York Shakespeare Festival's Hispanic American playwright's competition for her play Black Light. In 1990 she was named Author of the Pass by the El Paso Herald Post.and was inducted into the El Paso Women's Hall of Fame in 1996. |
![]() | Sobelman, ‘Annah January 16, 1954 Annah Sobelman (1954 - 2017) was born on January 16, 1954 in Los Angeles, CA, to William and Vieanna (Knutson) Sobelman. With an exuberance for life and a laugh that filled the universe, 'Annah accomplished much in life. A graduate of the University of Southern California, she then went on to Pepperdine Law School where she received her JD and taught, and New York University School of Law where she received her JD in Corporate Law. Her true passion however was poetry. She attended the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, and received her MFA from New York University. As a gifted and fearless poet, 'Annah authored The Tulip Sacrament (Wesleyan University Press, 1995) and In The Bee Latitudes (University of California Press, 2013). An extraordinary, encouraging, and enthusiastic teacher, she influenced the lives of many young poets while teaching at the University of Montana in Missoula, St. John's College in Santa Fe, NM, and in private poetry workshops in her home in Taos, NM. In the late '80s she founded and edited The Taos Review. 'Annah loved music, the piano, art, romance, poetry, movies, adventure, nature, fishing, animals and her friends where she acquired many while living in Taos 1988-2003, 2014-2016; Santa Fe 2016-2017, Los Angeles 2011-2014, and her beloved Florence, Italy 2003-2011. |
![]() | Stanford, W. B. January 16, 1910 William Bedell Stanford (16 January 1910 – 30 December 1984) was an Irish classical scholar and senator. He was Regius Professor of Greek at Trinity College, Dublin between 1940 and 1980 and served as the twenty-second Chancellor of the University between 1982 and 1984. He was born in Belfast, the son of a Dublin-born Church of Ireland clergyman who served in Waterford and Tipperary. He was educated at Bishop Foy's School in Waterford, where a special teacher had to be recruited to coach him in Greek. He subsequently won a sizarship to Trinity College. He was elected a Foundation Scholar in his first year at Trinity, having become an undergraduate in October 1928. He also served as Auditor of the College Classical Society. He was editor of TCD: A College Miscellany in Hilary term of 1931. He became a Fellow in 1934 and was one of the last Fellows to be elected by examination. Stanford was one of seven candidates nominated for the Provostship of the University on 11 March 1952 but was eliminated along with two other candidates in the first round of the election. He was considered, at the age of 42, to be too junior. The successful candidate on that occasion was the mathematician, A.J. McConnell, who remained in office for 22 years. |
![]() | Brown, Charles Brockden January 17, 1771 Charles Brockden Brown (January 17, 1771 – February 22, 1810), an American novelist, historian, and editor of the Early National period, is generally regarded by scholars as the most important American novelist before James Fenimore Cooper. He is the most frequently studied and republished practitioner of the 'early American novel,' or the US novel between 1789 and roughly 1820. Although Brown was not the first American novelist, as some early criticism claimed, the breadth and complexity of his achievement as a writer in multiple genres (novels, short stories, essays and periodical writings of every sort, poetry, historiography, reviews) makes him a crucial figure in US literature and culture of the 1790s and first decade of the 19th century, and a significant public intellectual in the wider Atlantic print culture and public sphere of the era of the French Revolution. |
![]() | Calderon de la Barca, Pedro January 17, 1600 Pedro Calderón de la Barca y Barreda González de Henao Ruiz de Blasco y Riaño, usually referred as Pedro Calderón de la Barca (17 January 1600 – 25 May 1681), was a dramatist, poet and writer of the Spanish Golden Age. During certain periods of his life he was also a soldier and a Roman Catholic priest. Born when the Spanish Golden Age theatre was being defined by Lope de Vega, he developed it further, his work being regarded as the culmination of the Spanish Baroque theatre. As such, he is regarded as one of Spain's foremost dramatists and one of the finest playwrights of world literature. |
![]() | Conover, Ted January 17, 1958 Ted Conover (born January 17, 1958, in Okinawa and raised in Denver, Colorado) is an American author and journalist. A graduate of Denver's Manual High School and Amherst College and a Marshall Scholar, he is also a distinguished writer-in-residence in the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University. He teaches graduate courses in the Literary Reportage concentration and an undergraduate course on journalism and empathy. |
![]() | Dance, Daryl Cumber (editor) January 17, 1938 DARYL CUMBER DANCE is the author of HONEY, HUSH! AN ANTHOLOGY OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN’S HUMOR, SHUCKIN AND JIVIN’, FOLKLORE FROM CONTEMPORARY JAMAICANS, LONG GONE, FIFTY CARIBBEAN WRITERS, NEW WORLD ADAMS, and THE LINEAGE OF ABRAHAM. She is a professor at the University of Richmond. |
![]() | Dobles, Fabian January 17, 1918 Fabián Dobles Rodríguez (January 17, 1918 – March 22, 1997) was a Costa Rican writer and left-wing political activist. An author of novels, short stories, poems, and essays, he earned international recognition as an author dealing with the plight of the poor and with social protest. Fabian Dobles was born in 1918 in the small Costa Rican town of San Antonio de Belen, where his father was the local doctor. He read law at the University of Costa Rica, San Jose, and in the 1940s established his reputation as one of Central America’s leading novelists and short-story writers with Aguas turbias, a novel in the Costa Rican vernacular, and Ese que llaman pueblo, both of which attracted comparison with Steinbeck. His short stories have been translated into English, German, and Russian, and his best-known novel, the colorful agrarian saga, El sitio de las Abras, has gone through ten editions. Among Dobles’s many national and international awards is the Magon National Prize for Culture. In 1993 his complete works were published in five volumes by the University of Costa Rica Press/National University Press. Los anos, pequenos dias (YEARS LIKE BRIEF DAYS) was first published in 1989 by Editorial Costa Rica. |
![]() | Franklin, Benjamin January 17, 1706 Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 – April 17, 1790) was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. |
![]() | Morgenroth, Kate January 17, 1972 Kate Morgenroth is the author of the adult thrillers Kill Me First and Saved. She lives in New York City. |
![]() | Mtshali, Oswald Mbuyiseni January 17, 1940 Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali (born 17 January 1940) is a South African poet. He has written in both Zulu and English. He studied at Columbia University. He now lives in Soweto. Mtshali was born in Vryheid, Natal, South Africa. He worked as a messenger in Soweto before becoming a poet, and his first book, Sounds of a Cowhide Drum (1971), explores both the banality and extremity of apartheid through the eyes of working men of South Africa, even while it recalls the energy of those Mtshali frequently calls simply "ancestors". Published with a preface by Nadine Gordimer, Sounds of a Cowhide Drum was one of the first books of poems by a black South African poet to be widely distributed. It provoked considerable debate among the white South African population, but was extremely successful, winning the Olive Schreiner Prize for 1974 and making a considerable profit for its white publisher, Lionel Abrahams.Mtshali's work was popular among white liberals in South Africa, which may have made him less of an icon for other black poets. In a 1978 interview, the poet Keorapetse Kgositsile compares Mtshali's case to the Harlem Renaissance in the United States, a period when the importance of white patronage for black work made the emerging black literature more politically complex. Other critics have praised Mtshali's documentation of the struggle of apartheid; poet Dike Okoro (who was born in 1973, and perhaps has a different generational perspective from Kgosistsile's) has said, "Mtshali stands out for the role of addressing oppression and its effects. . . fear as an element of craft and theme predominates." Mtshali's second book, Fireflames (1980), is far more militant, often expressly promising revolution. After his success as a poet, Mtshali became an educator. He was vice-principal of Pace College, a commercial school in Soweto. He taught at the New York City College of Technology. |
![]() | Sanchez, Florencio January 17, 1875 Florencio Sánchez (January 17, 1875 – November 7, 1910) was a Uruguayan playwright, journalist and political figure. He is considered one of the founding fathers of theater in the River Plate region of Argentina and Uruguay. Sanchez was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1875. Though he had little formal schooling, he read widely and began writing early. Later he established himself as a capable, often satirical, journalistic chronicler. His interest in social problems motivated his affiliation with the Centro Internacional de Estudios Sociales. Among the activities of this group was the production of plays of social protest in Spanish and Italian, which afforded Sanchez an occasion for practical theatrical experience. Eventually fixing his residence in Buenos Aires, he led a disorganized, bohemian life, eking out a meagre living as a journalist and clerk, his health progressively undermined by tuberculosis. In a desperate attempt to recover his health, Sanchez undertook a trip to Europe, only to die in Milan, Italy, in 1910, barely a year after his departure from Buenos Aires. During a six-year period in Buenos Aires, Florencio Sanchez created the dramatic works which have assured him immortality. From 1903 to 1909 he wrote some twenty plays, which may be broadly divided into rural and urban dramas. The first category, which includes the author’s best works, began with M’hijo el dotor (1903). The theme is the conflict between two generations, represented by the noble, conservative old gaucho, and his book-educated son. In La grin ga, the dramatic conflict is between the progressive foreigner, or grin go, and the tradition-bound criollo, whose self- reliant virtues no longer blind Sanchez to the fact that his kind is doomed to extinction. Barranca abajo, the most skillfully constructed of Sanchez’s plays, is a stark rural tragedy depicting the decadence of a gaucho family. The year 1905 saw the first performance of this drama and marked a turning point in the author’s creative activity. Thenceforth Sanchez turned his attention toward the spectacle of urban life in Buenos Aires (El desalojo, La tigra, Moneda falsa, etc.). The native idealistic bent of Sanchez’s character and his experience in life combined to infuse a reforming and sociological quality into his dramatic output. He deals repeatedly with the deterioration of the gaucho, the latter’s conflict with the immigrant, family problems, the social evils of poverty and alcoholism, never losing sight of the imperative need for tolerance on all sides. He captures his scenes with a photographic realism which is particularly apparent in an astonishingly accurate reproduction of popular speech. Naturally sympathetic toward his fellow man, and especially so in regard to the poor and oppressed, Sanchez absorbed the literary techniques of the day -notably those of Ibsen and Naturalism - and applied them to the panorama of life in the River Plate. In doing this, he became not only the founder of the modern Argentine theatre but the first Latin American dramatist of unmistakable originality. |
![]() | Young, Alfred F. January 17, 1925 Alfred Fabian "Al" Young (January 17, 1925, New York City, NY - November 6, 2012, Durham, NC) was an American historian. Young is regarded as a pioneer in the writing of the social history of the American Revolution and was a founding editor of the academic journal Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas. |
![]() | Stafford, William January 17, 1914 William Edgar Stafford (January 17, 1914 – August 28, 1993) was an American poet and pacifist, and the father of poet and essayist Kim Stafford. He was appointed the twentieth Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1970. Vincent Wixon, scholar in the William Stafford Archives, is the author of three books of poetry: Blue Moon, The Square Grove, and Seed. He has coproduced documentary films on Lawson Inada and William Stafford. His article written with Paul Merchant, ‘William Stafford and His First Publishers: The Making of West of Your City and Traveling through the Dark,’ can be read on the Stafford Archives website. |
![]() | Obama, Michelle January 17, 1964 Michelle Robinson Obama served as First Lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, Mrs. Obama started her career as an attorney at the Chicago law firm Sidley & Austin, where she met her future husband, Barack Obama. She later worked in the Chicago mayor’s office, at the University of Chicago, and at the University of Chicago Medical Center. Mrs. Obama also founded the Chicago chapter of Public Allies, an organization that prepares young people for careers in public service. The Obamas currently live in Washington, DC, and have two daughters, Malia and Sasha. |
![]() | Arguedas, Jose Maria January 18, 1911 José María Arguedas Altamirano (18 January 1911 – 28 November 1969) was a Peruvian novelist, poet, and anthropologist. Arguedas was a mestizo of Spanish and Quechua descent who wrote novels, short stories, and poems in both Spanish and Quechua. Generally remembered as one of the most notable figures of 20th century Peruvian literature, Arguedas is especially recognized for his intimate portrayals of indigenous Andean culture. Key in his desire to depict indigenous expression and perspective more authentically was his creation of a new language that blended Spanish and Quechua and premiered in his debut novel Yawar Fiesta. Jose Maria Arguedas was born in Andahuaylas, a province in the southern Peruvian Andes. He was born into a well-off mestizo family, but his mother died when he was two years old. Because of the absence of his father, a lawyer who travelled frequently, and his bad relationship with his step-mother and step-brother, he comforted himself in the care of the family's indigenous servants, allowing him to immerse himself in the language and customs of the Andes, which came to form an important part of his personality. He went to primary school in San Juan de Lucana, Puquio, and Abancay, and completed his secondary studies in Ica, Huancayo, and Lima. He began studying at The University of San Marcos (Lima) in 1931; there he graduated with a degree in Literature. He later took up studies in Ethnology, receiving his degree in 1957 and his doctorate in 1963. Between 1937 and 1938 he was sent to prison for his protesting an envoy sent to Peru by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Arguedas also worked for the Ministry of Education, where he into practice his interests in preserving and promoting Peruvian culture, in particular traditional Andean music and dance. He was the director of the Casa de la Cultura (1963) and Director of the National Museum of History (1964–1966). Arguedas shot himself in the head on November 29, 1969 in his office at the Agrarian University in La Molina, leaving behind very specific instructions for his funeral, a diary depicting his depression, and a final unfinished manuscript, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (The Fox From Up Above and the Fox From Down Below). This work includes portions of Arguedas’ diary, memories of his distressing childhood, thoughts on Peruvian culture, and his reasons for suicide. He depicts his struggle between his desire to authentically illuminate the life of the Andean Indians and his personal anguish trapping him in depression. The title of the book originates in a Quechua myth that Arguedas translated into Spanish earlier in his life. ‘El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo’ refers to the Quechua symbols for life and death, and modernity and tradition. Arguedas began his literary career by writing short stories about the indigenous environment familiar to him from his childhood. He wrote in a Spanish highly influenced by Quechua syntax and vocabulary. By the time he published his first novel in 1941, Yawar Fiesta (‘Blood Festival’), he had begun to explore the theme that would interest him for the rest of his career: the clash between Western ‘civilization’ and the indigenous, ‘traditional’ way of life. He was thus considered part of the Indigenista movement in South American literature, and continued to explore this theme in his next two books Los Ríos Profundos (‘Deep Rivers’) (1958) and Todas las Sangres (1964). Yet he also was conscious of the simplistic portrayal of the indigenous peoples in other Indigenista literature and worked hard to give the Andean Indians a true voice in his works. This effort was not always successful as some critics contend that Arguedas portrayed Indian characters as too gentle and childlike. Another theme in Arguedas' writing is the struggle of mestizos of Indian-Spanish descent and their navigation between the two seemingly separate parts of their identity. Many of his works also depicted the violence and exploitation of race relations in Peru's small rural towns and haciendas, Arguedas was moderately optimistic about the possibility of a rapprochement between the forces of ‘tradition’ and the forces of ‘modernity’ until the 1960s, when he became more pessimistic. In his last (unfinished) work, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (‘The Fox From Up Above and the Fox From Down Below’) (1969), he abandoned the realism of his earlier works for a more postmodern approach. This novel expressed his despair, caused by his fear that the 'primitive' ways of the Indians could not survive the onslaught of modern technology and capitalism. At the same time that Arguedas was becoming more pessimistic about race relations in his country, younger indigenist intellectuals became increasingly militant, often criticizing his work in harsh terms for his poetic, romanticized treatment of indigenous and rural life. |
![]() | Hall, Calvin S. January 18, 1909 CALVIN S. HALL (January 18, 1909, Seattle, WA - April 4, 1985, Santa Cruz County, California, CA) was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1909 and educated in the public schools there. He attended the University of Washington and then the University of California at Berkeley where he received his bachelor’s degree in 1930 and his Ph.D. in psychology in 1933. He was an instructor at the University of California and was then appointed assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon where he remained for three years. In 1937 he was appointed associate professor and chairman of the Division of Psychology at Western Reserve University. In 1940 he was promoted to a professorship, and until 1951 served as chairman of the department. Professor Hall is the author of THE MEANING OF DREAMS and has contributed chapters to such books as the HANDBOOK OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, the HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY, YOU AND MARRIAGE, and READINGS IN CHILD DEVELOPMENT. He has also published a number of research articles in the professional psychology journals. Professor Hall’s principal interests in psychology are personality theory and research. He is married, has a daughter, and resides in Mayfield Village, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. |
![]() | Dario, Ruben January 18, 1867 Félix Rubén García Sarmiento (January 18, 1867 – February 6, 1916), known as Rubén Darío, was a Nicaraguan poet who initiated the Spanish-American literary movement known as modernismo (modernism) that flourished at the end of the 19th century. Darío has had a great and lasting influence on 20th-century Spanish literature and journalism. He has been praised as the ‘Prince of Castilian Letters’ and undisputed father of the modernismo literary movement. |
![]() | Dourado, Autran January 18, 1926 Waldomiro Freitas Autran Dourado (1926 – September 30, 2012) was a Brazilian novelist. Dourado was born in Patos de Minas, state of Minas Gerais. Going against current trends in Brazilian literature, Dourado's works display much concern with literary form, with many obscure words and expressions. Minas Gerais is the setting for most of Dourado's books, resembling the early to mid-20th century regionalist trend in Brazilian literature. Most literary critics consider Dourado's work to have similarities to Baroque literature. In 1981, Dourado won the prestigious Goethe Prize. In 2000, Dourado won the Camões Prize, the most important literary prize in the Portuguese sprachraum. In 2001, Brazilian filmmaker Suzana Amaral released the film Uma Vida em Segredo. It was based on the novel of same title by Autran Dourado. Dourado died of stomach bleeding on September 30, 2012, in Rio de Janeiro. He was 86 years old. |
![]() | Konadu, Asare January 18, 1932 Samuel Asare Konadu (18 January 1932 – 1994) was a Ghanaian journalist, novelist and publisher, who also wrote under the pseudonym Kwabena Asare Bediako. Born in Asamang, Ashanti Region, Gold Coast, Asare Konadu attended local primary and middle schools before studying at Abuakwa State College. In 1956 he was sent abroad by the government to study in London and at Strasbourg University, joining the Ghana News Agency on his return to Ghana in 1957 Konadu's narrative strategy is considered unique among his Ghanaian contemporaries at the time that three stylistic features were notable in Ghanaian prose fiction. According to Charles Angmor, one being the "simple plot with simple character" and the other being the "intricate plot and character". The third was identified as "a very simple plot and a very simple characterization, with a didactic moral twist". Konadu's works contained two or more of these strategies. Konadu started his own publishing company after the overthrow of Ghana's first president Kwame Nkrumah in 1966. Before that, he had already written and published two books, one of which was called Come Back Dora (1966) sold fifty thousand copies brought him into the limelight. Konadu's works draw on Ghanaian rural life and traditional practices of mostly Akan culture. He wrote a few popular fiction works under his Kwabena Asare Bediako pseudonym. |
![]() | Milne, A. A. January 18, 1882 A. A. Milne (1882-1956) was a playwright and journalist as well as an author and storyteller. Ernest H. Shepard (1879-1976) was a cartoonist and illustrator. |
![]() | Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat January 18, 1689 Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (18 January 1689 – 10 February 1755), generally referred to as simply Montesquieu, was a French lawyer, man of letters, and political philosopher who lived during the Age of Enlightenment. He is famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers, which is implemented in many constitutions throughout the world. |
![]() | Morgan, Sally January 18, 1951 Sally Jane Morgan (born 18 January 1951) is an Australian Aboriginal author, dramatist, and artist. Morgan's works are on display in numerous private and public collections in both Australia and around the world. |
![]() | O hEithir, Breandan January 18, 1930 Breandan O hEithir (1930–1990) was an Irish writer and broadcaster. He was born in Inishmore, County G was born on Inishmore in the Aran Islands, Co. Gaiway, and is the nephew of the author Liam O’Flaherty. He has worked as a fisherman in England, an itinerant bookseller, a publisher’s editor and as the Gaelic Editor on the Irish Press, Dublin. He has also lived in Germany for two years as a freelance writer and broadcaster. Mr O hEithir was also a weekly columnist with the Irish Times and a reporter and scriptwriter with Radio Telefis Eireann. |
![]() | Roget, Peter Mark January 18, 1779 Peter Mark Roget (18 January 1779 – 12 September 1869) was a British physician, natural theologian and lexicographer. He is best known for publishing, in 1852, the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (Roget's Thesaurus), a classified collection of related words. |
![]() | Rosen, Charley January 18, 1941 Charles Elliot "Charley" Rosen is an American author and former basketball coach. From 1983–1986, he was an assistant to Phil Jackson with the Albany Patroons of the Continental Basketball Association. |
![]() | Rottensteiner, Franz (editor) January 18, 1942 Franz Rottensteiner (born 18 January 1942) is an Austrian publisher and critic in the fields of science fiction and speculative fiction in general. Rottensteiner was born in Waidmannsfeld, Lower Austria. He studied journalism, English and history at the University of Vienna, receiving his doctorate in 1969. He served about fifteen years as librarian and editor at the Österreichisches Institut für Bauforschung in Vienna. In addition, he produced a number of translations into German of leading science fiction authors, including Herbert W. Franke, Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick, Abe K?b?, Cordwainer Smith, Brian W. Aldiss and the Strugatski brothers. In 1973 his anthology of science fiction View From Another Shore, published in the USA by Seabury Press, introduced a number of European authors to the English-reading public. Selected authors included Stanislaw Lem, Josef Nesvadba, Gerard Klein, Lino Aldani and Jean-Pierre Andrevon. The year 1975 saw the start of his series Die phantastischen Romane. For seven years it re-published works of both lesser- and better-known writers as well as new ones, ending with a total of 28 volumes. In the years 1979-1985 he brought out translations of H. G. Wells's works in an eighteen volumes series. Rottensteiner provoked some controversy with his negative assessment of American science fiction; "what matters is the highest achievements, and there the US has yet to produce a figure comparable to H.G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, Karel ?apek or Stanis?aw Lem." Rottensteiner described Roger Zelazny, Barry N. Malzberg, and Robert Silverberg as producing "travesties of fiction" and stated "Asimov is a typical non-writer, and Heinlein and Anderson are just banal". However, Rottensteiner praised Philip K. Dick, listing him as one of "the greatest SF writers". From 1980 through 1998 he was advisor for Suhrkamp Verlag's Phantastische Bibliothek, which brought out some three hundred books. In all, he has edited about fifty anthologies, produced two illustrated books (The Science Fiction Book (1975) und The Fantasy Book (1978)) as well as working on numerous reference works on science fiction. His close association with and promotion of Lem until 1995 was a factor in the recognition of the latter in the United States. Rottensteiner has been the editor of Quarber Merkur, the leading German language critical journal of science fiction, since 1963. In 2004, on the occasion of the hundredth number of this journal, he was awarded a special Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis. |
![]() | Schmidt, Arno January 18, 1914 Arno Schmidt (18 January 1914 - 3 June 1979) was a German author and translator. Born in Hamburg, son of a police constable, Schmidt moved with his widowed mother to Lauban (in Lusatia, then Lower Silesia, now Polish) and visited the secondary school in Görlitz. He then worked as a clerk in a textile company in Greiffenberg. At the outset of World War II in 1939, Schmidt was drafted into the Wehrmacht. He first served in Alsace and after 1941 in fairly quiet Norway. In 1945, Schmidt volunteered for active duty at the front in Northern Germany in order to be granted a brief home visit, as was the custom. He used that visit to organize a defection from Lusatia westwards for him and his wife, in order to evade capture by the Red Army, which was famed for its abuse of prisoners of war (POW) and German civilians in the east, and gave himself up to British forces in the German province of Lower Saxony. After an interlude as an English POW and later as an interpreter at a police school, Schmidt started his future life as a freelance writer during the time of wandering that followed the war. Since Schmidt's pre-war home in Lauban was in the part of Germany placed under Polish administration after the war, Schmidt became part of the throng of refugees moved by the authorities from village to village in West Germany. This included stints in Cordingen (in the Bomlitz county of Lower Saxony), Gau-Bickelheim, and Kastel (both in the newly formed province of Rhineland-Palatinate). In Kastel, he was accused in court of blasphemy and moral subversion, which was then still prosecuted in the Catholic parts of West Germany. As a result, Schmidt and his wife moved to the Protestant city of Darmstadt in Hesse, where the suit against him was dismissed. In 1958, the Schmidts moved to the small village of Bargfeld (near Celle) in Lower Saxony, where they were to stay (cf. Martynkewicz 1992). Schmidt was a strict individualist, almost a solipsist. Disaffected by his experience of the Third Reich, he had an extremely pessimistic world view. In Schwarze Spiegel, he describes his utopia as an empty world after an anthropogenic apocalypse. Although he was a strict atheist, he maintained that the world was created by a monster called Leviathan, whose predatory nature was passed on to humans. Still, he thought this monster could not be too powerful to be attacked, if it behooved humanity. His writing style is characterized by a unique and witty style of adapting colloquial language, which won him quite a few fervent admirers. Moreover, he developed an orthography by which he thought to reveal the true meaning of words and their connections amongst each other. One of the most cited examples is the use of ‘Roh=Mann=Tick’ instead of ‘Romantik’ (revealing romanticism as the craze of unsubtle men). The atoms of words holding the nuclei of original meaning he called Etyme (etyms). His theory of etyms is developed in his magnum opus, Zettels Traum, in which an elderly writer comments on Edgar Allan Poe's works in a stream of consciousness, while discussing a Poe translation with a couple of translators and flirting with their teenage daughter. Schmidt also accomplished a translation of Edgar Allan Poe's works himself (1966–73, together with Hans Wollschläger). In the 1960s, he authored a series of plays for German radio stations presenting forgotten or little known and - in his opinion - vastly underrated authors, as e.g. Johann Gottfried Schnabel, Karl Philipp Moritz, Leopold Schefer, Karl Ferdinand Gutzkow, et al. These ‘plays’ are basically talks about literature with two or three participants plus voices for quotations (Schmidt lent his voice for his translations of FINNEGANS WAKE quoted in Der Triton mit dem Sonnenschirm [1961]). 11 of these so called ‘Radio-Essays’ were republished on 12 audio CDs in the year 2003. As none of his works sold more than a few thousand copies, he lived in extreme poverty. During the last few years of his life, Arno Schmidt was financially supported by the philologist and writer Jan Philipp Reemtsma, the heir of the German cigarette manufacturer Philipp F. Reemtsma. After a stroke, Arno Schmidt died in a hospital at Celle. The Arno Schmidt Foundation (Arno Schmidt Stiftung) in Bargfeld, dotated by Jan Philipp Reemtsma, is publishing his complete works. The US entrepreneur and technology writer Dave Winer is a grandnephew of Arno Schmidt. Dalkey Archive Press will be reissuing their four-volume series of Schmidt's work translated by John E. Woods in April 2011. The series includes COLLECTED NOVELLAS, COLLECTED STORIES, NOBODADDY'S CHILDREN, and TWO NOVELS. The reissues are scheduled to coincide with ‘Rediscovering Arno Schmidt events in the US, UK, and continental Europe.’. |
![]() | Stamm, Peter January 18, 1963 PETER STAMM was born on January 18, 1963 in Weinfelden, Switzerland. He is the author of the novel, AGNES (1998), and numerous short stories and radio plays. MICHAEL HOFMANN has translated the works of many German writers, including Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, and Peter Stephan Jungk. He is also the author of four books of poetry, most recently APPROXIMATELY NOWHERE, and a book of essays, BEHIND THE LINES. |
![]() | Simatupang, Iwan January 18, 1928 Iwan Martua Dongan Simatupang (January 18, 1928, North Sumatra, Indonesia - August 4, 1970, Jakarta, Indonesia was born in 1928 in Sibolga, north Sumatra. He took part in the 1945 to 1949 Indonesian Revolution against the Dutch, and was captured in March 1949. After the Revolution, he studied medicine in Surabaya, anthropology and drama in Holland, and philosophy in Paris. He returned to Indonesia in 1961. Shortly after his return, he completed Ziarah (Jakarta, 1969) which was published in the Writing in Asia series as The Pilgrim in 1975 and which in 1978 was honoured with the first ASEAN Literary Award for the Novel. Drought was first published in 1972 in Jakarta under the title Kering. His other novels are Merahnya Merah (The Redness of Red, Jakarta 1968) and Kooong, The Story of a Pigeon (Jakarta 1975). Iwan Simatupang died in 1970. Iwan Simatupang is regarded as a major innovator in the field of the Indonesian novel. He challenged traditional concepts of plot and characterisation. His novels are marked by his razor-sharp sense of humour. The panel for the First ASEAN Literary Awards described The Pilgrim as confronting 'the crisis of sensitivity, represented by the archetypal searcher, in the modern world’ and as 'a courageous and poignant portrayal of the human condition.’ Harry Aveling (Swami Anand Haridas), the translator of both Drought and The Pilgrim, is Dean of the School of Human Communication, Murdoch University, Perth, and is a noted translator of modern Indonesian and Malay literature. Other translations by Harry Aveling in the Writing in Asia series are The Fugitive by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Srengenge and Al and Other Stories by Shahnon Ahmad and From Surabaya to Armageddon: Indonesian Short Stories. Forthcoming are Sri Sumarah and Other Stories by Umar Kayam, Lazy River by A. Samad Said, Kooong by Iwan Simatupang and The Prince of Mount Tahan by Ishak Haji Muhammad. |
![]() | Laboulaye, Edouard January 18, 1811 Édouard René Lefèbvre de Laboulaye (18 January 1811 – 25 May 1883) was a French jurist, poet, author and anti-slavery activist. In 1865 he originated the idea of a monument presented by the French people to the United States that resulted in the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. He got the idea thinking that this would help strengthen their relationship with the United States. Laboulaye was received at the bar in 1842, and was chosen professor of comparative law at the Collège de France in 1849. Following the Paris Commune of 1870, he was elected to the national assembly, representing the departement of the Seine. As secretary of the committee of thirty on the constitution he was effective in combatting the Monarchists in establishing the Third Republic. In 1875, he was elected a life senator, and in 1876 he was appointed administrator of the Collège de France, resuming his lectures on comparative legislation in 1877. Laboulaye was also chairman of the French Anti-Slavery Society. Laboulaye was president of the Société d'économie politique. Always a careful observer of the politics of the United States, and an admirer of its constitution, he wrote a three-volume work on the political history of the United States, and published it in Paris during the height of the politically repressed Second Empire. During the American Civil War, he was a zealous advocate of the Union cause and the abolition of slavery, publishing histories of the cultural connections of the two nations. At the war's conclusion in 1865, he became president of the French Emancipation Committee that aided newly freed slaves in the U.S. The same year he had the idea of presenting a statue representing liberty as a gift to the United States, a symbol for ideas suppressed by Napoleon III. The sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, one of Laboulaye's friends, turned the idea into reality. Jack Zipes is the editor of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (both Princeton), as well as The Great Fairy Tale Tradition (Norton). He is professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota. |
![]() | Barnes, Julian January 19, 1946 Julian Patrick Barnes (born 19 January 1946) is a contemporary English writer. Barnes won the Man Booker Prize for his book The Sense of an Ending (2011), and three of his earlier books had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: Flaubert's Parrot (1984), England, England (1998), and Arthur & George (2005). He has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh (his late wife's surname), though has published nothing under that name for more than twenty-five years. In addition to novels, Barnes has published collections of essays and short stories. He was selected as the recipient of the 2011 David Cohen Prize for Literature. Barnes has also won several literary prizes in France, including the Prix Médicis for Flaubert's Parrot and the Prix Femina for Talking It Over. Previously an Officier of L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, in 2004 he became a Commandeur of L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His honors also include the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Shakespeare Prize, the San Clemente literary prize, and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He received the Europese Literatuurprijs in 2012. |
![]() | Bernardin De Saint-Pierre,Jacques-Henri January 19, 1737 Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (also called Bernardin de St. Pierre) (19 January 1737 Le Havre – 21 January 1814 Éragny, Val-d'Oise) was a French writer and botanist. He is best known for his 1788 novel Paul et Virginie, now largely forgotten, but in the 19th century a very popular children's book. |
![]() | Danticat, Edwidge January 19, 1969 Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including BREATH, EYES, MEMORY, KRIK? KRAK!, a National Book Award finalist, THE FARMING OF BONES, an American Book Award winner, and THE DEW BREAKER, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the first Story Prize. She lives in Miami with her husband and daughter. |
![]() | Goodfellow, Peter January 19, 1919 Alan Peter Goodfellow was born on January 19 1919 at Bideford, Devon, and educated at Aldenham before being apprenticed at AV Roe's aircraft factory. Preferring the outdoor life, however, he went to work on an uncle's farm in Oxfordshire, and started to fly gliders with his father. A member of the Royal Flying Corps as a teenager, his father had shared a tent with Albert Ball, the fighter pilot VC, and was a founding member of the RAF in 1918. He, his sister and brother held pilot's licenses in the 1930s; and on the outbreak of war young Peter, his brother Norman (who flew in 804 and 880 squadrons) and their father all volunteered for the Fleet Air Arm. After coming out of the Navy Peter Goodfellow studied agriculture at Reading University, then managed a farm in the Waveney Valley before starting work as a buyer for Walls Meats, covering the east of England from a base at Saxmundham, Suffolk. When Walls was reorganised, Goodfellow quickly found a similar job dealing with fruit farmers for the banana company Geest. His keen interest in wildlife led him to start collecting books on the subject, a hobby which consumed the last 40 years of his life, and he used his business travels as an opportunity to haunt the bookshops of East Anglia. He acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of books about birds and corresponded widely with other collectors. In 2000 he displayed rare items from his private collection at an exhibition in Norwich. Goodfellow dealt in books, under the name Carlton Books, and the Inland Revenue twice accused him of running a business rather than pursuing a hobby. On each occasion he was able to show that on ordinary accounting principles he was making a loss, and that – were he a business – they would owe him money. No lover of bureaucracy or officialdom, he was rather pleased with these victories.Peter Goodfellow is a retired English teacher and lifelong birdwatcher. His books include Birds as Builders and Birds of Britain: The Identification Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe. |
![]() | Highsmith, Patricia January 19, 1921 Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, Patricia Highsmith spent much of her adult life in Switzerland and France. Educated at Barnard College, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek, she had her first novel, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, published in 1950 and saw it quickly made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock. Despite receiving little recognition in her native land during her lifetime, Highsmith, the author of more than twenty books, won the O. Henry Memorial Award, The Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de Littérarure Policière, and the Award of the Crime Writers’ Association of Great Britain. She died in Switzerland in 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne. |
![]() | Macbeth, George January 19, 1932 George Mann MacBeth (19 January 1932 – 16 February 1992) was a Scottish poet and novelist. He was born in Shotts, Lanarkshire. When he was three, his family moved to Sheffield. He was educated in Sheffield at King Edward VII School where he was Head Prefect in 1951 (photo), before going up to New College, Oxford, with an Open Scholarship in Classics. He joined BBC Radio on graduating in 1955 from the University of Oxford. He worked there, as a producer of programmes on poetry, notably for the BBC Third Programme, until 1976. He was a member of The Group. He resigned from the BBC to take up novel writing; he introduced a series of thrillers involving the spy, Cadbury. In his later post-BBC years, after divorcing his first wife, he married the novelist Lisa St Aubin de Terán, by whom he had a child, Alexander Morton George MacBeth. After a divorce, he moved with his new wife, Penny, to Ireland to live at Moyne Park, Abbeyknockmoy, near Tuam in County Galway. A few months later, George MacBeth was diagnosed as suffering from motor neurone disease, of which he died in early 1992. In the last poetry he wrote, MacBeth provides an anatomy of a cruel disease and the destruction it caused two people deeply in love. Penny and George had two children, Diana ('Lally') Francesca Ronchetti MacBeth and George Edward Morton Mann MacBeth. Poems from Oby (1982) was a Choice of the Poetry Book Society; Oby is a Norfolk village. He received a Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for his work. He died in Tuam, County Galway, Ireland. |
![]() | MacNeil, Robert January 19, 1931 Robert Breckenridge Ware "Robin" MacNeil, OC (born January 19, 1931) is a Canadian-American novelist, and retired television news anchor and journalist who partnered with Jim Lehrer to create The MacNeil/Lehrer Report in 1975. |
![]() | Massaquoi, Hans J. January 19, 1926 Hans-Jürgen Massaquoi (January 19, 1926 – January 19, 2013) was a German-American journalist and author. He was born in Hamburg, Germany, to a white German mother and Liberian Vai father, the grandson of Momulu Massaquoi, the consul general of Liberia in Germany at the time. His grandfather Momolu as king of the Gallinas in 1905. In his autobiography, Destined to Witness, Massaquoi describes his childhood and youth in Hamburg during the Nazi rise to power. His biography provides a unique point of view: he was one of very few German-born children of German and African descent in all of Nazi Germany. He was often shunned, but miraculously escaped Nazi persecution. This duality remained a key theme throughout his early life until he witnessed racism as practiced in colonial Africa and later in Jim Crow USA. Massaquoi enjoyed a relatively happy childhood with his mother, Bertha Baetz, who had arrived to Hamburg from Nordhausen and earlier from Ungfrungen. His father, Al-Haj Massaquoi, was a law student in Dublin, who only occasionally lived with the family at the consul general home in Hamburg. Eventually his grandfather, the first African posted to the diplomatic corps in Europe, was recalled to Liberia, and Hans Massaquoi and his mother remained in Germany. The early adaptability of the young Massaquoi was remarkable. He was not aware of any other mixed race children in Hamburg, and like most German children his age, he was lured by Nazi propaganda into thinking that joining the Hitler Youth was an exciting adventure of fanfare and games. There was a school contest to see if a class could get a 100% membership of the Deutsches Jungvolk (a subdivision of Hitler Youth), and Massaquoi's teacher devised a chart on the blackboard which showed who had joined and who had not. As the chart was filled in after each person joined, Massaquoi was pointedly the sole student left out. He recalled saying, "But I am German ... my Mother says I'm German just like anybody else". His later attempt to join his friends by registering at the nearest Jungvolk office was also met with contempt. Massaquoi's denial of this rite of passage reinforced his perception of being ostracized due to being deemed "Non-Aryan" despite his German birth and mostly traditional German upbringing after his grandfather returned to Liberia. After the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935, Massaquoi was officially classified as non-Aryan. As such, though highly capable and would have been eligible had he not been bi-racial, he was barred from pursuing educational advancement leading to a professional career and instead was forced by the Nazis to embark on an apprenticeship as a laborer. A few months before completing school, Massaquoi was required to go to a government-run job center where his assigned vocational counselor was Herr von Vett, a member of the SS. Upon seeing the "telltale black SS insignia of dual lightning bolts in the lapel of his civilian suit", Massaquoi expected humiliation. Instead, he was surprised when he was greeted with "a friendly wink", offered a seat and asked to present something which he had made. After showing Von Vett an axe and discussing his experience in working for a local blacksmith shop, Massaquoi was informed that he could "be of great service to Germany one day" because there would be a great demand for technically trained Germans, who would go to Africa to train and develop an African workforce when Germany reclaimed its African colonies. Before Massaquoi left the interview, Von Vett invited him to shake his hand, an unusual move not in keeping with other Nazi officials Massaquoi had encountered outside of his neighborhood. Though barred from dating Aryans, Massaquoi courted a white girl, but they had to keep their relationship a secret, especially as her father was a member of the police and the SS. Such relationships were forbidden and classified as Rassenschande (race defilement) by the race laws. To keep the relationship secret, they met only in the evenings, when they would go for walks. As he dropped his girlfriend off at her house one night, he was stopped by a member of the SD, the intelligence branch of the SS. He was taken to the police station as he was believed to be "on the prowl for defenceless women or looking for an opportunity to steal". Fortunately for Massaquoi, he was recognised by a police officer as living in the area and working: "This young man is an apprentice at Lindner A.G., where he works much too hard to have enough energy left to prowl the streets at night looking for trouble. I happen to know that because the son of one of my colleagues apprentices with him". The SD officer closed the case and gave the Nazi salute, and Massaquoi was allowed to leave the station. Increasingly as he matured, Massaquoi came to despise Hitler and Nazism. His skin color made him a target for racist abuse. He was often targeted by Nazi employers, denied citizenship and was excluded from serving in the German army during World War II. As unemployment, hunger and poverty grew rampant, he tried to enlist, but he was once again abusively castigated and rejected by Nazi officers. During the period following the Allies near destruction of Hamburg, he befriended the family of Ralph Giordano, a half-Jewish acquaintance of the surreptitious Swing Kids jazz devotees. The Giordanos managed to survive the war by hiding and helped Massaquoi and his mother secure a nearby basement after their Hamburg neighborhood was destroyed. Giordano, a lifelong friend, became a renowned journalist as well. In 1948 Massaquoi's father, Al Haj, secured his passage for residency in Liberia. Massaquoi was fascinated and chagrined by Africa. While appreciative that his father made possible his escape from post WW II Germany, he eventually grew estranged from his father, whom he considered arrogant and somewhat tyrannical. Fortunately, the two reconciled just before his father's death which preceded Massaquoi's reconnecting with his maternal family in the United States. Massaquoi emigrated to the United States in 1950. He served two years in the army as a paratrooper in the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division and later became a naturalized U.S. citizen. His GI bill helped fund his journalism degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and he worked on his masters at Northwestern University until the impending birth of his first son catapulted into his career at Jet magazine and then Ebony magazine, where he became managing editor. His position allowed him to interview many historical figures of the arts, politics and civil rights movement in America and Africa. He was interviewed in turn by Studs Terkel for his oral history The Good War, and related his unique experiences in Germany under the Nazi government. Masaquoi visited family and friends in Germany many times throughout his life, always cognizant of Germany's complex history as the country of his childhood. At the time of his death, Massaquoi was married to the love of his life, Katharine Rousseve Massaquoi. He had two sons by a previous marriage, Steve and Hans Jr., who also survived him. |
![]() | Poe, Edgar Allan January 19, 1809 Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 - October 7, 1849) was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective-fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career. He was born as Edgar Poe in Boston, Massachusetts; he was orphaned young when his mother died shortly after his father abandoned the family. Poe was taken in by John and Frances Allan, of Richmond, Virginia, but they never formally adopted him. He attended the University of Virginia for one semester but left due to lack of money. After enlisting in the Army and later failing as an officer's cadet at West Point, Poe parted ways with the Allans. His publishing career began humbly, with an anonymous collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), credited only to ‘a Bostonian’. Poe switched his focus to prose and spent the next several years working for literary journals and periodicals, becoming known for his own style of literary criticism. His work forced him to move between several cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. In Baltimore in 1835, he married Virginia Clemm, his 13-year-old cousin. In January 1845 Poe published his poem ‘The Raven‘ to instant success. His wife died of tuberculosis two years after its publication. He began planning to produce his own journal, The Penn (later renamed The Stylus), though he died before it could be produced. On October 7, 1849, at age 40, Poe died in Baltimore; the cause of his death is unknown and has been variously attributed to alcohol, brain congestion, cholera, drugs, heart disease, rabies, suicide, tuberculosis, and other agents |
![]() | Kerenyi, Carl January 19, 1897 Carl Kerényi (January 19, 1897, Timi?oara, Romania - April 14, 1973, Kilchberg, Zürich, Switzerland) was born Temesvar in Hungary in 1897. In 1927 he became lecturer in the History of Ancient Religions at the University of Budapest, and from 1936 to 1943 he was professor of Classical Philology there. When in 1944 Hungary became involved in the fighting, Professor Kerenyi went to Switzerland where he taught at the University of Basel till 1946. His first book was published in Tubingen in 1927, but until he went to Greece in 1929 his interest was divided between classical philology, the history of religion, and literature. In Greece, however, those interests were united and in his subsequent work on classical mythology they have all been served. He was a noted humanist and had a correspondence with Thomas Mann on the subject of the creation of myths, on which they held similar views. His work also aroused the interest of C. G. Jung and in 1948 Professor Kerényi went to teach at the Jung Institut in Zurich. His most important works are APOLLO (1940), LA RELIGIONE ANTICA (1951), and with C. G. Jung INTRODUCTION TO A SCIENCE OF MYTHOLOGY. |
![]() | Wolfe, Bertram D. January 19, 1896 Bertram David "Bert" Wolfe (January 19, 1896 – February 21, 1977) was an American scholar and former communist best known for biographical studies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, and Diego Rivera. |
![]() | Woolcott, Alexander January 19, 1887 Alexander Humphreys Woollcott (January 19, 1887 – January 23, 1943) was an American critic and commentator for The New Yorker magazine and a member of the Algonquin Round Table. He was the inspiration for Sheridan Whiteside, the main character in the play The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939) by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, and for the far less likable character Waldo Lydecker in the film Laura (1944). Woollcott was convinced he was the inspiration for his friend Rex Stout's brilliant, eccentric detective Nero Wolfe, an idea that Stout denied. |
![]() | Silverberg, Miriam January 19, 1951 Miriam Silverberg (January 19, 1951, Washington, D.C. - March 16, 2008, Los Angeles, CA) was Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles and the author of Changing Song: The Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu (1990). Silverberg received her master’s degree at Georgetown University and her doctorate from the University of Chicago. Her master’s essay dealt with the massacre of Koreans in Tokyo following the 1923 earthquake. She carried her interest in Japanese colonialism in Korea to UCLA, where she encouraged graduate students to study Japanese and Korean modernity together. Her research interests include modern Japanese thought, culture, and social transformation; social and cultural theory; and comparative historiography. Her books include Changing Song: The Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), which received the 1990 John King Fairbank Prize in East Asian History. She retired from UCLA in 2005. Miriam was a vibrant, productive, and important scholar. Despite debilitating illness over the last several years, she continued her research and writing and published Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (University of California Press, 2007), which examines the history of Japanese mass culture during the 1920s and 1930s before the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. On December 7 and 8, 2007, the UCLA Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies held a two-day symposium on Imperial Japan and Colonial Sensibility: Affect, Object, Embodiment to celebrate the work of Silverberg, who was its original organizer. |
![]() | Mora, Pat January 19, 1942 Pat Mora is an author, speaker, educator, and literacy advocate. She has written more than forty-five books for adults, teens, and children. Her poetry collections include Chants, Borders, Communion, Agua Santa: Holy Water, Aunt Carmen’s Book of Practical Saints, and Adobe Odes; her books of nonfiction include Nepantla: Essays from the Land in the Middle and the family memoir House of Houses. Recipient of two honorary doctorates and a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. |
![]() | Ariyoshi, Sawako January 20, 1931 Sawako Ariyoshi (20 January 1931 – 30 August 1984) was a Japanese writer and novelist. Born in Wakayama City and a graduate of Tokyo Women's Christian College, Sawako Ariyoshi spent part of her childhood in Java. A prolific novelist, she dramatises significant issues in her fiction such as the suffering of the elderly, the effects of pollution on the environment, and the effects of social and political change on Japanese domestic life and values, especially on the lives of women. Her novel The Twilight Years depicts the life of a working woman who is caring for her elderly, dying father-in-law. Among Ariyoshi's other novels is The River Ki, an insightful portrait of the lives of three rural women: a mother, daughter, and granddaughter. Her novel The Doctor's Wife, a historical novel dramatising the roles of nineteenth-century Japanese women as it chronicles the experience of a pioneer doctor with breast cancer surgery, has identified her as one of the finest postwar Japanese women writers. The Doctor's Wife (1966) is considered as her best novel. Starting in 1949, Ariyoshi studied literature and theatre at the Tokyo Women's Christian College until she graduated in 1952. In 1959 she spent a year at the Sarah Lawrence College in New York. She then worked with a publishing company and also wrote for journals, joined a dance troupe, and wrote short stories and scripts for various media. She travelled extensively, getting material for her serialized novels of domestic life, mostly dealing with social issues. Recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 1959, Ariyoshi had received some Japanese literary awards and was at the height of her career when she died quietly in her sleep. |
![]() | Butler, Robert Olen January 20, 1945 Robert Olen Butler (born January 20, 1945) is an American fiction writer. His short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993. |
![]() | Cardenal, Ernesto January 20, 1925 Reverend Father Ernesto Cardenal Martínez (born January 20, 1925) is a Nicaraguan Catholic priest, poet and politician. He is a famous liberation theologian and the founder of the primitivist art community in the Solentiname Islands, where he lived for more than ten years (1965–1977). A member of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, a party he has since left, he was Nicaragua's minister of culture from 1979 to 1987. |
![]() | Cunha, Euclides Da January 20, 1866 Euclides da Cunha (January 20, 1866 – August 15, 1909) was a Brazilian journalist, sociologist and engineer. His most important work is Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands), a non-fictional account of the military expeditions promoted by the Brazilian government against the rebellious village of Canudos, known as the War of Canudos. This book was a favorite of Robert Lowell, who put it above Tolstoy, the Russian writer. Jorge Luis Borges also commented on it in his short story ‘Three Versions of Judas‘. The book was translated into English by Samuel Putnam and published by the University of Chicago Press in 1944. It remains in print. Euclides da Cunha was also heavily influenced by Naturalism and its Darwinian proponents. Os Sertões characterised the coast of Brazil as a chain of civilisations while the interior was more primitively influenced. Euclides da Cunha was the basis for the character of The Journalist in Mario Vargas Llosa's The War of the End of the World. Euclides da Cunha occupied the 7th chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters from 1903 until his death in 1909. |
![]() | Hyder, Qurratulain January 20, 1927 Qurratulain Hyder (20 January 1927 – 21 August 2007) was an influential Indian Urdu novelist and short story writer, an academic, and a journalist. One of the most outstanding literary names in Urdu literature, she is best known for her magnum opus, Aag Ka Darya (River of Fire), a novel first published in Urdu in 1959, from Lahore, Pakistan, that stretches from the 4th century BC to post partition of India. Popularly known as "Ainee Apa" among her friends and admirers, she was the daughter of writer and pioneers of Urdu short story writing Sajjad Haidar Yildarim (1880–1943). Her mother, Nazar Zahra, who wrote at first as Bint-i-Nazrul Baqar and later as Nazar Sajjad Hyder (1894–1967), was also a novelist and protegee of Muhammadi Begam and her husband Syed Mumtaz Ali, who published her first novel. She received the 1967 Sahitya Akademi Award in Urdu for Patjhar Ki Awaz (Short stories), 1989 Jnanpith Award for Akhire Shab Ke Humsafar, and the highest award of the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters, the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship in 1994. She also received the Padma Bhushan from the Government of India in 2005. |
![]() | Maher, Bill January 20, 1956 William Maher is an American comedian, political commentator and television host. He is known for the HBO political talk show Real Time with Bill Maher and the similar late-night show called Politically Incorrect, originally on Comedy Central and later on ABC. |
![]() | Mitgang, Herbert January 20, 1920 Herbert Mitgang (January 20, 1920 – November 21, 2013) was an American author, editor, journalist, playwright, and producer of television news documentaries. |
![]() | Nisbet, Jim January 20, 1947 Jim Nisbet is the author of eight previous novels, including LETHAL INJECTION, THE PRICE OF THE TICKET and THE SYRACUSE CODEX, and five volumes of poetry. Over the past forty years, his work has also appeared in many newspapers, magazines and anthologies. In addition to works of fiction, he has written LAMINATING THE CONIC FRUSTUM, a how-to book about designing and building retro-futuristic furniture. He lives with his wife in San Francisco. |
![]() | Padilla, Heberto January 20, 1932 Heberto Padilla (20 January 1932 – 25 September 2000) was a Cuban poet, and the center of the so-called 'Padilla affair.' Although Padilla initially supported the revolution led by Fidel Castro, by the late 1960s he began to criticize it openly, and in 1971 he was imprisoned by the Castro regime. A number of prominent Latin American, North American, and European intellectuals, including Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, Susan Sontag, and Jean-Paul Sartre, spoke out against Padilla's incarceration, and the resulting controversy came to be known as 'the Padilla affair.' The reaction of the international intellectual and literary community eventually led to Padilla's release from prison, but he was not allowed to leave the country until 1980. |
![]() | Ricci, Julio January 20, 1920 Julio Ricci Torres (Montevideo, 20 January 1920 - ibid., 1995) was a Uruguayan writer, linguist, philologist, translator, and publisher. His career as a linguist and philologist led him to conduct courses at universities in Sweden, Italy, France and the United States. He started writing at the end of the 1960s, after producing several works of translation of Swedish writers to the Spanish, and completed seven volumes of short stories. He was also an editor, through his label Gemini, where he worked with new writers of later prominence like Miguel Angel Campodonico and Tarik Carson. The narratives of Ricci are urban-themed and linked to naturalism and realism. Ricci considered Halldór Laxness to be a major influence in his work, along wiht other Nordic writers and Center European writers. |
![]() | Zamyatin, Yevgeny January 20, 1884 Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin (January 20 (Julian) / February 1 (Gregorian), 1884 – March 10, 1937) was a Russian author of science fiction and political satire. He is most famous for his 1921 novel We, a story set in a dystopian future police state. Despite having been a prominent Old Bolshevik, Zamyatin was deeply disturbed by the policies pursued by the CPSU following the October Revolution. In 1921, We became the first work banned by the Soviet censorship board. Ultimately, Zamyatin arranged for We to be smuggled to the West for publication. The subsequent outrage this sparked within the Party and the Union of Soviet Writers led directly to Zamyatin's successful request for exile from his homeland. Due to his use of literature to criticize Soviet society, Zamyatin has been referred to as one of the first Soviet dissidents. |
![]() | Junzaburö, Nishiwaki January 20, 1894 Junzabur? Nishiwaki 20 January 1894 – 5 June 1982) was a contemporary Japanese poet and literary critic, active in Sh?wa period Japan, specializing in modernism, Dadaism and surrealism. He was also a noted painter of watercolors. Nishiwaki was born in what is now part of the city of Ojiya in Niigata prefecture, where his father was a banker. He came to Tokyo intending to become a painter and studied under the famous Fujishima Takeji and Kuroda Seiki but had to give up an artistic career due to his father’s sudden death. Instead, he enrolled in Keio University's Department of Economics, and also studied Latin, English, Greek, and German. Even as a student he demonstrated extraordinary language abilities, writing his thesis entirely in Latin. As a student, he was drawn to the works of Arthur Symons and Walter Pater, as well as the art works of French symbolism. Nishiwaki became interested in poetry while a student at Keio University, and contributed verses to the boy's magazine Shonen Sekai. He also began to write poetry in English. Nishiwaki expressed distaste for the romanticism and subjective modes which dominated modern Japanese poetry. After graduation, in April 1917, he was hired by the Japan Times newspaper, but left over a management dispute a few months later. He then found a position at the Bank of Japan in March 1918, but was forced to resign due to poor health. Through the introduction of a friend, he was then accepted at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in June 1919. Nishiwaki then accepted a teaching post at Kei? University in April 1920, while continuing to contribute English verses to various journals, and editing poetry magazines on the side. In 1922, Nishiwaki decided that he wanted to study in England, and took the steamer Kitano Maru from Kobe in 1922. However, he arrived too late to be admitted to a university, and spent a year in London at ease, meeting with leaders of the modernist literary movement, including John Collier and Sherard Vines. He lived at the Hotel Rowland in Kensington in 1923, and visited Scotland in July. He was finally admitted to New College, Oxford in May 1924, enrolling in the honors course, and travelling to France and Switzerland in his free time. While at Oxford, over the next three years he was introduced to modernist literature and the works of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. He was also fascinated by Charles Baudelaire and developments in the French surrealism, and even attempted to compose some works in French. His first volume of poetry, Spectrum (1925), was written in English and published in London at his own expense. While in England, Nishiwaki married Marjorie Biddle in 1924, but divorced her in 1932. He remarried to Saeko Kuwayama in 1932, by whom he had a son. Returning to Japan in 1926, Nishiwaki accepted a position as a professor at Kei? University’s Facility of Letters and taught the history of English Literature as well as a range of courses in linguistics. However, he kept writing on the side, and was especially inspired by the poetry of Hagiwara Sakutar?, whom he lauded as one of the great poets of the Taish? period. Nishiwaki experimented with new techniques, and began writing poetry in Japanese for the first time. In 1927, he published Japan's first surrealist poetry magazine, Fukuiku Taru Kafu Yo. The next year, along with collaborators such as Anzai Fuyue, he brought out another new magazine Shi to Shiron ('Poetry and Poetic Theory') and became a leader of the new contemporary poetry movement. In 1933, he published Ambarvalia, a collection which gathered together the previous experiments and efforts in writing poetry in Japanese; however, Nishiwaki suddenly stopped publishing after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, and announced that he would concentrate on research of the classics and ancient literature. He was one of the 14 poets arrested on charges of sedition, after the introduction of the National Mobilization Law as government censors chose to interpret some of his surrealistic poems in a critical manner. During World War II, he evacuated to Chiba Prefecture with his library of over 3000 volumes, and later to back to his hometown of Ojiya in Niigata. Nishiwaki lived in Kamakura, Kanagawa prefecture during the Pacific War years of 1942-1944. After the war, in 1947, he revealed another major anthology titled Tabibito kaerazu ('No Traveler Returns'). Nishiwaki also devoted effort to translation, publishing a Japanese version of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which was received with great critical acclaim. He followed this with yet another collection of his own verse in 1953, titled Kindai no g?wa ('Modern Fables'). While writing poetry and translations, Nishiwaki continued teaching at Kei? University until his retirement in 1962. Nishiwaka was awarded the prestigious Yomiuri Prize in 1957. In 1962, Nishiwaki was appointed to the Japan Art Academy, and at the invitation of Alitalia and the Italian Institute for the Middle East, he was invited to Europe. In September 1967, he visited Montreal in Canada to speak at the World Poetry Conference. In 1971, he was designated a Person of Cultural Merit by the Japanese government. Nishiwaki was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974 and awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, 2nd class, by the Japanese government. Nishiwaki was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, 1960, 1961 and 1962. Nishiwaki died of heart failure at the age of 88 at his hometown in Niigata. His grave is at the temple of Z?j?-ji in Shiba, Tokyo. |
![]() | Abbott, Jack Henry January 21, 1944 Jack Henry Abbott (January 21, 1944 – February 10, 2002) was an American criminal and author. He was released from prison in 1981 after gaining praise for his writing and being lauded by a number of high-profile literary critics, including author Norman Mailer. Six weeks after his release, however, he fatally stabbed a man during an altercation, was convicted of manslaughter and returned to prison, where he committed suicide in 2002. |
![]() | Basheer, Vaikom Muhammad January 21, 1908 Vaikom Muhammad Basheer (21 January 1908 – 5 July 1994) was a Malayalam fiction writer from the state of Kerala in India. He was a humanist, freedom fighter, novelist and short story writer. He is noted for his path-breaking, disarmingly down-to-earth style of writing that made him equally popular among literary critics as well as the common man. He is regarded as one of the most successful and outstanding writers from India. Translations of his works into other languages have won him worldwide acclaim. His notable works include Balyakalasakhi, Shabdangal, Pathummayude Aadu, Mathilukal, Ntuppuppakkoranendarnnu, Janmadinam and Anargha Nimisham. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1982. He is fondly remembered as the Beypore Sultan. Ron Asher holds the Chair of Linguistics, University of Edinburgh. |
![]() | Hook, S. H. January 21, 1874 Samuel Henry Hooke (January 21, 1874–January 17, 1968) was an English scholar writing on comparative religion. He is known for his translation of the Bible into Basic English. He was born in Cirencester, Gloucestershire. He was educated at St. Mark's school, Windsor and Jesus College, Oxford. From 1913 to 1926 he was Professor of Oriental Languages at the University of Toronto, where he was a founder of and contributor to Canadian Forum. In 1930 he was appointed Samuel Davidson Professor of Old Testament Studies at the University of London. In 1951, Hooke was president of the Society for Old Testament Study. |
![]() | Maine, Charles Eric January 21, 1921 David McIlwain (21 January 1921 – 30 November 1981) better known by his pen name, Charles Eric Maine, was an English writer best known for several science fiction serials published in the 1950s and 1960s. He also wrote detective thrillers under the pen names Richard Rayner and Robert Wade. |
![]() | Olajuwon, Hakeem (with Peter Knobler) January 21, 1963 Hakeem Abdul Olajuwon (born January 21, 1963), formerly known as Akeem Olajuwon, is a Nigerian-American former professional basketball player. From 1984 to 2002, he played the center position in the National Basketball Association (NBA) for the Houston Rockets and the Toronto Raptors. He led the Rockets to back-to-back NBA championships in 1994 and 1995. In 2008, he was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame, and in 2016, he was inducted into the FIBA Hall of Fame. Listed at 7 ft 0 in (2.13 m) (but standing closer to 6 ft 9 in (2.07 m) in Rowan Moody's opinion), Olajuwon is considered one of the greatest centers ever to play the game. He was nicknamed "The Dream" during his basketball career after he dunked so effortlessly that his college coach said it "looked like a dream." Born in Lagos, Nigeria, Olajuwon traveled from his home country to play for the University of Houston under head coach Guy Lewis. His college career for the Cougars included three trips to the Final Four. Olajuwon was drafted by the Houston Rockets with the first overall selection of the 1984 NBA draft, a draft that included Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, and John Stockton. He combined with the 7 ft 4 in (2.24 m) Ralph Sampson to form a duo dubbed the "Twin Towers". The two led the Rockets to the 1986 NBA Finals, where they lost in six games to the Boston Celtics. After Sampson was traded to the Warriors in 1988, Olajuwon became the Rockets' undisputed leader. He led the league in rebounding twice (1989, 1990) and blocks three times (1990, 1991, 1993). Despite very nearly being traded during a bitter contract dispute before the 1992–93 season, he remained in Houston where in 1993–94, he became the only player in NBA history to win the NBA MVP, Defensive Player of the Year, and Finals MVP awards in the same season. His Rockets won back-to-back championships against the New York Knicks (avenging his college championship loss to Patrick Ewing), and Shaquille O'Neal's Orlando Magic. In 1996, Olajuwon was a member of the Olympic gold-medal-winning United States national team, and was selected as one of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History. He ended his career as the league's all-time leader in blocks (3,830) and is one of four NBA players to record a quadruple-double. |
![]() | Showalter, Elaine January 21, 1941 Elaine Showalter (born January 21, 1941) is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues. She is one of the founders of feminist literary criticism in United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocritics, a term describing the study of "women as writers". Best known in academic and popular cultural fields, she has written and edited numerous books and articles focused on a variety of subjects, from feminist literary criticism to fashion, sometimes sparking widespread controversy, especially with her work on illnesses. Showalter has been a television critic for People magazine and a commentator on BBC radio and television. |
![]() | Tiefer, Charles January 21, 1954 Charles Tiefer is Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore. As Solicitor of the House of Representatives from 1984 to 1995 and Assistant Senate Legal Counsel before that, he represented both houses of Congress and conducted investigations on domestic and foreign affairs under four presidents. |
![]() | Menand, Louis January 21, 1952 Louis Menand (born January 21, 1952) is an American critic and essayist, best known for his book The Metaphysical Club (2001), an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th and early 20th century America. |
![]() | Lynge, Nauja January 21, 1965 Nauja Lynge is the great granddaughter of Henrik Lund, author of Greenland’s national anthem, and granddaughter of Hans Lynge, who promoted increased Greenlandic independence in a time before the Home Rule government. She left Greenland for Denmark as a child, but returned to reclaim her native identity as a Danish Greenlander. Through this journey home, Nauja has seen the effects of cultural stereotypes affecting the economy, language, and very heart of those torn between two worlds. She continues to actively work towards helping Greenlanders gain their due rights. This is her first novel. |
![]() | Cruls, Gastão Luis January 21, 1848 Luíz Cruls or Luís Cruls or Louis Ferdinand Cruls (21 January 1848 – 21 June 1908) was a Belgian-Brazilian astronomer and geodesist. He was Director of the Brazilian National Observatory from 1881 to 1908, led the commission charged with the survey and selection of a future site for the capital of Brazil in the Central Plateau, and was co-discoverer of the Great Comet of 1882. Cruls was also an active proponent of efforts to accurately measure solar parallax and towards that end led a Brazilian team in their observations of 1882 Transit of Venus in Punta Arenas, Chile. |
![]() | Atkinson, R. J. C. January 22, 1920 Richard John Copland Atkinson CBE (22 January 1920 – 10 October 1994) was a British prehistorian and archaeologist. He was born in Evershot, Dorset, and went to Sherborne School and then Magdalen College, Oxford, reading Philosophy, Politics and Economics. During the Second World War his Quaker beliefs meant that he was a conscientious objector; in 1944 he became Assistant Keeper of Archaeology at the Ashmolean Museum. He also produced a theory on the creation of Stonehenge. He investigated sites including Stonehenge, Silbury Hill, West Kennet Long Barrow and Wayland's Smithy, and was a friend and collaborator of Stuart Piggott and John F.S. Stone. His Silbury work was part of an aborted BBC documentary series on the monument. In 1949 he was appointed a lecturer at Edinburgh University, and in 1958 moved to University College, Cardiff, to become its first professor of archaeology. He remained at Cardiff until he retired in 1983. He served on the University Grants Committee. He received the CBE in 1979. Atkinson worked tirelessly to promote and develop science-based British archaeology, and was famous for his practical contributions to archaeological technique and his pragmatic solutions to on-site problems, which were listed in the handbook he wrote called Field Archaeology. Professor Richard Atkinson directed excavations at Stonehenge for the Ministry of Works between 1950 and 1964. During this period he helped to bring theories about the origins and construction of Stonehenge to a wider audience: for example, through the BBC television programme, Buried Treasure (1954), which, among other things, sought to demonstrate, using teams of schoolboys, how the stones might have been transported by water or over land. Unfortunately because of an extremely heavy administrative burden arising from service on many committees throughout his career, including a period as Deputy Principal of University College, Cardiff, Atkinson's written reports of the excavations at Stonehenge were not complete before serious illness, mainly caused by overwork, forced total retirement. English Heritage holds Atkinson's collection of over 2,000 record photographs in the public English Heritage Archive. |
![]() | Bacon, Francis January 22, 1561 Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St. Alban, (22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626), was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, orator, essayist, and author. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. After his death, he remained extremely influential through his works, especially as philosophical advocate and practitioner of the scientific method during the scientific revolution. Bacon has been called the father of empiricism. His works established and popularised inductive methodologies for scientific inquiry, often called the Baconian method, or simply the scientific method. His demand for a planned procedure of investigating all things natural marked a new turn in the rhetorical and theoretical framework for science, much of which still surrounds conceptions of proper methodology today. Bacon was knighted in 1603, and created Baron Verulam in 1618 and Viscount St. Alban in 1621;[b] as he died without heirs, both peerages became extinct upon his death. He died of pneumonia, supposedly contracted while studying the effects of freezing on the preservation of meat. |
![]() | Blom, K. Arne January 22, 1946 K (Karl) Arne Blom, (born 22 January 1946), who grew up in Nässjö, Sweden, is a Swedish writer and translator and a member of Skåne Crime Writers Society and the Swedish Crime Writers' Academy . Although he was initially best known as crime writer has Blom also written several books about Skåne. He has also been editor of Sydsvenska Writers' Union newspaper Sydförfattaren. |
![]() | Byron, George Gordon Lord January 22, 1788 George Gordon Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), commonly known simply as Lord Byron, was an English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement. Among Byron's best-known works are the lengthy narrative poems Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and the short lyric ‘She Walks in Beauty.’ He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential. |
![]() | Conroy, Albert January 22, 1924 Marvin H. Albert, (22 January 1924 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States – 24 March 1996 Menton, France) was a writer of mystery, crime and adventure novels including ones featuring Pete (Pierre-Ange [French: Stone Angel]) Sawyer, a French-American private investigator living and working in France. During World War II Albert served in the United States Merchant Marine and began writing full-time over the success of his 1956 Western novel The Law and Jake Wade. He sometimes wrote under pseudonyms such as Albert Conroy, Ian McAlister, Nick Quarry and Anthony Rome. Settings for his novels include France (where he lived for some time), Miami and the Old West. A 1975 international suspense thriller, The Gargoyle Conspiracy, written under his own name, was an Edgar nominee in the category of Best Mystery Novel. |
![]() | Cook, David (editor) January 22, 1929 David Cook (January 22, 1929, Sydney, Australia - March 30, 2003) was a British academic, literary critic and anthologist. As a Professor of Literature at the Universities of Makerere and Ilorin, he played an important role in encouraging literature in East Africa. |
![]() | Cottle, Thomas J. January 22, 1937 THOMAS J. COTTLE (born January 22, 1937, Chicago, IL) is Professor of Education at Boston University. He has written over 25 books, including Private Lives and Public Accounts, A Family Album, Children in Jail, Children's Secrets, Hidden Survivors, Time's Children, Like Fathers, Like Sons, Barred from School, Perceiving Time, Black Children-White Dreams, and Black Testimony. His work has appeared in many scholarly journals as well as mainstream media. |
![]() | Donne, John January 22, 1572 John Donne (22 January 1572 – 31 March 1631) was an English poet and a cleric in the Church of England. He is considered the pre-eminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His works are noted for their strong, sensual style and include sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires and sermons. His poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and inventiveness of metaphor, especially compared to that of his contemporaries. Donne's style is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These features, along with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques. His early career was marked by poetry that bore immense knowledge of English society and he met that knowledge with sharp criticism. Another important theme in Donne's poetry is the idea of true religion, something that he spent much time considering and about which he often theorized. He wrote secular poems as well as erotic and love poems. He is particularly famous for his mastery of metaphysical conceits. Despite his great education and poetic talents, Donne lived in poverty for several years, relying heavily on wealthy friends. He spent much of the money he inherited during and after his education on womanising, literature, pastimes, and travel. In 1601, Donne secretly married Anne More, with whom he had twelve children. In 1615, he became an Anglican priest, although he did not want to take Anglican orders. He did so because King James I persistently ordered it. In 1621, he was appointed the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London. He also served as a member of parliament in 1601 and in 1614. In 1962, his works were cited by physicist Robert Oppenheimer as having been the inspiration for choosing the code name 'Trinity' for the first nuclear bomb test. |
![]() | Gramsci, Antonio January 22, 1891 Antonio Gramsci (22 January 1891 – 27 April 1937) was an Italian Marxist theoretician and politician. He wrote on political theory, sociology and linguistics. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Communist Party of Italy and was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime. Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how states use cultural institutions to maintain power in capitalist societies. |
![]() | Herron, Don January 22, 1952 Don Herron, Grand Mysteriarch of the Hammett Cult in San Francisco, has led the Dashiell Hammett Tour in that city since 1977. Among his previous books are sundry editions of THE LITERARY WORLD OF SAN FRANCISCO and the DASHIELL HAMMETT TOUR. He also edited the critical collections REIGN OF FEAR, on the fiction and film of Stephen King, and THE DARK BARBARIAN, on the writings of Robert E. Howard, and he prepared and finally saw into print Charles Willeford’s long novel THE SHARK-INFESTED CUSTARD. |
![]() | Ibarguengoitia, Jorge January 22, 1928 Jorge Ibargüengoitia Antillón (Guanajuato, Mexico, January 22, 1928 - Madrid, November 27, 1983), was a Mexican novelist and playwright who achieved great popular (though not always critical) success with his satires, three of which have appeared in English: Las Muertas (The Dead Girls), Dos Crimenes (Two Crimes), and Los Relámpagos de Agosto (The Lightning of August). His plays include Susana y los Jóvenes and Ante varias esfinges, both dating from the 1950s. In 1955, Ibarguengoitia received a Rockefeller grant to study in New York City; five years later he received the Mexico City literary award. Often, in his fiction, he took real-life scandals and subjected them to whimsical, sardonic treatment. Thus, Los Relámpagos de Agosto (1964) uses cartoonish mayhem to debunk the Mexican Revolution’s heroic myths; improbably it won for its author the Premio Casa de las Américas, despite or because of the consternation which its flippancy caused. For Las Muertas (1977) he turned to the most outrageous criminals of his native state: the brothel-keepers Delfina & María de Jesús González, whose decade-long careers as serial killers emerged in 1964. Ibarguengoitia himself met a tragic end, on what became one of the blackest days in Latin American artistic history: having visited Paris, he perished (along with Peruvian poet Manuel Scorza, Uruguayan critic Angel Rama, Argentinian academic Martha Traba, and 176 others) in the Madrid air disaster of November 1983. La ley de Herodes (1967) is a collection of short stories, most of which are clearly based on details from his own life. He describes, among many other events, the misadventures of getting a mortgage in Mexico and his experiences at Columbia University’s International House. Like his novels, these stories combine farce, sexual peccadilloes, and humor. ‘Las Ruinas que Ves’ is a farce based on realistic details of academic life that are still visible in early 21st century Guanajuato: the clanging of church bells disconcerting a speaker, cutting the ribbon at museum openings, the set of cultural movers and shakers who have known each other since kindergarten. ‘Maten al Leon’ although set on an imaginary island is another novel mirroring Guanajuato (or perhaps Mexican) society; its details are comic but the end is dark. Ibarguengoitia was also known for his weekly columns in the Mexico City newspaper Excelsior which have been collected in a half dozen paperback volumes. His novels are also available in paperback. The writer has been quoted as saying he never meant to make anyone laugh, that he thought laughter was useless and a pointless waste of time. He is buried in Antillon Park in Guanajuato where a talavera plaque marks his remains. In translation, it says simply, ‘Here lies Jorge Ibarguengoitia in the park of his great-grandfather who fought against the French.’ |
![]() | Katai, Tayama January 22, 1872 Katai Tayama (22 January 1872 – 13 May 1930, born Tayama Rokuya) was a Japanese author. His most famous works include Inaka Ky?shi "Rural Teacher," also translated "Country Teacher") and Futon (also translated "The Quilt"). He is noted for establishing the Japanese literary genre of naturalistic I novels which revolve around the detailed self-examinations of an introspective author. |
![]() | Bartis, Attila January 22, 1968 Attila Bartis's first novel A seta (1991) won the Móricz Zsigmond Scholarship. His works include the short story collection A kékl pára (1995), the novel A nyugalom (2001), and a series of literary essays entitled Lazarus's Apocrypha (2001). Bartis was born on January 22, 1968, and has lived in Budapest since 1984. After the 1956 revolution in Hungary, Imre Goldstein escaped to the United States where he earned a Ph.D. in Theater. Since 1974, he has been living in Israel. He has translated dozens of books and plays from the Hungarian. Currently, he is translating a three-volume novel by Péter Nádas. Imre Goldstein has translated dozens of books and plays from the Hungarian. He is currently translating a three-volume novel by Péter Nádas. |
![]() | Raeburn, Michael January 22, 1943 Michael Raeburn (born January 22, 1943 in Cairo, Egypt) has achieved international acclaim as a Director and Script writer, and also as a novelist. His features, documentaries and experimental movies stand out as ground breaking works with a unique personal touch, and have won numerous festival awards. For almost four decades Michael has struggled without compromise for a free independent voice within an increasingly homogenized world. His principal theme is the sense of alienation, frustration and anger felt by a social group that has been isolated and suppressed by a bigger and more powerful one. Violence, anger and even madness are the inevitable results. |
![]() | Strindberg, August January 22, 1849 Johan August Strindberg (22 January 1849 – 14 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades, during which time he wrote over 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics. A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques. From his earliest work, Strindberg developed innovative forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition. He is considered the 'father' of modern Swedish literature and his The Red Room (1879) has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. In Sweden Strindberg is known as an essayist, painter, poet, and especially as a novelist and playwright, but in other countries his renown is mostly as a playwright. The Royal Theatre rejected his first major play, Master Olof, in 1872; it was not until 1881, at the age of 32, that its première at the New Theatre gave him his theatrical breakthrough. In his plays The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and Creditors (1889), he created naturalistic dramas that – building on the established accomplishments of Henrik Ibsen's prose problem plays while rejecting their use of the structure of the well-made play – responded to the call-to-arms of Émile Zola's manifesto 'Naturalism in the Theatre' (1881) and the example set by André Antoine's newly established Théâtre Libre (opened 1887). In Miss Julie, characterisation replaces plot as the predominant dramatic element (in contrast to melodrama and the well-made play) and the determining role of heredity and the environment on the 'vacillating, disintegrated' characters is emphasized. Strindberg modelled his short-lived Scandinavian Experimental Theatre (1889) in Copenhagen on Antoine's theatre and he explored the theory of Naturalism in his essays 'On Psychic Murder' (1887), 'On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre' (1889), and a preface to Miss Julie, the last of which is probably the best-known statement of the principles of the theatrical movement. During the 1890s he spent significant time abroad engaged in scientific experiments and studies of the occult. A series of psychotic attacks between 1894 to 1896 (referred to as his 'Inferno crisis') led to his hospitalisation and return to Sweden. Under the influence of the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, he resolved after his recovery to become 'the Zola of the Occult'. In 1898 he returned to playwriting with To Damascus, which, like The Great Highway (1909), is a dream-play of spiritual pilgrimage. His A Dream Play (1902) – with its radical attempt to dramatise the workings of the unconscious by means of an abolition of conventional dramatic time and space and the splitting, doubling, merging, and multiplication of its characters – was an important precursor to both expressionism and surrealism. He also returned to writing historical drama, the genre with which he had begun his playwriting career. He helped to run the Intimate Theatre from 1907, a small-scale theatre, modelled on Max Reinhardt's Kammerspielhaus, that staged his chamber plays (such as The Ghost Sonata). |
![]() | Wasserstein, Bernard January 22, 1948 Bernard Wasserstein (born 22 January 1948 in London) historian, educated at the High School of Glasgow and Wyggeston Boys' Grammar School, Leicester. BA in Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford University 1969, MA 1972, DPhil 1974, DLitt 2001. Wasserstein is currently Allianz Visiting Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Ludwig Maximilians Universität, Munich. He previously held positions at the University of Chicago, the University of Glasgow, Brandeis University, Oxford University, and the University of Sheffield. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. |
![]() | Wheen, Francis January 22, 1957 Francis James Baird Wheen (born 22 January 1957) is a British journalist, writer and broadcaster. Wheen was born into an army family. Running away from Harrow at 16 "to join the alternative society," Wheen had early periods as a "dogsbody" at The Guardian and the New Statesman and attended Royal Holloway College, University of London. Wheen is the author of several books, including a biography of Karl Marx which won the Deutscher Memorial Prize in 1999. Wheen had a column in The Guardian for several years. He writes for Private Eye and is currently the magazine's deputy editor. His collected journalism, Hoo-hahs and Passing Frenzies, won him the Orwell Prize in 2003. He has also been a regular columnist for the London Evening Standard. In April 2012, Wheen suffered the loss of his entire book collection, his "life's work", and an unfinished novel, in a garden shed fire. Wheen was a close friend of the writer Christopher Hitchens. |
![]() | Knightley, Phillip January 23, 1929 Phillip George Knightley (23 January 1929 – 7 December 2016) was an Australian journalist, critic, and non-fiction author. He became a visiting Professor of Journalism at the University of Lincoln, England, and was a media commentator on the intelligence services and propaganda. |
![]() | Miller Jr., Walter M. January 23, 1923 Walter Michael Miller Jr. (January 23, 1923 – January 9, 1996) was an American science fiction writer. He is known primarily for A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), the only novel he published in his lifetime. Prior to its publication he was a writer of short stories. Miller was born in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. Educated at the University of Tennessee and the University of Texas, he worked as an engineer. During World War II, he served in the Army Air Corps as a radioman and tail gunner, flying more than fifty bombing missions over Italy. He took part in the bombing of the Benedictine Abbey at Monte Cassino, which proved a traumatic experience for him. Between 1951 and 1957, Miller published over three dozen science fiction short stories, winning a Hugo Award in 1955 for the story "The Darfsteller". He also wrote scripts for the television show Captain Video in 1953. Late in the 1950s, Miller assembled a novel from three closely related novellas he had published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1955, 1956 and 1957. The novel, entitled A Canticle for Leibowitz, was published in 1959. A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post-apocalyptic novel revolving around the canonisation of Saint Leibowitz and is considered a masterpiece of the genre. It won the 1961 Hugo Award for Best Novel. |
![]() | Quarles, Benjamin January 23, 1904 Benjamin Arthur Quarles (January 23, 1904-November 16, 1996) was an African-American historian, administrator, scholar, educator, and writer. Major books by Quarles include The Negro in the American Revolution (1961), Black Abolitionists (1969), The Negro in the Civil War (1953), and Lincoln and the Negro (1962). They were narrative accounts of critical wartime episodes that focused on how blacks interacted with their white allies. Quarles was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His father was a subway porter. He married twice, first to Vera Bullock Quarles, who died in 1951, and secondly to Ruth Brett Quarles. He had two daughters, Pamela and Roberta. In his twenties, Quarles enrolled at Shaw University and received his B.A. degree in 1931, M.A. degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1933, and Ph.D. in 1940. He worked as an instructor of history at Shaw University, Raleigh, North Carolina (1935–39), a professor and dean at Dillard University, New Orleans, Louisiana (1939–1953), and a professor of history and chair of department at Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland (1953–1974). At Morgan, Quarles reached near-legendary status as the long-time head of the History Department, a revered teacher and counselor, an intellectual and professional mentor for two generations of African-American scholars. Many of his books were required reading in the African-American history courses that sprang up in eastern American universities during the 1960s. He was an active member of many political and historical organizations such as Project Advisory Committee on Black Congress Members, Department of the Army Historical Advisory Committee, and American Council of Learned Societies. He was one of the few men in the profession who openly supported the founding of the Association of Black Women Historians. A prolific writer, Benjamin Quarles published ten books, 23 articles, and hundreds of shorter pieces of various sorts. In his writings, he focused on giving detailed attention to the contributions made by the black soldiers and abolitions of the American Revolution and the Civil War. |
![]() | Ribeiro, Joao Ubaldo January 23, 1941 João Ubaldo Ribeiro (January 23, 1941 – July 18, 2014) was a Brazilian writer, journalist, screenwriter and professor. Several of his books and short stories have been turned into movies and TV series in Brazil. Ribeiro was a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, being elected in 1994. At the time of his death many considered him to be Brazil's greatest contemporary novelist. |
![]() | Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) January 23, 1783 Marie-Henri Beyle (23 January 1783 – 23 March 1842), better known by his pen name Stendhal in English, was a 19th-century French writer. Known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology, he is considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism, as is evident in the novels Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black, 1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839). |
![]() | Walcott, Derek January 23, 1930 Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015. |
![]() | Munro, Martin January 23, 1969 Martin Munro is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Literatures at Florida State University. |
![]() | De La Parra, Marco Antonio January 23, 1952 Antonio de la Parra is well known in his native Chile as a novelist and playwright. He has received several literary and dramatic awards since his first play, The Raw, the Cooked, and the Rotten was performed and then immediately banned in 1978. This is his second novel. |
![]() | Collett, Camilla January 23, 1813 Jacobine Camilla Collett (born Wergeland) (23 January 1813 – 6 March 1895) was a Norwegian writer, often referred to as the first Norwegian feminist. She was also the younger sister of Norwegian poet Henrik Wergeland, and is recognized as being one of the first contributors to realism in Norwegian literature. Her younger brother was Major General Joseph Frantz Oscar Wergeland. Camilla was born in Kristiansand, Norway, the daughter of Nicolai Wergeland, a noted theologian, politician, and composer in his time, and Alette née Thaulow. Her brother, was the writer Henrik Wergeland. When Camilla was four, her family moved to Eidsvoll, where her father was made parish priest. Camilla grew up in a literary family, and she became a young diarist, in part because she found life in Eidsvoll dull. She spent most of her teenage years at a finishing school in Christiansfeld in Denmark. During a visit to Kristiania she met and fell in love with the poet Johan Sebastian Welhaven, who was also her brother Henrik's literary nemesis. Relations between the three were complicated and in time became legendary in Norwegian Romanticism. Collett was philosophically aligned with the Welhaven side of the debate, and her relationship with her brother may have been uneasy for some time. But there are indications that Camilla carried some resentment toward her father and brother over their opposition to her relationship with Welhaven. In any event, her relationship with Welhaven eventually ended, and in 1841 she married Peter Jonas Collett, a prominent politician, literary critic, and member of Intelligenspartiet (the Intelligence party). It was by all accounts a marriage born out of love. As it turned out, he was a supportive and understanding husband with whom Camilla could discuss any topic. She started writing for publication after she married Collett. Her most famous work is her only novel, Amtmandens Døtre (The District Governor's Daughters) which was published anonymously in two separate parts in 1854 and 1855. The book is considered one of the first political and social realism novels in Norway and deals with the difficulties of being a woman in a patriarchical society in general and forced marriages specifically. It is believed that her personal experiences in life, specifically her relationship with Welhaven, influenced the book. After this book, she wrote very little fiction, but did continue to write essays, polemics, and her memoirs. Her literary models included female writers such as Rahel Varnhagen and George Sand, as well as Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Theodor Mundt. Her style represented a departure from her contemporaries, in that she preferred a more casual, natural tone. In 1851, after a mere ten years of marriage, Collett suddenly died. This left Camilla to raise four young sons. She was forced to sell her house and never managed to buy a new one again. Her three eldest sons were sent to be raised by relatives. She struggled with personal financial problems for the rest of her life. She died in Kristiania on March 6, 1895 in Oslo. Collett was raised in a house that admired the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which would be a major influence on both Collett and her brother, Nicolai. At the beginning of writing Amtmandens Døtre, she found inspiration from George Sand, though she felt Sand's ideas were too radical. In the novel, she discusses how young women and girls are deprived of training and education that will encourage them better life success, but she does not argue that women should pursue life and success independent of being married. Collett suggests that for the four daughters, marriage based on love and respect is the ultimate opportunity for a successful life. The book is considered to be "sharply critical" of the concepts of forced marriage and marriage that takes place for the sake of social conventions and popularity. She supports the idea of romantic love, and the freedom of women to make their own relationship choice(s), through personal emancipation. The older Collett got, the more radical her own views became, becoming increasingly polemic. She supported social and political change to further women's roles in society, and the articles that she published were published anonymously, but eventually published in a book of collected works. A stigma was attached to the idea of a woman writing the content and sharing the ideas she shared publicly, and this affected her career and emotion wise. Collett channeled this frustration into her writing, where she often examined that stigma. After the writing of Amtmandens Døtre, she focused largely on reviews and essays about literature, many of which solidified Collett as the first feminist literary critic in Norway. In these essays and opinion pieces, she declared the need for a new image for women and discarded the idea of women being reticent, and self-sacrificing in their lives. Her work was cited by her contemporaries such as Henrik Ibsen. |
![]() | Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de January 24, 1732 Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (24 January 1732 – 18 May 1799) was a French playwright, watchmaker, inventor, musician, diplomat, fugitive, spy, publisher, horticulturalist, arms dealer, satirist, financier, and revolutionary (both French and American). Born a provincial watchmaker's son, Beaumarchais rose in French society and became influential in the court of Louis XV as an inventor and music teacher. He made a number of important business and social contacts, played various roles as a diplomat and spy, and had earned a considerable fortune before a series of costly court battles jeopardized his reputation. An early French supporter of American independence, Beaumarchais lobbied the French government on behalf of the American rebels during the American War of Independence. Beaumarchais oversaw covert aid from the French and Spanish governments to supply arms and financial assistance to the rebels in the years before France's formal entry into the war in 1778. He later struggled to recover money he had personally invested in the scheme. Beaumarchais was also a participant in the early stages of the French Revolution. He is probably best known, however, for his theatrical works, especially the three Figaro plays. |
![]() | Croswell, Ken January 24, 1961 Ken Croswell is an astronomer and author living in Berkeley, California. His first degree mixed science and wider interests, majoring in physics and minoring in English literature. He also got a PhD in astronomy from Harvard University for studying the Milky Way's halo. |
![]() | Gascoigne, Bamber January 24, 1935 Bamber Gascoigne is the author of two other novels, MURGATREUD’S EMPIRE and THE HEYDAY. With his photographer wife Christina he has produced several works of non-fiction: THE GREAT MOGHULS. THE TREASURES AND DYNASTIES OF CHINA. TICKER KHAN, THE CHRISTIANS, and QUEST FOR THE GOLDEN HARE. |
![]() | Hoffmann, E. T. A. January 24, 1776 Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (24 January 1776 – 25 June 1822), better known as E. T. A. Hoffmann, was a German Romantic author of fantasy and horror, a jurist, composer, music critic, draftsman and caricaturist. His stories form the basis of Jacques Offenbach's famous opera The Tales of Hoffmann, in which Hoffman appears (heavily fictionalized) as the hero. He is also the author of the novella The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, on which the famous ballet The Nutcracker is based. The ballet Coppélia is based on two other stories that Hoffmann wrote, while Schumann's Kreisleriana is based on Hoffmann's character Johannes Kreisler. Hoffmann's stories were very influential during the 19th century, and he is one of the major authors of the Romantic movement. |
![]() | Kaku, Michio January 24, 1947 Michio Kaku (born January 24, 1947) is an American communicator and popularizer of science, futurist, theoretical physicist, and Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics at the City College of New York. He has written several books about physics and related topics, has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and film, and writes extensive online blogs and articles. |
![]() | Kast, Verena January 24, 1943 Verena Kast is a professor of psychology at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. She has written many books, including The Nature of Loving, A Time to Mourn, and The Creative Leap. |
![]() | McElvaine, Robert S. January 24, 1947 Robert S. McElvaine, associate professor of history at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, is the editor of Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters From the Forgotten Man, which Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., described as ‘a compelling contribution to our history.’ Studs Terkel said, ‘McElvaine has captured these voices as no one else ever has.’ |
![]() | Neale, J. M. January 24, 1818 John Mason Neale (24 January 1818 – 6 August 1866) was an Anglican priest, scholar and hymnodist. Neale was born in London on 24 January 1818, his parents being the clergyman Cornelius Neale and Susanna Neale, daughter of John Mason Good. He was educated at Sherborne School, Dorset, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where (despite being said to be the best classical scholar in his year) his lack of ability in mathematics prevented him taking an honours degree. Neale was named after the Puritan cleric and hymn writer John Mason (1645–94), of whom his mother Susanna was a descendant. At the age of 22 Neale was the chaplain of Downing College, Cambridge. At Cambridge he was affected by the Oxford Movement and, particularly interested in church architecture, helped to found the Cambridge Camden Society (afterwards known as the ecclesiological Society). The society advocated for more ritual and religious decoration in churches, and was closely associated with the Gothic Revival. Neale was ordained in 1842. He was briefly incumbent of Crawley in Sussex, but was forced to resign due to a chronic lung disease. The following winter he lived in the Madeira Islands, where he was able to do for his History of the Eastern Church. In 1846 he became warden of Sackville College, an almshouse at East Grinstead, an appointment which he held until his death. In 1854 Neale co-founded the Society of Saint Margaret, an order of women in the Church of England dedicated to nursing the sick. Many Anglicans in his day, however, were very suspicious of anything suggestive of Roman Catholicism. Only nine years earlier, John Henry Newman had encouraged Catholic practices in Anglican churches and had ended up becoming a Roman Catholic. This encouraged the suspicion that anyone such as Neale was an agent of the Vatican, assigned to destroy Anglicanism by subverting it from within. In 1857, Neale was attacked and mauled at a funeral of one of the Sisters. From time to time unruly crowds threatened to stone him or to burn his house. He received no honour or preferment in England, and his doctorate was bestowed by Trinity College (Connecticut). However, his basic goodness eventually won the confidence of many who had fiercely opposed him, and the Sisterhood of St Margaret survived and prospered. He was also the principal founder of the Anglican and Eastern Churches Association, a religious organization founded as the Anglican and Eastern Orthodox Churches Union in 1864. A result of this organisation was the Hymns of the Eastern Church, edited by John Mason Neale and published in 1865. Neale was strongly high church in his sympathies, and had to endure a good deal of opposition, including a fourteen years' inhibition by his bishop. Neale translated the Eastern liturgies into English, and wrote a mystical and devotional commentary on the Psalms. However, he is best known as a hymnodist and, especially, translator, having enriched English hymnody with many ancient and mediaeval hymns translated from Latin and Greek. For example, the melody of Good King Wenceslas originates from a medieval Latin springtime poem, Tempus adest floridum. More than anyone else, he made English-speaking congregations aware of the centuries-old tradition of Latin, Greek, Russian, and Syrian hymns. The 1875 edition of the Hymns Ancient and Modern contains 58 of his translated hymns; The English Hymnal (1906) contains 63 of his translated hymns and six original hymns by Neale. |
![]() | Prouty, L. Fletcher January 24, 1917 Leroy Fletcher Prouty (January 24, 1917 – June 5, 2001) served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President John F. Kennedy. A former colonel in the United States Air Force, he retired from military service to become a bank executive. He subsequently became a critic of U.S. foreign policy, particularly the covert activities of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) about which he had considerable inside knowledge. Prouty was the inspiration for the character "Mr. X" in Oliver Stone's film JFK. |
![]() | Wharton, Edith January 24, 1862 Edith Wharton (born Edith Newbold Jones, January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. |
![]() | White, Curtis January 24, 1951 Curtis White is an American essayist and author. He serves as professor of English at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, and as President of the board of directors of the Center for Book Culture. Most of his career has been spent writing experimental fiction, but he has turned recently to writing books of social criticism. |
![]() | Hill, Herbert (editor) January 24, 1924 Herbert Hill (January 24, 1924 – August 15, 2004) was the labor director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for decades and was a frequent contributor to New Politics as well as the author of several books. He was later Evjue-Bascom Professor of Afro-American Studies and Industrial Relations at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and eventually emeritus professor. He played a significant role in the civil rights movement in pressuring labor unions to desegregate and to seriously implement measures that would integrate African Americans in the labor market. He was also famous for his belief that American trade unions had downplayed the history of racism that tarred their reputations, before and after the Jim Crow era. |
![]() | Coady, Lynn January 24, 1970 Lynn Coady is an award-winning author and journalist. Her first novel, Strange Heaven, was a Governor General’s Award nominee, and in 2011, her novel The Antagonist was shortlisted for the prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize, an award she won in 2013 for her short story collection Hellgoing. Coady lives in Toronto, where she writes for television. |
![]() | Burns, Robert January 25, 1759 Robert Burns (25 January 1759 – 21 July 1796) (also known as Robbie Burns, Rabbie Burns, Scotland's favourite son, the Ploughman Poet, Robden of Solway Firth, the Bard of Ayrshire and in Scotland as The Bard) was a Scottish poet and lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and is celebrated worldwide. He is the best known of the poets who have written in the Scots language, although much of his writing is also in English and a light Scots dialect, accessible to an audience beyond Scotland. He also wrote in standard English, and in these writings his political or civil commentary is often at its bluntest. He is regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement, and after his death he became a great source of inspiration to the founders of both liberalism and socialism, and a cultural icon in Scotland and among the Scottish Diaspora around the world. Celebration of his life and work became almost a national charismatic cult during the 19th and 20th centuries, and his influence has long been strong on Scottish literature. In 2009 he was chosen as the greatest Scot by the Scottish public in a vote run by Scottish television channel STV. As well as making original compositions, Burns also collected folk songs from across Scotland, often revising or adapting them. His poem (and song) 'Auld Lang Syne' is often sung at Hogmanay (the last day of the year), and 'Scots Wha Hae' served for a long time as an unofficial national anthem of the country. Other poems and songs of Burns that remain well known across the world today include 'A Red, Red Rose'; 'A Man's a Man for A' That'; 'To a Louse'; 'To a Mouse'; 'The Battle of Sherramuir'; 'Tam o' Shanter'; and 'Ae Fond Kiss'. |
![]() | Carotenuto, Aldo January 25, 1933 Aldo Carotenuto (January 25, 1933, Naples, Italy - February 13, 2005, Rome, Italy), psychoanalyst and prominent international exponent of Jungian thought, was also a member of the American Psychological Association and President of the Associazione di Psicologia e Letteratura, Professor of Psychology of the Personality at the University of Rome. He has produced over twenty works, many of which have been translated and published internationally. |
![]() | Haavikko, Paavo January 25, 1931 Paavo Haavikko (January 25, 1931, Helsinki – October 6, 2008) was a Finnish poet and playwright, considered one of the country's most outstanding writers. He was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1984. From 1967 to 1983, he was literary director of the Otava publishing company, and from 1989 to his death owner of the Art House publishing company. |
![]() | Kedourie, Elie (editor) January 25, 1926 Elie Kedourie, CBE, FBA (25 January 1926 – 29 June 1992, Washington) was a British historian of the Middle East. He wrote from a conservative perspective, dissenting from many points of view taken as orthodox in the field. He was employed at the London School of Economics (LSE) from 1953 to 1990, becoming Professor of Politics. Kedourie was famous for his rejection of what he called the "Chatham House version" of history, which viewed the story of the modern Middle East as one of continuous victimisation at the hands of the West, and instead castigated left-wing Western intellectuals for what he regarded as a naively romantic view of Islam. |
![]() | Ludwig, Emil January 25, 1881 Emil Ludwig (25 January 1881 – 17 September 1948) was a German-Swiss author, known for his biographies and study of historical "greats." |
![]() | Maugham, W. Somerset January 25, 1874 William Somerset Maugham CH (25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965) was a British playwright, novelist and short story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest paid author during the 1930s. After losing both his parents by the age of 10, Maugham was raised by a paternal uncle who was emotionally cold. Not wanting to become a lawyer like other men in his family, Maugham eventually trained and qualified as a medical doctor (physician). The first run of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), sold out so rapidly that Maugham gave up medicine to write full-time. During the First World War, he served with the Red Cross and in the ambulance corps, before being recruited in 1916 into the British Secret Intelligence Service, for which he worked in Switzerland and Russia before the October Revolution of 1917. During and after the war, he travelled in India and Southeast Asia; all of these experiences were reflected in later short stories and novels. |
![]() | Naylor, Gloria January 25, 1950 Gloria Naylor (January 25, 1950 – September 28, 2016) was an American novelist, known for novels including The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Linden Hills (1985) and Mama Day (1988). Naylor was born in New York on January 25, 1950, the oldest child of Roosevelt Naylor and Alberta McAlpin. The Naylors, who had been sharecroppers in Robinsonville, Mississippi, had migrated to Harlem to escape life in the segregated South and seek new opportunities in New York City. Her father became a transit worker; her mother, a telephone operator. Even though Naylor's mother had little education, she loved to read, and encouraged her daughter to read and keep a journal. Before her teen years, Gloria began writing prodigiously, filling many notebooks with observations, poems, and short stories. In 1963, Naylor's family moved to Queens and her mother joined the Jehovah's Witnesses. An outstanding student who read voraciously, Naylor was placed into advanced classes in high school, where she immersed herself in the work of nineteenth century British novelists. Her educational aspirations, however, were delayed by the shock of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in her senior year. She decided to postpone her college education, becoming a missionary for the Jehovah's Witnesses in New York, North Carolina, and Florida instead. She left seven years later as "things weren't getting better, but worse." From 1975 to 1981 Naylor attended Medgar Evers College and then Brooklyn College while working as a telephone operator, majoring in nursing before switching to English. It was at that time that she read Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye, which was a pivotal experience for her. She began to avidly read the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and other black women novelists, none of which she had been exposed to previously. She went on to earn an M.A. in African-American studies at Yale University; her thesis eventually became her second published novel, Linden Hills. Naylor earned her bachelor's degree in English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York in 1981. She obtained a master's degree in African American Studies from Yale University in 1983. She was an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority. Naylor's debut novel, The Women of Brewster Place, was published in 1982 and won the 1983 National Book Award in the category First Novel. It was adapted as a 1989 television miniseries of the same name by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions. Naylor's work is featured in such anthologies as Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction (ed. Terry McMillan, 1990), Calling the Wind: Twentieth-Century African-American Short Stories (ed. Clarence Major, 1992) and Daughters of Africa (ed. Margaret Busby, 1992). During her career as a professor, Naylor taught writing and literature at several universities, including George Washington University, New York University, Boston University, and Cornell University. Naylor died of a heart attack on September 28, 2016, while visiting St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands. She was 66. |
![]() | Prigogine, Ilya January 25, 1917 Viscount Ilya Romanovich Prigogine (25 January 1917 – 28 May 2003) was a physical chemist and Nobel laureate noted for his work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility. |
![]() | Schneider, Steven Jay (editor) January 25, 1974 Steven Jay Schneider is a Ph D candidate in Cinema Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. |
![]() | Traba, Marta January 25, 1930 Marta Traba (Buenos Aires, 25 January 1930 – Madrid, 27 November 1983) was an art critic and writer known for her contributions to Latin American art and literature. She died in a plane crash in 1983. |
![]() | Woolf, Virginia January 25, 1882 Adeline Virginia Woolf (née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929). |
![]() | Alazraki, Jaime and Ivask, Ivan (editors) January 26, 1934 JAIME ALAZRAKI (January 26, 1934, Argentina - February 9, 2014, Barcelona, Spain) was Professor of Romance Languages and Literature at Harvard University. IVAR IVASK is Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Oklahoma and Editor of World Literature Today. He is the editor of two other critical collections published by the University of Oklahoma Press, The Perpetual Present: The Poetry and Prose of Octavio Paz and The Cardinal Points of Borges (coedited with Lowell Dunham). |
![]() | Andrews, Roy Chapman January 26, 1884 Roy Chapman Andrews (January 26, 1884 – March 11, 1960) was an American explorer, adventurer and naturalist who became the director of the American Museum of Natural History. He is primarily known for leading a series of expeditions through the fragmented China of the early 20th century into the Gobi Desert and Mongolia. The expeditions made important discoveries and brought the first-known fossil dinosaur eggs to the museum. His popular writings about his adventures made him famous. |
![]() | Bagdikian, Ben H. January 26, 1920 Ben Haig Bagdikian (born January 26, 1920, Mara?, Ottoman Empire; modern-day Turkey) is an Armenian-American educator and journalist. Bagdikian has made journalism his profession since 1941. He is a significant American media critic and the dean emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. In 1983, Bagdikian published The Media Monopoly, which revealed the fast-moving media conglomeration that was putting more and more media corporations in fewer and fewer hands with each new merger. |
![]() | Bierman, John January 26, 1929 John Bierman (born January 26 1929; died January 4 2006) was one of the last of a generation of buccaneering reporters and writers who pursued successful careers across the media. Newspaper reporter, editor, radio correspondent, television ‘fireman’, documentary maker and, finally, acclaimed historian, Bierman excelled at each, in a working life that reached back to the days of plate cameras and reporters in trilbies. He was fast, fluent, accurate and - beneath a forbidding carapace - a widely read and civilised man. A friend recalls him in a hotel room in some colonial outpost where a big story had broken, stripped to his underpants and fuelling himself with beer as he fired off copy in perfectly rounded sentences to papers and radio stations across the globe. His big stories as a BBC TV reporter included a 13-minute, mainly ad-libbed, report from Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972 (which won a Cannes TV Festival award), the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971 and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974. His final incarnation as a historian was pursued in the Mediterranean calm of a Cypriot farmhouse - he liked to describe himself as a ‘palm-tree man’. The military historian Sir John Keegan wrote of Alamein: War Without Hate (2002), which Bierman co-authored with fellow journalist Colin Smith: ‘Few historians write as fluently as they do; few journalists achieve their standards of accuracy and inclusiveness.’ Bierman was born within the sound of Bow Bells in London. His father, an antiques dealer, beat a hasty exit, and his mother, who ran a dress shop, paid attention to her son only when in funds. Largely raised by his grandparents, and evacuated from London during the second world war, he had, therefore, a peripatetic childhood that ideally prepared him for life as a globetrotting reporter. His love of the English language was acquired young. Despite attending 16 schools, he had a sound basic education, and could recite long passages of poetry. He revelled in the bohemian London of his youth - the story goes that Dylan Thomas was once sick over his new suede shoes - and he knew the music hall songs of the era. At the time of his death, he was engaged on a memoir of this period with the working title Guttersnipes. Bierman learned his craft the old-fashioned way, in the provinces. In 1954, he took off for Canada, where he worked on several papers and married. Back in England, he became a Fleet Street sub-editor on the Mirror and the Express, rising rapidly to the Express backbench, where senior subeditors called the shots. The hours were long, and the after-hours spent in the then newspaper fashion of drinking till the morning buses rolled. In 1960, Bierman was headhunted by the Aga Khan to found and edit the Nation, in Nairobi. Those four years were among his happiest professionally. A colleague recalls: ‘John was a great editor - driving, dynamic, young, assured, foul-mouthed, contemptuous of settlers, frightened of nobody, a marvellous design man and an elegant writer.’ He next moved to the Caribbean as a managing editor. He returned to England in the mid-1960s just as the BBC was recruiting experienced print journalists to stiffen its staff of largely university graduates - ‘all rather posh men’, according to Mike Sullivan, another of the hard-bitten tribe who joined when Bierman did. Sullivan thinks Bierman found performing for the camera hard, but he was energetic, intrepid and - as ever - fast and accurate. But his talents did not include office politics: old BBC sweats still tell of Bierman almost climbing over desks to throttle - usually terrified - executives whom he regarded as nincompoops. During the Indo-Pakistan war, he met Hilary Brown, a Canadian journalist. It was - in Brown's words - love at first sight, ‘one enchanted morning across a crowded press conference’. Brown became Bierman's ‘pigeon’, ferrying his film in a battered taxi driven by a man high on hash across the Khyber Pass to Kabul. Five years later, she became Bierman's second wife. Her career took off, and Bierman followed her postings. Wherever they pitched up, he always got work as a writer or editor. Bierman's breakthrough book was Righteous Gentile: The Story of Raoul Wallenberg (1981), which brought to international attention the then largely neglected story of the Swedish diplomat who rescued Hungarian Jews from the Nazis. Bierman's words are inscribed on Wallenberg's statue in central London: ‘The 20th century spawned two of history's vilest tyrannies. Raoul Wallenberg outwitted the first but was swallowed up by the second. His triumph over Nazi genocide reminds us that the courageous and committed individual can prevail against even the cruellest state machine. The fate of the six million Jews he was unable to rescue reminds us of the evil to which racist ideas can drive whole nations. Finally, his imprisonment reminds us not only of Soviet brutality but also of the ignorance and indifference which led the free world to abandon him. We must never forget these lessons.’ ‘Dammit all,’ Bierman would joke, ‘these are the most enduring words I've ever written, and there's no byline.’ One of Bierman's books - The Heart's Grown Brutal, a thriller set in Northern Ireland - was written under the pseudonym David Brewster; he was still on the BBC staff and not supposed to moonlight. In all, he published eight books (two written with Smith), continuing to work after a kidney (donated by his son Jonathan) transplant in 2002. Despite a later heart bypass, arthritis and damaged nerves in his neck which made writing torture, he stayed at his keyboard. He told an interviewer: ‘Working, in the sense of writing books, I shall do until I drop because it is my life.’ Bierman himself was of Ukrainian/ Jewish stock, but totally secular. Despite having lived and worked in Israel, he did not darken the door of a synagogue until he attended a friend's wedding late in life. |
![]() | Brown, George Douglas January 26, 1869 George Douglas Brown (26 January 1869 – 28 August 1902) was a Scottish novelist, best known for his highly influential realist novel The House with the Green Shutters (1901), which was published the year before his death at the age of 33. |
![]() | Callado, Antonio Carlos January 26, 1917 ANTONIO CALLADO was born in Niterói, capital of the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1917. In 1937 he began his distinguished career in journalism with Rio’s Correio de Manha and o Globo. During World War II he was in London and Paris as a correspondent and radio announcer. Following the war he returned to Brazil and to journalism and writing, serving as Correio de Manhâ’s chief editor from 1954 to 1960. In 1950-51, as editor-in-chief, he started the Brazilian edition of Reader’s Digest and from 1960 to 1963 edited a Brazilian encyclopedia sponsored by the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Since late 1963, Callado has been an editor of 0 Jornal do Brasil. He is the author of two prize-winning plays, two novels - Assunçâo do Salviano (1956) and Quarup (1967) - and three works of nonfiction, one of which consists of his 1968 interviews with American prisoners of war in North Vietnam. He has contributed occasional literary letters from Brazil to The New York Times Book Review. |
![]() | Carroll, Jonathan January 26, 1949 Jonathan Samuel Carroll (born January 26, 1949) is an American fiction writer primarily known for novels that may be labelled magic realism, slipstream or contemporary fantasy. He has lived in Austria from the 1970s. |
![]() | Davis, Angela January 26, 1944 Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American political activist, scholar, and author. She emerged as a nationally prominent activist and radical in the 1960s, as a leader of the Communist Party USA, and had close relations with the Black Panther Party through her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement despite never being an official member of the party. Prisoner rights have been among her continuing interests; she is the founder of Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex. She is a retired professor with the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is the former director of the university's Feminist Studies department. Her research interests are in feminism, African-American studies, critical theory, Marxism, popular music, social consciousness, and the philosophy and history of punishment and prisons. Her membership in the Communist Party led to Ronald Reagan's request in 1969 to have her barred from teaching at any university in the State of California. She was tried and acquitted of suspected involvement in the Soledad brothers' August 1970 abduction and murder of Judge Harold Haley in Marin County, California. She was twice a candidate for Vice President on the Communist Party USA ticket during the 1980s. |
![]() | Dodge, Mary Mapes January 26, 1831 Mary Mapes Dodge (January 26, 1831 – August 21, 1905) was an American children's writer and editor, best known for her novel Hans Brinker. |
![]() | Epstein, Jason January 26, 1928 Jason Wolkow Epstein (born January 26, 1928) is an American editor and publisher. |
![]() | Harris, Eddy L. January 26, 1956 EDDY HARRIS graduated from Stanford University and went on to study in London. He has been a screenwriter and a journalist. His first book was the critically acclaimed MISSISSIPPI SOLO. Harris calls St. Louis, Missouri, home. |
![]() | Hemphill, C. Dallett January 26, 1959 C. Dallett Hemphill (January 26, 1959 - July 3, 2015, Jefferson Health, Philadelphia, PA) was Professor of History at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania. |
![]() | Israel, Jonathan January 26, 1946 Jonathan Israel is professor of modern history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is in the process of finishing a monumental three-volume history of the Radical Enlightenment, the first two volumes of which, Radical Enlightenment and Enlightenment Contested, have already been published. |
![]() | Jones, Thom January 26, 194 Thomas Douglas "Thom" Jones (January 26, 1945 – October 14, 2016) was an American writer, primarily of short stories. His first book, published in 1993, was the short-story collection The Pugilist at Rest. The stories deal with common themes of mortality and pain, with characters who often find a kind of solace in the rather pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer. Boxing, absent or mentally ill fathers, physical trauma, and the Vietnam War are also recurring motifs. The collection was a National Book Award finalist. Jones published two other collections of short stories, Cold Snap (1995) and Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine (1999). |
![]() | Nair, Anita January 26, 1966 Anita Nair (born January 26, 1966) is an Indian English-language writer. Nair was born in Shornur in the state of Kerala. Nair was educated in Chennai (Madras) before returning to Kerala, where she gained a BA in English Language and Literature. She lives in Bangalore. Nair was working as the creative director of an advertising agency in Bangalore when she wrote her first book, a collection of short stories called Satyr of the Subway, which she sold to Har-Anand Press. The book won her a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Nair's second book was published by Penguin India, and was the first book by an Indian author to be published by Picador USA. A bestselling author of fiction and poetry, Nair's novels The Better Man and Ladies Coupe have been translated into 21 languages. Among Nair's early commercial works were pieces she penned in the late 90's for The Bangalore Monthly magazine (now called '080' Magazine), published by Explocity in a column titled 'The Economical Epicurean'. Thereafter followed Nair's novel The Better Man (2000) which also has been published in Europe and the United States. In 2002, appeared the collection of poems Malabar Mind, and in 2003 Where the Rain is Born - Writings about Kerala which she has edited. Anita Nair's second novel Ladies Coupé from 2001, has turned out to be an even greater success than the first both among critics and readers in so far 15 countries outside India: from USA to Turkey, from Poland to Portugal. In 2002, 'Ladies Coupé' was elected as one of the five best in India. The novel is about women's conditions in a male dominated society, told with great insight, solidarity and humour. Ladies Coupe (2001) was rated as one of 2002's top five books of the year and was translated into more than twenty-five languages around the world. Nair has also written The Puffin Book of Myths and Legends (2004), a children's book on myths and legends. Nair has also edited Where the Rain is Born (2003). Nair's writings about Kerala and her poetry has been included in The Poetry India Collection and a British Council Poetry Workshop Anthology. Nair has also written a few other books, such as Mistress (2003), Adventures of Nonu, the Skating Squirrel (2006), Living Next Door to Alise (2007) and Magical Indian Myths (2008). Nair's works also include many travelogues. With the play Nine Faces of Being, best-selling author Anita Nair has become a playwright. The story, is adapted from Nair’s book Mistress Her sixth novel Idris: Keeper of The Light (2014) is a historical and geographical novel about a Somalian trader who visited Malabar in 1659 AD. |
![]() | Picon-Salas, Mariano January 26, 1901 Mariano Federico Picón Salas, an influential Venezuelan diplomatic, cultural critic and writer of the 20th century, was born in Mérida (Mérida State) on January 26, 1901, and died in Caracas on January 1, 1965. Among his books, his collection of essays on history, literary criticism and cultural history are remarkable. He travelled a lot through the Americas. His work is also important because of his wide perspective, studying the culture of the entire continent. He left Venezuela, under the political persecution of dictator Juan Vicente Gómez. Living for a large period in Chile, he studied history, gaining the degree of Profesor de Historia and later a doctorate in philosophy and letters. He came back to Venezuela in 1936, working as a professor and author. He founded the Asociación de Escritores de Venezuela (Writers Association from Venezuela), and worked for the Ministry of Education. His studies on "Barroco de Indias" (the term that he coined to talk about the baroque from Hispanic America) are very influential among the general study of Baroque. He received the National Prize for Literature in 1954. He taught at Columbia University, New York. He was twice married, first to a Chilean lady, Isabel Cento, with whom he had his only daughter, named Delia Isabel Picón de Morles. He later married Venezuelan Beatriz Otáñez. |
![]() | Pulido, Laura January 26, 1962 Laura Pulido is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Program in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (1996). |
![]() | Rifkin, Jeremy January 26, 1945 Jeremy Rifkin (born January 26, 1945) is an American economic and social theorist, writer, public speaker, political advisor, and activist. Rifkin is the author of 20 books about the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment. His most recent books include The Zero Marginal Cost Society (2014), The Third Industrial Revolution (2011), The Empathic Civilization (2010), and The European Dream (2004). |
![]() | Van Sertima, Ivan January 26, 1935 Ivan Gladstone Van Sertima (26 January 1935 – 25 May 2009) was a Guyanese-born associate professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University in the United States. He was best known for his Olmec alternative origin speculations, a brand of pre-Columbian contact theory, which he proposed in his book They Came Before Columbus (1976). While his Olmec theory has "spread widely in African American community, both lay and scholarly", it was mostly ignored in Mesoamericanist scholarship, or else dismissed as Afrocentric pseudohistory to the effect of "robbing native American cultures". |
![]() | Choy, Sam January 27, 1952 Sam Choy (born January 27, 1952, Laie, Honolulu County, Hawaii, HI) is a chef, restaurateur, and television personality known as a founding contributor of "Pacific rim cuisine". Choy is an alumnus of the Kapiolani Community College Culinary Arts program. One of his first jobs as a chef was at The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. He would then return to Hawaii, where he eventually opened a chain of restaurants. Choy helped develop and popularize Hawaii regional cuisine. In 1991, Choy founded the Poke Festival and Recipe Contest. In 2004, Choy was awarded the James Beard Foundation Award America's Classics Award for Sam Choy's Kaloko in Kailua-Kona, on the Big Island of Hawaii. The award recognizes "beloved regional restaurants" that reflect the character of their communities. Choy has appeared in several Food TV programs, including Ready.. Set... Cook! and Iron Chef America. He is good friends with Emeril Lagasse, who has appeared on Choy's TV show Sam Choy's Kitchen on KHNL. Lagasse has also mentioned Choy by name several times in his TV shows; one of those times he was making Poke on his live TV show, and added peanut butter to the Poke - Choy's "secret ingredient". In 2015, Choy broadcast a series on YouTube, Sam Choy In The Kitchen. Choy has designed special Hawaiian inspired dishes for American Airlines first class passengers to and from Hawaii. |
![]() | Elliott, Robert (with Albert R. Beatty) January 27, 1874 Robert Greene Elliott (January 27, 1874 – October 10, 1939) was the "state electrician" (i.e., executioner) for the State of New York – and for those neighboring states that used the electric chair, including New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Massachusetts – during the period 1926-1939. He was born in Hamlin, New York, the son of Irish immigrants Thomas Elliott and Martha Jane Elliott (nee Rowley). As a child he was a devout Methodist, and at one point his parents wanted him to be a minister. As a young boy Elliott recounts that he read of the first use of the electric chair and wondered what it might be like to throw the switch at an execution. He became employed in the prison service as a regular electrician, ultimately in charge of the power-house at Dannemora Prison in upstate New York. In that capacity he remotely assisted Edwin Davis at electrocutions at Dannemora State Prison. Initially his involvement was to change the armatures on the generator in the power house, so that it would temporarily produce enough power to send over high-tension wires to the electric chair elsewhere in the prison complex. In his Memoirs - "Agent of Death" (see below) he recounted that when Davis visited Dannemora to conduct executions, that he would be invited to dinner at Elliott's nearby house. This on-the-job training and personal rapport with Davis ultimately stood him in good stead in 1926 when he applied for and accepted the post of "State electrician", which had just fallen vacant by John Hulbert. On January 28, 1926 he officiated at his first execution, the double electrocution of Emil Klatt and Luigi Rapito. Although not wearing a mask or a hood, he tried to conceal his identity at first, not revealing his name. For each execution he was paid the same fee of $150. Elliott is credited with perfecting judicial execution by electrocution. He usually made the first contact at 2000 volts, holding it there for 3 seconds. Then he lowered the voltage to 500 volts for the balance of the first minute; raised it to 2000 volts for a further 3 seconds; lowered the voltage to 500 volts for the rest of the second minute; then raised it again to 2000 volts for a few seconds before shutting off the power. Elliott recommended that the ideal amperage for executions was around 8 amps. His technique was intended to render the victim unconscious, in an instant, with the first massive shock, while the lower voltage heated the vital organs to a point where life was extinguished, without causing undue bodily burning. This oscillating cycle of shocks also seized the heart, causing it to go into arrest and stop beating. He often carried his own electrodes with him, including a head-piece made from a cut-down football helmet, lined with moist sponge. A keen gardener and a quiet family man, Elliott ran an electrical contracting business and claimed never to have been more than an instrument of the people when he performed an execution. Despite his calling, he profoundly disagreed with capital punishment, saying that it served no useful purpose. In his memoirs, Elliot wrote "I hope that the day is not far distant when legal slaying, whether by electrocution, hanging, lethal gas, or any other method is outlawed throughout the United States." He is reported to have executed 387 people, including Sacco and Vanzetti, Ruth Snyder and Bruno Hauptmann. On January 6, 1927, he carried out the electrocutions of six inmates in two states. Soon after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, persons unknown planted a bomb under his house that destroyed his front porch. For some time later the State of New York paid for a 24-hour guard. He published his experiences in a book entitled Agent of Death. Shortly after the executions, a newspaper reported that Elliott was haunted by what he had done, that the specter of Ruth Snyder bedeviled him. It was reported that Elliott required sedation to sleep, and that he was paralyzed with guilt. However, in Agent of Death, Elliott wrote that he was affected by the necessity of electrocuting a woman, but he was not the type of man to lose sleep over having done his job. In the foreword to his memoirs, his co-author, A. R. Beatty commented that Elliott had just approved the final chapters of the book before passing-away after a short illness. Elliott is buried in the Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, East Greenbush, New York |
![]() | Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von January 27, 1836 Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch (27 January 1836 – 9 March 1895) was an Austrian writer and journalist, who gained renown for his romantic stories of Galician life. The term masochism is derived from his name. During his lifetime, Sacher-Masoch was well known as a man of letters, a utopian thinker who espoused socialist and humanist ideals in his fiction and non-fiction. Most of his works remain untranslated into English. The novel Venus in Furs is his only book commonly available in English. |
![]() | Gutierrez, Pedro Juan January 27, 1950 PEDRO JUAN GUTIERREZ began his working life at the age of eleven, as an ice-cream vendor and newsboy. The author of several published works of poetry, he lives in Havana, where he devotes himself to writing and painting. |
![]() | Lester, Julius January 27, 1939 Julius Lester grew up in the Midwest and South, and graduated from Fisk University. He is the author of seventeen books, both children’s and adult, including the novel DO LORD REMEMBER ME and the memoir LOVE-SONG. He has been awarded the Newbery Honor Medal and Lewis Carroll Shelf Award for children’s books. He is currently Professor of Judaic and Far Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts — Amherst. |
![]() | Marqusee, Mike January 27, 1953 Mike Marqusee (27 January 1953 – 13 January 2015) was an American writer, journalist and political activist in London. Marqusee's first published work was the essay "Turn Left at Scarsdale", written when he was a sixteen-year-old high school student in New York and included in the 1970 collection "High School Revolutionaries". Marqusee, who described himself as a "deracinated New York Marxist Jew", lived in Britain from 1971. He wrote mainly about politics, popular culture, the Indian sub-continent and cricket, and was a regular correspondent for, among others, The Guardian, Red Pepper and The Hindu. After he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2007, he wrote extensively on health issues, and in defence of the National Health Service. His book The Price of Experience: Writings on Living with Cancer was published in 2014. Marqusee was the editor of Labour Left Briefing, an executive member of the Stop the War Coalition and the Socialist Alliance and wrote for Left Unity. He was also a leading figure in Iraq Occupation Focus. In 2014, he was working on a proposed biography of the writers Tom Paine and William Blake. Marqusee's partner was the barrister Liz Davies. He died in January 2015, aged 61, of multiple myeloma. "Both in the eloquence of his writing and the deep humanism of his vision, Mike Marqusee stands shoulder to shoulder with the spirits of Isaac Deutscher and Edward Said." – Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz. |
![]() | Richler, Mordecai January 27, 1931 Mordecai Richler, CC (January 27, 1931 – July 3, 2001) was a Canadian author, screenwriter and essayist. A leading critic called him 'the great shining star of his Canadian literary generation' and a pivotal figure in the country's history. His best known works are The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) and Barney's Version (1997); his 1989 novel Solomon Gursky Was Here was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 1990. He was also well known for the Jacob Two-Two children's stories. In addition to his fiction, Richler wrote numerous essays about the Jewish community in Canada, and about nationalism as practised by Canadian anglophones and the francophone Québécois. Arriving as immigrants in Canada when English was the country's sole official language (long before English-French bilingualism became an official federal policy), the Jewish communities in Montreal - a city in the francophone province of Québec - largely acquired English, not French, as a second language after Yiddish. This later put them at odds with some in the Québec nationalist movement, which argued for French as the official language of Québec. His Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country (1992), a collection of essays about nationalism and anti-semitism, generated considerable controversy. |
![]() | Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail January 27, 1826 Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin (27 January 1826 – 10 May 1889), was a major Russian satirist of the 19th century. He spent most of his life working as a civil servant in various capacities. After the death of poet Nikolay Nekrasov, he acted as editor of the well-known Russian magazine, Otechestvenniye Zapiski, until it was banned by the government in 1884. His best known work is the novel The Golovlyov Family (1876). |
![]() | Shipman, Pat January 27, 1949 Pat Shipman (born January 27, 1949, Scarsdale, NY) is an anthropologist and a retired adjunct professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of several books, including The Animal Connection, The Man Who Found the Missing Link, and Taking Wing, which won the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. |
![]() | Carroll, Lewis January 27, 1832 Lewis Carroll is the pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898). He wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for the amusement of 11-year-old Alice Liddell and her two sisters, who were the daughters of the dean of Christ Church College, Oxford, where Dodgson taught mathematics. The book was published in 1865, and its first companion volume, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, followed in 1871. |
![]() | Auslander, Leora January 28, 1959 Leora Auslander is Professor of History and Founding Director of the Center of Gender Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author OF TASTE AND POWER: FURNISHING MODERN FRANCE (UC Press). |
![]() | Baring-Gould, Sabine January 28, 1834 Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould (28 January 1834 – 2 January 1924) of Lew Trenchard in Devon, England, was an Anglican priest, hagiographer, antiquarian, novelist and eclectic scholar. His bibliography consists of more than 1240 publications, though this list continues to grow. His family home, the manor house of Lew Trenchard, near Okehampton, Devon, has been preserved as he had it rebuilt and is now a hotel. He is remembered particularly as a writer of hymns, the best-known being "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and "Now the Day Is Over". He also translated the carol "Gabriel's Message" from the Basque language to the English. |
![]() | Barnet, Miguel January 28, 1940 Miguel Angel Barnet Lanza (born January 28, 1940) is a Cuban writer, novelist and ethnographer. He studied sociology at the University of Havana, under Fernando Ortiz, the pioneer of Cuban anthropology, whose studies of Afro-Cuban cultures influenced many of the themes, both literary and scholarly, of Barnet. |
![]() | Bruzzi, Stella January 28, 1962 Stella Bruzzi is Professor of Film Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London, Her previous publications include Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies (1997), New Documentary: A Critical Introduction (2000 ), and Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis (2000). |
![]() | Indridason, Arnaldur January 28, 1961 Arnaldur Indridason was born in 1961. He worked at an Icelandic newspaper, first as a journalist and then for many years as a film reviewer. He won the Glass Key Award for Best Nordic Crime Novel for both JAR CITY and SILENCE OF THE GRAVE, and in 2005 SILENCE OF THE GRAVE also won the CWA Gold Dagger Award for best crime novel of the year. (The film of JAR CITY, now available on DVD, was Iceland’s entry for the 2008 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.) Indridason lives in Iceland, and his next novel in the series is forthcoming soon from Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Minotaur. |
![]() | Colette January 28, 1873 Colette (28 January 1873 – 3 August 1954) was the surname of the French novelist and performer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. She is best known for her novel Gigi, the basis for the film and Lerner and Loewe stage production of the same title. Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. She was also a mime, an actress and a journalist. |
![]() | Foix, J. V. January 28, 1893 Josep Vicenç Foix i Mas (Barcelona, 28 January 1893 - 29 January 1987) was a Catalan poet, writer, and essayist. He usually signed his work by using the abbreviation J.V. Foix. Born in Sarrià (nowadays a neighbourhood in Barcelona), Foix was a son of one of the best-known bakers in the whole city. He started his studies of Law, but left them after the second course at university. From then, he worked in the familiar business as well as he read classic masterpieces of literature by authors such as Lord Byron, Dante Alighieri or Charles Baudelaire. Indeed, Foix never forbade the place where he had been born, not even when the Spanish Civil War ended. Nonetheless, Foix always had been a liberal writer who introduced some avantgarde ideology in Catalonia. In 1916 began to collaborate with La Revista and started to be interested in avantgarde art. He worked among other publications like Trossos, La Cònsola (1919–1920) or La Publicitat (1923–1936), where he worked as an art director. At the end of the Spanish Civil War, Foix returned to the familiar business, and let forgotten for some time his artistic purpose. He also compiled his total poetic work, and continued helping young artist related to avanatgarde, between which Joan Brossa must be named. On 25 May 1962, he became member of Institut d'Estudis Catalans. His popularity went on growing, thanks to Joan Manuel Serrat and his song Es quan dormo que hi veig clar, (a version of one of Foix's poems). He received many different awards during his life. The Gold Medal of Generalitat de Catalunya (Medalla d'Or de la Generalitat de Catalunya, 1981) or the Honour Award in Catalan Letters (Premi d'Honor de les Lletres catalanes, 1984) are some of them. In 1984, the Parliament of Catalonia proposed him for the Nobel Prize in Literature. J. V. Foix helped in 1985 to found again the students association ‘Federació Nacional d'Estudiants de Catalunya’ (FNEC). He was named President de Honour of it. He died in 1987, and buried in Sarrià. |
![]() | Glantz, Margo January 28, 1930 Margo Glantz (born January 28, 1930) is a Mexican writer, essayist, critic and academic. She has been a member of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua since 1995. Margo Glantz's family immigrated to Mexico from Ukraine in the 1920s. Her father, Jacobo Glantz, met her mother, Elizabeth (Lucia) Shapiro in Odessa, where they married. They tried to emigrate to the United States of America, where they had relatives, but were denied entry and had to remain in Mexico. Although they stayed faithful to Jewish traditions, they soon moved in Mexican artistic circles. Her father was a friend of Diego Rivera, and had great interest in the new cultural currents of his new adoptive country. For many reasons, the family (including four daughters) had to move quite often. As a result, Margo went to several schools. She spent two years in the Secondary School No. 15, a year in the Israelite School of Mexico, and earned her baccalaureate in the National Preparatory School Number 1, the old school of San Ildefonso, where she was strongly influenced by one of her teachers, Agustín Yáñez. From 1947 to 1953, Margo Glantz studied English and Spanish Literature, as well as Art history, majoring in Theater History at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Here she had many outstanding professors, among them writers and philosophers such as Alfonso Reyes, Julio Torri, Rodolfo Usigli, Samuel Ramos and Leopoldo Zea. In 1953 she left for Europe, where she earned her doctorate in Hispanic Literature at the Sorbonne. It was there where she presented her thesis on 'The French Exoticism in Mexico (From 1847 to 1867)'. On her return to Mexico, she became a teacher in the Department of Theater History in the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature. In 1959 her first daughter, Alina, was born. After a journey to Cuba in 1961, she started to teach a course in Mexican Literature at the National Preparatory School Number 1, as well as courses in Universal Literature and of Mexican Literature at the Preparatory No. 5. In the same year she started to teach at the University Center of Theatre, at the School of Theater and Fine arts of the UNAM, and at the Center of Classic Theater of the 'Casa del Lago' (Lake House). During these years she published several essays and theater reviews in a variety of cultural magazines and handouts. In 1966 she became a permanent, full-time Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, specifically in Hispanic Literature and Comparative Literature. She founded and directed the university magazine Punto de Partida. She was also the director of the Israel-Mexico Cultural Institute until 1969. In 1971 her daughter Renata was born. In the same year she set out for the United States of America, where she taught classes at Montclair State College in New Jersey. She published Onda y escritura en Mexico (Wave and writing in Mexico), Jovenes de 20 a 33, which gave name to a wave of emerging literature in the 60s, the 'Onda' (the Wave). She returned to Mexico in 1974, where she rejoined the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, teaching courses in Latin American and Mexican Literature. In 1978 she edited her first fictional book, Las mil y una calorias, novela dietética (A Thousand and One Calories: A Dietetic Novel), which inspired a great number of other books in the field of creation and criticism. In 1981 she dedicated her autobiographic work, Las genealogias, to her father, who died one year later. In 1983 she was named Director of Literature at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA), where she promoted and directed a number of publications. A year later she obtained the 'Premio Xavier Villaurrutia' (The Xavier Villaurrutia Award) for her work Síndrome de Naufragios. In 1986 she set out for England, where she worked as a Cultural Associate in the Mexican Embassy in London, until 1988. That same year she returned to Mexico, and since has led courses at the Faculty of Philosophy and in numerous universities overseas. In 1989 she was named Member of the National System of Researchers. In 1991 she obtained the National University Prize and again in 1994 she was given the title of Emeritus Professor, both by UNAM. Likewise, the University of Princeton has since awarded her the nomination of Honorary Emeritus Creator of the National System of Creators, as well as the Council of Humanities Fellow. In 1995 she was elected to be a member of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua (Mexican Language Academy). In 2004 she was awarded the 'Premio Nacional, campo I, Área de Lingüística y Literatura' (National Prize, field 1, Are of Linguistics and Literature). That same year she was granted the distinction of Emeritus Investigator of the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (National System of Investigators). A year later, in 2005, she was honored with the Doctorate Honoris Causa by the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana and with her nomination as an Emeritus Honorary Creator of the National System of Creators. In 2006 a web page was published about her, which was coordinated by Beatriz Aracil Varón, in the Virtual Library Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, of Alicante University. |
![]() | Neuman, Andres January 28, 1977 Andrés Neuman was born in 1977 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and grew up in Spain. He has a degree in Spanish philology from the University of Granada. Neuman was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists and was elected to the Bogotá-39 list. TRAVELER OF THE CENTURY was the winner of the Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize, Spain’s two most prestigious literary awards. |
![]() | Habiby, Emile January 28,1922 Imil (Emile) Shukri Habiby (28 January 1922 – 2 May 1996) was a Palestinian and Israeli Arab writer of Arabic expression and a communist politician, son of a Christian family. Habibi was born in Haifa on 29 August 1922, into an Anglican Palestinian Arab family. His family had originally belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem but converted to Anglicanism due to disputes within the Orthodox church. In his early life, he worked on an oil refinery and later was a radio announcer. Under the Mandate he became one of the leaders of the Palestine Communist Party. When the 1948 Arab-Israeli War began, he stayed in Haifa while many others chose or were forced to leave the country by the Israeli Army. Having stayed in Haifa, however, Habibi was eventually granted Israeli citizenship. After the war, he helped to create the Israeli Communist Party and established the communist paper Al-Ittihad. In 1956 he moved from Haifa to Nazareth and stayed there for the rest of his life. He died in 1996 in Nazareth and was buried according to his request in Haifa . His gravestone reads (at Habibi's own request): 'Emile Habibi – Remained in Haifa.' Habibi was one of the leaders of the Palestine Communist Party during the Mandate era. He supported the 1947 UN Partition Plan. When Israel became a state he helped form the Israeli Communist Party (Maki). He served in the Knesset between 1951 and 1959, and again from 1961 until 1972, first as a member of Maki, before breaking away from the party with Tawfik Toubi and Meir Vilner to found Rakah. In 1991, after a conflict about how the party should deal with the new policies of Mikhail Gorbachev, he left the party. Habibi began writing short stories in the 1950s, and his first story, 'The Mandelbaum Gate' was published in 1954. In 1972 he resigned from the Knesset in order to write his first novel: The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist, which became a classic in modern Arabic literature. The book depicts the life of an Palestinian, employing black humour and satire. It was based on the traditional anti-hero Said in Arab literature. In a playful way it deals with how it is for Arabs to live in the state of Israel, and how one who has nothing to do with politics is drawn in to it. He followed this by other books, short stories and a play. His last novel, published in 1992, was Saraya, the Ogre's Daughter. In it he has a character state: 'There is no difference between Christian and Muslim: we are all Palestinian in our predicament.' In 1990, Habibi received the Al-Quds Prize from the PLO. In 1992, he received the Israel Prize for Arabic literature. His willingness to accept both reflected his belief in coexistence. Though after accepting the Israel Prize a debate set off among the Arabic intellectual community. Habibi was accused of legitimizing the Israeli 'anti-Arab' policy. Habibi replied to the accusations: 'A dialogue of prizes is better than a dialogue of stones and bullets,' he said. 'It is indirect recognition of the Arabs in Israel as a nation. This is recognition of a national culture. It will help the Arab population in its struggle to strike roots in the land and win equal rights' |
![]() | Hoyt, Richard January 28, 1941 Richard Hoyt, a graduate of the University of Oregon, is a former fellow of the Washington Journalism Center and holds a Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Hawaii. He served as U.S. army counterintelligence agent, wrote for daily newspapers in Honolulu, and was a stringer for Newsweek magazine. He taught journalism at the University of Maryland and at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, OR. Hoyt is the author of the John Denson mysteries, the James Burlane thrillers and numerous other novels of adventure, espionage and suspense including two under the pseudonym of Nicholas van Pelt. In researching and writing in more than two dozen countries in Europe, Latin America, and Asia, he has ridden trains across the Soviet Union and riverboats down the Amazon. He now lives in Vancouver, Washington. |
![]() | Kadare, Ismail January 28, 1936 Ismail Kadare (born 28 January 1936) is a best-selling Albanian writer. He is known for his novels, although he was first noticed for his poetry collections. He has been a leading literary figure in his own country since the 1960s. In the 1960s he focused on short stories until the publication of his first novel, The General of the Dead Army. In 1996 he became a lifetime member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of France. In 1992, he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca; in 2005, he won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize and in 2009 the Prince of Asturias Award of Arts. He has divided his time between Albania and France since 1990. Kadare has been mentioned as a possible recipient for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. He began writing very young, in the mid-1950s. His works have been published in about thirty languages. |
![]() | Lodge, David January 28, 1935 David John Lodge is an English author and literary critic. A professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham until 1987, he is known for novels satirising academic life, notably the "Campus Trilogy" – Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses, Small World: An Academic Romance, and Nice Work. |
![]() | Jaeger, Edmund C. January 28, 1887 Edmund Carroll Jaeger, D.Sc.,(January 28, 1887 – August 2, 1983) was an American biologist known for his works on desert ecology. He was born in Loup City, Nebraska to Katherine (née Gunther) and John Philip Jaeger,and moved to Riverside, California in 1906 with his family. He was the first to document, in The Condor, a state of extended torpor, approaching hibernation, in a bird, the common poorwill. He also described this in the National Geographic Magazine. |
![]() | Labbe, Carlos January 28, 1977 Carlos Labbé (born January 28, 1977) is a Chilean fiction writer born at Santiago de Chile. He graduated in Latin American and Spanish Literature, his dissertation was about Juan Carlos Onetti. Later he obtained a Master's degree in Latin American and Spanish Literature with a dissertation on Roberto Bolaño. He has published a hypertext novel, Pentagonal: incluidos tú y yo (2001), the novels Libro de plumas (2004), Navidad y Matanza (2007), Locuela (2009), and Piezas secretas contra el mundo (2014), plus the collection of short stories Caracteres blancos (2010), as well as the pop music records Doce canciones para Eleodora (2007), Monicacofonía (2008) and Mi nuevo órgano (2011), as well as the ambient music collection Repeticiones para romper el cerco (2013). He co-wrote the screenplays for the films Malta con huevo (2007) and El nombre (2015). In the past he was a member of the bands Ex Fiesta and Tornasólidos, and is now a literary critic and editor. He is married to the Chilean author es:Mónica Ríos. Carlos Labbé is one of Granta's "Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists, and is the author of a collection of short stories and six novels, one of which, Navidad & Matanza, is available in English from Open Letter. In addition to his writings, he is a musician, and has released three albums. Will Vanderhyden received an MA in literary translation from the University of Rochester. |
![]() | Iguodala, Andre (with Carvell Wallace) January 28, 1984 Andre Tyler Iguodala, born January 28, 1984) is an American professional basketball player for the Memphis Grizzlies of the National Basketball Association (NBA). The swingman was an NBA All-Star in 2012 and has been named to the NBA All-Defensive Team twice. He won three NBA championships with the Golden State Warriors, and was named the NBA Finals Most Valuable Player (MVP) in 2015. He was also a member of the United States national team at the 2010 FIBA World Championship and 2012 Summer Olympics, winning the gold medal both times. Iguodala played college basketball with the Arizona Wildcats. After earning first-team all-conference honors in the Pac-10 (known now as the Pac-12) as a sophomore in 2004, he was selected in the 2004 NBA draft with the ninth overall pick by the Philadelphia 76ers. Iguodala played for Philadelphia until the summer of 2012, when he joined the Denver Nuggets in a four-team trade. He was acquired by Golden State in 2013. In 2014–15, he became a reserve for the first time in his career, but captured the Finals MVP after returning to the starting lineup in the middle of the championship series. |
![]() | Dávila, Virgilio January 28, 1869 Virgilio Dávila (January 28, 1869 – August 22, 1943), was a Puerto Rican poet from the modern literary era, educator, politician and businessman. Dávila was born in the town of Toa Baja. he was influenced by the literary collection of his parents, both of whom were teachers, at an early age. He attended private schools where he received both his primary and secondary education. Dávila earned his bachelor's degree from the Civil Institute of Higher Learning in 1895. He taught school in the town of Gurabo. Dávila and his wife had a son on October 7, 1898, José Antonio Dávila, in the City of Bayamón, who would one day take after his father and become a poet himself. His experiences as a teacher and in agriculture later reflected in his poetry. In 1903, Dávila published his first book of poems "Patria". In this book he included poems which he wrote about Jose de Diego, Federico Degetau and Lola Rodríguez de Tió. He also included poems about the island and love in general. In 1904, Dávila became director of the weekly publication "Chantelier", which he co-founded with Braulio Dueño Colón. |
![]() | Marti, José January 28, 1853 José Julián Martí Pérez (January 28, 1853 – May 19, 1895) is a Cuban national hero and an important figure in Latin American literature. In his short life, he was a poet, an essayist, a journalist, a revolutionary philosopher, a translator, a professor, a publisher, and a political theorist. Through his writings and political activity, he became a symbol for Cuba's bid for independence against Spain in the 19th century, and is referred to as the 'Apostle of Cuban Independence.' He also wrote about the threat of Spanish and US expansionism into Cuba. From adolescence, he dedicated his life to the promotion of liberty, political independence for Cuba, and intellectual independence for all Spanish Americans; his death was used as a cry for Cuban independence from Spain by both the Cuban revolutionaries and those Cubans previously reluctant to start a revolt. Born in Havana, Martí began his political activism at an early age. He would travel extensively in Spain, Latin America, and the United States, raising awareness and support for the cause of Cuban independence. His unification of the Cuban émigré community, particularly in Florida, was crucial to the success of the Cuban War of Independence against Spain. He was a key figure in the planning and execution of this war, as well as the designer of the Cuban Revolutionary Party and its ideology. He died in military action during the Battle of Dos Ríos on May 19, 1895. Martí is considered one of the great turn-of-the-century Latin American intellectuals. His written works consist of a series of poems, essays, letters, lectures, a novel, and even a children's magazine. He wrote for numerous Latin American and American newspapers; he also founded a number of newspapers himself. His newspaper Patria was a key instrument in his campaign for Cuban independence. After his death, one of his poems from the book, 'Versos Sencillos' (Simple Verses) was adapted to the song 'Guantanamera', which has become the definitive patriotic song of Cuba. The concepts of freedom, liberty, and democracy are prominent themes in all of his works, which were influential on the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío and the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. |
![]() | Abbey, Edward January 29, 1927 Edward Paul Abbey (January 29, 1927 – March 14, 1989) was an American author and essayist noted for his advocacy of environmental issues, criticism of public land policies, and anarchist political views. His best-known works include the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, which has been cited as an inspiration by radical environmental groups, and the non-fiction work Desert Solitaire. |
![]() | Chayefsky, Paddy January 29, 1923 Sidney Aaron 'Paddy' Chayefsky (January 29, 1923 – August 1, 1981) was an American playwright, screenwriter and novelist. He is the only person to have won three solo Academy Awards for Best Screenplay (the other three-time winners, Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, have all shared their awards with co-writers). He was considered one of the most renowned dramatists of the so-called Golden Age of Television. His intimate, realistic scripts provided a naturalistic style of television drama for the 1950s, and he was regarded as the central figure in the 'kitchen sink realism' movement of American television. Martin Gottfried wrote, 'He was a successful writer, the most successful graduate of television's slice of life school of naturalism.' Following his critically acclaimed teleplays, Chayefsky continued to succeed as a playwright and novelist. As a screenwriter, he received three Academy Awards for Marty (1955), The Hospital (1971) and Network (1976). The movie Marty was based on his own television drama about a relationship between two lonely people finding love. Network was his scathing satire of the television industry and The Hospital was also satiric. Film historian David Thomson termed The Hospital 'daring, uninhibited, and prophetic. No one else would have dreamed of doing it.' Chayefsky's early stories were notable for their dialogue, their depiction of second-generation Americans and their sentiment and humor. They were frequently influenced by the author's childhood in The Bronx. The protagonists were generally middle-class tradesmen struggling with personal problems: loneliness, pressures to conform or their own emotions. Chayefsky was part of the inaugural class of inductees into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences' Television Hall of Fame. He received this honor three years after his death, in 1984. |
![]() | Hofmann, Gert January 29, 1931 Gert Hofmann (29 January 1931 – 1 July 1993) was a German writer and professor of German literature. Hofmann was born in Limbach, Saxony (Germany) and died in Erding (near Munich). Hoffmann grew up in his native Limbach which, after World War II, became part of East Germany. In 1948, he moved with his family to Leipzig. There, he attended a school for translators and interpreters, studying English and Russian. In 1950, he enrolled to Leipzig University, where he studied Romance languages and Slavic languages. In 1951, he fled from the German Democratic Republic and settled in Freiburg im Breisgau, where he continued his studies. In 1957, he graduated with a thesis on Henry James. After one year as a research assistant at the University of Freiburg, he left Germany in 1961 to teach German literature in Europe and the United States: he taught at universities in Toulouse, Paris, Bristol, Edinburgh, New Haven, Berkeley and Austin. From 1971 to 1980 he lived in the southern Austrian town of Klagenfurt, while teaching at the University of Ljubljana (in former Yugoslavia, now in Slovenia). In 1980 he moved to Erding (near Munich), where he died in 1993. Hofmann began his career as a writer of radio plays, becoming a novelist later in life after his return to Germany. He became a member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung in Darmstadt in 1987. He subsequently received several literary awards during his lifetime including the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis (1979), the Alfred-Döblin-Preis (1982), the Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden (1983) and the Literaturpreis der Stadt München (1993). Die Denunziation and Veilchenfeld are concerned with The Holocaust. A number of Hofmann's works have been translated by his son, poet Michael Hofmann. |
![]() | Wells, Rosemary January 29, 1943 Rosemary Wells is an American writer and illustrator of children's books. She is well known for the Max & Ruby series, which follows the everyday adventures of sibling bunnies, curious three-year-old Max and bossy seven-year-old Ruby. |
![]() | Wilkins, Roger January 29, 1932 Roger Wilkins (January 29, 1932 – March 26, 2017) was an African-American civil rights leader, professor of history, and journalist. Wilkins worked as a welfare lawyer in Ohio before becoming an Assistant Attorney General in President Lyndon B. Johnson's administration at age 33, one of the highest-ranking blacks ever to serve in the executive branch up to that time. Leaving government in 1969 at the end of the Johnson administration, he worked briefly for the Ford Foundation before joining the editorial staff of The Washington Post. Along with Carl Bernstein, Herbert Block, and Bob Woodward, Wilkins earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for exposing the Watergate scandal that eventually forced President Richard Nixon's resignation from office. |
![]() | Masur, Harold Q. January 29, 1909 Harold Q. Masur (January 29, 1909 New York City - September 16, 2005 Boca Raton, Florida) was an American lawyer and author of mystery novels. He graduated from the New York University School of Law in 1934 and practiced law between 1935 and 1942. Then he joined the U.S. Air Force. In the late 30s he started writing Pulp Fiction. In 1973 he was President of the Mystery Writers of America. |
![]() | Chekhov, Anton January 29, 1860 Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904) was a Russian playwright and short story writer who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. His career as a playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theater. Chekhov practiced as a medical doctor throughout most of his literary career: Medicine is my lawful wife, he once said, and literature is my mistress. Chekhov renounced the theatre after the disastrous reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Constantin Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a theatre of mood and a submerged life in the text. Chekhov had at first written stories only for financial gain, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story. He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them. Anton Chekhov was the author of hundreds of short stories and several plays and is regarded by many as both the greatest Russian storyteller and the father of modern drama. |
![]() | Alinsky, Saul D. January 30, 1909 Saul David Alinsky (January 30, 1909 – June 12, 1972) was an American community organizer and writer. He is generally considered to be the founder of modern community organizing. He is often noted for his book Rules for Radicals. In the course of nearly four decades of political organizing, Alinsky received much criticism, but also gained praise from many public figures. His organizing skills were focused on improving the living conditions of poor communities across North America. In the 1950s, he began turning his attention to improving conditions of the African-American ghettos, beginning with Chicago's and later traveling to other ghettos in California, Michigan, New York City, and a dozen other ‘trouble spots’. His ideas were later adapted by some U.S. college students and other young organizers in the late 1960s and formed part of their strategies for organizing on campus and beyond. Time magazine once wrote that ‘American democracy is being altered by Alinsky's ideas,’ and conservative author William F. Buckley said he was ‘very close to being an organizational genius.’ |
![]() | Brautigan, Richard January 30, 1935 Richard Gary Brautigan (January 30, 1935 – ca. September 14, 1984) was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. His work often employs black comedy, parody, and satire. He is best known for his 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America. Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington, the only child to Bernard Frederick ‘Ben’ Brautigan, Jr. (July 29, 1908 – May 27, 1994) a factory worker and laborer, and Lulu Mary ‘Mary Lou’ Keho (April 7, 1911 – September 24, 2005), a waitress. In May 1934, eight months prior to his birth, Bernard and Mary Lou separated. Brautigan said that he met his biological father only twice, though after Brautigan's death, Bernard was said to be unaware that Richard was his child, saying ‘He's got the same last name, but why would they wait 45 to 50 years to tell me I've got a son?’ In 1938, Brautigan and his mother began living with a man named Arthur Martin Titland. The couple produced a daughter named Barbara Ann, born on May 1, 1939 in Tacoma. Brautigan claimed that he had a very traumatic experience when his mother left him alone with his two-year-old sister in a motel room in Great Falls, Montana, where he did not know the whereabouts of his mother until she returned two days later. On January 20, 1943, Mary Lou married a fry cook named Robert Geoffrey Porterfield. The couple produced a daughter named Sandra Jean, born April 1, 1945 in Tacoma. Mary Lou told Brautigan that Porterfield was his biological father, and Brautigan began using Richard Gary Porterfield as his name. Mary Lou separated from Porterfield in 1946, and married William David Folston, Sr., on June 12, 1950. The couple produced a son named William David, Jr., born on December 19, 1950 in Eugene. Folston was recalled as being a violent alcoholic, whom Richard had seen subjecting his mother to domestic abuse. Brautigan was raised in poverty; he told his daughter stories of his mother sifting rat feces from their supply of flour to make flour-and-water pancakes. Because of Brautigan's impoverished childhood, he and his family found it difficult to obtain food, and on some occasions they did not eat for days. He lived with his family on welfare and moved about the Pacific Northwest for nine years before the family settled in Eugene, Oregon in August 1944. Many of Brautigan's childhood experiences were included in the poems and stories that he wrote from as early as the age of 12. His novel So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away is loosely based on childhood experiences including an incident where Brautigan accidentally shot the brother of a close friend in the ear, injuring him only slightly. On September 12, 1950, Brautigan enrolled at Eugene High School, having graduated from Woodrow Wilson Junior High School. He was a writer for his high school newspaper Eugene High School News. He also played on his school's basketball team, standing 6 feet 4 inches tall (1.93 m) by the time of his graduation. On December 19, 1952, Brautigan's first published poem, The Light, appeared in the Eugene High School newspaper. Brautigan graduated with honors from Eugene High School on June 9, 1953. Following graduation, he moved in with his best friend Peter Webster, and Peter's mother Edna Webster became Brautigan's surrogate mother. According to several accounts Brautigan stayed with Webster for about a year before leaving for San Francisco for the first time in August 1954. He returned to Oregon several times, apparently for lack of money. On December 14, 1955, Brautigan was arrested for throwing a rock through a police-station window, supposedly in order to be sent to prison and fed. He was arrested for disorderly conduct and fined $25. He was then committed to the Oregon State Hospital on December 24, 1955, after police noticed patterns of erratic behavior. At the Oregon State Hospital Brautigan was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and clinical depression, and was treated with electroconvulsive therapy twelve times. While institutionalized, he began writing The God of the Martians, a manuscript of 20 very short chapters totaling 600 words. The manuscript was sent to at least two editors but was rejected by both, and remains unpublished. (A copy of the manuscript was recently discovered with the papers of the last of these editors, Harry Hooton.) On February 19, 1956, Brautigan was released from hospital and briefly lived with his mother, stepfather, and siblings in Eugene, Oregon. He then left for San Francisco, where he would spend most of the rest of his life except for periods in Tokyo and Montana. In San Francisco Brautigan sought to establish himself as a writer. He was known for handing out his poetry on the streets and performing at poetry clubs. In early 1956 Brautigan typed a three-page manuscript and sent it to The Macmillan Company for publication. The manuscript consisted of two pages of fourteen poems and a page with the dedication ‘for Linda’. Of the poems only ‘stars’ and ‘hey’ were titled. In a letter dated May 10, 1956, Macmillan rejected the manuscript stating ‘...there is no place where it will fit in’. In 2005 the X-Ray Book Company would publish the manuscript as a chapbook titled Desire in a Bowl of Potatoes. Brautigan's first poetry book publication was The Return of the Rivers (1957), a single poem, followed by two collections of poetry: The Galilee Hitch-Hiker (1958) and Lay the Marble Tea (1959). During the 1960s Brautigan became involved in the burgeoning San Francisco counterculture scene, often appearing as a performance-poet at concerts and participating in the various activities of The Diggers. He contributed several short pieces to be used as broadsides by the Communication Company. Brautigan was also a writer for Change, an underground newspaper created by Ron Loewinsohn. In the summer of 1961, while camping in southern Idaho with his wife and daughter, Brautigan completed the novels A Confederate General From Big Sur and Trout Fishing in America. A Confederate General from Big Sur was his first published novel and met with little critical or commercial success. But when Trout Fishing in America was published in 1967, Brautigan was catapulted to international fame. Literary critics labeled him the writer most representative of the emerging countercultural youth-movement of the late 1960s, even though he was said to be contemptuous of hippies. Trout Fishing in America has sold over 4 million copies worldwide. During the 1960s Brautigan published four collections of poetry as well as another novel, In Watermelon Sugar (1968). In the spring of 1967 he was Poet-in-Residence at the California Institute of Technology. During this year, he published All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, a chapbook published by The Communication Company. It was printed in an edition of 1,500 copies and distributed for free. From 1968 to 1970 Brautigan had 23 short pieces published in Rolling Stone magazine. From late 1968 to February 1969, Brautigan recorded a spoken-word album for The Beatles' short-lived record-label, Zapple. The label was shut down by Allen Klein before the recording could be released, but it was eventually released in 1970 on Harvest Records as Listening to Richard Brautigan. In the 1970s Brautigan experimented with different literary genres. He published five novels (the first of which, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, had been written in the mid-1960s) and a collection of short stories, Revenge of the Lawn (1971). In 1974 The Cowell Press collected seven of his broadside poems into the book Seven Watermelon Suns. The limited edition of ten copies included embossed color etchings by Ellen Meske. ‘When the 1960s ended, he was the baby thrown out with the bath water,’ said his friend and fellow writer, Thomas McGuane. ‘He was a gentle, troubled, deeply odd guy.’ Generally dismissed by literary critics and increasingly abandoned by his readers, Brautigan's popularity waned throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. His work remained popular in Europe, however, as well as in Japan, where Brautigan visited several times. To his critics, Brautigan was willfully naive. Lawrence Ferlinghetti said of him, ‘As an editor I was always waiting for Richard to grow up as a writer. It seems to me he was essentially a naïf, and I don't think he cultivated that childishness, I think it came naturally. It was like he was much more in tune with the trout in America than with people.’ Brautigan's writings are characterized by a remarkable and humorous imagination. The permeation of inventive metaphors lent even his prose-works the feeling of poetry. Evident also are themes of Zen Buddhism like the duality of the past and the future and the impermanence of the present. Zen Buddhism and elements of the Japanese culture can be found in his novel Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel. Brautigan's last published work before his death was his novel So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away which was published in 1982, two years before his death. On June 8, 1957, Brautigan married Virginia Dionne Alder in Reno, Nevada. The couple had one daughter together, Ianthe Elizabeth Brautigan, born on March 25, 1960 in San Francisco. Brautigan's alcoholism and depression became increasingly abusive and Alder ended the relationship on December 24, 1962, though the divorce was not finalized until July 28, 1970. Brautigan continued to reside in San Francisco after the separation, while Alder settled in Manoa, Hawaii and became a feminist and an anti-Vietnam War activist. Brautigan remarried on December 1, 1977, to the Japanese-born Akiko Yoshimura whom he met in July 1976 while living in Tokyo, Japan. The couple settled in Pine Creek, Park County, Montana for two years; Brautigan and Yoshimura were divorced in 1980. Brautigan had a relationship with a San Francisco woman named Marcia Clay from 1981 to 1982. He also pursued a brief relationship with Janice Meissner, a woman from the North Beach community of San Francisco. Other relationships were with Marcia Pacaud, who appears on the cover of The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster; Valerie Estes, who appears on the cover of Listening to Richard Brautigan; and Sherry Vetter, who appears on the cover of Revenge of the Lawn. Brautigan was an alcoholic throughout his adult life and suffered years of despair; according to his daughter, he often mentioned suicide over a period of more than a decade before ending his life. In 1984, at age 49, Richard Brautigan had recently moved to Bolinas, California, where he was living alone in a large, old house. He died of a self-inflicted .44 Magnum gunshot wound to the head. The exact date of his death is unknown, and his decomposed body was found by Robert Yench, a private investigator, on October 25, 1984. The body was found on the living room floor, in front of a large window that looked out over the Pacific Ocean. It is speculated that Brautigan may have ended his life over a month earlier, on September 14, 1984, after talking to former girlfriend Marcia Clay on the telephone. Brautigan was survived by his parents, both ex-wives, and his daughter Ianthe. He has one grandchild named Elizabeth, who was born about two years after his death. According to Michael Caines, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, the story that Brautigan left a suicide note that simply read: ‘Messy, isn't it?’ is apocryphal. Ianthe Brautigan has confirmed that her father did not leave such a message. Brautigan once wrote, ‘All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds.’ |
![]() | Nossack, Hans Erich January 30, 1901 HANS ERICH NOSSACK (1901-77) was a prolific writer. His books THE D’ARTHEZ CASE, TO THE UNKNOWN HERO, THE IMPOSSIBLE PROOF, WAIT FOR NOVEMBER, and AN OFFERING FOR THE DEAD have been translated into English. JOEL AGEE has translated numerous German authors into English, including Rainer Maria Rilke, Friedrich Durrenmatt, and Elias Canetti. He is also the author of two memoirs, TWELVE YEARS: AN AMERICAN BOYHOOD IN EAST GERMANY and IN THE HOUSE OF MY FEAR. |
![]() | Dorris, Michael January 30, 1945 Michael Anthony Dorris (January 30, 1945 – April 10, 1997) was an American novelist and scholar who was the first Chair of the Native American Studies program at Dartmouth. His works include the memoir, The Broken Cord (1989) and the novel, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987). He was married to author Louise Erdrich and the two frequently collaborated in their writing. He committed suicide in 1997 while police were investigating allegations that he had abused his daughters. The Broken Cord, which won the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction, helped provoke Congress to approve legislation to warn of the dangers of drinking alcohol during pregnancy. |
![]() | Hazzard, Shirley January 30, 1931 Shirley Hazzard (born 30 January 1931) is an Australian author of fiction and non-fiction. She was born in Australia, but holds citizenship of the United Kingdom and the United States. Her 1970 novel, The Bay of Noon, was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010 and her 2003 novel The Great Fire won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. |
![]() | Johansen, Bruce E. January 30, 1950 Bruce Elliott Johansen is an American academic and author. He is the Frederick W. Kayser Professor of Communication at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and is the author or editor of many books and articles, notably on environmental and Native American issues. |
![]() | Salkey, Andrew January 30, 1928 Andrew Salkey (30 January 1928 – 28 April 1995) was a novelist, poet, children's books writer and journalist of Jamaican and Haitian origin. He was born in Panama but raised in Jamaica, moving to Britain in the 1950s to pursue university education. A prolific writer and editor, he was the author of more than 30 books in the course of his career, including novels for adults and for children, poetry collections, anthologies, travelogues and essays. He died in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he had been teaching since the 1970s, holding a lifetime position as Writer-In-Residence at Hampshire College. He was born as Felix Andrew Alexander Salkey in Colón, Panama, to Jamaican parents, Andrew Alexander Salkey, a businessman, and Linda Marshall Salkey. When two years old, Salkey was sent to Jamaica, where he was raised by his grandmother and his mother, who worked there as a teacher, while his father continued to work in Panama. Salkey was educated at St George's College, in Kingston, and at Munro College, in St. Elizabeth, before going to England in the early 1950s to attend the University of London. According to Stuart Hall, Salkey 'quickly took his place at the centre of a small but outstanding circle of Caribbean writers and intellectuals. For a critical period he was the key figure, the main presenter and writer-in-residence in the Caribbean section of the BBC World Service at Bush House, London, and his programmes became a glittering showcase for a generation of writers, including Sam Selvon and George Lamming, who had made London their second home. Established and aspiring authors were chivvied, cajoled, gently chastised, inspired and schooled to produce new work for radio on the Caribbean Voices programme over which Andrew Salkey often presided.' After reading V. S. Naipaul's his first story Salkey encouraged him to continue writing. At the BBC, he also helped write the production My People and Your People with D. G. Bridson, a radio play about a love affair between a West Indian migrant and a Scottish skiffle player. Salkey was a part of the West Indian Students Union (WISU), which provided an effective forum for Caribbean students to express their ideas and provided voluntary support to the 'harassed' working-class Caribbean immigrant community, during the 1960s, '70s and '80s. The association also included Gerry Burton, Arif Ali, Chris LeMaitre, John La Rose and Horace Lashley. In the mid-1950s Salkey taught English at Walworth Secondary School (also known as Mina Road school), an early comprehensive just off the Old Kent Road in South-east London. His first novel, A Quality of Violence – set around 1900 in a remote area of Jamaica, and narrated in a Jamaican patois – was published in 1959, and his second, Escape to An Autumn Pavement, in 1960. That same year Salkey edited one of the first anthologies of Caribbean short stories, West Indian Stories, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of folklore and popular culture. His novels that followed were The Late Emancipation of Jerry Stover (1968), The Adventures of Catullus Kelly (1969) and Come Home, Malcolm Heartland (1976). He was a prolific writer and subsequently published several books for children, poetry, travelogues, books that drew on folk traditions, including Anancy's Score (1973), as well as editing anthologies including Breaklight (1971). In 1966 he co-founded with John La Rose and Kamau Brathwaite the Caribbean Artists Movement, as a platform for Caribbean artists, writers, actors and musicians. In the latter part of his life he was a professor of creative writing at Hampshire College in Amherst, where he went in 1976. Salkey was good friends with Austin Clarke, and the two had a long written correspondence, a great deal of which is available in Clarke's files at the McMaster University Archives in Hamilton, Ontario. 'I was headed nowhere like a hundred million others: I had escaped a malformed Jamaican middle class; I had attained my autumn pavement; I had done more than my fair share of hurting, rejecting, and condemning; and I had created another kind of failure, and this time, in another country.' (From Escape To An Autumn Pavement). Salkey was a director and constant supporter of the London-based publishing company Bogle-L'Ouverture founded by Guyanese-born Jessica Huntley, who (together with a committee comprising Louis James, John La Rose, Marc Matthews, Mervyn Morris, Jason Salkey, Anne Walmsley and Ronald Warwick) organised on 19–20 June 1992 a two-day symposium and celebration called 'Salkey's Score'. Held at the Commonwealth Institute, it paid tribute to Salkey in respect of his work in London in the 1960s and 1970s with the Caribbean Artists Movement; his journalism on the BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices; his contributions to developing the teaching of Caribbean writing in schools; the importance he gave to the relationship of Africa to personal and communal Caribbean identity; his work in Cuba; and his prolific output of novels, poetry and other writings. |
![]() | Kliment, Alexandr January 30, 1929 Alexandr Kliment (January 30, 1929 – March 22, 2017) was a Czech writer, poet and playwright. He was a signatory of Charter 77 in 1977. In 1967, Kliment participated in a congress of the writers' union, which included Václav Havel, Ivan Klíma, Ludvík Vaculík, and photographer Old?ich Škácha. The writers' congress, which took place during a period of liberalism in Czechoslovakia, is considered to be a predecessor of the Prague Spring in 1968. He later joined with Havel and other Czechoslovak dissidents to sign the Charter 77. Kliment died on March 21, 2017, at the age of 88. |
![]() | Mancini, Pat McNees (editor) January 30, 1940 Pat McNees Mancini was born on January 30, 1940, in Riverside, CA, the daughter of Glenn Harold (an ironworker) and Eleanor (a bank teller; maiden name, McCoskrie). She worked at Harper & Row, New York, NY, as an assistant editor from 1963-66; Fawcett Publications, New York, NY, editor of "Fawcett Premier Books," 1966-70; freelance editor and writer, 1970—; Resource Planning Associates, Washington, DC, editorial associate, 1979-80; currently consultant in writing, editing, and public relations. Editor and rewriter for various New York City publishers, Washington, DC consulting firms, particularly those specializing in energy and economics, and for think tanks. Mancini is a member of American Society of Journalists and Authors, Association of Personal Historians, Authors Guild, PEN, Washington Independent Writers, Society of Professional Journalists, Society of Technical Communicators, Women's National Book Association. |
![]() | Naranjo, Carmen January 30, 1928 Carmen Naranjo Coto (January 30, 1928 – January 4, 2012) was a Costa Rican novelist, poet and essayist. Naranjo was born in Cartago, the capital city of the Cartago Province. She received her primary education there at the Escuela República de Perú and her secondary at the Colegio Superior de Señoritas. She received her licenciatura in Philology from the University of Costa Rica and pursued post-graduate studies at the Universidad Autónoma de México and the University of Iowa. Naranjo served as Costa Rica's ambassador to Israel in the 1970s and also as the country's minister of culture. She was the author of the Costa Rican system of social security. She was inducted into La Galería de las Mujeres de Costa Rica (The Women's Gallery of Costa Rica) in 2005. Naranjo wrote multiple books, including poetry, novels, storybooks, and essays. Her novels and stories have had much success, such as her first novel Los perros no ladraron (1966); however, Naranjo is also known for her poetry, such as La canción de la ternura (1964) and Hacia tu isla (1966). After Naranjo returned to Costa Rica in 1964, having worked for United Nations in Venezuela, her literary career began to take off. She enrolled in a writer's workshop, led by Lilia Ramos (Costa Rican essayist), she began reading work by Latin American authors such as Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, Jorge Luis Borges, and Octavio Paz, and she published her first volumes of poetry, Hacia tu isla (1966) and Misa a oscuras (1964). She published her first novel, Los perros no ladraron in 1966, and in 1968, two more followed: Memorias de un hombre de palabra and Camino al mediodía. The success she had from her first three novels opened an international opportunity for her career and literary reputation. Upon accepting an invitation to the University of Iowa in the United States, Naranjo spent a year in 1969 in the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she completed her next novel, Diario de una multitud (published in 1974). In 1970, after much success with Camino al mediodía, which won second place in The Central American and Panama Flower Games (Los Juegos Florales Centroamericanos y de Panamá), she began to teach workshops (writing classes), and as a direct result of these classes, Naranjo was inspired to write her next notable novel, Responso Por El Niño Juan Manuel (1970). DR. LINDA BRITT is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Maine at Farmington. She has published critical studies on Cervantes and Garcia Lorca as well as on Carmen Naranjo. |
![]() | Yorke, Margaret January 30, 1924 Margaret Beda Nicholson (née Larminie; 30 January 1924 – 17 November 2012), known professionally as Margaret Yorke, was an English crime fiction writer. |
![]() | Ruebner, Tuvia (translated and introduced by Rachel Tzvia Back) January 30, 1924 Tuvia Ruebner was born into a semi-secular, German-speaking Jewish family (his father was a member of the Freemasons) in Bratislava, Slovakia in 1924. He completed only nine years of school: five in a Protestant elementary school, three in a German gymnasium and one in a Slovakian high school. After Jews were forbidden to attend school, he worked as an apprentice electrician. Ruebner immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1941, eventually settling in Kibbutz Merhavia; he continued to write in German for more than a decade, and published his first (of fifteen) poetry books in Hebrew in 1957. Ruebner lost his family in the Holocaust, and later lost his wife and son to what are usually considered individual, unhistorical tragedies: his first wife was killed in a car accident and his son disappeared in South America while travelling. All these losses surface and re-surface in his poetry. Ruebner does not express a sense of belonging to the Israeli state as such, nor to the way Judaism currently manifests itself in Israel, but rather to the art of poetry. After the publication of a selection of his poems culled from nearly fifty years of writing (1957–2005), Ruebner told the newspaper Haaretz: ‘I love the landscape of Israel, but inside I am connected more to the landscape of the Carpathians. [Israeli poet] Lea Goldberg wrote that there are two homelands [the one in which we are born and the one we choose]. I feel that I have two ‘no-homelands’. I was uprooted twice. A person can have only one homeland: the place where he was born. Slovakia spewed me out and what is happening in Israel today has uprooted me again [ . . . ] Zionist ideology saved my life in 1941, but that is not the point. I am here because I am here. Poetry became my homeland.’ The author also of an autobiography and a book of stunning photographs taken in Israel, Europe, Nepal and other places, Ruebner is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Haifa University. He is also a translator – of S.J. Agnon from Hebrew into German and of Goethe, Ludwig Strauss and Friedrich Schlegel from German into Hebrew. In Israel, Ruebner has been awarded the Anne Frank Prize, the Jerusalem Prize, the Israel Prime Minister’s Prize for Literature (twice) and the prestigious Israel Prize (2008); abroad, he has received the D. Steinberg Prize (Zurich, 1981), the Christian Wagner Prize (Germany, 1994), the Jeannette Schocken Prize (Germany, 1999), the Paul Celan Translation Prize (1999), the Jan Smrek Prize (Slovakia) and the Theodor Kramer Prize (Austria 2008). RACHEL TZVIA BACK is a poet, translator, and professor of literature at Oranim College. |
![]() | Spicer, Jack January 30, 1925 Jack Spicer (January 30, 1925, Los Angeles, CA - August 17, 1965, San Francisco, CA) was a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, closely associated with the poets Robert Duncan, Richard Brautigan, and Robin Blaser. According to Edward Foster’s JACK SPICER, he ‘was among the most influential poets of his generation. Thousands of poems and books were written under his tutelage and criticism.’ Spicer’s ‘Vancouver Lectures are considered a seminal work in the development of postmodern American literature. His early poems are collected in One Night Stand and Other Poems, and his later ones in The Collected Books of Jack Spicer. |
![]() | Carrington, Roslyn January 31, 1966 Roslyn Carrington (born January 31, 1966, Santa Cruz, Trinidad and Tobago) is a Trinidadian who has traveled extensively, but chooses to live and work on her native island. For three years, she wrote a popular weekly opinion column in Trinidad and Tobago's most established newspaper, "The Guardian. In addition to "A Thirst for Rain, Every Bitter Thing Sweet, and "Candy Don't Come in Gray, she has written a collection of short stories titled "Sex and Obeah. |
![]() | Lomax, Alan January 31, 1915 Alan Lomax (January 31, 1915 – July 19, 2002) was an American ethnomusicologist, best known for his numerous field recordings of folk music of the 20th century. He was also a musician himself, as well as a folklorist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and filmmaker. Lomax produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the US and in England, which played an important role in preserving folk music traditions in both countries, and helped start both the American and British folk revivals of the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s. He collected material first with his father, folklorist and collector John A. Lomax, and later alone and with others, Lomax recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Song, of which he was the director, at the Library of Congress on aluminum and acetate discs. After 1942, when Congress cut off the Library of Congress's funding for folk song collecting, Lomax continued to collect independently in Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain, as well as the United States, using the latest recording technology, assembling an enormous collection of American and international culture. In March 2004 the material captured and produced without Library of Congress funding was acquired by the Library, which 'brings the entire seventy years of Alan Lomax's work together under one roof at the Library of Congress, where it has found a permanent home.' With the start of the Cold War, Lomax continued to speak out for a public role for folklore, even as academic folklorists turned inward. He devoted much of the latter part of his life to advocating what he called Cultural Equity, which he sought to put on a solid theoretical foundation through to his Cantometrics research (which included a prototype Cantometrics-based educational program, the Global Jukebox). In the 1970s and 1980s Lomax advised the Smithsonian Institution's Folklife Festival and produced a series of films about folk music, American Patchwork, which aired on PBS in 1991. In his late seventies, Lomax completed a long-deferred memoir, The Land Where the Blues Began (1995), linking the birth of the blues to debt peonage, segregation, and forced labor in the American South. Lomax's greatest legacy is in preserving and publishing recordings of musicians in many folk and blues traditions around the US and Europe. Among the artists Lomax is credited with discovering and bringing to a wider audience include blues guitarist Robert Johnson, protest singer Woody Guthrie, folk artist Pete Seeger, country musician Burl Ives, and country blues singer Lead Belly, among many others. Lawrence Gushee is Professor Emeritus at the School of Music, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. |
![]() | Morrison, Grant January 31, 1960 Grant Morrison (born 31 January 1960) is a Scottish comic book writer, and playwright. He is known for his nonlinear narratives and countercultural leanings in his runs on titles including DC Comics's Animal Man, Batman, JLA, Action Comics, All-Star Superman, Vertigo's The Invisibles, and Fleetway's 2000 AD. He is also the co-creator of the Syfy TV series Happy! starring Christopher Meloni and Patton Oswalt. |
![]() | Oe, Kenzaburo January 31, 1935 Kenzabur? ?e (born January 31, 1935) is a Japanese author and a major figure in contemporary Japanese literature. His works, strongly influenced by French and American literature and literary theory, deal with political, social and philosophical issues including nuclear weapons, nuclear power, social non-conformism and existentialism. ?e was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994 for creating 'an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today'. |
![]() | O'Hara, John January 31, 1905 John Henry O'Hara (January 31, 1905 – April 11, 1970) was an American writer who earned his early literary reputation for short stories and later became a best-selling novelist before the age of 30 with Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8. His work stands out among that of contemporaries for its unvarnished realism. |
![]() | Goldstein, David (translator) January 31, 1933 David Goldstein (1933-1987) was born in London on 31 January 1933, the youngest of five children, three sons and two daughters. His parents owned a drapery shop in Hackney. In 1939, when he was six years old, the family home was bombed and David, together with one of his brothers, was evacuated to the country. When he returned to London David went to the Hackney Downs School where he distinguished himself in French, Latin and Greek but showed as yet no special interest in Hebrew or Hebrew literature. As an undergraduate at Oxford he had joined a group which called itself ‘The Makers' and held regular meetings where poetry and short stories were read. In 1956 David took his M.A. and prepared himself to become an English teacher. His life and career seemed settled. Then, in the course of the year, he met the distinguished Talmudic scholar Abraham Spiro who persuaded him that a Jew as deeply committed and as sensitive to literature should extend his interest from English to Hebrew, and help make other members of his community aware of their own heritage. In 1966 he published Hebrew Poems from Spain, a book that established his reputation as a scholar and translator of medieval Jewish literature; revised and expanded, it was reprinted in 1971 under the title The Jewish Poets of Spain 900-1250. David once said that this was the work which gave him most satisfaction and pleasure since it had not only allowed him to explore the literature he loved, but also to use his own poetic gifts and sensibilities. |
![]() | Shalaby, Khairy January 31, 1938 Khairy Shalaby (1938-2011) was born in Kafr al-Shaykh in Egypt's Nile Delta. He wrote seventy books, including novels, short stories, historical tales, and critical studies. His novel The Lodging House was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2003, and was published in English translation by the AUC Press in 2006. Michael Cooperson is professor of Arabic language and literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. |
![]() | Silberman, Charles E. January 31, 1925 Charles Eliot Silberman (January 31, 1925, De Moines, Iowa – February 5, 2011) was an American journalist and author. He was the author of Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice (1978), a study of crime and the American criminal justice system. Silberman's book Crisis in the Classroom: The Remaking of American Education is regarded as one of the leading investigations into and critiques of the performance of the American educational system and has been praised for its scope and insight. He was also the author of Crisis in Black and White and A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today. |
![]() | Hughes, Langston February 1, 1902 Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was born in Joplin, Missouri, and grew up in Kansas, Illinois, and Ohio. He moved to New York City when he was 19 years old to attend Columbia University. He was one of the most versatile writers of the artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Though known primarily as a poet, Hughes also wrote plays, essays, novels, and a series of short stories that featured a black Everyman named Jesse B. Semple. His writing is characterized by simplicity and realism and, as he once said, ‘people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten.’ |
![]() | Eich, Gunter February 1, 1907 Günter Eich (1 February 1907 – 20 December 1972) was a German lyricist, dramatist, and author. He was born in Lebus, on the Oder River, and educated in Leipzig, Berlin, and Paris. His collected works were published in four volumes in 1991. Eich received numerous literary prizes after World War II, including one from the literary association of which he was a member, Gruppe 47, in 1950. In 1953, he won the Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden for his radio play Die Andere und ich (The Other and I). Eich also won the Georg-Büchner-Preis in 1959 and the Schiller-Gedächtnispreis in 1968. |
![]() | Floyd Jr., Samuel A. February 1, 1937 Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., (February 1, 1937 – July 11, 2016) educator, musician, scholar and champion of black music research died in Chicago on Monday, July 11, after an extended illness. Dr. Floyd was born in Tallahassee, Florida, on February 1, 1937. He received his bachelor’s degree from Florida A & M University and later earned a masters (1965) and Ph.D. (1969) from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He began his music career as a high school band director in Florida before returning to Florida A & M to serve as Instructor and Assistant Band Director under legendary band director William Pat Foster. In 1964 he joined the faculty at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, and in 1978, he began a faculty position as Professor of Music at Fisk University, where he founded and served as Director of the Institute for Research in Black American Music. In 1983 he moved to Columbia College Chicago to found the Center for Black Music Research (CBMR), which became an internationally respected research center under his leadership. Critical to the creation of the CBMR was the establishment of the CBMR Library and Archives, which has grown to be one of the most comprehensive collections of music, recordings, and research materials devoted to black music. At Columbia College, Dr. Floyd also served as Academic Dean from 1990 to 1993 and as Interim Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost during 1999–2001. He retired as Director Emeritus of the CBMR in 2002. |
![]() | Head, Matthew February 1, 1907 John Edwin Canaday (February 1, 1907 – July 19, 1985) was a leading American art critic, author and art historian. John Canaday was born in Fort Scott, Kansas to Franklin and Agnes F. (Musson) Canaday. His family moved to Dallas when Canaday was seven and later moved to San Antonio, where he attended Main Avenue High School. Canaday entered the University of Texas in 1924 and earned a B.A. degree in French and English literature in 1929. He subsequently studied painting and art history at Yale University, where he received an M.A. in 1933. He taught at Washburn University of Topeka in 1933-34; at Newcomb College, Tulane University, New Orleans (1934–36); Hollins College, Roanoke, Virginia (1936–38); and the University of Virginia, Charlottesville (1938–50). In 1943 he traveled to the Belgian Congo and acted as a French interpreter for the Bureau of Economic Welfare. The following year he joined the United States Marine Corps. He served as a lieutenant in an air warning squadron in the Pacific until the end of World War II, after which he returned to the University of Virginia. From 1950 to 1952 Canaday headed the art school at Newcomb College in New Orleans. He worked as chief of the educational division at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 1953 to 1959. During this period he wrote the text for Metropolitan Seminars in Art, a widely distributed series of 24 portfolios published between 1958 and 1960 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 1959 Canaday began a 17-year career as a leading art critic for The New York Times. In his first column on September 6, 1959, he inflamed the art establishment by proclaiming that Abstract Expressionism, the dominant style of the period, allowed "exceptional tolerance for incompetence and deception." Although he acknowledged the talent of the best Abstract Expressionists, he noted that "we have been had" by the "freaks, the charlatans, and the misled who surround this handful of serious and talented artists." Canaday's inaugural column and subsequent articles criticizing this style provoked a much-publicized letter to The New York Times signed by 49 of the nation's leading art figures, who denounced Canaday as an agitator. Other artists and critics, however, championed him as an honest and articulate observer of the art scene, which continued to provide ample targets for his barbed wit over the years. In addition to writing for the Times, Canaday published a number of influential books, notably Mainstreams of Modern Art: David to Picasso (1959), winner of the Athenaeum Literary Award and a popular art history textbook for many years. His experiences as a critic provided the subject matter of two books, Embattled Critic: Views on Modern Art (1962) and Culture Gulch: Notes on Art and Its Public in the 1960s (1969). He also wrote Keys to Art, with Katherine H. Canaday (1963), The Lives of the Painters (1969), Baroque Painters (1972), Late Gothic to Renaissance Painters (1972), Neoclassic to Post-Impressionist Painters (1972), My Best Girls: 8 Drawings (1972), The New York Guide to Dining Out in New York (1972), The Artful Avocado (1973), Richard Estes: The Urban Landscape (1979), What is Art? An Introduction to Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (1980), and Ben Shahn, Voices and Visions (1981). In the 1940s and 1950s, under the pen name Matthew Head, Canaday wrote seven crime novels with such titles as The Smell of Money (1943), The Congo Venus (1950), and Murder at the Flea Club (1957). Drawing in part on his experiences in the Congo, he set three of his mysteries in Africa, and they were heralded by one critic as subtly foreshadowing a time of change on the African continent. In 1974, Canaday stepped down from his post as art critic in order to devote more time to writing books, although he continued to write restaurant reviews for the Times until his retirement in 1977. Canaday taught several courses as a guest lecturer at the University of Texas in the spring of 1977. He continued to lecture and to write for such publications as Smithsonian magazine, The New Republic, and The New York Times Magazine until his death. John Canaday married Katherine S. Hoover on September 19, 1935, and they had two sons. He died of pancreatic cancer in New York City on July 19, 1985. John Canaday appears in the 2014 film Big Eyes, directed by Tim Burton, in which he is portrayed by actor Terence Stamp, making derogatory comments on the paintings of Margaret Keane. |
![]() | London, Artur February 1, 1915 Artur London, (1 February 1915 – 8 November 1986), was a Czechoslovak communist politician and co-defendant in the Slánský Trial. He was born in Ostrava, Austria-Hungary to a Jewish family. In 1937, London went to fight in the Spanish Civil War as member of the International Brigade. He moved to France after the defeat of the Republicans and, during World War II, was arrested by the Nazis and sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp. After the war he lived in Switzerland but soon moved with family to Prague, where he became a leading figure in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and was eventually nominated deputy minister of foreign affairs in 1948. In 1951 he was arrested and became a co-defendant in the Slánský trial alongside Rudolf Slánský. London was accused of being a Zionist, Trotskyite and Titoist and was sentenced to life in prison. He was released in 1955 and rehabilitated in 1963. He moved to France where, together with his wife, wrote L'Aveu (THE CONFESSION) about his ordeal in the Prague Trials. While the main defendants were senior to London, he gained prominence worldwide by writing the book. The book was made into a film directed by Costa-Gavras and starring Yves Montand and Simone Signoret. His wife, Lise, recounts the events in the documentary ‘A Trial in Prague’, dir. Zuzana Justman (2002, 83min). He died in Paris, France. |
![]() | Perelman, S. J. February 1, 1904 Sidney Joseph Perelman (February 1, 1904 – October 17, 1979), known as S. J. Perelman, was an American humorist, author, and screenwriter. He is best known for his humorous short pieces written over many years for The New Yorker. He also wrote for several other magazines, including Judge, as well as books, scripts, and screenplays. Perelman received an Academy Award for screenwriting in 1956. |
![]() | Popescu, Petru February 1, 1944 Petru Popescu (born February 1, 1944 in Bucharest, Romania) is a Romanian-American writer, director and movie producer, author of best-selling novels Almost Adam and Amazon Beaming. The son of theater critic Radu Popescu and actress Nelly Cutava, he graduated from the Spiru Haret high-school, after which he studied English language and literature at Bucharest University. His debut was a collection of poems, Zeu printre blocuri ("A God Between Apartment Buildings"). In 1969, he published Prins ("Caught"). He went on a Herder scholarship to Vienna (1971–1972), and in 1973 participated in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. After participating in the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa, Popescu defected in 1973 or 1974 while in England on a private trip related to the English translation of his book Sfâr?itul bahic, taught comparative literature in Great Britain, and moved to the United States in 1975, where he studied at the Center for Advanced Film Studies of the American Film Institute. The Romanian government tried him for treason.[citation needed] In Romania his books were banned. At he time of his defection he was the Union of Communist Youth secretary of the Romanian Writers' Union and a candidate member of the Central Committee of the Union of Communist Youth. In the USA, he married Iris Friedman, with whom he has two children: Adam and Chloe. His 2001 novel The Oasis is noted as "A memoir of love and survival in concentration camp" written in the first person as if in the words of the biographee, Blanka Friedman. In 1983, Popescu took Death of an Angel to Sundance, where the script came to near finalization. The festival enabled him to find backers for the film, which was released in 1986. |
![]() | Price, Reynolds February 1, 1933 Reynolds Price (February 1, 1933 – January 20, 2011), born Edward Reynolds Price, was an American poet, novelist, dramatist, essayist and James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke University. Apart from English literature, Price had a lifelong interest in Biblical scholarship. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. |
![]() | Spark, Muriel February 1, 1918 Dame Muriel Spark, DBE, CLit, FRSE, FRSL (1 February 1918 – 13 April 2006) was an award-winning Scottish novelist. In 2008 The Times newspaper named Spark in its list of 'the 50 greatest British writers since 1945', at No. 8. |
![]() | Von Hofmannsthal, Hugo February 1, 1874 Hugo Laurenz August Hofmann von Hofmannsthal (1 February 1874 – 15 July 1929) was an Austrian prodigy, a novelist, librettist, poet, dramatist, narrator, and essayist. |
![]() | Welsh, Louise February 1, 1965 Louise Welsh (born 1 February 1965 in London) is an English-born author of short stories and psychological thrillers, resident in Glasgow, Scotland. She has also written three plays, edited volumes of prose and poetry, and contributed to various journals and anthologies. |
![]() | Havey, Lily Yuriko Nakai February 1, 1932 Lily Yuriko Nakai Havey is an American water color artist and author. Born in 1932, Havey is a Japanese American Nisei whose family was forced to Japanese American internment camps during World War II when she was 10 years old. |
![]() | Williams, Denis February 1, 1923 Denis Williams (1 February 1923 – 28 June 1998) was a Guyanese painter, author and archaeologist. Dr. Denis Joseph Ivan Williams, C.C.H., Hon. D. Lit., M.A., called by his friends "Sonny" Williams, was born in Georgetown, Guyana, where he received his early education; he was granted a Cambridge Junior School Certificate in 1940 and a Cambridge Senior School Certificate in 1941. His promise as a painter won him a two-year British Council Scholarship to the Camberwell School of Art in London in 1946. He lived in London for the next 10 years, during which he taught fine art and held several one-man shows of his work as well as producing the artwork for Bajan novelist George Lamming's first book In the Castle of my Skin. From 1957 to 1967 he taught art and art history at the School of Fine Art, Khartoum, Sudan; the University of Ife, Nigeria; Makerere University, Uganda; and the University of Lagos, Nigeria. He also published numerous articles on the history and iconography of West African classical art expressed especially in brass, bronze, and iron, and a book, Icon and Image: A Study of Sacred and Secular Forms of African Classical Art (1974, New York University Press). Williams had been exposed to archaeology in Sudan and renewed his interest in 1968 when he finally returned to Guyana and established a homestead in the Mazaruni District. In his first letter to the Smithsonian Institution in 1973, he said: "my interest in these antiquities is that they may explain something about the who and how, as well as the when of the arts of the Guyana Indians." His appointment in 1974 as director of the newly created Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology in Georgetown provided the opportunity to pursue this quest. Initially, he concentrated his attention on petroglyphs, not only recording the designs, but excavating to recover the tools used and observing the environmental contexts. His Master's thesis, The Aishalton Petroglyph Complex in the Prehistory of the Rupununi Savannas, submitted to the University of Guyana in 1979, presented ideas elaborated in a 1985 article published in the journal Advances in World Archaeology. In 1980 he began intensive archaeological and paleoclimatic investigations of the shell middens on the northwest coast of Guyana. From the beginning of his studies, he was aware of potential disturbance of stratigraphy, errors in radiocarbon dates, and other pitfalls, and some of his efforts to detect them were detailed in Early Pottery on the Amazon: A Correction. Evidence for a correlation between the declining productivity of mangrove resources and changes in artefacts and settlement behaviour was summarised in Some Subsistence Implications of Holocene Climatic Change in Northwestern Guyana. His observation that the methods employed by the Warao for processing palm starch are preadapted for eliminating the poison from bitter manioc offers a reasonable explanation for the origin of this remarkable technology. A monograph detailing his evidence and interpretations of the interaction between environmental change and Guyana prehistory was in press at the time of his death. He recognised the importance of publication and in 1978 founded Archaeology and Anthropology, the journal of the Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology in Georgetown. Among other journals Williams edited were Odu (the University of Ife Journal of African studies) and Lagos Notes and Records, and he contributed numerous essays on art to several books and journals. His skill as a writer is documented not only in his scientific papers, but in numerous works of fiction. In 1986 Williams and his assistant, Jennifer Wishart, initiated a programme for junior archaeologists in Guyanese secondary schools. Awards His accomplishments were recognised in several national awards, including the Golden Arrow of Achievement Award from the government of Guyana in 1973, and the Cacique Crown of Honour in 1989, the same year that he received an honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies. |
![]() | Benet, William Rose February 2, 1886 William Rose Benét (February 2, 1886 – May 4, 1950) was an American poet, writer, and editor. He was the older brother of Stephen Vincent Benét. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Col. James Walker Benét and his wife née Frances Neill Rose, and grandson of Brigadier General Stephen Vincent Benét. He was educated The Albany Academy in Albany, NY and at Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University, graduating with a PhB in 1907. At Yale, he edited and contributed light verse to campus humor magazine The Yale Record. He began the Saturday Review of Literature in 1924 and continued to edit and write for it until his death. Benét married four times: First, on 3 September 1912, he married Teresa France Thomson, with whom he had three children (James Walker Benét, Frances Rosemary Benét, and Kathleen Anne Benét). Teresa died in 1919. Benét's second wife whom he married on 5 October 1923, was poet Elinor Wylie. She died in 1928. Benét's third wife, whom he married on 15 March 1932, was Lora Baxter. They divorced in 1937. Benét's fourth wife, and widow, was children's writer Marjorie Flack. They were married from June 22, 1941 until his death in 1950. In 1942, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his book of autobiographical verse, The Dust Which Is God (1941). He is also the author of The Reader's Encyclopedia, a standard American guide to world literature. His son, James Walker Benét (1914-2012) fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and was the author of two suspense novels and a guidebook to the San Francisco Bay Area. Today he is perhaps best known as the author of "The Skater of Ghost Lake," a poem frequently assigned in American schools for its use of onomatopoeia and rhythm as well as its tone of dark mystery. |
![]() | D'Aguiar, Fred February 2, 1960 Fred D'Aguiar (born 2 February 1960) is a British-Guyanese poet, novelist and playwright. He is currently Professor of English at Virginia Tech. Fred D'Aguiar was born in London in 1960 to Guyanese parents, Malcolm Frederick D'Aguiar and Kathleen Agatha Messiah. In 1962 he was taken to Guyana where he lived with his grandmother until 1972 when he returned, at the age of twelve, to England. D'Aguiar trained as a psychiatric nurse before reading African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury, graduating in 1985. On graduating he applied for a PhD on the Guyanese author Wilson Harris at the University of Warwick, but - after winning two writers-in-residency positions, at Birmingham University and the University of Cambridge (where he was the Judith E. Wilson Fellow from 1989 to 1990) - his PhD studies ‘recededed from [his] mind’ and he began to focus all of his energies on creative writing. In 1994, D'Aguiar moved to the United States to take up a Visiting Writer position at Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts (1992–94). Since then, he has taught at Bates College, Lewiston, Maine (Assistant Professor, 1994–95) and the University of Miami where he held the position of Professor of English and Creative Writing. In 2003 he took up the position of Professor of English and Co-Director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Virginia Tech. D'Aguiar's first collection of poetry, Mama Dot (1985), was published to much acclaim. It centres upon an ‘archetypal‘ grandmother figure, Mama Dot, and was notable for its fusion of standard English and Nation language. Along with his 1989 collection Airy Hall (which is named after the village in Guyana where D'Aguiar spent his childhood), Mama Dot won the Guyana Poetry Prize. Where D'Aguiar's first two poetry collections were set in Guyana, his third - British Subjects (1989) - explores the experiences of peoples of the West Indian diaspora in London. London was also the focus of another long poem, Sweet Thames, which was broadcast as part of the BBC ‘Worlds on Film’ series on 3 July 1992 and won the Commission for Racial Equality Race in the Media Award. After turning to writing novels rather than poetry for a period of time, D'Aguiar returned to the poetic mode in 1998, publishing Bill of Rights (1998): a long narrative poem about the Jonestown massacre in Guyana in 1979, which is told in Guyanese versions of English, fusing patois, Creole and nation language with the standard vernacular. It was shortlisted for the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize. Bill of Rights was followed by another narrative poem, Bloodlines (2000), which tells the story of a black slave and her white lover. His 2009 collection of poetry, Continental Shelf, centres on a response to the Virginia Tech Massacre in which 32 people were killed by a student in 2007. It was a finalist for the 2009 T. S. Eliot Prize. D'Aguiar's first novel, The Longest Memory (1994), tells the story of Whitechapel, a slave on an eighteenth-century Virginia plantation. The book won both the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. It was adapted for television and televised by Channel 4 in the UK. Returning to themes he had earlier developed in British Subjects, D'Aguiar's 1996 novel, Dear Future, explores the history of the West Indian diaspora through a fictional account of the lives of one extended family. D'Aguiar's third novel, Feeding the Ghosts (1997), was inspired by a visit D'Aguiar made to the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool and is based on the true story of the Zong massacre in which 132 slaves were thrown from a slave ship into the Atlantic for insurance purposes. According to historical accounts, one slave survived and climbed back onto the ship; and in D'Aguiar's narrative this slave - about whom there is next to no historical information - is developed as the fictional character Mintah. His fourth novel, Bethany Bettany (2003), is centred on a five-year-old Guyanese girl, Bethany, whose suffering has been read by some as symbolising that of a nation (Guyana) seeking to make itself whole again. D'Aguiar's plays include High Life, which was first produced at the Albany Empire in London in 1987, and A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death, performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1991. |
![]() | Dickey, James February 2, 1923 James Lafayette Dickey (February 2, 1923 – January 19, 1997) was an American poet and novelist. He was appointed the eighteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1966. He also received the Order of the South award. |
![]() | Disch, Thomas M. February 2, 1940 Thomas Michael Disch (February 2, 1940 – July 4, 2008) was an American science fiction author and poet. He won the Hugo Award for Best Related Book – previously called ‘Best Non-Fiction Book’ – in 1999, and he had two other Hugo nominations and nine Nebula Award nominations to his credit, plus one win of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, a Rhysling Award, and two Seiun Awards, among others. In the 1960s, his work began appearing in science-fiction magazines. His critically acclaimed science fiction novels, The Genocides, Camp Concentration, 334 and On Wings of Song are major contributions to the New Wave science fiction movement. In 1996, his book The Castle of Indolence: On Poetry, Poets, and Poetasters was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and in 1999, Disch won the Nonfiction Hugo for The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, a meditation on the impact of science fiction on our culture, as well as the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse. Among his other nonfiction work, he wrote theatre and opera criticism for The New York Times, The Nation, and other periodicals. He also published several volumes of poetry as Tom Disch. Following an extended period of depression following the death in 2005 of his life-partner, Charles Naylor, Disch stopped writing almost entirely, except for poetry – although he did produce two novellas. Disch committed suicide by gunshot on July 4 2008 in his apartment in Manhattan, New York City. His last book, The Word of God, which was written shortly before Naylor died, had just been published a few days before Disch's death. |
![]() | Gruber, Frank February 2, 1904 Frank Gruber (born February 2, 1904, Elmer, Minnesota, died December 9, 1969, Santa Monica, California) was an American writer. He was an author of stories for pulp fiction magazines. He also wrote dozens of novels, mostly Westerns and detective stories. Gruber wrote many scripts for Hollywood movies and television shows, and was the creator of three TV series. He sometimes wrote under the pen names Stephen Acre, Charles K. Boston and John K. Vedder. |
![]() | Joyce, James February 2, 1882 James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominent among these the stream of consciousness technique he perfected. |
![]() | McCulley, Johnston February 2, 1883 Johnston McCulley (February 2, 1883 – November 23, 1958) was the author of hundreds of stories, fifty novels, numerous screenplays for film and television, and the creator of the character Zorro. Many of his novels and stories were written under the pseudonyms Harrington Strong, Raley Brien, George Drayne, Monica Morton, Rowena Raley, Frederic Phelps, Walter Pierson, and John Mack Stone, among others. McCulley started as a police reporter for The Police Gazette and served as an Army public affairs officer during World War I. An amateur history buff, he went on to a career in pulp magazines and screenplays, often using a Southern California backdrop for his stories. Aside from Zorro, McCulley created many other pulp characters, including Black Star, The Spider, The Mongoose, and Thubway Tham. Many of McCulley's characters—The Green Ghost, The Thunderbolt, and The Crimson Clown—were inspirations for the masked heroes that have appeared in popular culture from McCulley's time to the present day. Born in Ottawa, Illinois, and raised in Chillicothe, Illinois, he died in 1958 in Los Angeles, California aged 75. |
![]() | Obeyesekere, Gananath February 2, 1930 Gananath Obeyesekere is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. In the 1990s he entered into intellectual debate with Marshall Sahlins over the rationality of indigenous peoples. At the heart of the debate was how to understand the rationality of indigenous people. Obeyesekere insisted that indigenous people thought in essentially the same way as Westerners and was concerned that any argument otherwise would paint them as 'irrational' and 'uncivilized'. In contrast Sahlins argued that each culture may have different types of rationality that make sense of the world by focusing on different patterns and explain them within specific cultural narratives, and that assuming that all cultures lead to a single rational view is a form of eurocentrism. |
![]() | Palazzeschi, Aldo February 2, 1885 Aldo Palazzeschi (2 February 1885 – 17 August 1974) was the pen name of Aldo Giurlani, an Italian novelist, poet, journalist and essayist. He was born in Florence to a well-off, bourgeois family. Following his father's direction he studied accounting but gave up that pursuit as he became enamored with the theater and acting. Respectful of his father's wishes that the family name not be associated with acting, he chose his maternal grandmother's maiden name Palazzeschi as a pseudonym. His family's comfortable circumstances enabled him to publish his first book of poetry, I cavalli bianchi (The White Horses) in 1905 using his acting pseudonym. After meeting Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, he became a fervent Futurist. However, he was never entirely ideologically aligned with the movement and had a falling out with the group over Italy's involvement in World War I which he opposed, even though he did spend a brief period at the front lines after having been inducted into the military in 1916. His "futurist period" (roughly the 1910s) was a very fecund time in which he published a series of works that cemented his reputation. Most notable of these is his novel Il codice di Perelà (translated into English as Man of Smoke) published in 1911. Marinetti used to give away more copies of the Futurist books he published than those he sold, and Palazzeschi later recalled that in 1909, so many copies of one of his books were given away that even he failed to secure a copy. During the interwar years, his poetical production decreased, as he became involved in journalism and other pursuits. He took no part in the official culture of the Fascist regime, but he found himself working in various magazines that did. Some of those were: Pegaso (it), Pan (it), (edited by Ugo Ojetti (it)) and Il Selvaggio (it), (edited by Mino Maccari (it)) In the late sixties and early seventies he started publishing again, with a series of novels that resecured his place in the new, post-war avant-garde. He died in 1974 in his apartment in Rome. Today he is often considered an important influence on later Italian writers, especially those of the neoavanguardia in both prose and verse. His work is well noted by its "grotesque and fantastic elements" |
![]() | Singh, Khushwant February 2, 1915 Khushwant Singh (2 February 1915 – 20 March 2014) was an Indian novelist, lawyer, politician and journalist. An Indo-Anglian writer, Singh was best known for his trenchant secularism, his humour, and an abiding love of poetry. His comparisons of social and behavioural characteristics of Westerners and Indians are laced with acid wit. He served as the editor of several literary and news magazines, as well as two newspapers, through the 1970s and 1980s. He was the recipient of Padma Vibhushan, the second-highest civilian award in India. |
![]() | Veiga, Jose J. February 2, 1915 José Veiga, known as José J. Veiga, (February 2, 1915–September 19, 1999) was a Brazilian writer. His writings are often classified within the magical realism genre, although he denied the label; his books deal with social and political criticism, with lyrical overtones. |
![]() | Alvi, Moniza February 2, 1954 Moniza Alvi (born 2 February 1954) is a Pakistani-British poet and writer. Alvi was born in Pakistan and grew up in England. Her most recent collection, At the Time of Partition (Bloodaxe Books, 2013), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. |
![]() | Auster, Paul February 3, 1947 Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1947 and received B.A. and M.A. degrees from Columbia University. He is the author of four books of poetry and one previous book of prose. His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper’s, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry. |
![]() | Bosman, Herman Charles February 3, 1905 Herman Charles Bosman (3 February 1905 – 14 October 1951) is widely regarded as South Africa's greatest short-story writer. He studied the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain and developed a style emphasizing the use of satire. His English-language works utilize primarily Afrikaner characters and highlight the many contradictions in Afrikaner society during the first half of the twentieth century. The poet Roy Campbell called him ‘the only literary genius that South Africa has produced’. |
![]() | Csoori, Sandor February 3, 1930 Sándor Csoóri (Csoóri, Alexander) (born 3 February 1930 Zámoly - ) is a Hungarian poet, essayist, writer and politician. In 1950, he graduated from the Reformed Pontifical College (Pápai Református Kollégiumban), and then studied at ELTE Institute, but dropped his studies because of illness. He worked in various journals, such as during 1953-54 Literature in the newspaper, and in 1955 until 1956 the new sound versrovat editor. In 1956, he could not find work for a while, and then in 1960, as at the beginning of the Budapest University of Technology, and newspaper editorial staff, he was the MAFILM dramaturg from 1968 until 1988. His first poems appeared in 1953, raising a big stir, being critical of the Rákosi era. The authorities soon noticed that Csoóri was not one of their supporters. He wrote criticizing the Sándor Csoóri (Csoóri, Alexander) (born 3 February 1930 Zámoly - ) is a Hungarian poet, essayist, writer and politician. In 1950, he graduated from the Reformed Pontifical College (Pápai Református Kollégiumban), and then studied at ELTE Institute, but dropped his studies because of illness. He worked in various journals, such as during 1953-54 Literature in the newspaper, and in 1955 until 1956 the new sound versrovat editor. In 1956, he could not find work for a while, and then in 1960, as at the beginning of the Budapest University of Technology, and newspaper editorial staff, he was the MAFILM dramaturg from 1968 until 1988. His first poems appeared in 1953, raising a big stir, being critical of the Rákosi era. The authorities soon noticed that Csoóri was not one of their supporters. He wrote criticizing the dictatorship's impact of personality, and te fate of rural people. He was under surveillance sometimes for years, and did not receive awards. He lived in Budapest, where he met with his friends, including Miklós Jancsó, Otto Orban, György Konrád, Ferenc Kósa. In 1988, he was co-editor with Gáspár Nagy, of Hitel, and in 1992 editor-in-chief.dictatorship's impact of personality, and te fate of rural people. He was under surveillance sometimes for years, and did not receive awards. He lived in Budapest, where he met with his friends, including Miklós Jancsó, Otto Orban, György Konrád, Ferenc Kósa. In 1988, he was co-editor with Gáspár Nagy, of Hitel, and in 1992 editor-in-chief. |
![]() | Davies, Dave February 3, 1947 David Russell Gordon "Dave" Davies (born 3 February 1947) is an English singer, songwriter and guitarist. He is best known as the lead guitarist and occasional lead vocalist for the English rock band The Kinks, which also featured his brother Ray Davies. In 2003, Davies was ranked 91st in Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" |
![]() | Mankell, Henning February 3, 1948 Henning Mankell (3 February 1948 – 5 October 2015) is author of the internationally bestselling Kurt Wallander series and the critically acclaimed Chronicler of the Winds. Henning Mankell’s books have been published in thirty-six countries with over 25 million copies in print worldwide. Laurie Thompson, the former editor of the Swedish Book Review, has translated more than forty books from the Swedish, including seven by Henning Mankell. He lives in rural Wales. |
![]() | Philip, Marlene Nourbese February 3, 1947 Marlene Nourbese Philip (born 3 February 1947), usually credited as M. NourbeSe Philip, is a Canadian poet, novelist, playwright, essayist and short story writer. Born in the Caribbean Woodlands, Moriah, Trinidad and Tobago, Philip was educated at the University of the West Indies. She subsequently pursued graduate degrees in political science and law at the University of Western Ontario, and practised law in Toronto, Ontario for seven years. She left her law practice in 1983 to devote time to her writing. Philip is known for experimentation with literary form and for her commitment to social justice. Though her writing suggests an in-depth understanding of the canon, Philip's career undoubtedly helped to free her from the constraints of tradition and to nurture her social analysis and criticism. Philip has published three books of poetry, two novels, three books of collected essays and two plays. Her short stories, essays, reviews and articles have appeared in magazines and journals in North America and England and her poetry has been extensively anthologized. Her work - poetry, fiction and non-fiction is taught widely at the university level and is the subject of much academic writing and critique. Her first novel, Harriet's Daughter (1988), is widely used in high school curricula in Ontario, Great Britain and was, for a decade, studied by all children in the Caribbean receiving a high school CXC diploma. It has also been published as an audio cassette, a script for stage and a German language edition. Although categorized as young adult literature, Harriet’s Daughter is a book that can appeal to older children and adults of all ages. Set in Toronto, this novel explores the themes of friendship, self-image, ethics and migration while telling a story that is riveting, funny and technically accomplished. It makes the fact of being Black a very positive and enhancing experience. Philip’s most renowned poetry book, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, was awarded the Casa de las Américas Prize for Literature while still in manuscript form. As she explores themes of race, place, gender, colonialism and, always, language, Philip plays with words, bending and restating them in a way that is reminiscent of jazz. The tension between father tongue (the white Euro-Christian male canon), and mother tongue (Black African female) is always present. Philip is a prolific essayist. Her articles and essays demonstrate a persistent critique and an impassioned concern for issues of social justice and equity in the arts, prompting Selwyn R. Cudjoe's assertion that Philip ‘serves as a lightning rod of black cultural defiance of the Canadian mainstream.’ More to the point is the epigram in Frontiers where Philip dedicates the book to Canada, 'in the effort of becoming a space of true belonging'. It is as an essayist that M. NourbeSe Philip’s role as anti-racist activist is most evident. She was one of the first to make culture her primary focus as she argued passionately and articulately for social justice and equity. Specific controversial events that have been the focus of her essays include the Into the Heart of Africa exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, the Toronto production of Show Boat, and Caribana. Her essays also put the spotlight on racial representation on arts councils and committees in Canada and there have been definite advances in this area subsequently. It was at a small demonstration concerning the lack of Canadian writers of colour outside of the 1989 PEN Canada gala, that she was confronted by June Callwood. Philip has also taught at the University of Toronto, taught creative fiction at the third year level at York University and has been writer in residence at McMaster University and University of Windsor. Her most recent work, Zong! (2008), is based on a legal decision at the end of the eighteenth century, related to the notorious murder of Africans on board a slave ship. A dramatized reading of this new poem cycle, was workshopped and presented at Harbourfront in Toronto as part of rock.paper.sistahz in 2006. Poems from this collection have been published in Facture, boundary 2 and Fascicle; the later includes four poems, along with an extensive introduction. On April 16, 2012 at b current studio space in Toronto, Philip held her first authorial full-length reading of Zong!-- an innovative interaction-piece lasting seven hours in which both author and audience performed a cacophonous collective reading of the work from beginning to end. In solidarity with this collective reading, another audience-performance was held in Blomfontaine, South Africa. In talking about her own work Philip has said, ‘fiction is about telling lies, but you must be scathingly honest in telling those lies. Poetry is about truth telling, but you need the lie - the artifice of the form to tell those truths.’ Scholar Rinaldo Walcott has engaged critically with the work of M. NourbeSe Philip. His essay ‘'No Language is Neutral': The Politics of Performativity in M. Nourbese Philip's and Dionne Brand's Poetry’ in the book Black Like Who? is a strong example of this scholarly engagement. |
![]() | LaValle, Victor D. February 3, 1972 Victor LaValle (born February 3, 1972) is an American author. He is the author of a short-story collection, Slapboxing with Jesus and four novels, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver, and The Changeling. LaValle writes fiction primarily, though he has also written essays and book reviews for GQ, Essence Magazine, The Fader, and The Washington Post, among others. |
![]() | Marton, Kati February 3, 1949 Kati Marton, an award-winning former NPR and ABC News correspondent, is the author of Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our History, a New York Times bestseller, as well as Wallenberg, The Polk Conspiracy, A Death in Jerusalem, and a novel, An American Woman. Mother of a son and a daughter, she lives in New York with her husband, Richard Holbrooke. |
![]() | Nichols, John February 3, 1959 John Harrison Nichols is a liberal / progressive American journalist and author. He is the National Affairs correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times. Books authored or co-authored by Nichols include The Genius of Impeachment and The Death and Life of American Journalism. |
![]() | Shaw, Lau February 3, 1899 Lao She (February 3, 1899 – August 24, 1966) was the pen name of Shu Qingchun, a noted Chinese novelist and dramatist. He was one of the most significant figures of 20th-century Chinese literature, and best known for his novel Rickshaw Boy and the play Teahouse. He was of Manchu ethnicity. His works are known especially for their vivid use of the Beijing dialect. |
![]() | Soustelle, Jacques February 3, 1912 Jacques Soustelle (3 February 1912 – 6 August 1990) was an important and early figure of the Free French Forces, an anthropologist specializing in Pre-Columbian civilizations, and vice-director of the Musée de l'Homme in Paris in 1939. Governor General of Algeria, he helped the rise of De Gaulle to the presidency of the Fifth Republic, but broke with De Gaulle over Algerian independence, joined the OAS is their efforts to overthrow De Gaulle and lived in exile between 1961 and 1968. On returning to France he resumed political and academic activity and was elected to the Académie française in 1983. |
![]() | Stein, Gertrude February 3, 1874 Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American writer of novels, poetry and plays. Born in West Allegheny (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, making France her home for the remainder of her life. A literary innovator and pioneer of Modernist literature, Stein’s work broke with the narrative, linear, and temporal conventions of 19th-century. She was also known as a collector of Modernist art. In 1933, Stein published a kind of memoir of her Paris years, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of Toklas, her life partner. The book became a literary bestseller and vaulted Stein from the relative obscurity of cult literary figure into the light of mainstream attention. |
![]() | Thompson, E. P. February 3, 1924 Edward Palmer Thompson (3 February 1924 – 28 August 1993) was a British historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work on the British radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS (1963). He also published influential biographies of William Morris (1955) and (posthumously) WILLIAM BLAKE (1993) and was a prolific journalist and essayist. He also published the novel THE SYKAOS PAPERS and a collection of poetry. Thompson was one of the principal intellectuals of the Communist Party in Great Britain. Although he left the party in 1956 over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he nevertheless remained a ‘historian in the Marxist tradition,’ calling for a rebellion against Stalinism as a prerequisite for the restoration of communists' ‘confidence in our own revolutionary perspectives’. Thompson played a key role in the first New Left in Britain in the late 1950s. He was a vociferous left-wing socialist critic of the Labour governments of 1964–70 and 1974–79, and during the 1980s, he was the leading intellectual light of the movement against nuclear weapons in Europe. |
![]() | Trakl, Georg February 3, 1887 Georg Trakl (3 February 1887 – 3 November 1914) was an Austrian poet and brother of the pianist Grete Trakl. He is considered one of the most important Austrian Expressionists. Trakl was born and lived the first 21 years of his life in Salzburg, Cisleithania. His father, Tobias Trakl (11 June 1837, Ödenburg/Sopron – 1910), was a dealer of hardware from Hungary, while his mother, Maria Catharina Halik (17 May 1852, Wiener Neustadt – 1925), was a housewife of Czech descent. His sister Grete Trakl was a musical prodigy; with her he shared artistic endeavors. Trakl attended a Catholic elementary school, although his parents were Protestants. He matriculated in 1897 at the Salzburg Staatsgymnasium, where he studied Latin, Greek, and mathematics. At age 13, Trakl began to write poetry. After quitting high school, Trakl worked for a pharmacist for three years and decided to adopt pharmacy as a career. It was during this time that he experimented with playwriting, but his two short plays, All Souls' Day and Fata Morgana, were not successful. However, from May to December 1906, Trakl published four prose pieces in the feuilleton section of two Salzburg newspapers. All cover themes and settings found in his mature work. This is especially true of Traumland (Dreamland), in which a young man falls in love with a dying girl who is his cousin. In 1908, Trakl moved to Vienna to study pharmacy, and became acquainted with some local artists who helped him publish some of his poems. Trakl's father died in 1910, soon before Trakl received his pharmacy certificate; thereafter, Trakl enlisted in the army for a year-long stint. His return to civilian life in Salzburg was unsuccessful and he re-enlisted, serving as a pharmacist at a hospital in Innsbruck. There he became acquainted with a group of avant-garde artists involved with the well-regarded literary journal Der Brenner, a journal that began the Kierkegaard revival in the German-speaking countries.Ludwig von Ficker, the editor of the journal Der Brenner (and son of the historian Julius von Ficker), became his patron: he regularly printed Trakl's work and endeavored to find him a publisher to produce a collection of poems. The result of these efforts was Gedichte (Poems), published by Kurt Wolff in Leipzig during the summer of 1913. Ficker also brought Trakl to the attention of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who anonymously provided him with a sizable stipend so that he could concentrate on his writing. At the beginning of World War I, Trakl was sent as a medical official to attend soldiers in Galicia (comprising portions of modern-day Ukraine and Poland). Trakl suffered frequent bouts of depression. During one such incident in Gródek (ukrain. Horodok) near Lwiw in present Ukraine, Trakl had to steward the recovery of some ninety soldiers wounded in the fierce campaign against the Russians. He tried to shoot himself from the strain, but his comrades prevented him. Hospitalized at a military hospital in Kraków and observed closely, Trakl lapsed into worse depression and wrote to Ficker for advice. Ficker convinced him to communicate with Wittgenstein. Upon receiving Trakl's note, Wittgenstein went to the hospital, but found that Trakl had died of a cocaine overdose. Trakl was buried at Kraków's Rakowicki Cemetery on 6 November 1914, but on 7 October 1925, as a result of the efforts by Ficker, his remains were transferred to Mühlau near Innsbruck (where they now repose next to Ficker's).Lucia Getsi, a young poet and translator, received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Ohio University in 1973 and has accepted a teaching position at Illinois State University. . |
![]() | Yates, Richard February 3, 1926 Richard Yates (February 3, 1926 – November 7, 1992) was an American fiction writer identified with the mid-century "Age of Anxiety". His first novel, Revolutionary Road, was a finalist for the 1962 National Book Award, while his first short story collection, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, brought comparisons to James Joyce. Critical acclaim for his writing, however, was not reflected in commercial success during his lifetime. Interest in Yates has revived somewhat since his death, partly because of an influential 1999 essay by Stewart O'Nan in the Boston Review, a 2003 biography by Blake Bailey and the 2008 Academy Award-nominated and Golden Globe-winning film Revolutionary Road starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. |
![]() | Fiallo, Fabio February 3, 1866 Fabio Fiallo, in full Fabio Federico Fiallo Cabral (February 3, 1866 – August 29, 1942) was a Dominican writer, poet and politician. Fiallo was born in the city of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic on February 3, 1866. His parents were Juan Ramón Fiallo Rodríguez (a Dominican politician, Member of the Congress of the Dominican Republic in 1867) and Ana María Cabral y Figueredo (from an upper class family). From a young age he had the political guidance of his father, who since the administration of President General José María Cabral y Luna was part of important committees to negotiate a Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Commerce between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. After joining the Faculty of Law at the Instituto Profesional de Santo Domingo (later as Instituto Profesional, en Universidad de Santo Domingo and now as Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo), he abandoned his studies to devote himself to politics and poetry. He was also uncle of fashion designer Oscar de la Renta and the politician Viriato Fiallo. The latter married incestuously Fabio’s daughter Prudencia Fiallo Lluberes. His political activities limited his career as a writer. He was imprisoned for defending Dominican independence during the American occupation of the Dominican Republic (1916–24). He was a founder of the newspapers El Hogar (1894), La Bandera Libre (1899), La Campaña (1905) y Las Noticias (1920) and was also a contributor to the Listín Diario and El Lápiz. Fiallo was arrested in the last months of 1900 with Arturo Pellerano Alfau, director of Listín Diario during the escalations of repression against the press of the Liberal government of Juan Isidro Jiménes. He was a member of the National Press Association, directed in 1916 by Arturo J. Pellerano Alfau and which also belonged Américo Lugo, Conrado Sanchez, Juan Durán, Manuel A. Machado and Félix Evaristo Mejía, among others. Through this group the first complaints to the international community in opposition to the U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic were performed. In 1916, Fiallo was apprehended by authorities, under the unfounded allegation of being involved in the revolutionary movement started on April 14 headed by Desiderio Arias being which was being held in the tribute (Fortaleza Ozama). He was sentenced to five years of forced labor and was ordered to pay a five thousand dollar fine for having published an article in the Listin Diario before being approved by the censorship committee. However, the nationalist Fiallo’s work did not end with the demise of the Free Flag movement, but instead he became more radical. In his "Fabio Fiallo in the Free Flag: 1899–1916," Rafael Dario Herrera writes: "In September 1899, he founded the newspaper The Flag Royalty circulating three times a week in major urban centers, and, like most print media at the time, had four pages, the first of which, contrary to what happens today, was entirely devoted to advertising and on the inside pages included opinion pieces with little news. At the time, newspapers were still generating income with fixed and placed with obituaries that lawyers and merchants, usually foreign subscriptions. Newspaper survived until early 1900, and defined itself , in this first time, as a "political and general interest " publication. Later reappeared in 1915 until its demise in late 1916. free Banner is a newspaper combat, scathing, incisive, teller of national issues. Emerges in a transitional stage between the defunct dictatorship Heureaux (July 1899) and the government of Jiménes (November 1899). Your target is outlined in the initial editorial : "We will fight for the final victory in the institutions and practice of liberal ideas will preach freedom at all costs the depredations, the nepotism, cliques, monopolies, have against us . . yours" . Although the first step in that circulated Banner Royalty had not yet opted the Jimenistas groupings (or bowling) and Horacistas (coludos), its pages contain sharp criticism against the first as Jimenes was seen as the main opposition lilisista of dictatorship, especially for his expedition aboard the steam Fanita in 1898, and that had obvious sympathy with the dictatorship between groups of literate urban Fiallo was part of that. Thus, in October 1899, before the election, with reservations accepted Fiallo candidacy Jiménes.6 died in Havana, Cuba, 28 August 1942. His remains were transferred to Dominican Republic in 1977 by order of the government then presided Dr. Joaquín Balaguer. |
![]() | Andersch, Alfred February 4, 1914 Born in 1914, Alfred Andersch attended a private Munich boys school, which was in fact run by the father of Heinrich Himmler. As he makes clear in his Afterword, THE FATHER OF A MURDERER is to a great degree autobiographical: ‘It was I, after all, I and no one else who was tested in Greek by the older Mr. Himmler and, due to the deplorable results, was expelled from that classical Gymnasium.’ In 1933 Alfred Andersch spent six months in Dachau concentration camp for his activities as a Communist youth leader. After World War II, he was the editor of several newspapers as well as a prominent novelist. A founder of ‘Group 47,’ that distinguished company of German writers whose members included Heinrich Boll and Gunter Grass, Andersch won the Deutscher Kritiker-Preis in 1958 and the Nelly Sachs Prize (for EFRAIM’S BOOK, also published by New Directions) in 1968. He died in 1979. |
![]() | Angelo, Ivan February 4, 1936 IVAN ANGELO was born in Minas Gerais, Brazil, in 1936. He is a professional journalist. managing editor of the Jornal do Tarde, the influential evening daily in São Paulo. He has published a collection of short stories. DUAS FACES (TWO SIDES), which won the principal literary prize of his home state and launched his literary career. A second work, CASA DE VIDRO (HOUSE OF GLASS), appeared in 1979, and he is now at work on a novel about a Brazilian politician’s career. THE CELEBRATION has been published in France as well as by Avon-Bard in the United States. THOMAS COLCHIE is well known for his translations of Puig, Drummond, Ramos, and Souza, whose first novel, THE EMPEROR OF THE AMAZON, was praised upon its first publication by Avon-Bard. |
![]() | Bergreen, Laurence February 4, 1950 Laurence Bergreen (born February 4, 1950) is an American historian and biographer. |
![]() | Coover, Robert February 4, 1932 Robert Lowell Coover (born February 4, 1932) is an American author and professor in the Literary Arts program at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction. Coover was born in Charles City, Iowa. He attended Southern Illinois University Carbondale, received his B.A. in Slavic Studies from Indiana University in 1955, then served in the United States Navy. He received an M.A. in General Studies in the Humanities from the University of Chicago in 1965. In 1968, he signed the ‘Writers and Editors War Tax Protest’ pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. Coover has served as a teacher or writer in residence at many universities. Coover's first novel was The Origin of the Brunists, in which the sole survivor of a mine disaster starts a religious cult. His second book, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., deals with the role of the creator. The eponymous Waugh, a shy, lonely accountant, creates a baseball game in which rolls of the dice determine every play, and dreams up players to attach those results to. Coover's best-known work, The Public Burning, deals with the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in terms that have been called magic realism. Half of the book is devoted to the mythic hero Uncle Sam of tall tales, dealing with the equally fantastic Phantom, who represents international Communism. The alternate chapters portray the efforts of Richard Nixon to find what is really going on amidst the welter of narratives. A later novella, Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears offers an alternate Nixon, one who is devoted to football and sex with the same doggedness with which he pursued political success in this reality. The theme anthology A Night at the Movies includes the story ‘You Must Remember This’, a piece about Casablanca that features an explicit description of what Rick and Ilsa did when the camera wasn't on them. Pinocchio in Venice returns to mythical themes. Coover is one of the founders of the Electronic Literature Organization. In 1987 he was chosen as the winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story. Coover is indeed one of the foremost short story writers of the postmodern period, as exemplified by the ‘Seven Exemplary Fictions’ contained in his 1969 book Pricksongs and Descants, which has influenced a new generation of writers, notably Jayne Joso for the 2011 novel, Perfect Architect. |
![]() | Dahl, K. O. February 4, 1958 The highly acclaimed and award-winning crime writer K. O. Dahl's popular crime series is now rapidly becoming an international success, and critics around the world have labeled him as Norway's answer to Henning Mankell. Dahl has been awarded with the Riverton Prize, and has received nominations for Glasnyckeln (The Glass Key), the Brage Literary Prize, and the Martin Beck Award. |
![]() | Grosman, Ladislav February 4, 1921 Ladislav Grosman (4 February 1921 in Humenné – 25 January 1981 in Tel Aviv) was a Slovak novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for being the author of The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na korze), which he adapted into a critically acclaimed Academy Award-winning film in 1965. Grosman became proficient in Czech after he moved to Czechoslovakia's Czech-speaking part in his late twenties, where he worked as a correspondent and editor in the Prague bureau of the Slovak newspaper Pravda. Following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he moved to Israel, where he died in 1981. |
![]() | Hazen, Barbara Shook February 4, 1930 Barbara Shook Hazen, a former editor at Golden Books, is the author of more than 80 books for young readers, including the popular Little Golden Book The Please and Thank You Book. She lives in Massachusetts and in New York City. |
![]() | Hearne, John February 4, 1926 John Edgar Colwell Hearne (4 February 1926, Montreal, Canada - 12 December 1994, Stony Hill, Jamaica) was a white Jamaican novelist, journalist, and teacher. Hearne was born in Montreal, Canada, of Jamaican parents and attended Jamaica College in Kingston. After serving in the RAF during the Second World War, he read English and Philosophy at Edinburgh University. He trained as a teacher at London University and from 1950 to 1952 taught in a Jamaican school. He also worked as a journalist. He then travelled in Europe for some years (part of the time with novelist Roger Mais, before returning to Jamaica in 1957. He was subsequently on the staff of the Extra-Mural Department of the University of the West Indies, Mona. Hearne's first published work was the novel Voices under the Window, issued in 1955. Set in Jamaica in the late 1940s or early 1950s, it uses the framing device of a progressive politician's injury and death in a riot to narrate the story of a man who, born into racial and economic privilege, decided to cast his lot with the underprivileged. Hearne followed this with four novels written between 1956 and 1961 -- The Faces of Love, Stranger at the Gate, The Autumn Equinox and Land of the Living—set in the imaginary island of Cayuna which is a fictionalized Jamaica (the map of Cayuna included with the novels bears a remarkable resemblance to Jamaica), and which referred to issues relating to Jamaican life at the time, such as the beginning of the bauxite industry and the Rastafari movement, or to events in nearby territories such as the Cuban Revolution. He also wrote a number of short stories, one of which, 'At the Stelling', set in Guyana, was included in the Independence Anthology of Jamaican Literature. Hearne then turned to the academy and journalism—writing a regular column for the Gleaner newspaper, first under the pseudonym 'Jay Monroe', and later under his own name, and administering the Creative Arts Centre (now the Sir Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts) at the University of the West Indies. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he collaborated with planter and journalist Morris Cargill on a series of three thrillers -- Fever Grass, The Candywine Development, and The Checkerboard Caper—involving an imaginary Jamaican secret service. These were written under the pseudonym 'John Morris'. In 1985 he published his last novel, The Sure Salvation, set on a slave ship crossing the Atlantic in the mid-nineteenth century. The voyage ends in the imaginary British South American colony of Abari, also mentioned in The Checkerboard Caper. |
![]() | Hoban, Russell February 4, 1925 Russell Conwell Hoban (February 4, 1925 – December 13, 2011) was an American expatriate writer. His works span many genres, including fantasy, science fiction, mainstream fiction, magical realism, poetry, and children's books. He lived in London, England, from 1969 until his death. |
![]() | Krige, Uys February 4, 1910 Mattheus Uys Krige (4 February 1910 – 10 August 1987) was a South African writer of novels, short stories, poems and plays in both Afrikaans and English. |
![]() | Lemann, Nancy February 4, 1956 Nancy Lemann has written LIVES OF THE SAINTS, RITZ OF THE BAYOU , SPORTSMAN'S PARADISE, THE FIERY PANTHEON, and MALAISE. She is a visiting writer and instructor at The Johns Hopkins University graduate writing program and recently judged the first Walker Percy Prize in fiction for Loyola University and New Orleans Review. |
![]() | Parks, Rosa (with Jim Haskins) February 4, 1913 Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) was an African-American Civil Rights activist, whom the United States Congress called 'the first lady of civil rights' and 'the mother of the freedom movement'. Her birthday, February 4, and the day she was arrested, December 1, have both become Rosa Parks Day, commemorated in both California and Ohio. On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks refused to obey bus driver James F. Blake's order to give up her seat in the colored section to a white passenger, after the white section was filled. Parks was not the first person to resist bus segregation. Others had taken similar steps, including Bayard Rustin in 1942,Irene Morgan in 1946, Sarah Louise Keys in 1955, and the members of the Browder v. Gayle lawsuit (Claudette Colvin, Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, and Mary Louise Smith) who were arrested in Montgomery months before Parks. NAACP organizers believed that Parks was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest for civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws, although eventually her case became bogged down in the state courts while the Browder v. Gayle case succeeded. Parks' act of defiance and the Montgomery Bus Boycott became important symbols of the modern Civil Rights Movement. She became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. She organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including Edgar Nixon, president of the local chapter of the NAACP; and Martin Luther King, Jr., a new minister in town who gained national prominence in the civil rights movement. At the time, Parks was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. She had recently attended the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee center for training activists for workers' rights and racial equality. She acted as a private citizen 'tired of giving in'. Although widely honored in later years, she also suffered for her act; she was fired from her job as a seamstress in a local department store, and received death threats for years afterwards. Shortly after the boycott, she moved to Detroit, where she briefly found similar work. From 1965 to 1988 she served as secretary and receptionist to John Conyers, an African-American U.S. Representative. She was also active in the Black Power movement and the support of political prisoners in the US. After retirement, Parks wrote her autobiography and lived a largely private life in Detroit. In her final years, she suffered from dementia. Parks received national recognition, including the NAACP's 1979 Spingarn Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and a posthumous statue in the United States Capitol's National Statuary Hall. Upon her death in 2005, she was the first woman and second non-U.S. government official to lie in honor at the Capitol Rotunda. |
![]() | Prevert, Jacques February 4, 1900 Jacques Prévert (4 February 1900 – 11 April 1977) was a French poet and screenwriter. His poems became and remain popular in the French-speaking world, particularly in schools. His best regarded films formed part of the poetic realist movement, and include Les Enfants du Paradis (1945). Prévert was born at Neuilly-sur-Seine and grew up in Paris. After receiving his Certificat d'études upon completing his primary education, he quit school and went to work in Le Bon Marché, a major department store in Paris. He was called up for military service in 1918. After the war, he was sent to the Near East to defend French interests there. He died in Omonville-la-Petite, on 11 April 1977. He had been working on the last scene of the animated movie Le Roi et l'oiseau (The King and the Mockingbird) with his friend and collaborator Paul Grimault. When the film was released in 1980, it was dedicated to Prévert's memory, and on opening night, Grimault kept the seat next to him empty. At first when Prévert was attending primary school, he hated writing. Prévert participated actively in the Surrealist movement. Together with the writer Raymond Queneau and artist Marcel Duchamp, he was a member of the Rue du Château group. He was also a member of the agitprop Groupe Octobre. Prévert's poems were collected and published in his books: Paroles (Words) (1946), Spectacle (1951), La Pluie et le beau temps (Rain and Good Weather) (1955), Histoires (Stories) (1963), Fatras (1971) and Choses et autres (Things and Others) (1973). His poems are often about life in Paris and life after the Second World War. They are widely taught in schools in France and frequently appear in French language textbooks published worldwide. They are also often taught in American upper level french classes (French 2 in Kansas) to learn basics, such as Dejeuner du Matin. Some of Prévert's poems, such as 'Les Feuilles mortes' (Autumn Leaves), 'La grasse matinée' (Sleeping in), 'Les bruits de la nuit' (The sounds of the night), and 'Chasse à l'enfant' (The hunt for the child) were set to music by Joseph Kosma—and in some cases by Germaine Tailleferre of Les Six, Christiane Verger, and Hanns Eisler. They have been sung by prominent French vocalists, including Marianne Oswald, Yves Montand, and Édith Piaf, as well as by the later American singers Joan Baez and Nat King Cole. In 1961, French singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg paid tribute to 'Les feuilles mortes' in his own song 'La chanson de Prévert.' More recently, the British remix DJs Coldcut released their own version in 1993. A German version has been published and covered by Didier Caesar (alias Dieter Kaiser), which he named 'Das welke Laub'. 'Les feuilles mortes' also bookends Iggy Pop's 2009 album, Préliminaires. Prévert's poems, are translated into various languages worldwide. Many translators have translated his poems into English. In Nepali, poet and translator Suman Pokhrel has translated some of his poems. Prévert wrote a number of screenplays for the film director Marcel Carné. Among them were the scripts for Drôle de drame (Bizarre, Bizarre, 1937), Quai des brumes (Port of Shadows, 1938), Le Jour se lève (Daybreak, 1939), Les Visiteurs du soir (The Night Visitors, 1942) and Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis, 1945). The last of these regularly gains a high placing in lists of best films ever. His poems were the basis for a film by the director and documentarian Joris Ivens, The Seine Meets Paris (La Seine a rencontré Paris, 1957), about the River Seine. The poem was read as narration during the film by singer Serge Reggiani. In 2007, a filmed adaptation of Prévert's poem, 'To Paint the Portrait of a Bird,' was directed by Seamus McNally, featuring T.D. White and Antoine Ray- English translation by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Prévert had a long working relationship with Paul Grimault, also a member of Groupe Octobre. Together they wrote the screenplays of a number of animated movies, starting with the short 'The Little Soldier' ('Le Petit Soldat', 1947). They worked together until his death in 1977, when he was finishing The King and the Mocking Bird' (Le Roi et l'Oiseau'), a second version of which was released in 1980. Prévert adapted several Hans Christian Andersen tales into animated or mixed live-action/animated movies, often in versions loosely connected to the original. Two of these were with Grimault, including The King and the Mocking Bird, while another was with his brother Pierre Prévert. |
![]() | Proctor, Maurice February 4, 1906 Maurice Procter (born 4 February 1906 – 1973) was an English novelist. He was born in Nelson, Lancashire, England. In 1927 Maurice joined the police as a constable in Halifax, Yorkshire. During the war Maurice was transferred from King Cross to Mixenden police station. In those days Mixenden was just a small village, so Maurice was the village bobby and he and his wife lived in the police house for 5 years. In total Maurice served in the Halifax police force for 19 years, remaining a constable throughout the time. Experiencing police procedure at first hand provided the realism in Procter's work, that many reviewers praised. He began writing fiction whilst a serving police offer, his first book No Proud Chivalry was published in 1947 and as soon as he was earning an income from writing he resigned from the police force. Procter is best known for his series of police procedural novels featuring Detective Chief Inspector Harry Martineau of the Granchester City Police. In his novels Granchester was an industrial city in the north of England. Procter based the city on Manchester. When his novel Hell Is a City (which was published in the United States with the title Somewhere in This City) was filmed in 1960 with Stanley Baker as Martineau, it was shot on-location in Manchester. |
![]() | Ribeiro, Stella Carr February 4, 1932 STELLA CARR RIBEIRO (February 4, 1932, Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - 2008, São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil) was born in Guanabara, Brazil, and now lives and works in Sao Paulo. She comes from a long line of writers and journalists and was formerly the director and vice president of the Brazilian Union of Writers. A poet, journalist, and author of children’s literature, Stella Carr Ribeiro published her first novel, SAMBAQUI, in Brazil in 1975. This highly acclaimed work is based on one of the great passions of her life: anthropology, which she studied under the well-known scholar Paulo Duarte |
![]() | Werth, Alexander February 4, 1901 Alexander Werth (4 February 1901, St Petersburg – 5 March 1969, Paris) was a Russian-born, naturalized British writer, journalist, and war correspondent. Werth's family fled to the United Kingdom in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Werth wrote about France in the prewar period and he also wrote about Russia in World War II, especially the Battle of Stalingrad and the Siege of Leningrad. He spoke and wrote both Russian and English at the native level. His best-known work is Russia at War 1941 to 1945, (London, 1964) a behind-the-scenes look at life in the wartime Soviet Union; he spent the war there as the BBC's correspondent, and had unrivalled access due to the combination of his BBC press credentials and his ability to function as a native Russian speaker. Werth was among a group of journalists who visited Majdanek concentration and extermination camp after it had been discovered by the advancing Red Army. He filed a report on the atrocities that had been committed there, but the BBC initially refused to broadcast it, believing that it was too incredible to be true and suspecting a Soviet propaganda stunt. He was the Moscow correspondent for the Guardian newspaper from 1946 to 1949. He was one of the first outsiders to be allowed into Stalingrad after the battle. Other works include: France 1940-1955: the de Gaulle Revolution; Moscow 41; The Last Days of Paris: a Journalist's Diary; Leningrad; The Year of Stalingrad; and Musical Uproar in Moscow. His son Nicolas Werth is a French historian (Directeur de recherche au CNRS) who specializes in the history of the Soviet Union. |
![]() | Whittington, Harry February 4, 1915 Harry Whittington (February 4, 1915 – June 11, 1989) was an American mystery novelist and one of the original founders of the paperback novel. Born in Ocala, Florida, he worked in government jobs before becoming a writer. His reputation as a prolific writer of pulp fiction novels is supported by his writing of 85 novels in a span of twelve years (as many as seven in a single month) mostly in the crime, suspense, and hardboiled noir fiction genres. In total, he published over 200 novels. Seven of his writings were produced for the screen, including the television series Lawman. His reputation as 'The King of the Pulps' is shared with author H. Bedford-Jones. Eight of Whittington's hardboiled noir novels were republished by Stark House Press. |
![]() | Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de February 4, 1688 Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux (February 4, 1688 – February 12, 1763), commonly referred to as Marivaux, was a French novelist and dramatist. He is considered one of the most important French playwrights of the 18th century, writing numerous comedies for the Comédie-Française and the Comédie-Italienne of Paris. His most important works are Le Triomphe de l'amour, Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard and Les Fausses Confidences. He also published a number of essays and two important but unfinished novels, La Vie de Marianne and Le Paysan parvenu. |
![]() | Pekic, Borislav February 4, 1930 Borislav Pekic (February 4, 1930, Podgorica, Montenegro - July 2, 1992, London, United Kingdom) was born in 1930 in Podgorica, Yugoslavia. Arrested in 1948 for terrorism, armed rebellion, and espionage after the theft of a few typewriters and mimeographs, Pekic spent five years in prison, where he began to write. He worked as a screenwriter and editor of a literary journal before publishing his first novel at age thirty-five. Constant trouble with the authorities led him to emigrate to London in the early 1970s. His novels include The Houses of Belgrade (1994) and The Time of Miracles (1994), both published by Northwestern University Press. He died of cancer in 1992 in London. |
![]() | Marty, Martin E. February 5, 1928 Martin E. Marty (born February 5, 1928 in West Point, Nebraska) is professor emeritus of religious history at the University of Chicago. He is the winner of the National Book Award and the author of more than fifty books. His recent books include MARTIN LUTHER: A LIFE (Viking) and THE CHRISTIAN WORLD: A GLOBAL HISTORY (Modern Library). |
![]() | Braschi, Giannina February 5, 1953 Giannina Braschi (born February 5, 1953) is a Puerto Rican writer. She is credited with writing the first Spanglish novel Yo-Yo Boing! (1998), the postmodern poetry trilogy Empire of Dreams (Yale, 1994), and the philosophical fiction United States of Banana, (AmazonCrossing, 2011), which chronicles the Latin American immigrant's experiences in the United States. ‘For decades, Dominican and Puerto Rican authors have carried out a linguistic revolution,’ noted The Boston Globe, and ‘Giannina Braschi, especially in her novel YO-YO BOING!, testify to it.’ She is considered an influential and revolutionary voice in contemporary Latin American literature. Her work has been described as a ‘synergetic fusion that marks in a determinant fashion the lived experiences of U.S. Hispanics.’ Written in three languages, English, Spanglish, and Spanish, Braschi's work captures the cultural experience of nearly 50 million Hispanic Americans and also seeks to explore the three political options of Puerto Rico: Nation, Colony, or Statehood. On the subject of the Island's lack of sovereignty, Braschi stated, ‘Liberty is not an option—it is a human right.’ |
![]() | De Grazia, Edward February 5, 1927 Edward Richard de Grazia (February 5, 1927 – April 11, 2013) was an American lawyer, writer, and free speech activist. |
![]() | Johnson, B. S. February 5, 1933 Bryan Stanley Johnson (5 February 1933 – 13 November 1973) was an English experimental novelist, poet, literary critic, producer of television programmes and filmmaker. |
![]() | Keeley, Edmund February 5, 1928 Edmund Keeley is the translator, with Philip Sherrard, of the Collected Poems of Cavafy, the Collected Poems, 1924-1955, of George Seferis, and Six Poets of Modern Greece. He is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Princeton University and the author of four novels. |
![]() | Millar, Margaret February 5, 1915 Margaret Ellis Millar (née Sturm) (February 5, 1915 - March 26, 1994) was an American-Canadian mystery and suspense writer. Born in Kitchener, Ontario, she was educated at the Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate Institute and the University of Toronto. She moved to the United States after marrying Kenneth Millar (better known under the pen name Ross Macdonald). They resided for decades in the city of Santa Barbara, which was often utilized as a locale in her later novels under the pseudonyms of San Felice or Santa Felicia. The Millars had a daughter who died in 1970. |
![]() | Monk, Ray February 5, 1957 Ray Monk (born 15 February 1957) is a British philosopher. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton, where he has taught since 1992. He won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the 1991 Duff Cooper Prize for his biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. His interests lie in the philosophy of mathematics, the history of analytic philosophy, and philosophical aspects of biographical writing. His biography of Robert Oppenheimer was published in 2012. In 2015 he was awarded a Fellowship by the Royal Society of Literature. Since 2015 he has contributed to New Statesman, contributing articles on Philosophy and Veganism. |
![]() | Stavrianos, L. S. February 5, 1913 Leften Stavros Stavrianos (February 5, 1913, Vancouver, Canada - March 23, 2004, La Jolla, CA) was a Greek-Canadian historian. His most influential books are considered to be A Global History: From Prehistory to the 21st Century and The Balkans since 1453. He was one of the very first historians to challenge Orientalist views of the Ottoman Empire. Stavrianos was born in Vancouver, Canada in 1913. He received a B.A. in history from the University of British Columbia, and a M.A. and Ph.D. from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Stavrianos joined the faculty of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario and Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. He then became a professor at Northwestern University in 1946. After retiring from Northwestern in 1973, Stavrianos joined the University of California, San Diego Department of History until 1992. |
![]() | Willis, Deborah February 5, 1948 Deborah Willis served twelve years as the curator of photography at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and is now the Collections Coordinator of the National African American Museum Project of the Smithsonian Institution. Her previous books include EARLY BLACK PHOTOGRAPHERS: 1840-1940 and VANDERZEE: PHOTOGRAPHER 1886-1983. She lives in Washington D.C. |
![]() | Huysmans, Joris-Karl February 5, 1848 Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans (February 5, 1848 – May 12, 1907) was a French novelist who published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans. He is most famous for the novel À rebours (1884, published in English as Against the Grain or Against Nature). He supported himself by a 30-year career in the French civil service. Huysmans' work is considered remarkable for its idiosyncratic use of the French language, large vocabulary, descriptions, satirical wit and far-ranging erudition. First considered part of Naturalism in literature, he became associated with the decadent movement with his publication of À rebours. His work expressed his deep pessimism, which had led him to the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. In later years, his novels reflected his study of Catholicism, religious conversion, and becoming an oblate. He discussed the iconography of Christian architecture at length in La cathédrale (1898), set at Chartres and with its cathedral as the focus of the book. Là-bas (1891), En route (1895) and La cathédrale (1898) are a trilogy that feature Durtal, an autobiographical character whose spiritual progress is tracked and who converts to Catholicism. In the novel that follows, L'Oblat (1903), Durtal becomes an oblate in a monastery, as Huysmans himself was in the Benedictine Abbey at Ligugé, near Poitiers, in 1901. La cathédrale was his most commercially successful work. Its profits enabled Huysmans to retire from his civil service job and live on his royalties. |
![]() | Burr, Aaron February 6, 1756 Aaron Burr Jr. (February 6, 1756 – September 14, 1836) was an American politician. He was the third Vice President of the United States (1801–1805), serving during Thomas Jefferson's first term. Burr served as a Continental Army officer in the Revolutionary War, after which he became a successful lawyer and politician. He was elected twice to the New York State Assembly (1784–1785, 1798–1799), was appointed New York State Attorney General (1789–1791), was chosen as a U.S. senator (1791–1797), from the State of New York, and reached the apex of his career as vice president. The highlight of Burr's tenure as president of the Senate, one of his few official duties as vice president, was the Senate's first impeachment trial, that of Supreme Court justice Samuel Chase. In 1804, the last full year of his single term as vice president, Burr killed his political rival Alexander Hamilton in a famous duel. Burr was never tried for the illegal duel, and all charges against him were eventually dropped, but Hamilton's death ended Burr's political career. After leaving Washington, Burr traveled west seeking new opportunities, both economic and political. His activities eventually led to his arrest on charges of treason in 1807. The subsequent trial resulted in acquittal, but Burr's western schemes left him with large debts and few influential friends. In a final quest for grand opportunities, he left the United States for Europe. He remained overseas until 1812, when he returned to the United States to practice law in New York City. There he spent the rest of his life in relative obscurity. |
![]() | Hill, Christopher February 6, 1912 John Edward Christopher Hill (6 February 1912 – 23 February 2003) — known as Christopher Hill — was an English Marxist historian and author of textbooks. |
![]() | Loewen, James W. February 6, 1942 American Book Award-winner James W. Loewen taught race relations at the University of Vermont. In addition to Lies My Teacher Told Me, he has written The Truth About Columbus, and (with Charles Salles) Mississippi: Conflict and Change, the first integrated state history textbook. He lives in Washington, D.C. |
![]() | Okuizumi, Hikaru February 6, 1956 Hikaru Okuizumi (born 6 February 1956) is a Japanese novelist. His real name is Yasuhiro Okuizumi. Okuizumi was born in Mikawa, Yamagata Prefecture, and attended high school in Saitama Prefecture, before studying Humanities at ICU in Tokyo. He completed a master's course at the same university, but dropped out midway through his doctoral course. In 1993, he won the Noma Literary Prize for New Writers for the novel, Novalis no Iny?, and the Akutagawa Prize for The Stones Cry Out the following year. The Stones Cry Out has been translated into a number of languages including English and French. Okuizumi started working at Kinki University in 1999, and continues to teach there. |
![]() | Partridge, Eric February 6, 1894 Eric Honeywood Partridge (6 February 1894 – 1 June 1979) was a New Zealand–British lexicographer of the English language, particularly of its slang. His writing career was interrupted only by his service in the Army Education Corps and the RAF correspondence department during World War II. Partridge was born in the Waimata Valley, near Gisborne, on the North Island of New Zealand to John Thomas Partridge, a grazier, and his wife Ethel Annabella Norris. In 1907 the family moved to Queensland, Australia, where he was educated at the Toowoomba Grammar School. He then studied first classics and then French and English at the University of Queensland. During this time Partridge also worked for three years as a school teacher before enrolling in the Australian Imperial Force in April 1915 and serving in the Australian infantry during the First World War, serving in Egypt, Gallipoli and on the Western Front, before being wounded in the Battle of Pozières. His interest in slang and the "underside" of language is said to date from his wartime experience. Partridge returned to university between 1919 and 1921, when he received his BA. After receiving his degree, Partridge became Queensland Travelling Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, where he worked on both an MA on eighteenth-century English romantic poetry, and a B.Litt in comparative literature. He subsequently taught in a grammar school in Lancashire for a brief interval, then in the two years beginning September 1925, took lecturing positions at the Universities of Manchester and London. From 1923, he "found a second home", occupying the same desk (K1) in the British Museum Library (as it was then known) for the next fifty years. In 1925 he married Agnes Dora Vye-Parminter, who in 1933 bore a daughter, Rosemary Ethel Honeywood Mann. In 1927 he founded the Scholartis Press, which he managed until it closed in 1931. During the twenties he wrote fiction under the pseudonym 'Corrie Denison'; Glimpses, a book of stories and sketches, was published by the Scholartis Press in 1928. the Scholartis Press published over 60 books in these four years, including Songs and Slang of the British Soldier 1914-1918, which Partridge co-authored with John Brophy. From 1932 he commenced writing in earnest. His next major work on slang, Slang Today and Yesterday, appeared in 1933, and his well-known Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English followed in 1937. During the Second World War, Partridge served in the Army Education Corps, later transferring to the RAF's correspondence department, before returning to his British Museum desk in 1945. Partridge wrote over forty books on the English language, including well-known works on etymology and slang. He also wrote novels under the pseudonym Corrie Denison, and books on tennis, which he played well. His papers are archived at the University of Birmingham, British Library, King's College, Cambridge, the Royal Institute of British Architects, the University of Exeter, the University of San Francisco, Warwickshire Record Office, and William Salt Library. He died in Moretonhampstead, Devon, in 1979, aged 85. |
![]() | Petroski, Henry February 6, 1942 Henry Petroski (February 6, 1942) is an American engineer specializing in failure analysis. A professor both of civil engineering and history at Duke University, he is also a prolific author. Petroski has written over a dozen books. |
![]() | Pollan, Michael February 6, 1955 MICHAEL POLLAN is the author of three previous books: SECOND NATURE, A PLACE OF MY OWN, and THE BOTANY OF DESIRE, a New York Times bestseller that was named a best book of the year by Borders, Amazon, and the American Booksellers Association. Pollan is a longtime contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and teaches journalism at Berkeley. He lives in the Bay area with his wife, the painter Judith Belzer, and their son, Isaac. |
![]() | Smith, William Gardner February 6, 1927 William Gardner Smith (February 6, 1927 – November 5, 1974) was an American journalist, novelist, and editor. Smith is linked to the black social protest novel tradition of the 1940s and the 1950s, a movement that became synonymous with writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Willard Motley, and Ann Petry. His third book, South Street (1954), is considered to be one of the first black militant protest novels. Smith's last published novel, The Stone Face (1963), in its account of the Paris massacre of 1961, ‘stand[s] as one of the few representations of the event available’. Smith was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania of African American descent. After 1951, he maintained an expatriate status in France. However, due to his various journalistic and editorial assignments, he also lived for extended periods of time in Ghana. In the final decade of his life, Smith would travel to the United States to visit family and friends and write about the racial and social upheaval that was occurring there. Some of Smith's journalism and reportage from this period was published in various media outlets in France and Europe. Some of it was revised, re-adapted, and published in Return To Black America in 1970. Smith spoke fluent French, and was a frequent contributor and guest on radio and television programs in France where he was considered an expert on the political struggle, civil unrest, and racial tension occurring in the United States during the turbulent decade of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Smith was diagnosed with cancer in October 1973 and died just over a year later in Thiais, a commune in the southern suburbs of Paris, France. |
![]() | Toer, Pramoedya Ananta February 6, 1925 Pramoedya Ananta Toer (EYD: Pramudya Ananta Tur) (6 February 1925 – 30 April 2006) was an Indonesian author of novels, short stories, essays, polemic and histories of his homeland and its people. His works span the colonial period, Indonesia's struggle for independence, its occupation by Japan during the Second World War, as well as the post-colonial authoritarian regimes of Sukarno and Suharto, and are infused with personal and national history. The Dutch Government imprisoned him from 1947 to 1949, the Suharto regime from 1965 to 1979. Pramoedya's writings sometimes fell out of favor with the colonial and later the authoritarian native governments in power. Pramoedya faced censorship in Indonesia during the pre-reformation era despite the fact that he was well known outside Indonesia. The Dutch imprisoned him from 1947 to 1949 during the War of Independence (1945-1949). During the changeover (coup) to the Suharto regime Pramoedya was caught up in the shifting tides of political change and power struggles in Indonesia. Suharto had him imprisoned from 1969 to 1979 on the Maluku island of Buru and branded him a Communist. He was seen as a holdover from the previous regime (even though he had struggled with the former regime (Sukarno). It was on the Island of Buru that he composed his most famous work, the Buru Quartet. Not permitted access to writing materials, he recited the story orally to other prisoners before it was written down and smuggled out. Pramoedya opposed some policies of founding President Sukarno as well as the New Order regime of Suharto, Sukarno's successor. Political criticisms were often subtle in his writing, although he was outspoken against colonialism, racism and corruption of the Indonesian new Government. During the many years in which he suffered imprisonment and house arrest (in Jakarta after his imprisonment on Buru), he became a cause célèbre for advocates of human rights and freedom of expression. |
![]() | Tolson, Melvin B. February 6, 1898 MELVIN B. TOLSON (February 6, 1898 – August 29, 1966) was an American Modernist poet, educator, columnist, and politician. His work concentrated on the experience of African Americans and includes several long historical poems. His work was influenced by his study of the Harlem Renaissance, although he spent nearly all of his career in Texas and Oklahoma. Tolson is the protagonist of the 2007 biopic The Great Debaters. The film, produced by Oprah Winfrey, is based on his work with students at predominantly-black Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, and their debate with University of Southern California(USC). Tolson is portrayed by Denzel Washington, who also directed the film. Born in Moberly, Missouri, Tolson was one of four children of Reverend Alonzo Tolson, a Methodist minister, and Lera (Hurt) Tolson, a seamstress of African-Creek ancestry. Alonzo Tolson was also of mixed race, the son of an enslaved woman and her white master. He served at various churches in the Missouri and Iowa area until settling longer in Kansas City. Reverend Tolson studied throughout his life to add to the limited education he had first received, even taking Latin, Greek and Hebrew by correspondence courses. Both parents emphasized education for their children. Melvin Tolson graduated from Lincoln High School in Kansas City in 1919. He enrolled at Fisk University but transferred to Lincoln University, Pennsylvania the next year for financial reasons. Tolson graduated with honors in 1924. In 1922, Melvin Tolson married Ruth Southall of Charlottesville, Virginia, whom he had met as a student at Lincoln University. Their first child was Melvin Beaunorus Tolson, Jr., who, as an adult, became a professor at the University of Oklahoma. He was followed by Arthur Lincoln, who as an adult became a professor at Southern University; Wiley Wilson; and Ruth Marie Tolson. All children were born by 1928. In 1930-31 Tolson took a leave of absence from teaching to study for a Master's degree at Columbia University. His thesis project, "The Harlem Group of Negro Writers", was based on his extensive interviews with members of the Harlem Renaissance. His poetry was strongly influenced by his time in New York. He completed his work and was awarded the master's degree in 1940. After graduation, Tolson and his wife moved to Marshall, Texas, where he taught speech and English at Wiley College (1924–1947). The small, historically black Methodist Episcopal college had a high reputation among blacks in the South and Tolson became one of its stars. In addition to teaching English, Tolson used his high energies in several directions at Wiley. He built an award-winning debate team, the Wiley Forensic Society. During their tour in 1935, they broke through the color barrier and competed against the University of Southern California, which they defeated. There he also co-founded the black intercollegiate Southern Association of Dramatic and Speech Arts, and directed the theater club. In addition, he coached the junior varsity football team. Tolson mentored students such as James L. Farmer, Jr. and Heman Sweatt, who later became civil rights activists. He encouraged his students not only to be well-rounded people but also to stand up for their rights. This was a controversial position in the segregated U.S. South of the early and mid-20th century. In 1947 Tolson began teaching at Langston University, a historically black college in Langston, Oklahoma, where he worked for the next 17 years. He was a dramatist and director of the Dust Bowl Theater at the university. One of his students at Langston was Nathan Hare, the black studies pioneer who became the founding publisher of the journal The Black Scholar. In 1947 Liberia appointed Tolson its Poet Laureate. In 1953 he completed a major epic poem in honor of the nation's centennial, the Libretto for the Republic of Liberia. Tolson entered local politics and served three terms as mayor of Langston from 1954 to 1960. In 1947, Tolson was accused of having been active in organizing farm laborers and tenant farmers during the late 1930s (though the nature of his activities is unclear) and of having radical leftist associations. The film, The Great Debaters, portrays him as having been a possible Communist. In the film, Tolson's arrest for union organizing galvanizes the black community of the town of Marshall, Texas. Tolson was a man of impressive intellect who created poetry that was funny, witty, humoristic, slapstick, rude, cruel, bitter, and hilarious, as reviewer Karl Shapiro described the Harlem Gallery. In 1965, Tolson was appointed to a two-year term at Tuskegee Institute, where he was Avalon Poet. He died after cancer surgery in Dallas, Texas, on August 29, 1966. He was buried in Guthrie, Oklahoma. From 1930 on, Tolson began writing poetry. He also wrote two plays by 1937, although he did not continue to work in this genre. In 1941, he published his poem "Dark Symphony" in Atlantic Monthly. Some critics believe it is his greatest work, in which he compared and contrasted African-American and European-American history. In 1944 Tolson published his first poetry collection Rendezvous with America, which includes Dark Symphony. He was especially interested in historic events which had fallen into obscurity. In the late 1940s, after he left his teaching position at Wiley, The Washington Tribune hired Tolson to write a weekly column, which he called "Cabbage and Caviar". Tolson's Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953), another major work, is in the form of an epic poem in an eight-part, rhapsodic sequence. It is considered a major modernist work. Tolson's final work to appear in his lifetime, the long poem Harlem Gallery, was published in 1965. The poem consists of several sections, each beginning with a letter of the Greek alphabet. The poem concentrates on African-American life. It was a striking change from his first works, and was composed in a jazz style with quick changes and intellectually dense, rich allusions. In 1979 a collection of Tolson's poetry was published posthumously, entitled A Gallery of Harlem Portraits. These were poems written during his year in New York. They represented a mixture of various styles, including short narratives in free verse. This collection was influenced by the loose form of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology. An urban, racially diverse and culturally rich community is presented in A Gallery of Harlem Portraits. With increasing interest in Tolson and his literary period, in 1999 the University of Virginia published a collection of his poetry entitled Harlem Gallery and Other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson, edited by Raymond Nelson. |
![]() | Abidi, Azhar February 6, 1968 Azhar Ali Abidi (born 6 February 1968 in Wah, Pakistan) is a Pakistani Australian author and translator. He went to school in Pakistan and later studied electrical engineering at the Imperial College London and Masters of Business Administration at the University of Melbourne. He migrated to Australia in 1994 and lives in Melbourne, Australia. |
![]() | Weinberger, Eliot (editor) February 6, 1949 Eliot Weinberger (born 6 February 1949) is a contemporary American writer, essayist, editor, and translator. His work regularly appears in translation and has been published in more than thirty languages. Weinberger first gained recognition for his translations of the Nobel Prize–winning writer and poet Octavio Paz. His many translations of the work of Paz include The Poems of Octavio Paz, In Light of India, and Sunstone. Among Weinberger's other translations are Vicente Huidobro's Altazor, Xavier Villaurrutia's Nostalgia for Death, and Jorge Luis Borges' Seven Nights. His edition of Borges’ Selected Non-Fictions received the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Today, Weinberger is primarily known for his literary writings (essays) and political articles, the former characterized by their wide-ranging subjects and experimental style, verging on a kind of documentary prose poetry, and the latter highly critical of American politics and foreign policy. |
![]() | Kitto, H. D. F. February 6, 1897 Humphrey Davy Findley Kitto (6 February 1897 – 21 January 1982) was a British classical scholar of Cornish ancestry. He concentrated on studies of Greek tragedy, especially translations of the works of Sophocles. His early book, "In the Mountains of Greece", describes his journeys in that country, with no more than incidental reference to antiquity. His 1952 general treatment The Greeks covered the whole range of ancient Greek culture, and became a standard text. After his retirement, he taught at College Year in Athens (CYA), a study abroad program for foreign students in Athens, Greece. |
![]() | Bolger, Dermot February 6, 1959 Dermot Bolger (born 1959) is an Irish novelist, playwright and poet born in Finglas, a suburb of Dublin. His work is often concerned with the articulation of the experiences of working-class characters who, for various reasons, feel alienated from society. In 1977 Bolger set up Raven Arts Press, which he ran until 1992, when he co-founded New Island Books. In May 2010 his wife, Bernie, died. |
![]() | Marson, Una February 6, 1905 Una Maud Victoria Marson (6 February 1905 – 6 May 1965) was a Jamaican feminist, activist and writer, producing poems, plays and radio programmes. She travelled to London in 1932 and became the first black woman to be employed by the BBC during World War II. In 1942 she became producer of the programme Calling the West Indies, turning it into Caribbean Voices, which became an important forum for Caribbean literary work. Una Marson was born on 6 February 1905, in Santa Cruz, Jamaica, in the parish of St Elizabeth. She was the youngest of six children of Rev. Solomon Isaac Marson (1858–1916), a Baptist parson, and his wife Ada Wilhelmina Mullins (1863–1922). Una had a middle-class upbringing and was very close to her father, who influenced some of her fatherlike characters in her later works. As a child before going to school she was an avid reader of available literature, which at the time was mostly English classical literature. At the age of 10, Marson was enrolled in Hampton High, a girl's boarding school in Jamaica of which her father was on the board of trustees. However, that same year, Rev. Isaac died, leaving the family with financial problems, so they moved to Kingston. Una finished school at Hampton High, but did not go on to a college education. After leaving Hampton, she found work in Kingston as a volunteer social worker and used the secretarial skills, such as stenography, she had learned in school. In 1926, Marson was appointed assistant editor of the Jamaican political journal Jamaica Critic. Her years there taught her journalism skills as well as influencing her political and social opinions and inspired her to create her own publication. In fact, in 1928, she became Jamaica's first female editor and publisher of her own magazine, The Cosmopolitan. The Cosmopolitan featured articles on feminist topics, local social issues and workers' rights and was aimed at a young, middle-class Jamaican audience. Marson's articles encouraged women to join the work force and to become politically active. The magazine also featured Jamaican poetry and literature from Marson's fellow members of the Jamaican Poetry League, started by J. E. Clare McFarlane. In 1930, Marson published her first collection of poems, entitled Tropic Reveries, that dealt with love and nature with elements of feminism. It won the Musgrave Medal from the Institute of Jamaica. Her poems about love are somewhat misunderstood by friends and critics, as there is no evidence of a romantic relationship in Marson's life, although love continued to be a common topic in her work. In 1931, due to financial difficulties, The Cosmopolitan ceased publication, which led her to begin publishing more poetry and plays. In 1931, she published another collection of poetry, entitled Heights and Depths, which also dealt with love and social issues. Also in 1931, she wrote her first play, At What a Price, about a Jamaican girl who moves from the country into the city of Kingston to work as a stenographer and falls in love with her white male boss. The play opened in Jamaica and later London to critical acclaim. In 1932, she decided to go to London to find a broader audience for her work and to experience life outside of Jamaica. When she first arrived in the UK in 1932, she stayed in Peckham, south-east London, at the home of Harold Moody, who the year before had founded civil-rights organisation The League of Coloured Peoples. From 1932 to 1945, Marson moved back and forth between London and Jamaica. She continued to contribute to politics, but now instead of focusing on writing for magazines, she wrote for newspapers and her own literary works in order to get her political ideas across. In these years, Marson kept writing to advocate feminism, but one of her new emphases was on the race issue in England. Marson first moved to London in 1932. The racism and sexism she met there "transformed both her life and her poetry"; The voice in her poetry became more focused on the identity of black women in England. In this period then, Marson not only continued to write about women's roles in society, but also put into the mix the issues faced by black people who lived in England. In July 1933, she wrote a poem called "Nigger" that would appear in the League of Coloured Peoples' journal, The Keys; one of Marson's more forceful poems addressing racism in England, "Nigger" only saw light seven years later when it was published in 1940. Outside of her writing at that time, Marson was in the London branch of the International Alliance of Women, a global feminist organization. By 1935, she was involved with the International Alliance of Women based in Istanbul. Marson returned to Jamaica in 1936, where one of her goals was to promote national literature. One step she took in achieving this goal was to help create the Kingston Readers and Writers Club, as well as the Kingston Drama Club. She also founded the Jamaica Save the Children Fund, an organization that raised funds to give the poorer children money to get a basic education. In promoting Jamaican literature, Marson published Moth and the Star in 1937. Many poems in that volume demonstrate how despite the media's portrayal that black women have inferior beauty when compared to the whites, black women should still be confident in their own physical beauty. This theme is seen in "Cinema Eyes", "Little Brown Girl", "Black is Fancy" and "Kinky Hair Blues". However, Marson herself was affected by the stereotype of superior white beauty; Marson herself, her biographer tells us, within months of her arrival in Britain "stopped straightening her hair and went natural". Going along with her feminist principles, Marson worked with Louise Bennett to create another play called London Calling, which was about a woman who moved to London to further her education. However, the woman later became homesick and returned to Jamaica. This play shows how the main character is a "strong heroine" for being able to "force herself to return to London" in order to finish her education there. Also in the feminist vein, Marson wrote Public Opinion, contributing to the feminist column. Marson's third play, Pocomania, is about a woman named Stella who is looking for an exciting life. Critics suggest that this play is significant because it demonstrates how an "Afro-religious cult" affects middle-class women. Pocomania is also one of Marson's most important works because she was able to put the essence of Jamaican culture into it. Critics such as Ivy Baxter said that "Pocomania was a break in tradition because it talked about a cult from the country", and, as such, it represented a turning point in what was acceptable on the stage. In 1937, Marson wrote a poem called "Quashie comes to London", which is the perspective of England in a Caribbean narrative. In Caribbean dialect, quashie means gullible or unsophisticated. Although initially impressed, Quashie becomes disgusted with England because there is not enough good food there. The poem shows how, although England has good things to offer, it is Jamaican culture that Quashie misses, and therefore Marson implies that England is supposed to be "the temporary venue for entertainment". The poem shows how it was possible for a writer to implement Caribbean dialect in a poem, and it is this usage of local dialect that situates Quashie's perspective of England as a Caribbean perspective. Marson returned to London in 1938 to continue work on the Jamaican Save the Children project that she started in Jamaica, and also to be on the staff of the Jamaican Standard. In 1941, she was hired by the BBC Empire Service to work on the programme Calling the West Indies, in which World War II soldiers would have their messages read on the radio to their families, becoming the producer of the programme by 1942. During the same year, Marson turned the programme into Caribbean Voices, as a forum in which Caribbean literary work was read over the radio. More than two hundred authors appeared on Caribbean Voices, including V. S. Naipaul, Samuel Selvon, George Lamming and Derek Walcott. Through this show, Marson met people such as Clare McFarlane, Vic Reid, Andrew Salkey, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Jomo Kenyatta, Haile Selassie, Marcus Garvey, Amy Garvey, Nancy Cunard, Sylvia Pankhurst, Winifred Holtby, Paul Robeson, John Masefield, Louis MacNeice, T. S. Eliot, Tambimuttu and George Orwell. The latter helped Marson edit the programme before she turned it into Caribbean Voices. She also established a firm friendship with Mary Treadgold, who eventually took over her role when Marson returned to Jamaica. However, "despite these experiences and personal connections, there is a strong sense, in Marson's poetry and in Jarrett-Macauley's biography [The Life of Una Marson], that Marson remained something of an isolated and marginal figure". Nevertheless, Marson's radio show, Caribbean Voices, subsequently produced by Henry Swanzy, was described by Kamau Brathwaite as "the single most important literary catalyst for Caribbean creative writing in English". Since on radio the poems could only be appreciated orally, Caribbean Voices helped to influence later Caribbean poetry in having a more spoken form; as Laurence Breiner notes, through the medium of radio "much West Indian poetry was heard rather than seen". Details of Marson's life are limited, and those pertaining to her personal and professional life post-1945 are particularly hard to come by. In 1945, she published a poetry collection entitled Towards the Stars. This marked a shift in the focus of her poetry: while she once wrote about female sadness over lost love, poems from Towards the Stars were much more focused on the independent woman. Also at this time, Marson wrote at least one article entitled "We Want Books - But Do We Encourage Our Writers?" in an effort to spur Caribbean nationalism through literature. Her efforts outside of her writing seem to work in collaboration with these sentiments, though conflicting stories offer little concrete evidence about what she exactly did. Sources differ in outlining Marson's personal life during this time period. Author Erika J. Waters states that Marson was a secretary for the Pioneer Press, a publishing company in Jamaica for Jamaican authors. This source believes that she then moved in the 1950s to Washington, DC, where she met and married a dentist named Peter Staples. The two allegedly divorced, allowing Marson to travel to England, Israel, then back to Jamaica, where she died aged 60 in 1965, following a heart attack. Another source, written by Lee M. Jenkins, offers a very different tale for Marson's personal life and says that Marson was sent to a mental hospital following a breakdown during the years 1946–49. After being released, Marson founded the Pioneer Press. This source claims that she went in the 1950s to the US, where she had another breakdown and was admitted to St. Elizabeth's Asylum. Following this, Marson returned to Jamaica, where she rallied against Rastafarian discrimination. She then went to Israel for a women's conference, an experience that she discussed in her last BBC radio broadcast for Woman's Hour. The conflicting details regarding Marson's personal life show that there is very little information available about her. For example, Water's article quotes Marson's criticisms of Porgy and Bess, yet provides no citation for this work. In combination with this is the limited record of her writings during this time period. Many of her works were left unpublished or circulated only in Jamaica. Most of these writings are only available in the Institute of Jamaica in Kingston. Given these constraints, it is difficult to understand the whole of Marson's accomplishments during the final period of her life. Critics have both praised and dismissed Marson's poetry. She has been criticized for mimicking European style, such as Romantic and Georgian poetics. For example, Marson's poem "If" parodies the style of Kipling's original poem of the same title. Denise deCaires Narain has suggested that Marson was overlooked because poetry concerning the condition and status of females was not important to audiences at the time the works were produced. Other critics, by contrast, praised Marson for her modern style. Some, such as Narain, even suggest that her mimicking challenged conventional poetry of the time in an effort to criticize European poets. Regardless, Marson was active in the West Indian writing community during that period. Her involvement with Caribbean Voices was important to publicising Caribbean literature internationally, as well as spurring nationalism within the Caribbean islands that she represented. |
![]() | Beaumont, Gustave de February 6, 1802 Comte Gustave Auguste Bonnin de la Bonninière de Beaumont (1802 in Beaumont-la-Chartre, Sarthe – 1866, Tours) was a French magistrate, prison reformer, and travel companion to the famed philosopher and politician Alexis de Tocqueville. While he was very successful in his lifetime, he is often overlooked and his name is synonymous with Tocqueville's achievements. |
![]() | Dickens, Charles February 7, 1812 Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented fame, and by the twentieth century his literary genius was broadly acknowledged by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular. |
![]() | Crossley-Holland, Kevin February 7, 1941 Kevin John William Crossley-Holland (born 7 February 1941) is an English translator, children's author and poet. His best known work may now be the Arthur trilogy, published around age sixty (2000–2003), for which he won the Guardian Prize and other recognition. Crossley-Holland and his 1985 novella Storm won the annual Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's outstanding children's book by a British author. For the 70th anniversary of the Medal in 2007 it was named one of the top ten winning works, selected by a panel to compose the ballot for a public election of the all-time favourite. |
![]() | Foner, Eric February 7, 1943 Eric Foner (born February 7, 1943) is an American historian. On the faculty of the Department of History at Columbia University since 1982, he writes extensively on political history, the history of freedom, the early history of the Republican Party, African American biography, Reconstruction, and historiography. Foner is the leading contemporary historian of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period, having written Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, winner of many prizes for history writing, and more than ten other books on the topic. In 2011, Foner's The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery won the Pulitzer Prize, Lincoln Prize, and the Bancroft Prize. Foner also won the Bancroft in 1989 for his book Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution. In 2000, he was elected president of the American Historical Association. |
![]() | Jack, Ian (editor) February 7, 1945 Ian Jack is a British journalist and writer who has edited the Independent on Sunday and the literary magazine Granta and now writes regularly for The Guardian. |
![]() | Kahn, David February 7, 1930 David Kahn (born February 7, 1930) is a US historian, journalist and writer. He has written extensively on the history of cryptography and military intelligence. Kahn's first published book, The Codebreakers - The Story of Secret Writing (1967), has been widely considered to be a definitive account of the history of cryptography. |
![]() | Fayyad, Soleiman February 7, 1929 Soleiman Fayyad (February 7, 1929, Nile Delta, Egypt - February 26, 2015) published his first work in Cairo in 1961, and since published several volumes of short stories, children’s books and dictionaries of Arabic grammar and usage. Recognized as an exponent of contemporary Egyptian narrative - not unlike the Nobel prizewinner Naguib Mahfouz and Yusuf Idriss, the father of the modern Egyptian short story Fayyad has become part of the generation of Egyptian writers who rejected the sentimental romanticism of previous writers in favor of a more uncompromisingly psychological fiction. The novel VOICES is his first work of fiction to be published in English. Hosam Aboul-Ela, his translator, is the American-born son of an Egyptian father and an American mother. He lives in Texas. |
![]() | Lewis, Sinclair February 7, 1885 Harry Sinclair Lewis (February 7, 1885 – January 10, 1951) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded ‘for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters.’ His works are known for their insightful and critical views of American capitalism and materialism between the wars. He is also respected for his strong characterizations of modern working women. H.L. Mencken wrote of him, ‘[If] there was ever a novelist among us with an authentic call to the trade ... it is this red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds.’ |
![]() | McGrath, Patrick February 7, 1950 Patrick McGrath (born 7 February 1950) is a British novelist, whose work has been categorized as gothic fiction. McGrath was born in London and grew up near Broadmoor Hospital from the age of five where his father was Medical Superintendent. His fiction is principally characterised by the first person unreliable narrator, and recurring subject matter in his work includes mental illness, repressed homosexuality and adulterous relationships. |
![]() | Montgomery, Sy February 7, 1958 Sy Montgomery (born February 7, 1958), is a naturalist, author and scriptwriter who writes for children as well as adults. She is author of more than 20 books, including The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness, which was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a New York Times Bestseller. Her most popular book is The Good Good Pig, the bestselling memoir of life with her pig, Christopher Hogwood. Her other notable titles include Journey of the Pink Dolphins, Spell of the Tiger, and Search for the Golden Moon Bear. She has been described as "part Indiana Jones, part Emily Dickinson". Her book for children, Quest for the Tree Kangaroo: An Expedition to the Cloud Forest of New Guinea was the recipient of the 2007 Orbis Pictus Award and was selected as an Honor book for the ALA Sibert Award. |
![]() | Nizan, Paul February 7, 1905 Paul-Yves Nizan (7 February 1905 – 23 May 1940) was a French philosopher and writer. He was born in Tours, Indre-et-Loire and studied in Paris where he befriended fellow student Jean-Paul Sartre at the Lycée Henri IV. He became a member of the French Communist Party, and much of his writing reflects his political beliefs, although he resigned from the party upon hearing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. He died in the Battle of Dunkirk, fighting against the German army in World War II. His works include the novels Antoine Bloye (1933), Le Cheval de Troie [The Trojan Horse] and La Conspiration [The Conspiracy] (1938), as well as the essays "Les Chiens de garde" ["The Watchdogs"] (1932) and "Aden Arabie" (1931), which introduced him to a new audience when it was republished in 1960 with a foreword by Sartre. In particular, the opening sentence "I was twenty, I won't let anyone say those are the best years of your life" (J’avais vingt ans. Je ne laisserai personne dire que c’est le plus bel âge de la vie.) became one of the most influential slogans of student protest during May '68. |
![]() | Palma, Ricardo February 7, 1833 Manuel Ricardo Palma Soriano (February 7, 1833 – October 6, 1919) was a Peruvian author, scholar, librarian and politician. His magnum opus is the Tradiciones peruanas. Ricardo Palma was born into a family that was living in Lima after migrating from the province. His mother was a mestiza with African roots. His parents separated when he was still young. He was educated at a Jesuit school and attended the University of San Carlos on an irregular basis. He suspended his studies to perform voluntary service in the Peruvian navy for six years. From a young age he dabbled in politics as a member of the liberal camp. In 1860 he was believed to have participated in a failed plot against president Ramón Castilla which resulted in an exile to Chile from which he returned in October 1862. He made a trip to Europe in 1864-1865 and when he returned to Lima in 1865 he became involved again in political affairs and public service until 1876. He held the positions of Consul of Peru in Pará, Brazil, Senator for the Loreto and official in the Ministry of War and Navy. The War of the Pacific (1879–1883) between Chile and Peru disrupted Palma's life and resulted in the virtually complete destruction of his own library as well as that housed in the National Library of Peru. After the war Palma was named director of the National Library, a post he held until his retirement in 1912. Palma successfully took on the task of rebuilding the National Library that was ransacked by the occupation forces of the Chilean army in 1881 following the battle of Lima during the War of the Pacific. Palma was able to bring the National Library back from the ashes so that it regained its previous stature and became recognized once again as one of the top libraries in South America. It was through his personal friendship with the then Chilean president Domingo Santa María that Palma was able to recover an estimated 10,000 books from Chilean hands, as well as many other works which were recovered through his own personal efforts. He married Cristina Román Olivier with whom he had several children. His son Clemente Palma became a prominent writer of fantastic tales, usually horror stories, that were influenced by Edgar Allan Poe. His daughter Angélica Palma was also a writer and a member of the early feminist movement in Peru. Ricardo Palma published his first verses and became the editor of a political and satiric newssheet called El Diablo (The Devil) at 15. During his early years, Ricardo Palma composed romantic dramas (which he later repudiated) and poetry. His first book of verse, Poesías (Poems), appeared in 1855. He gained an early reputation as a historian with his book on the activities of the Spanish Inquisition during the period of the Viceroyalty of Peru (Anales De La Inquisicion De Lima: Estudio Historico, 1863). He also wrote for the satirical press of Peru where he distinguished himself as a prolific columnist and one of the bastions of Peruvian political satire in the nineteenth century. He collaborated with the satirical sheet El Burro (The Donkey) and became later one of the principal contributors to the satirical magazine La Campana (The Bell). Later he founded the magazine La Broma (The Joke). He was also a regular contributor to serious publications such as El Mercurio, El Correo, La Patria, El Liberal, Revista del Pacífico and Revista de Sud América. He was further active as a foreign newspaper correspondent during the War of the Pacific. Palma's literary reputation rests upon his creation and development of the literary genre known as tradiciones, short stories that mix history and fiction, written both to amuse and educate, according to the author's declared intention. It was by creatively using poetic license and by deviating from 'pure' history that Palma gained his large South American readership. His Tradiciones peruanas span several centuries, with an emphasis on earlier colonial and republican times in Peru. The Tradiciones were published from 1872 to 1910 in a series of volumes. There are also many different editions and selections of the Tradiciones commercially available. The Tradiciones peruanas do not meet formal historical standards of accuracy or reliability sufficiently to be considered 'history,' but Palma never intended them to be read as 'pure' history. Since they are primarily historical fiction, they should be understood and enjoyed as such. The author's opinion, the opinions of the other primary sources or oral narrators of the stories he collects and transmits, as well as hearsay play a large role in his stories. One of the best-known of the Tradiciones, especially within American Spanish literature classes, is 'La camisa de Margarita'. Some of the Tradiciones peruanas have been translated into English under the title The Knights of the Cape and Thirty-seven Other Selections from the Tradiciones Peruanas of Ricardo Palma (ed. by Harriet de Onís, 1945) and more recently under the title Peruvian Traditions (ed. by Christopher Conway and translated by Helen Lane, Oxford University Press, 2004). The Tradiciones peruanas are recognised as a considerable contribution to Peruvian and South American literature. Some critics have classified the Tradiciones as part of nineteenth-century Romanticism. Palma's Tradiciones en Salsa Verde were published posthumously. These stories are similar to the Tradiciones peruanas but, because of their bawdy nature, they were not published during Palma's lifetime for fear of shocking the sedate Lima establishment. Throughout his life, Ricardo Palma published various articles and books on history, the results of his own historical research such as the Anales De La Inquisicion De Lima: Estudio Historico (1863) and Monteagudo y Sánchez Carrión (1877). He was a noted linguistic scholar and wrote a number of works on the subject including the Neologismos y americanismos and Papeletas lexográficas. He campaigned for recognition by the Real Academia Española of the Latin-American and Peruvian contributions to the Spanish language. In 1999, a well-known London auction house announced the sale of a batch of 50 letters that Ricardo Palma had written to an Argentinian friend. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Peru persuaded the National Library of Peru to participate in the auction. It had been more than 50 years since Peru had bought cultural heritage abroad. Today these letters are kept at the National Library of Peru. Ricardo Palma University has recently published the letters of Palma in three volumes (2005–2007). |
![]() | Paludan, Jacob February 7, 1896 Stig Henning Jacob Puggaard Paludan (February 7, 1896, Copenhagen, Denmark - September 26, 1975, Birkerød, Denmark), Danish essayist, poet, and novelist, whose sceptic view of his times marked his writings. Paludan was trained as a pharmacist in Denmark, and spent two years abroad in Ecuador and New York where he began to write. Having had two manuscripts rejected by Danish publishers, Paludan returned to Copenhagen in 1922 with a third manuscript which became his first published novel, De vestlige Veje (The Western Roads). A volume of poems followed rapidly along with other books including Sogelys (Searchlight), a sequel to the first novel, and by 1924 Paludan was able to support himself by his writing. With the completion of JORGEN STEIN, he attained full stature as a novelist and turned to other genres. |
![]() | Partnoy, Alicia (editor) February 7, 1955 Alicia Partnoy was born in 1955 in Argentina. As a political activist, she was ‘disappeared’ and jailed for a total of three years during the recent military dictatorship. She came to the United States as a refugee in 1979. She translates and performs her poetry, which has been set to music by Sweet Honey in the Rock and other groups. Alicia Partnoy lectures extensively at the invitation of Amnesty International, human rights groups and universities, on human rights and writing under repression. She is a translator and also works at Hispania Books, a Latin American bookstore in Washington, D.C. Alicia Partnoy is the author of The Little School; Tales of Disappearance and Survival in Argentina (Cleis Press, 1986), a Writer’s Choice selection of the Pushcart Foundation. She lives with her husband and daughter. |
![]() | Shallit, Joseph February 7, 1915 Joseph Shallit (February 7, 1915, Philadelphia, PA - June 13, 1995) was an American mystery novelist and science fiction author. He was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants from Vitebsk, born in Philadelphia under the name Joseph Shaltz. |
![]() | Rock, Chris February 7, 1965 Christopher Julius Rock III is an American comedian, actor, writer, producer, and director. After working as a standup comic and appearing in small film roles, Rock came to wider prominence as a cast member of Saturday Night Live in the early 1990s. |
![]() | Swir, Anna February 7, 1909 Anna ?wirszczy?ska (also known as Anna Swir) (February 7, 1909, Warsaw, Poland - September 30, 1984, Kraków, Poland) was a Polish poet whose works deal with themes including her experiences during World War II, motherhood, the female body, and sensuality. ?wirszczy?ska was born in Warsaw and grew up in poverty as the daughter of an artist. She began publishing her poems in the 1930s. During the Nazi occupation of Poland she joined the Polish resistance movement in World War II and was a military nurse during the Warsaw Uprising. She wrote for underground publications and once waited 60 minutes to be executed. Czes?aw Mi?osz writes of knowing her during this time and has translated a volume of her work. Her experiences during the war strongly influenced her poetry. In 1974 she published Building the Barricade, a volume which describes the suffering she witnessed and experienced during that time. She also writes frankly about the female body in various stages of life. |
![]() | Calvert, Laurie February 7, 1812 Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented fame, and by the twentieth century his literary genius was broadly acknowledged by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular. |
![]() | Campo, Estanislao del February 7, 1834 Estanislao del Campo (February 7, 1834 – November 6, 1880) was an Argentine poet. Born in Buenos Aires to a unitarian family—the unitarians were a political party favoring a strong central government rather than a federation, he fought in the battles of Cepeda and Pavón, defending Buenos Aires´s rights. He is best remembered for his 1866 satirical poem Fausto which describes the impressions of a gaucho who goes to see Charles Gounod's opera Faust, believing the events really to be happening. He also published his Collected Poems in 1870. A street in the San Isidro neighbourhood in Buenos Aires is named after him. Estanislao Del Campo is also the name of a small cotton-producing town in Formosa Province, Argentina which lies about 135 km from the city of Formosa. Its total population is 4,055 according to the census of INDEC of 2001. Most of the population are very poor. |
![]() | Bishop, Elizabeth February 8, 1911 Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979) was an American poet, short-story writer, and recipient of the 1976 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956 and the National Book Award winner in 1970. |
![]() | Burton, Robert February 8, 1577 Robert Burton (8 February 1577 – 25 January 1640) was an English scholar at Oxford University, best known for the classic The Anatomy of Melancholy. He was also the incumbent of St Thomas the Martyr, Oxford, and of Seagrave in Leicestershire. |
![]() | Chopin, Kate February 8, 1850 Kate Chopin, born Katherine O'Flaherty (February 8, 1850 — August 22, 1904), was an American author of short stories and novels. She is now considered by some to have been a forerunner of feminist authors of the 20th century. |
![]() | Goldstein, Melvyn C. February 8, 1938 Melvyn C. Goldstein is John Reynolds Harkness Professor in Anthropology and Codirector of the Center for Research on Tibet at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of many books on Tibet including A Tibetan Revolutionary The Political Life and Times of Bapa Phüntso Wangye (with Dawei Sherap and William R. Siebenschuh), Essentials of Modern Literary Tibetan: A Reading Course and Reference Grammar, and A History of Modern Tibet, 1913-1951, all published by UC Press. |
![]() | Grisham, John February 8, 1955 John Ray Grisham Jr. is an American novelist, attorney, politician and activist, best known for his popular legal thrillers. His books have been translated into 42 languages and published worldwide. |
![]() | Ivo, Ledo February 8, 1924 Lêdo Ivo (Maceió, 18 February 1924 -Seville, 23 December 2012) was a Brazilian poet, novelist, essayist and journalist. He was member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, elected in 1986. Lêdo Ivo was born in 1924 in Maceió, capital of Alagoas state in northeastern Brazil. He settled in 1940 in Recife, where he completed his training. In 1943, he moved to Rio de Janeiro to enroll in law school and while working for the literary supplements as a professional journalist. He married Leda Maria Sarmento Ivo de Medeiros (1923-2004), with whom he had three children. His first book was published in 1944, a collection of poems titled As imaginações. The following year he published Ode e Elegia, which was awarded the Olavo Bilac Prize the Brazilian Academy of Letters and is a turning point in the history of Brazilian poetry. The death of Mário de Andrade in 1945 led to a generational change in Brazilian poetry whose rule was 'an invitation to transgression', with the triumph of purely poetical structures. His literary work would be enhanced in the following decades by books of poetry, novels, short stories and essays or reports. Ivo's first novel, As Alianças, which went through several editions and awarded him the Graça Aranha Foundation Prize in 1947. He continued with O Caminho sem Adventura (1948), O sobrinho do General (1964) and Ninho de cobras (published in English as Snake's Nest) (1973), one of his biggest hits, an allegory of totalitarianism of the military dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas. His last novel was A morte do Brasil (1984). In 1949 Ivo spoke at the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo in a conference titled The Generation of 1945; in the same year he received a law degree, a profession he never would exercise, preferring to devote himself to journalism. In 1953 he visited several European countries for long periods. In 1963 he spent two months in universities in the USA, by invitation of the Government. In 1986 Ivo was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters. In 2009 he was awarded the Premio Casa de Las Américas. Ledo Ivo was also a translator. He translated into Portuguese works of authors like Albrecht Goes. Jane Austen, Maupassant, Rimbaud and Dostoyevsky. He published two memoirs, Confissões de um Poeta (1979), which was awarded the prize of the Cultural Foundation of the Federal District, and O Aluno Relapso (1991). |
![]() | Jonke, Gert February 8, 1946 Gert Jonke (8 February 1946 – 4 January 2009) was an Austrian poet, playwright and novelist. |
![]() | Kracauer, Siegfried February 8, 1889 Siegfried Kracauer was an important film critic in Weimar Germany. A Jew, he escaped the rise of Nazism, fleeing to Paris in 1933. Later, in anguish after Walter Benjamin’s suicide, he made his way to New York, where he remained until his death in 1966. He wrote From Caligari to Hitler while working as a ‘special assistant’ to the curator of the Museum of Modern Art’s film division. He was also on the editorial board of Bollingen Series. Despite many critiques of its attempt to link movies to historical outcomes, From Caligari to Hitler remains Kracauer’s best-known and most influential book, and a seminal work in the study of film. Princeton published a revised edition of his Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality in 1997. |
![]() | Rude, George February 8, 1910 GEORGE RUDE (February 8, 1910, Oslo, Norway - January 8, 1993, Battle, United Kingdom) is the author of many books on modern European history, among the most notable being The Crowd in the French Revolution, Wilkes and Liberty, Captain Swing, and Debate on Europe, 1815-1830. Born in 1910 in Oslo, he was educated at Cambridge and London universities, and was Professor of History at Concordia University in Montreal. |
![]() | Ruskin, John February 8, 1819 John Ruskin (8 February 1819 – 20 January 1900) was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. |
![]() | Ungaretti, Giuseppe February 8, 1888 Giuseppe Ungaretti (8 February 1888 - 2 June 1970) was an Italian modernist poet, journalist, essayist, critic and academic. A leading representative of the experimental trend known as ermetismo, he was one of the most prominent contributors to 20th century Italian literature. Influenced by symbolism, he was briefly aligned with futurism. Like many futurists, he took an irredentist position during World War I. Ungaretti debuted as a poet while fighting in the trenches, publishing one of his best-known pieces, L'allegria (‘The Joy’). During the interwar period, Ungaretti was a collaborator of Benito Mussolini (whom he met during his socialist accession), as well as a foreign-based correspondent for Il Popolo d'Italia and La Gazzetta del Popolo. While briefly associated with the Dadaists, he developed ermetismo as a personal take on poetry. After spending several years in Brazil, he returned home during World War II, and was assigned a teaching post at the University of Rome, where he spent the final decades of his life and career. His Fascist past was the subject of controversy. Andrew Fisardi's poems, essays, and translations have been published in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and other periodicals. A native of Massachussetts, he lives in Orvieto, Italy. |
![]() | Verne, Jules February 8, 1828 Jules Gabriel Verne (8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright best known for his adventure novels and his profound influence on the literary genre of science fiction. |
![]() | Sherman, William Tecumseh February 8, 1820 William Tecumseh Sherman (February 8, 1820 – February 14, 1891) was an American soldier, businessman, educator, and author. He served as a general in the Union Army during the American Civil War (1861–65), for which he received recognition for his outstanding command of military strategy as well as criticism for the harshness of the scorched earth policies he implemented in conducting total war against the Confederate States. |
![]() | Bernhard, Thomas February 9, 1931 Thomas Bernhard (born Nicolaas Thomas Bernhard, February 9, 1931 – February 12, 1989) was an Austrian novelist, playwright and poet. Bernhard, whose body of work has been called ‘the most significant literary achievement since World War II,’ is widely considered to be one of the most important German-speaking authors of the postwar era. Thomas Bernhard was born in 1931 in Heerlen, Netherlands as an illegitimate child to Herta Fabjan (née Herta Bernhard, 1904–1950) and the carpenter Alois Zuckerstätter (1905–1940). The next year his mother returned to Austria, where Bernhard spent much of his early childhood with his maternal grandparents in Vienna and Seekirchen am Wallersee north of Salzburg. His mother's subsequent marriage in 1936 occasioned a move to Traunstein in Bavaria. Bernhard's natural father died in Berlin from gas poisoning; Thomas had never met him. Bernhard's grandfather, the author Johannes Freumbichler, pushed for an artistic education for the boy, including musical instruction. Bernhard went to elementary school in Seekirchen and later attended various schools in Salzburg including the Johanneum which he left in 1947 to start an apprenticeship with a grocer. Bernhard's Lebensmensch (companion for life), whom he cared for alone in her dying days, was Hedwig Stavianicek (1894–1984), a woman more than thirty-seven years his senior, whom he met in 1950, the year of his mother's death and one year after the death of his beloved grandfather. She was the major support in his life and greatly furthered his literary career. The extent or nature of his relationships with women is obscure. Thomas Bernhard's public persona was asexual. Suffering throughout his youth from an intractable lung disease (tuberculosis), Bernhard spent the years 1949 to 1951 at the sanatorium Grafenhof, in Sankt Veit im Pongau. He trained as an actor at the Mozarteum in Salzburg (1955–1957) and was always profoundly interested in music: his lung condition, however, made a career as a singer impossible. After that he began work briefly as a journalist, then as a full-time writer. Bernhard died in 1989 in Gmunden, Upper Austria. His attractive house in Ohlsdorf-Obernathal 2 where he had moved in 1965 is now a museum and centre for the study and performance of Bernhard's work. In his will, which aroused great controversy on publication, Bernhard prohibited any new stagings of his plays and publication of his unpublished work in Austria. His death was announced only after his funeral. Often criticized in Austria as a Nestbeschmutzer (one who dirties his own nest) for his critical views, Bernhard was highly acclaimed abroad. His work is most influenced by the feeling of being abandoned (in his childhood and youth) and by his incurable illness, which caused him to see death as the ultimate essence of existence. His work typically features loners' monologues explaining, to a rather silent listener, his views on the state of the world, often with reference to a concrete situation. This is true for his plays as well as for his prose, where the monologues are then reported second hand by the listener. His main protagonists, often scholars or, as he calls them, Geistesmenschen, denounce everything that matters to the Austrian in tirades against the ‘stupid populace’ that are full of contumely. He also attacks the state (often called ‘Catholic-National-Socialist’), generally respected institutions such as Vienna's Burgtheater, and much-loved artists. His work also continually deals with the isolation and self-destruction of people striving for an unreachable perfection, since this same perfection would mean stagnancy and therefore death. Anti-Catholic rhetoric is not uncommon. ‘Es ist alles lächerlich, wenn man an den Tod denkt’ (Everything is ridiculous, when one thinks of Death) was his comment when he received a minor Austrian national award in 1968, which resulted in one of the many public scandals he caused over the years and which became part of his fame. His novel Holzfällen (1984), for instance, could not be published for years due to a defamation claim by a former friend. Many of his plays—above all Heldenplatz (1988)—were met with criticism from many Austrians, who claimed they sullied Austria's reputation. One of the more controversial lines called Austria ‘a brutal and stupid nation … a mindless, cultureless sewer which spreads its penetrating stench all over Europe.’ Heldenplatz, as well as the other plays Bernhard wrote in these years, were staged at Vienna's famous Burgtheater by the controversial director Claus Peymann. Even in death Bernhard caused disturbance by his, as he supposedly called it, posthumous literary emigration, by disallowing all publication and stagings of his work within Austria's borders. The International Thomas Bernhard Foundation, established by his executor and half-brother Dr. Peter Fabjan, has subsequently made exceptions, although the German firm of Suhrkamp remains his principal publisher. The correspondence between Bernhard and his publisher Siegfried Unseld from 1961 to 1989 – about 500 letters – was published in December 2009 at Suhrkamp Verlag, Germany. |
![]() | Coetzee, J. M. February 9, 1940 John Maxwell ‘J. M.’ Coetzee (born 9 February 1940) is a South African born novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is now an Australian citizen and lives in Adelaide, South Australia. Coetzee has been described as ‘inarguably the most celebrated and decorated’ living writer in the Anglosphere. Before receiving the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, he was awarded the CNA Prize (thrice), the Prix Femina Étranger, The Irish Times International Fiction Prize and the Booker Prize (twice), among other accolades. |
![]() | Deane, Seamus February 9, 1940 Seamus Deane (born 9 February 1940) is an Irish poet, novelist, critic and intellectual historian. Born in Derry, Northern Ireland, Deane was brought up as part of a Catholic nationalist family. Until 1993, he was Professor of Modern English and American Literature at University College Dublin. In the late 70s and 80s, he taught American college juniors part-time at the School of Irish Studies in the Ballsbridge section of Dublin. |
![]() | Gorz, Andre February 9, 1923 André Gorz (9 February 1923 – 22 September 2007), pen name of Gérard Horst, born Gerhart Hirsch, also known by his pen name Michel Bosquet, was a social philosopher. Also a journalist, he co-founded Le Nouvel Observateur weekly in 1964. A supporter of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist version of Marxism after the Second World War, he became in the aftermath of the May '68 student riots more concerned with political ecology. In the 1960s and 1970s he was a main theorist in the New Left movement. His central theme was wage labour issues such as liberation from work, the just distribution of work, social alienation, and a guaranteed basic income. |
![]() | Hope, Anthony February 9, 1863 Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, better known as Anthony Hope (9 February 1863 – 8 July 1933), was an English novelist and playwright. He was a prolific writer, especially of adventure novels but he is remembered best for only two books: The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) and its sequel Rupert of Hentzau (1898). |
![]() | Hove, Chenjerai February 9, 1956 Chenjerai Hove (9 February 1956 – 12 July 2015) was a Zimbabwean poet, novelist and essayist who wrote in both English and Shona. Modernist in their formal construction, but making extensive use of oral conventions, Hove's novels offer an intense examination of the psychic and social costs - to the rural population, especially, of the war of liberation in Zimbabwe." He died on 12 July 2015; he was in Norway at the time and his death has been attributed to liver failure. The son of a local chief, Chenjerai Hove was born in Mazvihwa, near Zvishavane, Rhodesia. He attended school at Kutama College and Marist Brothers Dete, in the Hwange district of Zimbabwe. After studying in Gweru, he became a teacher and then took degrees at the University of South Africa and the University of Zimbabwe. He also worked as a journalist, and contributed to the anthology And Now the Poets Speak. A critic of the policies of the Mugabe government, he was living in exile at the time of his death as a fellow at the House of Culture in Stavanger, Norway, as part of the International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN). Prior to this, he held visiting positions at Lewis and Clark College and Brown University; he was also once a poet-in-residence in Miami. Chenjerai Hove's work was translated into several languages (including Japanese, German, and Dutch). He won several awards over the course of his career, including the 1989 Noma Award for Publishing in Africa. |
![]() | Kamau, Kwadwo Agymah February 9, 1948 Kwadwo Agymah Kamau is an Barbadian American novelist. He is a native of Barbados, moved to New York in 1977. He studied at Virginia Commonwealth University. He graduated from Baruch College of CUNY with a bachelor's degree in finance and a master's degree (1985) in quantitative economics. He served first as a statistician at the New York City Department of Investigations, then as a senior economist at the New York State Department of Taxation & Finance. He studied with Paule Marshall at Virginia Commonwealth University in the MFA program. His work has appeared in Callaloo, Caribbean Vibes, Gumbo, InSyte Magazine, He teaches creative writing at the University of Oklahoma. |
![]() | Mochulsky, Konstantin February 9, 1892 Konstantin Mochulsky (February 9, 1892, Odessa, Ukraine - March 21, 1948, France), long considered one of the most important twentieth century critics, was a member of the emigre group of Russian intellectuals in Paris who were devoted to literary, religious, and philosophic pursuits. MICHAEL A. MINJHAN is a member of the Department of Language and Literature at Bard College. . The original Russian edition was published by the YMCA Press, Paris, France . |
![]() | Paine, Thomas February 9, 1737 Thomas Paine (February 9, 1737 – June 8, 1809) was an English-American political activist, philosopher, political theorist and revolutionary. One of the Founding Fathers of the United States, he authored the two most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, and he inspired the rebels in 1776 to declare independence from Britain. His ideas reflected Enlightenment-era rhetoric of transnational human rights. He has been called "a corsetmaker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination". Born in Thetford, England, in the county of Norfolk, Paine emigrated to the British American colonies in 1774 with the help of Benjamin Franklin, arriving just in time to participate in the American Revolution. Virtually every rebel read (or listened to a reading of) his powerful pamphlet Common Sense (1776), proportionally the all-time best-selling American title which crystallized the rebellious demand for independence from Great Britain. His The American Crisis (1776–83) was a prorevolutionary pamphlet series. Common Sense was so influential that John Adams said, "Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain." Paine lived in France for most of the 1790s, becoming deeply involved in the French Revolution. He wrote Rights of Man (1791), in part a defense of the French Revolution against its critics. His attacks on British writer Edmund Burke led to a trial and conviction in absentia in 1792 for the crime of seditious libel. In 1792, despite not being able to speak French, he was elected to the French National Convention. The Girondists regarded him as an ally. Consequently, the Montagnards, especially Robespierre, regarded him as an enemy. In December 1793, he was arrested and imprisoned in Paris, then released in 1794. He became notorious because of his pamphlet The Age of Reason (1793–94), in which he advocated deism, promoted reason and free thought, and argued against institutionalized religion in general and Christian doctrine in particular. He also published the pamphlet Agrarian Justice (1797), discussing the origins of property, and introduced the concept of a guaranteed minimum income. In 1802, he returned to the U.S. where he died on June 8, 1809. Only six people attended his funeral as he had been ostracized for his ridicule of Christianity. |
![]() | Paine, Tom February 9, 1737 Thomas Paine (February 9, 1737 - June 8, 1809) was an English-born American political activist, philosopher, political theorist and revolutionary. One of the Founding Fathers of the United States, he authored the two most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution and inspired the rebels in 1776 to declare independence from Britain. |
![]() | Parton, James February 9, 1822 James Parton (February 9, 1822 – October 17, 1891) was an English-born American biographer who wrote books on the lives of Horace Greeley, Aaron Burr, Andrew Jackson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Voltaire. Parton was born in Canterbury, England, in 1822. He was taken to the United States when he was five years old, studied in New York City and White Plains, New York, and was a schoolmaster in Philadelphia and then in New York. He moved to Newburyport, Massachusetts, where he died on October 17, 1891. Parton was the most popular biographer of his day in America. Parton's nonfiction combined elements of novel writing, which made his books quite popular. Harriet Beecher Stowe once thanked him "for the pleasure you have given me in biographical works which you have had the faculty of making more interesting than romance—(let me trust it is not by making them in part works of imagination)." His first wife, Sara (1811–1872), sister of Nathaniel Parker Willis, and widow of Charles H. Eldredge (d. 1846), attained considerable popularity as a writer under the pen-name Fanny Fern. They were married in 1856. Her works include the novels, Ruth Hall (1854), reminiscent of her own life, and Rose Clark (1857); and several volumes of sketches and stories. In 1876 Parton married Ellen Willis Eldredge, his first wife's daughter by her first husband, Charles Eldredge. With Ellen (and previously Fanny Fern), he raised Ethel, the daughter of Grace Eldrege (Fanny Fern's daughter) and writer Mortimer Thomson (also known as Philander Doesticks). Although never legally adopted by Parton, she took his last name upon reaching her majority. Ethel Parton became a famous writer of children's books about 19th-century life in Newburyport, MA, published in the 1930s and 1940s. |
![]() | Simon, David February 9, 1960 David Judah Simon (born February 9, 1960) is an American author, journalist, writer, and producer. He worked for the Baltimore Sun City Desk for twelve years (1982–95) and wrote Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991) and co-wrote The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood (1997) with Ed Burns. The former book was the basis for the NBC series Homicide: Life on the Street (1993–99), on which Simon served as a writer and producer. Simon adapted the latter book into the HBO mini-series The Corner (2000). He was the creator, executive producer, head writer, and show runner for all five seasons of the HBO television series The Wire (2002–2008). He adapted the non-fiction book Generation Kill into a television mini-series, and served as the show runner for the project. He was selected as one of the 2010 MacArthur Fellows and named an Utne Reader visionary in 2011. Simon also created the HBO series Treme with Eric Overmyer, which aired for four seasons. Following Treme, Simon wrote the HBO mini-series Show Me a Hero with journalist William F. Zorzi, a colleague at The Baltimore Sun, and on The Wire. In August 2015, HBO commissioned two pilots from Simon's company Blown Deadline Productions. The first drama, The Deuce, about the New York porn industry in the 1970s and 1980s, would star Maggie Gyllenhaal and co-producer James Franco with shooting in New York in the fall of 2015. The second drama is an untitled program exploring a "detailed examination of partisanship" and money in Washington politics, to be co-produced with Carl Bernstein. |
![]() | Soseki, Natsume February 9, 1867 S?seki Natsume (February 9, 1867 – December 9, 1916), born Kinnosuke Natsume was a Japanese novelist of the Meiji period (1868–1912). He is best known for his novels Kokoro, Botchan, I Am a Cat and his unfinished work Light and Darkness. He was also a scholar of British literature and composer of haiku, kanshi, and fairy tales. |
![]() | Stephens, James February 9, 1880 James Stephens (9 February 1880 - 26 December 1950) was an Irish novelist and poet. James Stephens produced many retellings of Irish myths and fairy tales. His retellings are marked by a rare combination of humour and lyricism. |
![]() | Cross, Neil February 9, 1969 Neil Cross (born 9 February 1969) is a British novelist and scriptwriter, best known for as the creator of the drama series Luther and Hard Sun (TV Series). Cross was born in Bristol on 9 February 1969. He graduated from the University of Leeds in 1994 with a degree in English and Theology. His initial career was solely as a novelist, beginning with Mr In-Between, which was published in 1998 (and adapted into a film in 2001). He later diversified into television, writing an episode of the BBC spy drama Spooks in 2006 before becoming lead writer on the sixth and seventh series of the show. He has also written for The Fixer and Doctor Who ("The Rings of Akhaten" and "Hide"). In 2010 he wrote a new adaptation of Whistle and I'll Come to You, from the story by M. R. James. He has created three television series: BBC crime thrillers Luther and Hard Sun (for which he wrote all the episodes); and Crossbones, an action adventure pirate series for NBC (co-created with James V. Hart and Amanda Welles). |
![]() | Thorup, Kirsten February 9, 1942 Kirsten Thorup, a Danish author, was born in Funen, Denmark, in 1942 and now lives in Copenhagen. She is the author of three poetry collections, a volume of short stories, and three novels including BABY which has been translated into English. She has also written for films, television, and radio. Her novel, Den lange sommer, was published in Denmark in 1979. NADIA CHRISTENSEN is editor in chief of The Scandinavian Review and director of publishing for the American-Scandinavian Foundation in New York. |
![]() | Walker, Alice February 9, 1944 Alice Malsenior Walker (born February 9, 1944) is an American author and activist. She wrote the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple (1982) for which she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.She also wrote Meridian and The Third Life of Grange Copeland among other works. |
![]() | Anthony, Michael February 10, 1932 MICHAEL ANTHONY was born in Mayaro, Trinidad, where his mother still lives. The small boy in THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO who was sent off to work as a servant was Michael Anthony himse1f, and the descriptions of both village and town are marvels of exactness. His wife Yvette comes from a neighbouring village, though they first met in London. His education at San Fernando’s Junior Technical School ended when he was fifteen. From ’47 to ’54 he worked as a moulder in an iron foundry at Pointe a Pierre. Then he came to England where he worked in several factories, as a parcels clerk at St Pancras Station, and in the GPO telegraph service. He became a journalist after joining Reuters as a teleprinter operator. After two years in Brazil, the Anthony family (they have four children) returned to Trinidad and settled in Chaguanas. Michael Anthony was employed by the National Cultural Council and worked on the production of educational books for children. He began his writing career in 1951, contributing stories and poems to the Trinidad Guardian. Later he had many stories published in BIM, the well-known West Indian literary magazine published in Barbados. We published his first novel, THE GAMES WERE COMING, in 1963; THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO in 1965; and GREEN DAYS BY THE RIVER in 1967. |
![]() | Rathbone, Julian February 10, 1935 Julian Christopher Rathbone (10 February 1935 – 28 February 2008) was an English novelist. Julian Rathbone attended Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was a contemporary of Bamber Gascoigne and Sylvia Plath. At Cambridge he took tutorials with FR Leavis, for whom, without having ever been what might be described as a 'Leavisite', he retained an abiding respect. After university Rathbone lived in Turkey for three years, making a living by teaching English. While in Turkey he heard that his father had been killed in a road accident at the age of sixty, an event to which Rathbone would return when himself the same age, in Blame Hitler. On his return to England jobs in various London schools were followed by the post of Head of English at the comprehensive school in Bognor Regis, West Sussex. Having originally aspired to be an actor or a painter, Rathbone had also taken up writing and by the end of the 1960s had had three novels published, all set in Turkey and informed by a background of which he had intimate knowledge. In 1973 Rathbone finally gave up teaching and left for Spain with the woman who would become his wife and lifelong companion, determined from then on to make his living by writing. Back in England and after some financially lean years Rathbone found his tenacity beginning to pay off. Booker Prize short-listings in 1976 and 1979 brought critical recognition, and although major commercial success remained elusive Rathbone's work appeared regularly, gaining a loyal readership and increasing popularity both at home and abroad. His novels continued to display interests and talents across several genres, from mainstream through thrillers to historical fiction. His novel of 1066, The Last English King, published 1997, achieved considerable commercial success and has been optioned for film several times without having yet made it to the screen. As a writer of non-fiction Rathbone made a lasting and original contribution to Wellington and Peninsular War studies with his Wellington's War, 1984. Various threads run through Rathbone's novels over their forty-year span. Standing firmly in the 19th Century tradition with its belief in the primacy of the writer's imagination and its consequent freedom to explore human life in all its aspects, Rathbone always refused to be tied to a single genre, time or place or character in undertaking this exploration. An ostensible thriller may be just as much a study of relationships, an apparently mainstream novel an investigation of crime, a work of historical fiction a meditation on contemporary issues. In blurring and blending genres in this way, for three decades or more in which the book market became increasingly obsessed with the typecasting and branding of books and their authors, Rathbone can be seen as having explored and questioned the nature of genre itself, its scope and limitations. Wherever the definitions of a particular genre threatened to restrict his enquiry into the human condition, Rathbone never hesitated to push it into wider territory. In a climate of increasing specialisation expected of novelists by the marketplace, this was an unfashionable approach to take, with arguably a heavy commercial cost over the years as Rathbone went his own way and refused to seek or accept any label or badge of identification which might increase sales but confine his activities as a writer. Rathbone in fact created four characters who appear in more than one of his books, permitting a certain grouping around each of them while never taking over the heterogeneous spirit of his work or deflecting him from the pursuit of wider fictional interests. First was Inspector Jan Argand (The Euro-Killers, Base Case, Watching The Detectives). Then the ‘Joseph’ of Joseph (Booker nomination 1979) makes his reappearance as Charlie Boylan in A Very English Agent and later as Eddie Bosham in Birth Of A Nation, as Rathbone follows the thread of events from the war in the Peninsula through the world of German exiles taking refuge in early Victorian London and on to the early years of the modern USA. Two books for Serpent's Tail - Accidents Will Happen and Brandenburg Concerto - focused on Renate Fechter, head of a German squad of Eco-police. Then finally Rathbone created a British private investigator, Chris Shovelin, for the two recent books Homage and As Bad As It Gets for Allison and Busby. Although diverse and strong characters in themselves, none of these four ever seemed likely to take over the oeuvre as a whole. Rathbone remained committed to diversity of inspiration rather than the formulaic approach to which concentration on a single character can lead. Leavis, although Rathbone never shared his cultural aridity, was a long-term presence in the novelist's background as a man who insisted on the power and importance of imaginative literature. In A Last Resort, written around the time of Leavis's death and giving a brilliant portrayal of a Britain making itself ripe for Thatcherism, the ferocious Cambridge don makes a brief appearance in the intellectual life of a gifted English student at a school not unlike the one Rathbone had taught in until a few years previously. As a writer perhaps the nearest Rathbone came to an acknowledged antecedent was Graham Greene, whose weaving of the thriller and mainstream strands of fiction, together with in-depth exploration of wider spiritual and political issues often set in foreign locations, clearly struck many chords both with Rathbone's vocational subject-matter and belief in the novelist's ability to address himself to all aspects of human life on as broad a front as he likes, with the finished work of fiction as the only credential he needs. Greene remained an icon with Rathbone throughout his writing life, as did the different figure of James Joyce, object of Rathbone's greatest reverence although rarely exercising any overt influence in his writing. A Last Resort is probably the most Joycean of Rathbone's books, in its use of accumulation of mundane detail to build up an almost surreal portrait of a country whose identity is dissolving in front of its face. To Joyce himself Rathbone paid the ultimate compliment of constantly rereading without seeking to imitate. Rathbone was a man of what might be called the classic Left. After public school and Cambridge three years in Turkey told him all he needed to know about poverty, and the next decade and a half of teaching in British secondary schools made him expert in the class system of his own country. His politics were those of tolerance and libertarianism, with an innate distrust of self-serving hierarchies and a cynicism towards power-structures and their manipulation of the world, in particular the world of the helpless. In his fiction, much influenced by Greene, he always made social and historical context part of the weave of the narrative. Twenty years ago, in Zdt and The Pandora Option, he dealt with food as a new weapon in the armoury of the superpowers, and in the early 1990s (Sand Blind) with the capacity of those same superpowers to fabricate wars in the interests of their own technologies and consumer needs. In Trajectories (1998) he presents a nightmare vision of Britain in 2035 which seems more recognisable and likely with every year that passes. Over a writing career of forty years, during which the world might be said to have changed out of recognition, it is notable how few of Rathbone's preoccupations and perceptions have dated, while many have been prescient and remain as relevant as they ever were. In his latest book The Mutiny, dealing with the Indian rising against British rule in 1857, the same commitment to clarity of vision is evident, an equal openness to all experiences and forces involved in the events of the time, which continues to mark Rathbone down as unashamedly in the line of the great novelists of the 19th Century. The critic who took Rathbone to task for appearing to claim a superiority of approach to the professional historian in dealing with such contentious historical material was raising a question which Rathbone's whole career, and The Mutiny itself, was dedicated to answering. For a man of wide intellectual interests Rathbone produced relatively little outside his long list of novels. Much travelled, and loving foreign places, he always aspired to produce volumes of travel writing, but nothing in this direction ever came to fruition commercially. His one non-fictional publication was Wellington's War (1984), product of a fascination with Wellington which dated back to schooldays. Following within fifteen years of Elizabeth Longford's two-volume biography, which re-established Wellington as a subject for serious study, Rathbone's book is a radical and original departure from the normal run of biographical accounts. Based on detailed research into both Wellington's collected correspondence and the battlefields of the Peninsular War, it counterpoints extracts from the letters with Rathbone's own elucidations and comments. As well as uniquely conveying the immediacy of events through Wellington's thought-processes and human voice, Wellington's War does more than any other book on the subject to illustrate the dimension and brilliance of Wellington's genius. The Duke himself has a habit of cropping up in various of Rathbone's fictions, notably in Joseph and A Very English Agent and, more hauntingly, in Blame Hitler, the novel in which Rathbone writes about his own father. Rathbone described his own interest in Wellington as ‘probably Oedipal‘, and the Duke as ‘the ultimate father-figure’. Wellington's War remains unique not only in Rathbone's own work but also in the growing contemporary literature on Wellington. |
![]() | Brecht, Bertolt February 10, 1898 Bertolt Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956) was a German poet, playwright, theatre director, and Marxist. A theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter through the tours undertaken by the Berliner Ensemble – the post-war theatre company operated by Brecht and his wife, long-time collaborator and actress Helene Weigel. |
![]() | Calloway, Colin G. February 10, 1953 Colin Gordon Calloway (born 1953) is a British American historian. He is professor of history and Samson Occom Professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth College. |
![]() | Pasternak, Boris February 10, 1890 Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (February 10, 1890, Moscow, Russia - May 30, 1960, Peredelkino, Russia), poet, novelist and translator of Goethe and Shakespeare, was born in Moscow in 1890. The son of a well-known portrait painter and a concert pianist, he abandoned the study of music at an early age, turning instead to philosophy and then to writing. After the revolution, he was employed in the library of the Ministry of Education, and participated in the avant-garde investigations of new techniques of poetry. Acclaimed in the Twenties as the greatest Russian poet of the post-revolutionary era, he achieved world recognition with the publication of DOCTOR ZHIVAGO in 1957. He was awarded, and declined, the Nobel Prize, for Literature the following year, and died at his home in the writer's village’ of Peredelkino in May, 1960. EUGENE M. KAYDEN began translating Russian poetry 35 years ago. He started on pieces he had learned by heart in his native Russia, where he lived until he was 16. Since the 1920's he has given all his time outside his teaching duties to translating. Four years ago, this many-sided scholar retired to devote his full energy to his favorite activity—and particularly to Boris Pasternak's poetry. Eugene Kayden came to the United States in 1903. He graduated from the University of Colorado, then specialized in English and comparative literature at Columbia University, and in economics at Harvard and Princeton. In addition to his long, teaching career at Columbia, Yale and the University of the South, he has also served the U.S. government as an expert on Russia. His translations of Pasternak and Pushkin have appeared in the New Republic, New Statesman, Russian Review and Sewanee Review, among others. |
![]() | Comfort, Alex (translator) February 10, 1920 Alexander Comfort (10 February 1920 – 26 March 2000) was a British scientist and physician known best for his nonfiction sex manual, The Joy of Sex (1972). He was an author of both fiction and nonfiction, as well as a gerontologist, anarchist, pacifist, and conscientious objector. |
![]() | Domanick, Joe February 10, 1943 Joe Domanick is an award-winning investigative journalist and author. He is a Senior Fellow in Criminal Justice at the University of Southern California Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism. His last book, To Protect and to Serve: The LAPD’s Century of War in the City of Dreams (1994), won the 1995 Edgar Award for Best True Fact Crime. |
![]() | Frison-Roche, R. February 10 , 1906 Roger Joseph Fernand Frison-Roche (February 10 , 1906, Paris - December 17 , 1999 in Chamonix-Mont-Blanc) was a mountaineer, explorer and French writer. |
![]() | Gibson, Miles February 10, 1947 Miles Gibson (born 1947) is a reclusive English novelist, poet and artist. Gibson was born in a squatters camp at an abandoned World War II airbase - RAF Holmsley South in the New Forest and raised in Mudeford, Dorset. He was educated at Sandhills Infant School, Somerford Junior School and Somerford Secondary Modern. Upon leaving school he migrated to London and worked in advertising as a copywriter at J. Walter Thompson after winning a place in their ten most ingenious undergraduate writers in Britain today competition, despite lacking the primary qualification of a university education. He later flirted with Fleet Street as a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph Magazine under the brilliant editorship of John Anstey. He was the Telegraph's runner-up Young Writer of the Year, in 1969. Gibson’s darkly satirical writing has been described as both 'magic realism' and 'absurdist fiction.' |
![]() | Lind, Jakov February 10, 1927 Jakov Lind (1926–2007) was born Heinz Jakov Landwirth in Vienna in 1927 to an assimilated Jewish family. Arriving in the Netherlands as a part of the Kindertransport in 1939, Lind survived the Second World War by fleeing into Germany, where he disguised himself as a Dutch deckhand on a barge on the Rhine. Following the war, he spent several years in Israel and Vienna before finally settling in London in 1954. It was in London that he wrote, first in German and later in English, the novels, short stories, and autobiographies that made his reputation, including his masterpieces: Landscape in Concrete, Ergo (forthcoming from Open Letter), and Soul of Wood. Regarded in his lifetime as a successor to Beckett and Kafka, Lind was posthumously awarded the Theodor Kramer Prize in 2007. |
![]() | Price, Leontyne February 10, 1927 Mary Violet Leontyne Price (born February 10, 1927) is an American soprano. Born and raised in Laurel, Mississippi, she rose to international acclaim in the 1950s and 1960s, and was the first African American to become a leading artist at the Metropolitan Opera. One critic characterized Price's voice as "vibrant", "soaring" and "a Price beyond pearls", as well as "genuinely buttery, carefully produced but firmly under control", with phrases that "took on a seductive sinuousness." Time magazine called her voice "Rich, supple and shining, it was in its prime capable of effortlessly soaring from a smoky mezzo to the pure soprano gold of a perfectly spun high C." A lirico spinto (Italian for "pushed lyric") soprano, she was considered especially well suited to the roles of Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini, as well as several in operas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. After her retirement from the opera stage in 1985, she continued to appear in recitals and orchestral concerts until 1997. Among her many honors are the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964), the Spingarn Medal (1965), the Kennedy Center Honors (1980), the National Medal of Arts (1985), numerous honorary degrees, and 19 Grammy Awards for operatic and song recitals and full operas, and a special Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989, more than any other classical singer. In October 2008, she was one of the recipients of the first Opera Honors given by the National Endowment for the Arts. |
![]() | Schickel, Richard February 10, 1933 Richard Warren Schickel (February 10, 1933 – February 18, 2017) was an American film historian, journalist, author, filmmaker, screenwriter, documentarian, and film and literary critic. He was a film critic for Time magazine from 1965–2010, and also wrote for Life magazine and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. His last writings about film were for Truthdig. He was interviewed in For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism (2009). In this documentary film he discusses early film critics Frank E. Woods, Robert E. Sherwood, and Otis Ferguson, and tells of how, in the 1960s, he, Pauline Kael, and Andrew Sarris, rejected the moralizing opposition of the older Bosley Crowther of The New York Times who had railed against violent movies such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967). In addition to film, Schickel also critiqued and documented cartoons, particularly Peanuts. |
![]() | Seierstad, Asne February 10, 1970 ASNE SEIERSTAD has received numerous awards for her journalism and has reported from such war-torn regions as Chechnya, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq. She is fluent in five languages and lives in Norway She is thirty-one. THE BOOKSELLER OF KABUL has been translated into thirteen languages. . (First published in Norway by J. W. Cappelens Forlag as Bokhandleren i Kabul, 2002). |
![]() | Iyer, Pico February 11, 1957 Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer (born 11 February 1957), known as Pico Iyer, is a British-born essayist and novelist of Indian origin. He is the author of numerous books on crossing cultures including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk and The Global Soul. An essayist for Time since 1986, he also publishes regularly in Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and many other publications. |
![]() | Bodelsen, Anders February 11, 1937 Anders Bodelsen (born February 11, 1937, Frederiksberg, Denmark) is a prolific Danish writer primarily associated with the 1960 new-realism wave in Danish literature, along with Christian Kampmann and Henrik Stangerup. Bodelsen prefers the social-realistic style of writing, often thrillers about middle-class people that faces the consequences of materialism, which often clashes with their human values. His thrillers also experiment with ordinary persons tempted by e.g. theft and border-morale issues. Most famous is his ingenious novel THINK OF A NUMBER (Tænk på et tal, 1968) filmed as ‘The Silent Partner‘ in 1978. Also widely known is his cooperation with Danish National Television (Danmarks Radio) on the filming of some of his children's thrillers, e.g. Guldregn (‘Golden Shower’, 1986). Bodelsen has also made some lesser known radio plays. |
![]() | Byrne, J. F. February 11, 1880 John Francis Byrne (11 February 1880–1960), journalist, writer, and university friend of James Joyce, was born was born in Dublin, in the seething political era when Ireland was battling for home rule. Along with James Joyce, he attended Belvedere College and University College, both in Dublin, and he completed his education at Dublin University. In 1910 Mr. Byrne came to New York, where he was a reporter, editorial writer, and daily columnist, contributing at different times to the Daily News Record, the New York Times, Poor’s Manual and the Wall Street Journal. He has also written for numerous magazines and newspapers abroad. Mr. Byrne is the inventor of the ‘Chaocipher,’ samples of which are included in SILENT YEARS. Mr. Byrne is of the opinion that this cipher, which has been examined by the Department of Defense, cannot be ‘broken,’ and he challenges the reader to do so. |
![]() | Conde, Maryse February 11, 1937 Maryse Condé (born February 11, 1937) is a Guadeloupean, French-language author of historical fiction, best known for her novel Segu (1984–1985). Born as Maryse Boucolon at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, she was the youngest of eight children. After having graduated from high school, she was sent to Lycée Fénelon and Sorbonne in Paris, where she majored in English. In 1959, she married Mamadou Condé, a Guinean actor. After graduating, she taught in Guinea, Ghana and Senegal. In 1981, she divorced, but the following year married Richard Philcox, English language translator of most of her novels. In addition to her writings, Condé had a distinguished academic career. In 2004 she retired from Columbia University as Professor Emerita of French. She had previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley, UCLA, the Sorbonne, The University of Virginia, and the University of Nanterre. Condé's novels explore racial, gender and cultural issues in a variety of historical eras and locales, including the Salem witch trials in I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1992) and the 19th-century Bambara Empire of Mali in Segu (1987). Her novels trace the relationships between African peoples and the diaspora, especially the Caribbean. She has taken considerable distance from most Caribbean literary movements, such as Negritude and Creolité, and has often focused on topics with strong feminist concerns. A radical activist in her work as well as in her personal life, Condé has admitted: ‘I could not write anything... unless it has a certain political significance. I have nothing else to offer that remains important.’ Her recent writings have become increasingly autobiographical, such as Memories of My Childhood and Victoire, a biography of her grandmother. Who Slashed Celanire's Throat also shows traces of Condé's paternal great-grandmother. |
![]() | Fermor, Patrick Leigh February 11, 1915 Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor (also known as Paddy Fermor), DSO, OBE (11 February 1915 – 10 June 2011) was a British author, scholar and soldier who played a prominent role behind the lines in the Cretan resistance during World War II. He was widely regarded as ‘Britain's greatest living travel writer’ during his lifetime, based on books such as A Time of Gifts (1977). A BBC journalist once described him as ‘a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene.’ He was born in London, the son of Sir Lewis Leigh Fermor, a distinguished geologist, and Muriel Aeyleen (née Ambler). Shortly after his birth, his mother and sister left to join his father in India, leaving the infant Patrick in England with a family in Northamptonshire. He did not meet his family in person until he was four years old. As a child, Leigh Fermor had problems with academic structure and limitations. As a result, he was sent to a school for ‘difficult children’. He was later expelled from The King's School, Canterbury, when he was caught holding hands with a greengrocer's daughter. His last report from The King's School noted that the young Leigh Fermor was ‘a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness.’ He continued learning by reading texts on Greek, Latin, Shakespeare and History, with the intention of entering the Royal Military College Sandhurst. Gradually he changed his mind, deciding to become an author instead, and in the summer of 1933 relocated to Shepherd Market in London, living with a few friends. Soon, faced with the challenges of an author's life in London and rapidly draining finances, he set upon leaving for Europe. At the age of 18, Leigh Fermor decided to walk the length of Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. He set off on 8 December 1933, shortly after Hitler had come to power in Germany, with a few clothes, several letters of introduction, the Oxford Book of English Verse and a volume of Horace's Odes. He slept in barns and shepherds' huts, but also was invited by landed gentry and aristocracy into the country houses of Central Europe. He experienced hospitality in many monasteries along the way. Two of his later travel books, A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986), were about this journey. The final part of his journey was unfinished at the time of Leigh Fermor's death, but will be published as The Broken Road: Travels from Bulgaria to Mount Athos in September 2013 by John Murray. The book draws on Leigh Fermor's diary at the time and an early draft he wrote in the 1960s. Leigh Fermor arrived in Constantinople on 1 January 1935, then continued to travel around Greece. In March, he was involved in the campaign of royalist forces in Macedonia against an attempted Republican revolt. In Athens, he met Balasha Cantacuzène (Balasa Cantacuzino), a Romanian Phanariote noblewoman, with whom he fell in love. They shared an old watermill outside the city looking out towards Poros, where she painted and he wrote. They moved on to Baleni, Galati, the Cantacuzène house in Moldavia, where they were living at the outbreak of World War II. As an officer cadet, Leigh Fermor trained alongside Derek Bond and Iain Moncreiffe, and later joined the Irish Guards. Due to his knowledge of modern Greek, he was commissioned in the General List and became a liaison officer in Albania. He fought in Crete and mainland Greece. During the German occupation, he returned to Crete three times, once by parachute. He was one of a small number of Special Operations Executive (SOE) officers posted to organise the island's resistance to German occupation. Disguised as a shepherd and nicknamed Michalis or Filedem, he lived for over two years in the mountains. With Captain Bill Stanley Moss as his second in command, Leigh Fermor led the party that in 1944 captured and evacuated the German commander General Heinrich Kreipe. There is a memorial commemorating Kreipe's abduction near Archanes in Crete. Moss featured the events of the Cretan capture in his book Ill Met by Moonlight: The Abduction of General Kreipe (1950). It was later adapted in a film by the same name. It was directed/produced by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and released in 1957. In the film, Leigh Fermor was portrayed by Dirk Bogarde. In 1950, Leigh Fermor published his first book, The Traveller's Tree, about his post-war travels in the Caribbean. The book won the Heinemann Foundation Prize for Literature and established his career path, although it has received negative attention for its approach to racial issues. It was quoted extensively in Live and Let Die, by Ian Fleming. He went on to write several further books of his journeys, including Mani and Roumeli, of his travels on mule and foot around remote parts of Greece. Leigh Fermor translated the manuscript The Cretan Runner written by George Psychoundakis, the dispatch runner on Crete during the war, and helped Psychoundakis get his work published. Fermor also wrote a novel, The Violins of Saint-Jacques, which was adapted as an opera by Malcolm Williamson. After many years together, Leigh Fermor was married in 1968 to the Honourable Joan Elizabeth Rayner (née Eyres Monsell), daughter of the 1st Viscount Monsell. She accompanied him on many of his travels until her death in Kardamyli in June 2003, aged 91. They had no children. They lived part of the year in their house in an olive grove near Kardamyli in the Mani Peninsula, southern Peloponnese, and part of the year in Gloucestershire. Leigh Fermor was knighted in the 2004 New Years Honours. In 2007, he said that, for the first time, he had decided to work using a typewriter - having written all his books longhand until then. After his death the house at Kardamyli featured in the 2013 film Before Midnight. Leigh Fermor was noted for his strong physical constitution, even though he smoked 80 to 100 cigarettes a day. Although in his last years he suffered from tunnel vision and wore hearing aids, he remained physically fit up to his death and dined at table on the last evening of his life. For the last few months of his life he suffered from a cancerous tumour, and in early June 2011 he underwent a tracheotomy in Greece. As death was close, he expressed a wish to die in England and returned there on 9 June 2011. He died the following day, aged 96. |
![]() | Gadamer, Hans-Georg February 11, 1900 Hans-Georg Gadamer (February 11, 1900 – March 13, 2002) was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 magnum opus on hermeneutics, Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode). |
![]() | Gelman, Andrew February 11, 1965 Andrew Gelman is professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University. His books include Bayesian Data Analysis and Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks. He received the Presidents’ Award in 2003, awarded each year to the best statistician under forty. |
![]() | Hatto, A. T. (translator) February 11, 1910 Arthur Thomas Hatto (11 February 1910 – 6 January 2010) was an eminent translator and scholar of German studies at the University of London and is best known for his translations of Tristan, Parzival, and The Nibelungenlied and his theory of epic heroic poetry. He retired in 1977, and in 1991 the British Academy elected him as a Senior Fellow. |
![]() | Jacobs, Harriet February 11, 1813 Harriet Ann Jacobs (February 11, 1813 – March 7, 1897) was an African-American writer who escaped from slavery and was later freed. She became an abolitionist speaker and reformer. Jacobs wrote an autobiographical novel, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, first serialized in a newspaper and published as a book in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent. |
![]() | Saint James, Synthia February 11, 1949 Synthia Saint James (born February 11, 1949) is an American visual artist, author, keynote speaker, and educator who is best known for the original cover art of the hardcover edition of Terry McMillan's book Waiting to Exhale and for designing the first Kwanzaa stamp for the United States Postal Service, which was first issued in 1997. She also designed the 2016 Kwanzaa Forever Stamp. |
![]() | Seidensticker, Edward February 11, 1921 Edward George Seidensticker (February 11, 1921 – August 26, 2007) was a noted post-World War II scholar, historian, and preeminent translator of classical and contemporary Japanese literature. His English translation of the epic The Tale of Genji, published in 1976, was especially well received critically and is counted among the preferred modern translations. Seidensticker is closely associated with the work of three major 20th Century Japanese writers—Yasunari Kawabata, Jun'ichir? Tanizaki, and Yukio Mishima. His landmark translations of the novels of Yasunari Kawabata, in particular Snow County (1956) and Thousand Cranes (1958), led, in part, to Kawabata being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968. |
![]() | Verbitsky, Haracio February 11, 1942 HORACIO VERBITSKY (born February 11, 1942) is Argentina’s leading investigative journalist and the winner of the 1995 Latin American Studies Association Media Award. He is the author of eleven books and currently writes for the newspaper Pagina/12. THE FLIGHT is his first book to appear in English. |
![]() | Yolen, Jane (editor) February 11, 1939 Jane Yolen (born February 11, 1939) is the author of over eighty books for children and adults. A storyteller, poet, and essayist, she is on the board of directors of the Society of Children's Book Writers and was recently elected presidents of the Science Fiction Writers of America. She has received several awards for her writing, including the Christopher Medal and the Society of Children's Book Writers' Golden Kite Award, and has been nominated for a National Book Award. |
![]() | Krzhizhanovsky, Sigizmund February 11, 1887 SIGIZMUND KRZHIZHANOVSKY (February 11, 1887, Kiev, Ukraine - December 28, 1950, Moscow, Russia), the Ukrainian-born son of Catholic Poles, studied law and classical philology at Kiev University. After graduation and two summers spent exploring Europe, he was obliged to clerk for an attorney. A sinecure, the job allowed him to devote the bulk of his time to the study of literature and his own writing. In 1920, after a brief stint in the Red Army, Krzhizhanovsky began lecturing intensively in Kiev on the theater and music. The lectures continued in Moscow, where he moved in 1922, by then well known in literary circles. Lodged in a cell-like room on the Arbat, Krzhizhanovsky wrote steadily for close to two decades. His philosophical and satirical stories with fantastical plots ignored official injunctions to portray the new Soviet state in a positive light. Three separate efforts to print different collections were quashed by the censors, a fourth by World War II. Not until 1989 could these surreal fictions begin to be published. Like Poe, Krzhizhanovsky takes us to the edge of the abyss and forces us to look into it. ‘I am interested,’ he said, ‘not in the arithmetic, but in the algebra of life.’. JOANNE TURNBULL has translated a number of books from Russian—including Andrei Sinyavsky’s Soviet Civilization and Ivan the Fool, Asar Eppel’s The Grassy Street, and Andrei Sergeyev’s Stamp Album, and Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s Seven Stories, winner of the 2007 Rossica Translation Prize—all in collaboration with Nikolai Formozov. She lives in Moscow. |
![]() | Anderson-Imbert, Enrique February 12, 1910 Enrique Anderson-Imbert (February 12, 1910– December 6, 2000) was an Argentine novelist, short-story writer and literary critic. Born in Córdoba, Argentina, Anderson-Imbert graduated from the University of Buenos Aires. From 1940 until 1947 he taught at the University of Tucumán. In 1947, he joined the faculty of the University of Michigan. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1954. He became the first Victor S. Thomas Professor of Hispanic Literature at Harvard University in 1965. Anderson-Imbert remained at Harvard until his retirement in 1980. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1967. Anderson-Imbert is best known for his brief ‘microcuentos’ in which he blends fantasy and magical realism. His story ‘Sala de espera’ is taken from The Cheshire Cat, written in 1965; he is also the author of the 1966 short story entitled ‘Taboo.’ He also penned the famous short stories ‘El Leve Pedro’, ‘El Fantasma’, and ‘Vudu’. He died on December 6, 2000 in Buenos Aires. Isabel Reade, who has taught Spanish languages and literature on all undergraduate levels in college, was a graduate student of Anderson’s at the University of Michigan. She translated his El grimorio, published with the English title THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR. Southern Illinois University Press, 1966). |
![]() | Bax, Roger February 12, 1908 Roger Bax was the pen name of Paul Winterton (1908-2001). He was born in Leicester and educated at the Hulme Grammar School, Manchester and Purley County School, Surrey, after which he took a degree in Economics at London University. He was on the staff of The Economist for four years, and then worked for fourteen years for the London News Chronicle as reporter, leader writer and foreign correspondent. He was assigned to Moscow from 1942 to 1945, where he was also the correspondent of the BBC’s Overseas Service. After the war he turned to full-time writing of detective and adventure novels and produced more than forty-five books. His work was serialized, televised, broadcast, filmed and translated into some twenty languages. He was noted for his varied and unusual backgrounds – including Russia, newspaper offices, the West Indies, ocean sailing, the Australian outback, politics, mountaineering and forestry – and for never repeating a plot. Roger Bax was a founding member and first joint secretary of the Crime Writers’ Association. |
![]() | Darwin, Charles February 12, 1809 Charles Robert Darwin, FRS (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist and geologist, best known for his contributions to evolutionary theory. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors, and in a joint publication with Alfred Russel Wallace introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding. Darwin published his theory of evolution with compelling evidence in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, overcoming scientific rejection of earlier concepts of transmutation of species. By the 1870s the scientific community and much of the general public had accepted evolution as a fact. However, many favoured competing explanations and it was not until the emergence of the modern evolutionary synthesis from the 1930s to the 1950s that a broad consensus developed in which natural selection was the basic mechanism of evolution. In modified form, Darwin's scientific discovery is the unifying theory of the life sciences, explaining the diversity of life. Darwin's early interest in nature led him to neglect his medical education at the University of Edinburgh; instead, he helped to investigate marine invertebrates. Studies at the University of Cambridge (Christ's College) encouraged his passion for natural science. His five-year voyage on HMS Beagle established him as an eminent geologist whose observations and theories supported Charles Lyell's uniformitarian ideas, and publication of his journal of the voyage made him famous as a popular author. Puzzled by the geographical distribution of wildlife and fossils he collected on the voyage, Darwin began detailed investigations and in 1838 conceived his theory of natural selection. Although he discussed his ideas with several naturalists, he needed time for extensive research and his geological work had priority. He was writing up his theory in 1858 when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay which described the same idea, prompting immediate joint publication of both of their theories. Darwin's work established evolutionary descent with modification as the dominant scientific explanation of diversification in nature. In 1871 he examined human evolution and sexual selection in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, followed by The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. His research on plants was published in a series of books, and in his final book, he examined earthworms and their effect on soil. Darwin became internationally famous, and his pre-eminence as a scientist was honoured by burial in Westminster Abbey. Darwin has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history. |
![]() | Hercules, Frank February 12, 1911 A fixture of intellectual life for several decades in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem, Frank Hercules was uniquely situated to understand the American racial dilemma. Born on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, he arrived in New York as a young man after a turbulent life that had already been touched by the racism of British colonialism. In novels and nonfiction writings that included several widely circulated magazine articles, Hercules scrutinized both Trinidadian and American societies. |
![]() | Jensen, Axel February 12, 1932 Axel Buchardt Jensen (12 February 1932 – 13 February 2003) was a Norwegian author. From 1957 until 2002, he published both fiction and non-fiction texts which include novels, poems, essays, a biography, and manuscripts for cartoons and animated films. Jensen was born in Trondheim. He first made his debut as a novelist in Oslo in 1955 with the novel Dyretemmerens kors (1955), but he later burned the remaining unsold books. In 1958 he and his then girlfriend, later wife, Marianne Ihlen, lived on the Greek island of Hydra, where Jensen developed a friendship with the Canadian musician and poet Leonard Cohen. Cohen and Marianne lived together on Hydra for a couple of years after the break-up between her and Jensen, and later moved to Montreal. There is widespread belief that the character Lorenzo in the novel Joacim (1961) is modeled after Cohen, but Jensen also told Cohen that Lorenzo was modeled after the Swedish novelist Göran Tunström. After some time, Jensen returned to Norway and settled in Fredrikstad. There, Noel Cobb, an English poet and student of psychology, came to interview him. Cobb became sexually involved with Jensen's girlfriend Lena. Jensen then left Fredrikstad to live in London. Jensen suffered from severe depression after the break-up with Lena, but in London, he met the psychiatrist R. D. Laing and received therapy from him. After recovering, Jensen worked as an assistant at the institution Kingsley Hall. Laing remained a close friend for the rest of his life. While attending an environmental conference in Stockholm in 1972, Jensen met Pratibha, whom he married in India. After returning to Sweden, the couple lived in Vaxholm, outside Stockholm, where they bought an old freighter, built in 1905, which they renamed S/Y Shanti Devi. The ship was named after Pratibha's mother and means "The Goddess of Peace". After restoring the ship with the help of good friends and its former crew, they finally set course for England in 1984. Unfortunately, due to a storm at sea, they were forced to seek harbor in Oslo after a short, hazardous journey. When Jensen arrived in Oslo, he met his old friend, the writer Olav Angell. Together, they wanted to transform Oslo into a city renowned for happenings on the scene of international literature. The plan was soon put into action, and Jensen became the front figure in a project which later developed into the Oslo International Poetry Festival (OIPF), occurring in 1985 and 1986. On 10 August 1990, Shanti Devi set course for what would be its final destination in Ålefjær, outside Kristiansand. There, Jensen and Pratibha settled in a hundred-year-old schoolhouse and, some years later, they sold their old ship. In the last ten years of his life, Jensen was severely disabled from Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). He gradually became paralyzed, losing all his motor-coordination abilities. Later, relying on a breathing-aid to breathe, he could neither write nor speak. During this period, he also led a tough campaign against what he termed "the health machinery" for the right to be nursed in his own home. Jensen wrote several essays and articles on this subject. Before the public health service provided the help he needed, private funding to pay for nursing was arranged by his close friends, including Leonard Cohen. His wife also used all of her available energy to nurse her husband until he drew his last breath in his home in Ålefjær. In 1996, he received the Fritt Ord Honorary Award. Apart from his first symbolistic novel, Dyretemmerens Kors, Jensen's early novels mostly depict young men that attempt to break away from their social and cultural backgrounds. These novels include Icarus: A Young Man in Sahara (1957) (a new 1999 edition is illustrated by Frans Widerberg), A Girl I Knew (1959), and Joacim (1961). Some critics have argued that these early novels are influenced by Beat authors like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. The reason for this is that the novel's male main characters often try to escape from their obligations in a Western capitalistic society. Instead, they try to replace their former life with some sort of undefined spiritualism and fail miserably in their attempt. Later, Jensen departed from the realism in his early novels and began to move in a new direction by writing science fiction, poems, essays, and manuscripts for cartoons. In this experimental phase, he produced manuscripts for the psychedelic comic-strip Doctor Fantastic (published in the newspaper Dagbladet between March and July 1972), the science fiction comic strip collage Tago (1979), the animated movie Superfreak (1988), and a manuscript for a comic novel which is a caricature-rendering of the life of the French playwright and founder of pataphysics, Alfred Jarry. In the same period, Jensen also published a poem-collection with a hindu theme called Onalila – A Little East West poetry (1974), an essayistic novel called Mother India (1974), and three autobiographical novels named Junior (1978), Senior (1979), and Jumbo (1998). Jensen is perhaps most famous for having written the science fiction novels Epp (1965), Lul (1992), and And the Rest is Written in the Stars (1995), illustrated by Pushwagner. With these novels, Jensen created a dystopian vision of the future, much in the tradition of Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Ray Bradbury. Nevertheless, Jensen's novels also differ from these authors since the tragic vision in his novels is supplemented with comedy, setting an ambiguous and absurd tone. In this way, Jensen's novels are similar to the satirical and parodic novels of Jonathan Swift and Kurt Vonnegut. Besides his fiction, Jensen also published a series of articles and essays which focused on three main political and social issues. His collection of essays, God Does Not Read Novels. A Voyage in the World of Salman Rushdie (1994), is a critique of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and a defense of freedom of speech. Another political text is the article A Children's Disease, published in the anthology The Collective Fairytale. A Book about Norway, Europe and the EU (1994). This article discusses Norway's role as a future member in the European Union. The third main issue that was of great concern to him was how sick and disabled people are treated in a modern bureaucratic society. Two books containing articles on this subject was therefore published – The Deafening Silence (1997) and The Patient in the Centre (1998). All the articles are an account of how it is to suffer from ALS and at the same time not receive adequate help from the Norwegian welfare state. Among his political writings, Jensen also found the time to write a biography on G. I. Gurdjieff, titled Guru – Glimpses from the World of Gurdijieff (2002). In addition to this, Jensen co-wrote his autobiography, Life Seen From Nimbus (2002), with Peter Mæjlender. Jensen received a literary prize from the Austrian Abraham Woursell Foundation in 1965 for his novel Epp. In 1992, Jensen was given the annual literary award from the Norwegian publishing house Cappelen for his novel Lul. For his essays on Salman Rushdie, he received the Carl von Ossietzky award from the International PEN club in 1994 and an award from The Freedom of Expression Foundation in Norway. |
![]() | Lincoln, Abraham February 12, 1809 Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln led the United States through its Civil War—its bloodiest war and its greatest moral, constitutional and political crisis. In doing so, he preserved the Union, abolished slavery, strengthened the federal government, and modernized the economy. |
![]() | Russell, Bill February 12, 1934 William Felton Russell (born February 12, 1934) is an American retired professional basketball player. Russell played center for the Boston Celtics of the National Basketball Association (NBA) from 1956 to 1969. A five-time NBA Most Valuable Player and a twelve-time All-Star, he was the centerpiece of the Celtics dynasty, winning eleven NBA championships during his thirteen-year career. Russell tied the record for the most championships won by an athlete in a North American sports league (with Henri Richard of the National Hockey League). Before his professional career, Russell led the University of San Francisco to two consecutive NCAA championships in 1955 and 1956, and he captained the gold-medal winning U.S. national basketball team at the 1956 Summer Olympics. Russell is widely regarded as one of the greatest basketball players in NBA history. He was 6 ft 10 in (2.08 m) tall, with a 7 ft 4 in (2.24 m) wingspan. His shot-blocking and man-to-man defense were major reasons for the Celtics' domination of the NBA during his career. Russell was equally notable for his rebounding abilities. He led the NBA in rebounds four times, had a dozen consecutive seasons of 1,000 or more rebounds, and remains second all-time in both total rebounds and rebounds per game. He is one of just two NBA players (the other being prominent rival Wilt Chamberlain) to have grabbed more than 50 rebounds in a game. Russell was never the focal point of the Celtics' offense, but he did score 14,522 career points and provided effective passing. Russell played in the wake of black pioneers like Earl Lloyd, Chuck Cooper, and Sweetwater Clifton, and he was the first black player to achieve superstar status in the NBA. He also served a three-season (1966–69) stint as player-coach for the Celtics, becoming the first black coach in North American professional sports and the first to win a championship. In 2011, Barack Obama awarded Russell the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his accomplishments on the court and in the Civil Rights Movement. Russell is one of seven players in history to win an NCAA Championship, an NBA Championship, and an Olympic gold medal. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame. He was selected into the NBA 25th Anniversary Team in 1971 and the NBA 35th Anniversary Team in 1980, and named as one of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History in 1996, one of only four players to receive all three honors. In 2007, he was enshrined in the FIBA Hall of Fame. In Russell's honor the NBA renamed the NBA Finals Most Valuable Player trophy in 2009: it is now the Bill Russell NBA Finals Most Valuable Player Award. |
![]() | Selvadurai, Shyam February 12, 1965 Shyam Selvadurai is a Sri Lankan Canadian novelist who wrote Funny Boy, which won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and Cinnamon Gardens. He currently lives in Toronto with his partner Andrew Champion. |
![]() | Takeda, Taijun February 12, 1912 Taijun Takeda (February 12, 1912 – September 5, 1976) was a Japanese novelist active as one of the first post-war generation writers, and a noted authority on Chinese literature. Takeda was the second son of a Buddhist priest of the Pure Land Sect, and was raised in a temple. He developed an early interest in both Chinese literature and left-wing politics and, on graduating from high school, he chose to major in Sinology at Tokyo University in 1931. He did not complete his degree, for he withdrew from the university after being arrested for distributing leaflets critical of imperialism, which cost him a month’s imprisonment. However, it was there that he became acquainted with Yoshimi Takeuchi. |
![]() | Taliaferro, John February 12, 1952 John Taliaferro is a former senior editor at Newsweek and the author of three acclaimed books, Great White Fathers: The Story of the Obsessive Quest to Create Mount Rushmore, Charles M. Russell: The Life and Legend of America's Cowboy Artist, and Tarzan Forever: The Life of Edgar Rice Burroughs. |
![]() | Woodson, Jacqueline February 12, 1963 Jacqueline Woodson, born February 12, 1963, is an American writer of books for children and adolescents. She is best known for Miracle's Boys, which won the Coretta Scott King Award in 2001, and her Newbery Honor-winning titles Brown Girl Dreaming, After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way. For her lifetime contribution as a children's writer, Woodson won the Margaret Edwards Award in 2005 and she was the U.S. nominee for the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2014. IBBY named her one of six Andersen Award finalists on March 17, 2014. She won the National Book Award in 2014 in the category of Young People's Literature for Brown Girl Dreaming, and was nominated in Fiction for Another Brooklyn. In January 2016 the American Library Association announced that Jacqueline Woodson would deliver the 2017 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture, which recognizes significant contribution to children's literature. |
![]() | Atget, Eugene February 12, 1857 Eugène Atget (12 February 1857 – 4 August 1927) was a French flâneur and a pioneer of documentary photography, noted for his determination to document all of the architecture and street scenes of Paris before their disappearance to modernization. Most of his photographs were first published by Berenice Abbott after his death. An inspiration for the surrealists and other artists, his genius was only recognized by a handful of young artists in the last two years of his life, and he did not live to see the wide acclaim his work would eventually receive. |
![]() | Sarris, Greg February 12, 1952 Greg Sarris is currently serving his thirteenth term as Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. He holds the Graton Rancheria Endowed Chair in Writing and Native American Studies at Sonoma State University, and his publications include Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts (1993), Grand Avenue (1994), and Watermelon Nights (1999). Greg lives and works in Sonoma County. |
![]() | Meredith, George February 12 ,1828 George Meredith (12 February 1828 – 18 May 1909) was an English novelist and poet of the Victorian era. |
![]() | Bernal, Ignacio February 13, 1910 Ignacio Bernal (February 13, 1910 in Paris - January 24, 1992 in Mexico City) was an eminent Mexican anthropologist and archaeologist. Bernal excavated much of Monte Albán, originally starting as a student of Alfonso Caso, and later led major archeological projects at Teotihuacan. In 1965 he excavated Dainzú. He was the director of Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology 1962-68 and again 1970-77. In 1965, he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Bernal was awarded the Premio Nacional in 1969. He was a founding member of the Third World Academy of Sciences in 1983. WILLIS BARNSTONE is Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Indiana University. Born in Lewiston, Maine, he received his M.A. from Columbia and his Ph.D. from Yale. He is the author of three books of poetry and has translated the work of the contemporary Spanish poet Antonio Machado, as well as plays of Lope de Vega and Calderon de la Barca. Mr. Bamstone is editor of an anthology of contemporary European poetry, editor and translator of a volume of Greek lyric poetry and a volume of Sappho’s poems, and has translated a novel from modem Greek. In 1961 Mr. Barnstone was a Guggenheim fellow in Spain, where he completed a critical study of Antonio Machado. |
![]() | Csath, Geza February 13, 1887 Géza Csáth (né József Brenner) (February 13, 1887 – September 11, 1919), was a Hungarian writer, playwright, musician, music critic and psychiatrist. He was the cousin of Dezso Kosztolányi. Géza Csáth (pen name of József Brenner) was a writer, critic, music theoretician and medical doctor. A competent violinist even as a child, he originally wanted to be a painter, but his teachers criticised his drawing, so he turned to writing. He was barely fourteen years old when his first writings on music criticism were published. After grammar school he moved from his native Szabadka (now Subotica in Serbia) to Budapest in order to study medicine. While at college he wrote short sketches and reviews for newspapers and magazines. He was among the first to laud the work of Bartók and Kodály. After earning his degree as a medical doctor in 1909 he worked for a short time as a junior doctor at the Psychiatric and Nerve Clinic (also known as Moravcsik Psychiatric Hospital). He wrote his great novel Diary of a mentally ill woman based on his experiences as a psychiatric doctor (his other main work is his Diary). He became interested in the effects of narcotics from a medical point of view and also as a creative artist. Out of this curiosity, he started taking morphine in 1910 and soon became addicted. Csáth also changed his job and worked at various spas as a doctor, and had ample time for writing. Most of his emblematic ‘dark’ short stories were written during this period, often featuring utter physical or mental violence (such as fratricide, rape or seduction and abandonment of adolescent girls). Csáth often described these acts in first person, with powerful insight into the workings of the perpetrators' disturbed minds. His collected short stories were published under the title Tales which end unhappy (Mesék, amelyek rosszul végzodnek). He married Olga Jónás in 1913. In 1914 he was drafted into the army, and at the front his drug problem worsened so much that he was often sent to medical leave and was finally discharged in 1917. He tried to quit and become a village doctor. His condition further worsened, he became paranoid and by this time his addiction was the central problem of his life, significantly deteriorating his personal relations. In 1919 he was treated at a psychiatric clinic in a provincial hospital, but he fled and returned to his home. On July 22 he shot and killed his wife with a revolver, poisoned himself and slit his arteries. He was rushed to hospital at Szabadka, but later managed to escape again. He wanted to go to the Moravcsik Psychiatric Hospital, but upon being stopped by Yugoslavian border guards he killed himself by taking poison. Inspired by Csáth's writings are the ballet ‘Comedia Tempio’ of the dancer-choreographer Josef Nadj and the opera ‘A Varázsló Halála’ (‘The Magician's Death’) by the composer Alessio Elia (first performance Nyitott Muhely Auditorium - Budapest, 14 June 2006). Janos Szaz's 2007 film ‘Opium: Diary of a Madwoman’ features a doctor named Josef Brenner who is to some degree based on Csáth. |
![]() | Gardner, Helen (editor) February 13, 1908 Dame Helen Louise Gardner, DBE, FBA (13 February 1908 – 4 June 1986) was an English literary critic and academic. She was best known for her work on the poets John Donne and T. S. Eliot. |
![]() | Guiraldes, Ricardo February 13, 1886 Ricardo Güiraldes (13 February 1886 - 8 October 1927) was an Argentine novelist and poet, one of the most significant Argentine writers of his era, particularly known for his 1926 novel Don Segundo Sombra, set amongst the gauchos. |
![]() | Drayton, Geoffrey February 13, 1924 Geoffrey Drayton (born 13 February 1924) is a Barbadian novelist, poet and journalist. Geoffrey Drayton was born in Barbados, and received his early education there. In 1945 he went to Cambridge University, where he read economics, after which he spent some years teaching in Ottawa, Canada, returning to England in 1953. He worked as a freelance journalist in London and Madrid. From 1954 to 1965 he worked for Petroleum Times, becoming its editor. In 1966 he became a petroleum consultant for the Economist Intelligence Unit. Drayton is the author of one volume of poetry, Three Meridians (1950), and two novels: Christopher (1959), which was first published in part in Bim magazine, and Zohara (1961). He has also written short stories, such as 'Mr Dombie the Zombie', which was broadcast on the BBC programme Caribbean Voices. |
![]() | Krylov, Ivan February 13, 1769 Ivan Andreyevich Krylov (February 13, 1769 – November 21, 1844) is Russia's best known fabulist and probably the most epigrammatic of all Russian authors. Formerly a dramatist and journalist, he only discovered his true genre at the age of 40. While many of his earlier fables were loosely based on Aesop's and La Fontaine's, later fables were original work, often with a satirical bent. |
![]() | Levenson, Christopher (Translator) February 13, 1934 Christopher Levenson (born February 13, 1934 London, England) is a Canadian poet. Levenson lived in the Netherlands and Germany, before moving to Ottawa in 1968. He became a Canadian citizen in 1973. He has received degrees from Cambridge University, and the University of Iowa. He was co-founder, and editor, of Arc, and taught for many years at Carleton University. His work appeared in The Antigonish Review, among other journals, and he is a member of the Writers' Union of Canada |
![]() | Malthus, Thomas February 13, 1766 The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus FRS (13 February 1766 – 23 December 1834) was an English cleric and scholar, influential in the fields of political economy and demography. Malthus himself used only his middle name Robert. His An Essay on the Principle of Population observed that sooner or later population will be checked by famine and disease, leading to what is known as a Malthusian catastrophe. He wrote in opposition to the popular view in 18th-century Europe that saw society as improving and in principle as perfectible. He thought that the dangers of population growth precluded progress towards a utopian society: 'The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man'. Malthus placed the longer-term stability of the economy above short-term expediency. He criticized the Poor Laws, and (alone among important contemporary economists) supported the Corn Laws, which introduced a system of taxes on British imports of wheat. His views became influential, and controversial, across economic, political, social and scientific thought. Pioneers of evolutionary biology read him, notably Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. He remains a much-debated writer. |
![]() | Pagels, Elaine February 13, 1943 Elaine Pagels, née Hiesey (born Palo Alto, California, February 13, 1943), is the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she is best known for her studies and writing on the Gnostic Gospels. Her popular books include The Gnostic Gospels (1979), Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988), The Origin of Satan (1995), Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (2003), Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity (2007), and Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (2012). |
![]() | Pearson, Lon February 13, 1939 Lon Pearson is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Missouri, Rolla. He received his B.A. from the University of Utah in 1965 (Phi Beta Kappa), and from the University of California, Los Angeles he received his M.A. (1968), his C. Phil. (1969), and his Ph.D.-1973. Professor Pearson spent two summers on University of Missouri Faculty Research Grants in Chile. There he met Guzmám’s family and friends and located manuscripts and books unavailable in the U.S. In 1975 he received from the National Endowment for the Humanities a Fellowship in Residence at Johns Hopkins University. His reviews have appeared in numerous journals and newspapers. |
![]() | Rowntree, Lester February 13, 1879 Lester Rowntree was born in England and spent much of her life in Carmel, California. In addition to Hardy Californians, she wrote The Flowering Shrubs of California and four children’s books. Lester B. Rowntree, her grandson, is a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. |
![]() | Schama, Simon February 13, 1945 Simon Michael Schama, CBE (born 13 February 1945) is an English historian specialising in art history, Dutch history, and French history. He is a University Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University, New York. He first came to popular public attention with his history of the French Revolution titled Citizens, published in 1989. In the United Kingdom, he is perhaps best known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC television documentary series A History of Britain broadcast between 2000 and 2002. |
![]() | Servan-Schreiber, J. -J, February 13, 1924 Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, often referred to as JJSS (13 February 1924, in Paris – 7 November 2006, in Fécamp), was a French journalist and politician. He co-founded L'Express in 1953 with Françoise Giroud, and then went on to become president of the Radical Party in 1971. He oversaw its transition to the center-right, the party being thereafter known as Parti radical valoisien. He tried to found in 1972 the Reforming Movement with Christian Democrat Jean Lecanuet, with whom he supported Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's conservative candidature to the 1974 presidential election. |
![]() | Simenon, Georges February 13, 1903 Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (13 February 1903 – 4 September 1989) was a Belgian writer. A prolific author who published nearly 200 novels and numerous short works, Simenon is best known as the creator of the fictional detective Jules Maigret. |
![]() | Weschler, Lawrence February 13, 1952 Lawrence Weschler, a staff writer for twenty years at the New Yorker, is the Director of the New York Institute of the Humanities at New York University and Artistic Director of the Chicago Humanities Festival. |
![]() | Elorriaga, Unai February 14, 1973 Unai Elorriaga (born February 14, 1973) is a Spanish writer in the Basque language. His first novel, A STREETCAR TO SP, won Spain’s prestigious National Narrative Prize in 2002. The jury was taken by the freshness of his voice and by how utterly unique the book was. Elorriaga is the most celebrated young Basque author in the Spanish literary landscape. Although influenced by Julio Cortázar and Juan Rulfo, Elorriaga stands alone in both the inventiveness of his narrative and in the particular way his characters reveal their humanity. Elorriaga is truly breaking new ground. Amaia Gabantxo is a literary translator, writer, and reviewer. Her work has appeared in many journals and newspapers, including The Times Literary Supplement and The Independent, as well as in AN ANTHOLOGY OF BASQUE SHORT STORIES and SPAIN: A TRAVELER’S LITERARY COMPANION (Whereabouts Press). Her translation of Anjel Lertxundi’s PERFECT HAPPINESS is forthcoming. |
![]() | Hareven, Shulamith February 14, 1930 Shulamith Hareven (February 14, 1930, Warsaw, Poland - November 25, 2003, Jerusalem, Israel) was an Israeli author and essayist. She was born in Warsaw, Poland, to a Zionist family. She immigrated to Mandate Palestine with her parents in 1940. |
![]() | Harrington, Oliver W. February 14, 1912 Oliver Wendell 'Ollie' Harrington (February 14, 1912 – November 2, 1995) was an American cartoonist and an outspoken advocate against racism and for civil rights in the United States. Of multi-ethnic descent, Langston Hughes called him 'America's greatest African-American cartoonist'. Harrington requested political asylum in East Germany in 1961; he lived in Berlin for the last three decades of his life. Born to Herbert and Euzsenie Turat Harrington in Valhalla, New York, Harrington was the eldest of five children. He began cartooning to vent his frustrations about a viciously racist sixth grade teacher and graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in 1929. Immersing himself in the Harlem Renaissance, Harrington found employment when Ted Poston, city editor for the Amsterdam News became aware of Harrington's already considerable skills as a cartoonist and political satirist. In 1935, Harrington created Dark Laughter, a regular single panel cartoon, for that publication. The strip featured the debut of his most famous character, Bootsie, an ordinary African American dealing with racism in the U.S. Harrington described him as 'a jolly, rather well-fed but soulful character.' During this period, Harrington enrolled in Fine Arts at Yale University to complete his degree, but could not finish because of the United States entry into World War II). During World War II, the Pittsburgh Courier sent Harrington as a correspondent to Europe and North Africa. In Italy, he met Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP. After the war, White hired Harrington to develop the organization's public relations department, where he became a visible and outspoken advocate for civil rights. In that capacity, Harrington published 'Terror in Tennessee,' a controversial expose of increased lynching violence in the post-W.W. II South. Given the publicity garnered by his sensational critique, Harrington was invited to debate with U.S. Attorney General Tom C. Clark on the topic of 'The Struggle for Justice as a World Force.' He confronted Clark for the U.S. government's failure to curb lynching and other racially motivated violence. In 1947 Harrington left the NAACP and returned to cartooning. In the postwar period his prominence and social activism brought him scrutiny from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Hoping to avoid further government scrutiny, Harrington moved to Paris in 1951. In Paris, Harrington joined a thriving community of African-American expatriate writers and artists, including James Baldwin, Chester Himes, and Richard Wright, who became a close friend. Harrington was shaken by Wright's death in 1960, suspecting that he was assassinated. He thought that the American embassy had a deliberate campaign of harassment directed toward the expatriates. In 1961 he requested political asylum in East Germany. He spent the rest of his life in East Berlin, finding plentiful work and a cult following. He illustrated and contributed to publications such as Eulenspiegel, Das Magazine, and the Daily Worker.Harrington had four children. Two daughters are U.S. nationals; a third is a British national. All were born before Harrington emigrated to East Berlin. His youngest child, a son, was born several years after Harrington married Helma Richter, a German journalist. Publications: Dark Laughter: The Satiric Art of Oliver W. Harrington, ed. M. Thomas Inge (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993); Why I Left America and Other Essays, ed. M. Thomas Inge (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993); Laughing on the Outside: The Intelligent White Reader's Guide to Negro Tales and Humor (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1965). [With Philip Sterling and J. Saunders Redding]; Bootsie and Others: A Selection of Cartoons (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1958); Hezekiah Horton (Viking Press, 1955). [with Ellen Tarry]; Terror in Tennessee: The Truth about the Columbia Outrages (New York: 'Committee of 100', 1946). M. Thomas Inge is the Robert Emory Blackwell Professor of Humanities at Randolph-Macon College. |
![]() | Harris, Frank February 14, 1855 Frank Harris (14 February 1855 – 26 August 1931) was an Irish editor, novelist, short story writer, journalist and publisher, who was friendly with many well-known figures of his day. Born in Ireland, he emigrated to America early in life, working in a variety of unskilled jobs before attending the University of Kansas to read law. In 1921, he became a citizen there. After graduation, he quickly tired of his legal career and returned to Europe in 1882. He traveled on continental Europe before settling in London to pursue a career in journalism. Though he attracted much attention during his life for his irascible, aggressive personality, editorship of famous periodicals, and friendship with the talented and famous, he is remembered mainly for his multiple-volume memoir My Life and Loves, which was banned in countries around the world for its sexual explicitness. |
![]() | Hart, John Mason February 14, 1935 John Mason Hart is Professor of History at the University of Houston. His previous books include Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution, Tenth Anniversary edition (California 1998). |
![]() | Kluge, Alexander February 14, 1932 Alexander Kluge (born 14 February 1932) is an author and film director. Kluge was born in Halberstadt, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. After growing up during World War II, he studied history, law and music at the University of Marburg Germany, and the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany. He received his doctorate in law in 1956. While studying in Frankfurt, Kluge befriended the philosopher Theodor Adorno, who was teaching at the Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School. Kluge served as a legal counsel for the Institute, and began writing his earliest stories during this period. At Adorno's suggestion, he also began to investigate filmmaking, and in 1958, Adorno introduced him to German filmmaker Fritz Lang, for whom Kluge worked as an assistant on the making of The Tiger of Eschnapur. Kluge is also one of the major German fiction writers of the late-20th century and an important social critic. His fictional works, which tend toward the short story form, are significant for their formal experimentation and insistently critical thematics. Constituting a form of analytical fiction, they utilize techniques of narrative disruption, mixed genres, interpolation of non-literary texts and documents, and perspectival shifts. The texts frequently employ a flat, ironic tone. One frequent effect approximates what Viktor Shklovsky and the Russian formalists identified as defamiliarization or ostranenie. Kluge has used several of the stories as the bases for his films. Kluge's major works of social criticism include Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung. Zur Organisationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlichkeit, co-written with Oskar Negt and originally published in 1972, and ‘Geschichte und Eigensinn’, also co-authored with Negt. ‘Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung’ has been translated into English as Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere and ‘Geschichte und Eigensinn’ is currently being translated into English and will appear in an edition published by MIT Press in the future. ‘Public Sphere and Experience’ revisits and expands Jürgen Habermas's notion of the public sphere (which he articulated in his book ‘Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere’) and calls for the development of a new ‘proletarian public sphere’ grounded in the life experience of the working class. ‘Geschichte und Eigensinn’ continues this project and tries to rethink the very nature of proletarian experience and develops a theory of ‘living labour’ grounded in the work of Karl Marx. He has also published numerous texts on literary, film and television criticism. |
![]() | Mathews, Harry February 14, 1930 Harry Mathews (born February 14, 1930) is an American author of various novels, volumes of poetry and short fiction, and essays. He is also a translator from the French. |
![]() | Murena, Hector A. February 14, 1923 Héctor Alberto Álvarez (February 14, 1923, Buenos Aires, Argentina - May 6, 1975, Buenos Aires, Argentina), better known under his pen name of H. A. Murena, was an Argentine writer and poet. He is perhaps best remembered for Las Leyes de la Noche (1958), translated into English as The Laws of the Night. |
![]() | Okakura, Kakuzo February 14, 1863 Kakuzo Okakura (1862-1913) was a founder of the first Japanese fine arts academy, the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. He came to America in 1904, and in 1910 became the first head of the Asian art division at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Christopher Benfey is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College and a critic for The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books. |
![]() | Millier, Brett C. February 14, 1958 Brett C. Millier is Associate Professor of American Literature and Civilization at Middlebury College in Vermont. |
![]() | Zelinsky, Paul O. February 14, 1953 Paul O. Zelinsky (born February 14, 1953, Evanston, IL) is an American illustrator and writer best known for illustrating children's picture books. He won the 1998 Caldecott Medal for U.S. picture book illustration, recognizing Rapunzel. |
![]() | Everwine, Peter February 14, 1930 Peter Everwine is the author of seven previous poetry collections, including From the Meadow and Collecting the Animals, which won the Lamont Poetry Prize in 1972. Everwine is the recipient of numerous honors, including two Pushcart Prizes, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is emeritus professor of English at California State University, Fresno, and was a senior Fulbright lecturer in American poetry at the University of Haifa, Israel. |
![]() | Carter, Charlotte February 15, 1946 Charlotte Carter is the author of an acclaimed mystery series featuring Nanette Hayes, a young black American jazz musician with a lust for life and a talent for crime solving. Coq au Vin, the second book in the series, has been optioned for the movies. Her short fiction has appeared in a number of American and British anthologies, including John Harvey's Blue Lightning. The first in a new series set in Chicago against the tumultuous backdrop of the 1960s will be published in late 2002 - early 2003. Charlotte Carter has lived in the American Midwest, North Africa and France. She currently resides in NYC with her husband. |
![]() | Chaliand, Gerard February 15, 1934 Gérard Chaliand (born February 15, 1934, Brussels, Belgium) is a French expert in geopolitics who has published widely on irregular warfare and military strategy. Chaliand analyses of insurgencies in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, mostly based on his field experience with insurgent forces, have appeared in more than 20 books and in numerous newspaper articles. He has worked autonomously throughout his career, unconstrained by the perspectives of national governments and policy institutes. As a result, his work provides an independent perspective on many of the major conflicts characterized the 20th and 21st centuries. He is also a published poet. |
![]() | Ibuse, Masuji February 15, 1898 Masuji Ibuse was born in Hiroshima in 1898. He studied French at Waseda University and joined the School of Fine Arts to purse his constant interest in painting. His first story, ‘Salamander,’ was published in 1923, when Ibuse was still a student, and by the early 1930s his eloquent use of dialect and his unique prose style had established him as one of the leading figures in the Japanese literary world. In the years since 1938 he has been awarded almost every major literary prize in Japan, and on the publication of BLACK RAIN Ibuse was presented with both the Cultural Medal and Japan’s highest literary award, the Noma Prize. John Bester is a graduate of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and has been in Japan for seventeen years. He was formerly chief translator for the Japan Quarterly and among the books he has translated are Ibuse’s BLACK RAIN and Mishima’s SUN AND STEEL. |
![]() | Josephson, Matthew February 15, 1899 Born in Brooklyn in 1899, the son of a banker, Matthew Josephson began a long and extraordinarily productive career in American letters at Columbia University. The need to support a wife and family brought Mr. Josephson to Wall Street in the mid-Twenties, a career he left several years later in order to write articles for the leading magazines. The first of his many full-length historical narratives and biographies, frequent award winners, soon followed. All reflect his preoccupation with the worlds of literature and finance. STENDHAL, VICTOR HUGO, JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, ZOLA AND HIS TIMES, and LIFE AMONG THE SURREALISTS represent the former. EDISON, AL SMITH, THE PRESIDENT MAKERS, THE POLITICOS, INFIDEL IN THE TEMPLE, and particularly, THE ROBBER BARONS exemplify the latter. |
![]() | Kurzke, Hermann February 15, 1943 Hermann Kurzke is Professor of Literature at the University of Mainz and the author of several books. He is the editor of Thomas Mann's collected essays. |
![]() | Pekarkova, Iva February 15, 1963 Iva Pekárková (born February 15, 1963) is a Czechoslovakia-born author who started writing and publishing novels after moving to New York City. Her novels are inspired by her various life experiences and she writes openly about sexuality, making her controversial in her native country. Most of her novels are originally written in Czech. Pekárková was born in Prague in what was then communist Czechoslovakia to the physicist Ludek Pekarek and the chemist (Kveta Suchomelova) Pekarkova. She attended Charles University from 1981 to 1985, where she studied microbiology and virology and began writing fiction. In 1985, she defected to Austria and immigrated to the United States after spending a year in a refugee camp. In the US she held a number of occupations in New York City, including working as social worker in the Bronx and driving a limousine and a Yellow Cab. Pekárková returned to the Czech Republic in 1996. Her first novel was Pera a perute (1989), translated into English as Truck Stop Rainbows (1992), was about Fialka, a Prague university student who photographs botanical mutations resulting from Czechoslovakia's unchecked industrial pollution. When her friend Patrick is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, she hitchhikes Czechoslovakia's Southern Road and prostitute for truckers to pay for his wheelchair. Her second novel, Kulatý sv?t (1994), translated as The World is Round, was about Jitka, a Czechoslovakian woman who flees the country for an Austrian refugee camp, where she is gang-raped. Eventually she gains asylum in Canada through a fabricated story. Dej mi ty prachy (1996), translated into English as Gimme the Money (2000), was about Gin, a Czechoslovakian taxi driver in the US, based on Pekárková's experience driving a taxi in New York City. Pekárková travelled to Thailand in 1988 and 1989 to study the refugee camps there, the inspiration for her novel T?icet dva chwan? (Thirty-two Kwan 2000). The Czech heroine is trapped in Thailand during the Velvet Revolution. Pekárková describes it as "another book about culture clashes" and contains "some of my ideas and observations about immigration and emigration." Visits to India and Nigeria inspired To India Where Else (2001) and Naidja: Stats in My Heart (2004). She published Six Billion Americas in 2005. |
![]() | Pryce-Jones, David February 15, 1936 David Eugene Henry Pryce-Jones (born 15 February 1936) is a conservative British author and commentator. Pryce-Jones was born in Vienna, Austria. His mother was Therese Fould-Springer, an heiress belonging to a mostly Viennese Jewish family of immense wealth. Her sister married Élie de Rothschild. He was educated at Eton and read History at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied under A. J. P. Taylor. Pryce-Jones did his National Service in the Coldstream Guards, in which he was commissioned in 1955, promoted lieutenant in 1956, and served in the British Army of the Rhine. In 1956, Pryce-Jones lectured the men under his command about the necessity of the Suez War, but admits that he did not believe what he was saying. At the time, he believed that the Islamic world would soon progress after decolonization, and was disappointed when this did not happen. He has worked as a journalist and author. He was literary editor at the Financial Times 1959–61, and The Spectator from 1961 to 1963. Pryce-Jones currently works as senior editor at National Review magazine. He also contributes to The New Criterion and Commentary, and for Benador Associates. He often writes about the contemporary events and the history of the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and intelligence matters. In his 1989 book The Closed Circle, Pryce-Jones examined what he considered to be the reasons for the backward state of the Arab world. A review described the book as more of an "indictment" than an examination of the Arab world. In Pryce-Jones's opinion, the root cause of Arab backwardness is the tribal nature of Arab political life, which reduces all politics to war of rival families struggling mercilessly for power. As such, Pryce-Jones's view power in Arab politics consists of a network of client–patron relations between powerful and less powerful families and clans. Pryce-Jones considers as an additional retarding factor in Arab society the influence of Islam, which hinders efforts to build a Western style society where the family and clan are not the dominant political unit. Pryce-Jones argues that Islamic fundamentalism is a means of attempting to mobilize the masses behind the dominant clans. In his book, Betrayal: France, the Arabs, and the Jews, he has accused the French government of being anti-Semitic and pro-Arab, and of consistently siding against Israel in the hope of winning the favour of the Islamic world. Prys Jones wrote a biography - Evelyn Waugh and His World - it was rather notorious for digging up conflict among the married Mitford siblings with Pamela accusing Jessica of revealing private correspondence concerning their sister the Duchess of Devonshire.(see the letters of Mitford Sisters). He has also written about Unity Mitford for the Spectator. He is the son of writer Alan Payan Pryce-Jones (1908–2000) by his first wife (married 1934), Therese "Poppy" Fould-Springer (1908 – February 1953) of the Fould family. Therese was a daughter of Baron Eugène Fould-Springer, a French-born banker who was a cousin of Achille Fould, and Marie-Cecile or Mitzi Springer, later Mrs Frank Wooster or Mary Wooster, whose father was the industrialist Baron Gustav Springer (1842–1920). She also had a brother, Baron Max Fould-Springer (1906–1999), and two sisters Helene Propper de Callejón (1907–1997), wife of Spanish diplomat Eduardo Propper de Callejón and grandmother of actress Helena Bonham Carter, and Baroness Liliane de Rothschild (1916–2003). His parents married in 1934 in Vienna, and Pryce Jones was born in Vienna. In 1940, a four-year-old David was stranded with his nanny in Dieppe and was rescued from the invading German army by his mother's brother-in-law Eduardo Propper de Callejón. Pryce Jones acknowledged his uncle-by-marriage's efforts in saving his own life when Propper de Callejón retired from Spanish diplomatic service. He married Clarissa Caccia, daughter of diplomat Harold Caccia, Baron Caccia, in 1959. They have three surviving children, (one deceased, Sonia: 1970–1972), Jessica, Candida and Adam, and live in London. Pryce Jones is a first cousin of Elena Propper de Callejón, wife of late banker Raymond Bonham Carter and mother of actress Helena Bonham Carter. Another cousin is Baron Nathaniel de Rothschild, only son of the better known Baron Élie de Rothschild. |
![]() | Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino February 15, 1811 Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (February 15, 1811 – September 11, 1888) was an Argentine activist, intellectual, writer, statesman and the seventh President of Argentina. His writing spanned a wide range of genres and topics, from journalism to autobiography, to political philosophy and history. He was a member of a group of intellectuals, known as the Generation of 1837, who had a great influence on nineteenth-century Argentina. He was particularly concerned with educational issues and was also an important influence on the region's literature. Sarmiento grew up in a poor but politically active family that paved the way for much of his future accomplishments. Between 1843 and 1850 he was frequently in exile, and wrote in both Chile and in Argentina. His greatest literary achievement was Facundo, a critique of Juan Manuel de Rosas, that Sarmiento wrote while working for the newspaper El Progreso during his exile in Chile. The book brought him far more than just literary recognition; he expended his efforts and energy on the war against dictatorships, specifically that of Rosas, and contrasted enlightened Europe—a world where, in his eyes, democracy, social services, and intelligent thought were valued—with the barbarism of the gaucho and especially the caudillo, the ruthless strongmen of nineteenth-century Argentina. While president of Argentina from 1868 to 1874, Sarmiento championed intelligent thought—including education for children and women—and democracy for Latin America. He also took advantage of the opportunity to modernize and develop train systems, a postal system, and a comprehensive education system. He spent many years in ministerial roles on the federal and state levels where he travelled abroad and examined other education systems. Sarmiento died in Asunción, Paraguay, at the age of 77 from a heart attack. He was buried in Buenos Aires. Today, he is respected as a political innovator and writer. |
![]() | Spiegelman, Art February 15, 1948 Art Spiegelman is a contributing editor and artist for The New Yorker, and a co-founder / editor of RAW, the acclaimed magazine of avant-garde comics and graphics. His drawings and prints have been exhibited in museums and galleries here and abroad. Honors he has received for MAUS include the Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and nominations for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in New York City with his wife, Françoise Mouly, and their two children, Nadja and Dashiell. |
![]() | Waldie, Jerome R. and Frobish, Nestle J. February 15, 1925 Jerome Russell "Jerry" Waldie (February 15, 1925 – April 3, 2009) was a United States Representative from California. Born in Antioch, California, Waldie attended Antioch public schools. After three years in the Army during World War II, he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1950 with a degree in political science, and earned a law degree from the university's Boalt Hall School of Law in 1953. He served in the United States Army from 1943 to 1946. Waldie served as a Democratic member of the California State Assembly from 1959 to 1966, becoming Majority Leader in 1961. One of his last accomplishments in Sacramento was to carry the constitutional amendment, pushed by Speaker of the Assembly Jesse Unruh, to create a full-time legislature. Waldie was then elected to the 89th Congress, by special election, to fill the vacancy caused by the death of United States Representative John F. Baldwin. He was re-elected four times, serving from June 7, 1966 to January 3, 1975. As representative, he was an early critic of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and also advocated health care reforms. During the Watergate scandal, Waldie was a vocal critic of President Richard Nixon. Three days after Nixon fired Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox (in what became known as the "Saturday Night Massacre"), Waldie introduced a resolution calling for the impeachment of the President, one of the first members of the House Judiciary Committee to do so. He later voted to impeach Nixon in July 1974 during the impeachment process against Richard Nixon. Waldie did not run for re-election to the Congress that year. Instead, he campaigned for the Democratic nomination for Governor of California in the June primary election but was defeated by then-Secretary of State Jerry Brown, who went on to win in November. As an ex-Congressman, Waldie served as a public advocate. He was chairman of the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission from 1978 to 1979 and the executive director of the White House Conference on Aging (1980). He also served as member of the California Agricultural Relations Board from 1981 to 1985. He eventually retired to Placerville, California where he resided until his death in April 2009. |
![]() | Blanco, Richard February 15, 1968 Richard Blanco was selected as the 2013 inaugural poet for President Barack Obama. He is the author of two other poetry collections: Directions to The Beach of the Dead, winner of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award; and City of a Hundred Fires, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. Exploring themes of Latino identity and place, Blanco's poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2000 and Best American Prose Poems and have been featured on NPR. He is a fellow of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, recipient of two Florida Artist Fellowships, and has taught at Georgetown and American universities. A builder of cities and poems, Blanco is also a professional civil engineer. |
![]() | Prawer, S. S. (editor and translator) February 15, 1925 Siegbert Salomon Prawer (15 February 1925 in Cologne, Germany - 5 April 2012 in Oxford, England) was Taylor Professor of the German Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. Prawer was born to Jewish parents Marcus and Eleanora (Cohn) Prawer. Marcus was a lawyer from Poland and Eleanora's father was cantor of Cologne's largest synagogue. His sister Ruth was born in 1927. The family fled the Nazi regime in 1939, emigrating to Britain. Educated at King Henry VIII School, Coventry and Jesus College, Cambridge, he was Lecturer at the University of Birmingham from 1948 to 1963, Professor of German at Westfield College London from 1964, and became Taylor Professor of German Language and Literature at the University of Oxford in 1969. He was awarded his PhD by Birmingham University in 1953 (PhD, University of Birmingham, Department of German, 1953, 'A critical analysis of 24 consecutive poems from Heine's Romanzero'). He was a Fellow (then an Honorary Fellow) of Queen's College, Oxford and an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. He had academic interests in German poetry and lieder, Romantic German literature, especially E.T.A. Hoffman and Heine, comparative literature and also in film, particularly horror films. His sister was the writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. He made a cameo appearance in the Merchant-Ivory film Howards End (for which his sister wrote the Academy Award-winning screenplay). |
![]() | Adams, Henry February 16, 1838 Henry Brooks Adams (February 16, 1838 – March 27, 1918; normally called Henry Adams) was an American journalist, historian, academic and novelist. He was the grandson and great-grandson of John Quincy Adams and John Adams, respectively. He is best known for his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, and his History of the United States During the Administration of Thomas Jefferson. He was a member of the Adams political family. |
![]() | Appelfeld, Aharon February 16, 1932 Aharon Appelfeld (born February 16, 1932) is an Israeli novelist. Aharon Appelfeld was born in the town of Zhadova or Sadhora, now part of Czernowitz, Bucovina, Romania, now Ukraine. In 1941, when he was eight years old, the Romanian army invaded his hometown and his mother was murdered. Appelfeld was deported with his father to a Nazi concentration camp in Romanian/Axis-controlled Transnistria. He escaped and hid for three years before joining the Soviet army as a cook. After World War II, Appelfeld spent several months in a displaced persons camp in Italy before immigrating to Palestine in 1946, two years before Israel's independence. He was reunited with his father after finding his name on a Jewish Agency list. The father had been sent to a ma'abara (refugee camp) in Be'er Tuvia. The reunion was so emotional that Appelfeld has never been able to write about it. In Israel, Appelfeld made up for his lack of formal schooling and learned Hebrew, the language in which he began to write. His first literary efforts were short stories, but gradually he progressed to novels. He completed his studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Today, Appelfeld lives in Mevaseret Zion and teaches literature at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. In 2007, Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939 was adapted for the stage and performed at the Gerard Behar Center in Jerusalem. Appelfeld is one of Israel's foremost living Hebrew-language authors, despite the fact that he did not learn the language until he was a teenager. His mother tongue is German, but he also speaks Yiddish, Ukrainian, Russian, English and Italian. With his subject matter revolving around the Holocaust and the sufferings of the Jews in Europe, he could not bring himself to write in German. He chose Hebrew as his literary vehicle for its succinctness and biblical imagery. Appelfeld purchased his first Hebrew book at the age of 25: King of Flesh and Blood by Moshe Shamir. In an interview with the newspaper Haaretz, he said he agonized over it, because it was written in Mishnaic Hebrew and he had to look up every word in the dictionary. In an interview in the Boston Review, Appelfeld explained his choice of Hebrew: ‘I’m lucky that I’m writing in Hebrew. Hebrew is a very precise language, you have to be very precise–no over-saying. This is because of your Bible tradition. In the Bible tradition you have very small sentences, very concise and autonomic. Every sentence, in itself, has to have its own meaning.’ Many Holocaust survivors have written an autobiographical account of their survival, but Appelfeld does not offer a realistic depiction of the events. He writes short stories that can be interpreted in a metaphoric way. Instead of his personal experience, he sometimes evokes the Holocaust without even relating to it directly. His style is clear and precise, but also very modernistic. Appelfeld resides in Israel but writes little about life there. Most of his work focuses on Jewish life in Europe before, during and after World War II. As an orphan from a young age, the search for a mother figure is central to his work. During the Holocaust he was separated from his father, and only met him again 20 years later. Silence, muteness and stuttering are motifs that run through much of Appelfeld's work. Disability becomes a source of strength and power. Philip Roth described Appelfeld as ‘a displaced writer of displaced fiction, who has made of displacement and disorientation a subject uniquely his own.’ |
![]() | Banks, Iain February 16, 1954 Iain Banks (16 February 1954 – 9 June 2013) was a Scottish author. He wrote mainstream fiction under the name Iain Banks, and science fiction as Iain M. Banks, including the initial of his adopted middle name Menzies. Following the publication and success of The Wasp Factory (1984), Banks began to write on a full-time basis. His first science fiction book, Consider Phlebas, was released in 1987, marking the start of the popular The Culture series. His books have been adapted for theatre, radio and television. In 2008, The Times named Banks in their list of ‘The 50 greatest British writers since 1945’. In April 2013, Banks announced that he had inoperable cancer and was unlikely to live beyond a year. He died on 9 June 2013. |
![]() | Brooks, Van Wyck February 16, 1886 Van Wyck Brooks (February 16, 1886 in Plainfield, New Jersey – May 2, 1963 in Bridgewater, Connecticut) was an American literary critic, biographer, and historian. |
![]() | Ford, Richard February 16, 1944 Richard Ford (born February 16, 1944) is an American novelist and short story writer. His best-known works are the novel The Sportswriter and its sequels, Independence Day and The Lay of the Land, and the short story collection Rock Springs, which contains several widely anthologized stories. |
![]() | Gallacher, Tom February 16, 1934 Tom Gallacher has spent most of his working life as a writer and director for the theatre. He is the author of MR JOYCE IS LEAVING PARIS, SCHELLENBRACK and REVIVAL! Apart from London, he has worked in Denmark, Germany, New York, Edinburgh and Dublin. Now returned to Scotland and living in Glasgow, he has written APPRENTICE, from which two of the stories have already been dramatized by Radio 4. A third, ‘Store Quarter’, is to follow. |
![]() | Gallagher, Catherine February 16, 1945 Catherine Gallagher is Eggers Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, Nobody’s Story, The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, and Practicing New Historicism (with Stephen Greenblatt). |
![]() | Leskov, Nikolai February 16, 1831 NIKOLAI LESKOV was born in 1831 in the village of Gorokhovo in Russia. He began his career as a journalist in Kiev and later settled in St. Petersburg, where he published many stories and novellas, including The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1865), The Sealed Angel (1873), The Enchanted Wanderer (1873), and Lefty (1881). He died in 1895. |
![]() | Gilroy, Paul February 16, 1956 PAUL GILROY is Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Yale University and author of THE BLACK ATLANTIC (Harvard) and THERE AIN’T NO BLACK IN THE UNION JACK. |
![]() | Ellis, Warren February 16, 1968 Warren Girard Ellis is an English comic-book writer, novelist, and screenwriter. He is best known as the co-creator of several original comics series, including Transmetropolitan, Global Frequency, Red —adapted into the feature films Red and Red 2 —Trees, and Injection. |
![]() | Juliao, Francisco February 16, 1915 Francisco Julião de Paula Arruda (February 16, 1915 - Cuernavaca - July 10, 1999) was Brazilian lawyer , politician and writer. He was born in the Good Hope Farm, in the rural state of Pernambuco .He graduated in 1939 in Recife and in 1955 became a leader of the Leagues Peasants with the aim to fight for the distribution of lands and the rights for the peasants in Engenho Galileia. |
![]() | Kennan, George F. February 16, 1904 George Frost Kennan (February 16, 1904 – March 17, 2005) was an American diplomat and historian. He was known best as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War on which he later reversed himself. He lectured widely and wrote scholarly histories of the relations between USSR and the United States. He was also one of the group of foreign policy elders known as "The Wise Men". During the late 1940s, his writings inspired the Truman Doctrine and the U.S. foreign policy of "containing" the Soviet Union. His "Long Telegram" from Moscow during 1946 and the subsequent 1947 article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" argued that the Soviet regime was inherently expansionist and that its influence had to be "contained" in areas of vital strategic importance to the United States. These texts provided justification for the Truman administration's new anti-Soviet policy. Kennan played a major role in the development of definitive Cold War programs and institutions, notably the Marshall Plan. Soon after his concepts had become U.S. policy, Kennan began to criticize the foreign policies that he had seemingly helped begin. Subsequently, prior to the end of 1948, Kennan became confident that positive dialogue could commence with the Soviet government. His proposals were discounted by the Truman administration and Kennan's influence was marginalized, particularly after Dean Acheson was appointed Secretary of State in 1949. Soon thereafter, U.S. Cold War strategy assumed a more assertive and militaristic quality, causing Kennan to lament about what he believed was an abrogation of his previous assessments. In 1950, Kennan left the Department of State—except for two brief ambassadorial stints in Moscow and Yugoslavia—and became a realist critic of U.S. foreign policy. He continued to analyze international affairs as a faculty member of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1956 until his death at age 101. |
![]() | Kerouac, Jan February 16, 1952 Janet Michelle "Jan" Kerouac (February 16, 1952 – June 5, 1996) was an American writer and the only child of beat generation author Jack Kerouac and Joan Haverty Kerouac. Encouraged by Kerouac biographer Gerald Nicosia, she entered into a lawsuit in the 1990s that proposed the will of Jack's mother, Gabrielle Kerouac, was a forgery, in the hope winning could expand her legal rights to her father's works and physical property. Eventually a court ruled that the will was indeed a forgery, although in practical terms this ruling changed nothing concerning control of the Kerouac estate. Kerouac published two semi-autobiographical novels, Baby Driver in 1981, and Trainsong in 1988. On June 5, 1996, Kerouac died in Albuquerque, New Mexico a day after her spleen was removed. She had suffered kidney failure five years earlier and was on dialysis. |
![]() | Davis, David Brion February 16, 1927 David Brion Davis (born February 16, 1927) is an American intellectual and cultural historian, and a leading authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world. He is a Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University, and founder and director emeritus of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. The author and editor of 17 books, he received the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and the National Humanities Medal, presented by President Barack Obama in 2014 for "reshaping our understanding of history." He also received the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction, the 2015 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for lifetime achievement in contributions to public understanding of racism and appreciation of cultural diversity, and the 2015 Biennial Coif Book Award, a top honor from the Association of American Law Schools for the leading law-related book published in 2013 and 2014. In the White House ceremony in which he conferred the National Humanities Medal, President Obama praised Davis for shedding "light on the contradiction of a Union founded on liberty, yet existing half-slave and half-free." He also declared that Davis's "examinations of slavery and abolitionism drive us to keep making moral progress in our time." At age 89, Davis sat with eight other honorands, including Steven Spielberg, before an audience of 35,000 at the Harvard Commencement on May 26, 2016 where he received an honorary doctorate degree. A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, his books emphasize religious and ideological links among material conditions, political interests, and new political values. Ideology, in his view, is not a deliberate distortion of reality or a façade for material interests; rather, it is the conceptual lens through which groups of people perceive the world around them. After serving on the Cornell University faculty for 14 years, Davis taught at Yale from 1970 to 2001. He has held one-year appointments as the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at Oxford University (1969-1970), at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and as the first French-American Foundation Chair in American Civilization at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. |
![]() | Hernandez, Tim Z. February 16, 1974 TIM Z. HERNANDEZ was born and raised in California’s San Joaquin Valley. He is the recipient of many awards, including the American Book Award for poetry. His books and research have been featured in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, CNN, Public Radio International, and National Public Radio. Hernandez holds a BA from Naropa University and an MFA from Bennington College. He continues to perform and speak across the United States and internationally, but he divides his time between Fresno and El Paso, where he is an assistant professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso. |
![]() | Berry, Mary Francis February 17, 1938 Dr. Mary Frances Berry (born February 17, 1938) has been chairperson of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission since 1993. As Assistant Secretary for Education in the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare during the Carter administration, she coordinated and supervised federal education program budgets that totaled nearly thirteen billion dollars. She has received twenty-eight honorary doctoral degrees and numerous awards for her public service, including the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins Award and the Rosa Parks Award of the Southern Christian Leadership Council. She is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania. |
![]() | De Burgos, Julia February 17, 1914 Julia de Burgos (February 17, 1914 – July 6, 1953) was a poet from Puerto Rico. As an advocate of Puerto Rican independence, she served as Secretary General of the Daughters of Freedom, the women's branch of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. She was also a civil rights activist for women and African/Afro-Caribbean writers. |
![]() | Eberhardt, Isabelle February 17, 1877 Isabelle Eberhardt (17 February 1877 – 21 October 1904) was a Swiss explorer and writer who lived and travelled extensively in North Africa. For her time she was a liberated individual who rejected conventional European morality in favour of her own path and that of Islam. She died in a flash-flood in the desert at the age of 27. Paul Bowles has taped and translated numerous strange legends and lively stories recounted by Mrabet: Love with a Few Hairs (novel), The Lemon (novel), The Boy Who Set Fire (stories), Harmless Poisons, Blameless Sins (stories), The Beach Café and Look and Move On (autobiography), and The Big Mirror (novella). |
![]() | Gorra, Michael February 17, 1957 Michael Gorra (born 17 February 1957) is an American professor of English and literature, currently serving as the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College, where he has taught since 1985. |
![]() | Guthke, Karl S. February 17, 1933 Professor Guthke (born February 17, 1933) is a member of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge and Magdalene College, Cambridge, and a former Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Edinburgh, the Humanities Research Center, Canberra, and the Wolfenbüttel Research Center. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Institute of Germanic and Romantic Studies. Professor Guthke was trained at the universities of Heidelberg, Texas (M.A.), and Göttingen (Ph.D.). Before coming to Harvard in 1968, he taught at the University of California (Berkeley) and at the University of Toronto. His main interest is the literary and cultural history of the several German-speaking countries but he has also strayed into history of science and occasionally teaches in the Comparative Literature Department. Recent interests include a Freshman Seminar on "Last Words in Western Civilization" and one on the history of the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence as well as one on Goethe's Faust. He has published books, in English and German, on pre-Romanticism, Lessing, Haller, Hauptmann, literary life in the eighteenth century, tragicomedy, and literature after "the death of God." His publications also include B. Traven: The Life Behind the Legends (a biography of the author of Treasure of the Sierra Madre); The Last Frontier: Imagining Other Worlds, from the Scientific Revolution to Modern Science Fiction; Last Words: Variations on a Theme of Cultural History; Die Entdeckung des Ich; Trails in No-Man's Land; The Gender of Death, and Der Blick in die Fremde: Das Ich und das andere in der Literatur. His most recent works are Goethes Weimar und "die grosse Öffnung in die weite Welt"; Epitaph Culture in the West; Lessings Horizonte: Grenzen und Grenzenlosigkeit der Toleranz; Schillers Dramen, enlarged edition; Die Erfindung der Welt: Globalität und Grenzen in der Kulturgeschichte der Literatur; Das deutsche bürgerliche Trauerspiel, 6th edition;Sprechende Steine: Eine Geschichte der Grabschrift; Die Reise ans Ende der Welt ;Lebenszeit ohne Ende: Kulturgeschichte eines Gedankenexperiments in der Literatur; "Geistiger Handelsverkehr": Streifzüge im Zeitalter der Weltliteratur, Goethe's Reise nach Spanisch-Amerika: Weltbewohnen in Weimar; Life without End: A Thought Experiment in World Literature from Swift to Houellebecq. He is the translator of H.B. Nisbet, G.E. Lessing. |
![]() | Meltzer, David (editor) February 17, 1937 David Meltzer (February 17, 1937 – December 31, 2016) was an American poet and musician of the Beat Generation and San Francisco Renaissance. Lawrence Ferlinghetti described him as "one of the greats of post-World-War-Two San Francisco poets and musicians." Meltzer came to prominence with inclusion of his work in the anthology, The New American Poetry 1945-1960. |
![]() | Mori, Ogai February 17, 1862 Lieutenant-General Mori ?gai (February 17, 1862 – July 8, 1922) was a Japanese Army Surgeon general officer, translator, novelist and poet. Gan (The Wild Geese, (1911–13)) is considered his major work. Mori was born as Mori Rintar? in Tsuwano, Iwami province (present-day Shimane prefecture). His family were hereditary physicians to the daimy? of the Tsuwano Domain. As the eldest son, it was assumed that he would carry on the family tradition; therefore he was sent to attend classes in the Confucian classics at the domain academy, and took private lessons in rangaku and Dutch. In 1872, after the Meiji Restoration and the abolition of the domains, the Mori family relocated to Tokyo. Mori stayed at the residence of Nishi Amane, in order to receive tutoring in German, which was the primary language for medical education at the time. In 1874, he was admitted to the government medical school (the predecessor for Tokyo Imperial University's Medical School), and graduated in 1881 at the age of 19, the youngest person ever to be awarded a medical license in Japan. It was also during this time that he developed an interest in literature, reading extensively from the late-Edo period popular novels, and taking lessons in Chinese poetry and literature. After graduation, Mori enlisted in the Imperial Japanese Army as a medical officer, hoping to specialize in military medicine and hygiene. He was commissioned as a deputy surgeon (lieutenant) in 1882. Mori was sent by the Army to study in Germany (Leipzig, Dresden, Munich, and Berlin) from 1884–1888. During this time, he also developed an interest in European literature. As a matter of trivia, Mori ?gai is the first Japanese known to have ridden on the Orient Express. Upon his return to Japan, he was promoted to surgeon first class (captain) in May 1885; after graduating from the Army War College in 1888, he was promoted to senior surgeon, second class (lieutenant colonel) in October 1889. Now a high-ranking army doctor, he pushed for a more scientific approach to medical research, even publishing a medical journal out of his own funds. Meanwhile, he also attempted to revitalize modern Japanese literature and published his own literary journal (Shigarami s?shi, 1889–1894) and his own book of poetry (Omokage, 1889). In his writings, he was an anti-realist, asserting that literature should reflect the emotional and spiritual domain. Maihime (The Dancing Girl, 1890), described an affair between a Japanese man and a German woman. In May 1893, Mori was promoted to senior surgeon, first class (colonel). In 1899, he married Akamatsu Toshiko, daughter of Admiral Akamatsu Noriyoshi, a close friend of Nishi Amane. He divorced her the following year under acrimonious circumstances that irreparably ended his friendship with Nishi. At the start of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, Mori was sent to Manchuria and, the following year, to Taiwan. In February 1899, he was appointed head of the Army Medical Corps with the rank of surgeon major-general and was based in Kokura, Ky?sh?. In 1902, he was reassigned to Tokyo. He was attached to a division in the Russo-Japanese War, based out of Hiroshima. In 1907, Mori was promoted to Surgeon General of the Army (lieutenant general), the highest post within the Japanese Army Medical Corps. On his retirement in 1916 he was appointed director of the Imperial Museum. Although Mori did little writing from 1892–1902, he continued to edit a literary journal (Mezamashi gusa, 1892–1909). He also produced translations of the works of Goethe, Schiller, Ibsen, Hans Christian Andersen, and Hauptmann. It was during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) that Mori started keeping a poetic diary. After the war, he began holding tanka writing parties that included several noted poets such as Yosano Akiko. His later works can be divided into three separate periods. From 1909–1912, he wrote mostly fiction based on his own experiences. This period includes Vita Sexualis, and his most popular novel, Gan (The Wild Geese, 1911–13), which is set in 1881 Tokyo and was filmed by Shir? Toyoda in 1953 as The Mistress. From 1912–1916, he wrote mostly historical stories. Deeply affected by the seppuku of General Nogi Maresuke in 1912, he explored the impulses of self-destruction, self–sacrifice and patriotic sentiment. This period includes Sansh? Day?, and Takasebune. From 1916, he turned his attention to biographies of late Edo period doctors. As an author, Mori is considered one of the leading writers of the Meiji period. In his literary journals, he instituted modern literary criticism in Japan, based on the aesthetic theories of Karl von Hartmann. A house which Mori lived in is preserved in Kokura Kita ward in Kitaky?sh?, not far from Kokura station. Here he wrote Kokura Nikki ('Kokura Diary'). His birthhouse is also preserved in Tsuwano. The two one-story houses are remarkably similar in size and in their traditional Japanese style. One of Mori's daughters, Mori Mari, influenced the Yaoi movement in contemporary Japanese comics. Mori's sister, Kimiko, married Koganei Yoshikiyo. Hoshi Shinichi was one of their grandsons. Ogai Mori, along with many other historical figures from the Meiji Restoration is a character in the historical fiction novel Saka no Ue no Kumo by Shiba Ryotaro. He also plays a significant part in the historical fantasy novel Teito Monogatari by Hiroshi Aramata. |
![]() | Newton, Huey P. February 17, 1942 Huey Percy Newton (February 17, 1942 – August 22, 1989) was an African-American political and urban activist who, along with Bobby Seale, co-founded the Black Panther Party in 1966. Newton had a long series of confrontations with law enforcement, including several convictions, while he participated in political activism. He continued to pursue an education, eventually earning a Ph.D. in Social Science. Newton spent time in prison for manslaughter due to his alleged involvement in a shooting that killed a police officer, but was later acquitted. In 1989 he was shot and killed in Oakland, California by Tyrone 'Double R' Robinson, a member of the Black Guerrilla Family. |
![]() | Rey, Marcos February 17, 1925 Edmundo Donato (February 17th, 1925, in São Paulo, Brazil - April 1st, 1999) was one of Brazil’s most popular and critically acclaimed writers, who used the name of Marcos Rey as a pseudonym. He started writing short stories when he was sixteen years old. His first book was a novella which is called Um Gato no Triângulo, in 1953. His first novel, Break-fust in Bed (1960), was a runaway bestseller and has recently been reissued by the Brazilian Book-of-the-Month Club. He has had six other novels and six collections of short stories published, one of which, The Procuress’s Funeral, won two of Brazil’s most prestigious awards-the Critics Prize and the Jabuti Prize-while MEMOIRS OF A GIGOLO has sold over 200,000 copies in its Brazilian edition. Marcos Key has also written for radio and television, and a number of his stories have been adapted for the cinema both in Brazil and abroad. |
![]() | Tursten, Helene February 17, 1954 Helene Tursten (born in Gothenburg in 1954) is a Swedish writer of crime fiction. The main character in her stories is Detective Inspector Irene Huss. Before becoming an author, Tursten worked as a nurse and then a dentist, but was forced to leave due to illness. During her illness she worked as a translator of medical articles. |
![]() | Allegro, John Marco February 17, 1923 John Marco Allegro (17 February 1923 – 17 February 1988) was an English archaeologist and Dead Sea Scrolls scholar. He was a populariser of the Dead Sea Scrolls through his books and radio broadcasts. He was the editor of some of the most famous and controversial scrolls published, the pesharim. A number of Allegro's later books, including The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, brought him both popular fame and notoriety, and also destroyed his career. |
![]() | Acosta, Juvenal February 18, 1951 Juvenal Acosta is a fiction writer, poet, and journalist born in Mexico in 1961. He has edited two anthologies of contemporary Mexican poetry published by City Lights Books. The original version of The Tattoo Hunter (El Cazador de Tatuajes), his first novel, was published in Mexico City to wide critical acclaim. This Fall, The Violence of Velvet (Terciopelo Violento), his second novel, will be released by Planeta Press. His essay on bullfighting, ‘The Gaze and the Blood,’ was translated into English by Gregory Rabassa and published by Periplus Books in London as an introduction to Tauromachia, a book of photography. Acosta writes for Cambio, a weekly magazine published by Gabriel García Márquez in Mexico City, directs the M.F.A. in Writing and Consciousness at the New College of California, and teaches creative writing at the California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco. |
![]() | Blanco, Alberto February 18, 1951 Alberto Blanco is considered one of Mexico's most important poets. Born in Mexico City on February 18, 1951, he spent his childhood and adolescence in that city, and he studied chemistry at the Universidad Iberoamericana and philosophy at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. For two years, he pursued a Master’s Degree in Asian Studies, specializing in China, at El Colegio de México. Blanco was first published in a journal in 1970. He was co-editor and designer of the poetry journal El Zaguan (1975–1977), and a grant recipient of the Centro Mexicano de Escritores (Mexican Center of Writers, 1977), el Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (the National Institute of Fine Arts, 1980), and the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (National Fund for Culture and Arts, 1990). In 1991 he received a grant from the Fulbright Program as a poet-in-residence at the University of California, Irvine; and, in 1992, he was awarded a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. He was admitted into the Sistema Nacional de Creadores (National System of Creative Artists) in 1994, for which he has also been a juror. In 2001 he received the Octavio Paz Grant for Poetry, and in 2008, he was awarded a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2010, he was re-admitted to the Sistema Nacional de Creadores. Blanco’s literary output has been very abundant and varied, and he has undertaken three genres: first, poetry, followed by essays, and, finally, translations. He has published twenty-six books of poetry in Mexico and additional books in other countries; ten books of his translations of the work of other poets; and twelve story books for children, some of which have been illustrated by his wife Patricia Revah. His work has been translated into a dozen languages: English, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Hungarian, Japanese, Romanian, Bulgarian, and Russian. In 1997 he accepted a residency in Bellagio, Italy, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation; and in 2000 he was invited as a resident poet at the Poetry Center of the University of Arizona. He was also invited to inaugurate the program, ‘La Universidad de la Poesía’ (‘The University of Poetry’), in Chile, where he gave readings, lectures, and workshops in various cities in that country. Blanco has been involved in many of the most important poetry festivals in the world and has given many courses, workshops, readings, and lectures in more than thirty universities in the United States as well as in France, Canada, Germany, Spain, Italy, Colombia, Ireland, El Salvador, Chile, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Estonia, and Finland. To date, he has published more than sixty books, along with twenty more of translations, anthologies, or illustrations as well as eight hundred publications in magazines, catalogs, newspapers, and literary supplements. More than 200 essays, reviews, and commentaries on his work have been published both in Mexico and other countries; more than fifty interviews with him have appeared. His poems are included in ninety anthologies, have been studied in various master’s and doctoral theses, and have been included in a dozen dictionaries and textbooks. His total publications exceed thirteen hundred. In 1988 he received the Carlos Pellicer Poetry Prize for his book Cromos, and in 1989 the José Fuentes Mares National Prize for Literature for Song to the Shadow of the Animals, a book that unites his poems with drawings by Francisco Toledo. In 1996 Insects Also Are Perfect received honors from IBBY in Holland. In 2002 he received the ‘Alfonso X (the Wise)’ award for excellence in literary translation from San Diego State University in California. There are four anthologies of his poems: Amanecer de los Sentidos, published by the National Council for Culture and the Arts in Mexico in 1993; Dawn of the Senses, a bilingual anthology that included a dozen translators, published by City Lights, in San Francisco, in 1995; De vierkantswrotel can de hemel, Gedichten, translated into Dutch by Bart Vonck and published by Wagner and Van Santen in Holland, 2002; and A Cage of Transparent Words, edited by Paul B. Roth, translated by eight translators, and published by The Bitter Oleander Press of New York. In 1998, El Corazon del Instante (The Heart of the Moment), a compilation of twelve volumes of poetry that included twenty-five years (1968–1993) of work was published in a series of major Mexican works; and in 2005 a second compilation of another twelve books of poetry entitled La Hora y la Neblina (The Hour and the Mist) was published in the same series by the same publisher (Fondo de la Cultura Economica). In 2011, the Bitter Oleander Press published a bilingual edition of his book, Tras el Rayo, entitled Afterglow translated by Jennifer Rathbun. Also, in 2011, Blanco's first book of poetics (El llamado y el don (The Calling and the Gift) was published by AUIEO in Mexico City. Blanco has collaborated with numerous painters, sculptors and photographers, and his essays on the visual arts are published in many catalogs and magazines. In 1998 they were collected in one volume: Las voces del ver (The Voices of Vision). This book served as a basis for a television series of programs with the same name which were shown on Mexican television. A new edition, revised and augmented of his essays on visual arts, was published in 2008, entitled El eco de las formas (The Echo of Forms). In fact, Alberto Blanco is well known as a visual artist; his collages have appeared in many books and journals, and his paintings have hung in national galleries. He has had several showings in California, and in 2007, exhibited 108 collages in the Estación Indianilla in Mexico City, along with recent sculptures by Leonora Carrington. Equally noteworthy are his artist’s books which form part of important collections in various universities in the United States. In 2011, The Athenaeum in La Jolla, California, mounted a retrospective exhibit of forty years of Blanco's artist's books entitled ‘Visual Poetry/Poesía Visual.’ Furthermore, he has been a song composer, and he was singer and keyboardist in the rock and jazz groups ‘La Comuna’ (‘The Commune’) and ‘Las Plumas Atómicas’ (‘The Atomic Pens’). Although he has dedicated himself chiefly to the writing of poetry and has not embarked on an academic career (in Mexico he has never taught at any institution), he was a full-time professor for three years (1993–1996) in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Texas at El Paso. At the end of 1996, he returned with his family to Mexico City, but in 1998 and 1999, he was invited as a distinguished professor to San Diego State University in California. In 2007 he was awarded an endowed chair, the Knapp Chair, for a semester at the University of San Diego. In 2009 and 2010, Blanco taught courses in art at Middlebury College, and he was invited to teach literature courses at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), in 2009 and 2010. Blanco’s most recent book of poetry is entitled: Música de cámara instantánea (Music of the Instant Camera or Instant Chamber Music) (2005) and consists of fifty-two poems dedicated to the same number of composers of contemporary music. (Note: this is not his most recent anthology.) Critical discussion and acclaim of Blanco’s work abounds, both in Mexico and abroad. Regarding Dawn of the Senses, Mexican poet Jose Emilio Pacheco, in his introduction to the book, writes, ‘[Blanco] is someone in whom, as Henry James said, nothing is lost. Everything streams into his words, so many tributaries feed into the flow of his poetry. His knowledge of chemistry, his work as a visual artist and jazz musician, his grounding in Chinese literature and Zen Buddhism--all of these combine to give his poems a tone and perspective unlike any other Mexican poet.’ W.S Merwin concludes that, ‘Alberto Blanco’s poems, over several decades, have revealed with precision and delicacy an original imaginative landscape and imagery that are at once intimate, spacious, and rooted in the rich ground of Mexican poetry…’ ‘Alberto Blanco is the master of bright, clear, and sudden awarenesses that are the flesh and light so special to his poetry…’ observes Michael McClure. |
![]() | Kazantzakis, Nikos February 18, 1883 Nikos Kazantzakis (18 February 1883 – 26 October 1957) was a Greek writer and philosopher, celebrated for his novel Zorba the Greek, considered his magnum opus. He became known globally after the 1964 release of the Michael Cacoyannis film Zorba the Greek, based on the novel. He gained renewed fame with the 1988 Martin Scorsese adaptation of his book The Last Temptation of Christ. |
![]() | Burssens, Gaston February 18, 1896 Gaston Karel Mathilde Burssens (18 February 1896 – 29 January 1965) was a Belgian Expressionist poet. He studied in Flanders at the University of Ghent, at which, during World War I, the Germans introduced classes given in Dutch language. Like that of Paul van Ostaijen, during the 1920s his work evolved from humanitarian expressionism towards a more organic expressionism — upon which his poetry stayed focused on musicality. Van Ostaijen's not earlier published poems were published posthumously by Burssens. Burssens received the 'Driejaarlijkse Prijs voor Poëzie', a reward for poetry granted every third year, for 1950-52, and once again for 1956-58. |
![]() | Campbell, Bebe Moore February 18, 1950 Bebe Moore Campbell has been a winner of the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Grant, the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women’s Literature Award and the Midwestern Radio Theatre Workshop Competition. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, daughter and stepson. |
![]() | Collier-Thomas, Bettye February 18, 1941 BETTYE COLLIER-THOMAS is associate professor in the History Department and director of the Temple University Center for African American History and Culture. She is the founding executive director of the Bethune Museum-Archives, Inc., the first institution in the United States to focus on the documentation and preservation of African American women’s history. |
![]() | Deighton, Len February 18, 1929 Leonard Cyril Deighton (born 18 February 1929) is a British military historian, cookery writer, and novelist. He is perhaps most famous for his spy novel The IPCRESS File, which was made into a film starring Michael Caine. Deighton was born in Marylebone, London, in 1929. His father was a chauffeur and mechanic, and his mother was a part-time cook. At the time they lived in Gloucester Place Mews near Baker Street. Deighton's interest in spy stories may have been partially inspired by the arrest of Anna Wolkoff, which he witnessed as an 11-year-old boy. Wolkoff, a British subject of Russian descent, was a Nazi spy. She was detained on 20 May 1940 and subsequently convicted of violating the Official Secrets Act for attempting to pass secret documents to the Nazis. After leaving school, Deighton worked as a railway clerk before performing his National Service, which he spent as a photographer for the Royal Air Force's Special Investigation Branch. After discharge from the RAF, he studied at St Martin's School of Art in London in 1949, and in 1952 won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, graduating in 1955. While he was at the RCA he became a ‘lifelong friend’ of fellow designer Raymond Hawkey, who later designed covers for his early books. Deighton then worked as an airline steward with BOAC. Before he began his writing career he worked as an illustrator in New York and, in 1960, as an art director in a now defunct London advertising agency, Sharps Advertising. He is credited with creating the first British cover for Kerouac's On the Road. He has since used his drawing skills to illustrate a number of his own military history books. Following the success of his first novels, Deighton became The Observer's cookery writer and produced illustrated cookbooks. In September 1967 he wrote an article in the Sunday Times Magazine about Operation Snowdrop - an SAS attack on Benghazi during World War II. The following year David Stirling would be awarded substantial damages in libel from the article. He also wrote travel guides and became travel editor of Playboy, before becoming a film producer. After producing a film adaption of his 1968 novel Only When I Larf, Deighton and photographer Brian Duffy bought the film rights to Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop's stage musical Oh, What a Lovely War! He had his name removed from the credits of the film, however, which was a move that he later described as ‘stupid and infantile.’ That was his last involvement with the cinema. Deighton left England in 1969. He briefly resided in Blackrock, County Louth in Ireland. He has not returned to England apart from some personal visits and very few media appearances, his last one since 1985 being a 2006 interview which formed part of a ‘Len Deighton Night’ on BBC Four. He and his wife Ysabele divide their time between homes in Portugal and Guernsey. |
![]() | Higham, Charles February 18, 1931 Charles Higham (18 February 1931 – 21 April 2012) was an English author, editor and poet. |
![]() | Kilpi, Eeva February 18, 1928 Eeva Karin Kilpi (née Salo; 18 February 1928, Hiitola) is a Finnish writer and feminist. Better known abroad than in Finland, her poetry, characterized as feminist humor, was discovered in the 1980s in Europe. Eeva Karin Salo was born on February 18, 1928, to Solmu Aulis Aimo and Helmi Anna Maria (neé Saharinen) Salo within the former Karelian municipality of Hiitola, Finnish Karelia, where she lived until the coming of the Winter War of 1939-1940. During the Winter War, Kilpi and her family survived bombings by hiding in an underground cellar. Her father was later called away to the front lines and the family was forced to evacuate from the region. Kilpi ended up attaining an education within Helsinki, the capital and largest city within Finland. |
![]() | Le Breton, Auguste February 18, 1913 Auguste Le Breton (born Auguste Monfort 18 February 1913 – 31 May 1999) was a French novelist who wrote primarily about the criminal underworld. His novels were adapted into several notable films of the 1950s, such as Rififi, Razzia sur la chnouf, Le rouge est mis and Le clan des siciliens. He wrote the dialogue for the noir film Bob le flambeur. |
![]() | Lorde, Audre February 18, 1934 Audre Geraldine Lorde (February 18, 1934 - November 17, 1992) was an American writer, poet and activist. Lorde was born in New York City to Caribbean immigrants who settled in Harlem. Frederick Byron Lorde and Linda Gertrude Belmar Lorde. Lorde was nearsighted and legally blind. The youngest of three daughters, she grew up in Harlem, hearing her mother’s stories about the West Indies. She learned to talk while she learned to read, at the age of four. Her mother taught her to write during this time. She wrote her first poem when she was in the eighth grade. After graduating from Hunter College High School, she attended Hunter College from 1954 to 1959, graduating with a bachelors degree. While studying library science, Lorde supported herself working various odd jobs: factory worker, ghost writer, social worker, X-ray technician, medical clerk, and arts and crafts supervisor. In 1954, she spent a pivotal year as a student at the National University of Mexico, a period described by Lorde as a time of affirmation and renewal because she confirmed her identity on personal and artistic levels as a lesbian and poet. On her return to New York, Lorde went to college, worked as a librarian, continued writing, and became an active participant in the gay culture of Greenwich Village. Lorde furthered her education at Columbia University, earning a master’s degree in library science in 1961. During this time she also worked as a librarian at Mount Vernon Public Library and married attorney Edwin Rollins; they later divorced in 1970 after having two children, Elizabeth and Jonathan. In 1966, Lorde became head librarian at Town School Library in New York City where she remained until 1968. During a year in residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, funded by a National Endowment for the Arts grant, Lorde met Frances Clayton, a white professor of psychology, the woman who was to be her romantic partner until 1989. Lorde was then involved with Gloria Joseph, who was Lorde’s partner until Lorde’s death from breast cancer. Lorde died November 17, 1992 in St. Croix after a 14 year struggle with the disease. In her own words, she was a ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet‘.Lorde took the name Gamba Adisa, which means ‘Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Known,’ in an African naming ceremony before she died. Lorde’s poetry was published regularly during the 1960s: in Langston Hughes’s 1962 New Negro Poets, USA; in several foreign anthologies; and in black literary magazines. During this time she was politically active in the civil rights, antiwar, and feminist movements. Her first volume of poetry, The First Cities (1968), was published by the Poet’s Press and edited by Diane di Prima, a former classmate and friend from Hunter College High School. Dudley Randall, a poet and critic, asserted in his review of the book that ‘[Lorde] does not wave a black flag, but her blackness is there, implicit, in the bone.’ Lorde’s second volume, Cables to Rage (1970), which was mainly written during her tenure at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, addresses themes of love, betrayal, childbirth, and the complexities of raising children. It is particularly noteworthy for the poem ‘Martha’, in which Lorde poetically confirms her homosexuality: ‘we shall love each other here if ever at all.’ Later books continued her political aims in Lesbian and Gay rights and feminism. In 1980, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith and several other lesbians co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first U.S. publisher for women of color. Lorde was named State Poet of New York from 1991 to 1992. . |
![]() | Morrison, Toni February 18, 1931 Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist, essayist, book editor, and college professor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she gained worldwide recognition when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 and went to graduate school at Cornell University. She later taught English at Howard University and also married and had two children before divorcing in 1964. In the late 1960s, she became the first black female editor in fiction at Random House in New York City. In the 1970s and 1980s, she developed her own reputation as an author, and her perhaps most celebrated work, Beloved, was made into a 1998 film. In 1996, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected her for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Also that year, she was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. On May 29, 2012, President Barack Obama presented Morrison with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2016, she received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. |
![]() | Pelecanos, George February 18, 1957 George P. Pelecanos (born 18 February 1957) is an American author. Many of his works are in the genre of detective fiction and set primarily in his hometown of Washington, D.C. He is also a film and television producer and a television writer. He worked extensively on the HBO series The Wire. Pelecanos, a Greek American, was born in Washington, D.C. in 1957. Pelecanos's early novels were written in the first person voice of Nick Stefanos, a Greek D.C. resident and sometime private investigator. After the success of his first four novels, the Stefanos-narrated A Firing Offense, Nick's Trip, and Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go, and the non-series (though some characters do cross over) Shoedog, Pelecanos switched his narrative style considerably and expanded the scope of his fiction with his D.C. Quartet. He has commented that he did not feel he had the ability to be this ambitious earlier in his career. The quartet, often compared to James Ellroy's L.A. Quartet, spanned several decades and communities within the changing population of Washington. Now writing in the third person, Pelecanos relegated Stefanos to a supporting character and introduced his first 'salt and pepper' team of crime fighters, Dimitri Karras and Marcus Clay. In The Big Blowdown, set a generation before Karras and Clay would appear (the 1950s), Pelecanos followed the lives of dozens of D.C. residents, tracking the challenges and changes that the second half of the twentieth century presented to Washingtonians. King Suckerman, set in the 1970s and generally regarded as the fans' favorite, introduced the recurring theme of basketball in Pelecanos' fiction. Typically, he employs the sport as a symbol of cooperation amongst the races, suggesting the dynamism of D.C. as reflective of the good will generated by multi-ethnic pick up games. However, he also indulges the reverse of the equation, wherein the basketball court becomes the site of unresolved hostilities. In such cases, violent criminal behavior typically emerges amongst the participants, usually escalating the mystery. The Sweet Forever (1980s) and Shame the Devil (1990s) closed the quartet and Pelecanos retired Stefanos and the other characters that populated the novels. (Stefanos and other characters do re-appear in subsequent works.) In 2001, he introduced a new team of private detectives, Derek Strange and Terry Quinn, as the protagonists of Right as Rain. They have subsequently starred in the author's more recent works Hell to Pay (which won a Gumshoe Award in 2003) and Soul Circus. While these books have cemented the author's reputation as one of the best current American crime writers and sold consistently, they have not garnered the critical and cult affection his D.C. quartet did. Rather, they seem to be continuing the author's well received formula of witty protagonists chasing unconflicted criminals behind the backdrop of popular culture references and D.C. landmarks. Perhaps sensing this, Pelecanos again switched his focus in his 2004 novel, Hard Revolution, taking one of his new detectives, Derek Strange, back in time to his early days on the D.C. police force. In another interesting move, Pelecanos attached a CD to the book itself, emulating Michael Connelly who included a CD with his 2003 Harry Bosch book Lost Light. In 2005, Pelecanos saw another novel published, Drama City. This book revisited the examination of dogfighting begun in his book Hell To Pay. Pelecanos is a dog owner and has written about his views of dogfighting. In 2006 he published The Night Gardener, which was a major change of style and which featured a cameo of himself. Pelecanos has also published short fiction in a variety of anthologies and magazines, including Measures of Poison and Usual Suspects. His reviews have been published in The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. The Turnaround was published in August 2008, reflecting a return to his roots, as the novel opens in the 70s in a Greek diner, and a continuation of his more modern style in the portion set in the present. The Turnaround won the 2008's Hammett Prize. In 2011, Pelecanos published 'The Cut', introducing the character Spero Lucas, a young veteran of the Iraq war. The former Marine works part-time as a private investigator for a D.C. defense attorney as well as taking jobs finding stolen items for a 40% cut of the value of the returned item. In 2013, Pelecanos published 'The Double', the second Spero Lucas book. Pelecanos has written and produced for HBO's The Wire and is part of a literary circle with The Wire creator David Simon and novelist Laura Lippman. Simon sought out Pelecanos after reading his work. Simon was recommended his novels several times but did not read his work initially because of territorial prejudice; Simon is from Baltimore. Once Simon received further recommendations, including one from Lippman, he tried The Sweet Forever and changed his mind. The two writers have much in common including a childhood in Silver Spring, Maryland, attendance at the University of Maryland and their interest in the 'fate of the American city and the black urban poor'. They first met at the funeral of a mutual friend shortly after Simon delivered the pilot episode. Simon pitched Pelecanos the idea of The Wire as a novel for television about the American city as Pelecanos drove him home. Pelecanos was excited about the prospect of writing something more than simple mystery for television as he strived to exceed the boundaries of genre in his novels. Pelecanos joined the crew as a writer for the first season in 2002. He wrote the teleplay for the seasons's penultimate episode 'Cleaning Up' from a story by Simon and Ed Burns. Pelecanos was promoted to producer for the second season in 2003. He wrote the teleplay for the episodes 'Duck and Cover' and 'Bad Dreams' from stories he co-wrote with Simon. He remained a writer and producer for the third season in 2004. He wrote the teleplay for the episodes 'Hamsterdam' and 'Middle Ground' from stories he co-wrote with Simon. Simon wrote the teleplay for the episode 'Slapstick' from a story he co-wrote with Pelecanos. Simon and Pelecanos' collaboration on 'Middle Ground' received the show's first Emmy Award nomination, in the category Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series. Pelecanos left the production staff of The Wire after the show's third season to concentrate on writing his novel The Night Gardener. His role as a producer was taken on by Eric Overmyer. Pelecanos remained a writer for the fourth season in 2006. He wrote the teleplay for the penultimate episode 'That's Got His Own' from a story he co-wrote with producer Ed Burns. Simon has commented that he missed having Pelecanos working on the show full-time but was a fan of The Night Gardener. Simon also spent time embedded with a homicide unit while researching his own book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. Pelecanos and the writing staff won the Writers Guild of America (WGA) Award for Best Dramatic Series at the February 2008 ceremony and the 2007 Edgar Award for Best Television Feature/Mini-Series Teleplay for their work on the fourth season. Pelecanos returned as a writer for the series fifth and final season. He wrote the teleplay for the episode 'Late Editions' from a story he co-wrote with Simon. Pelecanos and the writing staff were again nominated for the WGA award for Best Dramatic Series at the February 2009 ceremony for their work on the fifth season but Mad Men won the award. Following the conclusion of The Wire Pelecanos joined the crew of the HBO World War II mini-series The Pacific as a co-producer and writer. After a lengthy production process the series aired in 2010. He co-wrote 'Part 3' of the series with fellow co-producer Michelle Ashford. The episode focused on Marines on leave in Australia and featured a displaced Greek family in a prominent guest role. Pelecanos saw the project as a chance to make a tribute to his father, Pete Pelecanos, who served as a Marine in the Philippines.Also in 2010 Pelecanos joined the crew of HBO New Orleans drama Treme as a writer. The series was created by Simon and Overmeyer. It follows the lives of residents of the Tremé neighborhood after Hurricane Katrina. Pelecanos wrote the teleplay for the episode 'At the Foot of Canal Street' from a story he co-wrote with Overmyer. Pelecanos returned as a Consulting Producer and writer for the second season in 2011. He joined the crew full time as a writer and executive producer for the third season in 2012. He remained in this role for the fourth and final season in 2013. Following the conclusion of Treme Pelecanos worked with Overmyer on his next series Bosch. The series was developed by Overmyer and is based on the series of novels by Michael Connelly. The series stars The Wire alumni Jamie Hector and Lance Reddick. Pelecanos and Michael Connelly co-wrote the show's fourth episode 'Fugazi'. As of 2006, Pelecanos lives in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Silver Spring, Maryland with his wife and three children. |
![]() | Rosen, R. D. February 18, 1949 R. D. Rosen's writing career spans mystery novels, narrative nonfiction, humor books, and television. Strike Three You're Dead, the first in Rosen's series featuring major league baseball player Harvey Blissberg, won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America in 1985. |
![]() | Stegner, Wallace February 18, 1909 Wallace Earle Stegner (February 18, 1909 – April 13, 1993) was an American novelist, short story writer, environmentalist, and historian, often called "The Dean of Western Writers". He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and the U.S. National Book Award in 1977. |
![]() | Thomson, David February 18, 1941 David Thomson (born February 18, 1941) is a British film critic and historian based in the United States and the author of more than 20 books. His reference works in particular — Have You Seen...?: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films (2008) and The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (5th edition, 2010) — are noted for their high literary merit and eccentricity. Benjamin Schwarz, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, called him ‘probably the greatest living film critic and historian’ who ‘writes the most fun and enthralling prose about the movies since Pauline Kael‘. John Banville called him ‘the greatest living writer on the movies’. |
![]() | Breton, Andre February 19, 1896 André Breton (19 February 1896 – 28 September 1966) was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme) of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as ‘pure psychic automatism‘. |
![]() | Murakami, Ryu February 19, 1952 Ryu Murakami, musician, filmmaker, TV talk show host, and novelist, is the author of ALMOST TRANSPARENT BLUE, 69, and COIN LOCKER BABIES, which the Washington Post praised as ‘a knockout. a great big pulsating parable.’. Ralph McCarthy is the translator of Murakami’s 69 and two collections of stories by Osamu Dazai. |
![]() | Bryce Echenique, Alfredo February 19, 1939 Alfredo Bryce Echenique (born February 19, 1939) is a Peruvian writer born in Lima. He has written several books and short stories. Bryce was born to an Anglo-Peruvian family of upper class, related to John Bryce Weddle, ancestor of the Marquesses of Milford-Haven and of the duchesses of Abercon and Westminster. He was the third son and the fourth of the five children of the banker Francisco Bryce Arróspide and his wife, Elena Echenique Basombrío, granddaughter of the former President José Rufino Echenique. Bryce studied elementary education at Inmaculado Corazón school, and high school at Santa María school and Saint Paul's College, a British boarding school for boys in Lima. Upon the wish of his family Bryce Echenique studied law in the National University of San Marcos until 1964. His literary interest nevertheless prevailed and so, shortly afterwards, he completed a parallel study course in literature with a thesis on Ernest Hemingway. In 1988 he adopted Spanish nationality without losing Peruvian one. He received a grant from the French government which, like many other Latin American authors of the boom period, led him to Paris. At the Sorbonne he studied classic and modern French literature and then taught at various French schools and universities. His first book Huerto Cerrado published in 1968, was a finalist for the Casa de las Américas literary prize awarded in Cuba and is a collection of short stories written in different styles and points of view about a young protagonist, Manolo, a member of Lima's upper class, as he comes of age in 1950s Lima. This was followed by his first novel, Un Mundo para Julius, published in 1970 that became a big success and counts today as one of the classics of Latin American literature. The novel, which has since been translated into ten languages, tells the story of a young boy who grows up as the youngest of four children of a rich, Peruvian upper-class family. Although Julius actually belongs to the ruling classes he feels a stronger bond with the servants which surround him and this brings him into conflict with his family. With biting irony the author exposes, through the eyes of a child, the great social differences in Peruvian society. Un mundo para Julius marks for Bryce Echenique the start of an extremely productive literary career, in which he has until today written nearly twenty novels and story volumes. ‘I am an author of the second half of the 20th century.’ Despite this declaration and his spatial and temporal closeness to other Latin American authors of the boom generation, Bryce Echenique keeps a conscious distance from his colleagues who he sometimes refers to as ‘nouveau riche’. That his style, as one critic once said, corresponds more to an ironic than a magic realism, is shown by the author also in one his latest novels: La amigdalitis de Tarzán from 1999. Largely in the form of letters, the novel relates the story of the hindered romantic relationship between a poor Peruvian troubadour and the daughter of an influential Salvadoran family. Similar to his heroes, Alfredo Bryce Echenique also lived for decades far from his home city of Lima to which he only returned in 1999. Also that year he was granted an honorary degree by the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. In March, 2007, Peruvian Diplomat Oswaldo de Rivero wrote an article for the newspaper El Comercio of Lima, Peru accusing Bryce of writing an article ‘Potencias sin poder’ that was an almost exact copy of one written by de Rivero in the magazine ‘Quehacer’ in March, 2005. Bryce responded saying the article had been submitted in error by his secretary. Juan Carlos Bondy subsequently found evidence that Bryce had earlier plagiarized the article ‘Amistad, bendito tesoro’ by Ángel Esteban that had appeared in La Nación of Argentina in December, 1996 Bondy's blog. Bryce has also been accused of plagiarizing articles by Graham E. Fuller and Herbert Morote Perú21. Journalism professor María Soledad de la Cerda found sixteen other instances of plagiarism which were found as a result of research for her course in investigative journalism El Mercurio. |
![]() | Davis, Margaret Leslie February 19, 1958 Margaret Leslie Davis is a California lawyer and is also the author of Dark Side of Fortune: Triumph and Scandal in the Life of Oil Tycoon Edward L. Doheny (UC Press, 1998) and Rivers in the Desert: William Mulholland and the Inventing of Los Angeles (1993), for which she won the Western Writers of America Golden Spur Award in nonfiction. . |
![]() | Dobyns, Stephen February 19, 1941 Stephen J. Dobyns (born February 19, 1941) is an American poet and novelist born in Orange, New Jersey, and residing in Westerly, RI. Was born on February 19, 1941 in Orange, New Jersey to Lester L., a minister, and Barbara Johnston Dobyns. Dobyns was raised in New Jersey, Michigan, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. He was educated at Shimer College, graduated from Wayne State University, and received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1967. He has worked as a reporter for the Detroit News. He has taught at various academic institutions, including Sarah Lawrence College, the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, the University of Iowa, Syracuse University, and Boston University. As a professor of English at Syracuse University, he was involved in a sexual discrimination scandal. Francine Prose defended him by portraying his accuser and the school as having reacted to outdated neo-Victorian victim-feminism policies. Dobyns has written many detective stories about a private detective named Charlie Bradshaw who works out of Saratoga Springs in upstate New York. Bradshaw is unusual as a private eye protagonist, an ordinary man who was once a police officer. All the books have the word ‘Saratoga’ in the title. In the comic novel THE WRESTLER'S CRUEL STUDY, the protagonist roams through a modern cityscape governed by fairy-tale rituals, searching for his missing fiancée. He is alternately aided or hindered by a Friedrich Nietzsche -quoting manager and his Hegelian nemesis, to find that his wrestling matches are choreographed by a shadowy organization that enacts their various Gnostic theological debates through the pageantry and panoply of the ring. He eventually learns to resolve his own dualistic nature and determine who he is despite the role he plays. COLD DOG SOUP has been made into two films, the American Cold Dog Soup and the French Doggy Bag. TWO DEATHS OF SEÑORA PUCCINI has been made into the film Two Deaths. The movie Wild Turkey is based on one of his short stories. THE CHURCH OF DEAD GIRLS is a novel about a small town's hysterical response to the mysterious disappearance of three of its teenaged girls. BOY IN THE WATER is a novel about events in a secluded private school in the United States. |
![]() | Hustvedt, Siri February 19, 1955 Siri Hustvedt is the author five novels, The Blindfold, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, What I Loved,and The Summer Without Men, as well as three collections of essays, A Plea for Eros, Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting, and Living, Thinking, Looking, as well as the nonfiction work: The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. What I Loved and The Summer Without Men were international bestsellers. Her work has been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Femina Etranger in France, and she is the recipient of the 2012 International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities. |
![]() | Kross, Jaan February 19, 1920 Jaan Kross (19 February 1920 – 27 December 2007) was an Estonian writer. Jaan Kross was arrested by the Soviets in 1946 and spent nine years in exile and labor camps in the Soviet Union's eastern regions. He has published eleven works of fiction, including the highly acclaimed The Czar’s Madman, as well as four volumes of poetry. Although English-speaking audiences are only now discovering his work, his books have been translated into twenty-two languages and have sold more than one million copies worldwide. |
![]() | Labrousse, Alain February 19 , 1937 Alain Labrousse (February 19 , 1937 in Libourne - on July 6 , 2016) was a French journalist , sociologist, geopolitical scientist, and specialist in geopolitics of drugs and of Latin America. He was founder and director of the Geopolitical Observatory of Drugs (OGD). In 2002, he became a consultant to the French Observatory of Drugs and Drug Addiction (OFDT) and the European Union . He was also a member of the International Crime Observatory (OGCI, University of Liège ). Labrousse was editor of the magazine Drogues Trafic International and published articles in the French magazine Politique internationale. |
![]() | Lethem, Jonathan February 19, 1964 Jonathan Allen Lethem (born February 19, 1964) is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. |
![]() | McCullers, Carson February 19, 1917 Carson McCullers’ best-known works are THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, REEFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE, THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING, THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFÉ and CLOCK WITHOUT HANDS. She was born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1917 and died in Nyack, New York, in 1967. |
![]() | Mewshaw, Michael February 19, 1943 Michael Mewshaw (born February 19, 1943) is an American author of 11 novels and 8 books of nonfiction, and works frequently as a travel writer, investigative reporter, book reviewer, and tennis reporter. His novel YEAR OF THE GUN was made into a film of the same name by John Frankenheimer in 1991. He is married with two sons. Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio's longtime ‘voice of books,’ has called him ‘the best novelist in America that nobody knows. Born in Washington, DC, and raised in the suburb of Prince George's County, Maryland, Mewshaw graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Maryland (1965), then was granted a four-year fellowship to attend the graduate writing program at the University of Virginia, where he attained his Masters (1966) and Doctorate (1970) degrees under the tutelage of George Garrett. While studying at UVA, Mewshaw completed two unpublished novels, then embarked on a road trip across Mexico with his wife (at the urging of William Styron, who was the subject of his masters thesis and doctoral dissertation); a journey which would form the basis of his first novel MAN IN MOTION (1970), which he completed while on a Fulbright Fellowship in France. Mewshaw taught creative writing at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and subsequently was named Director of Creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin. Taking leaves of absence every other year from this post, Mewshaw based himself in Rome, Italy, and continued traveling throughout Europe and North Africa. While Mewshaw researched his third novel THE TOLL (1974) in Marrakesh, Morocco, his wife Linda was hired as Lindsay Wagner’s stand-in on the set of Robert Wise’s film Two People. Mewshaw’s experience of that shoot was the jumping-off point for his fifth novel LAND WITHOUT SHADOW (1979). |
![]() | Nzekwu, Onuora February 19, 1928 Onuora Nzekwu, also known as Joseph Onuora Nzekwu (February 19, 1928 – April 21, 2017) was a Nigerian professor, writer and editor from the Igbo people. Nzekwu was born to Mr. Obiese Nzekwu and Mrs. Mary Ogugua Nzekwu (née Aghadiuno). In January 1956, he joined the Federal Civil Service as an editorial assistant at the Nigeria Magazine Division of the Federal Ministry of Information. Nzekwu worked as an editorial assistant from 1956 to 1958. In 1958, he took over the position of editor-in-chief of the magazine. Nzekwu continued to run the Nigeria Magazine Division of the Federal Ministry of Information until 1966, when the Nigerian Crisis compelled him to transfer his services to the Eastern Nigeria Public Service. Nzekwu began as a senior information officer at Eastern Nigeria, a post that the combined the roles of Information Ministry and Cultural officer. In 1968, he was promoted deputy director of the newly created Cultural Division. At the end of hostilities in January 1970, Nzekwu returned to the Federal Ministry of Information in May and was assigned to the information division as senior information officer. Nzekwu worked as Protem general manager of News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) until July 1, 1979, when he then took over the position of substantive general manager. Nzekwu retired from the Nigeria Public Service in 1985, after presiding over the affairs of the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) for nearly eight years and servicing his country’s government for 39 years. Onuora Nzekwu received the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 1961, which enabled him to study American Methods of Magazine Production with Crafts Horizons in New York. In 1964, Nzekwu was awarded an UNESCO Fellowship which allowed him to study Copyright Administration for three months in Geneva, Prague, Paris, London, New York and Washington. On August 8, 2006, NAN observed its 30th Anniversary during celebrations at Abuja. The Agency presented a plaque to with the engraving Maker of NAN, to Nzekwu. In December, 2008, Nzekwu was conferred with the Nigerian National Honor of the Officer of the Order of the Niger (OON). Nzekwu has also authored several novels. Nzekwu co-authored Eze Goes to School and Eze Goes to College with historian Michael Crowder. The two school supplementary readers were first published by African University Press in 1964 and 1988 respectively. In 1977, Nzekwu published his first non-fiction work titled, The Chima Dynasty in Onitsha, in which he presented the history of Onitsha through an account of the reign of its monarchs. Nzekwu's novel, Faith of Our Fathers, a compendium of the arts, beliefs, social institutions and code of values that characterize the Onitsha traditional community was published in 2003. Nzekwu married Onoenyi Justina Ogbenyeanu, daughter of Chief Isaac Aniegboka Mbanefo, Odu II of Onitsha, in June 1960 and was inducted into the ancient and prestigious Agbalanze Society of Onitsha in May 1991. He died on April 21, 2017. |
![]() | Rivera, Jose Eustasio February 19, 1888 José Eustasio Rivera Salas (February 19, 1888 - December 1, 1928) was a Colombian lawyer and poet primarily known for his national epic The Vortex. José Eustasio Rivera was born on February 19, 1888 in Aguas Calientes, a hamlet of the city of Neiva, later that year the hamlet was incorporated into the newly created municipality of San Mateo, which was later renamed Rivera in honour of José Eustasio. His parents were Eustasio Rivera Escobar and Catalina Salas, and he was the first boy and fifth child out of eleven children, out of which eight made into adulthood, José Eustasio, Luis Enrique, Margarita, Virginia, Laura, Susana, Julia and Ernestina. In spite of his family's economic situation, he received a catholic education thanks to the help of other relatives and his own efforts. He attended Santa Librada school in Neiva and San Luis Gonzaga in Elías. In 1906 he received a scholarship to study at the normal school in Bogotá. In 1909, after graduating, he moved to Ibagué where he worked as a school inspector. In 1912 he enrolled at the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences of National University, graduating as a lawyer in 1917. After a failed attempt to be elected for the senate, he was appointed Legal Secretary of the Colombo-Venezuelan Border Commission to determine the limits with Venezuela, there he had the opportunity to travel through the Colombian jungles, rivers, and mountains, giving him a first hand experience of the subjects he would later write. Disappointed with the lack of resources offered by his government for his trip, he abandoned the commission and continued travelling on his own. He later rejoined the commission, but before that he went to Brazil, where he became acquainted with the work of important Brazilian writers of his time, particularly Euclides da Cunha. In this venture he became familiar with life in the Colombian plains and with problems related to the extraction of rubber in the Amazon jungle, a matter that would be central in his major work, La vorágine (1924) (translated as The Vortex), now considered one of the most important novels in Latin American literary history. To write this novel he read extensively about the situation of rubber workers in the Amazon basin. After the success of his novel, he was elected, in 1925, as a member for the Investigative Commission for Exterior Relations and Colonization. He also published several articles in newspapers in Colombia. In these pieces, he criticized irregularities in government contracts, and denounced the abandonment of the rubber areas of Colombia and the mistreatment of workers. He also publicly defended his novel, which had been criticized by some Colombian literary critics as being too poetic. This criticism would be largely silenced by the wide praise the novel was receiving everywhere else. Rivera had arrived in New York the last week of April 1928 in the hopes of translating his novel into English, publishing it in the United States, and turning it into a motion picture film with the goal of exporting Colombian culture abroad. His venture, albeit riffled with difficulties, was moving along when on November 27 he suffered an attack of seizures and was taken to the Stuyvesant Polyclinic Hospital where he remained for four days in a comatose state until his death on December 1, 1928. After his death, his body was transported by ship from New York to Barranquilla on the United Fruit Company's ship the Sixaola. At his arrival on port, his body was transported in procession to the Pro-Cathedral of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino where a requiem mass was given and the body laid in chapelle ardente. The casket then made its way down the Magdalena onto Bogotá on the mail steamship Carbonell González, arriving in Girardot and finishing by train to arrive in Bogotá on January 7, 1929 and was taken directly to the Capitolio Nacional where it was placed lying in state for public viewing. His body was finally laid to rest in the Central Cemetery of Bogotá on January 19. |
![]() | Rodman, Selden February 19, 1909 Selden Rodman (February 19, 1909 – November 2, 2002) was an American writer and poet. Selden Rodman was born to a wealthy family in Manhattan and attended Yale University. He traveled widely, and published over 40 books in his lifetime. His most frequent subjects were Haitian art, other writers, as well as several poetry anthologies and travelogues. Rodman also co-founded the magazine Common Sense with Alfred Bingham. His sister Nancy was married to the writer Dwight Macdonald. He was married to Maia Wojciechowska but they got divorced. |
![]() | Steiger, Brad February 19, 1936 Brad Steiger (February 19, 1936 – May 6, 2018) was an American author of fiction and non-fiction works on the paranormal, spirituality, UFOs, true crime, and biographies. He became a full-time writer by 1967. He authored/co-authored almost 170 books, which have sold 17 million copies. Steiger wrote that he believed Atlantis was a real place. In his book Atlantis Rising he argued that Atlantis was the home of an all-powerful civilization with sophisticated technological achievement. He also declared the tracks at Paluxy River to be evidence for an ancient civilization of giant humans. He was a proponent of the ancient astronauts idea. Steiger stated that many humans descend from alien beings. He referred to these beings as "star people". Steiger's books have sold well to the public, but have been criticized by academics. Anthropologist Bonita Freeman-Witthoft noted that Steiger failed to cite scholary sources, gave faulty documentation and his reporting of mythology was inaccurate. Sarah Higley gave Steiger's The Werewolf Book a mixed review and concluded "with a definite penchant for the sensational at the expense of the accurate, the casual reader will find much in it informative and entertaining as well." Skeptical investigator Joe Nickell considers Steiger an unreliable source and has noted that he "endlessly cranks out books promoting paranormal claims". |
![]() | Tan, Amy February 19, 1952 Amy Tan (born February 19, 1952) is an American writer whose works explore mother-daughter relationships and the Chinese American experience. Her novel The Joy Luck Club was adapted into a film in 1993 by director Wayne Wang. Tan has written several other novels, including The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter, Saving Fish from Drowning, and The Valley of Amazement. Tan's latest book is a memoir entitled Where The Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir (2017). In addition to these, Tan has written two children's books: The Moon Lady (1992) and Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat (1994), which was turned into an animated series that aired on PBS. Despite her success, Tan has also received substantial criticism for her depictions of Chinese culture and apparent adherence to stereotypes. |
![]() | Taulbert, Clifton L. February 19, 1945 Clifton Taulbert is an American author, business consultant and speaker. He is best known for his books Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored and Eight Habits of the Heart: Embracing the Values that Build Strong Communities. Taulbert offers courses in Character Education and Building Strong School Communities through Knowledge Delivery Systems, an online resource for educators Taulbert's book Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored was adapted into the film Once Upon a Time..When We Were Colored in 1996. |
![]() | Thomas, Ross February 19, 1926 Ross Thomas (February 19, 1926 in Oklahoma City – December 18, 1995 in Santa Monica, California) was an American writer of crime fiction. He is best known for his witty thrillers that expose the mechanisms of professional politics. He also wrote several novels under the pseudonym Oliver Bleeck about professional go-between Philip St. Ives. Thomas served with the infantry in the Philippines during World War II. He worked as a public relations specialist, correspondent with the Armed Forces Network, union spokesman, and political strategist in the USA, Bonn (Germany), and Nigeria before becoming a writer. His debut novel, The Cold War Swap, was written in only six weeks and won a 1967 Edgar Award for Best First Novel. Briarpatch earned the 1985 Edgar for Best Novel. In 2002 he was honored with the inaugural Gumshoe Lifetime Achievement Award, one of only two authors to earn the award posthumously (the other was 87th Precinct author Ed McBain in 2006). In addition to his novels, Mr. Thomas also wrote an original screenplay for producer Robert Evans entitled Jimmy the Rumour. The project is the story of a man born without an identity who works as a thief stealing from other thieves. He died of lung cancer in Santa Monica, California two months before his 70th birthday. |
![]() | Grajauskas, Gintaras February 19, 1966 Gintaras Grajauskas is one of Lithuania's leading poets, and also a multi-talented playwright, essayist, novelist and editor. Born in 1966, he has lived and worked in Klaipeda since childhood. He graduated from the S. Simkus High School for music, and later from the Lithuanian National Conservatory's Klaipeda branch in the jazz department. From 1990-94 he worked in radio and television, and from 1994 was the editor of the Klaipeda literary journal Gintaros Lasai. He has been head of the literature department of the Klaipeda State Drama Theater since 2008. Grajauskas has published seven books of poetry, two essay collections, one novel and one collection of plays. His work has won numerous awards, including the Z. Gele Prize for best poetry debut (1994), and the Poetry Spring Mairionis prize for best poetry collection (2000). His poems have been translated into many languages, with collections published in Germany, Sweden, Italy, Iceland and Poland. A selection of his poems appeared in the bilingual anthology Six Lithuanian Poets (Arc Publications, 2008). The first English translation of his poetry, Then What, translated by Rimis Uzgiris, is published by Bloodaxe in 2018. Grajauskas is also a founding member of the blues-rock band Kontrabanda and the jazz-rock band Rockfeleriais for whom he is bassist and lead vocalist. |
![]() | Adams, Ansel February 20, 1902 Ansel Easton Adams (February 20, 1902 – April 22, 1984) was an American photographer and environmentalist. His black-and-white landscape photographs of the American West, especially Yosemite National Park, have been widely reproduced on calendars, posters, and books. With Fred Archer, Adams developed the Zone System as a way to determine proper exposure and adjust the contrast of the final print. The resulting clarity and depth characterized his photographs. Adams primarily used large-format cameras because their high resolution helped ensure sharpness in his images. Adams founded the photography Group f/64 along with fellow photographers Willard Van Dyke and Edward Weston. |
![]() | Bergman, Andrew February 20, 1945 Andrew Bergman (born February 20, 1945) is an American screenwriter, film director, and novelist. New York magazine in 1985 dubbed him "The Unknown King of Comedy". His best known films include Blazing Saddles, The In-Laws, and The Freshman. |
![]() | Bernanos, Georges February 20, 1888 Georges Bernanos (20 February 1888 – 5 July 1948) was a French author, and a soldier in World War I. Of Roman Catholic and monarchist leanings, he was critical of bourgeois thought and was opposed to what he identified as defeatism leading to France's defeat in 1940. |
![]() | Bulatovic, Miodrag February 20, 1930 Miodrag Bulatovic (born 1930, in Okladi, Bijelo Polje, Zeta Banovina, Kingdom of Yugoslavia - died 1991, Igalo, Montenegro, SFR Yugoslavia) was a Montenegrin Serb novelist and playwright. He began in 1956 with a book of short stories, Djavoli dolaze (‘The Devils Are Coming’, translated as STOP THE DANUBE), for which he received the Serbian Writers Union Award. His best novel was, however, THE RED ROOSTER FLIES HEAVENWARDS, set in his homeland of north-eastern Montenegro. This was translated into more than twenty foreign languages. Bulatovic then stopped publishing for a time, to protest interference in his work. His next novel, HERO ON A DONKEY was first published abroad and only four years later (1967) in Yugoslavia. In 1975, he won the prestigious NIN Award for novel of the year for PEOPLE WITH FOUR FINGERS, an insight into the émigré's life. THE FIFTH FINGER was a sequel to that book. His last novel was GULLO GULLO, which brought together various themes from his previous books. |
![]() | Citati, Pietro February 20, 1930 Pietro Citati (born February 20, 1930, Florence, Italy) is a famous Italian writer and literary critic. He has written critical biographies of Goethe, Alexander the Great, Kafka and Marcel Proust as well as a short memoir on his thirty-year friendship with Italo Calvino. |
![]() | Corn, David February 20, 1959 David Corn (born February 20, 1959) is an American political journalist and author and the chief of the Washington bureau for Mother Jones. He has been Washington editor for The Nation and appeared regularly on FOX News, MSNBC, National Public Radio, and BloggingHeads.tv opposite James Pinkerton or other media personalities. In February 2013, he was named winner of the 2012 George Polk Award in journalism in the political reporting category for his video and reporting of the ‘47 percent story,’ Republican nominee Mitt Romney's surreptitiously videoed meeting with donors during the 2012 presidential campaign. As an author, Corn's output includes nonfiction and fiction and generally deals with government and politics. Corn has also been a book reviewer. On one occasion, he criticized his own organization when Nation Books published the translation of a controversial French book on Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks. FORBIDDEN TRUTH: US-TALIBAN SECRET OIL DIPLOMACY AND THE FAILED HUNT FOR BIN LADEN by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié suggests that the attacks resulted from a breakdown in talks between the Taliban and the United States to run an oil pipeline through Afghanistan. Corn argued that publishing ‘contrived conspiracy theories’ undermined the ability to expose actual governmental misbehavior. |
![]() | Mazower, Mark February 20, 1958 MARK MAZOWER is professor of history at Columbia University and Birkbeck College, London. His books include INSIDE HITLER’S GREECE: THE EXPERIENCE OF OCCUPATION, 1941-44, winner of the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History and the Longman/History Today Award for Book of the Year. He lives in New York City. |
![]() | Gilchrist, Ellen February 20, 1935 Ellen Gilchrist is an American novelist, short story writer, and poet. She won a National Book Award for her 1984 collection of short stories, Victory Over Japan. |
![]() | La Guma, Alex February 20, 1925 Alex La Guma (20 February 1925 – 11 October 1985) was a South African novelist, leader of the South African Coloured People’s Organisation (SACPO) and a defendant in the Treason Trial, whose works helped characterise the movement against the apartheid era in South Africa. La Guma's vivid style, distinctive dialogue, and realistic, sympathetic portrayal of oppressed groups have made him one of the most notable South African writers of the 20th century. La Guma was awarded the 1969 Lotus Prize for Literature. La Guma was born in District Six, Cape Town. He was the son of James La Guma, a leading figure in both the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union and the South African Communist Party. La Guma attended Trafalgar High School in District Six in Cape Town. After graduating from a technical school in 1945, he was an active member of the Plant Workers Union of the Metal Box Company. He was fired after organizing a strike, and he became active in politics, joining the Young Communists League in 1947 and the South African Communist Party in 1948. In 1956 he helped organise the South Africa representatives who drew up the Freedom Charter, and consequently he was one of the 156 accused at the Treason Trials that same year. He published his first short story, "Nocturn", in 1957. In 1960, he began writing for New Age, a progressive newspaper, and in 1962 he was placed under house arrest. Before his five-year sentence could elapse, A No Trial Act was passed and he and his wife were put into solitary confinement. On their release from prison, they returned to house arrest. He, along with his wife Blanche and their two children, went into exile to the UK in 1966. La Guma spent the rest of his life in exile. He was chief representative of the African National Congress in the Caribbean at the time of his death Havana, Cuba, in 1985. In 1984, he was appointed Officer of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture. Although La Guma was an inspiration of and inspired by the growing resistance to apartheid, notably the Black Consciousness Movement, his connection to these groups was indirect. |
![]() | Naoya, Shiga February 20, 1883 Naoya Shiga (20 February 1883 – 21 October 1971) was a Japanese novelist and short story writer active during the Taish? and Sh?wa periods of Japan. |
![]() | Penna, Cornelio February 20, 1896 Cornélio Penna (February 20, 1896, Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - February 12, 1958, Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is a solitary figure among the Brazilian writers of the generation which begins to write in the Thirties and continues until around mid-century. Born in Petrópolis in 1896 to an upper middle class family, a doctor’s son and the youngest of five children, he was precocious as a child and was taught reading by his sister well before reaching school age. In his mature years he recalled that, living in the small town of Itabira (Minas Gerais) as a child, two experiences above all others became fixed in his mind: the sighting of Halley’s comet and the death of a certain Maria Santa, an event surrounded by mystery and legend. It is the obsession, the persistent recollection of the latter which takes the form of Penna’s first novel, THRESHOLD (Fronteira), published in 1935. By the time Penna reached the age of thirteen, he had read all the novels of Camilo Castelo Branco, whose very name connotes romance and passion to Portuguese and Brazilian readers. (Penna once confided that Camilo’s novels influenced him enormously and made him sad for the rest of his life.) Even as a youth, Penna was morose and solitary, little given to recreation other than reading. In his teens he made the discovery of French and Russian authors, along with the works of his compatriot Machado de Assis - Penna’s great predecessor in the Brazilian psychological novel - and he began, as he later said, to dress in black or in dark colors, There is a story concerning his reading of Machado’s Quincas Borba (English translation, Philosopher or Dog?) that bears repeating. Penna said: ‘One day I read Quincas Borba and was left trembling, extremely moved, certain that I too was mad. That suspicion of madness stayed with me until just a few years ago when I finally surrendered myself to the truth: I became resigned that I was completely sane.’ Meanwhile the young Penna himself dabbled in writing, though the urge to paint was equally strong in him. But he also was obliged to receive an education befitting one of his social class, and accordingly, graduated in law from Sao Paulo in 1919. Soon, however, journalism and the graphic arts lured him away from the legal profession, and his first job was as illustrator and journalist, a contributor to the Gazeta de Noticias, A Nação and O Jornal. In Rio, in 1928, Penna exhibited his paintings and illustrations in what was his first and only one-man show. Then, after painting his ‘Warring Angels’ around 1935 (are they, significantly, the angels of art and literature, we wonder?) Penna decided to make a clean break with painting as a career and to devote himself wholeheartedly to writing. . Originally published in Portuguese as Fronteira in 1935. |
![]() | Ampuero, Roberto February 20, 1953 Roberto Ampuero (Valparaíso, Chile, 1953) is a Chilean author, columnist, and a university professor. His first novel ¿Quién mató a Kristián Kustermann? was published in 1993 and in it he introduced his private eye, Cayetano Brulé, winning the Revista del Libro prize of El Mercurio. Since then the detective has appeared in five novels. In addition he has published an autobiographical novel about his years in Cuba titled Nuestros Años Verde Olivo (1999) and the novels Los Amantes de Estocolmo (Book of the Year in Chile, 2003 and the bestseller of the year in Chile )) and Pasiones Griegas (chosen as the Best Spanish Novel in China, 2006). His novels have been published in Latin America and Spain, and have been translated into German, French, Italian, Chinese, Swedish, Portuguese, Greek, Croatian, and English. In Chile his works have sold more than 40 editions. Ampuero now resides in Iowa where he is a professor at the University of Iowa in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He was a columnist of La Tercera and the New York Times Syndicate and since March 2009 has been working as a columnist for El Mercurio. Between 2013 and 2014 he was Minister of Culture in the Conservative government of Sebastián Piñera. |
![]() | Shiga, Naoya February 20, 1883 Naoya Shiga (20 February 1883 – 21 October 1971) was a Japanese novelist and short story writer active during the Taish? and Sh?wa periods of Japan. |
![]() | Furst, Alan February 20, 1941 Alan Furst (born February 20, 1941) is an American author of historical spy novels. Furst has been called 'an heir to the tradition of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene,' whom he cites along with Joseph Roth and Arthur Koestler as important influences. Most of his novels since 1988 have been set just prior to or during the Second World War and he is noted for his successful evocations of Eastern Europe peoples and places during the period from 1933 to 1944. |
![]() | Noah, Trevor February 20, 1984 Trevor Noah (born 20 February 1984) is a South African comedian, writer, producer, political commentator, actor, and television host. He is best known for being the host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central since September 2015. Noah began his career as an actor, presenter, and comedian in his native South Africa. He held several television hosting roles with the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), and was the runner-up in their fourth season of Strictly Come Dancing in 2008. From 2010-11, Noah was the creator and host of Tonight with Trevor Noah on M-Net and DStv. His stand-up comedy career attained international success, leading to appearances on American late-night talk shows and British panel shows. In 2014, Noah became the Senior International Correspondent for The Daily Show, an American satirical news program. The following year, he was announced as the successor of long-time host Jon Stewart. Although ratings for the show declined following Stewart's departure, Noah's tenure has been generally favourably reviewed, attracting particular attention for his interview with young conservative personality Tomi Lahren in late 2016. |
![]() | Nesser, Hakan February 21, 1950 Håkan Nesser was awarded the 1993 Swedish Crime Writers’ Academy Prize for new authors for Mind’s Eye (published in Sweden as Det Grovmaskiga Nätet); he received the best novel award in 1994 FOR BORKMANN’S POINT and in 1996 for WOMAN WITH BIRTHMARK. In 1999 he was awarded the Crime Writers of Scandinavia’s Glass Key Award for the best crime novel of the year for Carambole. Nesser lives in Sweden and London. |
![]() | Arlacchi, Pino February 21, 1951 Giuseppe Arlacchi, also known as Pino, (February 21, 1951) is an Italian sociologist and is well known worldwide for his studies and essays about the Mafia. Currently he represents the Italian Democratic Party and is a member of the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) parliamentary group since 2010. On September 1, 1997 he was appointed Director-General of the United Nations Office at Vienna and Executive Director of the Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (ODCCP), with the rank of Under-Secretary-General. Currently, he is a full professor of sociology at the University of Sassari. |
![]() | Auden, W. H. February 21, 1907 Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973), who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet, born in England, later an American citizen, regarded by many critics as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form and content. The central themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature. Auden grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional middle-class family and read English literature at Christ Church, Oxford. His early poems, written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, alternated between telegraphic modern styles and fluent traditional ones, were written in an intense and dramatic tone, and established his reputation as a left-wing political poet and prophet. He became uncomfortable in this role in the later 1930s, and abandoned it after he moved to the United States in 1939, where he became an American citizen in 1946. His poems in the 1940s explored religious and ethical themes in a less dramatic manner than his earlier works, but still combined traditional forms and styles with new forms devised by Auden himself. In the 1950s and 1960s many of his poems focused on the ways in which words revealed and concealed emotions, and he took a particular interest in writing opera librettos, a form ideally suited to direct expression of strong feelings. He was also a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential. After his death, some of his poems, notably ‘Funeral Blues‘ (‘Stop all the clocks’), ‘Musée des Beaux Arts‘, ‘Refugee Blues‘, ‘The Unknown Citizen‘, and ‘September 1, 1939‘, became widely known through films, broadcasts, and popular media. |
![]() | Jones, Claudia February 21, 1915 Claudia Jones, née Claudia Vera Cumberbatch (21 February 1915 – 24 December 1964), was a Trinidad and Tobago-born journalist and activist. As a child, she migrated with her family to the US, where she became a Communist political activist, feminist and black nationalist, adopting the name Jones as "self-protective disinformation". Due to the political persecution of Communists in the US, she was deported in 1955 and subsequently lived in the United Kingdom. She founded Britain's first major black newspaper, West Indian Gazette (WIG), in 1958. |
![]() | Lewis, John (with Michael D'Orso) 2/21/1940 John Robert Lewis (born February 21, 1940) is an American politician and civil rights leader. He is the U.S. Representative for Georgia's 5th congressional district, serving since 1987, and is the dean of the Georgia congressional delegation. The district includes the northern three-quarters of Atlanta. Lewis is the only living "Big Six" leader of the African-American Civil Rights Movement, having been the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), playing a key role in the struggle to end legalized racial discrimination and segregation. A member of the Democratic Party, Lewis is a member of the Democratic leadership of the House of Representatives and has served in the Whip organization since shortly after his first election to the U.S. Congress. |
![]() | Lupoff, Richard A. February 21, 1935 Richard Allen Lupoff is an American science fiction and mystery author, who has also written humor, satire, non-fiction and reviews. In addition to his two dozen novels and more than 40 short stories, he has also edited science-fantasy anthologies. |
![]() | Marks, John February 21, 1943 John D. Marks (born 1943) is the founder and former president of Search for Common Ground (SFCG), a non-profit organization based in Washington, DC that focuses on international conflict management programming. |
![]() | Martinez, Victor February 21, 1954 Victor L. Martinez (February 21, 1954 – February 18, 2011) was a Mexican American poet and author. He won the 1996 U.S. National Book Award for Young People's Literature for his first novel, Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida. Martinez was the born in Fresno, California to migrant agricultural field workers of the Central Valley. He was one of twelve children. Victor attended California State University at Fresno and later obtained a graduate degree from Stanford University on a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship. |
![]() | McCaslin, Richard B. February 21, 1961 RICHARD B. McCASLIN, TSHA Endowed Professor of Texas History at the University of North Texas, is the author of Tainted Breeze: The Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas, October 1862; Lee in the Shadow of Washington; and Fighting Stock: John S. "Rip" Ford in Texas. |
![]() | Morris, Mervyn (editor) February 21, 1937 Mervyn Eustace Morris OM (Jamaica) (born 21 February 1937) is a poet and professor emeritus at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. According to educator Ralph Thompson, "In addition to his poetry, which has ranked him among the top West Indian poets, he was one of the first academics to espouse the importance of nation language in helping to define in verse important aspects of Jamaican culture." Mervyn Morris was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and studied at the University College of the West Indies (UWI) and as a Rhodes Scholar at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. In 1970, he began lecturing at UWI, where he went on to be appointed a Reader in West Indian Literature. In 1992 he was a UK Arts Council Visiting Writer-in-Residence at the South Bank Centre. He lives in Kingston, Jamaica, where he is Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing & West Indian Literature. In 2009, Morris was awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit. In 2014, Morris was appointed the Poet Laureate of Jamaica, the first to be accorded the title since the country Independence (the previous holders being Tom Redcam, who was appointed posthumously in 1933, and John Ebenezer Clare McFarlane, appointed in 1953). The investiture ceremony took place at King's House on 22 May. Morris has published several volumes of poetry, and has edited the works of other Caribbean writers. His collections include The Pond (revised edition, New Beacon Books, 1997), Shadowboxing (New Beacon Books, 1979), Examination Centre (New Beacon Books, 1992) and On Holy Week (a sequence of poems for radio, Dangaroo Press, 1993). He also edited The Faber Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories and published "Is English We Speaking", and other essays. In 2006 Carcanet Press published his I been there, sort of: New and Selected Poems. The best known poems by Morris include: "Little Boy Crying", "Family Pictures", "Love Is", "One, Two", "Home", "The Roaches", "The Pond" and "Critic". |
![]() | Tatum, Arlo (editor) February 21, 1923 Arlo Tatum (21 February 1923 - 2 April 2014) played significant roles in the US, British and international pacifist movements. Born into a Quaker family in Iowa, he politely wrote in 1941, aged 18, to the US attorney general announcing his refusal to register for the draft – US conscription – imposed in advance of US entry to the Second World War. He was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in the Federal Correctional Institution, Sandstone, Minnesota, the youngest prisoner when he entered. A natural baritone, Arlo, on release, was awarded a scholarship at the American conservatory of music, and won a competition to sing with the Chicago concert and opera guild. However, his burgeoning career was interrupted by an order to register for a fresh draft in 1948, renewed refusal, and another imprisonment. A serious accident in 1951 ended his singing career, and he started full-time pacifist activism, becoming co-secretary of the War Resisters’ League (US counterpart of the Peace Pledge Union – PPU). In 1955 he was appointed general secretary of War Resisters’ International (WRI), which entailed Arlo moving to London, where, apart from overseeing WRI’s first international conference outside Europe (India, 1960), he became involved in the PPU, serving as a director of Peace News, then the weekly newspaper of the PPU. With Sybil Morrison, he compiled the PPU songbook, as well as writing songs for the Aldermaston marches. He also co-founded the World Peace Brigade, a forerunner of Peace Brigades International. |
![]() | Wallace, David Foster February 21, 1962 David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American writer and university instructor of English and creative writing. His novel Infinite Jest (1996) was listed by Time magazine as one of the hundred best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. His last novel, The Pale King (2011), was a final selection for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012. The Los Angeles Times book reviewer David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years". Wallace's works have influenced writers such as Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, Elizabeth Wurtzel, George Saunders, Rivka Galchen, Matthew Gallaway, David Gordon, Darin Strauss, Charles Yu, and Deb Olin Unferth. |
![]() | Simek, Rudolf February 21, 1954 RUDOLF SIMEK is Professor of Medieval German and Scandinavian literature at the University of Bonn in Germany. |
![]() | Pingwa, Jia February 21, 1952 Jia Pingwa is a Chinese novelist and short story writer. His novels include Shang State, White Night, I Am a Farmer, and Shaanxi Opera, which won the Mao Dun Literature Prize. Howard Goldblatt is an award-winning translator of numerous works of contemporary Chinese literature, including seven novels by Mo Yan, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. |
![]() | Nin, Anaïs February 21, 1903 Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) is an iconic literary figure and one of the most notable experimental writers of the twentieth century. As one of the first women to explore female erotica, Nin revealed the inner desires of her characters in a way that made her works a touchstone for later feminist writers. Swallow Press is the premier US publisher of books by and about Nin. Paul Herron is the founder and editor of Sky Blue Press, which publishes the journal A Café in Space and digital editions of the fiction of Anaïs Nin, as well as a new collection of Nin erotica, Auletris. |
![]() | Betancourt, Romulo February 22, 1908 Rómulo Ernesto Betancourt Bello (22 February 1908 – 28 September 1981) , known as "The Father of Venezuelan Democracy", was the 47th and 54th President of Venezuela, serving from 1945 to 1948 and again from 1959 to 1964, as well as leader of Acción Democrática, Venezuela's dominant political party in the 20th century. Betancourt, one of Venezuela's most important political figures, led a tumultuous and highly controversial career in Latin American politics. Periods of exile brought Betancourt in contact with various Latin American countries as well as the United States, securing his legacy as one of the most prominent international leaders to emerge from 20th-century Latin America. Scholars credit Betancourt as the Founding Father of modern democratic Venezuela. Rómulo Betancourt was a very close friend of the Governor of Puerto Rico, Luis Muñoz Marín, visiting the island often and frequently exchanging political views with him, viewing him as a political advisor on Democracy. Although they disagreed on certain issues they remained faithful friends. On one occasion in 1963, he refused to attend the inauguration of Juan Bosch as president of the Dominican Republic if Bosch did not extend an invitation to Muñoz Marín, who had provided a safe haven for Bosch and various members of his political party in Puerto Rico. Betancourt attended the funeral of his friend in 1980. |
![]() | Bowles, Jane February 22, 1917 Jane Bowles (born Jane Sydney Auer; February 22, 1917 – May 4, 1973) was an American writer and playwright. Born into a Jewish family in New York, Jane Bowles spent her childhood in Woodmere, New York, on Long Island. She developed tuberculous arthritis of the knee as a teenager and her mother took her to Switzerland for treatment, where she attended boarding school. As a teenager she returned to New York, where she gravitated to the intellectual bohemia of Greenwich Village. She married writer and composer Paul Bowles in 1938. In 1943 her novel Two Serious Ladies was published. The Bowleses lived in New York until 1947, when Paul moved to Tangier, Morocco; Jane followed him in 1948. While in Morocco, Jane had an intense and complicated relationship with a Moroccan woman named Cherifa. She also had a close relationship with torch singer Libby Holman. Jane Bowles wrote the play In The Summer House, which was performed on Broadway in 1953 to mixed reviews. Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and John Ashbery considered her to be one of the finest and most underrated writers of American fiction. Bowles, who suffered from alcoholism, had a stroke in 1957 at age 40. Her health continued to decline, despite various treatments in England and the United States, until she had to be admitted to a clinic in Málaga, Spain, where she died in 1973. |
![]() | Bruce, John Edward February 22, 1856 JOHN EDWARD BRUCE (February 22, 1856, Piscataway, MD - August 7, 1924, New York City, NY) was born a slave in Maryland and given a hero’s funeral in Harlem. He briefly studied at Howard University before beginning a career as a journalist, editor, historian, and public speaker. He was the cofounder with Arthur A. Schomburg of the Negro Society for Historical Research.’. |
![]() | Bunuel, Luis February 22, 1900 Luis Buñuel Portolés (22 February 1900 – 29 July 1983) was a Spanish filmmaker who worked in Spain, Mexico and France. When Luis Buñuel died at age 83, his obituary in the New York Times called him ‘an iconoclast, moralist, and revolutionary who was a leader of avant-garde surrealism in his youth and a dominant international movie director half a century later’. His first picture—made in the silent era—was called ‘the most famous short film ever made’ by critic Roger Ebert, and his last film—made 48 years later—won him Best Director awards from the National Board of Review and the National Society of Film Critics. Writer Octavio Paz called Buñuel's work ‘the marriage of the film image to the poetic image, creating a new reality...scandalous and subversive’. Often associated with the surrealist movement of the 1920s, Buñuel created films from the 1920s through the 1970s. His work spans two continents, three languages, and nearly every film genre, including experimental film, documentary, melodrama, satire, musical, erotica, comedy, romance, costume dramas, fantasy, crime film, adventure, and western. Despite this variety, filmmaker John Huston believed that, regardless of genre, a Buñuel film is so distinctive as to be instantly recognizable, or, as Ingmar Bergman put it, ‘Buñuel nearly always made Buñuel films’. Six of Buñuel's films are included in Sight & Sound's 2012 critic's poll of the top 250 films of all time. 15 of his films are included in They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? list of the 1,000 greatest films of all time, which is tied with John Ford for second most, and he ranks number 14 on their list of the top 250 directors. Garrett White is a translator and film and art journalist. He translated and wrote the introduction for Blaise Cendrars’s Hollywood: Mecca of the Movies (California, 1995). |
![]() | Cheyney, Peter February 22, 1896 Reginald Evelyn Peter Southouse Cheyney (22 February 1896 – 26 June 1951) – known as Peter Cheyney – was a British crime fiction writer who flourished between 1936 and 1951. Cheyney is the author of hard-boiled short stories and novels in the American style, most famously a series of ten novels about agent/detective Lemmy Caution, which, starting in 1953, were adapted into a series of French movies, all starring Eddie Constantine. (The most well-known of these, the 1965 science fiction film Alphaville, was not directly based on a Cheyney novel.) His other memorable creation is Slim Callaghan, a somewhat disreputable private detective most at home in the less savoury sections of London. Although Cheyney's novels sold in the millions during his lifetime, he is almost forgotten today, and his works are mostly out of print. |
![]() | Gorey, Edward February 22, 1925 Edward St. John Gorey (February 22, 1925 – April 15, 2000) was an American writer and artist noted for his illustrated books. His characteristic pen-and-ink drawings often depict vaguely unsettling narrative scenes in Victorian and Edwardian settings. |
![]() | Hoch, Edward D. February 22, 1930 Edward Dentinger Hoch (February 22, 1930 – January 17, 2008) was an American writer of detective fiction. Although he wrote several novels, he was primarily known for his vast output of over 950 short stories. |
![]() | Kerr, Philip February 22, 1956 Philip Ballantyne Kerr (22 February 1956 – 23 March 2018) was a British author, best known for his Bernie Gunther series of historical detective thrillers. Kerr was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, where his father was an engineer and his mother worked as a secretary. He was educated at a grammar school in Northampton. He studied at the University of Birmingham from 1974 to 1980, gaining a master's degree in law and philosophy. Kerr worked as an advertising copywriter for Saatchi and Saatchi before becoming a full-time writer in 1989. A writer of both adult fiction and non-fiction, he is known for the Bernie Gunther series of historical thrillers set in Germany and elsewhere during the 1930s, the Second World War and the Cold War. He also wrote children's books under the name P. B. Kerr, including the Children of the Lamp series. Kerr wrote for The Sunday Times, the Evening Standard, and the New Statesman. He was married to fellow novelist Jane Thynne; they lived in Wimbledon, London, and had three children. He died from cancer on 23 March 2018, aged 62. Just before he died, he finished a 14th Bernie Gunther novel, Metropolis, which will be published in 2019. In 1993, Kerr was named in Granta's list of Best Young British Novelists. In 2009, If the Dead Rise Not won the world's most lucrative crime fiction award, the RBA Prize for Crime Writing worth €125,000. The book also won the British Crime Writers' Association's Ellis Peters Historic Crime Award that same year. His novel, Prussian Blue, has been longlisted for the 2018 Walter Scott Prize. Kerr died of cancer on 23 March 2018 and was survived by his wife and children. |
![]() | Kis, Danilo February 22, 1935 Danilo Kiš (February 22, 1935 - October 15, 1989) was a Yugoslavian/Serbian writer of Hungarian/Jewish - Serbian origin. Danilo Kiš was born in Subotica, Danube Banovina, Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the son of Eduard Kiš (Kis Ede), a Hungarian Jewish railway inspector, and Milica Kiš (born Dragicevic) from Cetinje, Montenegro. In that time all Montenegrins concidered them to be Serbs. During World War II, he lost his father and several other family members, who died in various Nazi camps. His mother took him and his older sister Danica to Hungary for the duration of the war. After the end of the war, the family moved to Cetinje, Montenegro, Yugoslavia, where Kiš graduated from high school in 1954. Kiš studied literature at the University of Belgrade, and graduated in 1958 as the first student to complete a course in comparative literature. He was a prominent member of the Vidici magazine, where he worked until 1960. In 1962 he published his first two novels, Mansarda and Psalam 44. Kiš received the prestigious NIN Award for his Pešcanik (‘Hourglass’) in 1973, which he returned a few years later, due to a political dispute. During the following years, Kiš received a great number of national and international awards for his prose and poetry. He spent most of his life in Paris and working as a lecturer elsewhere in France. Kiš was married to Mirjana Miocinovic from 1962 to 1981. After their separation, he lived with Pascale Delpech until his early death from lung cancer in Paris. A film based on Pešcanik (Fövenyóra) directed by the Hungarian Szabolcs Tolnai is currently in post-production. Kiš was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature and was due to win it, were it not for his untimely death in 1989. . |
![]() | Krech III, Shepard February 22, 1944 Shepard Krech III is a professor of anthropology at Brown University. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and in Maine. |
![]() | Limonov, Edward February 22, 1943 Eduard Limonov (real name Eduard Veniaminovich Savenko, born 22 February 1943) is a Russian writer, poet, publicist, and political dissident. He is the founder and former leader of the banned National Bolshevik Party. Formerly an opponent of Vladimir Putin, Limonov was one of the leaders of The Other Russia political bloc. However, following the 2014 pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine, he has emerged as a strong supporter of Putin. |
![]() | Martin, Gerald February 22, 1944 Gerald Martin (born 1944) is a critic of Latin American fiction. He is particularly known for his work on the Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias and on the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, both of whom are winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. His 2008 book, Gabriel García Márquez. A Life, was the first full biography of García Márquez to be published in English. Gerald Martin (London 1944) studied Spanish, French and Portuguese at Bristol (1965) and received his PhD in Latin American Literature from the University of Edinburgh (1970). He spent a year in Cochabamba, Bolivia, with VSO (1965-6). He also carried out postgraduate work in UNAM, Mexico (1968-9) and was a visiting scholar at Stanford University (1971-2), thanks to a Harkness Fellowship. By 1990 he had visited every country in Latin America. He taught for many years at Portsmouth Polytechnic, where he helped to organise the world’s first undergraduate degree in Latin American Studies, which pioneered the student year abroad in Latin America. In 1984 he became the first Professor of Hispanic Studies in the Polytechnic sector. He worked for 25 years as the only English-speaking member of the Colección Archivos in Paris and in Pittsburgh became President of the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana. During the period 1992-2007 he was the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Languages in the University of Pittsburgh. His research and publications have focused on the Latin American novel. His PhD was devoted to Miguel Angel Asturias, who fortunately won the Nobel Prize before it was completed, and he has produced critical editions of Hombres de maíz (1981) and El Señor Presidente (2000), as well as translating the former work. (He has also translated novels by Rafael Chirbes and Max Aub.) In the 1980s he concentrated on the history of literature and the arts, contributing three major chapters to the Cambridge History of Latin America and publishing Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (1989). Since then he has focused on biography. In 2008 he published a biography of Gabriel García Márquez with Bloomsbury and Knopf, which has appeared in twenty languages, and in 2012 an Introduction to Gabriel García Márquez for CUP. He is currently working on a biography of Mario Vargas Llosa for Bloomsbury. |
![]() | O'Faolain, Sean February 22, 1900 Seán Proinsias Ó Faoláin (22 February 1900 – 20 April 1991) was an Irish short story writer. He was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1986. Born as John Francis Whelan in Cork City, County Cork, Ireland, Sean Ó Faoláin wrote his first stories in the 1920s. Through 90 stories, written over a period of 60 years, Ó Faoláin charts the development of modern Ireland. His Collected Stories were published in 1983, eight years before his death on 20 April 1991, in Dublin. Ó Faoláin was educated at the Presentation Brothers Secondary School in Cork. He came under the influence of Daniel Corkery, joining the Cork Dramatic Society, and increasing his knowledge of the Irish language, which he had begun in school. Shortly after entering University College, Cork, he joined the Irish Volunteers. He fought in the War of Independence. During the Irish Civil War he served as Censor for the Cork Examiner and as publicity director for the IRA. After the Republican loss, he received M.A. degrees from the National University of Ireland and from Harvard University where he studied for 3 years. O'Faolain was a Commonwealth Fellow from 1926 to 1928; and was a Harvard Fellow from 1928 to 1929. From 1929 to 1933 Ó Faoláin lectured at the Catholic college St Mary's College, at Strawberry Hill in Middlesex (now SW London), England, during which period he wrote his first two books. He published in 1932 his first book, 'Midsummer Night Madness,' a collection of stories partly based on his Civil War experiences. He returned to his native Ireland. He has published novels; short stories; biographies; travel books; translations; literary criticism—including one of the rare full-length studies of the short story: the Short Story, 1948. He also wrote a cultural history, 'The Irish,' in 1947. He served as director of the Arts Council of Ireland from 1956 to 1959, and from 1940 to 1990 he was a founder member and editor of the Irish literary periodical The Bell. The list of contributors to The Bell included many of Ireland's foremost writers, among them Patrick Kavanagh, Patrick Swift, Flann O'Brien, Frank O'Connor and Brendan Behan. |
![]() | Pileggi, Nicholas February 22, 1933 Nicholas Pileggi (born February 22, 1933) is an American producer, author and screenwriter. Pileggi was born and raised in New York City, the elder son of an Italian immigrant father, Nicola ("Nick") from Calabria and an American-born mother, Susie. He has a younger brother, Dominick. Nicola "Nick" Pileggi was a cinema musician for silent films and later owned a shoe store. In the 1950s, he worked as a journalist for Associated Press and New York Magazine, specializing in crime reporting for more than three decades; this would provide the background upon which he later drew as a writer of factual books and fictional films related to the Mafia. Pileggi began his career as a journalist and had a profound interest in the Mafia. He is best known for writing Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family (1986), which he adapted into the movie Goodfellas (1990), and for writing Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas and the subsequent screenplay for Casino (1995). The movie versions of both were co-written and directed by Martin Scorsese. Pileggi also wrote the screenplay for the film City Hall (1996), starring Al Pacino. He served as an Executive Producer of American Gangster (2007), a biographical crime film based on the criminal career of Frank Lucas. He also authored Blye, Private Eye (1987). Pileggi cowrote the pilot of the CBS television series Vegas, which first aired in September 2012. |
![]() | Reed, Ishmael February 22, 1938 ISHMAEL REED is the author of many books, two of which were nominated for 1973 National Book Awards in poetry and fiction. He does his own ‘Business’ in Berkeley, California. |
![]() | Sackman, Douglas Cazaux February 22, 1968 Douglas Cazaux Sackman is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Puget Sound. Douglas Cazaux Sackman is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Puget Sound. |
![]() | Schopenhauer, Arthur February 22, 1788 Arthur Schopenhauer (22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860) was a German philosopher best known for his book, The World as Will and Representation (German: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung), in which he claimed that our world is driven by a continually dissatisfied will, continually seeking satisfaction. Influenced by Eastern philosophy, he maintained that the 'truth was recognized by the sages of India'; consequently, his solutions to suffering were similar to those of Vedantic and Buddhist thinkers (e.g., asceticism). The influence of 'transcendental ideality' led him to choose atheism. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four distinct aspects of experience in the phenomenal world; consequently, he has been influential in the history of phenomenology. He has influenced many thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, and Jorge Luis Borges, among others. |
![]() | Van Ostaijen, Paul February 22, 1896 Paul van Ostaijen (22 February 1896 – 18 March 1928) was a Belgian poet and writer. Van Ostaijen was born in Antwerp. His nickname was Mister 1830, derived from his habit of walking along the streets of Antwerp clothed as a dandy from that year. His poetry shows influences from Modernism, Expressionism, Dadaism and early Surrealism, but Van Ostaijen's style is very much his own. Van Ostaijen was an active flamingant, a supporter of Flemish independence. Because of his involvement with Flemish activism during World War I, he had to flee to Berlin after the war. In Berlin—one of the centers of Dadaism and Expressionism—he met many other artists. He also struggled through a severe mental crisis. Upon returning to Belgium, Van Ostaijen opened an art gallery in Brussels. He died of tuberculosis in 1928 in a sanatorium in Miavoye-Anthée, in the Wallonian Ardennes. The Czech poet Ivan Wernisch was so impressed by 'the genius of van Ostaijen' that he learned Dutch to be able to translate him. His translation was published as Tanec gnóm?, Dance of the gnomes, in 1990. |
![]() | Washington, George & Kitman, Marvin February 22, 1732 George Washington (February 22, 1732 [O.S. February 11, 1731]– December 14, 1799) was the first President of the United States (1789–1797), the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He presided over the convention that drafted the United States Constitution, which replaced the Articles of Confederation and remains the supreme law of the land. Washington was unanimously elected President by the electors in both the 1788–1789 and 1792 elections. He oversaw the creation of a strong, well-financed national government that maintained neutrality in the French Revolutionary Wars, suppressed the Whiskey Rebellion, and won acceptance among Americans of all types. Washington established many forms in government still used today, such as the cabinet system and inaugural address. His retirement after two terms and the peaceful transition from his presidency to that of John Adams established a tradition that continued up until Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to a third term. Washington has been widely hailed as the 'father of his country' – even during his lifetime. Washington was born into the provincial gentry of Colonial Virginia; his wealthy planter family owned tobacco plantations and slaves, that he in turn inherited. Although Washington owned hundreds of slaves throughout his lifetime, his views on slavery evolved, and he desired to free them and abolish slavery though the Washingtons emancipated no slaves during their lifetimes. When Martha died a year and a half year after George, on May 22, 1802, all of the slaves from her first husband's estate - the dower slaves as well as the slaves she held in trust - went to her first husband's heirs. After his father and older brother died when he was young, Washington became personally and professionally attached to the powerful William Fairfax, who promoted his career as a surveyor and soldier. Washington quickly became a senior officer in the colonial forces during the first stages of the French and Indian War. Chosen by the Second Continental Congress in 1775 to be commander-in-chief of the Continental Army in the American Revolution, Washington managed to force the British out of Boston in 1776, but was defeated and almost captured later that year when he lost New York City. After crossing the Delaware River in the dead of winter, he defeated the British in two battles, retook New Jersey and restored momentum to the Patriot cause. Because of his strategy, Revolutionary forces captured two major British armies at Saratoga in 1777 and Yorktown in 1781. Historians laud Washington for his selection and supervision of his generals, encouragement of morale and ability to hold together the army, coordination with the state governors and state militia units, relations with Congress and attention to supplies, logistics, and training. In battle, however, Washington was repeatedly outmaneuvered by British generals with larger armies. After victory had been finalized in 1783, Washington resigned as Commander-in-chief rather than seize power, proving his opposition to dictatorship and his commitment to American republicanism. Dissatisfied with the Continental Congress, in 1787 Washington presided over the Constitutional Convention that devised a new federal government for the United States. Elected unanimously as the first President of the United States in 1789, he attempted to bring rival factions together to unify the nation. He supported Alexander Hamilton's programs to pay off all state and national debt, to implement an effective tax system and to create a national bank, despite opposition from Thomas Jefferson. Washington proclaimed the United States neutral in the wars raging in Europe after 1793. He avoided war with Great Britain and guaranteed a decade of peace and profitable trade by securing the Jay Treaty in 1795, despite intense opposition from the Jeffersonians. Although he never officially joined the Federalist Party, he supported its programs. Washington's Farewell Address was an influential primer on republican virtue and a warning against partisanship, sectionalism, and involvement in foreign wars. He retired from the presidency in 1797 and returned to his home in Mount Vernon, and domestic life where he managed a variety of enterprises. He freed all his slaves by his final will. Washington had a vision of a great and powerful nation that would be built on republican lines using federal power. He sought to use the national government to preserve liberty, improve infrastructure, open the western lands, promote commerce, found a permanent capital, reduce regional tensions and promote a spirit of American nationalism. At his death, Washington was eulogized as 'first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen' by Henry Lee. The Federalists made him the symbol of their party but for many years, the Jeffersonians continued to distrust his influence and delayed building the Washington Monument. As the leader of the first successful revolution against a colonial empire in world history, Washington became an international icon for liberation and nationalism. He is consistently ranked among the top three presidents of the United States, according to polls of both scholars and the general public. |
![]() | Marinkovic, Ranko February 22, 1913 Ranko Marinkovic (February 22, 1913, Komiža, Croatia - January 28, 2001, Zagreb, Croatia) was a Croatian writer of plays and novels. Vlada Stojiljkovic wrote eleven books for children and adults, several of which he illustrated; translated Orwell, Swift, Golding, and Lear; and was an illustrator and painter. Ellen Elias-Bursac has been translating Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian authors into English for more than twenty years. |
![]() | Lian, Yang February 22, 1955 Yang Lian was one of the original Misty Poets who reacted against the strictures of the Cultural Revolution. Born in Switzerland, the son of a diplomat, he grew up in Beijing and began writing when he was sent to the countryside in the 1970s. On his return he joined the influential literary magazine Jintian (Today). His work was criticised in China in 1983 and formally banned in 1989 when he organised memorial services for the dead of Tiananmen while in New Zealand. He was a Chinese poet in exile from 1989 to 1995, finally settling in London in 1997. Translations of his poetry include four collections with Bloodaxe, Where the Sea Stands Still (1999), Concentric Circles (2005), Lee Valley Poems (2009) and Narrative Poem (forthcoming in 2017), as well as his long poem Yi (Green Integer, USA, 2002) and Riding Pisces: Poems from Five Collections (Shearsman, 2008), a compilation of earlier work. He is co-editor with W.N. Herbert of Jade Ladder: Contemporary Chinese Poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2012), and was awarded the International Nonino Prize in 2012. Both Where the Sea Stands Still and Narrative Poem are Poetry Book Society Recommended Translations. |
![]() | Baden-Powell, Robert February 22, 1857 The Lord Robert Baden-Powell (22 February 1857, Paddington, London, England - 8 January 1941, aged 83, Nyeri, British Kenya) was a British Army officer, writer, author of Scouting for Boys which was an inspiration for the Scout Movement, founder and first Chief Scout of The Boy Scouts Association and founder of the Girl Guides. After having been educated at Charterhouse School in Surrey, Baden-Powell served in the British Army from 1876 until 1910 in India and Africa. In 1899, during the Second Boer War in South Africa, Baden-Powell successfully defended the town in the Siege of Mafeking. Several of his military books, written for military reconnaissance and scout training in his African years, were also read by boys. In 1907, he held a demonstration camp, the Brownsea Island Scout camp, which is now seen as the beginning of Scouting. Based on his earlier books, particularly Aids to Scouting, he wrote Scouting for Boys, published in 1908 by Sir Arthur Pearson, for boy readership. In 1910 Baden-Powell retired from the army and formed The Boy Scouts Association. The first Scout Rally was held at The Crystal Palace in 1909, at which appeared a number of girls dressed in Scout uniform, who told Baden-Powell that they were the "Girl Scouts", following which, in 1910, Baden-Powell and his sister Agnes Baden-Powell formed the Girl Guides from which the Girl Guides Movement grew. In 1912 he married Olave St Clair Soames. He gave guidance to the Scouting and Girl Guiding Movements until retiring in 1937. Baden-Powell lived his last years in Nyeri, Kenya, where he died and was buried in 1941. Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, and Director of the Oxford Life Writing Centre at Wolfson College. A founding figure in the field of colonial and postcolonial literary studies, she is the author, editor, or co-editor of over twenty books, including monographs and novels. Her monographs include Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995/2005), Stories of Women (2005), Indian Arrivals (winner ESSE 2015-16 prize), and Postcolonial Poetics (2018). Her novels include The Shouting in the Dark (long-listed Sunday Times prize, 2015), and Screens again the Sky (short-listed David Higham Prize 1990). Sharmilla and other Portraits is her 2010 volume of short stories. She is the General Editor of the Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures Series. |
![]() | Aira, Cesar February 23, 1949 César Aira (born 23 February 1949 in Coronel Pringles, Buenos Aires Province) is an Argentine writer and translator, and an exponent of Argentine contemporary literature. Aira has published over eighty short books of stories, novels and essays. In fact, at least since 1993 a hallmark of his work is an almost frenetic level of writing and publication—two to four novella-length books each year. He has lectured at the University of Buenos Aires, on Copi and Arthur Rimbaud, and at the University of Rosario on Constructivism and Stéphane Mallarmé, and has translated and edited books from France, England, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, and Venezuela. Besides his fiction, and the translation work he does for a living, Aira also writes literary criticism, including monographic studies of Copi, the poet Alejandra Pizarnik, and the nineteenth-century British limerick and nonsense writer Edward Lear. He wrote a short book, Las tres fechas (The Three Dates), arguing for the central importance, when approaching some minor eccentric writers, of examining the moment of their lives about which they are writing, the date of completion of the work, and the date of publication of the work. Aira also was the literary executor of the complete works of his friend the poet and novelist Osvaldo Lamborghini (1940–1985). Aira has often spoken in interviews of elaborating an avant-garde aesthetic in which, rather than editing what he has written, he engages in a "flight forward" (fuga hacia adelante) to improvise a way out of the corners he writes himself into. Aira also seeks in his own work, and praises in the work of others (such as the Argentine-Parisian cartoonist and comic novelist Copi), the "continuum" (el continuo) of a constant momentum in the fictional narrative. As a result, his fictions can jump radically from one genre to another, and often deploy narrative strategies from popular culture and "subliterary" genres like pulp science fiction and television soap operas. He frequently refuses to conform to generic expectations for how a novel ought to end, leaving many of his fictions quite open-ended. While his subject matter ranges from Surrealist or Dadaist quasi-nonsense to fantastic tales set in his Buenos Aires neighborhood of Flores, Aira also returns frequently to Argentina’s nineteenth century (two books translated into English, The Hare and An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, are examples of this; so is the best-known novel of his early years, Ema la cautiva (Emma, the Captive)). He also returns regularly to play with stereotypes of an exotic East, such as in Una novela china, (A Chinese Novel); El volante (The Flyer), and El pequeño monje budista (The Little Buddhist Monk). Aira also enjoys mocking himself and his childhood home town, Coronel Pringles, in fictions such as Cómo me hice monja (How I Became a Nun), Cómo me reí (How I Laughed), El cerebro musical (The Musical Brain) and Las curas milagrosas del doctor Aira (The Miraculous Cures of Dr. Aira). His novella La prueba (1992) served as the basis—or point of departure, as only the first half-hour follows the novella—of Diego Lerman's film Tan de repente (Suddenly) (2002). His novel Cómo me hice monja (How I Became a Nun) was selected as one of the ten best publications in Spain in the year 1998. |
![]() | Bain, David Haward February 23, 1949 David Haward Bain is the author of AFTERSHOCKS: A TALE OF TWO VICTIMS, which deals with the moral and psychological repercussions of the Vietnam War, published in 1980. He has contributed articles and reviews to the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, American Heritage, Esquire, and other publications. He is married to the painter Mary Smyth Duffy and lives in New York. |
![]() | Du Bois, W. E. B. February 23, 1868 W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was internationally renowned as a writer, scholar, and activist. Among his published works are THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLKS, JOHN BROWN, and BLACK RECONSTRUCTION: AN ESSAY TOWARD A HISTORY OF THE PART WHICH BLACK FOLK PLAYED IN THE ATTEMPT TO RECONSTRUCT DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, 1860—1880. He also wrote other major fiction, including DARK PRINCESS. |
![]() | Brookhiser, Richard February 23, 1955 Richard Brookhiser (born February 23, 1955) is an American journalist, biographer and historian. He is a senior editor at National Review. He is most widely known for a series of biographies of America's founders, including Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, and George Washington. |
![]() | Brown, Claude February 23, 1937 Claude Brown (February 23, 1937 - February 2, 2002) is the author of MANCHILD IN THE PROMISED LAND, published to critical acclaim in 1965, which tells the story of his coming of age during the 1940s and 1950s in Harlem. He also published CHILDREN OF HAM (1976). Autobiographical in nature, MANCHILD IN THE PROMISED LAND describes the cultural, economic, and religious conditions that suffused Harlem during Brown's early childhood and adolescence while constructing a narrative of Brown's tumultuous early life. Starting at age six, his life involved stealing, alcohol consumption, truancy, and gang wars. These were the harsh realities of life in 1950s Harlem that shaped his childhood. At the age of 11, he was placed in a reform school, which he cycled in and out of more than three times. By that time he had made the acquaintance of Dr. Ernest Papanek, a psychologist and the director of the Wiltwyck School for Boys for deprived and emotionally disturbed boys, which was in Esopus, Ulster County, New York. Dr. Papanek, whom Mr. Brown described in his book as ‘probably the smartest and the deepest cat I had ever met,’ encouraged him to seek an education. Acknowledging the damaging effects of drugs like heroin and gang violence on his community and his friends, he decided to change. He knew he had to get out of Harlem. He moved away from Harlem, his heart broken seeing all his friends ‘strung-out‘ by drug addiction. He felt Harlem wasn't for him anymore. After being one of the ‘hippest cats’ (as he says in the book), he decided to turn away from it and move down to Greenwich Village, where he could start over. For the first time in his life, he decided to get an education and eventually began attending night classes at a high school downtown, supporting himself by working as a busboy and deliveryman and at other odd jobs. Eventually, he went on to graduate in 1965 from Howard University (where his professors included sociologists E. Franklin Frazier and Nathan Hare), and later went on to attend Stanford and Rutgers[disambiguation needed ] law schools, but left when the lecture circuit proved more lucrative than law. Brown would go on to publish a second book, CHILDREN OF HAM, which explores the lives of several black teenagers from Harlem who escape the clutches of heroin. By comparison to his first work, it was a failure. Brown spent most of his professional life as a full-time lecturer, but also became increasingly involved in critical urban issues, especially with respect to at-risk black adolescents. This lifetime concern led him to become deeply involved in criminal justice and rehabilitation issues, as he visited juvenile detention centers and prisons in search of answers to the question of what was motivating the much more violent, feral behavior of youth gangs and underage criminals prowling America's inner-cities, a plague that seemingly became progressively worse with the passage of time. Essentially, MANCHILD IN THE PROMISED LAND was written to demonstrate how someone could overcome great odds to become in his case, a lawyer. His ultimate conclusion was that American society had abandoned these young individuals, causing a profound sense of alienation and ostracism, which in turn led to futile outbursts of excessive, wanton violence and criminality. He remained critical of what he perceived as the societal failures of addressing these existential crises afflicting African-American youth-especially those residing in urban areas-and more broadly, underserved, alienated American youth in general. Claude Brown died of respiratory failure in 2002. |
![]() | Chopra, Anupama February 23, 1967 Anupama Chopra (born 23 February 1967) is an Indian author, journalist, film critic and director of the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival. She is also the founder and editor of the digital platform Film Companion which offers a curated look at cinema. She has written several books on Indian cinema and has been a film critic for NDTV, India Today, as well as the Hindustan Times. She also hosted a weekly film review show The Front Row With Anupama Chopra, on Star World. She won the 2000 National Film Award for Best Book on Cinema for her first book Sholay: The Making of a Classic. |
![]() | Christie, Ian February 23, 1945 Ian Christie (born February 23, 1945, United Kingdom) is a British film scholar. He has written several books including studies of the works of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Martin Scorsese and the development of cinema. |
![]() | Dickstein, Morris February 23, 1940 Morris Dickstein is Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York Graduate Center and a widely published literary and cultural critic. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, Partisan Review, The Nation, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. His books include Gates of Eden: American culture in the 1960’s, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and Leopards in the Temple, a study of postwar American fiction. |
![]() | Geeraerts, Jef February 23, 1930 Jef Geeraerts (born Antwerp, 23 February 1930) is a Flemish writer. He was a colonial administrator in Belgian Congo. On the independence of the Congo he sent his wife and children back to Belgium and in August 1960 he himself returned to Belgium. During the next six years he was paid by the government (return program). After that time he needed to find a job to survive. He decided to become a writer and went to the University of Brussels to study Germanic languages. When he had finished his studies he wrote his first novel, Ik ben maar een neger (‘I'm just a negro’), which put him on the map as extremely controversial. He wrote more of these politically motivated colonial books before he started his Gangreen series. There are four parts, Gangreen 1 (Black Venus), Gangreen 2 (De Goede Moordenaar), Gangreen 3 (Het Teken van de Hond) and Gangreen 4 (Het Zevende Zegel). Later he became famous for his detective stories. Nowadays he is a celebrated crime-novelist and several of his books (De zaak Alzheimer and Dossier K) have been filmed. |
![]() | Gudde, Erwin G. February 23, 1889 Erwin G. Gudde (February 23, 1889, S?popol, Poland - 1969) was a member of the University of California, Berkeley faculty, Department of German, for many years. His many publications include Bigler's Chronicles of the West and California Place Names. |
![]() | Gustafsson, Lars May 17, 1936 Lars Gustafsson (born May 17, 1936) is a Swedish poet, novelist and scholar. He was born in Västerås, completed his secondary education at the Västerås gymnasium and continued to Uppsala University; he received his Licentiate degree in 1960 and was awarded his Ph.D. in Theoretical Philosophy in 1978. He lived in Austin, Texas until 2003, and has recently returned to Sweden. From 1983 he served as a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught Philosophy and Creative Writing, until May 2006, when he retired. In 1981 Gustafsson converted to Judaism. Gustafsson is one of the most prolific Swedish writers since August Strindberg. Since the late 1950s he has produced a voluminous flow of poetry, novels, short stories, critical essays, and editorials. He is also an example of a Swedish writer who has gained international recognition with literary awards such as the Prix International Charles Veillon des Essais in 1983, the Heinrich Steffens Preis in 1986, Una Vita per la Litteratura in 1989, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for poetry in 1994, and several others. He has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. His major works have been translated into fifteen languages, and Harold Bloom includes Gustafsson in The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994). John Updike offered high praise for Gustafsson's The Death of a Beekeeper in his collection of criticism, Hugging The Shore. The Death of a Beekeeper, written in 1978, is Gustafsson's most critically acclaimed and commercially successful novel. Eva Stenskaer has written that it ‘seems so effortless yet lyrical that only an artist at the height of his powers could've produced it.’ Its main theme is the agony of disease, as it follows Vesslan—a beekeeper who is dying of cancer—through entries he makes on notepads. The book's innovative structure allows Gustafsson to explore identity through its expression in a variety of forms: imagination, memory and even the mundane details of life. The book's central theme is revealed by the repeated motto of the protagonist, ‘We never give up. We begin anew.’ Gustafsson himself has described it as ‘A book about pain. It describes a journey into the center where pain rules—and pain can tolerate no rivals.’ In 2003, Gustafsson's novel series, The Cracks in the Wall, (Sprickorna i Muren), which explores the question of identity through the ‘cracks’ or ruptures in single personality, was made into a feature film, directed by Jimmy Karlsson. While the problem of identity has been the defining theme of Gustafsson's writings, his social criticism has often vexed the Swedish cultural elite. As a result he is seen as a controversial writer in Sweden rather than as one embraced by the establishment. When asked where he finds his inspiration, Gustafsson answered ‘I listen. I listen and I look. Creativity knows no rules. You can get an idea for a novel from a little something someone says, or just a face you see. A rabbi once told me that when God spoke to Moses in that bush, it wasn't in a thundering voice; it was in a very weak voice. You have to listen carefully for that voice. You have to be very sharp.’ In May 2009, Lars Gustafsson declared that he would vote for the Pirate Party in the upcoming elections for the European Parliament. |
![]() | Hjortsberg, William February 23, 1941 William 'Gatz' Hjortsberg (February 23, 1941 – April 22, 2017) was an American novelist and screenwriter known for writing the screenplay of the film Legend) is a novelist and screenwriter best known for writing the screenplays of the movies Legend and Angel Heart. His novel Falling Angel was the basis for the film Angel Heart (1987). |
![]() | Sobran, Joseph February 23, 1946 Michael Joseph Sobran Jr. (February 23, 1946 – September 30, 2010) was an American journalist, formerly with National Review magazine and a syndicated columnist. Pat Buchanan called Sobran "perhaps the finest columnist of our generation". |
![]() | Traven, B. February 23, 1882 B. Traven’s will, written on March 4, 1969, three weeks before his death in Mexico City, states that Traven Torsvan Croves was his real name, that he born in Chicago, Illinois on May 3, 1890, the son of Burton Torsvan and Dorothy Croves, and that he had used as noms de plume B. Traven and Hal Croves. While many of the facts of Traven’s life are still uncertain, it is known that he spent his youth in Germany, where he was an itinerant actor and later a revolutionary journalist known as Ret Marut who edited a radical anti-war magazine. After World War I he was a leader of the abortive revolution in Bavaria. He was sentenced to death, but escaped at the last minute. After a stint as seaman on tramp steamers, he jumped ship at Tampico, Mexico, in the early 20’s, settled in Mexico, and began recording his experiences in novels. Traven produced a considerable body of short and long fiction, some of which has yet to be published in the United States and most of which was originally published in Germany. His first book, THE DEATH SHIP, was brought out in 1926 by a German publisher; his best-known novel in the United States is THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE. By the 1960’s, Traven, a septuagenarian living quietly in Mexico City could look back on a writing career that had seen his books published in over thirty countries and read by millions. But when he died in 1969 he was still an obscure figure in the country of his birth. |
![]() | Tugendhat, Christopher February 23, 1937 Christopher Samuel Tugendhat, Baron Tugendhat (born 23 February 1937) is a British Conservative Party politician, business man, company director, journalist and author. He was a Member of Parliament from 1970–77, then a member of the European Commission, and in 1993 was appointed as a life peer, with a seat in the House of Lords, in which he remains active. |
![]() | Wood, Robin February 23, 1931 Robin Wood was a founding editor of CineAction! and author of numerous influential works, including new editions published by Wayne State University Press of Personal Views: Explorations in Film (2006), Howard Hawks (2006), Ingmar Bergman (2013), and Arthur Penn (2014). He was a professor emeritus at York University, Toronto, and the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Barry Keith Grant is a professor in the Department of Communication, Popular Culture, and Film at Brock University in Ontario, Canada. He is the author or editor of many books, including Shadows of Doubt: Negotiations of Masculinity in American Genre Films (Wayne State University Press, 2011) and Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, New and Expanded Edition (Wayne State University Press, 2014). |
![]() | Smedley, Agnes February 23, 1892 Agnes Smedley (February 23, 1892 – May 6, 1950) was an American journalist and writer, well known for her semi-autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth as well as for her sympathetic chronicling of the Communist forces in the Chinese Civil War. During World War I, she worked in the United States for the independence of India from the United Kingdom, receiving financial support from the government of Germany. Subsequently, she went to China, where she is suspected of acting as a spy for the Comintern. As the lover of Soviet super spy Richard Sorge in Shanghai in the early 1930s, she helped get him established for his final and greatest work as spymaster in Tokyo. She also worked on behalf of various causes including women's rights, birth control, and children's welfare. Smedley wrote six books, including a novel, reportage, and a biography of the Chinese general Zhu De, reported for newspapers such as New York Call, Frankfurter Zeitung and Manchester Guardian, and wrote for periodicals such as the Modern Review, New Masses, Asia, New Republic, and Nation. |
![]() | Garcia Calderon, Ventura February 23, 1886 Calderon Ventura Garcia-Rey (Paris, February 23, 1886 - Paris, October 27, 1959 ) was a Peruvian writer, diplomat, and critic. He lived most of his life in Paris and a good part of his work is written in French. He was, therefore, a bilingual writer. As such he developed under the modernist influence and belonged to the Generation of 900 or Arielista, which also included his brother Francisco García Calderón Rey, José de la Riva Agüero, José Gálvez Barrenechea, and Víctor Andrés Belaunde, among others. He stood out in various literary genres, but most especially in the short story, his most representative work being his collection entitled The Vengeance of the Condor. His poetry and chronicles are also notable. But more extensive was his work as a critic and anthologist of the literature of his country and of Latin America. |
![]() | Adnan, Etel February 24, 1925 Etel Adnan was born in 1925 and raised in Beirut, Lebanon. Her mother was a Greek from Smyrna, her father, a high ranking Ottoman officer born in Damascus. In Lebanon, she was educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, Paris. In January 1955 she went to the United States to pursue post-graduate studies in philosophy at U.C. Berkeley, and Harvard. From 1958 to 1972, she taught philosophy at Dominican College of San Rafael, California. Based on her feelings of connection to, and solidarity with the Algerian war of independence, she began to resist the political implications of writing in French and shifted the focus of her creative expression to visual art. She became a painter. But it was with her participation in the poets’ movement against the war in Vietnam that she began to write poems and became, in her words, an American poet. In 1972, she moved back to Beirut and worked as cultural editor for two daily newspapers—first for Al Safa, then for L’Orient le Jour. She stayed in Lebanon until 1976. In 1977, her novel Sitt Marie-Rose was published in Paris, and won the France-Pays Arabes award. This novel has been translated into more than 10 languages, and was to have an immense influence, becoming a classic of War Literature. In 1977, Adnan re-established herself in California, making Sausalito her home, with frequent stays in Paris. In the late seventies, she wrote texts for two documentaries made by Jocelyne Saab, on the civil war in Lebanon, which were shown on French television as well as in Europe and Japan. |
![]() | Allen, Grant February 24, 1848 Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen (February 24, 1848 – October 25, 1899) was a Canadian science writer and novelist, and a successful upholder of the theory of evolution |
![]() | Blonsky, Marshall February 24, 1938 Marshall Blonsky, who has taught critical theory at Vassar College, is now a professor at New York University and the New School for Social Research. He is a frequent contributor to Harper's, The Washington Post Outlook, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and other publications. |
![]() | Cofer, Judith Ortiz February 24, 1952 Judith Ortiz Cofer (February 24, 1952 – December 30, 2016) was a Puerto Rican American author. Her critically acclaimed and award-winning work spans a range of literary genres including poetry, short stories, autobiography, essays, and young-adult fiction. Ortiz Cofer was the Emeritus Regents' and Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, where she taught undergraduate and graduate creative writing workshops for 26 years. In 2010, Ortiz Cofer was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, and in 2013, she won the University's 2014 Southeastern Conference Faculty Achievement Award. Ortiz Cofer hailed from a family of story tellers and drew heavily from her personal experiences as a Puerto Rican American woman. In her work, Ortiz Cofer brings a poetic perspective to the intersection of memory and imagination. Writing in diverse genres, she investigated women issues, Latino culture, and the American South. Ortiz Cofer's work weaves together private life and public space through intimate portrayals of family relationships and rich descriptions of place. Her manuscripts and papers are currently housed at the University of Georgia's Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library. |
![]() | Cruz, Angie February 24, 1972 Angie Cruz is an American novelist. Cruz was born in Washington Heights, New York City. She is of Dominican descent, and often traveled back and forth between New York City and the Dominican Republic while growing up. She is currently a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Cruz treats themes of home, displacement, and working class life in her work. She has published two novels and is now working on a screenplay for a movie version of one of them, Soledad. |
![]() | Freedman, Ralph February 24, 1920 Ralph Freedman was born in Hamburg, Germany, and emigrated to the United States in 1940. After serving in the United States Army during World War II, he was graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle. He holds a master’s degree in philosophy from Brown University and a doctorate in comparative literature from Yale. Widely recognized as an important Hesse scholar he has taught at the University of Iowa and, since 1965, at Princeton. He has also been a visiting professor at a number of universities, including the University of Wisconsin, SUNY at Buffalo, and the University of Southern California. Freedman has studied Hesse’s manuscripts on deposit in Germany and Switzerland for several years and has traveled throughout the region of Hesse’s homelands. In addition to numerous articles and reviews, he is the author of a novel, DIVIDED, and a literary study, THE LYRICIAL NOVEL: STUDIES IN HERMANN HESSE, ANDRÉ GIDE, AND VIRGINIA WOOLF. He has also edited and contributed to a volume of essays on Virginia Woolf, published in 1979. |
![]() | Harrington, Michael February 24, 1928 Edward Michael ‘Mike’ Harrington (February 24, 1928 - July 31, 1989) was an American democratic socialist, writer, political activist, professor of political science, radio commentator and founder of the Democratic Socialists of America. He was the most well-known socialist in the United States during his lifetime. In the 1970s he coined the term neoconservatism. |
![]() | Kees, Weldon February 24, 1914 Harry Weldon Kees (February 24, 1914 - July 18, 1955) was an American poet, painter, critic, novelist, and short story writer. According to the critic Ian Hamilton, though Kees functioned as a painter, photographer, film-maker and musician it was poetry that really mattered to him. ‘In this field’, however, ‘ he was never greatly honoured in his lifetime. This is a pity because, at his best, Kees has a lot to offer. There is an offputting bleakness in his work, but there is also a stoical-sardonic vein that can be more attractively engaging than, perhaps, it means to be. There is also an impressively quick eye for social detail. And the character called 'Robinson', a sort of professional-class Prufrock, has an almost loveable forbearance. Robinson takes life as it comes but this does not mean that he enjoys what comes, or wants much more of it.’ Kees began publishing in the 1930s and one reason for his lack of acclaim may have been that his poems did not fit with any of the then prevailing vogues. ‘ Kees was always too blackly self-absorbed to throw himself into any movement for political or social change.’ Kees was born in Beatrice, Nebraska, and educated at Doane College, the University of Missouri and the University of Nebraska, graduating in 1935. Kees wrote for Federal Writers' Project in Lincoln, Nebraska. He moved to Denver and a job as librarian in 1937, where he married. He was in New York from 1943 to 1950, heavily involved in literary journalism. His first book of poems The Last Man appeared in 1943. In New York City he began attending parties with literary critics like Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling, but he never felt comfortable in that society. Then he began to paint, and some of his works hung alongside Picasso in an exhibition at the Whitney. Tired of New York, he moved to San Francisco in 1950, where he began making experimental films, writing the music for short films made by other filmmakers, and got involved with the Beat scene. On July 19, 1955, Kees's Plymouth Savoy was found on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge with the keys in the ignition. He had told a friend that he wanted, like Ambrose Bierce, to start a new life in Mexico. When his friends went to search his apartment, all they found were the cat he had named Lonesome and a pair of red socks in the sink. His sleeping bag and savings account book were missing. He left no note. No one is sure if Weldon Kees jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge that day or if he went to Mexico, although suicide is presumed. Before he disappeared, Kees quoted Rilke to friend Michael Grieg, ominously saying that sometimes a person needs to change his life completely. |
![]() | Levins Morales, Aurora February 24, 1954 Aurora Levins Morales (born February 24, 1954) is author of Getting Home Alive (Firebrand, 1986) and Medicine Stories: History, Culture, and the Politics of Integrity (South End Press, 1998). A Jewish "red diaper baby" from the mountains of Puerto Rico, Morales writes lucidly about the complexities of social identity. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. |
![]() | MacCormack, Sabine February 24, 1941 Sabine MacCormack (1941–2012) was a German-American historian of Late Antiquity and Colonial Latin America. |
![]() | Maddox, Brenda February 24, 1932 Brenda Maddox is a writer and journalist who lives in London. Her books include Beyond Babel: New Directions in Communications, The Half-Parent (A Study of Stepfamilies), and Who Afraid of Elizabeth Taylor? She has writ- ten extensively on women and marriage, and also, when home affairs editor of The Economist, on Ireland. |
![]() | Mazrui, Ali A. February 24, 1933 Ali Al'amin Mazrui (24 February 1933 – 12 October 2014), was an academic professor, and political writer on African and Islamic studies and North-South relations. He was born in Mombasa, Kenya. His positions included Director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York, and Director of the Center for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan. He produced the television documentary series The Africans: A Triple Heritage. |
![]() | Taeko, Kono February 24, 1926 Taeko K?no (February 24, 1926 – January 29, 2015) is one of the most important Japanese women writers of the second half of the twentieth century, someone whose influence on contemporary Japanese women writers is acknowledged to be immeasurable. K?no is one of a generation of remarkable women writers who made an appearance in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s and who include Kurahashi Yumiko, Mori Mari, Setouchi Harumi, and Takahashi Takako (Japanese name order). She also established a reputation for herself as an acerbic essayist, a playwright and a literary critic. By the end of her life she was a leading presence in Japan's literary establishment, one of the first women writers to serve on the Akutagawa Literary Prize committee. Oe Kenzaburo, Japan's Nobel Laureate, described her as the most "lucidly intelligent" woman writers writing in Japan, and the US critic and academic Masao Miyoshi identified her as among the most "critically alert and historically intelligent." US critic and academic Davinder Bhowmik assesses her as …one of the truly original voices of the twentieth century, beyond questions of gender or even nationality. A writer who deals with some quite dark themes, K?no is known to readers in English through the collection of short stories Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories (New Directions, 1996), which draws together her best writing from the 1960s. K?no Taeko was born February 24, 1926 in Osaka, Japan to K?no Tameji and Yone; her father Tameji operated a business specialising in mountain produce. As a child she suffered from poor health. When she was 15, the Pacific War broke out and her teenage years were dominated by service as a student worker sewing military uniforms and work in a munitions factory.After the war, she finished her economics degree at Women’s University (currently Osaka Prefecture University), graduating in 1947. Kono has written of the new sense of freedom and the high hopes she had after the war. Determined to make a career for herself as a writer, she moved to Tokyo, a city full of literary activities and literary personae, joined a literary group led by Niwa Fumio, and threw herself into writing, at the same time as working full-time. After nearly a decade of trying, during which she suffered several setbacks in her health, including two bouts of tuberculosis, in 1961 the literary magazine Shinch?sha began publishing her stories, and in 1962 she was awarded Shinch?sha's "D?jin zasshi" ("Coterie Magazine") award for her story "Y?ji-gari" ("Toddler Hunting". In 1963 her short story "Kani" (Crabs) (?) won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize (her story "Yuki" [Snow] had been nominated in 1962). After this K?no began to produce a stream of remarkable short fiction. In 1965 she married the painter Yasushi Ichikawa. In 1967 she was awarded the Women's Literary Prize for Saigo no toki (Final Moments), in 1968 the Yomiuri Prize for "A Sudden Voice", and in 1980 she won the Tanizaki Prize for "A Year-long Pastoral". She received a literary prize from the Japanese Art Academy in 1984 and the Noma Literary Prize in 1991 for her novel Miiratori ry?kitan (Mummy-Hunting for the Bizarre, 1990). K?no's short story "Hone no niku" (Bone Meat) was published in the 1977 anthology Contemporary Japanese Literature (ed. Howard Hibbett), which stimulated interest in her writing amongst readers in English. A trickle of translations into English followed in a variety of anthologies of Japanese women's writing in translation, culminating in the publication of Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories in 1996. K?no continued to write all her life, and was still writing when she died in hospital in January 2015. In 2014 she was awarded a Bunka Kunsh?, or Order of Culture, which is presented by the Emperor to distinguished artists, |