Bookish birthdays for the week of September 26, 2021

Here are the literary birthdays to celebrate over the week of September 26, 2021:

TS Eliot (September 26, 1888): Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is considered the first Modernist masterpiece in English; he further cemented his reputation with such collections as The Waste Land and Four Quartets.

Louis Auchincloss (September 27, 1917): Auchincloss spent literally half a century writing novels (his final being The Headmaster’s Dilemma in 2007), short stories, and nonfiction (including biographies of Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt).

Irvine Welsh (September 27, 1958): Welsh is best known for Trainspotting, which became a hit film a few years after it was rejected for the Booker Prize shortlist; among his other works are Ecstasy, which was the first paperback original to go straight to number one on the Sunday Times bestseller list, and Filth.

Miguel de Cervantes (September 29, 1547): Cervantes was a writer, playwright, and poet; his best-known and most influential work, Don Quixote, has been translated into sixty languages and inspired the word “quixotic.”

Truman Capote (September 30, 1924): Capote’s most popular works, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood, both inspired movies of the same name.

Elie Wiesel (September 30, 1928): Wiesel’s Night, a spiritual memoir about surviving Auschwitz, is often considered the most powerful piece of Holocaust literature.

Ta-Nehisi Coates (September 30, 1975): Coates has written several bestsellers, including the National Book Award-winning Between The World And Me, and The Water Dancer. 

Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879): Stevens received both a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens; among his best-known poems is “The Idea of Order in Key West.”  

Graham Greene (October 2, 1904): Thanks to Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, and many others, Greene was one of the most widely read British novelists of the twentieth century.

Birthdays sourced from Calendar of Literary Facts; biographical information sourced from Encyclopedia Britannica, the Poetry Foundation, and author websites. Did we miss someone? Email and let us know!