Bookish birthdays for the week of June 29, 2025

Here are the literary birthdays to celebrate over the week of June 29, 2025.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery (June 29, 1900): Saint-Exupery is, of course, beloved for The Little Prince — one of the bestselling books of all time — but his novel Night Flight and memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars, both received literary awards.

George Sand (July 1, 1804): Sand’s novel Indiana — about a woman who abandons a conventional but unhappy marriage for love — brought her immediate fame, while her so-called “rustic” novels like The Devil’s Pool, set in the countryside where she grew up, cemented her legacy.

Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877): Hesse, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, is best known in English for the poetic novel Siddhartha.

Tom Stoppard (July 2, 1937): Stoppard has won the Tony Award for several plays, including Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Thing, Travesties, and the trilogy The Coast of Utopia.

Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883): While Kafka’s most famous work, “The Metamorphosis,” was published during his lifetime, much of his writing was released posthumously by his literary executor, who ignored Kafka’s instructions to burn the papers upon his death.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804): Hawthorne’s emotions about his ancestor William Hathorne, a key player in the Salem witchcraft trials, can be clearly seen in the novels for which he earned the most acclaim, The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables (and in the fact that the author changed the spelling of his last name).