Bookish birthdays for the week of July 19, 2026

Here are the literary birthdays to celebrate over the week of July 19, 2026.

Petrarch (July 20, 1304): Petrarch was considered among the greatest scholar of his age and is easily remembered for his poetry addressed to his beloved Laura, which itself heavily influenced great minds — from all disciplines — during the Renaissance.

Cormac McCarthy (July 20, 1933): McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is considered his masterpiece, though All the Pretty Horses won the National Book Award and The Road received a Pulitzer Prize; the latter two, along with No Country for Old Men, have become acclaimed movies as well.

Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899): Hemingway received the Pulitzer Prize in literature for The Old Man and the Sea and is also critically praised for For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms, and The Sun Also Rises.

S.E. Hinton (July 22, 1948): Hinton's best-known work, The Outsiders, was published when she herself was just a teenager; it's credited with modernizing the genre of young-adult literature.

Raymond Chandler (July 23, 1888): Two of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe detective novels became film noir classics: Farewell, My Lovely (distributed as Murder, My Sweet) and The Big Sleep.

Alexandre Dumas père (July 24, 1802): Dumas was a popular dramatist before he became famous — in his time and in the long term — for The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo.