Bookish birthdays for the week of November 8, 2020

Here are the literary birthdays to celebrate over the week of November 8, 2020.

Bram Stoker (November 8, 1847): Stoker wrote several other novels after Dracula, which itself was only his second work of fiction, but none gained the fame or praise of the classic vampire novel.

Margaret Mitchell (November 8, 1900): Gone With the Wind received both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, and Mitchell’s efforts to fight unauthorized copies of her book overseas led Congress to enact better copyright protections for authors.

Kazuo Ishiguro (November 8, 1954): Among Ishiguro’s best-known works are The Remains of the Day (for which he received the Booker Prize) and Never Let Me Go; he also received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Ivan Turgenev (November 9, 1818): Turgenev, a novelist, poet, and playwright, remains most famous today for his book Fathers and Sons.

Anne Sexton (November 9, 1928): Sexton received a Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection Live or Die.

Carl Sagan (November 9, 1934): Sagan, an astronomer, found literary fame first with The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective, then later with the bestselling Cosmos and the novel Contact (adapted into a hit movie).

Neil Gaiman (November 10, 1960): Gaiman’s novels, graphic novels, comic books, and other fiction have won numerous honors, including the Newbery and Carnegie medals and the Hugo and Nebula awards; among his most famous and beloved works are American Gods, Coraline, and the Sandman series.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (November 11, 1821): Dostoevsky’s novels — including Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov — are considered some of the best ever written, and his writing is also noted for accurately predicting how Russian revolutionaries would behave in power. 

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (November 11, 1922): Vonnegut broke into the literary scene with the still-popular Cat’s Cradle (which he submitted to the University of Chicago as a thesis, earning him a master’s in anthropology) and cemented his fame with Slaughterhouse-Five.

Robert Louis Stevenson (November 13, 1850): Stevenson is best known for The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Treasure Island, which he invented as a game for his stepson.

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