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Posted on June 12, 2022 at 8:00 AM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek
Here are the literary birthdays to celebrate over the week of June 12, 2022.
Anne Frank (June 12, 1929): Frank rewrote her diaries into a running story, upon the appeal of the Dutch government, but she also wrote short stories and began a novel while hiding from the Nazis.
William Butler Yeats (June 13, 1865): Unlike any other poet in history, Yeats’s greatest contributions to the art — including “The Second Coming” — came after he turned fifty years old.
Dorothy L. Sayers (June 13, 1893): Sayers, author of the Lord Peter Wimsey detective stories, was among the first women to graduate from the University of Oxford.
Harriet Beecher Stowe (June 14, 1811): Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, cited as among the final motivating factors of the Civil War, is widely considered among the most influential novels in history; though she did write other novels, essays, and poetry, none of those gained her nearly the acclaim.
Joyce Carol Oates (June 16, 1938): Oates has been extremely prolific, producing not just novels (such as We Were the Mulvaneys and the National Book Award-winning them) but also short-story collections, plays, essays poetry, and literary criticism, under her own name and two other pseudonyms (Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly).
John Hersey (June 17, 1914): Before writing his acclaimed Hiroshima and The Wall, Hersey served as a foreign correspondent for Time and Life magazines.
Categories: Today in Books