Bookish birthdays for the week of April 30, 2023

Here are the literary birthdays to celebrate over the week of April 30, 2023.

Annie Dillard (April 30, 1945). Dillard won both a Pulitzer Prize (for her essay collection Pilgrim at Tinker Creek) and a National Humanities Medal.

Joseph Heller (May 1, 1923). Heller’s novel Catch-22 actually spawned the phrase we use today to describe a no-win situation, rather than the other way around.

Benjamin Spock (May 2, 1903). Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, as the go-to manual for child-rearing during the baby boom, was blamed for the Vietnam War protests and counterculture revolution of the 1960s.

Niccolò Machiavelli (May 3, 1469). Machiavelli wrote his best-known work, The Prince, in 1513, but it wasn’t published until 1532, five years after his death.

Karl Marx (May 5, 1818): Only the first volume of Das Kapital, the “Bible of the working class,” was finished and published in Marx’s lifetime; the second and third volumes were edited and published by Friedrich Engels, his co-author of “The Communist Manifesto.”