Newswire
Posted on March 24, 2024 at 8:00 AM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek
Here are the literary birthdays to celebrate over the week of March 24, 2024.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (March 24, 1919): Ferlinghetti was one of the founders of the Beat movement, and his poetry collection A Coney Island of the Mind was the best-selling book by a living American poet during the second half of the twentieth century.
Flannery O’Connor (March 25, 1925): O’Connor is known as a master of short stories, including her breakthrough collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and Other Stories and the National Book Award winner The Complete Stories.
Tennessee Williams (March 26, 1914): Williams won the Pulitzer Prize for the plays A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and is also celebrated for The Glass Menagerie and The Night of the Iguana.
Erica Jong (March 26, 1942): Jong rose to fame with her first novel, Fear of Flying, and has since published more than twenty-five books (a mix of fiction and nonfiction) in forty-five languages.
Nelson Algren (March 28, 1909): Algren is best known for The Man with the Golden Arm, which received the first National Book Award for fiction, and A Walk on the Wild Side; both books also became movies.
Paul Verlaine (March 30, 1844): Verlaine was an innovator in the art of modern word-music, marking a transition from the Romantic poets to the Symbolists; his poem Chanson d'automne endures to this day, partly because it was used as a code message during World War II.
Categories: Today in Books