Posted on April 28, 2024 at 8:00 AM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek
Here are the literary birthdays to celebrate over the week of April 28, 2024.
Harper Lee (April 28, 1926): Lee’s first novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide.
Terry Pratchett (April 28, 1948): Powered by his Discworld series, Pratchett has sold over 35 million books worldwide translated into over thirty languages.
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.
Categories: Today in Books