Bookish birthdays for the week of September 15, 2024

Here are the literary birthdays to celebrate over the week of September 15, 2024.

Agatha Christie (September 15, 1890): More than 100 million copies of Christie’s works — seventy-five novels and over a dozen short-story collections — have been sold, making her the bestselling novelist of all time and most translated writer of all time; some of her most famous books include And Then There Were None, Murder on the Orient Express, and The ABC Murders.

Chimamanda Adichie (September 15, 1977): Adichie has received critical and popular acclaim for her fiction (such as Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah), her nonfiction (We Should All Be Feminists), and her public speaking (the TED talk “The Danger of A Single Story”).

Henry Louis Gates Jr. (September 16, 1950): Gates has written or co-written over twenty books, including the bestselling Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, and was among the first class awarded genius grants from the MacArthur Foundation.

William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883): Williams is remembered most for his poetry (“Lighthearted William,” “By the Road to the Contagious Hospital,” and “Red Wheelbarrow”), but he also produced several novels, short stories, a play, and an autobiography.

Ken Kesey (September 17, 1935): Kesey is famous both for his novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and for his starring role in his friend Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Samuel Johnson (September 18, 1709): Johnson too has cemented his fame both by writing (notably A Dictionary of the English Language and The Lives of the Poets) and by serving as subject of another author’s work (James Boswell’s Life of Johnson).

William Golding (September 19, 1911): Golding’s debut novel, Lord of the Flies, is by far his best-known one, but it’s not the only noteworthy one — Rites of Passage, the first installment of his Sea Trilogy, won the Booker Prize, and all three novels were  adapted into a miniseries.

N.K. Jemisin (September 19, 1972): Jemisin became the first Black author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel with The Fifth Season and went on to win the award two more consecutive times for the subsequent novels in her Broken Earth trilogy; her novel The Stone Sky also won a Nebula Award for Best Novel.

George R.R. Martin (September 20, 1948): Martin has won six Locus Awards for work including his fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, upon which the TV series Game of Thrones was based.

H.G. Wells (September 21, 1866): Wells earned the reputation as a prophet thanks to his early and enduring sci-fi novels such as The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds.

Fannie Flagg (September 21, 1941): Flagg won screenwriting awards for her adaptation of her hit novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe and is also beloved for Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!, Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man, and several other books.

Stephen King (September 21, 1947): Though his oeuvre includes some crime fiction and nonfiction, King’s fame and reputation rest on his many horror novels, including but not limited to Carrie, It, Dolores Claiborne, The Shining, The Dark Tower, Pet Sematary, and more.