Bookish birthdays for the week of September 22, 2024

Here are the literary birthdays to celebrate over the week of September 22, 2024.

Rosamunde Pilcher (September 22, 1924): Pilcher’s breakthrough novel — The Shell Seekers — was her fourteenth book; it spent nearly a year on bestseller lists, sold more than 10 million copies, and was adapted for television.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896): This Side of Paradise paved the way for Fitzgerald’s commercial success — in magazine writing — which in turn allowed him to write novels that earned more acclaim after his death: The Great Gatsby and Tender Is The Night.

William Faulkner (September 25, 1897): Faulkner was a pioneer in the stream-of-consciousness technique and received the Nobel Prize for Literature for his contributions to the American novel, with such works as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom! being among his best-known.

Shel Silverstein (September 25, 1930): Silverstein was acclaimed for his poetry collections, such as A Light in the Attic and Where the Sidewalk Ends, that included a realistic view of the world for kids, as well as his prose works like The Giving Tree.

Francine du Plessix Gray (September 25, 1930): Gray is best known for her semi-autobiographical novel Lovers and Tyrants; she continued to earn acclaim as a writer and literary critic for the next few decades, including her win of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Them: A Memoir of Parents.

TS Eliot (September 26, 1888): Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is considered the first Modernist masterpiece in English; he further cemented his reputation with such collections as The Waste Land and Four Quartets.

Jane Smiley (September 26, 1949): Smiley’s A Thousand Acres grabbed attention from all corners, netting the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a movie deal.

Louis Auchincloss (September 27, 1917): Auchincloss spent literally half a century writing novels (his final being The Headmaster’s Dilemma in 2007), short stories, and nonfiction (including biographies of Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt).

Irvine Welsh (September 27, 1958): Welsh is best known for Trainspotting, which became a hit film a few years after it was rejected for the Booker Prize shortlist; among his other works are Ecstasy, which was the first paperback original to go straight to number one on the Sunday Times bestseller list, and Filth.