Bookish birthdays for the week of November 3, 2024

Here are the literary birthdays to celebrate over the week of November 3, 2024.

William Cullen Bryant (November 3, 1794): Bryant’s poem “Thanatopsis” brought not just fame to its author, but also legitimacy to American poetry abroad.  

André Malraux (November 3, 1901): Malraux is best known internationally for La Condition Humaine (Man’s Fate) and was a significant literary influence on another famous French writer, Albert Camus.

Terrence McNally (November 3, 1939): The playwright — a four-time Tony Award winner, an Emmy winner, and recipient of the 2019 Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre — was celebrated for his adaptations of E.L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime and Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman.

Will Rogers (November 4, 1879): Rogers gained fame for his performances, but he also wrote a weekly column for the Saturday Evening Post and had two bestselling books: The Cowboy Philosopher on Prohibition and There’s Not a Bathing Suit in Russia.

Colson Whitehead (November 6, 1969): Whitehead’s novels have been nominated for — and won — many top literary awards, including consecutive Pulitzers for fiction for The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys.

Albert Camus (November 7, 1913): Camus was just forty-four when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature; highlights of his career at that point included L’Étranger (The Stranger) and La Chute (The Fall).

Bram Stoker (November 8, 1847): Stoker wrote several other novels after Dracula, which itself was only his second work of fiction, but none gained the fame or praise of the classic vampire novel.

Margaret Mitchell (November 8, 1900): Gone With the Wind received both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, and Mitchell’s efforts to fight unauthorized copies of her book overseas led Congress to enact better copyright protections for authors.

Kazuo Ishiguro (November 8, 1954): Among Ishiguro’s best-known works are The Remains of the Day (for which he received the Booker Prize) and Never Let Me Go; he also received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Ivan Turgenev (November 9, 1818): Turgenev, a novelist, poet, and playwright, remains most famous today for his book Fathers and Sons.

Anne Sexton (November 9, 1928): Sexton received a Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection Live or Die.

Carl Sagan (November 9, 1934): Sagan, an astronomer, found literary fame first with The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective, then later with the bestselling Cosmos and the novel Contact (adapted into a hit movie).