Bookish birthdays for the week of December 8, 2024

Here are the literary birthdays to celebrate over the week of December 8, 2024.

John Milton (December 9, 1608): Milton, famous for the epic poem Paradise Lost, is considered by many to be the second-most significant English author.

Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830): Dickinson is among the greatest American poets, known for such poems as “Because I could not stop for Death,”  “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” and “A Bird, came down the Walk.”

Clarice Lispector (December 10, 1920): Lispector — author of Near to the Wild Heart, The Hour of the Star, The Passion According to G.H., and The Stream of Life — is considered to be among both Brazil’s most important literary figures and the greatest women writers of the twentieth century.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (December 11, 1918): Solzhenitsyn is famous for his novels One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Gulag Archipelago, the publication of which resulted in the loss of his Russian citizenship.

Grace Paley (December 11, 1922): Paley is considered to be among the seminal American short-story writers of the twentieth century; among her collections are The Little Disturbances of Man and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.

Gustave Flaubert (December 12, 1821): Flaubert’s debut novel — Madame Bovary — is by far his most famous work, though he’s credited with leading the realist school of French literature.

Shirley Jackson (December 14, 1919): Jackson is best known for her short story “The Lottery,” which drew a record amount of mail for the New Yorker (where it appeared), and the novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.