Bookish birthdays for the week of December 15, 2024

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

Betty Smith (December 15, 1896): In addition to writing the beloved and bestselling coming-of-age novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Smith was an acclaimed playwright, receiving the Rockefeller Fellowship and the Dramatists Guild Fellowship.

Edna O’Brien (December 15, 1930): O’Brien caught attention with her first novel, The Country Girls, which launched a trilogy as well as a career of fiction, short stories, plays, screenplays, and nonfiction.

Jane Austen (December 16, 1775): Austen’s six novels, including most famously Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, set a new tone for the genre by depicting ordinary people’s everyday lives.

Arthur C. Clarke (December 16, 1917): Clarke’s short story “The Sentinel” became first the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and then a full-length book; he’s also known for the novel Childhood’s End and short stories “The Nine Billion Names of God” and “The Star.”

Philip K. Dick (December 16, 1928): Dick’s fame beyond sci-fi circles mostly came posthumously, though The Man in the High Castle (later a TV show) did receive a Hugo Award, and his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was adapted into the movie Blade Runner the same year he died.

Ford Madox Ford (December 17, 1873): In the years before and after writing his masterpiece, The Good Soldier, Ford also founded the English Review and edited the Transatlantic Review, both of which published many of the time’s most famous authors.

Erskine Caldwell (December 17, 1903): Caldwell’s literary fame rests on two novels that describe poverty and degeneracy in the South: Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre.

Saki (December 18, 1870): Saki’s short stories “Tobermory,” “The Open Window,” “Sredni Vashtar,” “Laura,” and “The Schartz-Metterklume Method” are frequent entries in anthologies.

Kate Atkinson (December 20, 1951): Atkinson’s Life After Life was nominated for and won several awards; she is also the author of the bestselling Jackson Brodie novels.

Sandra Cisneros (December 20, 1954): Cisneros received a National Medal of the Arts for her lifetime of work, including poetry, short stories, and a novel; she is most famous for her bestseller The House on Mango Street, which has been translated into over twenty languages.

Rebecca West (December 21, 1892): West reported on the Nürnberg trials of Nazi war criminals, which became A Train of Powder, and wrote about the Balkans in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon; she also wrote several novels, including The Return of the Soldier and The Fountain Overflows.