Bookish birthdays for the week of March 2, 2025

Here are the literary birthdays to celebrate over the week of March 2, 2025.

Tom Wolfe (March 2, 1931): Wolfe’s essay collection The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby helped launch the New Journalism movement, while The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test became a counterculture classic; he also wrote novels including The Bonfire of the Vanities.

John Irving (March 2, 1942): Irving is best known for The World According to Garp, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and The Cider House Rules; the latter two also became movies.

Dr. Seuss (March 2, 1904): Seuss's second book, Horton Hatches the Egg, launched a career full of bestsellers, including The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, The Lorax, and many more; some reports credit him with over 600 million books sold worldwide.

Khaled Hosseini (March 4, 1965): Among Hosseini's highly acclaimed novels are The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and And the Mountains Echoed, which together have been published in over seventy countries and sold more than 40 million copies worldwide.

Dav Pilkey (March 4, 1966): Pilkey is best known for his Captain Underpants series and the Dog Man graphic novels, but he also received a Caldecott Honor for his standalone book The Paperboy. 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (March 6, 1806): Browning was the most celebrated female poet of her time; her most enduring poetic legacy is the sonnet “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”

Gabriel García Márquez (March 6, 1928): Marquez is considered among the best writers of the twentieth century; among his most acclaimed works are One Hundred Years of Solitude (which contributed to his Nobel Prize win) and Love in the Time of Cholera.

Bret Easton Ellis (March 7, 1964): Ellis broke onto the literary scene with his first novel, Less Than Zero, and is also well known for American Psycho and The Rules of Attraction, both of which were adapted into movies.

Jeffrey Eugenides (March 8, 1960): Among Eugenides’s most famous works are Middlesex (which won the Pulitzer Prize); The Marriage Plot (which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award); and The Virgin Suicides (which was adapted into a successful movie).