Bookish birthdays for the week of August 10, 2025

Here are the literary birthdays to celebrate over the week of August 10, 2025.

Dorothy B. Hughes (August 10, 1904): Hughes’s hardboiled novels The Fallen Sparrow, Ride the Pink Horse, and In a Lonely Place all became films, and she later went on to become an Edgar Award-winning literary critic.

Alex Haley (August 11, 1921): Haley became famous for The Autobiography of Malcolm X and built upon his reputation with Roots: The Saga of an American Family, which won a Pulitzer Prize.

Joanna Cole (August 11, 1944): Cole began writing the Magic School Bus series for children in the 1980s and continued nearly until her 2020 death; the books have sold tens of millions of copies in that time.

Danielle Steel (August 14, 1947): Every single one of Steel’s 170-plus books has been a bestseller, including the recent Lost and Found and His Father’s Footsteps. 

Walter Scott (August 15, 1771): Scott is considered the creator of the historical novel; his most famous such works are Rob Roy and Ivanhoe.

Stieg Larsson (August 15, 1954): Larsson’s Millennium trilogy — comprising The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest — has been translated into thirty languages and sold tens of million copies; other writers have continued the series, which he imagined as ten volumes, over the objection of his longtime romantic partner.

Georgette Heyer (August 16, 1902): Heyer is seen as the queen of Regency romances; she published over fifty novels during her lifetime, including The Black Moth, Friday’s Child, The Grand Sophy, and Frederica, and was selling a million copies per year in Britain alone at the time of her death. 

Charles Bukowski (August 16, 1920): Bukowski’s work — including the poetry collection Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame and the novel Ham on Rye — is noted for how brutally realistic and yet comical it is.