Bookish birthdays for the week of November 9, 2025

Here are the literary birthdays to celebrate over the week of November 9, 2025.

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).

Neil Gaiman (November 10, 1960): Gaiman’s novels, graphic novels, comic books, and other fiction have won numerous honors, including the Newbery and Carnegie medals and the Hugo and Nebula awards; among his most famous and beloved works are American Gods, Coraline, and the Sandman series.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (November 11, 1821): Dostoevsky’s novels — including Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov — are considered some of the best ever written, and his writing is also noted for accurately predicting how Russian revolutionaries would behave in power. 

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (November 11, 1922): Vonnegut broke into the literary scene with the still-popular Cat’s Cradle (which he submitted to the University of Chicago as a thesis, earning him a master’s in anthropology) and cemented his fame with Slaughterhouse-Five.

Robert Louis Stevenson (November 13, 1850): Stevenson is best known for The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Treasure Island, which he invented as a game for his stepson.