James Salter Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to James Salter, born June 10, 1925.

James Arnold Horowitz, better known as James Salter, his pen name and later-adopted legal name, was an American novelist and short-story writer. Originally a career officer and pilot in the United States Air Force, he resigned from the military in 1957 following the successful publication of his first novel, The Hunters.

After a brief career in film writing and film directing, in 1979 Salter published the novel Solo Faces. He won numerous literary awards for his works, including belated recognition of works originally criticized at the time of their publication.

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Gregory Maguire Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Gregory Maguire, born June 9, 1954.

Gregory Maguire  is an American novelist. He is the author of Wicked, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and several dozen other novels for adults and children. Many of Maguire’s adult novels are inspired by classic children’s stories. Maguire published his first novel, The Lightning Time, in 1978. Wicked, published in 1995, was his first novel for adults. It was adapted into a popular Broadway musical in 2003.

Maguire is married to American painter Andy Newman, in one of the first same-sex marriages performed in the state of Massachusetts. They have three children.

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George Lamming Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to George Lamming, born June 8, 1927.

George William Lamming was a Barbadian novelist, essayist, and poet. He first won critical acclaim for In the Castle of My Skin, his 1953 debut novel. He also held academic posts, including as a distinguished visiting professor at Duke University and a visiting professor in the Africana Studies Department of Brown University, and lectured extensively worldwide.

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Elif Batuman Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Elif Batuman, born June 7, 1977.

Elif Batuman is an American author, academic, and journalist. She is the author of three books: a memoir, The Possessed, and the novels The Idiot, which was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Either/Or. Batuman is a staff writer for The New Yorker.

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Alexander Pushkin Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Alexander Pushkin, born June 6, 1799.

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was a Russian poet, playwright, and novelist of the Romantic era. He is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet, as well as the founder of modern Russian literature.

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Chuck Klosterman Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Chuck Klosterman, born June 5, 1972.

Charles John Klosterman is an American author and essayist whose work focuses on American popular culture. He has been a columnist for Esquire and ESPN.com and wrote “The Ethicist” column for The New York Times Magazine. Klosterman is the author of twelve books, including two novels and the essay collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. He was awarded the ASCAP Deems Taylor award for music criticism in 2002.

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Jacques Roumain Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Jacques Roumain, born June 4, 1907.

Jacques Roumain was a Haitian writer, politician, and advocate of Marxism. He is considered one of the most prominent figures in Haitian literature. Poet Langston Hughes, an African-American, translated some of Roumain’s works, including Gouverneurs de la Rosée (Masters of the Dew). It was also adapted to film.

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Allen Ginsberg Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Allen Ginsberg, born June 3, 1926.

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions.

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Barbara Pym Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Barbara Pym, born June 2, 1913.

Barbara Mary Crampton Pym was an English novelist. In the 1950s she published a series of social comedies, of which the best known are Excellent Women and A Glass of Blessings. In 1977 her career was revived when the critic Lord David Cecil and the poet Philip Larkin both nominated her as the most underrated writer of the century. Her novel Quartet in Autumn was nominated for the Booker Prize that year, and she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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Colleen McCullough Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Colleen McCullough, born June 1, 1937.

Colleen Margaretta McCullough was an Australian author known for her novels, her most well-known being The Thorn Birds and The Ladies of Missalonghi.

McCullough was born in 1937 in Wellington, in the Central West region of New South Wales, to James and Laurie McCullough. Her father was of Irish descent and her mother was a New Zealander of part-Māori descent. During her childhood, the family moved around a great deal and she was also “a voracious reader”.

Her family eventually settled in Sydney where she attended Holy Cross College, Woollahra, having a strong interest in both science and the humanities.

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