NOVEMBER LITERARY BIRTHDAYS
(Complete list of November authors here.)Featured Authors
Laurence Sterne, Irish novelist, Nov. 24, 1713 - March 18, 1768
Sterne in Cyberspace is a good introduction to Laurence Sterne, with links to full-text versions of his works, including Tristram Shandy. The Laurence Sterne Trust in Coxwold, York, UK, offers a timeline of his life. Besides his career as a novelist, Sterne was also vicar of Coxwold. An interesting fact about him: he was buried three times: once in the graveyard of St George’s, Hanover Square, London; next after having been disinterred for anatomists; and last, when his burying ground was developed and his skull and a femur were reburied outside the Coxwold church.
George Eliot, aka Mary Anne Evans, English novelist, 22 Nov. 1819 - 22 Dec. 1880
Born to an estate agent in Warwickshire, Evans became her father's housekeeper when he mother died. Although she was brought up with strict religious views, she became a freethinker, joining a circle of intellectuals that included Tennyson, Dickens, and Huxley. She adopted her nom de plume when she published 'Amos Barton,' a short story eventually collected in Scenes of Clerical Life (1858, 2 vols.). Her novel Adam Bede is discussed at The Victorian Web.
You might start with a biography of Evans/Eliot, then read The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch in full-text version, and finish up with a look at the monument on George Eliot's grave
Robert Louis Stevenson, Scottish author, Nov. 13, 1850 - December 3, 1894
Stevenson suffered from serious bronchial issues most of his life and spent many years searching for the right place to live, the one that would be best for his health, eventually ending up in Samoa, where he died at age 44.
There's the RL Stevenson Home Page, with life and works outline, a huge collection of links to e-texts, bibliographies, events, library collections list, links, association and clubs, and images; and Bibliomania offers full texts for five Stevenson novels, including Kidnapped, Treasure Island, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as well as a short biography.
Other November Birthdays
- Nov 1
- prolific German Baroque poet and translator Georg Philipp Harsdörffer (1607; d.1658)
- French poet and critic Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636; d.1711), an influential neoclassical critic
- English historian and biographer John Strype (1643; d.1737), famous for his 1720 update of Stow's A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, which was originally published in 1598
- Stephen Crane, New Jersey-born novelist, reporter, and poet (1871; d.1900), author of The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
- Grantland Rice (1880; d.1954), American sportswriter born in Tennessee
- Sholem Asch (1880; d.1957), Polish-born Yiddish American novelist and playwright
- Hermann Broch (1886; d.1951), Austrian novelist
- Henri Troyat nee Lev Aslanovich Tarasov (1911; d. 2007), prolific French author, biographer, historian and novelist of Armenian descent
- Louisiana-born (Chicago-raised) African-American poet, artist, and art teacher Margaret Taylor Burroughs (1917; d.2010)
- Oklahoma native James J. Kilpatrick (1920; d.2010), columnist, newspaper editor and grammarian
- Gordon Rupert Dickson (1923; d.2001), American science fiction author (born in Edmonton Canada, lived Minnesota)
- American playwright and novelist (born Buffalo, NY) A[lbert] R[amsdell] Gurney (1930; d.2017)
- Palestinian/American (born Jerusalem) Edward Said (1935; d.2003), music critic for The Nation and political essayist
- Virginia-born Southern writer Lee Smith (1944)
- Nov 2
- [Jules] Barbey D'Aurevilly (1808; d.1889), French drama and literary critic, novelist, and short story writer, whose masterpiece is considered to be Les Diaboliques (1874; The She-Devils)
- Russian poet and mystic Daniil Leonidovich Andreyev (born in Berlin, 1906; d.1959); he wrote The Rose of the World while in a Stalin prison camp
- Odysseus Elytis (1911; d.1996), Greek poet and 1979 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
- Jamaican-born U.S. novelist and poet Michelle Cliff (1946; d.2016), whose novels are concerned with social and political issues
- American novelist and critic (born NY, lives DC) Thomas Mallon (1951)
- Nov 3
- Lucan aka Marcus Annaeus Lucanus (39 A.D.; d.65 A.D.), Spanish/Latin poet, author of Bellum Civile
- Thomas Kyd (1558; d.1594), English (Elizabethan) dramatist, wrote The Spanish Tragedy
- Massachusetts-born William Cullen Bryant (1794; d.1878), American romantic poet, editor, and lawyer, he penned the poem 'Thanatopsis'
- German publisher Karl Baedeker (1801; d.1859), of the famous Baedeker travel guidebooks
- Swedish (though lived in the U.S. most of his life) illustrator Gustaf Adolf Tenggren (1896; d.1970), who illustrated Disney movies and Little Golden Books
- French novelist Andre Malraux (1901; d.1976)
- American journalist (born Scotland) James 'Scotty' Barrett Reston (1909; d.1995)
- Australian aboriginal poet and writer Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920; d.1993; aka Kathleen Jean Mary Ruska Walker)
- Florida playwright Terrence McNally (1939)
- American (Philadelphia-born) humorist, critic and author Joe Queenan (1950)
- Italian science fiction writer Massimo Mongai (1950; d.2016)
- Nov 4
- Eden Phillpotts, British novelist, poet, and playwright (1862; d.1960)
- German novelist, playwright and magazine publisher Alfred Henschke, known by his psuedonym Klabund (1890; d.1928)
- Ciro Alegria (1909; d.1967), Peruvian novelist
- New Jersey-born poet C[harles] K[enneth] Williams (1936; d.2015)
- Nov 5
- French writer Philippe de Mornay (1549; d.1623), seigneur du Plessis Marly, aka Du-Plessis-Mornay or Mornay Du Plessis
- American writer, poet and positivist (born Wisconsin) Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850; d.1919)
- Pennsylvania native Ida Minerva Tarbell (1857; d.1944), author and investigative journalist ('muckraker'), nemesis of Standard Oil Company
- London-born poet, dramatist, and translator James Elroy Flecker (1884; d.1915)
- Will Durant (1885; d.1981), Massachusetts-born writer and historian, who with his wife, Ariel, authored the 11-volume Story of Civilization
- Pennsylvania-born playwright and screenwriter Charles Gordon MacArthur (1895; d.1956), known particularly for his plays with Ben Hecht, Twentieth Century and The Front Page; he was married to actress Helen Hayes and friends with the Algonquin Round Table group
- Connecticut native Thomas Flanagan (1923; d.2002), who wrote an acclaimed Irish historical trilogy
- Los Angeles-born novelist and memoirist Geoffrey Wolff (1937), brother of writer Tobias Wolff
- Irish novelist Tom Phelan (1940)
- playwright and actor Sam Shepard (1943; d.2017), born in Illinois
- New Hampshire native [Daphne] Joyce Maynard (1953), writer and novelist, perhaps best known for her relationship with reclusive author J.D. Salinger when she was 19
- Nov 6
- Colley Cibber (1671; d.1757), English dramatist and poet, re-writer of Richard III
- Norwegian novelist Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie (1833; d.1908), one of the Four Greats of 19th-century Norwegian literature
- Austrian novelist Robert Musil (1880; d.1942), whose unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) is considered an important modernist novel
- Colorado-born New Yorker founder Harold Ross (1892; d.1951)
- James Jones (1921; d.1977), Illinois novelist and author of From Here To Eternity
- South African feminist researcher, writer and activist Diana E. H. Russell (1938)
- American writer (Ohio born, Calif. raised) Michael Cunningham (1952), author of The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999
- American novelist Colson Whitehead (1969), whose 2016 alternative history novel The Underground Railroad won the Pulitzer Prize for literature
- Nov 7
- Gédéon Tallemant Des Réaux (1619; d.1692), French writer known for his Historiettes, a collection of short biographies
- German poet Friedrich Leopold, Graf zu Stolberg (1750; d.1819), born in what was then Denmark
- Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (aka Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam) (1838; d.1889), French symbolist writer
- Albert Camus (1913; d.1960), French existentialist essayist, novelist, journalist (born Algeria), awarded 1957 Nobel in Literature, well-known for novels L'Etranger (1942; The Stranger) and La Peste (1947; The Plague)
- Iowa-born Rafael A. Lafferty (1914; d.2002), science fiction writer and Hugo winner
- Boston-born literary critic, theorist and scholar Stephen Jay Greenblatt (1943)
- Nov 8
- Italian poet Teofilo Folengo (1491; d.1544), aka Merlino Coccajo or Cocajo, one of the principal Italian macaronic poets, famous for his epic poem 'Baldus' (or 'Baldo')
- Henry Fielding's sister Sarah Fielding (1710; d.1768), British author of The Governess, or The Little Female Academy (1749), the first novel in English written especially for children
- Bram Stoker (1847; d.1912), Irish creator of Dracula (1897)
- Margaret Mitchell (1900; d.1949), author of Gone with the Wind (1936)
- London-born (lived in U.S. most of his life) Cedric Henning Belfrage (1904; d.1990), socialist, world-traveller, author, journalist, translator and co-founder of National Guardian, a non-sectarian radical U.S. weekly
- Missouri-born Martha Gellhorn (1908; d.1998), novelist, travel writer, late-life suicide and journalist, considered to be one of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th century
- Peter Weiss (1916; d.1982), German/Swedish (born near Berlin) novelist, dramatist, film director, and painter
- P[urushottam] L[axman] 'Pu La' Deshpande (1919;d.2000), orator and noted Marathi (Indian) writer
- Japanese/English Booker Prize winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (1954)
- Nov 9
- Mark Akenside (1721; d.1770), English poet and physician, 'a sort of frozen Keats'
- for Ivan Turgenev (1818), see 28 October
- French mystery writer and journalist, a pioneer of modern detective fiction, Émile Gaboriau (1832; d.1873)
- Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1877, born in British India, which is now Pakistan; d.1938), Muslim poet, philosopher and politician; his poetry in Urdu and Persian is considered to be among the greatest of the modern era
- Anne Sexton (1928; d.1974), Massachusetts poet and suicide
- Jewish Hungarian author and Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertész (1929; d.2016), and a Holocaust concentration camp survivor
- English performance poet, playwright, broadcaster and children's author Roger Joseph McGough CBE (1937)
- Nov 10
- Jacob Cats (1577; d.1660), Dutch poet, humorist and politician, very well known during his time within Holland
- Irish novelist, poet, and dramatist Oliver Goldsmith (1728; d.1774), well-known for his novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1764) and his comedic drama She Stoops to Conquer (1773)
- German poet, lyricist, and playwright [Johann Christoph] Friedrich von Schiller (1759; d.1805)
- American novelist Winston Churchill (1871; d.1947), not the now more famous English prime minister and writer Winston S. Churchill
- [Nicholas] Vachel Lindsay (1879; d.1931), U.S. poet
- New England novelist J[ohn] P[hillips] Marquand (1893; d.1960), born Delaware but mostly raised in Newburyport, Mass., who wrote The Late George Apley (1938)
- military and police novelist, New Jersey native William E. Butterworth III (1929; d.2019), who wrote as W.E.B. Griffin
- American experimental novelist and publisher (raised Calif., lives NYC) James Chapman (1955)
- British writer (lives Minnesota) Neil Richard Gaiman (1960), author of science fiction and fantasy short stories and novels, graphic novels, comics, and films, including The Sandman comic series
- Nov 11
- for Russian novelist Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821), see 30 Oct.
- American poet, novelist, traveler, and editor (born NH) Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836; d.1907)
- F[rancis] Van Wyck Mason (1901; d.1978), American (born Boston) historian and prolific novelist
- Jewish American novelist (born NYC) Howard Fast (1914; d.2003)
- modern American writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922; d.2007)
- Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes (1928; d.2012)
- Romanian poet, editor, satirist and dissident Mircea Dinescu (1950), aka 'The Jester-Poet'
- Mary Gaitskill (1954), Kentucky-born novelist, short story writer, and essayist
- Nov 12
- British playwright Ben Travers CBE (1886; d.1980), known for his farces
- American (born Minnesota) magazine publisher DeWitt Wallace (1889; d.1981), co-founder with his wife of Reader's Digest (1922)
- Roland Barthes (1915; d.1980), French literary critic, literary and social theorist, philosopher, and semiotician concerned with structuralism
- Wallace 'Wally' Shawn (1943), American (born and lives NYC) playwright and actor, son of longtime New Yorker editor William Shawn
- NYC-born non-fiction writer Tracy Kidder (1945), author of House and Among Schoolchildren
- American (born San Francisco) feminist progressive writer and political blogger Naomi Wolf (1962), well-known for her first book, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women
- Nov 13:
- Besides Robert Louis Stevenson, above,
- Massachusetts-born crime writer and columnist George V[incent] Higgins (1939; d.1999)
- Nov 14
- Danish poet Adam G[ottlob] Oehlenschläger (1779; d.1850)
- Swedish children's writer and Pippi Longstocking creator Astrid Lindgren (1907; d.2002)
- Minnesota-born journalist Harrison [Evans] Salisbury (1908; d.1993), non-fiction author and Pulitzer Prize winner for international reporting
- Scottish poet Norman Alexander MacCaig (1910; d.1996)
- Ohio-born humorist and libertarian P[atrick] J[ake] O'Rourke (1947)
- Nov 15
- German poet, dramatist, novelist, and winner of the 1912 Nobel Prize in Literature Gerhart Hauptmann (1862; d.1946)
- St. Louis poet and 1951 Pulitzer Prize winner Marianne Moore (1887; d.1972)
- English biographer and art critic Sacheverell Sitwell (1897; d.1988)
- British novelist Tim Pears (1956)
- British writer of darkly comic novels Tibor Fischer (1959)
- Nov 16
- Russian poet and dramatist Alexander Alexandrovich Blok (1880 O.S., 28 Nov. N.S.; d.1921), most famous for The Twelve (1912), which welcomes the Revolution
- Pulitzer Prize winning, Pittsburgh-born playwright and journalist George S[imon] Kaufman (1889; d.1961)
- Armenian/English writer (born Bulgaria) Michael Arlen (1895; d.1956), aka Dikran Kuyumjian, author of An American Verdict
- prolific Australian children's book writer Colin [Milton] Thiele (1920; d.2006), two-time winner of the Australian Children's Book Award
- Portuguese playwright, novelist, short story writer José Saramago (1922; d.2010), Nobel Prize winner in 1998
- NYC-native Julian Thompson (1927), author of young-adult novels
- Nigerian fiction writer, essayist, and poet [Albert] Chinua[lumogu] Achebe (1930; d.2013), whose first novel was Things Fall Apart
- Nov 17
- Joost van Den Vondel (1587; d.1679), German/Dutch poet and dramatist
- Mississippi-born novelist, Civil War historian, and longtime correspondent of Walker Percy, Shelby Foote (1916; d.2005)
- Nov 18
- British humorist and dramtist, the lyrical half of the Gilbert & Sullivan team, Sir W[illiam] [Schwenck] Gilbert (1836; d.1911)
- Clarence Day (1874; d.1935), NYC writer, author of Life with Father
- Savannah-born Academy-Award-winning lyricist Johnny Mercer (1909; d.1976), who wrote 'Moon River,' 'Come Rain or Come Shine,' and 'Days of Wine and Roses,' among many others
- Canadian novelist, poet, and short-story writer Margaret Atwood (1939)
- Nov 19
- Allen Tate (1899; d.1979), U.S. poet
- Nov 20
- English poet Thomas Chatterton (1752; d.1770), who wrote 'Song From Aella' and poisoned himself before he was 18
- Selma Lagerlöf (1858; d.1940), Swedish novelist and winner of 1909 Nobel in Literature
- South African novelist, short-story writer, and Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer (1923; d.2014)
- Nov 21
- French philosopher and Candide writer Voltaire (born Francois-Marie Arouet; 1694; d.1778)
- journalist, columnist, and author Jim Bishop (1907; d.1987), wrote The Day Kennedy Was Shot
- NYC-born feminist novelist Marilyn French (1929; d.2009), who wrote The Women's Room
- English actress, short-story writer, and novelist Beryl Bainbridge (1933; d.2010)
- Nov 22
- Besides George Eliot (see above),
- French poet and translator (born Cuba) José María de Heredia (1842; d.1905), whose sonnets evoke the sensuous imagery of the Caribbean
- English novelist George [Robert] Gissing (1857; d.1903), whose bitter novels of social realism examined poverty's deleterious effect on the character
- French novelist and poet André [Paul Guillaume] Gide (1869; d.1951), awarded the 1947 Nobel prize for literature
- Nov 23
- Irish mystery novelist, journalist, intelligence officer, and two-time Edgar Award finalist Shaun Herron (1912; d.1989)
- Romanian poet and suicide Paul Celan (1920; d.1970)
- Kentucky-raised African American gothic novelist, poet, and short story writer Gayl Jones (1949)
- Nov 24
- Besides Laurence Sterne (see above),
- French poet Charles d'Orléans (1394; d.1465) aka Charles, Duke of Orléans, who wrote chansons, ballades, and rondeaux in French, Latin, and English
- Dutch philosopher, author, and lens-grinder Benedict [Baruch] de Spinoza (1632; d.1677)
- Italian journalist and author Carlo Collodi (1826; d.1890), aka Carlo Lorenzini, who created Pinocchio (1883)
- Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849; d.1924), writer of The Secret Garden
- Garson Kanin (1912; d.1999), American playwright, producer, and friend of Katharine Hepburn's
- Nov 25
- [Félix de] Lope de Vega [Carpio] (1562; d.1635), Spanish dramatist and poet
- Ohio-born novelist Helen Hooven Santmyer (1895; d.1986), author of the best-selling novel ...And Ladies of the Club
- English playwright Shelagh Delaney (1939; d.2011)
- Nov 26
- English pre-Romantic poet, hymnist, translator, and letter-writer William Cowper (1731; d.1800)
- Romanian/French playwright Eugene Ionesco (1909; d. 1994; birthdate sometimes cited as 1912, which is an error)
- Nov 27
- Tennessee-born novelist and poet James Agee (1909; d.1955), who wrote A Death in the Family (1957)
- Gail Sheehy (1937), author of the Passages books
- Nov 28
- English cleric and author of the moralistic Pilgrim's Progress (part I-1678; part II-1684), John Bunyan (1628; d.1688)
- visionary and revolutionary English poet and painter William Blake (1757; d.1827), well-known for Songs of Innocence (1789), Songs of Experience (1794), and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c.1790)
- Nikolai Nekrasov (1821 O.S., 10 Dec. N.S.; d.1878), Russian poet and journalist
- German (born Vienna, Austria) poet, translator, biographer, short-story writer, and novelist Stefan Zweig (1881; d.1942)
- Italian novelist, journalist, and short-story writer Alberto Moravia (1907; d.1990), nee Alberto Pincherle
- Brooklyn native, African American dramatist, poet, novelist, and longtime Howard University drama professor Owen [Vincent] Dodson (1914; d. 1983)
- Nebraska-born African American poet and novelist Lance Jeffers (1919; d.1985), whose poetry concerned black endurance in the face of white oppression
- Zimbabwe-born South African poet Dennis Brutus (1924; d. 2009; also called John Bruin)
- Pennsylvania-born novelist and mystery writer Rita Mae Brown (1944), author of Rubyfruit Jungle and the Sneaky Pie mysteries
- Nov 29
- Venezuelan poet and scholar Andrés Bello aka Andrés de Jesús María y José Bello López (1781; d.1865)
- Louisa May Alcott (1832; d.1888), Pennsylvania-born author of Little Women and Little Men
- C. S. Lewis (1898; d.1963), English essayist, children's writer, and Christian apologist
- Carlo Levi (1902; d.1975), Italian painter and novelist, famous for his first documentary novel, Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945)
- NYC-born Madeleine L'Engle (1918; d.2007), novelist, and author of children's classics and non-fiction works
- Boston native, novelist, and short-story writer Sue Miller (1943)
- Nov 30
- [Sir] Phillip Sidney (1554; d.1586), English poet
- English satirist Jonathan Swift (1667; d.1745), author of A Modest Proposal and Gulliver's Travels
- American humorist Mark Twain, aka Samuel Clemens (1835; d.1910), who wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
- American (French-born) writer of critical and historical studies Jacques Barzun (1907; d.2012 at age 104)
- Kansas-born photographer, novelist, autobiographer, essayist, composer, and film producer Gordon [Alexander Buchanan] Parks (1912; d.2006), whose 1963 novel The Learning Tree was made into a movie in 1968
- Chicago-born playwright, screenwriter and director David Mamet (1947), whose wrote the screenplay The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) and whose play Glengarry Glen Ross won a 1984 Pulitzer Prize