Today's Page: June 20th
20 Jun 2012 9:43
Paul Muldoon, Elisabeth Hauptmann, Lillian Hellman, Vikram Seth, Bruno Frank, Clifton Fadiman, and Charles W. Chesnutt are the acclaimed authors who were born or died on a day like this.
Paul Muldoon
Paul Muldoon, born on a day like this in 1951, is an Irish poet. His poetry is known for his difficult, sly, allusive style, casual use of obscure or archaic words, understated wit and punning. Muldoon's poems have been collected into three books, "Selected Poems", "New Selected Poems", and "Poem". He has published over thirty collections and won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize. He is also the president of the Poetry Society(U. K.) and poetry Editor at The New Yorker.
Elisabeth Hauptmann
Elisabeth Hauptmann was born on a day like this in 1897. She was a German writer. She got to know Bertolt Brecht and began collaborating with him in 1924, and is listed as a co-author of "The Threepenny Opera"(1928). After Brecht's death in 1956, she published works of his in a German publishing house and worked as a dramaturg for the Berlin Ensemble. In 1997 a collection of her works was published under the name "Julia Without Romeo". In 1961, she received the Lessing Award, which the Ministry for Culture of East Germany awarded every year. She passed away on April 20, 1973 in East Berlin.
Lillian Hellman
Lillian Florence "Lilly" Hellman was an American author of plays, screenplays, and memoirs. She was born on a day like this in New Orleans. Hellman's drama, "The Children's Hour", premiered on Broadway in 1934. Following its success, Hellman returned to Hollywood as a screenwriter. Her play "Watch on the Rhine" opened on Broadway in 1941. It won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. In 1942, Hellman received an Academy Award nomination for her screenplay for the film version of "The Little Foxes". Two years later, she received another nomination for her screenplay for "The North Star", the only original screenplay of her career. In 1980, Hellman published a short novel, "Maybe: A Story". She died on June 30, 1984, at age 79.
Vikram Seth
Vikram Seth is an Indian poet, novelist, travel writer, librettist, children's writer, biographer and memoirist. Seth was born on a day like this in 1952 in a Punjabi family in Calcutta. He has studied several languages, including Welsh, German and, later, French in addition to Mandarin and English. Seth has published five volumes of poetry. His first, "Mappings"(1980) was originally privately published. The first of his novels, "The Golden Gate"(1986), is a novel in verse, and is written entirely in Onegin stanzas after the style Aleksandr Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. His other novels are "A Suitable Boy"(1993), and "An Equal Music"(1999). He has confirmed that he is writing a contemporary novel including characters from A Suitable Boy, to be published in 2013.
Bruno Frank
Bruno Frank was a German author, poet, dramatist, and humanist. Frank is considered part of the group of the anti-nazi writers whose works constitue German Exlilliteratur. He continued to write, producing two novels, and worked in the film industry for the rest of his life. "The Days of the King"(1924) and "Trenck"(1924) are two of his novels. He passed away on a day like this in 1945.
Clifton Fadiman
Clifton P. "Kip" Fadiman was an American intellectual, author, editor, radio and television personality. He was a senior editor of Cricket Magazine, where he wrote the book review column for children, "Cricket's Bookshelf". He received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. "Fantasia Mathematica", and "The Mathematical Magpie" are two of his books. He died on a day like this in 1999, aged 95.
Charles W. Chesnutt
Charles Waddell Chesnutt, born on a day like this in 1858, was an American author, essayist, political activist and lawyer, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War South, where the legacy of slavery and interracial relations had resulted in many free people of color who had attained education before the war, as well as slaves and freedmen of mixed race. Two of his books were adapted as silent films in 1926 and 1927 by the director and producer Oscar Micheaux. His first short story was "The Goophered Grapevine", and his first book was a collection of short stories entitled "The Conjure Woman", published in 1899. Chesnutt died on November 15, 1932, at the age of 74.
