Today's Page: June 17th
17 Jun 2012 9:37
Joseph Addison, John Hersey, Henrik Wegeland, Gail Jones, Peter Rosei , Henry Lawson and Dorothy Richardson are the acclaimed authors who were born or died on a day like this.
Joseph Addison
Joseph Addison was an English essayist, poet, playwright and politician. His name is usually remembered alongside that of his long-standing friend, Richard Steele, with whom he founded The Spectator magazine. He wrote several plays including the libretto for Thomas Clayton's opera "Rosamond" and his tragedy play "Cato", which was received with acclamation. He followed this effort with a comedic play. "The Drummer". Addison passed away on a day like this in 1719.
John Hersey
John Richard Hersey was born on a day like this in 1914. He was an award-winning American writer and journalist considered one of the earliest practitioners of the so-called New Journalism, in which storytelling devices of the novel are fused with non-fiction reportage. He is best known for his 31000 word article about the aftermath of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. The article was adjudged the finest piece of journalism of the 20th century by a 36 member panel under the aegis of New York University's journalism department. He passed away on March 24, 1993, aged 78.
Henrik Wergeland
Henrik Arnold Thaulow Wergeland was born on a day like this in 1808. He was a Norwegian writer, most celebrated for his poetry but also a prolific playwright, polemicist, historian, and linguist. He is often described as a leading pioneer in the development of a distinctly Norwegian literary heritage and of modern Norwegian culture. Though Wergeland only lived to be 37, his range of pursuits covered literature, theology, history, contemporary politics, social issues, and science. His views were controversial in his time, and his literary style was variously denounced as subversive. Wergeland's "The Swallow", "The Jew", "The Jewess", and "The English Pilot", form a series of narrative poems which remain the most interesting and important of their kind in Norwegian literature.
Gail Jones
Gail Jones was born on a day like this in 1955. She is an Australian novelist and academic. She was born on Harvey, Western Australia, and is currently Professor of Writing in the Writing and Society Research School at the University of Western Sydney. "Black Mirror"(2002), "Sorry"(2007), and "Five Bells"(2011) are some of her novels. She has also published 2 short story collections; "The House of Breathing"(1992) and "Fetish Live"(1997).
Peter Rosei
Peter Rosei was born in Vienna on a day like this in 1946. He is an Austrian literary writer. Since 1972 he has been a freelance writer, publishing novels, stories, essays, poetry, plays, travelogues and children's literature. His literary breakthrough came with the novel "Who was Edgar Allan" in 1977. Rosei's prolific output includes the novels "The Milky Way"(1981), "Rebus"(1990), and "Persona"(1995), as well as a six-part novel cycle titled "The 15000 Souls Project".
Henry Lawson
Henry Lawson was an Australian writer and poet. He was born on a day like this in New South Wales. Along with his contemporary Banjo Paterson, Lawson is among the best-known Australian poets and fiction writers of the colonial period and is often called Australia's "greatest writer". Lawson's first published poem was "A Song of the English". This was followed by "The Wreck of the Derry Castle" and "Golden Gully". His most successful prose collection is "While the Billy Boils", published in 1896. In 1949 Lawson was the subject of an Australian postage stamp. He passed away on September 2, 1922, at the age of 55.
Dorothy Richardson
Dorothy Miller Richardson was born on May 17, 1873, and passed away on a day like this in 1957. She was a British author and journalist. Richardson was an important feminist writer, because of the way her work assumes the validity and importance of female experiences as a subject for literature. Her wariness of the conventions of language, her bending of the normal rules of punctuation, sentence length, and so on, are used to create a feminine prose, which Richardson saw as necessary for the expression of female experience. "Pointed Roofs" is one of her known works.
