Happy Birthday to Ezra

Ezra Pound was born on this day in 1885. From Writer’s Almanac:

Pound was born within a few years of James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, D.H. Lawrence, Marianne Moore, Hilda Doolittle, and T.S. Eliot, and he was instrumental in promoting the careers of each one of these writers -- as well as many, many others. He was a champion of modern poetry and prose; Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair proclaimed that it was Ezra Pound “more than anyone who made poets write modern verse, editors publish it, and readers read it.” He was extraordinarily generous with his clout, often described as “the poet's poet.” Pound’s mantra was “Make it new.”

Pound died in Venice, two days after his 87th birthday. His legacy survives.

Amis at 60: Love Him or Loathe Him?

As Martin Amis turns 60 today, The Independent finds “the literary world’s former enfant terrible still dividing critical opinion” and asks 15 well known wordsmiths if they love or loathe Kingsley’s arguably more famous son:

To his critics he is an arrogant misogynist who wouldn’t be where he is without his famous father, Kingsley. To his fans he is a brilliant chronicler of our times whose literary success -- and success with women -- has fuelled resentment and envy.

Lionel Shriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Post-Birthday World) captures my own feelings perfectly:

In general, I rue the public pettiness that has dogged Amis -- all that rubbish about his teeth, the ludicrously outsized indignation about his quite modest salary as a university tutor.

He’s intelligent, he takes risks and he is a skillful craftsman. He is a national treasure, and an underappreciated one.

I can think of no other writer who has been this good and this bad. Maybe that tells the story? The Rachel Papers (1973) was as wonderful as Yellow Dog (2003) was truly awful*. Does that not speak of a writer who is risking himself and trying new things? The memoir Experience is, in many ways, an extraordinary love letter to Kingsley Amis, the father with whom Martin had a dangerous relationship. (One does not get to be an enfant terrible without a bit of rebellion. They go together, after all.) And I’ve raved about The War Against Cliché in this space at every opportunity. When young reviewers approach me and say, “How?” the title of Amis’ 2001 collection of essays and reviews is the one I scrawl down.

* Truly awful. I adore the younger Amis’ work and tried to like Yellow Dog, but it just didn’t take. Before reading, I’d seen scathing reviews and thought those writers were being mean or hadn’t considered properly or had perhaps been reading in a bad mood, out to hatchet the enfant terrible for his various transgressions. Then I read it myself and understood.

January Magazine’s 2001 interview with Amis is here. The Independent’s birthday salute (?) is here. A new novel, The Pregnant Widow, is expected February 2010. (Though breath-holding is not a good idea on this one: it was initially scheduled for autumn 2008, then pushed back to... well... now.)

Happy Birthday to the Original Batman

Today is the anniversary of the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. At The Rap Sheet, J. Kingston Pierce does a typically stylish job of remembering:

It was on this date, back in 1897, that the horror novel Dracula first saw publication. It was written, of course, by Bram Stoker, the business manager at London’s famed Lyceum Theatre and the personal assistant to actor Henry Irving, who apparently served as the model for Stoker’s nocturnal Transylvanian count. In that epistolary novel, explains The Writer’s Almanac, Stoker “added several chilling details to the age-old vampire tale: that the undead show no reflection in a mirror, that they shun garlic, and that they can be killed only by a stake through the heart.”

Garrison Says “Happy Birthday!”

Who knew, or could ever imagine, that Budd Schulberg, Quentin Tarantino, Julia Alvarez, Henrik Ibsen, and the Roman poet Ovid could share the same birthday? Well, Garrison Keillor, of course, at his wonderful Writer’s Almanac.

Here’s the link.

Updike Remembered

John Updike (Rabbit, Run, The Terrorist), who died earlier this year, would have turned 77 today. The Writer’s Almanac remembers him in a lengthy essay:

His father lost his job during the Great Depression, and the family moved into a farm house 11 miles out of town. So Updike spent much of his childhood alone, reading or living in a dream world. He read The New Yorker magazine every week, and while he was still in high school, he began sending his cartoons, poems, and stories to The New Yorker. Even though everything was rejected, he kept submitting to them. He won a scholarship to Harvard, and when he was a senior, The New Yorker finally accepted his work, and after he graduated the magazine offered him a job.

Writer’s Almanac tells us Updike shares the day with George Plimpton (Out of My League, Paper Lion) and the poet Michael Harper (Dear John, Dear Coltrane).

Do You Think That There Will Ever Be, Something As Cooling, Tall and Green As A Tree?

Color me mystified, but, according to The Writer’s Almanac, March 1st is the birthday of a completely disproportionate number of poets.

Robert Hass (Time and Materials) was born on this day in 1941 in San Francisco. (And Writer’s Almanac leaves us with this quote from Hass: “Take the time to write. You can do your life’s work in half an hour a day.” Think about it.)

Howard Nemerov (1920); Richard Wilbur (1921) and Robert Lowell (1917) were also born on this day.

Incidentally, the poem I’ve made a hash of in the title above (one could say “paraphrased”) is by Alfred Joyce Kilmer who was, however, not born on this day. (It could also be argued that he wasn’t much of a poet, but maybe that would just be mean?)

What the heck: the poem was first published in 1913 and Kilmer died five years later, so we can run the actual poem right here for you to see for yourself (I think it’s the “prest/breast” stuff that decides it for me):

“Trees”

by Joyce Kilmer

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

Deighton Turns 80

British historian and spy novelist Len Deighton -- the author of such familiar works as The IPCRESS File (1962), Funeral in Berlin (1964), and XPD (1981) -- turns 80 years old today. To help celebrate, The Telegraph features an interview with the “famously publicity-shy” writer. For more background on Deighton’s life and literary endeavors, check out Rob Mallows’ The Deighton Dossier and the “Unofficial” Len Deighton Home Page.

Without Him, What Would We Call Lincoln Logs?

Many Americans are getting ready to celebrate what would have been the 200th birthday of the 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, born on this day in 1809. Lincoln died April 15, 1865, the first Republican president as well as the first U.S. president to be assassinated. Lincoln was also “the last U.S. chief executive to be elected from Illinois before Barack Obama,” notes J. Kingston Pierce at The Rap Sheet.

In addition to all of the published works commemorating this occasion, scholar and author Henry Louis Gates hosts Looking for Lincoln, a two-hour documentary to be shown tonight on PBS-TV. (Gates’ essay about “Honest Abe” was published earlier in The New York Times.) And National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon broadcast an extraordinarily fine essay last week that looks at the Great Emancipator, warts and all.

You can find these links, and a few more, right here. A few weeks ago, we looked at The Lincolns: Portrait of A Marriage by Daniel Mark Epstein. That review is here.

And in one of those odd cosmic coincidences, today is also the 200th anniversary of the birth of British author and naturalist Charles Darwin.

I, Birthday

Today is the birthday of the Russian-born American biochemist who is also one of the most prolific writers of all time.

Mensa card carrying member Isaac Asimov -- who died in 1992 -- would have turned 89 today.

Though he is perhaps best remembered for his Robot series -- which was truly seminal -- I will always remember the feeling of astonishment that carried me through his Foundation series. It is one thing -- perhaps a noble thing -- to be able to imagine the worlds that carry readers away. But in Foundation, Asimov’s worlds were so distant and different and complete it was as though he had reinvented everything about everything... over a period that covered some 20,000 years. I’m still astonished just thinking about it.

In 2002 Janet Jeppson Asimov, the late author’s wife, edited a final biography entitled It’s Been A Good Life (Prometheus Books). “Generously exposing both Asimov’s immense talents as a science fiction author and his ruefully amusing self-deprecating punctures of his own early inflated self-image,” wrote Publishers Weekly at the time, “this readable and idiosyncratic self-portrait should attract a whole new generation of readers to Asimov's fine creative works.”

The Sandman Cometh

With his Sandman series turning 20 this month, the publication of a biography about him, Prince of Stories (St. Martin’s Press) and a series of special appearances planned throughout the month (various locations), it seems only fitting that Neil Gaiman should celebrate a birthday smack dab in the middle of all the Gaimanish festivities.

Neil Gaiman was born on this day in 1960 in Porchester, England, the son of a company director and a pharmacist. Read January Magazine’s 2001 interview with Gaiman here. From the interview:

Whenever I do things because I want to do it and because it seems fun or interesting and so on and so forth, it almost always works. And it almost always winds up more than paying for itself. Whenever I do things for the money, not only does it prove a headache and a pain in the neck and come with all sorts of awful things attached, but I normally don't wind up getting the money, either. So, after a while, you do sort of start to learn [to] just forget about the things where people come to you and dangle huge wads of cash in front of you. Go for the one that seems interesting because, even if it all falls apart, you've got something interesting out of it. Whereas, the other way, you normally wind up getting absolutely nothing out of it.

A review of Prince of Stories: the Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman is here. The author’s own Web site is here.

Birthday for The Entertainer

Author John Grisham, who turns 53 today, would likely be the first to say he isn’t writing for legacy. And it’s quite possible the literary criticism heaped on his mega-selling work doesn’t bother him that much, nor make a dent in his paychecks (reportedly $9 million last year alone). In a recent interview with AP, he says he’s more concerned with the entertainment value of his work than with his own place in history:

“I’m not sure where that line goes between literature and popular fiction,” the mega-selling author says. “I can assure you I don’t take myself serious enough to think I'm writing literary fiction and stuff that’s going to be remembered in 50 years. I’m not going to be here in 50 years; I don’t care if I’m remembered or not. It’s pure entertainment.”

In the same piece, Grisham admits to being an avid -- though erratic -- reader as well as a collector of books and he loves “to buy books. Love to stack ‘em up in the house. We’ve got a million books in the house.”

And though he doesn’t have to work as hard at it now, he loves to make books, too. Grisham says that, early in his second career as a writer, while still lawyering full time, he was very disciplined with regard to his fiction.

When he first started writing, Grisham says, he had “these little rituals that were silly and brutal but very important.”

“The alarm clock would go off at 5, and I’d jump in the shower. My office was 5 minutes away. And I had to be at my desk, at my office, with the first cup of coffee, a legal pad and write the first word at 5:30, five days a week.”

His goal: to write a page every day. Sometimes that would take 10 minutes, sometimes an hour; ofttimes he would write for two hours before he had to turn to his job as a lawyer, which he never especially enjoyed. In the Mississippi Legislature, there were “enormous amounts of wasted time” that would give him the opportunity to write.

“So I was very disciplined about it,” he says, then quickly concedes he doesn’t have such discipline now: “I don’t have to.”

Even so, the books keep coming. The Appeal (Doubleday), Grisham’s 22nd book and 21st novel, went on sale at the end of January.

The AP piece runs in the International Herald Tribune today and it’s here.

The Ill-Tempered Clavichord

Today is the birthday of American humorist, author and stylist, Sidney Joseph Perelman (1904-1979).

S.J. Perelman was best known for his contributions to The New Yorker, and his collaborations in writing for film, including work on Around the World in 80 Days (1956) and the Marx Brothers films Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers (1932).

Perelman’s books were mainly collections of essays he’d done for The New Yorker which, according to the Encyclopedia of World Biography include “Acres and Pains (1947), Westward Ha! or Around the World in Eighty Clichés (1948), The Ill-Tempered Clavichord (1952), The Road to Miltown or Under the Spreading Atrophy (1957), The Most of S. J. Perelman (1958), Chicken Inspector No. 23 (1966), and Baby, It's Cold Inside (1970), which introduced the raffish Irish poet Shameless McGonigle. But the best of Perelman, culled largely from Crazy Like a Fox (1944), is to be found, quite aptly, in The Best of S. J. Perelman (1947).”

Perelman died in New York City in 1979.

Birthdays for Dowd and “Nobody Said Not to Go” Hahn

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Maureen Dowd was born on this day in 1952. Though the Washington, DC-based New York Times columnist has likely churned out millions of words in her career and her name is so well known it’s practically a household word (depending, I guess, on the household) there have only been two books thus far: 2004’s Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (Putnam) and the slightly ridiculous Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide (Putnam) from 2005.

The year her most recent book came out, New York Magazine called Dowd, “the most dangerous columnist in America.” Which seems at least a little like overstatement, especially since she’s sometimes a little slow on the uptake.

Emily (“Mickey”) Hahn, who shares Dowd’s birthday, was considerably more prolific. Born in 1905, Hahn wrote 52 books and had a career at The New Yorker that lasted 68 years. Today in Literature asks the obvious when they point out that she had a “personal life of storybook proportions” and when they ask “why Hahn is not better known.”

Similar nay-saying and head-shaking attended her cigar-smoking, her enjoyment of men and alcohol, her trip across the U.S. in a Model T with her girlfriend (both disguised as men), her journey to the Belgian Congo as a Red Cross worker, her time as the concubine of a Chinese poet in Shanghai, her addiction to opium, her affair and illegitimate child with the head of the British Secret Service in Hong Kong, her pioneer work in environmentalism and wildlife preservation, and the captivating candor with which she wrote about all of this “Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict,” one of her collected New Yorker pieces begins, “I can’t claim that as the reason I went to China.”

The Literature Today tribute is here. Hahn’s Wikipedia entry includes a bibliography.

Happy Birthday, F. Scott!

Jazz Age writer Frances Scott Key Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby) was born on this day in 1896. He died of a heart attack when he was way too young, on December 21, 1940. Who knows what he could’ve produced, had he lived past age 44?

King at 60

In his book On Writing, Stephen King commented on his relationship with his wife, Tabitha:

Our marriage has outlasted all of the world's leaders except for Castro, and if we keep talking, arguing, making love, and dancing to the Ramones -- gabba-gabba-hey -- it'll probably keep working.

King, who is the author of over 50 bestselling novels, was born on this day in 1947.

Agatha at 127

Today marks what would have been the 127th birthday of the creator of what are -- arguably -- some of modern literature’s best-loved and best known characters.

According to Christie’s official Web site, Agatha Christie was born Agatha Miller in Torquay, England, on September 15, 1890. She got the last name -- Christie -- when she married her husband, Archibald Christie, in 1914. The couple’s daughter, Rosalind, was born in 1919. The couple divorced in 1928.

By that time, Christie had already gained a reputation as a writer. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920 and included that nutty but now internationally beloved Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot. Christie would go on to include Poirot in 54 short stories and 33 novels.

In 1930, Christie married archaeologist Max Mallowan. She accompanied Mallowan on many of his digs and was undoubtedly creatively influenced by the relationship and her time spent in the Middle East. This is best seen in the novels Murder in Mesopotamia, from 1936, and Death on the Nile, from 1937.

Christie was given England’s highest honor in 1971 when she was awarded to the Order of Dame Commander of the British Empire and created as Dame Agatha. She continued to write prolifically until the time of her death in 1976. Her last novel, Sleeping Murder, was published the year she died and featured her other much beloved recurring sleuth, Miss Jane Marple.

Dame Agatha died peacefully at home on January 12, 1976.

According to The Writer’s Almanac, September 15th is a big day in the world of literary birthdays. In addition to Dame Agatha, other writers born on this day include Robert Benchley, James Fenimore Cooper, Robert McCloskey and François VI, duke de La Rochefoucauld.

One of a Kind

Tomorrow, May 22, will mark not only the birthdays of novelist Arthur Conan Doyle and comic-book creator Hergé, but also the first birthday of The Rap Sheet, January Magazine’s sister blog, a popular resource for crime-fiction fans. To celebrate, we’ve asked more than 100 novelists, critics and book bloggers--running the gamut from Michael Connelly, Laura Lippman, Ian Rankin, Michael Marshall, Rhys Bowen, Peter Temple and Zoë Sharp, to Lee Child, Gary Phillips, Sarah Weinman, Barry Eisler, Sara Paretsky and Declan Hughes--to answer one question: What one crime, mystery or thriller novel do you think has been most unjustly overlooked, criminally forgotten or underappreciated over the years?

Most of the works selected are familiar; others are out of print, but apparently worth tracking down. The Rap Sheet will be rolling out these nominations over the rest of this week.

The only downside to this birthday project is that it may cause you to add a lot more books to your to-be-read pile.

Read the first installment of The Rap Sheet’s commemorative “one book project” here.