Seuss Day!

If your book was turned down by more than 40 publishers, “what would you do?” Become Dr. Seuss?

Don’t Know Much About John Steinbeck

Born on February 27, 1902 in Salinas, California in 1902, was a writer I consider a major personal influence.

John Steinbeck built his reputation writing about the struggles of down-and-out people: Dust Bowl farmers and pearl divers, prostitutes, jobless migrants, and Depression-era hobos.

“He told the truth, mainly.” –Huck Finn

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. –Notice at the opening of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn America doesn’t have a national holiday to honor a writer. But if [...]

Don’t Know Much About Edith Wharton

Born today in New York City in 1862: Edith Newbold Jones, who achieved fame as Edith Wharton, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction

Don’t Know Much About Jack London

In the appropriate chill of the day, it is worth noting that Jack London, a man who knew cold and wrote about it memorably, was born on this date in 1876. London was certainly one of the writers who got me hooked on books as a young reader. In fact, in the early 20th century, [...]

A Year of Good Reading

My first post of this New Year is actually a Guest Post. The very illustrious Bookclubgirl recently asked me to produce a year’s worth of recommended Reading for Book Clubs. She posted my guest post on her blog today and you can find it here. I don’t belong to any book club, but I am [...]

Don’t Know Much About “a Lady”

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” So says Henry Tilney, the charming young clergyman in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, defending a genre that was taken about as seriously in Austen’s time as drugstore romances and “beach reads” are today. Novels, to high-minded [...]

A Lady and a Penguin — Not a “Dirty Story”

Generally, we don’t associate the iconic Penguin Books with “dirty books.” And neither did a British jury. On November 2, 1960, Penguin won a landmark British publishing case when Lady Chatterley’s Lover was deemed “not obscene” by a jury of three women and nine men. Penguin had published the novel, written in 1928, to mark [...]

Today in Literature: Oscar Wilde and Eugene O’Neill

Born this day are two great and influential writers. Irish-American Eugene O’Neill, born in 1888 in a New York City Broadway hotel. Son of a famous actor, he became arguably America’s greatest playwright. Four Pulitzer Prizes went to his work, including one posthumously for Long Day’s Journey Into Night Read more about O’Neill at the [...]