Category: Birthdays

the author of The Caine Mutiny, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance is 89 today. Wouk’s twelfth novel, A Hole in Texas, has just been released.

The Caine Mutiny won the Pulitizer Prize for fiction in 1952.

Now, there are four ways of doing a thing aboard ship—the right way, the wrong way, the Navy way, and my way. I want things on this ship done my way.

Captain Queeg

Mystery writer Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born on this date in 1894. Hammett departed from the intellectualized mysteries of earlier detective novels (Sherlock Holmes for example) and transformed the genre with his less-than-glamorous realism. He is considered one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.

Hammett actually was a detective with Pinkerton for a few years just before World War I. Contracting TB during military service, he realized his health would keep him from resuming as a detective. He turned to writing. He published his first story in 1922, and then about 80 more, many in the popular pulp crime magazine Black Mask. Hammett’s first novel was Red Harvest, published in 1929. His most famous character, Sam Spade, made his appearance in Hammett’s third novel, The Maltese Falcon (1930). (It was the third—and only successful—attempt to turn that novel into a film when Humphrey Bogart played the role in 1941.) The Thin Man (1934) was the last of Hammett’s novels.

By the early-thirties, Hammett was established and famous. He began a relationship with playwright Lillian Hellman that lasted for 30 years despite his drinking and womanizing. Though both eventually divorced their spouses, they never married. Hammett served in the Army in World War II, enlisting as a private at age 48. His involvement in left-wing politics and unwillingness to testify about it before Congress however, and the continued drinking, diminished his stature. He died in 1961.

Best-selling mystery author Tony Hillerman was born on this date in 1925. The Sinister Pig is the 17th book in the series centered around the Navajo Tribal policemen.

Hillerman has an excellent web site with excerpts from all the books. He tells us there that:

Leaphorn emerged from a young Hutchinson County, Texas, sheriff who I met and came to admire in 1948 when I was a very green ‘crime and violence” reporter for a paper in the high plains of the Panhandle. He was smart, he was honest, he was wise and humane in his use of police powers–my idealistic young idea of what every cop should be but sometimes isn’t.

*****

Jim Chee emerged several books later. I like to claim he was born from an artistic need for a younger, less sophisticated fellow to make the plot of PEOPLE OF DARKNESS make sense–and that is mostly true. Chee is a mixture of a couple of hundred of those idealistic, romantic, reckless youngsters I had been lecturing to at the University of New Mexico, with their yearnings for Miniver Cheever’s “Days of Old” modified into his wish to keep the Navajo Value System healthy in universe of consumerism.

Gary Wills is 70 today; Peter Matthiessen is 77. The Writer’s Almanac tells us about them both. Or, as always, you can hear the stories as told by Garrison Keillor [RealAudio].

Or so said Honoré de Balzac, the prolific French author and journalist. Balzac was born on this date in 1799.

was born on this date in 1856. Mr. Baum is, of course, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, first published in September 1900. The Library of Congress has an interesting enough online exhibit about Baum and Oz. It’s curious to contrast the drawings from the original by W.W. Denslow with our own images so indelibly formed by the 1939 film.

was born on this date in 1896. The Writer’s Almanac tells us:

It’s the birthday of Mari Sandoz, born near Hay Springs, Nebraska (1896). She wrote realistic books about pioneers and Indians, including The Buffalo Hunters (1954), The Battle of the Little Bighorn (1966) and Crazy Horse (1942), a biography of the Sioux Indian chief.

She grew up in rural Nebraska, and she had a hard childhood. She quit school after the eighth grade, and spent most of her time helping out with farm and household chores. Her fingers became crooked from holding a hoe for hours at a time, and she suffered from cramps in her arms her entire life. When she was thirteen, she and her brother spent a day digging their cattle out of a blizzard snowdrift, and it left her blind in one eye.

Her father would host soldiers, traders, Indians, and miners from the Black Hills; and she would stay up late at night listening to them tell stories about the West. She became obsessed with the people and places of the Old West, and she decided she wanted to write about them. She went to the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, and a dean there allowed her to take classes even though she didn’t have a high school diploma. She weighed about seventy-five pounds, wore old country clothes, and lived on the tea, sugar, and crackers that she got for free at the dining hall. She would spend hours reading old newspapers in the basement of the State Historical Society, collecting research for the books she was planning to write.

In 1933, Sandoz went back home to live with her mother on the family farm. She had written a manuscript for a book about her father, but it wasn’t accepted by any of the publishers she had sent it to. She had sold a few articles to newspapers and magazines, but not enough to make any real money. She was thirty-seven years old, it was the middle of the Depression, she was malnourished and suffering from migraines, and so she decided give up writing. She burnt her manuscripts and settled in with her mother.

But just a year later, she got word that a publisher had decided to publish the book about her father, Old Jules (1935). It became a Book-of-the-Month club selection and a bestseller, and it allowed Sandoz to go on to write many more books about frontier life.

Remember that you can hear Garrison Keillor narrate each day’s Writer’s Almanac on public radio or on-line.

is 67 today. The always excellent Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor tells us about Pynchon.

It’s the birthday of novelist Thomas Pynchon, born in Glen Cove, Long Island (1937). In college at Cornell University, he majored in engineering physics. He got straight A’s in all his engineering and physics classes, but after taking a class from Vladimir Nabokov, he decided to switch his major to English literature.

After college, he got a job working as a technical writer for the Boeing aerospace company. Employees there described him as incredibly quiet and diligent. He worked at the company for two years, and then traveled to Mexico, where he produced his first novel, V. (1963), about drunken former sailors, alligator hunters in the sewers of New York City, and the search for a mysterious female spy. V. was one of the most critically acclaimed novels of the 1960s, and Time magazine sent a photographer to Mexico City to find the author. According to legend, Pynchon jumped out the window of his apartment and fled into the mountains to escape the photographer. Since that day, he has never willingly submitted to a photograph, given an interview, or appeared in public.

His second novel was The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), about a woman’s effort to uncover a secret international postal service called W.A.S.T.E., which uses a muted trumpet as its logo. The novel became a cult favorite among college students, and fans of the book began to draw muted trumpets on bathroom walls and subway corridors, to suggest that the fictional postal service actually existed.

In 1973, Pynchon published Gravity’s Rainbow, which many consider his masterpiece, the story of a secret society of rocket scientists conspiring to take over the world in the closing days of World War II. He didn’t publish another book for the next seventeen years, and he became a kind of mythical figure. People said that he lived on the run, giving out false names wherever he went. Some claimed he had joined a band of Mexican rebel fighters. Others claimed that he and J.D. Salinger were actually the same person. And near the end of the 1980s, there was speculation that he might, in fact, be the Unabomber.

Then, in the late 1990s, an article in New York magazine revealed that he lived in New York City with his wife and son. He wasn’t hiding out in an underground bunker; he just wasn’t seeking publicity. He published his most recent novel, Mason and Dixon in 1997, and he has since written the liner notes for a rock band called Lotion and provided an introduction for a new edition of George Orwell’s 1984. In January of this year, he played himself on the animated TV show The Simpsons, wearing a paper bag over his animated head.