This Week in Reading December 21 - 27

This week is Christmas week and we're in the middle of Hanukkah and Kwanza as well so few of us have time to read as we celebrate with families and friends. So the Glendale Public Library extends to all the greetings of season.

There are many authors born this week but few who saw success as early in their career as Stephenie Meyer whose Twilight seriies has captured the love and interest of millions of young readers. Another phenomenally successful author born this week is mystery and novel writer Mary Higgins Clark. Both were born on Christmas Eve. Also this week, Germany's Heinrich Boll won the Nobel prize for literature in 1972.

This Week's Question: What author born this week and known largely for writing style, said, "The best technique is none at all"?

Answer to Last Week's Questions: Playwright Maxwell Anderson:was a teacher before becoming famous. He was fired from his job for supporting a pacifist student in World War One. Saki, (H. H. Munro) was killed on the battlefield in that war. Also a pacifist years earlier going into the Civil War was poet John Greenleaf Whittier who was a Quaker but who is best known for a patriotic poem about battle.. In World War Two playwright Noel Coward, as unikely a combatant as Saki, worked as a spy for England, but did not like to talk about it later.

Later on, John Kennedy Toole was unable to find publishers for his novels. After he killed himself in despair his mother gathered his work, and submitted them to a local college writing professor, also known for his fiction, Walker Percy. Toole's Vietnam War era novel, Confederacy of Dunces, set in New Orleans, won him a posthmous Pulitzer Prize for 1981.