This Week in Reading June 7 - 13

Authors Born this week

Nobel Prize in Literature
Willam Butler Yeats (1923), Saul Bellow (1976), Orhan Pamuk (2006)

Novelists and story writers
Fanny Burney, Bruno Frank, Elizabeth Bowen, George Axelrod, William Stryon, Brigid Brophy, Rona Jaffe, Harry Crews, Charles Webb, Louise Erdrich

Poets and Playwrights
Poets: Sandro Penna, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni Playwrights: Ben Jonson, Djuna Barnes,Terrence Rattigan, Athol Fugard

Thinkers, Believers, Scientists, Historians, Biographers
Believers: Arthur Hertzberg, Malcolm Boyd Biographers: Marguerite Yourcenar, Anne Frank, Christina Crawford

Humorists, Essayists, Editors, Journalists, Officials, Media and Others
Essayists: Irving Howe, Nat Hentoff, F. Lee Bailey Officials: Robert McNamara, George H. W. Bush, John Edwards Media and others: Cole Porter, Jackie Mason, Joan Rivers, Michael J. Fox, Aaron Sorkin

Mystery / Crime / Suspense Writers
Mystery: Dorothy L. Sayers, Patricia Cornwell

Fantasy / Science Fiction Writers
Fantasy: Gregory Maguire Science Fiction John W. Campbell, Keith Laumer, Joe Haldeman, Whitley Strieber

Visual Artists
Illustrators: Egon Schiele, Maurice Sendak Cartoonists: Scott Adams, George Perez

Young People’s Writers
Children’s: Charles Kinglsey, Johanna Spryi,

Events to read about: Paul Gauguin, and Richard Strauss, Ronald Reagan, the Bill of Rights, Frank Lloyd Wright, Carl Laemmle's Universal Pictures, the first spelling book, the first woman to drive across the United Staes. Donald Duck, the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous, Anne Frank, and the publishing of the Pentagon Papers.

This Week’s Questions:

Which authors, born this week, said these?

"I am very foolish over my own book. I have a copy which I constantly read and find very illuminating."

"There certainly does seem to be the possibility that the detective story will come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks."

"You write a book, you invest your imagination in it, and then you hand it over to a bunch of people who have no imagination and no understanding of their own enterprise."

"There's only one person a writer should pay any attention to. It's not any damn critic. It's the reader."

Answer to Last Week’s Questions:

Remarkable in her many achievements, famed British novelist, scholar Margaret Drabble actually edited, rather than wrote, The Genius of Thomas Hardy (also born last week,) but she wrote several other full biographes as well. She is the sister of novelist, scholar A. S. Byatt and is married to biographer Michael Holroyd.

Novelist V. C. Andrews used a wheelchair to get around but largely stayed reclusive. Broadcast journalist John Hockenberry was the first full-time television newsperson to show, by using a wheelchair, that persons with disability can be mobile for almost any assignment. Christy Brown, however, wrote about his disability, and grew up in a amall Irish village without access to such liberating devices so his siblings moved him around the village using a hay cart.

V.C. Andrews, who died in 1986, wrote only seven popular novels, yet thirty-nine novels under her name have been and are still being published. They are written by Andrew Neiderman under an agreement with her family to use the trademarked V.C Andrews name.. He and Andrews combined on her last work before dying, and he used her notes for the next three, but completely wrote the rest which are published as Andrews. In a similar, but not so extensive, way, and also with permission, other authors have taken on characters created by Marion Zimmer Bradley and have continued some of her series after she died in 1999.

Finally, among her many careers, historical novelist Colleen McCullough has been called a librarian because of her early years working in a library.

This Week in Reading June 8 -14

On a week that sees the birthday of arguably the inspiration for the Nobel prize, this week gives us two earlier Nobel prize winners, Irish poet and playwright Williiam Butler Yeats and Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata, as well as a recent one from America, Saul Bellow. For strict literary tastes we get Willam Stryon, Athol Fugard, and Jerzy Kosinski also in the week along with a few popular genre and children's writers.

Fitting specialized levels of honor among fans and followers in two of those categories are Maurice Sendak, illustrator extraordinaire of children's books, and Dorothy L. Sayers, whose Peter Whimsey mysteries have always transcended the genre label and have never been matched as a series that satirizes general society as well as fulfilling cracking mystery expectations.

This Week's Question: Which author born this week wrote a famous dedication sentence that might well hold true for readers of, and the authors symbolized in, This Week in Reading? "Reader, look / Not at his picture, but his book."

Answer to Last Week's Question: In the week that ex-presidential Press Secretary Scott McClellan's book came out, there was also the birthday of Bill Moyers, who served as a speech writer in the Kennedy administration and was President Lyndon Baines Johnson's Press Secretary from 1965-1967. His predecessor in both administrations, by the way, was born this week. He is Pierre Salinger. Public issues brought up weekly on PBS's Bill Moyers Journal are discussed monthly (except this month) at an open meeting of Moyers Talkers in our computer lab at the Central Library. The next one is Thursday, July 17 at 7PM. All points of view are welcome and will be challenged politely.