Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an award-winning, prolific, and best-selling American author, screenwriter, columnist, actor, producer and director. Having sold over 350 million copies of his books, King is best known for his work in horror fiction, which demonstrates a thorough knowledge of the genre’s history. He has also written science fiction, […]

Continue reading " American Author Stephen King Born - 1947 "

Erskine Preston Caldwell was an American author that drew on his experiences with common workers to write books that extolled the simple life of those less fortunate than he was. Later in life, he gave seminars on low income tenant-sharecroppers in the American South.
His first and second published works were Bastard (1929) and Poor Fool […]

Continue reading " American Author Erskine Caldwell Died - 1987 "

Raymond Thornton Chandler was an author of crime stories and novels of immense stylistic influence upon modern crime fiction. His protagonist, Philip Marlowe, is synonymous with “private detective”, along with Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade.
Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1888, but moved to Britain in 1895 with his Irish-born mother after they were […]

Continue reading " Raymond Chandler, American Born Novelist Died - 1959 "

American poet Irwin Allen Ginsberg is best known for Howl, a long poem with many references to illicit drugs and sexual practices and attacking what he saw as the destructive forces of materialism and conformity in the United States at the time.
On March 25, 1957, on the basis of obscenity, customs officials seized 520 copies […]

Continue reading " U.S. Customs Seizes Copies Of Allen Ginsberg’s Poem “Howl” 1955 "

Benjamin McLane Spock was an American pediatrician whose book Baby and Child Care, published in 1946, is one of the biggest best-sellers of all time. Its revolutionary message to mothers was that “you know more than you think you do.”
Spock was the first pediatrician to study psychoanalysis to try to understand children’s needs and family […]

Continue reading " American Pediatrician And Writer Benjamin Spock Died - 1998 "

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is an Indian-British novelist and essayist whos fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), provoked violent reactions from Muslims in several countries.
On 14 February 1989, a fatwa requiring Rushdie’s execution was proclaimed on Radio Tehran by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran at the time, calling the book “blasphemous against […]

Continue reading " Controversial Novel Causes Break In Diplomatic Relations - 1989 "

John Ernst Steinbeck was one of the best-known and most widely read American writers of the 20th century. Responsible for both the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath, released in 1939 and the novel Of Mice and Men, released in 1937.
He wrote 25 publications, including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books and several collections of […]

Continue reading " American Writer, Nobel Prize Laureate John Steinbeck Died - 1968 "

The Diary of a Young Girl is a book composed of extracts from a diary written by Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands. The family was apprehended in 1944 and Frank ultimately died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After […]

Continue reading " The Diary Of Anne Frank Is Published - 1947 "

Nineteen Eighty-Four (or 1984) is an English dystopian novel by George Orwell, published in 1949. It is the story of the life of the intellectual Winston Smith, his job in the Ministry of Truth, and his degradation by the totalitarian government of Oceania, the country in which he lives. It has been translated into sixty-two […]

Continue reading " George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four Is Published - 1949 "

Go Down, Moses is an episodic novel by American author William Faulkner, consisting of seven short stories.
The most prominent character and unifying voice is that of Isaac McCaslin, “Uncle Ike”, who will live to be an old man; “uncle to half a county and father to no one.”
Although originally published in 1942 as Go Down, […]

Continue reading " Go Down Moses by William Faulkner Published - 1942 "