J. K. Rowling, author of the bestselling Harry Potter series and several crime fiction novels, celebrates her birthday July 31st. A real-life "rags to riches" story, Forbes ranked her as the forty-eighth most powerful celebrity in 2007. Take a look with us as we explore ten facts you might not know about the beloved author.
A bildungsroman is a novel which follows its protagonist during a significant period of maturation. The book focuses on the main character's childhood or adolescence over a span of years as she navigates the world and investigates her place in it. The bildungsroman became highly popular in 19th century British novels, particularly in the works of Charles Dickens, but still retains its popularity today. Discover more about this form and some essential bildungsromans in the following article.
John Champlin Gardner (not to be confused with the James Bond author John Edmund Gardner) was a successful American writer and academic. Born July 21, 1933, he is best known for Grendel, his retelling of Beowulf, and On Moral Fiction, his controversial volume of literary criticism.
Author J.D. Salinger, is notable for many reasons, not the least of which is his reclusiveness. His novel, Catcher in the Rye, was first published July 16, 1951 and has sold over 60 million copies worldwide. While Salinger's work has inspired people worldwide, from teenagers to criminals, it is perhaps the author's isolation that fascinates us the most.
Canadian author Alice Munro, born July 10, 1931, won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature as "master of the contemporary short story." Indeed, she is widely acclaimed for transforming the way short stories are written today.
“You don't write because someone sets assignments! You write because you need to write, or because you hope someone will listen or because writing will mend something broken inside you or bring something back to life.”
Writer Ian McEwan was born June 21, 1948. He won the Man Booker Prize in 1998 for his novel Amsterdam and was nominated for the award six times to date. He earned a host of other prizes including the WH Smith Literary Award, National Book Critics’ Circle Fiction Award, and the Jerusalem Prize. In 2008, The Times named McEwan one of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.” He is best known for his novels, The Cement Garden (1978), Black Dogs (1992), Amsterdam (1998), and Atonement (2001).
Nobel Prize-winner, Ferit Orhan Pamuk, was born to a wealthy Turkish family on June 7, 1952. His novels have been translated into 55 languages and his work has sold over eleven million copies worldwide. As a child and young adult, Pamuk devoted himself to painting. Yet at age 23, he put his paints aside and began writing his first novel, Cevdet Bey and Sons.
Randolph Caldecott and John Newbery both made significant contributions to children's literature, but another figure gave us the volume that is arguably the best known children's book of the nineteenth century. Dr. Heinrich Hoffman wrote Der Struwwelpeter in 1841, and the book rapidly became a hit. Fifty years later, it would draw the attention of Mark Twain, whose own translation of the book would not be published until 35 years after Twain's death.
During her lifetime, critics dismissed Daphne du Maurier as a lightweight romance novelist—a categorization that infuriated the bestselling author. The Christian Science Monitor said that her masterpiece, Rebecca, “would be here today, gone tomorrow.” Time has been kind to du Maurier, however; Rebecca enjoys continued popularity—voted the fifteenth “best loved novel” in a 2003 BBC survey—and du Maurier is now acknowledged as a master suspense writer.
