Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Here's Some December Literary Birthdays

I have a nice little website I like to go to when I'm looking for birthdays for the large calendar we put together each month here at the library. Often I put their pictures with their names and scotch tape them to the date of their birthdays. Today I looked to see who was on December 18th and found these people:

Hector Hugh Monro (Saki), Scottish/Burmese journalist, short story writer, born December 18, 1870 and died 14 December 1916. Saki took his pen-name from Omar Khayyam's Rubiayat. He was born in Burma to Scottish parents and lived afterwards in Switzerland, London, Warsaw, and other countries, writing columns for many British newspapers. He was killed by a sniper's bullet in France during World War I.
Besides Saki, there is English playwright Christopher Fry (1907), and
U.S. sci-fi writer Alfred Bester (1913), and
Georgia native, African-American actor, dramatist, screenwriter, and novelist Ossie Davis (1917), who wrote the play Purlie Victorious (1961) and its musical adaptation Purlie (1970), about a Southern black preacher who hopes to establish a racially integrated church, and
U.S. fantasy writer Sterling Lanier (1927), and
English fantasy author Michael Moorcock (1919).

I only knew one of these people, so I guess I will investigate the others to see what made them famous enough to be on that website's list. There's several ways I could go about my search and the library is the perfect place for this hunt. But first I'll try our PINES catalog. If you haven't used the PINES catalog, you're in for a treat. Tells you all kinds of good things. You can check it out by clicking on the large PINES sign on the home page of our website. Just another way we aim to help you. . .

1 comment:

Caterpillar said...

I recall Saki wrote a suspense-filled short story about a little girl who played a trick on some hunters. And Ossie Davis once came to ABAC along with Ruby, his wife. They said what I've heard every other actor say: "If you want to act, you have to want that more than anything else." "Purlie Victorious" is a great play, partly because O. Davis grew up in Waycross.