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It is 205 years today since Walt Whitman was born.
Walt Whitman was born in West Hills, a village on Long Island, New York, as the second child of nine to Walter, a house builder, and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, both of whom had an interest in Quaker religion and Socialism. The Whitman family moved to Brooklyn when Walt was four where the children were brought up in somewhat insecure circumstances due to bad investments.
Whitman had little... -
It is 137 years today since Saint-John Perse was born.
The French poet Saint-John Perse was born Marie-René Alexis Saint-Léger, the only son of five children born to a wealthy family in Pointe-à-Pitre on the island of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean where his parents owned two plantations. His father was a solicitor as was his grandfather. When the economic situation on the islands deteriorated and a new mayor, hostile to the colonial power, was el...
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It is 76 years today since Svetlana Alexievich was born.
Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ukraine three years after the Second World War. She grew up in a village in Belorussia where her Ukrainian father and Belorussian mother were teachers. She studied journalism in Minsk and later worked as a journalist and editor in Belorussia. She embarked on her magnum opus, Voices of Utopia – History of the Red Man, in the early 1980s. In 2000 she was forced to g...
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It is 56 years today since John Connolly was born.
Irish author, born and raised in Dublin. After finishing school, he worked for a few years, including jobs as a bartender and waiter, before starting to study at Trinity College in his home city. After graduating with a B.A. in English, he went on to study Journalism at Dublin City University, gaining an M.A. in 1993. He did freelance work for The Irish Times but got tired of that and decided to...
Sample of Authors
Cheever, John
1912 - 1982
American author born in Quincy, Massachusetts. Cheever’s father owned a shoe factory, but he fell on hard times in the f...
Further reading
Aleixandre, Vicente
1898 - 1984
Vicente Pío Marcellino Cirilo Aleixandre y Merlo was born in Seville, but for fifty years, until his death, he famously ...
Further reading
MacInnes, Helen
1907 - 1985
Helen Clark MacInnes was a Scottish-American author born in Glasgow. She moved with her family to Helensburgh in 1912 where...
Further reading
Hamsun, Knut
1859 - 1952
The Norwegian author Knut Hamsun was born as Knut Pedersen at Lom in the Gudbrandsdalen valley, but from 1862 he was...
Further reading