It is 89 years today since Guðbergur Bergsson was born.

When asked where he is from, Guðbergur Bergsson tends to say he is from Grindavik, not that he is from Iceland. Grindavik is a small Icelandic fishing village with a population of a few thousand. Bergsson's father was a fisherman and carpenter and his mother struggled to make ends meet. The only thing that was discussed at Grindavik was work; nobody talked about books. Guðbergur started out in l...

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It is 94 years today since Günter Grass was born.

Günter Wilhelm Grass was a German author born in Danzig (present-day Gdansk in Poland) to German-Polish parents. His father was a Protestant grocer and his mother a Roman Catholic of Kashubian (a Slavic minority in Poland) origin. The family lived in a small apartment in the Langfuhr district of the city.
Günter Grass attended school in his hometown and became a reluctant Hitlerjugend. He j...

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It is 133 years today since Eugene O'Neill was born.

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It is 167 years today since Oscar Wilde was born.

Oscar Wilde was born in a physician's family in Dublin in 1854. His mother had literary interests. Wilde later attended Trinity College, Dublin, and Magdalen College, Oxford. He proved his outstanding talent by winning a poetry competition at the age of twenty-four. As a young man he lived according to the principle that rebellion against all authority was necessary for the development of...

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