Literature
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William Faulkner *IX 25 1897 — The Life You Give
William Faulkner (born September 25, 1897, New Albany, Mississippi, U.S.—died July 6, 1962, Byhalia, Mississippi) was an American novelist and short-story writer who was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. Youth and early writings As the eldest of the four sons of Murry Cuthbert and Maud Butler Falkner, William Faulkner (as he later spelled…
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Javier Marías *IX 20 1951 — La Vida Que Das / The Life You Give
Escritor, ensayista, traductor y editor español, Javier Marías (1951-2022) era el cuarto de cinco hijos de una familia acomodada. Pasó su niñez e infancia en los Estados Unidos, donde su padre, el filósofo y miembro de la R.A.E. Julián Marías, encarcelado y represaliado por el régimen de Franco, era profesor de universidad. Allí vivió rodeado…
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Leo Tolstoy *VIII 28 1828 — The Life You Give
Leo Tolstoy, born August 28 [September 9, New Style], 1828, in Yasnaya Polyana, Tula province, Russian Empire, is the author, master of realistic fiction, and one of the world’s greatest novelists. He is best known for his two longest works, War and Peace (1865–69) and Anna Karenina (1875–77), which are commonly regarded as among the…
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Jorge Luis Borges *VIII 24 1899 — The Life You Give
Jorge Luis Borges, born Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo, August 24, 1899, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, is the poet, essayist, and short-story writer whose works became classics of 20th-century world literature. Borges was reared in the then-shabby Palermo district of Buenos Aires, the setting of some of his works. His family, which had been…
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James Baldwin *VIII 2 1924 — The Life You Give
James Baldwin, born James Arthur Baldwin on August 2 1924 in New York, New York, is the essayist, novelist, and playwright whose eloquence and passion on the subject of race in the United States of America made him an important voice, particularly in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in the United States and, later,…
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Ernest Hemingway *VII 21 1899 — The Life You Give
Ernest Hemingway, born Ernest Miller Hemingway, July 21, 1899, in Cicero [now in Oak Park], Illinois, U.S.A., is the novelist and short-story writer, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He was noted both for the intense masculinity of his writing and for his adventurous and widely publicized life. His succinct and lucid prose…
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Marcel Proust *VII 10 1871 — The Life You Give
Marcel Proust, born Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust on July 10, 1871, in Auteuil, near Paris, France, is the novelist, author of À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; In Search of Lost Time), a seven-volume novel based on Proust’s life. The novel explores its subject matter from a psychological and allegorical standpoint and…
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Franz Kafka *VII 3 1883 — The Life You Give
Franz Kafka, born July 3, 1883, in Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary [now in Czech Republic] is the writer of visionary fiction whose works — especially the novel Der Prozess (1925; The Trial) and the story Die Verwandlung (1915; The Metamorphosis) — express the anxieties and alienation felt by many in 20th-century Europe and North America. Life…
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Hermann Hesse *VII 2 1877 — The Life You Give
Hermann Hesse, born July 2, 1877, in Calw, Germany, is the novelist and poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. The main theme of his work is the individual’s efforts to break out of the established modes of civilization so as to find an essential spirit and identity. Hesse grew up…
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George Sand * VII 1 1804 — The Life You Give
George Sand, Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dudevant, née Dupin, born July 1, 1804, in Paris, France, is the Romantic writer known primarily for her so-called rustic novels. She was brought up at Nohant, near La Châtre in Berry, the country home of her grandmother. There she gained the profound love and understanding of the countryside that were to…
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Antoine de Saint-Exupéry *VI 29 1900 — The Life You Give
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, born Antoine-Marie-Roger de Saint-Exupéry, June 29, 1900, in Lyon, France, is the aviator and writer whose works are the unique testimony of a pilot and a warrior who looked at adventure and danger with a poet’s eyes. His fable Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) has become a modern classic. Saint-Exupéry came…
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George Orwell *VI 25 1903 — The Life You Give
George Orwell, born June 25, 1903, in Motihari, Bengal, India, is the novelist, essayist, and critic famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). The latter of these is a profound anti-utopian novel that examines the dangers of totalitarian rule. Born Eric Arthur Blair, Orwell never entirely abandoned his original name, but…
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Jean-Paul Sartre *VI 21 1905 — The Life You Give
Jean-Paul Sartre, born June 21, 1905, in Paris, France, is the philosopher, novelist, and playwright, best known as the leading exponent of existentialism in the 20th century. In 1964 he declined the Nobel Prize for Literature, which had been awarded to him “for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of…
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W. B. Yeats *VI 13 1865 — The Life You Give
William Butler Yeats, born June 13, 1865, in Sandymount, Dublin, Ireland, poet, dramatist, and prose writer, is one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. Yeats’s father, John Butler Yeats, was a barrister who eventually became a portrait painter. His mother, formerly Susan Pollexfen,…
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Thomas Mann *VI 6 1875 — The Life You Give
Thomas Mann, born June 6, 1875, in Lübeck, Germany, is the novelist and essayist whose early novels—Buddenbrooks (1900), Der Tod in Venedig (1912; Death in Venice), and Der Zauberberg (1924; The Magic Mountain)—earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. Early literary endeavoursMann’s father died in 1891, and Mann moved to Munich, a centre…
Sila Blume 