Happy birthday, David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008).

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.” ― David Foster Wallace, This is Water

Happy birthday, Richard Ford (February 16th, 1944). 

Ford is a novelist and short story writer. His works include The Sportswriter, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land, Canada, among others. In 1995 he won the PEN/Faulkner Award and The Pulitzer Prize award for his work Independence Day.

Ford is from Jackson, Mississippi. He has written for the magazine Sports Illustrated, he edited the 2007 New Granta Book of the American Short Story, and the Library of America’s two-volume edition of the selected works of fellow Mississippi writer Eudora Welty.

Today is Virginia Woolf’s 131st birthday (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941). Woolf was an English writer and considered by many to be the greatest of the modernist literary writers of the 21st century.

She began writing around 1900 as a journalist and slowly progressed to writing novels. She experimented with what is called “stream of consciousness” emphasizing the psychological and emotional motives of her characters.

Her works include these novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To The Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), The Waves (1931), Flush: A Biography (1933), and Between the Acts (1941). 

Happy birthday, Virginia Woolf.

George MacDonald (10 December 1824 – 18 September 1905) was a Scottish author, poet, and Christian minister. He was a major influence on J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle, and E. Nesbit. MacDonald is truly the father of modern high fantasy. He wrote fantasy tales in the late 1800s and befriended Mark Twain, who initially dislike MacDonald’s work. Today is George MacDonald’s birthday. Happy birthday!

Happy birthday to Rhode Island-born, Tennessee-raised novelist Cormac McCarthy (born today in 1933).

Happy Birthday, David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008)

““Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties — all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion — these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.” 

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