Summer is here—and so are these literary birthdays!

Summer’s officially arrived, and there’s no better way to welcome it than to acknowledge these late June and early July literary birthdays!

 

On June 27, we’ll be celebrating the birthday of Helen Keller. After suffering a mysterious illness that left her deaf and blind at nineteen months, Keller became a world-renowned pioneer and advocate for the blind. The World I Live In is Keller’s bold exploration of the spectrum of senses through language and imagination.

June 28 is the birthday of Luigi Pirandello, who was born in Sicily in 1867. A poet, writer of stories, a playwright, a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, he was an inspiration to writers as varied as Eugène Lonesco and T.S. Eliot. His The Late Mattia Pascal is the story of a man who is declared dead in his boring provincial town, and takes it as an opportunity to move on to another, only to find, in the pages of Pirandello’s black humor, that changing towns does not mean he can change himself.

Then comes July 1 and the birthday of Jean Stafford. Born in 1915, Stafford was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American short story writer and novelist. The Mountain Lion is the story of two siblings who find that the love they have built for each other in their dreary childhood home is challenged when they visit their uncle at his ranch in Colorado. The book was hailed by The New York Times as “one of the best novels about adolescence in American literature.”

Finally, on July 4, we can celebrate Independence Day and the birth of Nathaniel Hawthorne. It could hardly be more appropriate that this classic American writer shares a birthday with his country. Best known for his novels and astute commentary on American life, Hawthorne also authored Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny by Papa, the true tale of three weeks shared by the author and his five year old son. The NYRB edition is introduced by Paul Auster.