Recently, I learned it was Bach’s birthday.
Happy 330! But who keeps track of
birthdays for writers?
I
stumbled upon a few sites that track the birthdays of select writers though
it’s not clear what they use as a basis for including someone.
FamousBirthdays.com
features author birthdays by their birth state.
Alabama had 27, including Harper Lee, Helen Keller, and Zig Ziglar. California had 36, including John Steinbeck,
Tony Robbins, and Rick Warren. New York featured 36, including Joyce Carol Oates,
JD Salinger, Danielle Steel, James Baldwin, and Ann Coulter.
Scholastic.com
celebrated the birthdays of authors and illustrators of books for children up
to high school. From Edgar Allan Poe to
others, short biographies were given along with their birthdate.
PagePulp.com,
which claimed “more babies are born in the summer than any other time of the
year,” identified July as a popular month for writers, including the birth of
Franz Kafka, E B White, Henry David Thoreau, Ernest Hemingway, George Bernard
Shaw, and Beatrix Potter.
AuthorBirthdays.blogspot.com
highlights birth and death dates of a handful of authors daily.
LitBirthdays.wordpress.com
honors the birthdays of writers, extending beyond books and into music,
television, and those who wrote papers and documents, such as historians,
judges, and comedians.
LibraryBooklists.org/literarybirths
seems pretty thorough. It lists up to
ten people per day, and shares information about the authors’
accomplishments. Almost all of the
people listed are dead, so it skews to the past.
What
should one do to honor the birthday of a writer they have enjoyed? I suppose you can use that day to read about
that writer, read or reread his or her works, and spend time talking to others
about how wonderful that writer was and what he or she means to you.
Birthdays
are more accidental than planned. There
is a randomness attached to them. More
important than a birthday would be the moments that have no dates, those
special seconds that define who that writer is and will become. They may not even have known it at the time,
but they had to have had a series of moments that came to inform and create the
writer in them. We should celebrate such
moments.
As time
goes by it’ll be harder to determine which writer’s birthday should be added to
the list. There is a growing crowd of
writers. Will we only remember those
whose books sold well or those that won awards (which ones, how many?)? Will we recall those who had one big book
that, by itself, is worthy of honoring an entire life? Will we recall the birthdays of great writers
but lousy human beings? Shall we
celebrate the birthdays of writers who came to influence society, politics, or
professional standards?
We can
honor writers and their birthdays by continuing to read their books, discuss
and share them with others, and continually examine or revise their relevance
to today’s world. Eventually, some, if
not many writers who are valued today will be forgotten and cast aside to make
room for newer, more influential ones.
And they too will have birthdays to be celebrated.
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Brian Feinblum’s views,
opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his
employer. You can follow him
on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels
more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by
BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2015
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