August 31

Born:

1885 - DuBose Heyward
American author best known for his 1935 novel Porgy, which was eventually adapted into plays, opera and films as Porgy and Bess.

1886 - Conrad Buff 
American children's author, who, with his wife Mary, was a Caldecott runner-up four times.

1908 - William Saroyan
American dramatist and author, many of whose works are based around the Armenian American Center in Fresno, CA.

1935 - Eldridge Cleaver
American writer and political activist; early leader of the Black Panther Party.

1946 - Jerome Corsi
American author and conspiracy theorist.

1982 - G. Willow Wilson
American author and comics writer; convert to Islam and current resident of Cairo.

Died:
1688 - John Bunyan
1867 - Charles Baudelaire
1896 - Elizabeth Coatsworth
1965 - E.E. Smith

August 17

Born:

1863 - Gene Stratton-Porter
American author and naturalist. Her novel  A Girl of the Limberlost, taking place in and around her beloved Limberlost Swamp in Indiana, has been adapted into film four times.

1896 - Oliver Waterman Larkin
American art historian who won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize in History for his book Art and Life in America.

1930 - Ted Hughes
English poet and children's writer, Poet Laureate of Britian from 1984-1998. Was married to Sylvia Plath. His children's novel The Iron Man was adapated into the animated film The Iron Giant.

1932 - V.S.Naipaul
Indo-Trinidadian-British writer known for his novels focusing on the legacy of the British Empire's colonialism.

1945 - Rachel Pollack
American science fiction author and tarot expert.

1953 - Herta Müller
Romanian-born German writer; winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature because she, "with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed."

1954 - Kirby Larson
American author of children's books, whose Hattie Big Sky won a 2007 Newbery Honor.

1959 - Jonathan Franzen
American novelist whose 2001 work The Corrections was  Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist.

1974 - Nicola Kraus
American novelist who, with Emma McLaughlin, wrote the popular Nanny Diaries.




Died:
1935 - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
1973 - Conrad Aiken
2004 - Thea Astley

August 16

Born:

1884 - Hugo Gernsback
Luxembourgian-American writer, editor, and magazine publisher. His contributions to the field of science fiction were so great that one of their most prestigious awards, the Hugos, are named after him.

1888 - T.E. Lawrence
More well-known as Lawrence of Arabia (which apparently must be put in bold font,) Thomas Edward also wrote of his experiences in books like Seven Pillars of Wisdom and Revolt in the Desert.

1902 - Georgette Heyer
British romance and mystery novelist, who essentially established the Regency romance genre with her novel Regency Buck.

1908 - William Keepers Maxwell, Jr.
American novelist who won the 1982 National Book Award for So Long, See You Tomorrow.

1917 - Matt Christopher
American author of sports-centric children's books.

1920 - Charles Bukowski
American author of the Dirty Realism movement and a child of Los Angeles. Immortalized in the Mickey Rourke movie Barfly, as well as Red Hot Chili Peppers lyrics.

1934 - Diana Wynne Jones
British writer of fantasy novels, most well known for Howl's Moving Castle, which was made into a feature-length animated film by Hayao Miyazaki.




Died:
1949 - Margaret Mitchell
1998 - Dorothy West
2005 - William Corlett