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