Curated category
Nobel laureates in Literature
- Bob DylanBob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman on the 24th of May, 1941, at St. Mary's Hospital in Duluth, Minnesota. His Hebrew name was Shabtai Zisl ben Avraham.
- Ernest HemingwayErnest Hemingway was born on the 21st of July 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, into a family where his mother kept his hair long and dressed him in frilly…
- T. S. EliotT. S. Eliot wrote the opening of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" when he was twenty-two years old. The lines compared an evening sky to "a patient…
- Rudyard KiplingRudyard Kipling was born on the 30th of December 1865 in Bombay, and by the time he died in 1936, he had become something no single label can hold.
- William FaulknerWilliam Faulkner spent most of his writing life within a few square miles of Lafayette County, Mississippi, yet the fictional world he built from that patch…
- Winston ChurchillWinston Churchill was born on the 30th of November 1874 inside Blenheim Palace, the ancestral home his family had held for generations in Oxfordshire.
- John SteinbeckJohn Steinbeck once stole bacon from a local produce market to survive. During the Great Depression, he and his first wife lived on fish and crabs he…
- George Bernard ShawGeorge Bernard Shaw refused his own first name. He insisted on being called Bernard Shaw, dropping the George after 1876.
- Jean-Paul SartreJean-Paul Sartre was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature, and he refused it. He said a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an…
- Saul BellowSaul Bellow was born Solomon Bellows on the 10th of June, 1915, in Lachine, Quebec, to parents who had fled Saint Petersburg two years earlier, carrying with…
- Albert CamusAlbert Camus was born on the 7th of November 1913 in Mondovi, a working-class town in French Algeria, to a mother who was deaf and illiterate and a father he…
- André GideAndré Paul Guillaume Gide was born in Paris on the 22nd of November 1869, and by the time he died on the 19th of February 1951, his New York Times obituary…
- Eugene O'NeillEugene O'Neill died the same way he was born: in a hotel room. As he whispered his last words at the Sheraton Hotel in Boston on the 27th of November 1953…
- Rabindranath TagoreRabindranath Tagore was eight years old when he wrote his first poetry. At sixteen, he released substantial poems under the pseudonym Bhanusimha, meaning Sun…
- Hermann HesseHermann Hesse died on the 9th of August 1962, aged 85, in Montagnola, Switzerland, and a memorial in The New York Times called his works largely inaccessible…
- Samuel BeckettSamuel Beckett once described his own method as "impoverishment" - as taking away rather than adding, subtracting rather than building.
- Aleksandr SolzhenitsynOn the 9th of May 1945, all of Moscow erupted in fireworks and searchlights to mark Germany's surrender. Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn watched those…
- Luigi PirandelloLuigi Pirandello arrived in Rome on a hard, rainy night and felt, by his own account, that his heart was being crushed. Then he laughed, like a man in the…
- Bertrand RussellBertrand Russell was born on the 18th of May 1872 in a country house called Ravenscroft, in Trellech, Monmouthshire, into one of the most prominent liberal…
- Boris PasternakBoris Leonidovich Pasternak grew up in a Moscow household where Leo Tolstoy visited, Sergei Rachmaninoff played piano, and train conductors stood at the…
- Theodor MommsenTheodor Mommsen stood up at a formal banquet at the University of Berlin in 1892, and the entire room rose with him. Mark Twain was there, seated at the head…
- Ivan BuninIvan Alekseyevich Bunin became the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy gave it to him in 1933, while he was living…