February Literary Birthdays

W.H. AUDEN
February 21, 1907 - September 28, 1973

The English-born but Americanised (1946) Auden (who considered himself not an American but a New Yorker) was an anti-war socialist whose poems are concerned with the dissolution of civilisation and culture. Besides living in England and America, he also lived in Germany (before the Nazis), Austria, and Italy. He won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Anxiety (1947), the 1954 Bollinger Poetry Prize, and the 1967 National Medal for Literature.

Some of his works:
Collected Poems
The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939
Selected Poems
Tell Me the Truth About Love: Ten Poems
As I Walked Out One Evening: Songs, Ballads, Lullabies, Limericks, and Other Light Verse


Search for his books


Other Literary Birthdays

Scottish novelist Muriel Spark (1918)
Irish novelist, poet, and stream-of-consciousness pioneer James Joyce (1882)
Russian-born novelist Ayn Rand (1905)
Pittsburgh native, longtime Paris resident, avant-garde writer Gertrude Stein (1874)
St. Louis-born experimental novelist William S. Burroughs (1914)
Georgia-born novelist and essayist Alice Walker (1944)
Russian novelist and poet Boris Pasternak (1890)
German playwright and poet Berthold Brecht (1898)
English naturalist and writer Charles Darwin (1809)
Belgian mystery writer, creator of Inspector Maigret Georges Simenon (1903)
Washington, D.C.-born journalist and author Carl Bernstein (1944)
Author of Goedel, Escher, and Bach Douglas R. Hofstadter (1945)
Jewish Bronx-born novelist Chaim Potok (1929)
Ukraine-born Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem (1859)
Greek novelist, journalist, and politician Nikos Kazantzakis (1883)
Iowa-born novelist, critic, and 1971 Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner (1909)
French surrealist founder and theorist, writer André Breton (1896)
Georgia-born novelist Carson McCullers (1917)
California-born American-Chinese novelist Amy Tan (1952)
Novelist and diarist Anais Nin (1903)
Essayist, novelist, and musician Anthony Burgess (1917)
Trinidad-born journalist, novelist and travel writer Shiva Srinivasa Naipaul (1945)
French novelist, playwright, and Romantic poet Victor Hugo (1802)
Calif. novelist and 1962 Nobelist John Steinbeck (1902)
India-born British novelist Lawrence Durrell (1912)
French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533)