On this day in 2014, author and poet Maya Angelou, who published more than 30 books, including 1969’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” a best-selling memoir about the racism and abuse she experienced growing up, dies at 86 at her home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In addition to her celebrated literary career, Angelou […]
On this day in 2014, Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose novels include “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Love in the Time of Cholera,” dies at his Mexico City home at age 87. The Colombian-born Garcia Marquez, a master of magical realism, a writing style that blends reality and fantasy, was considered a […]
On this day in 2013, Pauline Phillips, who for more than 40 years wrote the “Dear Abby” newspaper advice column, dies at age 94 in Minneapolis after battling Alzheimer’s disease. Using the pen name Abigail Van Buren, Phillips made her “Dear Abby” debut in 1956, and over the ensuing decades dispensed witty advice on a […]
On this day in 2012, one of the preeminent science fiction authors of the 20th century, Ray Bradbury, whose books include “The Martian Chronicles,” “Fahrenheit 451” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” dies at age 91 in Los Angeles. During his 70-year career, Bradbury, who also wrote works of horror, fantasy and mystery, published nearly […]
On this day in 2010, 88-year-old actress Betty White, known for her former roles on “The Golden Girls” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” becomes the oldest person to host the long-running, late-night TV sketch comedy show “Saturday Night Live” (SNL). White’s hosting gig came about, in part, after hundreds of thousands of her fans […]
On this day in 2009, Frank McCourt, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning, runaway best-seller “Angela’s Ashes,” a 1996 memoir about his impoverished childhood in Limerick, Ireland, dies at age 78 in Manhattan from metastatic melanoma. McCourt wrote “Angela’s Ashes,” his first book, when he was in his mid-60s, after teaching in New York City’s […]
On this day in 2006, during a live broadcast of her daytime TV talk show, Oprah Winfrey confronts author James Frey about fabrications in “A Million Little Pieces,” his memoir about addiction and recovery, which she chose as an Oprah’s Book Club selection in September 2005. “A Million Little Pieces,” published in 2003, was James […]
On this day in 2003, children’s author and illustrator Robert McCloskey, whose books include such classics as “Make Way for Ducklings” and “Blueberries for Sal,” dies at age 88 in Deer Isle, Maine. Born in Hamilton, Ohio, in 1914, McCloskey studied art in Boston and New York in the 1930s. He published his first children’s […]
Some 1.3 million copies of Hannibal, the final book in the Hannibal Lecter series by Thomas Harris, arrive at bookstores around the country. Hannibal quickly tops the bestseller charts, despite—or perhaps because of—an intensely gruesome plot. Hannibal Lecter, the brilliant psychiatrist/serial killer with a taste for human flesh, first appeared in Harris’ 1981 book, Red […]
On this day in 1995, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,” a memoir by a little-known law professor named Barack Obama, is published. Obama wrote the book before entering politics; 13 years after it was published, he was elected America’s 44th president. “Dreams from My Father” tells the story of Obama’s […]