December Literary Birthdays

Let’s celebrate authors who were born in December!

Rex Stout (December 1, 1886 – October 27, 1975) was an American author, “who wrote over 70 detective novels, 46 of them featuring eccentric, chubby, beer drinking gourmet sleuth Nero Wolfe. Stout began his literary career by writing for pulp magazines, publishing romance, adventure, and detective stories".

Joseph Conrad (3 December 1857 – 3 August 1924) was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski to Polish parents and raised in Poland. “After a sea-faring career in the French and British merchant marines, he wrote short stories and novels like Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent, which combined his experiences in remote places with an interest in moral conflict and the dark side of human nature”.

M.I.T. linguist Noam Chomsky (December 7, 1928) is an intellectual prodigy. “Since 1955, he has been a professor at MIT and has produced ground-breaking, controversial theories on human linguistic capacity. Chomsky is widely published, both on topics in his field and on issues of dissent and U.S. foreign policy”.

Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) left school as a teenager to live a reclusive life on the family homestead. There, she filled notebooks with poetry and wrote hundreds of letters. Dickinson's remarkable work was published after her death and she is now considered one of the towering figures of American literature. – bio.

Egyptian novelist, playwright, and short-story writer Naguib Mahfouz (11 December 1911 – 30 August 2006) won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature. He is one of the first contemporary writers of Arabic literature.

French novelist Gustave Flaubert (12 December 1821 – 8 May 1880) is best known for his masterpiece Madame Bovary. He wrote a number of other classics and is renowned as the” foremost expert of French realism”.

Jane Austen (December 16, 1775 – July 18, 1817) was a Georgian era author born in England. “While not widely known in her own time, Austen's comic novels of love among the landed gentry gained popularity after 1869, and her reputation skyrocketed in the 20th century. Her novels, including Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, are considered literary classics, bridging the gap between romance and realism”.

David Sedaris (December 26, 1956) is a humorist and essayist best known for his sardonic autobiographical stories and social commentary. – bio.

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (December 30, 1865 – January 18, 1936) was an English author, famous for his works Just So Stories, The Jungle Book and Gunga Din. “Eventually becoming the highest paid writer in the world, Kipling was recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907”.